06-08-2025
How Times readers debated the morality of the Hiroshima bomb
The letters page of The Times on August 8, 1945 was, as ever, eclectic. There was a letter praising midwives. There was another discussing which clergy should sit in the House of Lords. Then, just before resuming a long-running correspondence about postwar forestry, the editor found space to moot the possibility of the apocalypse.
Sir Henry Dale, a winner of the Nobel prize for physiology and medicine, confessed that he was worried about whether the bomb just dropped on Hiroshima was a portent of the end of humanity.
'Science, an unwilling conscript, has become the direct agent of undiscriminating devastation at long range,' wrote Dale, the president of the Royal Society. With atomic power, he said, came tremendous opportunities, but also 'the threat of final disaster to civilisation '.
