This year marks the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August). A quarter of a million people instantly killed.
Rather than those events leading us to reflect and give up our obsession with weapons and war, we have, since then, accelerated our search for means to kill and destroy.
As Quaker and Nobel Prize Winner Philip Noel-Baker opined, science has been made the prostitute of war. He also asked rhetorically “In the age when the atom has been split, the moon encircled, diseases conquered, is disarmament so difficult a matter that it must remain a distant dream?”
It seems that it must.
On 23 March 2026, Pope Leo, the leader of the world’s Catholics, unexpectedly caused controversy by opining:
“No one should have to fear that threats of death and destruction might come from the sky. After the tragic experiences of the 20th century, aerial bombings should have been banned forever, yet they still exist … this is not progress; it is regression!“
Pope Leo concluded by referring to wars in the Middle East as a “scandal to the whole human family”.
And indeed, they are.
Whether it is the live streamed and ongoing, deliberate genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the daily carnage in dozens of conflicts or the ongoing “Settler” violence in the West Bank (as many Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 2023 as were killed by Hamas in their attack October 2023, but that does not dominate headlines), the scandal is not just the daily death toll but the silence, the justification and the lack of action.
The wars that Pope Leo referenced are ongoing.
Overnight, 19 people were killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes – death and destruction from the sky. The violence of one explosion was such that all that was left of one pregnant woman was the foetus she was carrying. All this during a “ceasefire”.
Overnight, 35 people were killed by drone strikes in Sudan.
The day before, the United States dropped a 2,000lb (900kg) bomb on a residential building in Qeshm, Iran killing a couple and their 2-year-old child. Two other children survived with significant injuries and are orphaned.
Israel has dropped over 15,000 such US-manufactured and supplied 2,000lb bombs on Gaza and Lebanon in the last 3 years alone, together with thermal and thermobaric munitions that, like nuclear weapons, leave no trace of their victims.
There was the 28 February 2026 Minab school bombing by the United States – 156 people killed, 120 of them children aged 5-12 years old.
Death by aerial bombardment is a daily event in our world, in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Sudan, Ukraine, Russia, boats in the Caribbean, around the globe. The bombs may not be nuclear weapons, but they are deadly. Such weapons are now often missiles fired from many miles away, unpiloted drones controlled remotely from a distance, or autonomous weapons controlled not by human oversight but AI. Machine killing.
What connects Gaza and Hiroshima? The same view of some populations, not our own, as expendable. The same dehumanising of “the enemy”, the same lust to take, the same arrogance of being superior, of being “just” of being “right”. The same supply of weapons by bloodthirsty men and the same deployment and use of those weapons by other bloodthirsty men, men who will never get their own hands dirty.
Unlike Tibbetts, who described that as the bomb exploded over Hiroshima, the sky lit up like nothing he had ever seen, in the present day the bringer of death sees his target on a screen from afar.
The world’s first aerial bombardment occurred 115 years ago in Libya when an Italian airman hand-dropped four 2kg (4.5 lb) grenades from his plane onto Turkish troops. Since then, we have increased the scale of killing enormously, including the first aerial bombing of WWI (bombs dropped on Harwich and Hull by German zeppelins), the devastation of Guernica in 1937 (as painted by Picasso), the German bombing of London, Hull, Liverpool, Rotterdam, Moscow, Warsaw, Leningrad, et al, the destruction of Dresden and Tokyo and, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The casualties are always largely civilians.
Death is indiscriminate.
As in many things, Bertolt Brecht eloquently wrote, albeit of conflicts now generations ago, when the bombs were smaller but no less deadly:
It’s we who fly above your city, woman
Now trembling for your children. From up here
We’re fixing our sights on you and them as targets.
If you ask why, the answer is: from fear
