In his book “Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), he suggests that this new form of warfare is so civilized that it has reduced our incentive to stop fighting. Samuel Moyn, a professor of history and of jurisprudence at Yale, believes that we have less to celebrate than we might imagine. Most people would consider this a positive development. Improvements in bomb accuracy have made it easier to focus on military targets. Shifting international standards, codified in treaties like the Geneva Conventions, have mirrored a trend among military commanders to choose targets carefully, and to spare civilians whenever possible. In the past half century, war waged by states has become more humane. undertook such a campaign these days, worldwide revulsion would be intense and long lasting. In the words of the raid’s architect, Major General Curtis LeMay, the Japanese were “scorched and boiled and baked to death.” Five months later, the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered. In six hours, as many as a hundred thousand civilians were killed, and a million others were left without homes. The bombing ignited a firestorm that sent smoke miles into the sky the glow was visible for a hundred and fifty miles. The B-29s were headed for Tokyo, and carried napalm, chosen for the mission because so many of the city’s inhabitants lived in houses made of wood. On the evening of March 9, 1945, the United States sent an armada of B-29 Superfortresses toward Japan, which for months had resisted surrender, even as a naval blockade brought much of the population to the brink of starvation.
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