At the beginning of his essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” the literary critic (and World War Two Army veteran) Paul Fussell recalled a poetic advertising slogan he used to see on the sides of city buses.

In life, experience is the great teacher. In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience.

In life, experience is the great teacher.

In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience.

Not having tasted the potation named in the second line, I offer no opinion about the truth of the statement declaring its excellence. About the first line of the couplet, however, I must register a certain skepticism. Is experience “the great teacher” in life? An honest answer, I believe, should begin with the hoary qualification “that depends.”

Fussell wanted to emphasize the importance of “experience, sheer, vulgar experience” in determining one’s attitude toward the morality of dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The more distant one’s experience of the war, he had noticed, the more likely it was that one would wax moralistic about the decision to use those ghastly weapons.

Fussell himself, being part of a group scheduled to invade the Japanese home islands, had a different attitude. Did you know that the US military is still drawing on the store of Purple Hearts it manufactured during the run-up to the planned invasion? War planners estimated that the incursion would take more than a year and cost one million American lives. One million. Fussell and his fellow soldiers, hearing the news that the........

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