I DO not really want to get involved in turgid philosophical arguments about whether there can really be such a thing as “international law” in the absence of any enforcing authority.

More competent jurists than I have spent hours on end disputing the extent and character of such claims, and, as was said even of the Nuremberg trials, such events tend to be the law of the victors. Nor am I a pacifist.

As Simon Topliss himself observes (Letters, April 23), things are never as simple as they seem. In that light, his attempt to justify American use of the atom bomb is equally open to challenge.

A leading American academic recently published a study which, uniquely, was based on access to top secret defence archives in America, Japan and the Soviet Union, and concluded that the war against Japan was all but won before the decision to drop the atom bomb was finally taken.

In fact, the study found that a major factor in Truman’s decision to use the weapon was the requirement to display American military might to Stalin and the Soviet Union, and thereby to frighten them into moderating their demands in the post-war settlement.

This failed, since Stalin remained intransigent, and simply redoubled the efforts of his own scientists to acquire nuclear capability.

And why two atom bombs — Hiroshima and Nagasaki — one might well ask? Simple — US military scientists had developed two different designs of warhead, with two different sorts of mechanism to produce the explosion, and wanted a practical test to determine which design would be the most effective citybuster. They got it, too.

Whether or not this constitutes a war crime is a matter of opinion, but there is a case to be answered.

Peter Johnston Bolton