After the commemorations for the atomic atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has a few days left to contemplate what he will say about war and peace on the 70th anniversary of Japan's defeat and surrender. He has a wonderful opportunity to set a new path for Japan, for Asia and the world. I fear that he will continue to bulldoze a wrong and dangerous road.

"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, wrote, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, about the bombs. But war is also death, and World War II saw too many atrocities and too many leaders with blood on their hands. Altogether, up to 85 million people died in the war, including 3.3 million Japanese.

Before the dropping of the atomic bombs, there was the massacre of Nanjing, with over 200,000 Chinese dead according to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Japanese estimates are considerably lower), or 300,000 according to China; the Shoah (or Holocaust) slaughtering six million Jews, plus the murder of five million non-Jews by the Nazis; the battle of Stalingrad with two million casualties; the Burma Death Railway, on which an estimated 90,000 died, the majority civilians; mass murder of civilians on all sides by wholesale bombing of Osaka (10,000 killed), London (20,000), Berlin (20,000-50,000), Dresden (25,000), Hamburg (42,000), and Tokyo (100,000 plus); the battle of Normandy with 425,000 casualties; battles for Iwo Jima (nearly 18,000 Japanese dead and 7,000 Americans) and Okinawa (149,193 Japanese civilian deaths, many of them enforced suicides or human shields, 77,166 Imperial Japanese soldiers, and 14,009 American troops, plus about 600 from Korea, Britain and Taiwan).