Today's Hiroshima doesn't give the TV journalists a lot to work with. It's a raucous, bustling, mid-sized Japanese city with only few reminders of its destruction by atomic bomb in 1945. There's the skeletal dome of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall (which was right under the blast), and discreet plaques on various other buildings saying that such-and-such a junior high school, with 600 students, used to be on this site, and that's all.

So it's no wonder, with U.S. President Barack Obama's scheduled visit to Hiroshima Friday (but no apology), that practically every journalist writing about the visit resorts to quoting from Paul Fussell's famous article in the New Republic in August 1981: "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb."

At a time when all right-thinking intellectuals in the United States deplored the 1945 decision to drop two of America's new atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was shocking for a university professor to point out that they had saved his life. For Paul Fussell was a university professor in 1981, but in 1945 he had been a 20-year-old infantry second lieutenant getting ready to invade Japan.