THE RIGHT CHOICE

I’m sorry, but the revisionists have got it wrong once again (“Fifty Years of Fallout,” by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, July 30).

They keep saying that Truman was incorrect in his decision to drop the atomic bomb. There weren’t a million Americans that could have possibly been killed landing on Japan’s beaches but only 100,000. Ask the mothers of those potential 100,000 victims what they think about the bomb. And what about the 250,000 Japanese who would have been killed in an invasion?

And if the Japanese were ready to surrender so rapidly, why didn’t they surrender after the first bomb was dropped?

I’m tired of the revisionists telling us how wrong we were. If you lived in those days, you were glad the bomb ended the war. The saving of American lives was the paramount thing in the minds of our leaders--not the saving of the enemy, who bombed Pearl Harbor, who were cruel to prisoners of war in military camps and ravaged cities and people in China and throughout the South Pacific.

DAVID L. WOLPER

Burbank