Your commanding tone is unfortunate but I will trust that you are attempting to give me advice, as opposed to dictating to or instructing me.

Had I used this combination of words in a different context or used them carelessly or flippantly, I would have sympathy with your remonstration.

However, in the context that I connected “only” and “killed”, which you failed to show adequately in your extract and which you have clearly failed to understand, there is no question of insensitivity.

I used the word “only” in respect to the direct deaths from the the mightiest weapon the world has used in war and in contrast to “twice that number” who subsequently died from the effects of that bomb, often suffering long and lingering deaths.

The whole was in the context of making the point that numbers killed directly, as tragic as we recognise that that to be, is not necessarily a good indicator of the impact of war. At the very least it leaves aside the major impacts of war which those who live have to endure.

Given the nature of the article, its topic and its slant, together with the actual context of my language usage, I think that your criticism is unfounded and that I neither showed nor implied any insensitivity.

Should you still feel unconvinced, may I recommend to you a book written, in the immediate aftermath, by a survivor: Hiroshima, by John Hersey (1945); (Penguin Random House)1985.

Not only am I not insensitive to death or dying but every year, I take time to remind others of the calumny that was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the inaccurate common belief that these bombings were what ended the war with Japan. They were not. That actual reason that the Japanese stopped fighting was the effect of the death of their emperor which just happened to occur at almost the same time. It was that which took the spirit out of the Japanese people, not the impact of the two bombs, which most of the people didn’t even understand as such.