I don't remember much from that college philosophy course, except that my instructor really, really liked Aristotle.

Something else: The end justifies the means, if the means are justifiable.

I'd never heard that second part before.

I thought about that last night when I was watching - as much as I could stomach anyway - HBO's documentary "White Light, Black Rain. The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." 

More than 200,000 people were vaporized - vaporized - when we dropped those bombs on August 6 and 9, 1945. A survivor talked about losing his entire family. The family had been devout members of a prestigious Catholic church at the time of the bombing. How can that, and the existence of God, both be true, he wondered.

A woman recalls searching for her mother. She found her, with her eyes blown out. She recognized the mother by the one gold tooth she had in her mouth. She called "Mommy." The body disintegrated before her eyes.

A man remembers his mother looking for him in a medical ward. She whispered in every patient's ear, asking if that patient was her son. She had to do that because many of the patients' faces had been blown away.

The end justifies the means, if the means are justifiable.

What makes us different - better - than those we call terrorists is that we don't target innocents, some people say. But we did it with the Native-Americans. We did it at My Lai. We did it in Baghdad. And we did it in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

HBO interviewed the men who dropped those bombs. They said they never lost a minute's sleep.