This Caught My Eye

Apropos of my last blog, this is from John Bew's highly readable Attlee biography, Citizen Clem:

In other words, Attlee's instinctive and immediate response to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan was that Britain must have this weapon for itself. In a brutally realistic assessment, he came to the conclusion that there was no alternative. He had  heard a suggestion that, in a new Geneva Convention, all nations might agree to abstain from the use of the atomic bomb. Yet while gas was forbidden in the First World War it was still used. Indeed the British were quite prepared to use it on Germans if they had landed on British beaches in 1940. Attlee himself had been the minister responsible for stockpiling thousands of gallons of poison gas against this eventuality.

Nothing is truly simple. Happy Easter.