Slacktivist:

YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO KILL CIVILIANS (part 2,398)

Nicholas Kristof, repeat after me, 'You're not allowed to kill civilians.'

Today is the 58th anniversary of America's dropping an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That's city -- not 'missile site' or 'strategic installation,' but city -- as in 'population center where lots and lots of noncombatants live.' The American bomb killed 231,920 people -- the great majority of whom were noncombatants. Women and children. Civilians.

You're not allowed to kill civilians.

No utilitarian calculus, no alternative-history what-if gamesmanship after the fact can alter that rule.

But Nicholas Kristof tries, and with little more by way of argument than that he seems to have read The Man in the High Castle back in high school.

All of Kristof's hypothetical what-iffery doesn't change the rules. You may not both 1) intentionally target and incinerate 230,000 noncombatants in an act of terrorism; and 2) not be a monster.