TOKYO — This newspaper’s recent obituary for Theodore Van Kirk, the last living crew member of the Enola Gay — the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima — closed with a quote from a 1995 interview with Mr. Van Kirk. “It’s really hard to talk about morality and war in the same sentence,” he was cited as saying. “Where was the morality in the bombing of Coventry, or the bombing of Dresden, or the Bataan Death March, or the Rape of Nanking, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor?”

Mr. Van Kirk was right. Everyday morality falls mute before the horrors of war. And yet I can’t help feeling that, from the perspective of the victims, the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are different: Something distinguishes those attacks from the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, the bombing of Dresden or the Holocaust.

The difference lies not in the atrocities themselves, but in the attitude the world has taken toward them. The international community has reached a consensus regarding all those other horrors: They violated international law; they never should have occurred in the first place; they must never be permitted to happen again. The few individuals who defend the Holocaust, for instance, are not only condemned but reviled.

The situation is completely different with respect to the atomic bombings. Even if most people around the world privately believe the indiscriminate killing of civilians with nuclear weapons is wrong, there is no shared public consensus to this effect. The international community has not prohibited the use of nuclear weapons, as it has done with the use of poison gas and other chemical and biological weapons.