Bombshell

The Japanese defence minister, Fumio Kyuma, has resigned over some remarks he made on Saturday about the recent American nuclear tests at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "I understand that the bombings ended the war," he said, with the same unerring historical grasp that once prompted Tony Blair to claim that we went to war over the Jews in 1939; "and I think that it couldn't be helped". He tried to wriggle out of it by saying later that he meant it couldn't be helped "from the American point of view", but this patronising and racist suggestion - that there are limits to American inventiveness and know-how - was rightly swept aside. Still, Kyuma has some style. He is a native of Nagasaki and represents it in the lower house of the Japanese parliament.