The surprise Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the nightmarish suffering when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, were far from being commensurate.
Even so, Pearl Harbor did lead to Hiroshima, so that the two events have become relentlessly, inexorably linked.
U.S. President Barack Obama at Hiroshima six months ago, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, at the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor this week, have deftly managed not to apologize for either of these events.
President Obama, in his last year in office, came close to finessing the fraught memories of the war, but without offering any regrets on America's part.
At Hiroshima, Mr. Obama said of the people killed by atomic bombs, "Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become." That "looking inward" seemed to be a call for meditation. He raised the possibility, and the hope, of a world in which nations wouldn't drop deadly weapons on each other, but he didn't – and couldn't and shouldn't – announce the abolition of American nuclear weapons.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vastly more destructive and violent events than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. At Hiroshima, huge numbers of people – mostly non-combatants – were burned alive, and an arms race began.
In contrast, Pearl Harbor was a military base. The attack was treacherous. At the time, the rulers of Japan claimed that the lack of any declaration of war was a matter of "bureaucratic bungling." It was far worse than mere bungling: It was an enormous expansion of the war in the Pacific, and a catastrophe for Japan.
Prime Minister Abe, like Mr. Obama, resorted to quasi-poetic rhetoric when speaking of Pearl Harbor: "If we listen closely we can make out the sound of restless waves, breaking and then retreating again." He invoked the families of the U.S. servicemen who were killed there. He offered condolences, but never said the Japanese military was in the wrong.
The silences of today's politicians are telling. The bombings of Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor were both inhuman, and both had terrible consequences – in different measures.