ABSTRACT
The idea for the Unbombing Project came after I visited Tokyo in 1995. At first I could not understand why so few older buildings and landmarks could be seen, and I was shocked to learn that a great part of this huge city had been torched and burned down during aerial bombing campaigns of the US Air Force in March–July 1945. I was ashamed not to know that far over a hundred thousand people died, probably more than the death toll taken by the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. It prompted me to start a study on aerial bombing, and I discovered the Italian general Douhet (1869–1930), who formulated in 1921 his doctrine “Il dominio dell’area,” “the dominion of the air,” in which threats to bomb enemy cities were proposed to break “the will of a nation.” Douhet, who had experienced the endless suffering in the trenches of World War I, hoped to evade such prolonged ways of warfare; he saw aerial bombing as a humanitarian way to cut a war short. It was also Italians who carried out the first aerial bombardment during the Italo-Turkish War in Libya in 1911, throwing grenades – by hand – from their fragile airplanes over the desert.
