McCluskey himself has gone back and forth over the years about Enola Gay, named for the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that dropped the bomb in August 1945. As the world marks the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima this week, his feelings remain nuanced. “I’ve always had an ambivalence regarding the dropping of the bomb,” says McCluskey a history nerd and World War 2 buff going back to his adolescence on the Wirral. “I’ve been fascinated – but not in a celebratory way – about the moral dilemmas that occur in warfare. “I’m not a black and white person: it’s always fascinated me…you are actively encouraged to do things in a time of war that would get you locked up for. The pilot, Paul Tibbets, always felt that he had done the right thing.' “And of course, there is no more greater moral dilemma than whether you should drop an atomic bomb that kills 140,000 people in the hope that it might save five million. McCluskey had long intended writing about the dawn of the atomic age.
He carried with him a folder of lyrics ideas and had spent time reading up on the subject in Liverpool’s grand old Central Library on William Brown Street. So many contradictions and different points of view as to whether the Japanese would have surrendered because the Russians were about to come into the war… the dropping of the bomb was actually to demonstrate to the Russians what the Americans could do.
There are so many questions that hang over the dropping of the bomb.