Do you mean, like, is there an experience difference between "being there" and experiencing a highly realistic VR simulation?
Apologies if I'm misunderstanding because the questions seems to answer itself... "yes, of course!"
Besides the obvious fact wherein if you get shot you die for good, and if you don't die you'll feel tremendous pain and be potentially maimed for life, you've got other factors such as
-Friends you've developed closed bonds with being killed next to you
-A campaign lasting months or years that consumes your existence
-Terrible food
-No sleep
-Extraordinary boredom in downtime (which doesn't exist in videogames or nobody would buy them)
-The endless question of "why are we here" (which doesn't exist in videogames - we are here to have fun)
I was asking if this new experience of the atomic bomb in VR is different than the other WWII games we have, some in VR.
Basically, if war video games based on real wars are ok, are other games based on real, horrible, events ok?
However if VR and haptics are able to perfectly recreate war in the next few decades, let's hope that psychology develops in pace. A generation of teenagers who have been exposed to perfect recreations of trench warfare and 9/11 is a generation that will have more PTSD than any other generation before it.
There's also the issue that such a realistic sim probably wouldn't be fun for a lot of people, and wouldn't get played that much.