How was Hiroshima and Nagasaki not a War Crime?
The phrase "Winners get to write history" couldn't be more accurate when it comes to the many shady things the United States has done over the centuries. One of the worst atrocities it has committed, in my mind, was the dropping of nukes on Japan:
‘A crime against humanity’In Hiroshima, an estimated 80,000 people were killed in a split second on Aug. 6. Some 13 square kilometers of the city were obliterated. By December, at least another 70,000 people had died from radiation and injuries. Three days later, on Aug. 9, the U.S. dropped an A-bomb on Nagasaki, resulting in the deaths of at least 70,000 people before the year was out. About 10 percent of the casualties were Koreans forced to work in Japan at the time.
When we put our objective thinking caps on, it is hard to see just how this act could not be considered a crime against humanity / war crime / genocidal act.
Harry Truman was a war criminal no better than Hitler. He was a racist against Japanese:
We'll never know if Truman's attitudes toward minorities -- including his comment in 1911 to Bess that he hated "Japs" -- influenced his decision to drop two atomic bombs at a point when the Japanese were already militarily devastated and seeking acceptable surrender terms. Truman understood that he was embarking on a course that could ultimately bring the extinction of mankind.Truman always insisted that he felt "no remorse" over that decision, about which, he commented, he "never lost a minute's sleep." Condoleezza Rice picked Truman as man of the last century in an interview with Time magazine, but he was no hero to most of his contemporaries. Those who subsequently orchestrated his historical revitalization have often used his refurbished image to justify a conservative political agenda.
Arguments for this being classified as war crimes:
Kuznick and Selden put most of the blame on Truman. “He knew he was begin ning the process of annihilation of the species,” says Kuznick, “It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity.”Bolton continued: “The definition of ‘war crimes’ includes, for example: ‘intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities.’”
Bolton wrote that under the ICC rules, U.S. leaders could have been found guilty of a war crime for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for all the aerial bombardments of German and Japanese civilian areas.
The A-bombs were not the only crimes. U.S. nighttime raids using conventional bombs against residential areas of Tokyo, Osaka and other industrial cities caused hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilian deaths, and Dresden, Germany, was obliterated in early 1945, killing mainly refugees. But Truman’s decision opened the door to massive use of these new terror bombs.
TL;DR
- Truman was noted to be a racist against the Japanese (also black people too, fun fact)
- The bombs were dropped purely for political purposes against the USSR
- Truman was ready to annihilate Japan (genocidal) if two nukes didn't do it
- Japan was already blockaded, being invaded by USSR. They would have surrendered very soon without the nukes being dropped.
- The United States gets away with war crimes all the damn time.