> We find no evidence that anyone within the Truman administration undertook a formal legal analysis of the attack options in 1945. I mean… they’d already fire

> We find no evidence that anyone within the Truman administration undertook a formal legal analysis of the attack options in 1945. I mean… they’d already firebombed a lot of cities to similar effect. Japanese and German. We may wish they’d considered the morality or legality more thoughtfully in all cases, but it’s not an aberration that they went with “meh, kill them all” in the case of the A-bombs. The tool was (notably! Especially in hindsight) different, but the effect was similar to what they’d achieved in prior cases.