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After WW2 we call it a war crime (or terrorism) to mass kill civilians to save military casualties. Though the US did this already before the use of nuclear wea

After WW2 we call it a war crime (or terrorism) to mass kill civilians to save military casualties. Though the US did this already before the use of nuclear weapons through mass bombing cities with conventional weapons.

himinlomax 3y ago
The Japanese were killing more civilians in China and other occupied territories in two weeks than a single nuclear bomb did. If the bombs shortened the war by just a month, and that's a perfectly reasonable estimate, they were morally justified. Read up on Japanese atrocities. They were just as bad as Nazi concentration camp.
- fulafel 3y ago
  Was this really the motivation, or a post war found justification? Regardless, we'd then need to consider what were the military options to defend chinese civilians (eg bombing (nuking?) Japanese military assets there).
  - himinlomax 3y ago
    Atrocities committed by Japan in China were very much a concern in the US (and even in Germany for that matter!) already before the war, and were incontrovertibly the reason for the US foreign policy towards Japan then, and thus arguably a distant cause for Pearl Harbor. You'd have to argue that the US had forgotten about it, and then not gotten the memo on the atrocities committed since then.
  - refurb 3y ago
    Does it have to be the motivation? It's true in either case.
wolverine876 3y ago
See Fog of War, the Erroll Morris's interview with Robert McNamara, who was US Secretary of Defense during Vietnam and helped manage the bombing of Japan in WWII. McNamara says he and compatriots would have been convicted as war criminals if the US had lost, and IIRC says they were war criminals.
- pests 3y ago
  I mean it got to the point where we had to "save" Japanese cities to make them enticing targets for the nuke. If we had let our bombers go full force then there literally wouldn't have been a target left.
refurb 3y ago
> After WW2 we call it a war crime (or terrorism) to mass kill civilians to save military casualties. We did? Where? The laws of war have always made allowances for civilian deaths as long as "military necessity" is justified. And they would have to be - there is no way to conduct a war without civilian casualties. It is true that mass killing civilians for no military purpose is a war crime. So at the extreme ends the answer is simple. But not in the middle. One can quibble at the margins - how much destruction of military capabilities are justified in exchange for the loss of X civilian lives, but that can never be answered since it's not an objective measure. There is significant overlap between civilians and military when answering such questions - are workers in a factory producing weapons civilians or means to wage war? The answer is both.
- fulafel 3y ago
  > We did? Where? The Geneva Conventions were updated partly in response to the Japan bombings. You can quibble how exactly the criteria my casual summary of "mass kill civilians to save military casualties" but broadly the Japan style bombing of cities full of civilians was made illegal. See eg: https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/why-atomic-bombing-hiroshima-would-be-illegal-today https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/why-atomic-bombing-hiroshima-w...
  - refurb 3y ago
    That’s an opinion piece. It attempts to “infer” the purpose of bombing from select statements like a Presidential speech. It’s not all that convincing. But regardless the point stands. Proportionality is a subjective rather than objective measure. The paper claims that “less than 10% of the individuals killed were military personnel”. Ok, so what percentage makes the bombing legal? 50%? 90%? What if based on all available information the death toll was estimated at 90% but it turns out to be 70%? Is it still illegal? And could you even reliably determine the number? Is someone in the military a civilian because they took their uniform off and went home for the night?

himinlomax 3y ago

The Japanese were killing more civilians in China and other occupied territories in two weeks than a single nuclear bomb did. If the bombs shortened the war by just a month, and that's a perfectly reasonable estimate, they were morally justified. Read up on Japanese atrocities. They were just as bad as Nazi concentration camp.

fulafel 3y ago
Was this really the motivation, or a post war found justification? Regardless, we'd then need to consider what were the military options to defend chinese civilians (eg bombing (nuking?) Japanese military assets there).
- himinlomax 3y ago
  Atrocities committed by Japan in China were very much a concern in the US (and even in Germany for that matter!) already before the war, and were incontrovertibly the reason for the US foreign policy towards Japan then, and thus arguably a distant cause for Pearl Harbor. You'd have to argue that the US had forgotten about it, and then not gotten the memo on the atrocities committed since then.
- refurb 3y ago
  Does it have to be the motivation? It's true in either case.

wolverine876 3y ago

See Fog of War, the Erroll Morris's interview with Robert McNamara, who was US Secretary of Defense during Vietnam and helped manage the bombing of Japan in WWII. McNamara says he and compatriots would have been convicted as war criminals if the US had lost, and IIRC says they were war criminals.

pests 3y ago
I mean it got to the point where we had to "save" Japanese cities to make them enticing targets for the nuke. If we had let our bombers go full force then there literally wouldn't have been a target left.

refurb 3y ago

> After WW2 we call it a war crime (or terrorism) to mass kill civilians to save military casualties. We did? Where? The laws of war have always made allowances for civilian deaths as long as "military necessity" is justified. And they would have to be - there is no way to conduct a war without civilian casualties. It is true that mass killing civilians for no military purpose is a war crime. So at the extreme ends the answer is simple. But not in the middle. One can quibble at the margins - how much destruction of military capabilities are justified in exchange for the loss of X civilian lives, but that can never be answered since it's not an objective measure. There is significant overlap between civilians and military when answering such questions - are workers in a factory producing weapons civilians or means to wage war? The answer is both.

fulafel 3y ago
> We did? Where? The Geneva Conventions were updated partly in response to the Japan bombings. You can quibble how exactly the criteria my casual summary of "mass kill civilians to save military casualties" but broadly the Japan style bombing of cities full of civilians was made illegal. See eg: https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/why-atomic-bombing-hiroshima-would-be-illegal-today https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/why-atomic-bombing-hiroshima-w...
- refurb 3y ago
  That’s an opinion piece. It attempts to “infer” the purpose of bombing from select statements like a Presidential speech. It’s not all that convincing. But regardless the point stands. Proportionality is a subjective rather than objective measure. The paper claims that “less than 10% of the individuals killed were military personnel”. Ok, so what percentage makes the bombing legal? 50%? 90%? What if based on all available information the death toll was estimated at 90% but it turns out to be 70%? Is it still illegal? And could you even reliably determine the number? Is someone in the military a civilian because they took their uniform off and went home for the night?