Today, on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Oliver argues that the act was justified; it was not a war crime. With the first part of his argument, that the bombing wasn't motivated as an exemplary act of warning to the USSR - to demonstrate the destructive power America could now command - I concur. But what he goes on to say I think is unpersuasive. Oliver writes:
The decision to drop the bomb was founded on the conviction that a blockade and invasion of Japan would cause massive casualties. Estimates derived from intelligence about Japan's military deployments projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties.And he then quotes the words of the historian Wilson Miscamble who said...
Truman "hoped that the bombs would end the war and secure peace with the fewest American casualties, and so they did. Surely he took the action any American president would have undertaken."Even if one thinks the calculation does convincingly establish how any US president would have acted, it doesn't show that it wasn't a war crime. It is not a legitimate act of war to save the lives of your own soldiers by the mass bombing of civilians, and to reason simply from the 'realism' of what was to be expected in the situation prevailing is to suggest that the laws of war only apply when it's easy to uphold them, but otherwise must give way to utilitarian calculation. On that basis you might as well scrap those laws. It is true that Oliver also alludes to the possibility that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. This is a separate argument. But as Michael Walzer has pointed out, it is not clear even those (Japanese) casualties must be accepted without question as having been the unavoidable alternative to use of the atomic bomb. They were based on the assumption that America could accept nothing less than Japan's unconditional surrender.