and a few other memorable phenomena when the old Soviet Union died. But we could still go after individuals, I suppose.

would be better served if they investigated Soviet participation in the murder of 10,000 Polish Army officers in the Katyn Forest, or war crimes against German civilians after the Soviet Army crossed into German.

"Oh, uh oh! A report is coming!"

I mean, really?

I do not think they will go there though, they too have crimes to account for

I wasn't alive at the time, but I can remember hearing some people say "a war crimes case could be made" about our use of the bombs in the late 50's when I was knee high to a grasshopper. I suspect such thought began immediately after their use. Contemporary films of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were every bit as shocking as those of Buchenwald and Dachau.

.... Or the horrific damage the Red Army did as it swept into Germany in 1945.

War sucks.

And then prosecute those who used it before it was made illegal. The UN Charter itself has language that prohibits ex post facto prosecutions that would certainly cover this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights_and_related_treaties

It's the same reason you couldn't prosecute the allies and central powers and those who gave the orders to use poison gas in the First World War.

in addition to that very serious problem with the idea of this prosecution, you have the idea that mass aerial bombing of cities itself was not illegal. More people died in at least a few other attacks than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

such conventional area attack, the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany (although post-war estimates have put its death toll at only 22-25,000, in contrast to Hiroshima's 75-100,000). Another such conventional aerial attack that comes to mind is the fire-bombing of Tokyo in March 1945. IIRC, that attack killed about 100,000 people, more than conservative estimates of the Hiroshima toll.

Weren't the Nuremburg prosecutions for 'crimes against humanity' ex post facto? I don't remember the rationale the Nuremburg tribunal used to get around that issue. But I don't think there was a governing statute that predated the Nazis' rise to power that governed Auschwitz and the Final Solution. It's been quite awhile since I studied the period, so I may be mis-remembering.

of the Geneva conventions already in place that placed rules on how you treated prisoners of war, also there were conventions against use of chemical weapons and poison gas. Everyone pretty much obeyed the gas and chemical weapons rules during the second world war. So in terms of war crimes, there were plenty of existing rules that those prosecuted broke.

In terms of crimes against humanity, murder was already a crime. Bundling up a bunch of murders and assaults that occurred outside of the bounds of war and calling them crimes against humanity was a prosecutorial convenience, not really a new crime. They could have chosen any ten individual documented intentional murders of civilians and given leading Nazis the death penalty for them.

to the great crime known as "The Final Solution" and suggesting that the statutory authority under which the leading Nazis were tried and convicted for it was cooked up after the war was over. I agree with you that prosecutors could instead have chosen any individual homicide or group thereof and prosecuted under existing statutes. But the Allies chose not to.

Because the Final Solution was sui generis, conveners of the Nuremberg Tribunals could feel justified in creating a governing statutory authority after the fact. The Nazi regime's behavior was so odious as to offend the decent opinion(s) of mankind. But the conveners did so after the fact, let us not forget.

So, wrt to the topic at hand in the OP, the question becomes whether the dropping of fission weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki likewise is sui generis and so offensive to the decent opinion(s) of mankind, as to override the general rules against ex post facto law. While dropping the atomic bomb may indeed be the former, there are many reasons why it could, would and should not be the latter, especially if the decent opinion(s) of mankind include the opinions of the peoples of Asia's mainland and non-Japanese archipelagos. Japanese imperial militarism had to be smashed and, whether that smashing came from a long, drawn-out conventional campaign or a short and shocking nuclear campaign, to me matters as much or more as validating delicate sensibilities about the horrors of nuclear weapons. (I get huge amounts of shit from some of my Socialist and Communist comrades for this position, as you can probably imagine.)

so it wasn't ex-post-facto, hell they were still trying to burn bodies when American troops went into the camps. The Nazis went to great extremes to hide their actions in recent year we just finding out how extreme...

part refers to the crafting of statutes after the criminal acts had taken place, specifically for the Nuremberg Tribunals (and also, IIRC, the tribunals that tried and convicted some of the Japanese).

As for how crazy the Nazis got, Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners definitely opened my eyes. I know Goldhagen's work has subsequently come in for some serious criticism from Holocaust scholars like Raul Hilberg but I'm pretty sure his point that the Nazis were frenetically pursuing the Final Solution even as the fronts collapsed on both East and West still holds.

Scholars of international law disagree on whether the US committed war crimes in bombing dozens of major Japanese cities during WWII. The issue is a subtle one, not to be resolved with a quick talking point.

I am sure you are happy being ignorant; so I will drop the issue.

....major combatant did it.

Conventional bombing killed anywhere from 241,000 to 900,000 Japanese.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raids_on_Japan

the range, as in, could very well be the lower end.

Here is something they haven't considered with this ridiculous attempt to attack the U.S., Truman informed Stalin of the existence of the bomb at Potsdam and Stalin certainly did not object to the project or its potential use. That would make Soviet Union/Russia an accessory should this be found to be a crime.

conventional attack and invasion upon the Japanese home islands would have caused an estimated 2 million civilian casualties, far more than the the casualties produced by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons. While horrific by contemporary standards, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks shortened the war by hastening Japan's surrender, leading to fewer civilian casualties.

only far fewer U.S. and allied casualties but also far fewer Japanese civilian casualties (if one accepts allied war planners' estimates of 1-2 million civilian casualties upon a conventional invasion of the home islands).

When Lee and Longstreet stood atop the heights of Fredericksburg and surveyed the advancing waves of Union soldiers being mowed down by the entrenched and prepared Confederates, Lee is reputed to have remarked to Longstreet that "it's a good thing war is so terrible, else we should grow to love it too much." I think all of us can agree with the first part of Lee's statement and, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, inhuman would he or she be who agreed with the latter part. I'm damned glad I wasn't in Harry S. Truman's shoes; there's no way I could have filled them.

talking about. That he ended the war early. I had an uncle in the war and they were always very worried about him.

As to Lee's statement, yes the first part is always true. I am somewhat afraid that we are moving toward the last part. At least some of our leaders are.

Why was an inasion needed? The Japanese were no longer capable of threatening anyone and could not defend their own skies.

know whether some sort of alternative like a naval quarantine might have proven a sufficient substitute for invasion or aerial nuclear attack. A failure to secure Japan's surrender would have been something of a slap in the face to the peoples of Asia, all of whom had suffered mightily at the hands of Japanese imperialism, not to mention the people(s) of the U.S. who had sacrificed sons and daughters to the war effort.

Yours may actually be the best question posed in this sub-thread. I'll have to think about it some more and maybe dig out some dusty tomes to refresh my memory. In the meantime, some of the DU experts in the history of World War II may want to weigh in.

Just so we're clear, are you saying that you would have preferred a naval quarantine? What provision should the Allies have made to ensure that Japanese civilians were not enduring inhumane privation and starvation?

My initial response would be to say that it that consideration would come AFTER first securing the lives of our allied forces. I brought this issue up because the old chestnut of how an invasion would have cost millions of lives was carted out. So naturally the question becomes "so why invade?"
Going further, any pretense that a full victory was done to ensure the emotional closure of Asia or in order to prevent mass starvation of Japanese citizens is really too silly and dishonest to even waste my breath with.
But back to the issue of Japan's lack of offensive capabilities, it is well known that they had no oil left, no airplanes and no navy left. Given that, it is difficult to see why an invasion that risked millions would have been a pressing need.

give you any kind of satisfactory answer. I mean, I can tell you that there had been conferences (Tehran in 1943, Yalta and Potsdam) where the Allies discussed and made plans for the invasion of the Home Islands. I can also tell you that allied war planners had made estimates of allied and Japanese casualties. But doing so doesn't really answer the question you pose but instead begs it.

I do think that the Korean sex slaves and Chinese and Vietnamese peasants and proletariat who were brutalized by the Japanese may have felt like only a full Japanese surrender would make things right. I don't think it's silly and dishonest to consider that. Or maybe I'm just a bit slow on the uptake this New Year's Eve night.

As for protecting against the mass starvation of Japanese civilians, I meant that only as a consideration of any sort of quarantine strategy and not as a rationale for a conventional invasion. As we found out with our sanctions on so-called dual use items on Iraq during the 90s, doing so can have unforeseen and reprehensible consequences (preventable deaths of some 500,000 Iraqi children not least among them).

You have raised some damned important questions; I only wish I could give you better answers to them.

What I meant to say is that it would be silly to pretend that tgat was a consideration in America's wartime plans.

thought to the plight of Korean sex slaves, nor did Comrade Joe nor PM Churchill.

I still think you have raised THE question and I thank you for doing so. Again, the haberdasher did not have a large enough soul at the time to ask himself "Why bother invading?" To be honest, though, I'm not sure FDR would have had either, no disrespect to either of them.

I enjoyed the discussion.

for those Chinese, Philipinos, and others living under Japanese occupation and dying by the thousands of starvation, disease and atrocities, a timely end of the war was literally a matter of life or death.

Besides - how would the slow death of hundreds of thousands of Japanese due to cold, disease and starvation be more humane than bombing? Does spreading the death over a longer period of time make it more acceptable?

they hoarded a great number of new weapons and human powered guided missiles & torpedos to take on American ships. Perhaps if some took the actual time to see what is housed at the Smithsonian they might open their eyes. They have some of the examples the were captured at the wars end. The Germans were already in the process of transferring technology to them. There are lots of revisonists out there, some saying our planes bombed w/o resistance....perhaps but Americans sending a 1000 plane raids didn't stop Germany and 300 American planes didn't stop Japan. If the Emperor was really in charge, he could have ended it long before "Fat Man" &
"Little Boy" hit his cities.

and the back tail with the circled R. The entire plane can be seen over near Dulles International in Baltimore.

....not to mention the Japanese who would have starved due to the blockade of the home islands.

as a motivation for America's decision to use the bombs. Not seriously anyway.

....we shouldn't have bombed them, just blockade them into surrender.

I don't think several million Japanese starving to death is somehow a better result.

Conclusion that that is what would have happened. Japan had been self-sufficient from a food perspective for a very very long time. There would have been starvation, for sure, but millions seems to me an unsupported claim.

....as Japan still had the bulk of their army in China at the end of the war.

As to the food issues on the main Islands:

Food shortages had begun to appear in some parts of the country even before Pearl Harbor. A majority of the Japanese already were malnourished at the time of surrender. In 1944, officials in Osaka prefecture estimated that 46% of all economic crimes in their jurisdiction involved food. Hunger was compounded by a disastrous harvest (1945 was the worst since 1910, a shortfall of almost 40% from normal yield) and exacerbated by the confusion, corruption, and ineptitude of the postsurrender elites. Food shipments from the U.S. helped avert the anticipated disaster of as many as 10 million Japanese starving to death through the fall and winter, and, in the process, enhanced the image of the U.S. as a generous benefactor.

http://www.phoenixbonsai.com/bigpicture/PostWarJapan.html

Older Japanese are almost universally grateful to America despite the nukes because of the food issue in my experience.

There was never any discussion at the highest level about the use of the bomb. As soon as it was ready it was going to be used. The only question was who and what would be first target. My opinion has always been that if the bomb has been available 6-12 months sooner, or the war lasted 6-12 months longer, then Berlin would have been the first target. Those on the Left who now condemn the use of the bombs on Japan would not have said a thing about their use on Germany. Their attitude would have been that the dirty Fascists got what they deserved.

The Nazis were executing more people toward the end of the war in the concentration camps because they had perfected the mechanical means of the Holocaust. How many Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals and others might have been saved if the war in Europe had ended 6-12 months sooner?

Those scientists who worked on the bomb (many of the Jewish refugees from Hitler) did not seem to develop scruples until it was clear that Germany would no longer be the target. They knew for a fact that Berlin, and its civilians would certainly be the main target. They certainly didn’t have any concerns about German civilians being killed.

For those who cry moral outrage I see no difference between the fire-bombing of Dresden, Tokyo, other Japanese cities and the atomic bombings. Dead is dead.

The Japanese were just as bad as the Nazis. But too many people weep bitter tears for the “victims" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as if the Japanese did nothing to start the war in Asia. The Chinese suffered between 20-35 million casualties during the Japanese invasion of China (1937-1945). The Japanese forced Korean women into sexual slavery as “comfort women” in field brothels where the women were forced to sexually service, as many as 70 Japanese soldiers a day. In other words these women were raped 70 times a day for years on end. Everywhere the Japanese conquered, they acted like barbarians toward Allied POWS and civilians. The Japanese beat, starved, tortured and executed men and women. They used living human beings as living test subjects in their infamous biological warfare Unit 731.

People these days find it easy to take some moral high-ground when they are not involved in a war to the knife for the future of civilization. Hindsight is easy.

Finally, I think if Truman had not used the bomb out of moral scruples, and Operation Downfall had gone ahead, then America would have suffered terrible casualties. The truth about the bomb would have come out. And I think Truman would have been deservedly impeached.

Nor were they horrible in Manchuruia to the citizenry.

Sorry but they were not as bad as the Nazis by any measure and the figure you quote of 25 million in China at the hands of the Japanese is unsupportable.

Thanks for proving my point earlier. Sheesh.

Clearly not. I have so I know of what I speak and I know that you do not.

In other words, one of us is full of shit and doesn't know what he is talking about and it isn't me.

Please feel free to go to Seoul or Beijing, and tell the local residents all about how beneficial Japan's rule was during that war. I'm willing to bet most will instantly turn hostile against you.

I understand you have neither the education or experience to argue against what I actually SAID but even your strawman is so weak and poorly constructed that I'm having a hard time containing my amusement.

You've proved yourself to be generally clueless regarding this topic (as evidenced by your weak "rebuttals" to the other users' posts), yet you have the audacity to presume I know nothing? Talk about having an inflated ego..

And good to see you deflecting yet again, just like in the rest of your posts.

I asked if you have spoken to many Taiwanese on the subject. You dodged so I assumed you have not.

But I have. so it is no exaggeration to say you are ignorant of the opinions of actual people involved in the subject you are bloviating on.

for remaining in a place of ignorance.

Last edited Fri Jan 2, 2015, 12:23 PM - Edit history (3)

I've actually read some archived discussions regarding Japan during WWII on this board, and in quite a few of them, you were doing your best to downplay the true extent of Imperial Japan's crimes during that era. You were like, "Imperial Japan was victim of bully-boys" or "Other nations committed crimes, too!", basically implying that this somehow absolved Japan of its crimes. Your posts seem like they were taken directly from the comments made by the typical extremist right wing Japanese revisionist. Kind of like the 50 centers who go around spouting their CCP propaganda.

Oh, and regarding Manchuria and Taiwan, I'm not quite sure if the people in the articles below would agree with your statements:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2010/12/27/2003491990/1
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2014/01/13/2003581195
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

But I'm sure the "comfort girls" mentioned were just lowly sluts who were asking for it, right? Or just mere "collateral damage", as Bush put it.

And in regards to whether Imperial Japan's crimes were as bad as Nazi Germany, I think Chalmers Johnson, a major critic of US foreign policy, and the former president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, said it best when he stated:

"It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers—and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4% chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30%"

But of course, he's probably "full of shit", as you would put it.

EDIT: Oh, and I see that in the "228 thread" you posted recently, you stressed how the Japanese Empire was a civilizing power. Kind of like how the Third Reich built great highways, or how Bush "civilized" Iraq when he invaded that country. Typical.

Dang.

What say you?

I googled him. I guess he has YouTube videos talking about this subject.

Maybe Death-Threat guy assumed there was only one person in the world who thinks that America should apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I was teasing with the extra cheese comment because NYC_SKP was ordering a pizza (aka a Tombstone for Death Threat guy).

What a whack-job that one was!



No need for that around here. We might all occasionally have differences of opinion, but that one was nuttier than a pecan pie in a fruitcake factory.

Total deaths, ie military + civilian + war related starvation & disease is listed as between 10 million and 20 million:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_deaths

If that ain't a war crime, than the phrase has no meaning.

And yet many prominent Japanese officials downplay the true extent of these atrocities, or deny their existence altogether. A sad state of affairs all around.

40,0000 Taiwanese killed in a park. They don't like to mention that. Just nanjing, never apologized either. Ask a Taiwanese sometime.

As if one crime absolves another. I suppose you think Imperial Japan was really doing its best to promote the Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere, eh?

Apparently in the alternate universe you inhabit, describing war crimes by other countries is the same as apologizing for war crimes of another. I admire your ability to create and populate a world of your own imagining.

And nice of you to completely miss the point.

It is really ironic to be accused of denying war crimes by the only one actually doing so.

That is PRECISELY what you are doing. Nanking was a war crime. Tokyo fire bombings, Nagasaki and 228 also should be.

The only apologist I see here is you.

You presume quite a lot, and end up writing a bunch of absolute nonsense.

You started this with your spit-flecked sputterings of outrage when I DARED to point out the burning of 125,000 Japanesr in one night.

Why that caused you to be so outraged that you had to jump to Nanking is not clear to me, but perhaps is something you need to work through.

It's obvious that you simply don't get it, and it is not worth discussing this matter any further. Good day to you sir.

Your accusing me of being an apologist for war crimes didn't go quite as easily as you thought it would. I understand your embarrassment.

Once again, you've missed the general point completely, as evidence by your last post. Jesus.

It was the US that helped Europe and Russia during WWII fight back Nazi Germany. The men on those planes and those on the ground risked their lives and worked to end the war quickly. It is not surprising how dishonest some are that benefited from effort we put into ended the war.

I have met one of the men who was on that mission and seen and touched the plane.

We may not always be on the right side of history, but I believe that particular time we were.

There was NO reason to drop those bombs. We knew Japan was done!

It's wasn't over once they were dropped. It's a gift that keeps on giving.

Really? How many people were dying every month as the war ground on? About a million people died every month in WWII average so getting it over as fast as possible was a good thing.

And the bulk of the Japanese army was in China where about 20 million people were killed, so ending the war as soon as possible was a overall life saver.

And saying the Japanese were blockaded by submarines and would have surrendered "eventually" ignores the number of Japanese who would have died of starvation in the mean time.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/the-real-reason-america-used-nuclear-weapons-against-japan-to-contain-russian-ambitions.html

This tells the rest of the story. Like most of what is fed to the public, we are only told part of it. It is to long for me to put on here.
Ike

Eisenhower also noted (pg. 380):

In [July] 1945… Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude….

Admiral William Leahy – the highest ranking member of the U.S. military from 1942 until retiring in 1949, who was the first de facto Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and who was at the center of all major American military decisions in World War II – wrote (pg. 441):

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

General Douglas MacArthur agreed (pg. 65, 70-71):

MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed …. When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.

And of course after the war we used German scientists to further our nuclear program.

Bet there's silence from the Russians on that one.

Do they really want to remind their neighbors about the Winter War, or Baltic annexations right now?

Only what 70 years late?

The US campaign of mass murder included conventional bombing of dozens of cities.

surely you are not saying the US has a unique guilt here?

Plenty of guilt to go around.

There is no doubt of that. Not one nation involved would be left unscathed if we wanted to go nuts with investigations.

Only Japan and Germany were worse than the US in terms of human rights violations.

then yeah the U.S did that, though I'd point out that Britain had more bombers involved in the Dresden bombings than the U.S. But I'm talking atrocities great and small. The Soviets, for example, routinely shelled the hell outta cities before entering them. The British, as mentioned, eschewed daylight bombing missions (preferred by the US since it allowed greater precision of attacks on industrial targets), favoring instead night time missions that were much less precise and resulted in greater civilian casualties. Even at Dresden, the USAAF was targeting industrial centers, and not population centers. The British were also targeting industrial targets, but were far less precise in their attacks. And yeah, the use of incendiaries made the problem much worse. But it DID destroy Dresden's industrial capacity, which was the goal.

The Soviet bombardment of cities could easily be described as punitive in nature, so they aren't off the hook either.

It was a nasty, nasty war.

German cities in response.

Italy had bombed Ethiopian cities and Greek cities. Japan had bombed dozens of nearly defenseless Chinese cities.

But with all of that, you focus on the US. In fact, you always seem to focus on the US. Why is that?

did the same thing that is alleged about one of the participants.

Did you really need me to spell it out for you?

of cities that the US did. Most of the participants in WWII did no bombing of population centers at all.

Your suggestion that I always focus on the US is silly grade-school kind of stuff. Do I have to take it seriously?

the nations in WWII were meant to destroy specific items of war such as factories, government buildings, military bases, etc. The bombing of those two cities were meant to show the strength of our new weapon. By the way I don't think we fully understood the power of those bombs until we saw the results.

or bombed very little.
These were reserved for the atomic bombs.

We knew the power. It was a war crime by today's standards.

It was a bombing of a military installation. Yamamoto, who organized the attack, was killed in the war so we will never know if he would have be tried for it.

there was no Geneva Conference Laws until after the war ended. I think one of the worst things we have done in our modern time is ignore those laws. It has gotten us into a lot of trouble.

No question about it.

(i) The conduct endangers protected persons or objects. The majority of war crimes involve death, injury, destruction or unlawful taking of property. However, not all acts necessarily have to result in actual damage to persons or objects in order to amount to war crimes. This became evident when the Elements of Crimes for the International Criminal Court were being drafted. It was decided, for example, that it was enough to launch an attack on civilians or civilian objects, even if something unexpectedly prevented the attack from causing death or serious injury. This could be the case of an attack launched against the civilian population or individual civilians, even though, owing to the failure of the weapon system, the intended target was not hit. The same is the case for subjecting a protected person to medical experiments – actual injury is not required for the act to amount to a war crime; it is enough to endanger the life or health of the person through such an act.

(ii) The conduct breaches important values. Acts may amount to war crimes because they breach important values, even without physically endangering persons or objects directly. These include, for example, abusing dead bodies; subjecting persons to humiliating treatment;making persons undertake work that directly helps the military operations of the enemy; violation of the right to fair trial; and recruiting children under 15 years of age into the armed forces.

Pearl Harbor does not fall into these categories.

https://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v1_cha_chapter44_rule156

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_aggression

A war of aggression, sometimes also war of conquest, is a military conflict waged without the justification of self-defense, usually for territorial gain and subjugation. The phrase is distinctly modern and diametrically opposed to the prior legal international standard of "might makes right", under the medieval and pre-historic beliefs of right of conquest. Since the Korean War of the early 1950s, waging such a war of aggression is a crime under the customary international law. Possibly the first trial for waging aggressive war is that of Conradin von Hohenstaufen in 1268.[1]

Wars without international legality (e.g. not out of self-defense nor sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council) can be considered wars of aggression; however, this alone usually does not constitute the definition of a war of aggression; certain wars may be unlawful but not aggressive (a war to settle a boundary dispute where the initiator has a reasonable claim, and limited aims, is one example).

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."[2] Article 39 of the United Nations Charter provides that the UN Security Council shall determine the existence of any act of aggression and "shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security".

More links

http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/da/da.html

https://books.google.com/books?id=m-3lBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA536&lpg=PA536&dq=unprovoked+war+of+aggression+war+crime&source=bl&ots=RLJ6sflp2X&sig=4v30GDfHbUy-iv_ySHCMURe4gZs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-6mlVP3hLYe0ggS8zoD4Ag&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAzgK#v=onepage&q=unprovoked%20war%20of%20aggression%20war%20crime&f=false

http://www.roberthjackson.org/the-man/speeches-articles/speeches/speeches-related-to-robert-h-jackson/the-crime-of-waging-aggressive-war/

http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-nurem.htm

Principle Vl

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under; international law:
Crimes against peace:
Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

And if you are going to prosecute 'wars of aggression' several U.S. presidents, starting with LBJ, would have to go on trial.

Hiroshima was an alternative target because the primary was to socked in with clouds. I'd have to go look in a book to refresh my memory on what the primary was for that mission. The city of Hiroshima had factories that were integral to the Japanese war effort.

I tend to disagree with you on whether we fully understood the power. Given that a test had been conducted in NM, I think we had a good idea the bomb was going to cause massive damage.

When the crew (of the Enola Gay) took off, only a handful actually knew what the bomb was (I believe if memory serves me right besides Tibbets, and Parsons and his assistant knew for sure. There may have been others). Other crew members on the plane had some idea, but didn't know until Tibbets announced it once they were airborne.

I've read and studied about the bombings quite a bit over the years.

I'm sure that the Russians get some great headlines off of Cruz, Bachmann, and the rest of our lunatic "leaders".

That being said...

"Japan was at the moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of 'face'. It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
- General Dwight D. Eisenhower

(I look forward to this post being added to your list of evidence that I love Putin and hate America.)

You think I maintain a list of evidence that you love Putin and hate America and you think I'm going to add this post to my list because you referenced Eisenhower saying dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was awful?

OK, boss....

ambiguous and equivocal than Ike's words would suggest.

Without dredging up the entire debate yet again, there were informal back channel negotiations under way to explore a way for Japan to surrender without Hirohito having to abdicate. However, Hirohito was surrounded by the type of militarists who make Wolfowitz, Perle and even Cheney look like choir boys by comparison. Surrender was the farthest thing from their mindset before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Those informal back-channel negotiations may have proceeded with Hirohito's knowledge but certainly did not have his overt blessing. That MacArthur and Truman allowed Hirohito to remain Emperor as a type of ceremonial figurehead after Japan surrendered makes the posturing on both sides before Hiroshima seem petty and childish. But Hirohito and his court retinue bear some significant responsibility for perpetuating the combat.

Were the U.S. and her allies supposed to commit to a conventional invasion of the home islands, at the cost of tens of thousands of additional U.S. and allied casualties and as many as 1 million Japanese civilian casualities out of some moral squeamishness?

I believe that Ike said roughly the same thing on several occasions.

The fundamental idea was to break the enemy's will to fight, which seems to be necessary for any lasting peace after a war. Certainly, far more Japanese were killed by conventional munitions than by the atomic bomb, and conventional munitions had been sufficient to force Germany's unconditional surrender (i.e., to break their will to fight). Having seen so much war, and being an expert on it, perhaps Ike was thinking that the potential of atomic weapons was so terrible that the precedent of using it was not worth the gain in that specific instance.

I find this to be a very interesting topic, would love to have the time to research it!

exactly that - intimidation - by showing Japan the power of our new weapon we hoped to convince them to end the war. He was just a farmer in Iowa and I do not know where he got the idea but that is how he understood it.

farmers, including your Dad. It's hard work and a hard life.