The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes. Full stop.

There is no justification for killing hundreds of thousands of civilians

Atomic bomb damage in Hiroshima, 1945.
(Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Seventy-two years ago this week the United States committed war crimes against the Japanese people on a scale that was previously unimaginable in human history.

It is almost impossible to utter this truism in public without being subjected to a chorus of tediously well-rehearsed, half-understood objections learned from high-school classrooms, pop history, and talk radio. The most common form these replies take is that, so far from being acts of state-sponsored mass murder, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were humanitarian missions meant primarily to save lives: Had it not been for the instantaneous slaughter of some 220,000 people (a conservative estimate), mainly civilians, the war would have been unnecessarily prolonged. It was far better, assuming those projected casualty figures, which since at least 1947 have routinely been estimated upward after the fact, to kill a few hundred thousand civilians rather than risk an equal or greater number of dead American and Japanese soldiers.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.