In a sense, the quibbling over whether or not it was a war crime is meaningless. If atomic weapons hadn't been available, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki would've undergone ordinary firebombing, likely resulting in immediate casualties just as high. See, for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/14/world/tokyo-journal-10000... for a description of the effects of firebombing elsewhere in Japan.

One might argue that the lingering radiation effects made atomic weapons worse but, on the other hand, the firebombing would've been done more than once. Really six of one, half a dozen of the other, except you don't see that many people bringing up firebombings as a war crime.

Honest question: can it not be both a less fatal end to the war and a war crime? This classification of something as a war crime, even if appropriate, isn't the ending of a discussion.

A lot of people are uncomfortable with the concept that the best possible outcome should be considered a crime.

(And I'm not limiting this to the circumstances under discussion -- I'm talking about the view that, no matter what situation you're in, there should be a way out that isn't a crime. Such people will, for example, object violently if somewhat incoherently to the fact that, under Qing Chinese law, a man ordered by his father to commit a crime had no way to get out of that situation while following the law: following the order is illegal, but so is disobeying the command.)

Note that people who object to committing war crimes are not a kind of legalistic automata that require following the letter of the law no matter what. We do not always decide something is a crime because there's a law that says so. For example, the Holocaust would have been a crime even if the powers at the time had decided that it wasn't.

Complicated Chinese (and Japanese) laws about legal and familiar duty are really not the subject under discussion here, but a red herring. Murdering innocent people is an entirely different matter.

Finally, consider there are many people in this world who won't commit some crimes -- such as genocide -- even if there is no way out and refusing will cost them their own lives.

> Finally, consider there are many people in this world who won't commit some crimes -- such as genocide -- even if there is no way out and refusing will cost them their own lives.

Yes, this viewpoint is more or less the opposite of the viewpoint I describe above, and it is also common. But so is the other one.

It is hard to overstate how many civilians suffered and died in war crimes perpetrated by Japan before and during the war. The number vastly exceeds the number who died as a result of the American atomic bombs. Breaking Japan's will and ability to make war was the entire world's highest priority in late 1945. Any discussion of "American war crimes against Japan" is meaningless without discussing Japan's crimes against half the world, together with the very real possibility that the nation of Japan continues to exist today solely because those two bombs were dropped.

> "It is hard to overstate how many civilians suffered and died in war crimes perpetrated by Japan before and during the war"

I'll take a stab at it.

If one sums together the estimated deaths in Asia caused by Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties), both military and civilian, one gets totals in excess of 15-22 million. This compares to about 5 million dead in the Holocaust. So basically, Japan effectively committed 3 to 4 Holocausts, a fact not often remarked upon in these discussions. If we compare that to the roughly 0.25 million estimated dead from Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, the US would have had to drop 40 more atomic bombs to catch up to the Germans and another 120-176 atomic bombs to catch up to the Japanese. (If one likes, they can subtract out military casualties or otherwise adjust the numbers but the ratios are still high.)

One should also factor in that the Nazis simply executed the majority of the victims of the Holocaust as efficiently as they could in concentration camps. The deaths inflicted during the IJA occupation, on the other hand was accompanied by rape and by torture, including on children, across significant parts of a continent. It's notable that even a diehard Nazi who was in China was so revolted by what he was witnessing that he intervened to protect civilians from the IJA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe. Given the option, it doesn't seem unlikely that many of the IJA's victims would have preferred a death by nuclear blast; at least it would have been impersonal.

So, were Hiroshima and Nagasaki war crimes? I think it's not unreasonable to say that even if they were, they were negligible in the grand scheme of things.

You're comparing unrelated numbers.

I don't subscribe to the moral calculus that has war crimes cancel each other. When one starts justifying a war crime against civilians because the enemy committed war crimes themselves, one is on very shaky ground.

For example, rape and murder against German civilians is not morally justifiable just because the Nazis were horrendous monsters.

There were 4 alternatives. Nuclear weapons were one.

2. Invade. The Japanese had 900,000 troops in Kyushu, plus militia forces. Japanese estimates were for 20 million deaths. Look up the battle for Okinawa some time.

3. Let the Soviets invade. Same deaths, just not US soldiers. Plus Stalin didn't like to give up territory the Soviets conquered.

4. Continue the blockade, with or without conventional bombing. Likely, the Japanese government would have surrendered or collapsed by mid-1946. Again, millions of deaths due to starvation. And civil war.

On #3, it would not have been the same deaths. Russia hated Japan and would have genocided the Japanese by the millions, torturing, starving, brutalizing, slaughtering them. Russia would have conquered and enslaved Japan for the next half century.

Instead the US occupied Japan and forced cultural changes upon them, which resulted in Japan becoming a democratic, peaceful economic power and tremendous contributor to the global economy and both global and regional stability.

The nuclear bombings saved at least a million Japanese lives. It can easily be argued it would be a war crime not to drop them.

No it cannot. That is not what war crime means.