‘Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war.’ 1/
‘…Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?’ 2/
That was Leo Szilárd on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 75 years ago. Szilárd was the Hungarian-American physicist, among the first to warn of Germany’s A bomb programme, and a central figure in the Manhattan Project. 3/
It was not just scientists who made that point. 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' That was Curtis LeMay, the US Air Force general who directed the air assault over Japan in the final days of World War II and was a military hawk. 4/
‘We had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.’ Fleet Admiral William Leahy, Chair of the Chiefs of Staff under both presidents Roosevelt and Truman. 5/
Robert McNamara, the US Defence secretary who escalated the war in Vietnam, reflecting on LeMay’s point: ‘LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?’ 6/
75 years on, we remember the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in an almost abstract way. It is striking how much less aware we seem to be aware of the sheer inhumanity, and moral indefensibility, of the bombings, than even the military hawks were at the time. 7/
We should never forget either the human or the moral cost of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 8/
