Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

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Peter H
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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#241

Post by Peter H » 13 Jan 2010, 05:31

Fallout Forecasting-1945 Through 1962
http://www.osti.gov/bridge/purl.cover.j ... 09-vLl9E0/

Based on the Los Alamos testing(page 4-6) "fallout was of little concern...planning called for the fireball not to intersect the ground...the Height of Burst(HOB) of both as planned was to maximise the explosive force of the bomb".

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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#242

Post by Scott Smith » 13 Jan 2010, 20:33

TEST- Am I still banned at AHF?

:-)


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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#243

Post by David Thompson » 13 Jan 2010, 20:51

TEST- Am I still banned at AHF?

:-)
Nope. Merry Christmas amnesty! Our rules have changed somewhat since you were last here; you can review them at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=53962

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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#244

Post by Scott Smith » 13 Jan 2010, 21:26

Thanks and Happy New Year!

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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#245

Post by Guaporense » 16 Feb 2010, 05:38

phylo_roadking wrote:...ALL that looks remarkably NOT "literally destroyed" to me!!! :lol:
All right, so literally destroyed only means that 100% of the buildings that once existed in the country are destroyed. Anyway, this is a straw man.

Well, do you think that the measures taken be the allies against Japan were proportional to the damage that country caused to the allies? Apparently, the allies would continue to kill civilians until the Japanese government accepted the demand of unconditional surrender. Is that reasonable? Hardly.
Strange how YOUR opinion differs from the IJA! 8O :lol:
To them the country could continue the war if there was people that still could punch at the invaders. However, more reasonable people would have accepted the reality and surrendered in 1944.

Do you think that one government that refuses to surrender to another gives the "another" government the right to kill the civilian population that lives under the first? Note that Poland didn't formally surrender to Germany in 1939.
"Right" or "wrong" might be acceptable personally subjective measurements...but they are ALSO entirely separate from the requirement to indicate WHAT LAW HAS BEEN BROKEN before you can say a "crime" has been committed.
What are the laws that the holocaust broke? I think that I can make the case that strategic bombing over cities broke some of these laws, considering the similarities between these "social processes".
"In tactics, as in strategy, superiority in numbers is the most common element of victory." - Carl von Clausewitz

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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#246

Post by David Thompson » 16 Feb 2010, 06:47

Guaporense -- You wrote: (1)
Well, do you think that the measures taken be the allies against Japan were proportional to the damage that country caused to the allies? Apparently, the allies would continue to kill civilians until the Japanese government accepted the demand of unconditional surrender. Is that reasonable? Hardly.
I take it you don't know much about the subject. There are only limited restrictions on the methods of waging war now, and there were even less in WWII. If you think the atomic bombings were a war crime, please cite to the treaty or treaties in effect at the time that made it so. You can find a list of them, with links, at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 03#p238603

(2)
What are the laws that the holocaust broke? I think that I can make the case that strategic bombing over cities broke some of these laws, considering the similarities between these "social processes".
Please stay on topic -- whether or not the atomic bombings were a war crime, and if so, in violation of what treaty or custom of war. If you read about the holocaust, and the resulting trials, you will get a clear picture of what laws were broken. Here's a start:

(1) Killing foreign civilians, without legal authority, in violation of the domestic laws of their countries, the 1899 Hague II and 1907 Hague IV conferences, and the pre-existing customs of war.

(2) Murder and mistreatment of foreign civilians, in violation of German domestic law.

(3) Abductions and slave labor operations, involving foreign civilians forcibly deported from occupied territory, in violation of the 1899 Hague II and 1907 Hague IV conferences and the pre-existing customs of war.

(4) Robbery of foreign civilians, in violation of the 1899 Hague II and 1907 Hague IV conferences and the pre-existing customs of war.

(5) Murder and mistreatment of POWs, in violation of the 1899 Hague II conference, the 1907 Hague IV conference, the 1929 Geneva POW convention, and the pre-existing customs of war.

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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#247

Post by phylo_roadking » 18 Feb 2010, 19:21

In addition to what David has said above, I would merely add...
Apparently, the allies would continue to kill civilians until the Japanese government accepted the demand of unconditional surrender. Is that reasonable? Hardly.
Having already given the details of the targeting criteria discussions in 1944/45....I would say they would actually continue to attack military targets assisting the Japanese defensive effort until the Japanese accepted - given that case that the Americans intentionally targeted civilians as a criterion before they targeted military targets as a criterion has been demolished (sic) in this thread adequately.
All right, so literally destroyed only means that 100% of the buildings that once existed in the country are destroyed. Anyway, this is a straw man.
No its not. But what it DID do is demonstrate the foolishness of using 100%-inclusive descriptive terms like "literally destroyed" and leaving yourself no wiggle-room :wink:
Strange how YOUR opinion differs from the IJA!
To them the country could continue the war if there was people that still could punch at the invaders. However, more reasonable people would have accepted the reality and surrendered in 1944.
1/ this was 1945, not 1944...
2/ and who was in control of the government of Japan by then?

But anyway that's an entirely theoretical AND anacrhonistic argument that has NO bearing on the legal issue involved here. This is a fact-based research part of the Forum, not a place for What-Ifs.

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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#248

Post by Guaporense » 18 Feb 2010, 19:47

All right. By the laws of 1945, they weren't war crimes.
"In tactics, as in strategy, superiority in numbers is the most common element of victory." - Carl von Clausewitz

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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#249

Post by ljadw » 18 Feb 2010, 19:56

And are they by the laws of today ?

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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#250

Post by bf109 emil » 19 Feb 2010, 09:22

ljadw wrote:And are they by the laws of today ?
good point and the answer would be no...as both cities where industrial and military cities. Thus bombing them was justified...now we come to the use of an atomic bomb...the destructive power of the bomb dropped upon Hiroshima equaled around 15,000 tons in terms of conventional explosive power...does the fact that an army can produce this amount of force from 1 bomb as opposed to say B-29's flying a total of 1500 sorties each dropping 10 ton of bombs would equal the same destructive force...would be no different

so what we have to focus upon was Hiroshima and Nagasaki a legit target under the rules of warfare, and the answer is without a doubt as being legal.

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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#251

Post by David Thompson » 19 Feb 2010, 17:24

bf109 emil -- You wrote, in response to a question by ljadw about the legality of the use of nuclear weapons:
ljadw wrote:And are they by the laws of today ?
good point and the answer would be no...as both cities where industrial and military cities. Thus bombing them was justified...now we come to the use of an atomic bomb...the destructive power of the bomb dropped upon Hiroshima equaled around 15,000 tons in terms of conventional explosive power...does the fact that an army can produce this amount of force from 1 bomb as opposed to say B-29's flying a total of 1500 sorties each dropping 10 ton of bombs would equal the same destructive force...would be no different

so what we have to focus upon was Hiroshima and Nagasaki a legit target under the rules of warfare, and the answer is without a doubt as being legal.
I think that the provisions of the two 1977 Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva IV Conference on the protection of civilian populations effectively ban most uses of nuclear weapons, including Hiroshima/Nagasaki-type bombings. See Articles 35, 36, Part IV and Article 87 of Protocol 1:

http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/470?OpenDocument

and Part IV of Protocol 2:

http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/475?OpenDocument

While the US is not a party to either protocol, 169 countries are parties to Protocol 1 and 165 countries are parties to Protocol 2:

http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/WebSign?Rea ... d=470&ps=P
http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/WebSign?Rea ... d=475&ps=P

The very large number of parties to these two protocols suggests that the protocols have become a new international standard of conduct, for leaders and military commanders of non-party countries to ignore at their peril.

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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#252

Post by bf109 emil » 23 Feb 2010, 11:02

I think that the provisions of the two 1977 Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva IV Conference on the protection of civilian populations effectively ban most uses of nuclear weapons, including Hiroshima/Nagasaki-type bombings. See Articles 35, 36, Part IV and Article 87 of Protocol 1:

http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/470?OpenDocument

and Part IV of Protocol 2:

http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/475?OpenDocument
but so does the wordings such as likewise prevent the indiscriminate bombing of cities as...Part IV of Protocol 2:

Part IV. Civilian Population


Art 13. Protection of the civilian population

1. The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against the dangers arising from military operations. To give effect to this protection, the following rules shall be observed in all circumstances.

2. The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.

3. Civilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this part, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.


unsure how an atomic bomb say dropped on Hanoi would be termed a war crime, while IIRC the tonnage dropped by B-52 in tonnage, the total dropped upon Vietnam exceeded that dropped upon Germany by the USAAF. By this definition those responsible would be under the same war crime for dropping hundreds of thousands of tons upon a civilian population by multiple sorties as opposed to a single bomb carrying the same destructive force in a single blast...would they not?

I'm not trying to be smart alec or argue for the sake of it, but I don't see the difference when the combined destructive force would equal the same over all result...other then a high number of sorties can be toned down with a victory earlier then a single blast maybe being to much to quick...

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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#253

Post by David Thompson » 09 Aug 2011, 05:20

The Nuking Of Japan
By Henry Miller | Forbes – 2 hrs 25 mins ago

Saturday Aug. 6 marked one of the United States' most important but unheralded anniversaries. It is remarkable not only for what happened on that date in 1945 but for what did not happen subsequently.

What did happen was that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, dropped a uranium-based atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It hastened the end of World War II, which concluded within a week after the dropping of a plutonium-based bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Approximately 140,000 died in Hiroshima from the acute effects of the "Little Boy" bomb, and about 74,000 more in Nagasaki from the "Fat Man" bomb.

About a year after the war ended, the "was it necessary?" Monday-morning quarterbacks began to question the military necessity and morality of the use of nuclear weapons on Japanese cities. Since then, there have been eruptions of revisionism and uninformed speculation on this subject, perhaps the most offensive of which was the Smithsonian Institution's plan for an exhibition of the Enola Gay for the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The exhibit was to emphasize the victimization of the Japanese, mentioning the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor only as the motivation for the "vengeance" sought by the U.S. (The exhibit as originally conceived was eventually canceled.)

The historical context and military realities of 1945 are often lost in judging whether it was necessity for the U.S. to use nuclear weapons. The Japanese had been the aggressors, launching the war with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and subsequently systematically and flagrantly violated various international agreements by employing biological and chemical warfare, torturing and murdering prisoners of war, and brutalizing civilians and forcing them to perform slave labor. More than 50 million people had perished during the war, many of them civilians.

What did not happen as a result of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the massive Allied (largely American) invasion of the Japanese home islands that was being actively planned. As Allied forces closed in on the home islands, the intentions of Japan's senior military leaders ranged from "fighting to the last man" to inflicting sufficiently heavy losses on invading American ground forces that the U.S. would agree to a conditional peace. As U.S. strategists knew from having broken the Japanese military and diplomatic codes, there was virtually no inclination toward unconditional surrender.

Finally, because the Allied military planners assumed "that operations in this area will be opposed not only by the available organized military forces of the Empire [of Japan], but also by a fanatically hostile population," astronomical casualties were thought to be inevitable. A study performed for the staff of Secretary of War Henry Stimson by physicist William Shockley estimated that the invasion of Japan would cost 1.7-4 million American casualties, including 400,000-800,000 fatalities, and 5 million to 10 million Japanese deaths. These fatality estimates are, of course, in addition to those who had already perished during four long years of war; American deaths were already about 292,000. In other words, the invasion of Japan could have resulted in the death of twice as many Americans as had already been killed in the European and Pacific theaters!

A critical element of the Shockley analysis was the assumption of large-scale participation by civilians in repelling invading forces. This assumption is supported by a recent book, "The Most Controversial Decision," by the Rev. Wilson Miscamble, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, who blames "the twisted neo-samurai who led the Japanese military geared up with true banzai spirit to engage the whole population in a kind of kamikaze campaign." He added, "Their stupidity and perfidy in perpetuating and prolonging the struggle should not be ignored."

Much has been made of the moral line that supposedly was crossed by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, but far more significant were the decisions earlier in the war to adopt widespread bombing of civilians – initially by Hitler in attacking English cities and later by the Allied devastation of, for example, Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo. As Dr. Kori Schake, professor of international security studies at the U.S. Military Academy, put it in an e-mail to me, "It seems to me morally significant that we were already engaged in fire-bombing cities; the use of a more efficient weapon to do so was therefore an even smaller jump.'

In World War I, Europe lost almost an entire generation of young men. Combatant fatalities were approximately 13 million. In 1945, Allied military planners and political leaders were correct, both tactically and morally, in not wanting to repeat history. They understood the need to consider the costs and benefits for the American people, present and future. Had they been less wise or less courageous, the American post-war "baby boomer" generation would have been much smaller.

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He was a U.S. government official from 1977 to 1994.
http://news.yahoo.com/nuking-japan-184823159.html

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Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki... warcrimes?

#254

Post by PFLB » 11 Aug 2011, 04:54

The US government has publicly stated that it accepts parts of Additional Protocol I as embodying customary law. This includes most of the targeting regime that prohibits attacks on civilians, indiscriminate attacks, etc. Every US military operation since the 1991 Gulf War has been carried out in accordance with rules of engagement based on these treaty provisions. The only material distinction I am aware of is that the US government does not use the Protocol's definition of military objective, but instead refers to 'war-sustaining' targets. Whether there is even a difference is open to debate.

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