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

But the truth is that it doesn’t matter what the motivation was. The indiscriminate targeting of civilians in warfare is always evil. It was evil when the Germans engaged in it during the Blitz; it was evil when the Royal Air Force, amid almost no protests save from a lone Anglican bishop, firebombed Dresden. It was unspeakably, blasphemously, indescribably evil during the Rape of Nanking (if you can read Iris Chang’s book without coming close to despair, your stomach is stronger than mine). It is one thing to take military action in full knowledge of the fact that the innocent may be harmed in pursuit of a just end (for example, targeting a military base where there may be civilian employees); this is in keeping with a principle that philosophers and theologians call “double effect” — it is something else entirely to make the harming of innocents the end in itself.

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