Defending the Hiroshima and Nagasaki war crimes sets a chilling precedent.

As the world was marking the 80^th anniversary of the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki earlier this month, Polly Toynbee kindly chose to tell us why she had changed her mind on banning the bomb. The Guardian columnist, who apparently went on CND marches as a child, has now decided that because NATO has “fallen apart” unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain “does not look a good proposition.” The implication is, of course, that she was never unconditionally anti-nuclear but only thought it was a good idea when Britain was assured of US nuclear protection.

Worse was, however, to come. Later in the article, she took Jeremy Corbyn to task for describing the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “criminal”. “The inconvenient truth,” she said, “is that most historians think fewer people died in those bombings than would have perished in a prolonged invasion of Japan.”

Most historians? Has she done a global poll? Even in the US – never mind in Japan or neutral countries – there are many historians who most definitely do not support Washington’s traditional justification for knowingly slaughtering most of the civilian inhabitants of two cities.

Toynbee’s assertion is, in fact, merely repetition of the claim made by the principal perpetrator of the crime, President Truman, who said in 1953 that “an invasion would cost at a minimum one quarter of a million casualties, and might cost as much as a million, on the American side alone.” The wideness of that ballpark reflects the fact that they were purely speculative figures for an invasion that might not even have been necessary.

To put it in context, the total US military death toll in the whole of the war was 407,316, more than half of whom died in Europe not in fighting Japan. Truman’s figures for what it would have taken to push Japan, which was already considering terms for surrender, into accepting defeat stretch credulity.

They also fly in the face of the view of his own supreme commander in the Pacific, General MacArthur, who told reporters – before the bombs were dropped – that Japan was “already beaten.”* And MacArthur was far from alone among the US top brass in this view: of the seven five-star officers who received their final star in World War II, six – Generals MacArthur, Eisenhower and Arnold and Admirals Leahy, King and Nimitz – rejected the idea that using atomic bombs was necessary.

Putting it bluntly, Admiral Leahy said that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan” and that “the Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.” He continued:

“My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had joined the barbarians of the world. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. We were the first to have this weapon in our possession, and the first to use it….These new and terrible instruments of uncivilized warfare represent a modern type of barbarism not worthy of Christian man.”

We could debate whether warfare is ever civilised, but – as Toynbee must surely know – there is no question that intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime, and there is no doubt that this is what happened.

According to an independent estimate made in 1977, 140,000 and 70,000 people were killed as a direct result of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. Many more died in the following years from the cancers triggered by the radioactive fall-out. Of these, fewer than one in ten were military personnel in Hiroshima, while only an estimated 150 Japanese soldiers were killed in Nagasaki. And this lack of any military targets was known in advance: an article published in 2020 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists concluded, after examining statements made by those directly involved in planning the operation, that they “make clear that killing large numbers of civilians was the primary purpose of the attack; destruction of military targets and war industry was a secondary goal and one that ‘legitimized’ the intentional destruction of a city in the minds of some participants.”

For some, that mindset went beyond killing civilians as an exceptional act to shock Japan’s leaders into surrendering sooner. Truman’s entourage included advisers who held the Japanese people as a whole responsible for the actions of their Emperor. As Colonel Harry F Cunningham, an intelligence officer of the US Fifth Air Force, put it: “The entire population of Japan is a proper military target – there are no civilians in Japan.”

This chilling attitude has a monstrous echo in the rhetoric of prominent politicians in Israel today. In April, Nissim Vituri, a Likud MP and the deputy speaker of Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset, described Palestinians as “creatures” with whom there would be no peace and said every child in Gaza “is already a terrorist when he is born.” A few weeks later, Moshe Feiglin, a former Knesset member, added: “The enemy is not Hamas, and not the military wing of Hamas, every single child in Gaza is an enemy…we must occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single child should remain.”

Other Israeli politicians may have distanced themselves from these statements, but the actions of the Israel’s military demonstrate the prevalence of an indiscriminate genocidal mindset. Israeli troops have posed with the toys of Palestinian children. A soldier with a conscience has anonymously spoken of being ordered “to kill them, no matter who it is.” A former US lieutenant-colonel, Anthony Aguilar, who worked recently for a food distribution agency in Gaza, said afterwards: “In my entire career, never have I witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against an unarmed, starving, civilian population.” The result is that five of every six people killed in Gaza are civilians, according to a leaked Israeli military intelligence database.

Curtis LeMay, the US air force chief of staff who oversaw the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said later that “if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” In the eighty years since, the victors have continued to shape how what they call the ‘rules-based order’ should be applied. According to Amnesty International, up to the middle of last year, 47 of the 54 individuals indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) were African. Meanwhile, the court’s prosecutor decided in 2020 not to investigate war crimes by UK forces in Iraq and to ‘deprioritise’ in 2021 an investigation into war crimes committed by US forces in Afghanistan.

In arguing that Truman was justified in obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Toynbee personifies the degeneration and double standards of the Western liberal commentariat. Decades of defending indefensible wars and deflecting from blatant war crimes have left them looking morally bankrupt in the eyes of most of the world. South Africa has turned the tables by taking Israel to the ICC for genocide. Whatever the outcome of that, the ability of the US and its NATO allies to impose their ‘order’ on everyone else is fast diminishing.

* Quoted in The Untold History of the United States, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, Gallery Books, 2013, p166.

Steve Howell

Note: My next book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press on May 1, 2026. The book is already available for pre-order through major retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Waterstones. The recommended retail price for the paperback is $34.95 but UK pre-orders via my website are at the special price of £20 including postage. The publisher is also offering a 20% discount for pre-orders via their website by using the code UMASS20.