Originally Posted by
jerryleber
The context of 1945 was an estimate of a million US casualties by conventional means not "to save even one US life or one US dollar."
Stop gaslighting.
At the time, they probably would have used the bomb to prevent even very minimal further loss of life and treasure, perfectly understandable after all they had been through.
Originally Posted by
jerryleber
Thus, my response. I am glad you now seem to agree it "would be clearly illegal and non-proportional" today.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be just fine today. It's a little weird because of the timing, the obvious justification would have been Pearl Harbor and related attacks in the Pacific. But they didn't have the bomb yet so the whole thing dragged out for years. We attempted to get Japan to surrender once we did have the bomb, they declined, so we did a demonstration, rinse wash, repeat and then they came around. Pretty good restrain actually, that they just did one demonstration to start.
Nuking someone because their suicide bomber detonated a vest in a shopping mall would be non-proportional.
The scale of 9/11 was in the ballpark for justification, if somebody actually wanted to go there and you could identify a culprit to target. Most administrations would probably not.
Also I retract my comment about "legality". "Legal" is irrelevant wrt to nuclear weapons, if it gets to that point we're way beyond the nuances of what UN delegates might chatter about at a cocktail party, or what anybody else thinks.