TIL Jimmy Carter is the only American president to have visited Hiroshima's ground zero

Watch The Fog of War. About the life of Robert MacNamara. I doubt anyone would consider him a bad strategist or that he pulled any punches with his actions.

"Tokyo was a wooden city and we dropped these firebombs and it just burned it." "In one night we burned 100,000 people."

"MacNamara do you mean to say that instead burning a 100,000 Japanese civilian in one night and another night we should burn a lesser number? Or none? And then had our soldiers crossed the beaches into Tokyo and be slaughtered in the tens of thousands? Is that what you're proposing? Is that moral? Is that wise?"

"Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb when LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities." He goes on to list Japanese cities and % destroyed and what it would be like if that % of a US city was destroyed.

"Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50-90% of the people in 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the eyes of some people, to the objective we were trying to achieve."

"I don't fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb. The US-Japanese war was one of the most brutal wars in all of human history. What one can criticize is that the human race prior to that time and today has not really grappled with what are the 'rules of war'. Was there a rule then that should said you shouldn't kill 100,000 civilians in a night?"

"LeMay said if we had lost the war we all would have been prosecuted as war criminals and I think he's right. He, and I would say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral. If our side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

/r/todayilearned Thread Parent Link - observer.com