"Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime"
About this Quote
Calling Hiroshima and Nagasaki a "war crime" is less a historical footnote than a deliberate moral provocation. George Wald, a working scientist with firsthand intimacy with the machinery of modernity, chooses a phrase designed to pierce the comforting fog of necessity that often surrounds U.S. World War II memory. "War crime" isn’t a general lament about tragedy; it’s a legal-ethical indictment. Wald is trying to yank the bombings out of the realm of victors’ narrative and drop them into the harsher grammar of culpability.
The intent is twofold: to deny the listener the refuge of scale ("a million lives saved") and to reject the idea that technological achievement is self-justifying. Coming from a scientist, the charge carries a quiet subtext of professional complicity. He’s not just condemning military planners; he’s warning that scientific brilliance can be drafted into atrocity with alarming ease, then laundered afterward as progress or patriotism. The starkness of "dropping those atomic bombs" keeps the focus on agency, not abstraction: decisions were made, targets were selected, civilians died.
Context matters. Wald’s era spans the triumphal debut of nuclear weapons and the long hangover of the Cold War, when "deterrence" became a moral sedative. His phrasing resists that sedation. It also anticipates today’s arguments about drones, AI, and remote killing: once a weapon is framed as decisive, the threshold for using it quietly lowers. Wald’s sentence is built to keep that threshold high by making the moral cost impossible to euphemize.
The intent is twofold: to deny the listener the refuge of scale ("a million lives saved") and to reject the idea that technological achievement is self-justifying. Coming from a scientist, the charge carries a quiet subtext of professional complicity. He’s not just condemning military planners; he’s warning that scientific brilliance can be drafted into atrocity with alarming ease, then laundered afterward as progress or patriotism. The starkness of "dropping those atomic bombs" keeps the focus on agency, not abstraction: decisions were made, targets were selected, civilians died.
Context matters. Wald’s era spans the triumphal debut of nuclear weapons and the long hangover of the Cold War, when "deterrence" became a moral sedative. His phrasing resists that sedation. It also anticipates today’s arguments about drones, AI, and remote killing: once a weapon is framed as decisive, the threshold for using it quietly lowers. Wald’s sentence is built to keep that threshold high by making the moral cost impossible to euphemize.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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