Leo Szilard was the world-renowned physicist who drafted the original letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, instigating the Manhattan Project. In 1960, shortly before his death, Szilard stated another obvious truth:
If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.
It is also worth noting that Army Air Force General Curtis LeMay once remarked that had the U.S. lost the war, he fully expected to be tried for war crimes, and that Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz furnished an affidavit in support of the practice of unrestricted submarine warfare for the post-war trial of German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946, a practice that he himself had employed throughout the war in the Pacific. The simple fact is that Total War is an American invention, first used by Generals Sherman and Sheridan against the Southern Insurrection. It is a proven, effective method that consists primarily in destroying the capacity of the enemy to economically sustain a war, often involving genocide. It is naive, it is silly to expect to win a war by other methods in this day and age.
