"President Truman Did Not Understand" http://www.peak.org/~danneng/decision/usnews.html in U.S. News & World Report (15 August 1960)
Variant: 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.
As quoted in The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (1996) by Dennis Wainstock, p. 122
Context: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?
But, again, don't misunderstand me. The only conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect.
“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”
talk at St. Michael's College, Vermont, around 1990 http://www.chomsky.info/talks/1990----.htm.
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994
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Noam Chomsky 334
american linguist, philosopher and activist 1928Related quotes
“If the President had his way, we’d have a nuclear war every week.”
Source: Henry Kissinger on Nixon, as quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide. chapter 19
“There were those in the South who would have been willing to wage war for its continuation”
1920s, Freedom and its Obligations (1924)
Variant: There were those in the North who would have been willing to wage war for its abolition
Context: We meet again upon this hallowed ground to commemorate those who played their part in a particular outbreak of an age-old conflict. Many men have many theories about the struggle that went on from 1861 to 1865. Some say it had for its purpose the abolition of slavery. President Lincoln did not so consider it. There were those in the South who would have been willing to wage war for its continuation, but I very much doubt if the South as a whole could have been persuaded to take up arms for that purpose. There were those in the North who would have been willing to wage war for its abolition, but the North as a whole could not have been persuaded to take up arms for that purpose. President Lincoln made it perfectly clear that his effort was to save the Union — with slavery if he could save it that way; without slavery if he could save it that way. But he would save the Union. The South stood for the principle of the sovereignty of the States. The North stood for the principle of the supremacy of the Union.
“Lincoln was the only president in American history whose administration was bounded by war.”
James M. McPherson. Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (2008) p. xiii
2000s
From his autobiography, also requoted in Rhodes, 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', p. 596
Reported in Eugene Gerhart, America's Advocate: Robert H. Jackson (1958), p. 289
"The Price of Empire" speech, to the meeting of the American Bar Association in Hawaii (August 1967), in Haynes Bonner Johnson and Bernard M. Gwertzman, Fulbright: The Dissenter (1968), p. 305.
James M. McPherson. Drawn with the Sword : Reflections on the American Civil War] (1996), Princeton University: Oxford University Press. pp. 91–92
1990s
Context: Rioters were mostly Irish Catholic immigrants and their children. They mainly attacked the members of New York's small black population. For a year, Democratic leaders had been telling their Irish-American constituents that the wicked Black Republicans were waging the war to free the slaves who would come north and take away the jobs of Irish workers. The use of black stevedores as scabs in a recent strike by Irish dockworkers made this charge seem plausible. The prospect of being drafted to fight to free the slaves made the Irish even more receptive to demogogic rhetoric.