By John LaForge
With another film depiction of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal story being debuted, today’s plans and preparations involving thermonuclear weapons should be adjudged in this historical context, before they are used again.
The United States was instrumental in creating the Nuremberg Charter, Principles and Judgment, and in orchestrating the Tribunals. The chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, made clear that the Tribunal’s function was to prosecute and punish the architects of the “final solution,” the designers, developers, and administrators that produced and implemented the gigantic apparatus of the holocaust which destroyed at least 10 million civilian victims.
Justice Jackson said in his opening remarks to the Tribunal that if the law it was about to enforce was to be viewed as legitimate, it must be applied universally, and not only to the defeated. Justice Jackson said: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.” Justice Jackson continued:
“If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
Jackson then pointedly announced the novel, unprecedented, and war-shattering aspect of the Nuremberg Principles, saying:
“A fundamental provision of the Charter is that to plan, prepare, initiate, or wage a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances, or to conspire or participate in a common plan to do so, is a crime.”
The Nuremberg prosecutors adopted this new class of universally prohibited criminality, the “planning and preparation” of illegal warfare, and the Tribunal enforced this new prohibition against the Nazi authorities in the dock. This new prohibition means today, that inchoate crimes, or crimes in-the-making, of conspiracy, incitement, aiding, and abetting, etc. — planning and preparing of unlawful war — can be prosecuted before the nuclear weapons are detonated, before the fire storms ensue.
Wars that violate treaties include unprovoked wars of aggression, wars that are indiscriminate as to civilian or “protected” populations, wars that employ banned weapons such as poison or weapons whose effects cross neutral borders, or wars that do severe, long-term damage to the environment. Nuclear detonations produce all these outlawed effects.
Nuremberg’s monumental criminalization of certain “planning and preparation” should have sounded the death knell for nuclear weapons, because their indiscriminate and catastrophic explosive force — thoroughly understood, exhaustively tested, and officially declared “credible” — can only produce massacres.
This past October’s nuclear attack rehearsal known as “Steadfast Noon,” conducted by European allies, was publicized by NATO’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte himself as a way “to make sure that our nuclear deterrent remains as credible … and as effective as possible.” NATO’s Col. Daniel Bunch, Chief of Nuclear Operations at SHAPE, said to the press October 13: “There is focus in … getting the strikes planned, … getting … all of those elements synchronized to deliver…”
The mass destruction being admitted to, planned, and prepared, is the deliberately indiscriminate incineration of civilians and using mass fire and radiation. This “planning and preparation of wars … in violation of treaties, agreements or assurances” is precisely the inchoate criminality for which the Nuremberg Tribunal imposed death by hanging or sentences of life in prison.
If only it were true of the United States today that, “We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Co-director of Nukewatch a nuclear power and weapons watchdog group.
