Speaking at a roundtable meeting in the Moscow Institute of International Relations on Wednesday, Sergey Naryshkin said the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not necessary for the military campaign against Japan. He added that the thousands of civilians killed by the atomic bombs had not been involved in crimes of the Japanese military.
The lower house speaker suggested that the participants of the roundtable imagine the situation in which Nazi Germany completely destroyed the population of one or several European cities, for example by means of chemical weapons.
“Would this have been included in charges pressed during the Nuremberg trial? Of course, it would!” he said.
Naryshkin also accused the modern leaders of the United States of intent to silence the real reasons behind the nuclear bombings.
“The current US authorities want to conceal not the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this would be impossible, but the hypocrisy and cynicism of their leaders of these times. This happens because such behavior casts a shadow on the modern American policies which, of course, retain the legacy of exceptionalist ideology and the position of own infallibility and arrogant force.”
Deputy Duma Speaker Andrey Isayev supported the initiative, saying that there were enough grounds for such step. Isayev also noted that the single and universally-recognized legal assessment of the 1945 attacks was the most important thing that could be done by the international tribunal.
In December 2014, Naryshkin voiced the idea of an international investigation into the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the session of the presidium of the Russian History Society. Back then he also said that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hardly justifiable from a purely military position, as the defeat of Japan was practically decided after the Soviet Army’s victories in Manchuria.
The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place 70 years ago, in early August of 1945. They resulted in the deaths of between 150,000 and 250,000 people, mostly civilians. The two attacks, especially the Hiroshima bombing, have been repeatedly denounced by the international rights community as fundamentally immoral and violating the spirit of conventions that banned the use of weapons of mass destruction against an enemy’s civilian population.