Was Hiroshima a war crime?
The News Agents
Global
4.2 • 4.3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thousands of people have gathered in Hiroshima - including representatives from 120 countries - to come together with a renewed call for nuclear disarmament.
America's use of the atom bomb on the Japanese city, followed by Nagasaki a few days later, remains the only time in human history that nuclear weapons have been deployed in armed conflict.
To some, it was a decisive turning point in WW2 - the moment where the Axis powers realised they were destined for defeat. But to others, including Jeremy Corbyn, the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were crimes against humanity. Could both things be true?
And why has the long shadow of the second world war made it so difficult for nations to look at their own histories objectively?
The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:09.1 | This is a global player original podcast. A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on |
| 0:19.0 | Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. |
| 0:23.6 | That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. |
| 0:29.4 | The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. |
| 0:33.6 | They have been repaid many foe, and the end is not yet. |
| 0:39.6 | That is President Harry S. Truman 80 years ago announcing the first time that the world had seen an atomic bomb. |
| 0:50.9 | Even by the scale of devastation that the world had been through up until 1945, |
| 0:57.4 | this was something completely different, with the questions still reverberating today |
| 1:03.3 | about whether what happened then was something beyond what war should allow. |
| 1:09.7 | It changed the world. It ushered in a new era in which we are still |
| 1:14.3 | living in the long shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But 80 years on to the day, as Hiroshima |
| 1:21.5 | remembers, should we remember those events in a different way? Was it a moment of triumph and victory? Or was it a moment that, in fact, |
| 1:30.9 | was the biggest war crime we've ever seen in history? Something that many politicians today believe, |
| 1:36.7 | including Jeremy Corbyn, who has said that it is a crime against humanity. How should we remember |
| 1:42.8 | the use of the atomic bomb? And should we be less afraid |
| 1:47.0 | of looking at our own history in the eye and calling it for what it was? Welcome to the newsagents. |
| 1:58.0 | The Newsagents. It's John. It's Lewis. |
| 2:01.5 | And in case you are not familiar with the events that took place 80 years ago or don't know much about it, |
| 2:08.4 | it's worth just doing a brief history. |
| 2:10.9 | On the morning of August 6th, 1945, a US B-29 bomber named the Inola Gay took off from the island of Tinian heading for Japan. |
| 2:20.3 | These are the last days of the Second World War. |
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