There is considerable disagreement over the extent of the Nuremberg obligation, especially when it is used to justify opposing an illegal war, as was attempted on a number of occasions by Americans resisting the United States involvement in Indochina. At issue in particular is the claim of an ordinary citizen to engage in violent acts of resistance, illegal under domestic law, in opposition to a war that can reasonably be considered to violate international treaties and to defy basic moral precepts. The broader question is whether a movement for global reform, which includes among its goals the elimination of the war system, should, as one of its operative principles, renounce reliance on violent tactics.

In the years since the Nuremberg judgment of 1945, no official attempt has been made to apply the Nuremberg Principles to the concrete circumstances of violent conflict. An unofficial and symbolic application of the Nuremberg idea underlay the proceedings of the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal held in 1967 in two Scandinavian countries. The proceedings of the tribunal depict accurately the basic pattern of combat violations of the laws of war characteristic of the early years of heavy American involvement in Vietnam. Aside from this single controversial incident, there has been no effort by governments, international institutions, or public opinion to take seriously the justly celebrated American pledge at Nuremberg of the chief prosecutor for the United States, Justice Robert H. Jackson: “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and 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.”

Even as Justice Jackson uttered these sentiments on behalf of the United States, there were grounds for suspicion. After all, the Allied powers after World War II did not allow inquiry into the legal status of their own war policies, even though their obliteration bombing of cities in Germany and Japan and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could not easily be reconciled with prevailing views of the restraints embodied in rules of international law applicable at the time.