National Security, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Selective Pursuit of Justice at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 1946–1948

Jeanne Guillemin

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511657511.014

12 - National Security, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Selective Pursuit of Justice at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 1946–1948

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2010

Jeanne Guillemin

Edited by

Kamari Maxine Clarke and

Mark Goodale

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Kamari Maxine Clarke: Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Mark Goodale: Affiliation:
George Mason University, Virginia

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Summary

The Allied victory in 1945 produced two innovative but not necessarily compatible constructions of justice. The first was the agreement among the Allies (United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France) to jointly prosecute the individual leaders of the defeated Axis powers for waging aggressive war and committing crimes against humanity, particularly the mass murder and torture of civilians. This consensus generated the initial Nuremberg trial (1945–1946) and then the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo war crimes trial.

The second Allied consensus was that Germany and Japan had to be militarily occupied, purged of fascism (which was already defeated in Italy), and made incapable of threatening world peace. As early as 1946, as part of its grand strategy, the United States envisioned the reinvention of both these defeated enemies as bulwarks of free-market democracy against the geopolitical threat of the Soviet Union, west and east. For Japan, the postwar nation-building project entailed radical constitutional reform and cultural change. Less attention has been paid to how the U.S. Cold War national security objectives – founded on the legitimacy of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – ultimately corrupted the IMTFE by excluding evidence of mass murder with germ weapons and by failing to indict the responsible Japanese leaders for these crimes.

In contemporary times, American political indifference to genocide and torture in the Balkans and Africa has been analyzed as part of its historical reluctance to intervene in international conflict.

Type: Chapter
Information: Mirrors of Justice
Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era
, pp. 248 - 269

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511657511.014 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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12 - National Security, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Selective Pursuit of Justice at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 1946–1948

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