Did bombing enemy cities and using atomic bombs save enough lives to justify the attacks?
Short answerStrategic necessity could justify many raids, but it did not erase the legal equivalence problem or make every target equally defensible.
NotesBombing could shorten a war and save lives without making that consequence a complete moral defence. The legal problem at Nuremberg was equivalence: prosecuting the Blitz as a war crime would invite scrutiny of Allied bombing in Germany and the atomic attacks on Japan. An act could approach a legal line without making every commander involved a war criminal. Dresden remains the hardest case to justify here because the chosen target had less military value than other possible cities.