James Vanderbilt’s 2025 blockbuster about the Nuremberg trials makes for great drama and the awards it has received are well-deserved. It lays bare some extremely relevant truths for today, but it also contains a big lie that has likely gone unnoticed by most of the people watching it.

In the film, U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (superbly played by Rami Malek), develops a surprisingly close relationship with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring(superbly played by Russell Crowe), Hitler’s second in command and chosen successor. After seeing on film the horrors of the Nazi death camps during Göring’s trial, Kelley confronts him. “How was that possible?” he asks. In a direct reference to the U.S. destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the atom bomb, Göring replies: “You think American bullets and bombs don’t kill people? You vaporize 150,000 Japanese at the touch of a button and you presume to stand in judgment on me for all crimes?”

And here’s the lie: “We had every right to defend ourselves,” says Kelley. “There’s a difference between us bombing war factories and civilians dying as collateral damage and you building 1,200 human slaughterhouses designed to exterminate an entire race …”

There is no question that the cold, calculated murder of six million Jews and other “unwanted” human beings by the Nazis was pure, unmitigated evil. But so was the cold, calculated mass murder of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were not acts of “self-defense” by any stretch of the imagination. And they were not aimed at “war factories” with the inevitable killing of civilians as “collateral damage.” Those bombs were deliberately detonated above the center of cities filled with civilians.

The mass murder of over 150,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as well as the bombing of numerous other cities with conventional bombs) was not only unmitigated evil. It was also a war crime. The bombing of cities was then, and still is, a clear violation of the laws of war that go back centuries. These laws, incorporated into the U.S. laws of war as well as into the laws of other countries, make it an offense, punishable by firing squad, to deliberately attack or kill non-combatants, i.e. civilians.

The U.S. War Manual operative at the time clearly states that “the attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.” (Rules of Land Warfare, 1940, paragraph 45) And “in sieges and bombardments, all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science or charitable purposes, historical monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected…” (Rules of Land Warfare, 1940, para. 58)

Although many other bombs were used to attack cities in World War II and since, the scale of even the smallest nuclear bomb makes it literally impossible to spare hospitals, schools and other public buildings. In Hiroshima, 18 hospitals and 32 first-aid clinics were instantly incinerated in the atomic blast. Fifteen elementary schools were destroyed, along with 13 Christian churches, numerous Buddhist temples and shrines, government buildings, museums, and of course tens of thousands of private homes.

“Nuremberg” (2025) is an important reminder of the horrific legacy that the Nazi regime left in its wake. The goal of the movie, as was the goal of the Nuremberg trials themselves, was to help ensure this could never happen again. And yet, by downplaying and excusing the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are we not in danger of making possible an even greater crime — indeed the greatest crime of all?

A nuclear war today would kill billions of people and be the end of human civilization as we know it. We don’t need more movies from Hollywood reinforcing the lie that the atomic bombings of Japan were justified and that the continued possession of nuclear weapons by the U.S. is somehow “safer” than getting rid of them. Surely it is well past time to face up to the reality of just how evil a nuclear war would be — and to redouble our efforts to get rid of these monstrous weapons before it’s too late.

Timmon Wallis lives in Northampton.