The My Lai Massacre is now almost universally considered a heinous war crime. The Hiroshima bombing, in contrast, enjoys bipartisan admiration.
I mean, what to say? The most prominent pro-bomb view I know of, within the academic community, is that one can justify dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima only because it proved to be a means of ending the war in a significantly faster manner (n.b. also that it's much harder, though not quite impossible, to justify Nagasaki on these terms). Hundreds of thousands of people were going to die one way or another--hundreds of thousands at a minimum--and the only choice actually confronting policymakers was which method would be employed. It was a morally problematic decision that can be justified, if barely, because of the situation. And these are the pro-bomb dropping arguments. The anti-bomb arguments can be withering, see for example G.E.M. Anscombe's "Mr. Truman's Degree"; Anscombe differs in degree of intensity but not in belief from the vast majority of philosophers and international lawyers on this question.
To summarize: Hiroshima's almost certainly a war crime. If it isn't, it just barely misses due to some very unique circumstances. Either way, there is certainly a degree of moral guilt that should attach in either case.
But I take it this is not the real question Caplan's asking, even though he phrases his query in strictly moral terms. To address the legal question: why was there no war crimes trial for the decision to bomb Hiroshima? Some of it is certainly p.r. and relative power: the optics of My Lai were bad and inexcusable at a difficult moment in U.S. foreign policy, and a (non-international) trial for those who committed the violations had to happen as a matter of course once the violations were discovered. Similarly, no one was going to take the U.S. to court in 1945, if there were a court competent to hear a war crimes case, especially not after they just ended World War II, their actions morally legitimate or not.
But it's also not clear to me that there was any law that existed in 1945 under which the U.S. could have been tried. It's a fact of the law of war in long standing that you're not allowed to do things like intentionally shoot a bunch of civilians, and it's a feature of international criminal law beginning with the Nuremberg IMT that superior orders no longer suffices as a defense against a war crimes charge (though it is permitted as a mitigation of responsibility); the U.S. in the 1960s was a signatory to conventions to this effect; it had legal obligations that had to be met. It's not clear to me that there existed any law that made the use of a nuclear bomb illegal under the law of war, so I'm not sure it could qualify as a war crime.
In this case I think the combatant/noncombatant question is the wrong analogy to make: Hiroshima is not like My Lai in that it involved the intended death of civilians. Instead, Hiroshima is like dropping a regular but very powerful bomb on a city. For most of World War II, it was the case that bomb-dropping was an extremely inaccurate science: one would have to fly multiple missions in order to guarantee the destruction of a target (Graham Allison writes in Essence of Decision that part of the reason Kennedy scraps the possibility of taking out Soviet facilities on Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis is that the Air Force estimated needing at least three missions to take out each target, and that's with an additional twenty years of technological advancement). In fact, the only real guarantee one had in dropping a bomb is that it would probably not hit its intended target. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima is more powerful than any other bomb dropped previously, but by less of a scale than one might imagine: twenty or so times more powerful that the biggest of the British bombs. Details notwithstanding, the point is: one doesn't prosecute soldiers or governments from dropping bombs, because that's an expected part of war, and legitimate most of the time; and, if one considers nuclear bombs to be of a different class or type, there's no new law to cover them; and the provisions by which old laws can be used to cover new cases are not well-developed in 1945.
(The x-factor here, about which I admittedly do not know, is how the bombing of Britain was categorized by the IMT. One might well think Coventry was a good example of a parallel case likely to be prosecuted. But I'm not sure whether it was prosecuted, or convictions were reached, under War Crimes or Crimes Against Peace counts. Because the U.S. was fighting, under the terms of international law, a war of defense against an unwarranted act of aggression. So if it's included, but included under crimes against peace, there'd be no comparable analogy to the U.S. If it's included as a war crime it'd matter if it becomes a war crime as part of an aggressive war or is a crime as such.)
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