[Mrs. Don-o]

These are all points worthy of discussion. I’d like to consider them all. But first I have to ask: if deliberately killing an innocent person isn’t murder, what is?

[steve86]

I did say the Rosary, BTW.

[rlmorel]

Define “Innocent”.

[Ramius]

Murder: “The crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought”.

That’s how my dictionary puts it.

War is, curiously enough, neither unlawful nor malicious in intent. Especially since we didn’t start it.

[tanknetter]

But first I have to ask: if deliberately killing an innocent person isn’t murder, what is?

There's another important question that needs to be asked along with that to get a full answer: if an innocent person is deliberately killed, who is the party responsible for the murder?

Case in point: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially "military cities", with civillian housing, war industries and military facilities all intermixed. The decision to intermix them, and therefore put innocents in the line of fire, was made by the Japanese, not the Americans/Allies.

In essence, the innocents amongst the civillian population were turned into human shields by the Japanese (not that the term existed at the time, nor that the Japanese leadership at the time was attempting to exploit innocent civillian deaths for PR advantage in the face of Allied victories).

Beyond that, the US/Allies did go out of their way to spare large-scale civillian targets that were of limited military value. The city of Kyoto, Japan, for instance was deliberately spared (struck off the A-bomb target list in fact) because it was a cultural and religious heritage center, rather than a military/industrial city.