Q Report: Top 10 U.S. War Crimes So Far

What Eisenhower was describing when he warned the country about the military industrial complex was not simply a large defense sector or a standing army. He was describing a system in which the production of weapons, the preservation of military budgets, the economic dependence of whole regions, and the political incentives of elected officials become fused into a single engine that is always hungry for justification. Over time, that engine does not merely prepare for war. It creates the conditions that make war, intervention, escalation, and permanent global tension seem normal, necessary, and unavoidable. The tragedy is that the people most often harmed by this arrangement are not those who build the weapons, sell the policy, fund the campaigns, or deliver the speeches. They are civilians far from the centers of power, living in villages, cities, hospitals, schools, and fields that have the misfortune of existing near targets. This is the dark logic of nation building and playing world police: the powerful call it order, but the dead experience only terror. What follows is a list of atrocities that reveal what this system has done, and continues to do, when it is allowed to survive unchecked. 

10. No Gun Ri massacre

Deaths and casualties: at least 163 dead or missing, 55 wounded

In July 1950, U.S. forces attacked South Korean refugees near No Gun Ri during the opening days of the Korean War. The South Korean government later certified 163 dead or missing and 55 wounded, though survivors have long maintained that the real number was higher. The victims were civilians trying to flee the fighting, not an armed enemy formation. The event remains one of the clearest examples of U.S. troops treating refugees as expendable.

9. My Lai massacre

Deaths and casualties: as many as 500 dead

On March 16, 1968, U.S. soldiers entered My Lai and massacred unarmed Vietnamese civilians. Britannica puts the death toll at as many as 500 villagers, including women, children, and elderly people. The killings were followed by an attempted cover-up, which only deepened the national disgrace. My Lai became the defining atrocity of the Vietnam War because it was unforgivable, undeniable, and impossible to explain away as simple collateral damage. It remains one of the most infamous war crimes in history.

8. Operation Speedy Express

Deaths and casualties: at least 5,000 civilian deaths

Operation Speedy Express was a U.S. campaign in the Mekong Delta. Later reporting drew on an Army inspector general estimate that between 5,000 and 7,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed during the operation. One extraordinary detail is how badly the reported kills outpaced the number of weapons captured, suggesting a vast gulf between official claims and actual combat. This was not a single outburst but a system that rewarded indiscriminate killing.

7. U.S. bombing of Laos and unexploded-ordnance

Deaths and casualties: more than 50,000 killed or injured

The U.S. dropped an enormous volume of bombs on Laos during the Vietnam War era, and the killing did not end when the bombing stopped. History reports that more than 50,000 Lao have been killed or injured since 1964 by U.S. bombs, and about 98 percent of those casualties were civilians. What makes this case especially heinous is that much of the damage continued in peacetime through unexploded ordnance. Children and farmers kept dying for a war long after the conflict itself had ended. It is one of the clearest examples of intergenerational violence perpetrated by the U.S. without a semblance of responsibility taken.

6. Nagasaki

Deaths and casualties: at least 70,000 dead by the end of 1945

Three days after dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the United States dropped a second on Nagasaki. By the end of 1945, at least 70,000 people were dead. The victims were overwhelmingly civilians, and many others suffered from burns, radiation exposure, and long-term illness. What makes Nagasaki especially devastating is that it was not the first use of a nuclear weapon in war, but the second. It remains part of the only wartime use of nuclear weapons in human history.

5. Tokyo firebombing

Deaths and casualties: at least 80,000 dead, likely more than 100,000

The March 9–10, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo turned the city into an inferno. Britannica gives a conservative estimate of at least 80,000 killed and notes that the true total was likely more than 100,000. About a million people were left homeless in the aftermath. This was one of the most destructive air attacks in history, carried out against a densely populated urban center. If the higher-end death toll is used, Tokyo matches Hiroshima in fatalities.

4. Hiroshima

Deaths and casualties: more than 100,000 dead by the end of 1945

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. More than 100,000 people were dead by the end of that year, most of them civilians. The bomb killed people instantly and continued killing through radiation sickness, burns, and injuries in the weeks and months that followed. Hiroshima stands apart because it was the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare. It opened the atomic age by wholly annihilating a city.

3. Philippine-American War / reconcentration and campaign atrocities

Deaths and casualties: about 20,000 Filipino combatants killed and more than 200,000 civilians dead

The Philippine-American War exposed the brutality of early U.S. imperialism in plain terms. Britannica estimates that about 20,000 Filipino combatants were killed and more than 200,000 civilians perished as a result of combat, hunger, or disease. The civilian toll was not incidental but part of the larger punitive machinery of occupation, displacement, and repression. This was colonial violence on a massive scale, directed at a people resisting foreign control.

2. U.S. bombing of North Korea during the Korean War

Deaths and casualties: about 282,000 civilians killed in bombing raids

The U.S. bombing campaign against North Korea was devastating enough to wipe out whole cities. A Wilson Center summary of North Korean records cites about 282,000 civilians killed in bombing raids alone. That figure covers bombing deaths specifically, not the full civilian toll of the war, which means the broader human cost was greater still. The scale of destruction in Korea is often underremembered in the U.S. despite being one of the largest episodes of civilian killing in modern warfare.

1. Operation Ranch Hand / Agent Orange

Deaths and casualties: about 400,000 deaths or permanent injuries

Operation Ranch Hand spread Agent Orange and related herbicides across Vietnam in one of the most infamous chemical warfare campaigns in modern history. Britannica reports Vietnam’s estimate that some 400,000 people suffered death or permanent injury from exposure. The damage extended far beyond immediate casualties into long-term illness, disability, and birth defects. This is a rare war crime that continues reproducing itself across decades, long after the war formally ended.

Across this century of violence the entries with clearly separable death tolls account for at least 757,663 dead, roughly 97 percent of them civilians, with Laos and Agent Orange adding tens of thousands more deaths and permanent injuries that push the true human toll far higher. Yet still the argument rolls on, just as it always has, that it is the means to a righteous end. That Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, that this target or that city had to burn because in the end it benefited us somehow. We were defeating fascism. We were defeating Communism. We were defeating Terrorism. We are always defeating some evil large enough to make the dead seem acceptable. The pattern does not change. We reserve for ourselves the right to bomb whoever we want so long as the justification is ready in time, and meanwhile it is the innocent who go on dying for our refusal to shut down the complex forever. For it must be shut down. Forever and ever, Amen.