The Guardian of London has an intriguing piece on the justice of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (discriminating readers will notice I have found a gold mine at Real Clear today). The author, Max Hastings, wishes to give a qualified defense of the bombing. I wish to present a qualified counterargument. Hastings concludes:
Those who today find it easy to condemn the architects of Hiroshima sometimes seem to lack humility in recognising the frailties of the decision-makers, mortal men grappling with dilemmas of a magnitude our own generation has been spared.
In August 1945, amid a world sick of death in the cause of defeating evil, allied lives seemed very precious, while the enemy appeared to value neither his own nor those of the innocent. Truman's Hiroshima judgment may seem wrong in the eyes of posterity, but it is easy to understand why it seemed right to most of his contemporaries.
One should start by recognizing the difficulty of the moral question and the agony that must have characterized the decision making process. Harry Truman famously said he never lost one night's sleep over the decision to bomb these cities. If that's true, Truman was a beast. And I don't think he was a beast, so I conclude he made that statement purely for public consumption. I don't blame him.
What factors go into our analysis? I draw on Michael Walzer's flawed by helpful Just and Unjust Wars. First, there is the general rule that one should not target civilians. In war, the participants must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. It is enough to say that in war not all lives are equal. Non-combatant life, whether a civilian, a POW, or what have you, cannot be justly taken. There is, though, the concept of "double effect." One may target military targets even if one knows that civillian life will be lost. The easy example is the munitions factory. But here is the moral calculation: the purpose of bombing the munitions factory must be military in nature. You can never intend the deaths of non-combatants even if that is the effect. There is also the notion of "supreme emergency" that Walzer uses to justify British bombing of German cities during the "Battle of Britain." Walzer argues that even though the British were targeting civilian centers with hopelessly inaccurate bombs (at that time, of course, there were no precision bombs), this was justified. Why? Because the Nazis represented unique evil, and for most of 1940-1941 the only option left to the British was the bombing of cities. It could not have hoped to wage land war against the Nazis in Germany. Naval war was of limited value. With their backs against the wall the British were left with attacking civilians.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki meets none of these standards. First, despite some claims from the US government, these clearly were, at most, second best military targets. We targeted civilian centers that represented little military value. Second, we were not in a "supreme emergency." The Japanese military was clearly defeated by 1945. We were going to win the war, the only question was when (and I don't deny that that's no small question). One thing that suggested prolonged war was our insistence on unconditional surrender. I think this was sound policy by the US, but it wasn't a necessary policy to defeating the Japanese. Finally, it cannot be denied that a prolonged war and the likely necessity of invading the Japanese mainland would have cost untold life. Here's where we once again return to the distinction between combatant and non-combatant. Taking the lives of non-combatants to spare your own combatants is not just. While we all know (or should know) that all life is intrinsically equal, we do not treat it as such in war. Soldiers give up some of their rights when they put on the uniform. But this, of course, is the strongest argument for dropping the bomb. In total, it might have actually saved lives given that US and Japanese soldiers did not have to die by the tens of thousands in a US invasion. But, getting over faster a war that you've largely won and sparing your own soldiers lives (and those of the enemy in this case) is not a justification for direct targeting of civilians.
This is not an easy moral question. Thoughtful responses welcome.
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