It’s a little late in the day to remember this, but today is the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The Catholic Herald has commemorated the day with the remarkable story of eight Jesuit priests who survived the atomic blast although they were less than a mile from the detonation point. Over at Public Discourse, Chris Tollefsen has a reflection on “what it means to take the lives of innocent civilians intentionally” and the consequences for America today:
How are the lives of innocent Japanese and German women, children, sick, elderly, and non-military personnel to be weighed against the lives of Allied fighters in such a way as to make clear that saving a certain number of Allied lives was “better” all things considered than killing a much larger number of enemy civilians? The impossibility of such a calculation, and the dignity of each human being, as a free and rational creature, seem together to be at the root of the traditional injunction never intentionally to kill the innocent. Meanwhile, the abandonment of this injunction seems to be at the root of the philosophical and cultural move in the direction which Anscombe called consequentialism.
The Allied bombings were, therefore, by the standards of traditional, non-consequentialist morality, utterly wrong and intrinsically unjustifiable. And this great moral evil has itself had consequences, some of which it is salutary to note now, more than half a century later.
You can read the rest of Tollefsen’s piece here.
August 6th, 2010 | 6:16 pm
Why does Hiroshima get remembered and Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March forgotten?
The bombs ended the war and saved at least four million Japanese lives. And that’s by *their* admission.
August 6th, 2010 | 6:25 pm
This is important. I would put the fire-bombing of Dresden in the same category. Active responsibility for taking the lives of innocents cannot be a part of Christian moral calculus.
I think this is a relevant concern in the age of the drone assasinations and airstrikes that we are told are perfectly accurate when they in fact are not. How many more times will we blow up cars without noticing the 3-year-olds in the backseat? Are we continually re-writing Hiroshima in miniature?
August 6th, 2010 | 6:41 pm
It is my understanding that a significant part of Japan’s machine shops were located in private homes or small workshops throughout the major cities. Dresden was a major military transport center which Germans expected the allies to bomb.
U.S. bombing of the cities of the fascist powers was a necessary part of winning a terrible war against an utterly evil enemy.
My father was a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany (Austria). Most of the members of his extended family (those who didn’t manage to escape) were killed by the Nazis. Dad never graduated from college. On the other hand he did serve for two and a half years as U.S. Navy combat engineer (C.B.s), including taking part in numerous large and small amphibious landings in the Solomon Islands, New Guinea and the Philippines. He fought a war against a fanatical enemy which refused to surrender. He saw at first hand the atrocities which the Japanese had committed against Phillippino citizens. That was a war of machine guns, flame throwers and satchel charges. It has never been difficult for Dad to understand the justice of the air bombardments which helped to end the war.
August 6th, 2010 | 8:22 pm
Since this is a re-post of a link that David Mills talked about yesterday, I’ll re=post here what I posted there:
What exactly is an “innocent civilian”? Is a worker manufacturing shells in a factory an innocent civilian? What about a someone who buys war bonds to directly fund military purchases? How about a Japanese housewife being trained to use a bamboo pike to fight the Americans when they invade the home islands? What about kids collecting scrap rubber and tin to turn in for recycling into war materiel?
I think World War II is a very bad example to use in evaluating just war arguments, because of the special circumstances of nations militarizing their whole cultures. Japan is a very strong example: the Japanese government taught its own citizens that they were all part of the military effort, and it viewed its whole domestic population as a military asset that could be sacrificed to repel the American invasion. Against a culture thoroughly indoctrinated with militaristic ideology, where exactly should the U.S. have drawn the line in deciding who was fair game for attack and who wasn’t?
I think just war limitations on acceptable targeting make a lot of sense when there is a bright dividing line between civilians and military personnel, such as in the United States today. I don’t think that line was especially clear during World War II, particularly in Japan’s case.
August 6th, 2010 | 8:27 pm
Also:
Yes, the main reason the U.S. used the atomic bombs instead of a ground invasion was to save American lives, but an invasion would also have caused a lot more Japanese domestic casualties than the bombs inflicted.
Is it consequentialist to attack civilians directly if it is done in order to spare those very same civilians from greater damage that would be inflicted upon them indirectly by rigorous adherence to traditional just war doctrine?
I think the Cold War nuclear stalemate illustrates this: Were the civilian populations of the USSR and the US better off in a world where they were held hostage by the other’s nuclear weapons, or would they have been better off in a world where each side only used its nukes against the other’s military assets — and only incidentally destroyed vast percentages of the other’s civilian population?
If it’s sometimes the case that specifically targeting civilian populations actually saves those populations from annihilation, I find it hard to see how that undermines our respect for their absolute value as persons.
If the goal of just war behavior is to guard the absolute value and sacredness of human life, then I can’t see how refusing to drop the bombs is any less consequentialist than the actions of Truman.
August 6th, 2010 | 9:11 pm
Of course, the ultimate goal was the unconditional surrender of Japan which seemed to be taken as a given. The consequentialism was killing innocent civilians as a means of accomplishing this end. At least if we take the Catholic (Christian?) view seriously that it is never acceptable to aim at the death of an innocent person (whether in abortion, euthanasia or war), this was an example of war crimes on the part of the United States.
Also, can someone explain how the thousands of young children and elderly (intentionally) killed were not innocent civilians?
August 6th, 2010 | 10:38 pm
You should study your history before damning the U.S. for dropping the bomb. The Axis was truly evil in every sense of the term. While we were fighting the Japs in the Pacific, the Japs were slaughtering millions of innocent people in China for the simple reason that they had the power to do so.
When you look at how many lives were taken by the Japanese and the Germans in that war, with no regard whatsoever for the distinction between soldier and civilian, it is impossible to criticize the U.S. for launching an attack that brought a swift end to a long and brutal conflict. We didn’t want a war. We didn’t start the war. The Japanese brought it upon themselves, and we rose to the challenge by doing what was necessary to win. Yes, civilians die in warfare. There is no way to avoid it, especially when an entire nation is mobilized for the combat machine, thus blurring any neat distinctions. When generals plan their wars, they do so knowing that a lot of people are going to die, including civilians, even when they don’t want that to happen. The difference in WWII was that our goal was for the dying to stop and everyone to go home, while our enemies didn’t seem to care how many people died to achieve their insane ambitions.
August 6th, 2010 | 10:51 pm
“At least if we take the Catholic (Christian?) view seriously that it is never acceptable to aim at the death of an innocent person (whether in abortion, euthanasia or war), this was an example of war crimes on the part of the United States.”
This is what I’m addressing in my second comment. What if we’re not aiming for the deaths of those civilians, but for saving them? Or at least at giving them a better chance of living? Because if the choice is between nuclear bombing or ground invasion, a whole lot more civilians are going to die in the “morally pure” way. Is it really more moral to kill all of those additional civilians just so we can say that we didn’t directly target them? How does that respect their fundamental worth?
(I leave aside the possibility of granting negotiated surrender terms, which might well have been a historical possibility. I consider it so obvious that such a solution would be morally preferable that it’s not really worth discussing.)
August 6th, 2010 | 11:02 pm
Thought experiment:
Let’s say I’m a policeman dealing with a gunman who’s killing a roomful of hostages one by one. Unfortunately, I only have two weapons: a sniper rifle and a laser-guided rocket launcher.
He has one hostage in front of him, shielding him from my sniper rifle. I would have to deliberately kill the hostage first, and then I could shoot him with the rifle. But I could lock onto him specifically with my rocket launcher, not targeting any of the civilians. But the rocket will explode, certainly killing most of the hostages, including the one he’s holding as a shield.
Which option shows respect for the absolute worth of the hostages’ lives: the rifle or the rocket? Or should I just stand there and wait for him to kill them all himself?
August 6th, 2010 | 11:51 pm
This is what I’m addressing in my second comment. What if we’re not aiming for the deaths of those civilians, but for saving them?
This is smuggling in consequentialism, though. The aim certainly was not to save any any civilians within a certain radius of the bomb. The aim was to kill and horribly maim large numbers of people to put pressure on Japan to unconditionally surrender by making clear the horror that they will face if they do not.
Your hypothetical is a good one but it has a problem. To get at this problem, let’s tweak the hypothetical. Suppose the police identify the hostage-taker’s family and apprehend his wife and 10-year-old daughter despite the fact that there is no evidence of either having engaged in criminal wrongdoing. Can the police threaten to murder the wife and daughter in order to secure the release of the hostages? What if they just threaten to rape one of them instead?
I think almost any decent person here will say no. Yet this hypothetical is closer to the reality of the Hiroshima bombings. The difference is obviously that the stakes were so much higher in WWII. Maybe deliberately slaughtering innocent people can be justified when the stakes are high enough.
But then let’s not mince words about what is really going on. In your sniper example, it is not necessary to kill one hostage to free the others. Meaning that if the hostage-taker were to be sloppy or make a mistake, all the hostages could be freed without any of them dying. Or the policeman could try to aim the shot that will pass through the hostage in a way that reduces the chance of death.
The policeman never says to himself, “I have to make sure I kill this hostage to free the rest of them.”
August 7th, 2010 | 12:34 am
“This is smuggling in consequentialism, though.”
What I’m saying is that the Just War argument against the a-bombs is just as consequential. There’s no difference between knowingly dooming 200,000 civilians by dropping an atomic bombs on them and knowingly dooming, let’s say 2,000,000 civilians (a conservative estimate) by invading with ground forces. Both repudiate, to some degree, the essential valuation of innocent civilians as sacrosanct. Both make civilian casualties a means to an end: the first a means to destroy morale and therefore force a surrender, the second a means to destroy actual capacity for resistance and therefore force a surrender.
What is our goal in judging between the two? To discover which one more closely reflects our respect for innocent human life. That is our principle. Which choice does this? The one that “accidentally”, but certainly not unexpectedly or unnecessarily, kills more civilians? Or the one that “deliberately” kills fewer, in order to minimize the damage done to the whole population?
August 7th, 2010 | 12:39 am
On the other hand, the Japanese government was organizing its entire adult population into military units. So if we had invaded, maybe we could have just killed everybody in the country fair and square as soldiers. Moral problem solved!!!
August 7th, 2010 | 1:42 am
There’s no difference between knowingly dooming 200,000 civilians by dropping an atomic bombs on them and knowingly dooming, let’s say 2,000,000 civilians (a conservative estimate) by invading with ground forces.
It matters a great deal on the details of those 2 million. Who does what to them, when, where and why? If U.S. forces go house to house and summarily execute every male inhabitant, sure, that’s far worse than nuking a city. But I don’t think that was ever part of the invasion plan.
The whole point of non-consequentialist ethics is you cannot simply compare numbers to decide which is the lesser evil. You have to look at who is engaging in deliberate action to take lives.
August 7th, 2010 | 2:34 am
People in this thread are holding innocent lives as though they were in a balance, as though strategic hypotheticals and shadows of future events might prove equal to them, when in fact, the Bible teaches us that they are not.
People were worth Christ’s death, which is the greatest possible price, so it logically follows that their lives are, in each moment, priceless. The future is not ours, it is God’s, and thank goodness, too, since we make enough of a mess of that we’ve been entrusted with.
It is possible to argue that killing in self-defense is permissible, to suggest that it is an act of love on behalf of the potential victims of a certain agression. What is not possible, at least not for the Christian, is to accept the logic of pre-emption, since that is to rob God of his command of the future and turn it over to our petty strategists, all of whom have become habituated enough to bloodshed that they no longer understand the weight of it.
August 7th, 2010 | 8:20 am
Why would I want to waste my time reading any more of this drivel? What a bunch of Monday morning arm chair quarterbacking by folks who didn’t see the game and apparently didn’t read about it in the paper either? None of the Monday morning quarterbacks in these comments has addressed the Japanese aggression that started the Pacific conflict nor have they addressed the Japanese war crimes? Hideki Tojo, Prime Minister of Japan during WWII was one of many convicted of war crimes including unprovoked and aggressive war and the murder of millions in China, the Phillipines, Indochina, and other Pacific Island nations. In addition they were responsible for atrocities, including experiments on Allied POWs.
It wasn’t so much a matter of which civilian lives were more valuable, Japanese or Allied, but which way of life was more valuable, brutal authoritarian regimes or the democracy (though imperfect) of the Allies? If the Allies had taken the stance that many of Tollefsen we would all be speaking Japanese right now. The USA would have ceased to exist. It was a case of national self defense.
And it is outrageous to state that military commanders, then and now, have ceased to “understand the weight of it.” Really? How do you know?
First Things is a disappointment these days. There is less and less intelligent discourse on the part of staff writers and more links to outside trash. No thanks, I can find the trash on my own.
August 7th, 2010 | 10:00 am
While it is desirable to reduce the number od innocent casualties, it is not always possible. Like surgery, some of the healthy tissue must also go with the bad.
It is strange that some of the most criticism about using a a-bomb comes supposedly intelligent people. They seem to forget, that there is a finite number of choices, there is a time limit to make decisions, and we are have to go one what one knows at the time. It is easy to judge the past, it will be more interesting how the future will judge the present.
Having lived through WW II, and talking to many relative who had combat duty in the Pacific, the estimated casualties from an invasion of Japan would have been in the millions. Remember the Japanese Army officers had a much different way of thinking. They even killed one of their own generals to keep the surrender broadcast from happening.
Somehow Meghan Duke seems to think one can due surgery by removing only the “bad” tissue. Good luck on that one. We are finite human beings, we can only do the best on what we are given, at the given time.
August 7th, 2010 | 11:54 am
“It is possible to argue that killing in self-defense is permissible, to suggest that it is an act of love on behalf of the potential victims of a certain agression. What is not possible, at least not for the Christian, is to accept the logic of pre-emption, since that is to rob God of his command of the future and turn it over to our petty strategists, all of whom have become habituated enough to bloodshed that they no longer understand the weight of it.”
So when exactly does an action stop being preemption and start being self defense?
Listen, I’m not saying that the principles of Just War Theory are invalid. I agree completely that we ought to restrain ourselves in war in accordance with a due regard for the lives of civilians. I agree in principle that there are some actions which should not be undertaken for any reason, no matter how the ends might seem to justify the means.
What I’m saying is that the atomic bombings were not a simple and easy case of unjust warfare. Anscombe is definitely wrong to think that they are a clear case that goes far beyond the pale.
There are at least two reasons for this: (1) In this particular case, I don’t think there is a meaningful distinction between “intentional” civilian deaths from the bombing and “unintentional,” but unavoidable and expected, civilian deaths from an invasion; and (2) Due to Japan’s militarized culture and economy, and its plans to arm its entire adult population, I don’t think the vast majority of the Japanese people obviously meet the definition of “innocent civilian.”
August 7th, 2010 | 6:41 pm
Matt- your comment on drone killings is in error- they do not violate the rules of just war theory if innocent civilians are accidentally killed- they are targeted, discriminate and efforts are made to spare civilians. The fact that innocents are killed in a conflict UNINTENTIONALLY does not cause the conflict to be unjust. If that were so we would need to surrender in the face of every aggressor, since to oppose we would always kill some of his civilian population by accident.
August 7th, 2010 | 7:24 pm
The morality of WWII bombing campaigns are difficult to grapple with. The war was against profoundly evil regimes and the technology of the day made precision bombing an oxymoron. But many of the debates against the campaigns have a surreal attitude about the war & are made by those who were unlikely to be at risk- read this article from the New Republic:
http://croker.harpethhall.org/Must%20Know/History/AtomBombFussell.pdf
August 7th, 2010 | 8:23 pm
It’s interesting that we toss around this notion of “innocent civilian” as if the soldiers in war are the opposite, i.e. guilty combatants.
I wonder, what makes the solider guilty and the civilian innocent? Both are serving their country, obeying their emperor’s orders, and probably even supporting the war effort. Now hear me out… I’m not saying this to demonize civilians so much as to defend the boys in the trenches, who have put their lives on the line simply because that is what has been commanded of them, and who more often than not have very little understanding of why the war is taking place.
If it is morally right to kill such men when they attack (I believe it is), then should it not also be morally right to kill their unarmed countrymen (who also are our clueless enemies) if such an action is necessary to win the war and to reduce overall casualties?
August 7th, 2010 | 8:54 pm
It is an enduring catastrophe of the post-war era that so many people endorse the abandonment of ethics thanks to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Comments like Ann’s are disturbing, especially on a site that is nominally Christian and pro-life.
Or, are we allowed to abandon ethics when life becomes too difficult? Isn’t that the message we’ve inherited from the bombing?
The allied leadership had already abandoned ethics in the firebombing of Tokyo – where more civilians were killed than in either of the atomic bombings.
Perhaps that is why we are constantly presented with the false dichotomy of bombing versus ruinous invasion?
Those who still adhere to the bombings as a ‘necessary evil’ should ask themselves whether the invasion of Japan would have been any more permissible under Just War theory than the bombings?
For Christians this question should be especially dire: which is worse – to suffer or to do evil? Are we meant to do good only when we are guaranteed a good outcome? Or may we ‘do evil that good may come’?
At what other point in Western civilisation has such an atrocity been embraced by so many? Anyone who wonders at the decay of ethics in the West should examine this closely.
Perhaps the words of Bishop Fulton Sheen will have some impact:
“When, I wonder, did we in America ever get into this idea that freedom means having no boundaries and no limits? You know I think it began on the 6th of August 1945 at 8:15 am when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. That blotted out boundaries. The boundary of America that was the aid of nations, and the nations that were helped. It blotted out the boundary between life and death for the victims of nuclear incineration. Among them even the living were dead. It blotted out the boundary between the civilian and the military. And somehow or other, from that day on in our American life, we say we want no limits and no boundaries.”
August 7th, 2010 | 11:04 pm
I am always struck by the rank historical ignorance displayed in these annual August self-flagellations on Catholic websites regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If people are going to attempt to intelligently discuss the decision of Truman to use the bomb to end the Pacific War, they really need to have at least some familiarity with the basic facts. A good recent book on the subject is linked to below.
http://www.usni.org/store/books/history/hell-pay
August 9th, 2010 | 8:04 am
The moral evaluation of the bombings should take into consideration the fact that the Japanese had put factories producing military goods in the middle of their cities. It should also consider the Allied efforts to warn the residents of those cities to evacuate and that those cities were going to be destroyed.
August 9th, 2010 | 9:36 am
Bombing Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only saved the lives of Allied servicemen. It probably saved the lives of Axis servicemen and reduced the toll on innocent civilians. Nonetheless, this doesn’t justify intentionally targeting innocent civilians. One can try to make the case that in total war most civilians are not innocent and traditionally civilian targets have military significance. Maybe that works.
Unfortunately, Tollefson minimizes the benefits to dropping the bomb. He says, falsely, that many civilians died to save the lives of a smaller number of Allied servicemen. Then he shifts into an attack on the use of drones because collateral damage to civilians is so high. Drones do not intentionally target innocent civilians. He seems to be adopting the same consequentialist approach to the conduct of war that he condemns with respect to Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
August 9th, 2010 | 12:20 pm
Zac
You wrote:
Those who still adhere to the bombings as a ‘necessary evil’ should ask themselves whether the invasion of Japan would have been any more permissible under Just War theory than the bombings?
Please enlighten us as to what action would have been permissible to achieve victory. Or is would have just ending the war been your preference? In that case, the US could have simply surrendered.
——————————————————
Everyone:
I have yet to see any comment in this thread acknowledging the degree to which the astronomical body count – given the size of the island – that resulted from the invasion of Okinawa had in the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan: 38,000 Americans wounded and 12,000 killed or missing, more than 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan conscripts killed, and about 100,000 Okinawan civilians.
Not surprisingly, the cost of this battle, in terms of lives, time, and material, weighed heavily in the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan just 6 weeks later. As the Japanese soldier would generally choose to fight to the death over surrender, and those civilians not conscripted into combat would likely have had as hard a time getting out of the way as those on Okinawa had, the Japanese death toll – soldier, conscript, civilian – could have easily exceeded a million. US casualties would have likewise been staggering.
I do not consider myself any less of a Catholic Christian for limiting my criticism of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings to suggesting that exclusively military targets – a base, a large airfield, whatever – should have been chosen (and no, I’m not overlooking the fact that civilians would have perished in that scenario also). Perhaps such an idea was considered, and rejected on the grounds that an American aircraft anywhere near a Japanese military installation would be in much greater danger of being shot down; if the bomb were somehow recovered by the Japanese….holy crap.
Thus, neither do I consider myself any less of a Catholic Christian for holding the view that every option Truman had to achieve victory in that long and brutal war was a terrible option, and that Truman chose what he viewed as the least terrible option. I neither “embrace” nor condemn the decision, but acknowledge that war is a horrible, bloody, and rather consistent feature of human history, and pray for the souls of all those involved and for the day when there is no more war.
If such a position does not satisfy your view of morality, dear reader, then please pray for me, also….
Cordially,
GR
August 9th, 2010 | 8:58 pm
GR:
Just War theory does not permit the targeting of non-combatants, but that doesn’t mean the atomic bomb could not be used at all. There does not seem to be any moral obstacle to using the bomb against enemy combatants, or against military targets (provided disproportionate unintended civilian casualties do not result).
“Please enlighten us as to what action would have been permissible to achieve victory. Or is would have just ending the war been your preference? In that case, the US could have simply surrendered.”
Just War is an extension of self-defense. Our intention is to defend ourselves and others from attack and/or persecution, through actions that carry the likelihood of success, and are in proportion to the threat.
Hence, if I it were up to me to decide in accordance with Just War theory; I would consider it my primary objective to defend against the threat from Japan. It seems that the allies had succeeded in defeating the Japanese forces outside the main islands, so the remaining question was whether to continue the war on Japanese soil, or to blockade the islands.
Given the assessments that invasion would incur massive costs to allied forces and locals alike, it would seem that the costs of invasion were disproportionate to the remaining threat. In other words, if the nation could be contained, then it would be wrong to send hundreds of thousands of allied soldiers to their deaths in order to defeat the regime.
Containment may not be an ideal solution, but I put it to you that it is not our role to guarantee ideal solutions at any cost, but rather to do what is right.
Using the bombs guaranteed surrender of the regime, without the cost to allied troops. The only problem is that it breached a fundamental moral precept, Just War theory, and caused whole generations of Westerners to embrace the killing of innocent civilians as a means to an end.
You cannot affirm the bombing without agreeing in principle that there are at least some circumstances in which we may intentionally kill innocent human beings. A Gallup poll in 1945 found that 85% of Americans agreed that the bombing was the right thing to do. We can therefore pinpoint the moment that Western civilisation made its first exception to the principle of the sanctity of human life.
I think that many people feel forced to accept the bombings as ‘necessary evils’ because we have been told that the only alternative was a costly invasion.
But I will repeat that if the invasion were truly so costly, it would not be right to sacrifice allied troops nor japanese civilians for it. The priority in a Just War is simply to defend against the threat, not to guarantee regime change or ‘unconditional’ surrender (which some have argued was the stumbling block to a Japanese surrender in the first place).
Do not forget that the bombing was followed by decades of Cold War in which the immoral principle of targeting civilians served as the basis of defense policy on both sides. The West has endorsed this principle for more than half a century, and yet we (on sites such as this) lament the decline of morality across Western societies?
The message of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the resounding divorce of ethics from ‘harsh reality’. The sentiment arises time and time again that ethics and morality simply do not apply anymore; that the situation was so dire, we could no longer afford to do what is right.
Tell me if this is not the driving ethos of contemporary western societies: that morality is dispensable in the face of hardship. Look at abortion, euthanasia, the use of embryos in research, or any other ethical issue we know so well, and ask yourself at what point in recent history Western societies emphatically rejected the inviolability of ethics.
August 10th, 2010 | 3:51 am
Just War theory does not permit the targeting of non-combatants, but that doesn’t mean the atomic bomb could not be used at all. There does not seem to be any moral obstacle to using the bomb against enemy combatants, or against military targets (provided disproportionate unintended civilian casualties do not result).
If you had read my entire post, you likely would have noticed that I asserted exactly that. As I made clear, Truman’s choice of targets is my only criticism of his decision; however, not being content to offer that criticism of Truman’s decision and let the matter rest, you delve off into a long lecture about Just War Theory, in which you posit as a permissible course of action for Truman to have been to contain and blockade the Japanese on their island.
Right. Isolate a still large and deadly army on their home island along with their civilian population, and commence starvation and deprivation, and if they surrender – great; if not, well, they’re contained.
That you consider this to be an acceptable and moral course of action for the US in July 1945, and not just one of the terrible options I referred to as being available, leads me to wonder whether you’ve thought about where such a course would lead. This solution would certainly cause any civilian deaths, would require an enormous American military presence to enforce, and would essentially invite the Japanese to regroup and continue to pose a viable, deadly, and essentially open-ended threat to our allies in the region as well as to the American soldiers whose presence would be required there to keep the Japanese tentatively “contained”. You may view this option as satisfying your criteria for not violating Just War Theory, but from a military perspective, it certainly would have been a monumentally foolish plan of action; as a country fighting alongside allies regional to Japan, it would have also been gravely irresponsible.
I’ll just close by reiterating that I believe Truman’s decision should have been to drop the bomb on a more explicitly military target, but I’ll leave the condemnation to others more certain of their own righteousness.
Cordially,
GR
August 10th, 2010 | 8:06 pm
I did read your entire post, and included for the sake of clarification that I am not ruling out the use of nuclear weapons either.
“not being content to offer that criticism of Truman’s decision and let the matter rest, you delve off into a long lecture about Just War Theory, in which you posit as a permissible course of action for Truman to have been to contain and blockade the Japanese on their island. ”
I thought I was responding to your direct challenge to provide an alternative option?
“That you consider this to be an acceptable and moral course of action for the US in July 1945, and not just one of the terrible options I referred to as being available, leads me to wonder whether you’ve thought about where such a course would lead. ”
“This solution would certainly cause any civilian deaths, would require an enormous American military presence to enforce, and would essentially invite the Japanese to regroup and continue to pose a viable, deadly, and essentially open-ended threat to our allies in the region as well as to the American soldiers whose presence would be required there to keep the Japanese tentatively “contained”.”
I think you need to make a clearer distinction between what we are responsible for, and what the enemy is responsible for. We are not responsible for the actions of our enemy, only for our own actions.
If it is evil to intentionally kill innocent civilians, and it is likewise evil to send hundreds of thousands of allied soldiers to their deaths when the threat is already contained, then I do not see what alternative remains.
Containment might be ‘terrible’…if the Japanese refuse to surrender, if they allow their people to starve, etc. That is their responsibility, not ours.
It might be terrible, but it is not evil. That is the whole point of Just War theory. We might have to endure terrible situations, but at least we are not committing evil. It is not our intention or action that makes them terrible.
“You may view this option as satisfying your criteria for not violating Just War Theory, but from a military perspective, it certainly would have been a monumentally foolish plan of action;”
And if ethics requires us to do ‘foolish’ things?
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