“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?

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

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.

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

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.

http://www.usni.org/store/books/history/hell-pay

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.”

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?