The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
My last post argued that the two terrible atomic weapons forced the Japanese surrender when it occurred. Let me clarify further in response to some of the comments offered that by July of 1945 the Japanese had been subjected to months of devastating attacks by American B-29s, their capital and other major cities had suffered extensive damage, the home islands were subjected to a naval blockade that made food and fuel increasingly scarce. The Japanese military and civilian losses had reached approximately three million and there seemed no end in sight. Despite all this, however, Japan’s leaders and especially its military clung to notions of Ketsu-Go, to a plan that involved inflicting such punishment on the invader in defense of the homeland that the invader would sue for terms. In fact, even after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Soviet attack in Manchuria the military still wanted to pursue that desperate option, but Emperor Hirohito broke the impasse in the Japanese government and ordered surrender. He came to understand that the atomic bomb undermined (as the brilliant historian Richard Frank has noted) “the fundamental premise” of Ketsu-Go “that the United States would have to invade Japan to secure a decision” in the war. Ultimately the atomic bombs allowed the emperor and the peace faction in the Japanese government to negotiate an end to the war.
Writers engaging in wishful thinking and fanciful recreations have sought to fashion circumstances in which the A-bombs might be seen as unnecessary (and then as almost certainly wrong and immoral.) Yet the painful reality that fair-minded observers must concede is that Japan most certainly would have fought on considerably longer unless the United States and its allies had accepted major changes to its Potsdam surrender terms. Of course, it is clear that the United States eventually could have defeated Japan without the atomic bomb, but one must appreciate that all the alternate scenarios to secure victory—continued obliteration bombing of Japanese cities and infrastructure, a choking blockade, the terrible invasions-- would have meant significantly greater allied casualties and much higher Japanese civilian and military casualties.
Those who rush to ‘judge’ Truman’s decision to use the atomic bombs must hesitate a little so as to appreciate that had he not authorized the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki thousands of American and allied soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen would have been added to the lists of those killed in World War II. This would have included not only those involved in the planned invasions of the home islands but also American, British and Australian ground forces in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific who expected to engage the Japanese in bloody fighting in the months preceding such assaults. Added to their number would have been the thousands of allied prisoners of war whom the Japanese planned to execute. Could an American president have survived politically and personally knowing that he might have used a weapon that could have avoided their slaughter?
Also, hard as it may be to accept when one sees the visual record of the terrible destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese losses probably would have been substantially greater without the A-bombs. Moreover, the use of the awful weapons abruptly ended the death and suffering of innocent third parties among peoples throughout Asia. Rather surprisingly, the enormous wartime losses of the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Javanese at the hands of the Japanese receive little attention in weighing the American effort to shock the Japanese into surrender. The losses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki assuredly were horrific, but they pale in significance when compared to the estimates of seventeen to twenty-four million deaths attributed to the Japanese during their rampage from Manchuria to New Guinea. And, the thoughtful scholar Robert Newman tellingly revealed that “the last months were in many ways the worst; starvation and disease aggravated the usual beatings, beheadings and battle deaths. It is plausible to hold that upwards of 250,000 people, mostly Asian but some Westerners, would have died each month the Japanese Empire struggled in its death throes beyond July 1945.”
If then the atomic bombs shortened the war, averted the need for a land invasion, saved countless more lives on both sides of the ghastly conflict than it cost, and brought to an end the Japanese brutalization of the conquered peoples of Asia, does this make their use moral? This obviously has been a much-debated question. Even Harry Truman’s firm conviction that he had done the necessary thing in dropping the bomb, thus ending the war and saving numerous lives in the process, did not stave off his own serious moral qualms about the action. He never again spoke of the atomic bombs as military weapons to which the United States could make easy resort and indicated some retreat from his pre-Hiroshima view that the A-bomb was ‘just’ another military weapon.
Some evidence suggests that Truman worried that he had blood on his hands. But in this he hardly stood alone among the participants in the enormous, ghastly struggle, which came to be known as World War II. Well over fifty million people lost their lives in that gigantic conflict which descended to new lows of barbarism in both European and Pacific theaters. Restraints that previously had directed soldiers to spare non-combatants were thrown off as the Allies battled to defeat their brutal foes. As a number of writers have noted succinctly, a ‘moral Rubicon’ had been crossed long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indiscriminate bombing had become the norm for the Anglo-American forces well before 1945. Churchill and Roosevelt both approved the brutal endeavors to break the morale of their foes, which they hoped ultimately, would secure victory and save lives. The Tokyo fire-bombings took place on FDR’s watch after all. Surprisingly, however, in the moral assessments of the war Churchill and FDR escape the condemnation heaped on Harry Truman. Surely, however, Truman’s contemporary critics should refrain from putting him in some singular dock of history. Certainly, they carefully should consider the responsibility of the Japanese leadership for the fate of their own people. In moral terms surely the Japanese leadership had a responsibility to surrender at least by June of 1945, when there existed no reasonable prospect of success and when their civilian population suffered so greatly. Instead, the twisted neo-samurai who led the Japanese military geared up with true banzai spirit to engage the whole population in a kind of national kamikaze campaign. Their stupidity and perfidy in perpetrating and prolonging the war should not be ignored.
Of course, we must still ask was it right? I suggest that in retrospect and within the privacy of his own heart and soul it is likely that Truman understood he had been forced by necessity to enter into evil. And, so indeed, he had. He ordered the bombing of cities in which thousands of non-combatants, among them the innocent elderly and the sick, women and children, were annihilated. Evaluated in isolation each atomic bombing assuredly was a deeply immoral act deserving of condemnation. The fact that it did the least harm possible of the available options to gain victory, and that it brought an end to destruction, death and casualties on an even more massive scale cannot obviate this, although it might satisfy those who accept a strict utilitarian approach to morality in which good ends can serve to justify certain immoral means. I am not in that number.
Yet, I remain sympathetic in evaluating Truman and his decision. He was a person who knew that decisions in the sometimes confusing fog of war placed the policymaker in circumstances where he sometimes had neither a clear nor easy ‘moral’ option. Perhaps Truman had himself and the A-bomb decision retrospectively in mind when he wrote fifteen years after their use in a discourse on decision-making [in his Mr. Citizen] that “sometimes you have a choice of evils, in which case you try to take the course that is likely to bring the least harm.”
From the perspective of over six decades Truman’s use of the bomb, when viewed in the context of the long and terrible war, should be seen as his choosing the lesser of the evils available to him. Admittedly, he did not weigh carefully the options in a careful moral calculus at the time and proceed forward with that understanding, but fair-minded observers will see that he chose what he might have termed a necessary evil—the one that did the least harm. Henry L. Stimson had it exactly right when he wrote in 1947 that “the decision to use the atomic bomb was a decision that brought death to over a hundred thousand Japanese. No explanation can change that fact and I do not wish to gloss over it. But this deliberate, premeditated destruction was our least abhorrent choice.” “Abhorrent,” for sure, but it must be understood, the “least abhorrent” as well so as to bring the bloodshed to an end. Truman, along with many others, has blood on his hands but he also stopped the veritable flood of blood on all sides. The reality that he prevented much greater bloodshed must be acknowledged. So too must it be appreciated that he did not turn his back on some obvious and feasible ‘moral’ course of action that would have secured a Japanese surrender.
I realize that this analysis will hardly satisfy all participants in this discussion, but I hope it will provide food for serious reflection. Let me apologize for the length of this post. I trust it will still be of interest to Ricochet readers.
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Feb '11
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
Why, from a moral standpoint, does the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki get so much more attention than the conventional fire-bombing of other Japanese cities, which killed more people?
And regarding the European front of the war, why do most people focus on Dresden and seem unaware that this was but one target in the sustained British/American strategic bombing campaign?
Speaking of Dresden, I have a post on the subject here.
Jan '11
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
The great horror about the bomb was colored by the later recognition that it was a weapon that could wipe out humanity. If we were merely and exclusively discussing the use of the bomb by Truman to end the Pacific War with Japan in 1945, when only the Americans had the weapon, that’s a different decision from whether we should enter the Nuclear Age, with all the dangers associated with that.
You have to make that distinction to appreciate Truman’s decision. Remember, this was before the Rosenbergs, and while Mao was still just a goofball in the hills. Many strategists may have guessed where the Nuclear Age would lead, but at the time it was still all just speculation to Truman. So, how would Truman compare them? If Truman’s biographers are right, his personality would take the bird in the hand instead of the multiple horrors lurking in the bush. He wasn’t president of the future – he was president of living Americans, and they were who he was responsible to.
Apr '11
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
I'm not sure how necessity and morality are so different, to be honest with you.
Was it moral to, instead of using the Bomb, send young men, perhaps your own sons to take the beaches of the main island with nothing more than deer rilfles with knives attached to them, where the Japanese were more than ready for them with machine guns and mortars and everything else in their bloody arsenal? Because those were the options, Father. Those were human souls at stake fighting against a fanatical enemy they did not even start the war with to begin with.
The Japanese used gas against Chinese civilians in the late 30s because they knew they could not use it against them back while they refrained against doing it to us because they were afraid of that very thing.
We did not use gas at all during that war, as well other Christian acts all over the globe at the same time.
Which side should you side with? I'm sorry but if that was what it took to save the souls of our Christian boys to make these people stop, I think it is moral in itself.
Apr '11
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
It's a kind of political correctness. It is the insidious nature of the unseen radiation that kills later that gives propaganda fuel to the anti-nuclear movement. A demagogue's dream.
Jan '11
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
War has a way of presenting you with an array of choices none of which are "good" or "right."
My father was in the Navy, in the South Pacific, when the bombs were dropped. Most of my friends' fathers were serving in one branch or another. I never heard any of them criticize Truman's decision.
I find President Obama's decision to phone in a war from Libya and casually start bombing with no particular strategic object far more morally repugnant than Truman's decision to end the war in the Pacific with the least possible loss of life.
And David, could the focus on the fire-bombing of Dresden be a result of Slaughterhouse-Five's popularity? A highly successful novel does help to concentrate attention on its subject; how many Americans do you think would know the word "gulag" if not for Solzhenitsyn?
Dec '10
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
Fr. Bill, when you speak of Truman not turning his back on an obvious, feasible, moral alternative, what would you consider the liklihood for success, of softening the terms of surrender, as queried by Brandon Zaffini in a previous thread?
Feb '11
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
Charlie...I think you're basically correct..not just the radiation, though, but the seemingly-magical nature of nuclear energy itself.
In my post deterrence, I quoted a Los Alamos scientist as saying “Weapons designers play the societal role of witches in fairy tales–we scare people into behaving.” This captures very well the image of nuclear weapons that evolved during the Cold War–they are of the supernatural rather than the natural world; they belong to the realm of fevered nightmares rather than waking thoughts. I think that some critics of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki attacks are motivated in part by a subconscious feeling that black magic was involved.
Jul '10
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
I will quibble with KC on "the great horror." To populations that had experienced the Blitz and fire bombings, the world calamity scenario that would emerge over the next few years was not necessary to amplify the horror that the bomb represented. Reducing the effects of hundreds of sorties to a single bomb was a harrowingly vivid concept in 1945. Not knowing how many more there might be, then or in the future, was not a comfort either.
The nuclear winter theory doesn't make it into widespread discussion for thirty years. At least a decade before that rumors of a Soviet cobalt bomb that was a planet buster made the rounds, but never proved to be more than speculation and fodder for science fiction stories.
Apr '11
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
May '10
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
Fr. Bill Miscamble:
Henry L. Stimson had it exactly right when he wrote in 1947 that “the decision to use the atomic bomb was a decision that brought death to over a hundred thousand Japanese. "
I realize that your "exactly right" comment refers to Stimson's conclusion that the decision was the "least abhorrent", but I would respond to his assertion above that it was the decision to go to war in the first place, made years earlier, that released the demons of death and destruction upon Japan. Individual decisions of targeting and tactics are just links in a long chain.
As you have related in you post, Fr. Bill, the fabled "four horseman" were very much on the ride in the region and every month brought death and suffering to thousands. A decision to bomb shifts the suffering to one group while likely relieving others, and a decision not to bomb saves (for a while, at least) Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but allowed many others to die. There is no resolving this sort of calculation, except to say that anything that hastens the end of fighting is an act of mercy, no matter how horrible the immediate effect.
Feb '11
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
Margaret....I think you're probably correct that the Vonnegut novel is the reason why Dresden ranks so high in the collective consciousness. Should have thought of that.
The German movie about the event, which I reviewed at the link above, was actually IMO quite well-done. It was disturbing that some of the viewer reviews at Netflix and elsewhere were actually eager to find more moral equivalency in the movie than was actually in it.
May '10
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
Fr. Bill Miscamble: ...although it might satisfy those who accept a strict utilitarian approach to morality in which good ends can serve to justify certain immoral means. I am not in that number.
Yet, I remain sympathetic in evaluating Truman and his decision.
I'm with you in that regard. Our decisions should not be strictly utilitarian.
But I reject the common notion of "necessary evils" as it relates to decision making. There is no situation — none whatsoever — in which God wills us to do evil. That is logically impossible, because "good" is that which embodies God's will. If God is perfect and if we are created to do His will, then it is impossible to perform evil while following His will.
Life is full of moments when we cannot discern God's will. There are also moments when our "best" options are horrifying or repugnant. But "horrifying" is not necessarily evil. There is always a decision available which God approves under the circumstances.
We live in a fallen world. Sadness and anger are ugly, too, but they are God's own responses to sin and corruption. Only in Heaven, devoid of sin, can all actions be beautiful.
Dec '10
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
The question is essentially invalid. If one uses a fixed standard of morality concerning the taking of another's life, then no act of war is ever moral or just. However, if any other consideration is brought into the decision then the standard becomes relative, which, to my understanding, is utilitarianism and not a moral system. The choice is not between moral ways to fight war, but between existence and annihilation, and that is an existential question, not a moral one.
Edited on Aug 5, 2011 at 2:17pmJun '10
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
Can we still put the guy who first used the catapult on trial for crimes against humanity?
What I find particularly irksome about this hand-wringing over the use of the A-bomb is the implication that we are morally more elevated as a result of this navel gazing. It amounts to liberal sludge aimed at good men pressed by exigencies we will never face. Men are not angels and will never be perfected into being angels by liberals who feel that four mea culpas are better than three. Or should that be two with a followup mea maxima culpa.
I apologize in advance if this makes me seem uninterested in self-examination or morality or even the morality of war, but as we read prisoners their Miranda Rights, the prisoner's mates are planning their next church bombing, their next beheading, or how they might slash some teacher's throat for the crime of educating girls. Which one of us wouldn't act to prevent such a crime? The rest is a debate over method.
Edited on Aug 5, 2011 at 3:25pmDec '10
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
Good has an obligation to survive. If Good decides that it cannot use the necessary means to survive and therefore should allow Evil to triumph, then the world will be given over to Evil's dominion. Evil will breed and raise the next generation and the one after that and every successive one unto Eternity.
So there is a limit to how much self-examination and self-censorship Good should direct to itself. Unnecessary cruelty and bloodthirstiness in combatting Evil are wrong -- but using less than the minimum necessary cruelty and bloodthirstiness is equally or more wrong.
Jun '10
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
I agree with Father Bill's analysis. It was the least abhorrent alternative. And while I find strict utilitarian thought as far too simplistic in a complex world, this decision wasn't even a close call. Millions of people's lives were saved by Truman's decision.
Sep '10
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
I'm convinced that if we had not used those bombs, we would have undertaken Operation Downfall & Operation Olympic. Once our troops made landfall and watching school aged combatants charging them with spears the unofficial word from the Officers on the ground might turn to genocide. The amount of deaths on those beaches and on Honshu would have far outweighed the paltry sum that were sacrificed for the sake of peace in Hiroshima & Nagasaki.
Jul '10
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
... Admittedly, he did not weigh carefully the options in a careful moral calculus at the time and proceed forward with that understanding, but fair-minded observers will see that he chose what he might have termed a necessary evil—the one that did the least harm. ...
The nature of executive decision in a modern state is at a far remove from careful, considered, properly articulated study of the moral options. Decision briefings compress the pertinent facts as understood at the time and, if the circumstances insist a decision be made or the situation appears harmless enough to allow one, a decision is made. One needs just to consider the fog of numbers that emerges from Ricochet debates on federal finances to appreciate the quality of the data on which a president decides the fate of a city, or a nation.
Hayek's problem of knowledge (popularly expounded in the Road to Serfdom) impacts more than just command economies.
It may seem inconceivable that life and death decisions must be made in such a flawed and unconsidered way, but that is the human condition as Truman found it and as it continues today.
Jun '10
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
Another great post Father! I would love to hear your view on CCC 2314:
"Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation." (GS 80 § 3) A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons—especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons—to commit such crimes.
Does it apply here? If not, why not?
Sep '10
Re: The A-Bomb: Necessary, But Was It Right?
I lived thru it all. I hid under my desk in grade school. In college, I was glued to the TV during the Cuban missile crisis. In my professional life, I was very knowledgeable of the nuclear weapons program. I rolled my eyes at the idiocy of the nuclear freeze movement: "we must learn to live with the Soviet Union". But by1990, all that was over. And when I stood on the deck of the MIssouri in 1996 with my 15 year old son and 12 year old daughter, I said with confidence: " because of what happened here [and implicitly the decisions that preceded the surrender] you will not die on some god-forsaken beach." That's true for all the sons and daughters that were born post-Vietnam. Philosophize all you want, but there will be no more world wars because of decisions made in the 30s and early 40s.