How can we celebrate the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, knowing that victory was bought by the dropping of atomic bombs? For pacifists, the answer is clear: we can’t. Since any deliberate killing is wrong, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 was wrong two-hundred thousand times over.
But that clear answer raises further questions whose answers aren’t so obvious. If killing is always wrong, then the United States (and Britain) should never have gone to war against Imperial Japan and therefore its ally, Hitler’s Germany. What, then, would have stopped the triumph of brutally racist Japanese imperialism in Asia and massively murderous Nazism in Europe? The noble witness of innocent non-violence?
Unfortunately, the historical evidence is that the kind of people who ran the slave-labour camps in Burma, and the likes of Dachau in Germany and Auschwitz in Poland, were not at all shamed by the face of vulnerable innocence. Quite the opposite: it excited their lust for domination. No one who has watched the frenzied beating to death of a sick Australian POW in BBC 4’s showing of the dramatisation of Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North can doubt it.
On the other hand, those who think that war can sometimes be justified might judge that the killing of civilians on such a massive scale was indiscriminate and therefore unjust. But the “just war” ethics don’t say that we may not kill civilians, even on a massive scale; it only says we may not kill them intentionally. If a military objective can’t be achieved except by risking the deaths of civilians, then it may still be attempted – provided the objective is sufficiently important militarily, and that all reasonable measures are taken to minimise the side-effect of civilian casualties. The reason for this permissiveness is that in most circumstances, just war would otherwise be impossible to prosecute.
So, for the “just war” proponent, if the intention in dropping the bombs on Japan was to slaughter the Japanese out of vengeance, then that would be clearly immoral, because vengeance is always forbidden. Also immoral would be the indiscriminate slaughtering of civilians to terrorise the Japanese government into surrender, because if it’s morally okay to use non-combatant civilians in such a “terroristic” fashion, then nothing will constrain how we wage war.
So how does the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki measure up, ethically?
Vengeance had nothing to do with it. The overriding motive of the US government was the desire to save lives by bringing the war to a swift end, through forcing the Japanese government to surrender. Two weeks before the first bomb was dropped, President Truman wrote: “My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a humane feeling for the women and children of Japan”.
How can we celebrate the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, knowing that victory was bought by the dropping of atomic bombs? For pacifists, the answer is clear: we can’t. Since any deliberate killing is wrong, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 was wrong two-hundred thousand times over.
But that clear answer raises further questions whose answers aren’t so obvious. If killing is always wrong, then the United States (and Britain) should never have gone to war against Imperial Japan and therefore its ally, Hitler’s Germany. What, then, would have stopped the triumph of brutally racist Japanese imperialism in Asia and massively murderous Nazism in Europe? The noble witness of innocent non-violence?
Unfortunately, the historical evidence is that the kind of people who ran the slave-labour camps in Burma, and the likes of Dachau in Germany and Auschwitz in Poland, were not at all shamed by the face of vulnerable innocence. Quite the opposite: it excited their lust for domination. No one who has watched the frenzied beating to death of a sick Australian POW in BBC 4’s showing of the dramatisation of Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North can doubt it.
On the other hand, those who think that war can sometimes be justified might judge that the killing of civilians on such a massive scale was indiscriminate and therefore unjust. But the “just war” ethics don’t say that we may not kill civilians, even on a massive scale; it only says we may not kill them intentionally. If a military objective can’t be achieved except by risking the deaths of civilians, then it may still be attempted – provided the objective is sufficiently important militarily, and that all reasonable measures are taken to minimise the side-effect of civilian casualties. The reason for this permissiveness is that in most circumstances, just war would otherwise be impossible to prosecute.
So, for the “just war” proponent, if the intention in dropping the bombs on Japan was to slaughter the Japanese out of vengeance, then that would be clearly immoral, because vengeance is always forbidden. Also immoral would be the indiscriminate slaughtering of civilians to terrorise the Japanese government into surrender, because if it’s morally okay to use non-combatant civilians in such a “terroristic” fashion, then nothing will constrain how we wage war.
So how does the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki measure up, ethically?
Vengeance had nothing to do with it. The overriding motive of the US government was the desire to save lives by bringing the war to a swift end, through forcing the Japanese government to surrender. Two weeks before the first bomb was dropped, President Truman wrote: “My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a humane feeling for the women and children of Japan”.