Is it immoral to use nuclear weapons in war?

[GKMotley]

Heaviest concentration of military in any major city at the time.

 

[Hume]

Hume:

20k soldiers were actually present in Hiroshima.

Headquarters for the Second General Army, 59th Army, 5th Division and the 224th Division, 5 batteries of the 3rd anti-aircraft division, units of the 121st and 122nd anti aircraft Regiments and the 22nd and 45th Separate anti aircraft Divisions, lead to the estimate of 40,000 troops.

I take it you have never been in the military.

The garrison was 40k.

A war was on, you see. They’d been moved to potential fronts. 20k of them were in Hiroshima when the bomb fell. This fact isn’t up for debate.

 

[GKMotley]

SURRENDER. I’ll post it as often as required.

 

[PetraG]

It could be argued very effectively that the nulcear bombs were far less destructive overall than the fire bombing being used against Japan.

And another issue is the constant mantra that “they were (all) civilians”. There were 40,000 garrisoned troops in Hiroshima, making it a combined target. Nagasaki contained numerous war manufacturing sites.

One of the proposals above was that we simply starve the entire country; I have no clue as to how many hundreds of thousands, if not millions would have died as a result.

Exactly. That is, carpet-bombing in the conventional way was not some morally-superior way to impose the same destruction against civilians. I’m not making the statement that starvation isn’t better or worse than having your skin melted off in a callous bean-counter sort of way. I mean it is morally-repugnant, either way. Learning to do it so efficiently is a terrible use of technology, but “low-tech” ways aren’t morally superior.

Having said that, this was not a strike meant to take out a factory. They knew how to do that. This was a strike meant to terrify the government into an immediate surrender. Is there some calculus that says we’d kill fewer civilians that way? Hmmm…I mean, if targeting civilian populations to kill the morale of the government was already OK? I don’t think Truman saw it that way, though. I think it was a matter of weighing human life in toto against the lives of Americans troops who volunteered to fight in a war provoked by an attack without no declaration of war who all had a lot of life left ahead of them, if they survived the war. He didn’t want to weight the lives of American troops lightly when they were in a war the United States entered by reason of an infamous and indecent attack.

 

[GKMotley]

Hiroshima was the port of embarkation for the troops heading for Kyushu. Which the Japanese had quite cleverly discerned as the site for the initial DOWNFALL landings. Very accurately too. Drea/MACARTHURS ULTRA. Which you have not read.

Recall that while the military assets in the target where precisely that, the assets were not the target of the bomb. That was the minds of the relevant decision makers. If we merely wanted to bomb Hiroshima, we would have bombed Hiroshima, conventionally.

 

[GKMotley]

Two planes. Two bombs. End of war. Good.

 

[Hume]

SURRENDER. I’ll post it as often as required.

Not just surrender, though.

You’ve identified yourself that the reasons for the immoral deed was;
Surrender on our terms
The economy of paying for ongoing war, regardless specious guesses at cost of unneeded invasion
A display of might to the Russians

I think the only obvious reason you haven’t copped to that the bombs were dropped was just to see what they’d do - a la Halsey.

And I agree that those were the reasons it was dropped. What wasn’t anywhere near the top of the list was to, per Truman, “End Japan’s ability to make war”. That had already been achieved by August 1945.

 

[Hume]

If we merely wanted to bomb Hiroshima, we would have bombed Hiroshima, conventionally.

They were picked, chiefly, because they were relatively pristine cities. The affects could be observed without much interference from other bombings.

 

[GKMotley]

Correct. And the vital point was the impact one plane made on the decision makers. See Asado, op. cit.

Surrender. Unconditionally.

 

[PetraG]

Two planes. Two bombs. End of war. Good.

Well, another way to word it is: One bomb and one plane melted the skin off of children and incinerated grandmothers for miles from the epicenter. There was warrant for the first, let alone two?

I don’t think American troops were ready to target any Japanese children and grandparents to win the war. I don’t think that was Truman’s thinking. I think the calculation was that–because of the decisions of the Japanese government, not the American government–it was deemed certain that a comparable number of Japanese children and grandparents would be sacrificed no matter what the American government did. That is the best view I can have of the thinking. There is no defense for it, otherwise.

 

[GKMotley]

I think the only obvious reason you haven’t copped to that the bombs were dropped was just to see what they’d do - a la Halsey.

Because it wasn’t. Halsey was wrong. That happens to military types, occasionally.

 

[GKMotley]

I’ll go with your thinking.

So, what was the thinking during the three Tokyo fire bomb raids?

 

[PetraG]

They were picked, chiefly, because they were relatively pristine cities. The affects could be observed without much interference from other bombings.

The locals said afterwards that they wondered why other towns nearby had been hit but Hiroshima had not been hit.
That city was relatively pristine because the people who planned the bombing runs had decided to keep it that way, in case they needed to demonstrate what this new weapon would do to an untouched city.

 

[Hume]

Hume:

I think the only obvious reason you haven’t copped to that the bombs were dropped was just to see what they’d do - a la Halsey.

Because it wasn’t. Halsey was wrong. That happens to military types, occasionally.

Eisenhower included?
“I voiced to [Truman] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”

 

[PetraG]

Eisenhower included?
“I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”

I think there is question about what Truman knew or ought to have known or what thoughts had been presented to him by his advisors.

Again: we ought to be answering this question not to condemn Truman but to inform our own thinking for the time that may come too soon when we are confronted with a similar decision. The Hiroshima decision is in the past and President Truman is dead and buried. His judgment belongs to God alone. What, if anything, could we see as a moral use of our present nuclear arsenal in the military or political situation we might find in our future? That is the only reason to re-visit the difficult situation of Hiroshima: that is, because it is real, and not hypothetical. The lives saved were the lives of our fathers and grandfathers. The lives lost were real, too. The real survivors have told their stories. It is a story that is full of life, not a bloodless theoretical calculation with no real persons involved.

 

[Hume]

You gotta face it, GKM. One of the primary reasons we did it was to see what it would do to a city.

 

[Hume]

What, if anything, could we see as a moral use of our present nuclear arsenal in the military or political situation we might find in our future.

I think the only long-term solution for the survival of humanity is their complete abolition. As a matter of statistics, the longer they exist and the more of them there are both work to reduce our odds of survival as a civilization, if not as a species.

 

[PetraG]

You gotta face it, GKM. One of the primary reasons we did it was to see what it would do to a city.

It was, in the end, Truman’s decision. I have no reason to believe he made it so callously as that.

 

[GKMotley]

Eisenhower was an interesting case.

Eisenhower made similar statements in three places, in 1948 (CRUSADE IN EUROPE, p. 443) and 1963 (MANDATE FOR CHANGE), and a NEWSWEEK interview. The 1963 account (as was even more true of the 1963 Newsweek article) was more detailed and more colorful than the first. But then, more principals were deceased by then. In the 1948, but not the 1963 account , Eisenhower added “My views were merely personal and immediate reactions, they were not based on any analysis of the subject”. Indeed. In a 12 July 1945 letter he wrote that he had not the slightest idea what would happen in the Pacific, nor was there any reason he should. He was the ETO commander. MacArthur or Nimitz had similarly no insight into the European Theater.

Whether Eisenhower was opposed to the use of the bomb, personally, is certainly probable. His accounts of how and when he expressed his opinions are dubious. Reading for this would be Newman/WEAPONS OF VICTORY, esp.pp. 121-124, , HIROSHIMA IN HISTORY (ed. Maddux), pp. 7-23. And Frank’s notes on pp. 332-33 (DOWNFALL). And Newma’s chapter in HIROSHIMA IN HISTORY, previously cited.

.But Eisenhower’s opinions were of no matter. The issue was what actions would result in the fewest casualties, and end the war, at the time, not what Eisenhower said he thought of it. The persons making the decision were those with both the responsibility and the information best suited to make the decision. Eisenhower had neither, as he said in in the cited letter.

 

[Hume]

Hume:

You gotta face it, GKM. One of the primary reasons we did it was to see what it would do to a city.

It was, in the end, Truman’s decision. I have no reason to believe he made it so callously as that.

To be sure, there were other reasons as I agreed above. But despite warnings from what seems to be most of the allied generals, we’d spent quite a bit of time, money and effort developing these things. Everyone knew the war was ending. If Truman and his spooks wanted to see what it looked like dropped on something other than a Nevada test range, this was their shot and the window was closing.