Is it immoral to use nuclear weapons in war?

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What I’m saying is this: who is a combatant and who is a civilian is very much open to interpretation, and by that stage of WWII most “civilians” had become combatants.
 
If you apply that logic then you have to admit the Pentagon was a legitimate target on 9/11. As were, to a certain extent, the Towers.
 
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The first invasion of the Home Islands proper, under DOWNFALL, was scheduled for 1 Nov 45, on Kyushu, Operation Olympic.
 
No. The differences are many. Remember that the US legally declared war on Japan by act of Congress. Further, I don’t think you will ever find a sanctioned attack on defenseless civilians, and only civilians, by the US military, rivaling flying stolen jetliners laden with gasoline into the twin towers, which was the furthest thing from a military target.
 
No we tend to use proxies like death squads to inflict terror in the civilian populace, or US soldiers like in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam.

I notice you didn’t touch on the Pentagon. In any case, war was declared by Al Qaeda before 9/11. Michael Scheuer documents this in Imperial Hubris.

What’s more we had already antagonized Japan for years before Pearl Harbor. If Iraq was justified on the grounds of a potential threat, so was Pearl Harbor.

And as for terror inflicted on civilian populations, why else firebomb cities other than to terrorize civilians? And besides impressing Stalin with our new toys, why bomb Nagasaki? Even granting Hiroshima as a military target, why bomb Nagasaki?
 
VonDerTann said:
What I’m saying is this: who is a combatant and who is a civilian is very much open to interpretation, and by that stage of WWII most “civilians” had become combatants.
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What? In what sense? What sort of “combat” were they engaging in? Paying taxes?
 
VonDerTann said:
No. The differences are many. Remember that the US legally declared war on Japan by act of Congress. Further, I don’t think you will ever find a sanctioned attack on defenseless civilians, and only civilians, by the US military, rivaling flying stolen jetliners laden with gasoline into the twin towers, which was the furthest thing from a military target.
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not legitimate military targets. About 5% of the Hiroshima deaths were military. In Nagasaki, it was about 150 in 140,000. The leaflets dropped to warn the populace were dropped after the bombings, not before; the message was that further resistance was futile.

I don’t know what Harry Truman knew about these targets, but if he thought they were legitimate military targets with a minimum of civilian casualties to be likely compared to the military casualties, he was grossly in error.
 
I’m referring to the Japanese. As I wrote above, they were being actively armed by the Japanese military; were expected to actively help to repel an invasion; and were engaged in direct war work like digging fortifications. (to say nothing of those in war support, like building munitions in factories).
 
VonDerTann said:
I’m referring to the Japanese. As I wrote above, they were being actively armed by the Japanese military; were expected to actively help to repel an invasion; and were engaged in direct war work like digging fortifications. (to say nothing of those in war support, like building munitions in factories).
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Yes, it could be true that the populace had been armed. The question, though, is whether the bombing of a largely civilian target was moral in light of the threat posed to our military by the civilian population. I don’t know the answer to that. I suspect that the threat was somewhere between not high and largely symbolic. When the Germans were bombing Buckingham Palace, it wasn’t because they thought the Queen had a rifle fitted with a bayonet.

The best I can say about those bombings is that it is possible they were made based on faulty intelligence. Yes, that intelligence may have included warnings that the civilian population was armed to the teeth and ready to commit kamakazi-like attacks on occupiers. Again, I don’t know the answer to that. When the decision to bomb was made, though, less was known than we know now. I think that is a fair defense of the decisions.
 
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Give some sources on the military deaths. Hiroshima was about 40% (memory working here) military.

Give a source on the Nagasaki deaths.

Note: I’m not arguing these were targeted for the military assets that could be destroyed. They were targeted to bring about a rapid surrender, by breaking the impasse in the Saiko Senso Shido Kaigo. Which they did.
 
I’ve dealt with that article before. But it’s behind a pay wall now and nothing I do to my ad blocker opens it up.

That the war was won before the bombing is correct. That the Japanese were defeated were correct. That they were prepared to surrender is incorrect.

Post a pertinent assertion from it. We shall see.
 
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I’m sorry, as I will have a great deal to say on this.

First, remember the Japanese started the war, long before Pearl Harbor, when they made aggressive war on China and other neighbors. The Japanese also committed horrible atrocities in essentially every area they conquered. In Nanking they engaged in mass rape on a grand scale along with other horrible behavior (such as forcing parents to rape their children and forcing buddhist priests (sworn to celibacy) to also commit rape. In you were a US solider captured by the Germans in WWII, your chance of being killed in captivity was 1 in 100, i.e., you were generally treated reasonably well. If you were captured by the Japanese your likelihood of being killed in captivity was 1 in 2 (not including the decision to kill POWs upon invasion). Point: This was an enemy to all mankind, that had to be defeated as swiftly as possible.

Second, US military planners estimated US casualties in the event of an invasion to be anywhere from 250,000 to 1 million. Japanese military planners fully expected 20 million Japanese casualtes 20 MILLION! (Cite is the book “Hell to Pay” by DM Giangreco). The flippancy of that should astound you: The Japanese were planning for that and had no intention of surrendering instead. As that author notes, even if some later say, “the Japanese were defeated,” there was a very large difference between being defeated and actually surrendering (the Germans maybe were “defeated” by mid-1944 if not earlier yet fought on until May 1945).

Third, it is really, really easy in the comfort of our warm homes to engage in armchair speculation about “well, we could have done X.” The US was facing a vicious enemy and people were dying by the thousands daily. That enemy used literally every weapon it possessed (i.e., Kamikaze suicide planes, etc.) with no regard to their own side’s lives, let alone enemy lives (ie the US). That enemy had 400,000 allied POWs in their grip and those POWs too were being killed. When offered a chance to end the war, quickly and with essentially no further loss of life, not only will I not condemn Truman for his decision; I applaud him instead.
 
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VonDerTann said:
Third, it is really, really easy in the comfort of our warm homes to engage in armchair speculation about “well, we could have done X.”
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Do you say the same for Catholic moral theologians who have condemned the bombing of Hiroshima?
 
I most certainly do. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both legitimate military targets. But I need a break as I have to make dinner.
 
Then you are disrespectful to learned theologians and priests. Sorry.

In addition don’t cite things like Nanking. We didn’t get involved in the war for that reason. Even my pro bombing of Hiroshima friend who studies asian history says Nanking was par for the course when it came to warfare between China and Japan.
 
Points for citing Giangreco, foremost expert in this particular area. 2nd ed. of his book recommended.
 
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