Support for nuclear weapons

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The real question is: Who decided to make them and deploy them? Certainly not the average citizen in the UK. The UK is a US ally and we would come to your aid if the threat of nuclear attack occurred, but neither you or I will have a say. Only the most senior military officials and select others would make the decision to use them.

By the way, I recently read about the UK testing its first atomic bomb in Australia, which was the equivalent of our US test sites. The first bomb was just a tad more powerful than expected.
 
Targetting an individual terrorist is one thing, you are specifically targetting a perpetrator whose intent is to harm, but knowingly targetting hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians is something else.

I don’t believe that the Church teaches that innocent civilians can be knowingly and deliberately targetted just because the country is at war. I believe that the Church has taught specifically that this is wrong.
 
A LOT of ink has been spilled over the atomic bombings in Japan.

I’m a US Military Veteran myself, my dad is a combat Veteran, my grandfather was an Army Veteran of WWII who fought in the Pacific, and my wifes grandfather was a Navy WWII Veteran who fought in the Pacific.

Had the US not dropped Fat Man and Little Boy, there’s a good chance neither my wife or I would exist, as most likely our grandfathers would have both been killed in the Japanese invasion.

I have a clear bias towards leaning in the direction of seeing the bombings of Japan as justified.

In this specific instance, I think a Catholic can in good conscience lean either way.
 
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And that makes everything OK then? Loads of innocent people have been killed by other weapons, so why not killed a load more innocent people with a couple of really big weapons?
 
Where is this idea coming from? The goal would be to not target civilians. The bombs, not to sound flip, would not be wasted on civilian targets. There is a time factor involved. In order for us to avoid getting hit with all of the enemy’s missiles, we will try to take out all of their launch sites, which are heavily guarded and usually far from civilian population centers. Thanks to satellite mapping and GPS, we would have some confidence that our bomb would land within several feet of our target. It would not need to be more powerful than necessary.

If not, we get hit with all or most of the enemy’s missiles. Millions dead. In fact, the living would envy the dead. And lingering radiation and clouds of deadly fallout means parts or most of the US goes dark, and people will continue to die from breathing radioactive fallout and radiation burns. Fires are everywhere. Medical help will be minimal or nonexistent. And the only survivors would be highly trained individuals in deep underground installations that would have enough food and water to last a year or more. They would probably have orders to not exit for a year and have the necessary protective clothing to survive in what remains of the US. The same would be true in the Russian Federation.
 
It is really easy to say whether dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary or not … because we now have all kinds of nuclear tests and films of nuclear explosions.

But back in 1945, we had NO IDEA what would happen when we dropped one of these things.

No one knew.

So, really, criticism is unfair and unwarranted.

Decision makers back then had no idea.

They DID know that landings on islands caused ENORMOUS numbers of deaths.
 
The Trinity Test that was conducted in the US before we dropped the bombs on Japan and was designed to show that (a) the bomb design worked and (b) to monitor effects and damage. An earlier test using conventional high-explosives mixed with radioactive isotopes was also conducted. The splitting of the atom on that scale caused some scientists to be concerned that the atomic blast might ignite the atmosphere.

So, they knew. Military planners in charge of the proposed invasion of Japan were given “close enough” information about what one bomb could do. By comparison, the British developed very large conventional bombs during World War II. The sizes ranged from 4,000, 8,000 to 12,000 pounds or six tons. Referred to as “Cookies,” they are little known today. The yield from the Trinity Test was around 20,000 tons of TNT.

The landings/invasion was not called for. What was the rush? The Japanese were already in bad shape and the Russians sent in over a million troops on the day the first bomb was dropped to attack Japan from the West. Why didn’t we let them finish the job? What would we gain from invading Japan? Rice paddies?
 
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MonteRCMS said:
It is really easy to say whether dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary or not … because we now have all kinds of nuclear tests and films of nuclear explosions.

But back in 1945, we had NO IDEA what would happen when we dropped one of these things.

No one knew.

So, really, criticism is unfair and unwarranted.

Decision makers back then had no idea.

They DID know that landings on islands caused ENORMOUS numbers of deaths.
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Correct… which is why I said “in retrospect.” 🙂
 
They (North Korea) shouldn’t be allowed sharp sticks…
 
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Nukes are a very interesting ‘weapon’. They are MOST effective in their NOT being used. I would propose that the world would be very different if say, the old USSR hade been the first to develop them…

The US has made them the ultimate DETERRANT, except for mad men, not a real weapon of choice.
 
North Korea has an interesting history concerning the birth of Kim Jong Il. It has been alleged that he was born in Siberia, quite a dangerous starting point upon entering battle. The nuclear exploits they seek to produce regularly are a technique most only consider terror. There was a recent report about their ICBMs being more advanced but most media outlets released old footage. I have seen a terrorist picture used for about 3 or more different persons in the news media also.
 
This is a difficult question. The Church has repeatedly re-affirmed the duty to work for the abolition of nuclear weapons, although unilateral disarmament would be obviously imprudent. As for whether a militarily weak country (e.g. Iran) could legitimately develop a small nuclear arsenal to deter aggression by more powerful countries, it’s a tougher case to make but I think it could be argued that such would sometimes be justifiable.

Of course, intending to do something intrinsically evil is itself intrinsically evil, so no government could legitimately make plans to use nuclear (or other) weapons against civilian targets. A government in possession of them, to act rightly, would need to plan on using them only against military targets or for EMP attacks, if it were ever necessary to use them.

As for the question of whether a government could licitly create the false public impression that it would use nuclear weapons against civilians, if necessary, I’m not sure. On the one hand, such a false impression would greatly increase the deterrent value of nuclear weapons and thus greatly decrease the chances of them ever actually being used, but on the other hand it would be a cause of very grave scandal (at a minimum to all of the military personal faced with the question of whether or not they would comply with orders to attack civilians if such orders ever came, and probably to many people in society who would be tempted to reject the Church’s teaching on the matter in support of their country’s policy).
 
As an aviator in the Navy, I was designated as a nuclear delivery crewmember. A few things about your post.
  • Nuclear disarmament is a nice concept, but sadly, it can never happen. Now that nukes are out there for irresponsible parties to use offensively, responsible countries will need them for deterrence.
  • The US does not target civilians per se, but there is almost no nuclear attack against a military target that would not kill more civilians than military.
  • EMP attacks could potentially be more destructive than more common nuclear attacks. A moderate sized nuke delivered in the middle of Los Angeles would kill about 360,000 and injure nearly a million, which is terrible. But scientists have testified at least twice before Congress that an EMP attack could wipe out the power grids in the US long term, leaving us in a post apocalyptic scenario. The scientists testified that could lead to the death of up to 90% of Americans over the first year. That’s roughly 290 million people.
  • Accurate, surgical strikes with the lowest possible yield weapons are the best use of nukes and is the US nuclear strategy. We have variable yield weapons that can be tailored to the target. Other countries are not so humane. Most of them go for wanton mass destruction.
 
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The invasion of Japan was scheduled for the fall of 1945 and would be in two phases:


About 750,000 men would invade and casualties would be extremely high. [Phase Two would involve more than 1,000,000 men invading.]

The men were already aboard the troopships and were becoming “deconditioned” from being cooped up.

If the atomic bombs did not accomplish their hoped-for task, then the invasion would have taken place.

My dad survived several landings on Pacific islands and was scheduled to be part of the invasion of Japan. In the end, he was part of the occupation force.
 
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Here is a good analysis on the Church’s position on nuclear weapons from Pope Pius XII through Francis (yest, the article is from the SSPX, who are in an irregular canonical situation and working with the Church to resolve, but it is a good, brief explanation nonetheless).


Basically, Pius XII was first completely for disarmament as nuclear weapons were always disproportional in a just war analysis, and therefore we would have to choose to suffer injustice rather than use them. Through the papacy of St. John Paul II, the Church accepted possessing them for bilateral deterrence as an intermediate step to disarmament–this toleration was mostly due to the need to maintain the political stability between the two superpowers with the world in a state of bi-polarization. With the breakdown of that situation, Benedict XVI and Francis returned to the earlier position of Pius XII.
 
The invasion did not need to happen. What was the rush? No one has addressed that. There was no need. And I’m referring to high-ranking people in the military who condemned the use of the atomic bombs shortly after the surrender,
 
We had the aircraft and the conventional bombs to take out legitimate military targets. The war would have lasted a little longer, but over a million Russian troops were coming in from the West and the Japanese were losing against them. Hokkaido was 10 miles away from their front lines on the day we dropped the first atomic bomb. This just doesn’t wash.
 
Bombers were inaccurate until the 1970’s.

So, they used “area bombing” … sort of aiming for important targets but having to be satisfied with hopefully getting to within five miles of their aiming point.

Our bombing raids resulted in huge losses to our bombing fleet from anti-aircraft fire, Japanese interceptors, and (mostly) malfunctioning B-29’s which caught fire from the exceptionally poorly designed engines [a death wish according to one of my friends who flew them; suicide according to another B-29 pilot friend]. It wasn’t until many years later that Pratt & Whitney engines were substituted and the airplanes renamed the B-50, that the airframe began to perform well.

Our amphibious invasion of Japan was planned in advance and our troops were there ready to wade ashore under Japanese artillery fire.
 
When Japan still hadn’t surrendered after the dropping of two atomic bombs, Truman let the Japs know that Hirohito could remain Emperor of Japan (if the people of Japan so chose.) That is when Hirohito ordered the surrender of Japan. Hirohito threw his generals under the bus to save his own neck. Actually, the Russian declaration of war was a far greater shock than the two A-bombs. Fire bombing of Japans cities by B-29s had caused more destruction than those two bombs. Hirohito mentioned the A-bombs as a way of distracting attention from his own cowardice.
The US motivation in dropping the A-bombs was never about “saving the lives of US soldiers.” It was all about forstalling Russian advances in the far east and intimidating the Russians. The “saving lives” bit was US government propaganda to try to justify those unnecessary A-bomb attacks. Proof of this is the fact that the USA could have easily canceled its planned invasion of Japan and turned the Japs over to the Russians who would have been only too happy to invade and subjugate Japan (and put the war criminal Hirohito on trial too!)

As for our country’s possession of nuclear weapons, here we have more insidious government propaganda purporting that these evil devices are somehow “necessary” for our safety. This is the lie of the millenium. Our nuclear weapons are NOT keeping us safe at all! Rather they place us in mortal danger. A peace based on fear is no peace at all, and the great problem with the “deterrence” protocol is that the side that strikes first in a nuclear war is the side that will win such a war. And a soon as one side becomes convinced that the other is about to launch a first strike, it will be compelled to strike pre-emptively. This scenario is not a fantasy, it has come close to happening more than once!

As for the MAD protocol having prevented a conventional WW III, this is pure speculation. Even if true, so what? Do the postulators of this idea have any idea of what the coming global nuclear war is going to be like? Read Jeremiah 25:32-33 and you will get the picture: the dead will be scattered across the the world from end to end with no one to bury them. They will stay lying on the ground like dung!

Unilateral nuclear disarment is a viable solution, and, in fact, the only one. The idea that the Russians would launch a nuclear attact against a nuclear disarmed USA is just silly. Why would they?–since they would have nothing to fear from us anymore. As for rogue states such as N. Korea, let the Russians deal with them. With the US no longer threatenting Russia, Russia would have a free hand to do so.

Global nuclear war is deliniated in Holy Scripture. It is the natural outcome of man’s rejection of YHWH’s Law: To love our Creator and to love our neighbors. Genesis 8:21— YHWH promised never again to destroy mankind as He had done with the Deluge. Yes my friends, this time we do it to ourselves with the “inventions of our own hands,” (Psalm 9:15-16)
 
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