Were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified?

[Wirraway]

Why are you so belligerent? I have a right to my opinion even if you don’t share it

I’m pointing out that your opinion is unsupported by any critical analysis. why are you taking it personally?

 

[mdgspencer]

I still believe that when a country wages a just war, that any act is justified.

 

[redrosetea]

I’m pointing out that your opinion is unsupported by any critical analysis. why are you taking it personally?

I am taking it just the way you posted it angry and demanding. I am no military tactician but I know something that can kill 250,000 people in 2 bombs is way more force than the enemy had

I don’t believe in nuclear war , even as a defensive measure, and it is not just…nor do I beleive my country right or wrong

 

[Wirraway]

I am taking it just the way you posted it angry and demanding. I am no military tactician but I know something that can kill 250,000 people in 2 bombs is way more force than the enemy had

I don’t believe in nuclear war , even as a defensive measure, and it is not just…nor do I beleive my country right or wrong

I’m glad the war ended by the means it did before another million or more people were killed. your mileage may vary.

and I do have a personal stake in this. my uncle was killed during the defense of Bataan and Dad served for the duration and would have been in the invasion fleet in a big fat troop transport waiting for the suicide attackers.

 

[redrosetea]

Your personal stake is no bigger than mine, all my family served…its a long time to hang on to such bitterness

 

[Wirraway]

Your personal stake is no bigger than mine, all my family served…its a long time to hang on to such bitterness

I’m not bitter at the japanese. I own japanese trucks. I’m bitter at the blame-america crowd that gloms onto events in August '45 without the least understanding of the bigger picture. did you know that on this forum there’s a citation to an purported anti-nuke proclamation by the Pope which was clearly a forgery?

 

[redrosetea]

No but it doesn’t change my mind about nukes at all

 

[mdgspencer]

–oops, I corrected what I actually meant below. It is getting too late for me to write any more messages.

I still do not believe that when a country wages a just war, that any act is justified.

 

[SimonArizona]

I am opposed to war. Nuclear weapons are terrible. But when faced with two evils we should always choose the lesser, and I firmly believe that ending the war via nuclear weapons was the lesser of letting the war drag on for years in which evermore deaths would have occured and families devestated.

 

[quasimodo]

I am opposed to war. Nuclear weapons are terrible. But when faced with two evils we should always choose the lesser, and I firmly believe that ending the war via nuclear weapons was the lesser of letting the war drag on for years in which evermore deaths would have occured and families devestated.

But you may never choose an inherently evil act - even if it is the lesser of two evils. Our acts become our character. If we choose inherently evil acts, we ourselves become evil.

 

[quasimodo]

except you have no viable alternative solutions, no facts, only bare statements devoid of **any **analysis and which are nothing more than mere conclusions. you’ve already admitted elsewhere that you have no idea how the war could have ended otherwise. , it happens that the allies chose, as confirmed by the Japanese authorities, the method that did end the war with the least human cost – the air campaign, as brutal as it was.

without the bombing of Japanese cities and in particular the atomic bombings, the total toll of Japanse and American losses soars into the millions if the DOWNFALL invasions went forward. this sounds like prosecuting a just war to me.

before you drone on and on about proportionality, come up with a viable alternative available to war planners in the summer of '45.

you also might want to acknowledge who was at fault here. hint: they had a god-emperor.

I have offered no alternatives or facts? So what? I am not a military man. It is not my job to offer facts or alternatives. But that does not make me incapable of examining a situation as presented by history and evaluating the choice actually made in order to have a better choice the next time.

You have artificially limited the choices available to nuking civilians or invasion. There were other alternatives - you just don’t like them - and neither did the politicians once unconditional surrender was written in stone and they had the Bomb. You’d rather choose an inherently evil act (nuking a predominately civilian target) because the ends justify the means to the politicians and to you apparently.

Our choices determine our character. In choosing evil, we become evil.

Now, I suppose you want a list of alternatives, don’t you? Not my job. My job - and yours - is to consider our actions individually and collectively and make moral judgments so that we can train our consciousnesses and form virtue so as to make good moral decisions in the future. 20 -20 hind sight? Of course it is. That’s how we train ourselves morally! At least, it’s one of the ways.

In the event that temptation overwhelms our character as apparently happened in 1945, we need rules and lines on the playing field to guide our actions. The rules that apply here are 1) You may not do evil that good may result. 2) the ends do not justify the means 3) nuking predominately civilian targets is inherently evil.

Demanding that I provide facts and alternative solutions is just avoiding your obligation to approach this with Christian ethics. The Consequentialism that you are employing here is a non-Christian, even anti-Christian system of ethics. Why are you so wedded to it?

 

[Lorik]

The bombs were not justified and evil. Japan was already in peace negotiations with the U.S. Also we gave no warning to Japan that we had such bombs. We just did it to show we could.

 

[LRThunder]

The thing we need to remember is that in 1945, atomic weapons were an unknown technology. We didn’t know if the bombs would work, or would fizzle. We’re trying to judge those actions from a 2008 perspective and we really can’t.

However, knowing what we know about nukes now, there is no way they can be justifiably used with the possible exception of a counterattack if we were attacked by nukes (nuclear missiles, and not mere suitcase bombs). We certainly cannot use them unprovoked.

 

[LRThunder]

The bombs were not justified and evil. Japan was already in peace negotiations with the U.S. Also we gave no warning to Japan that we had such bombs. We just did it to show we could.

Sorry, but I find that argument silly. Why should we have been required to give Japan warning when they didn’t warn us about their attack on Pearl Harbor? War shouldn’t require enemies to give their enemies advance notice of attacks. That’s counter productive to winning a war.

That being said, we could not be justified in using nukes now a days with the possible exception (key word: possible) of a counterattack. Then, and only then, it would have to be the result of a nuclear first strike from an enemy nation (like Iran, China, Russia, etc.)

 

[Contarini]

most of the criticism of the bombings is done by merely citing a rule like the Just War Theory without applying it to the historical facts

Yes, because attacks on civilians are always wrong. The circumstances do not matter. The provocation does not matter. The consequences do not matter. Attacking civilians is murder, and murder is intrinsically evil. End of discussion.

The historical discussion on this thread is fascinating, and I personally have learned a lot. But it is only relevant to the moral issue if dropping large bombs on cities is not intrinsically evil.

The pro-bomb arguments on this forum are a lot like pro-choice arguments. You make all sorts of appeals to particular circumstances, to horrifying consequences, to emotions of various sorts, all to distract from the basic moral question: is the act intrinsically evil?

Edwin

 

[YipYupYep]

Yes, because attacks on civilians are always wrong. The circumstances do not matter. The provocation does not matter. The consequences do not matter. Attacking civilians is murder, and murder is intrinsically evil. End of discussion.

I wonder how many people who post on this very site would never have been born because there fathers , grand fathers or great grand fathers, would have never made it home because of a forced entry.

“If the invasion had gone through, the death toll would have been in the Millions, for both American and Japanese. The US military anticipated so many causalities, the company that produces the “Purple Heart” medal, awarded for wounded or killed in action produced over a million medals. There was such an overstock of the medal that they were still being awarded up to the first Gulf War”

How could the President and the Generals prosecuting the war have explained to at least a half million more gold star families that; Oh, well, sure we had the bomb, but we didn’t use it because we have an argument concerning the morals of ending the war by using all the weapons in the arsenal. “Sorry about that, but we just felt that our obligation to the enemy and there families was more important than your son, your husband, your brother, but take comfort that you loved one died to save the enemy. You can be proud!”

 

[Wirraway]

Yes, because attacks on civilians are always wrong. The circumstances do not matter. The provocation does not matter. The consequences do not matter. Attacking civilians is murder, and murder is intrinsically evil. End of discussion. …

we’ll see if the discussion is over. let’s look at some facts.

the enemy does not always wear uniforms.

I have a war-time american service rifle, it was made by civilians working at a typewriter company (Smith Corona). civillian employees of a sewing machine company (Singer) made machine guns, a [horse and] buggy manufacturer won a contract to produce fighter aircraft (Brewster). detroit auto workers turned out armored fighting vehicles. if you were in a vital war industry, you were so much a part of the critical war effort that you were draft deferred. this is the face of modern warfare: hundreds of “non-combatant” civilians support every man with a rifle. this was one of the most important reasons why the US won WW2.

on the other hand, the reason why the Imperial Japanese Army was able to inflict 300,000 (roughly) casualties per month on the Chinese for eight years was because the japanese economy was also organized for total war, so that every soldier in China was supported by hundreds of “noncombatant” civilians at home. the aircraft factories of kawasaki, nakajima or mitsubishi weren’t staffed by men in uniform, but “noncombatant” civilians. so all those “innocent” civilians working in ship yards, as merchant marines, automotive workers building tanks, women sewing uniforms, making canteens, tires, wheels, ball bearings, canvas rifle covers, transportation sector workers, government clerks, farmers with suplus to sell to the government, were all vital to the war effort** and in the direct chain of causation that resulted in the slaughter in China.**

so think again before you paint wartime Japanese civilians as poor victims cowering in the rubble as B-29s soared overhead.

I see you’re unhappy with the air war as a whole, and believe that something, somehow, would have been morally acceptable. such as the DOWNFALL invasions? we do know that the IJA was prepared for a fight to extinction, using the same “noncombatant” civilians in a more direct role as fodder. we do know that the invasion of Okinawa, which was a japanese prefecture, resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 IJ soldiers and sailors and about 150,000 civilians (and 50,000 US casualties). extrapolate that into an invasion of the home islands and you are looking at casualties running into the millions – more so than the DOWNFALL estimates because the air war wouldn’t have degraded defenses or morale.

you cannot cannot cannot stand aloof and make pronoucements about like just war without understanding any of the factual background. in 940, combatants wore armor and carried swords, noncombatants were peasants with pitchforks. in 1940, the man with the bayonet was a combantant, but so was the woman at home loading cartridges for him.

I don’t always end arguments on catch phrases like that, so let me repeat the salient point: without those “noncombatant victims” of the air attacks, the IJA wouldn’t have been able to kill 300,000 Chinese per month for eight years.

 

[Lorik]

I wonder how many people who post on this very site would never have been born because there fathers , grand fathers or great grand fathers, would have never made it home because of a forced entry.

“If the invasion had gone through, the death toll would have been in the Millions, for both American and Japanese. The US military anticipated so many causalities, the company that produces the “Purple Heart” medal, awarded for wounded or killed in action produced over a million medals. There was such an overstock of the medal that they were still being awarded up to the first Gulf War”

How could the President and the Generals prosecuting the war have explained to at least a half million more gold star families that; Oh, well, sure we had the bomb, but we didn’t use it because we have an argument concerning the morals of ending the war by using all the weapons in the arsenal. “Sorry about that, but we just felt that our obligation to the enemy and there families was more important than your son, your husband, your brother, but take comfort that you loved one died to save the enemy. You can be proud!”

There would have been no invasion. Japan was seeking peace at this point. The US refused b/c we wanted no conditions but then bombed them and then accepted a treaty with conditions. It made no sense.

Don’t get me wrong I love the US but the nuclear attacks were evil. My grandfather fought on the Pacific front and about disowned my mother for buying a Toyota years ago. I know that the Japanese did evil things to the US. The War was ugly and terrible and both sides made huge mistakes.

 

[SimonArizona]

But you may never choose an inherently evil act - even if it is the lesser of two evils. Our acts become our character. If we choose inherently evil acts, we ourselves become evil.

To do nothing to spare the majority of lives is the greater evil in this situation

 

[Wirraway]

There would have been no invasion. Japan was seeking peace at this point. The US refused b/c we wanted no conditions but then bombed them and then accepted a treaty with conditions. It made no sense…

that’s completely wrong. this has been discussed at length in another thread in this forum. the army was in firm control of the government to the extent that there was even coup attempt at the eleventh hour.

now, to address a specific problem with your post.

the Japanese would have surrendered by December 1945 at the latest because of the destructive air campaign that had been ongoing since 1944 even without the atomic bombs. this is what the Japanese stated in the post war study called the Stragetic Bombing Survey linked several times in this thread. so in that sense you are right, there would have been, probably no invasion. HOWEVER the poster I was responding to was arguing that the air campaign itself, meaning the mix of high explosive and fire bombs, as it included the civilian population as targets, was immoral. His argument was that there should have been no air war at all.

MY POINT is that, assuming, arguendo, that there was no air campaign because of ethical issues, that an invasion would have been necessary, the consequences of which would be casualties in the millions.

see, you can’t have it both ways.