What is the official Church position regarding the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

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I think that the way in which it was carried out makes them to be unjustifiable. However, the use of atomic weapons could have been morally justifiable if the U.S. warned the civilians to get out or use it on a purely military target. While they both seem infesable, especially the first one, that would be the only way in which it could be justifiable from a Catholic moral view.
 
Generic warnings were issued. Leaflets were dropped, over a number of cities (around 30), including the target cities, the week prior to the first bomb, counseling the inhabitants to evacuate immediately. Radio messages were broadcast from Saipan with the same warning. After the Hiroshima bomb, more leaflets were dropped, warning that more such weapons would follow.
 
Well then I don’t see how it is morally unjustified. It’s not ideal but the civilian populace was given enough warning to evacuate. I think that the U.S. did everything they could in that case.
 
jackfitz316 said:
Well then I don’t see how it is morally unjustified. It’s not ideal but the civilian populace was given enough warning to evacuate. I think that the U.S. did everything they could in that case.
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That sounds like Hitler saying to all the Jews that they should leave Germany, or else.
 
I disagree. The goal is to win the war. Not kill people. It then becomes just like using conventional weapons.
 
MonteRCMS said:
The topic has been discussed in depth for years, but so far no one has actually come up with a better suggestion.
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Better by what measure? The consequences? That is not a sure guide to the morality of what we do.
 
It is difficult to see an atomic bomb as directed at just a military target, due to the innate scale of destruction they bring. [That observation may be true of other weapons too.]
 
They were directed at military targets, which were embedded in non-military areas. The true target of the bombs was neither the military components, nor the civilian; not the buildings, people, equipment, weapons, etc. They were targeted at the will of the controlling Japanese power structure, particularly to a portion of the Saiko Senso Shido Kaigi, to bring about a quick end to the war, on the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. The details are given on any of the related threads on this subject that I’ve posted on in the past few months, including this one, above.

It should be remembered that I do not deal in the morality of the subject. I have my concept of that, the RCC has another, and for RCs, that one should always prevail. I deal in the history.
 
What we should have learned from Hiroshima is that this weapon cannot be aimed (not with WWII technology anyway): The intended target was missed by a mile, leaving the primary target standing while the residential population was devastated. Why? Because the parachute needed to slow the bomb’s descent to give the plane enough time to escape is just as good at catching the wind as it is at slowing the bomb’s fall. A gust of wind blew the bomb a mile off course, right to the city center, where it maximized the civilian casualties while failing at its military objective.
 
Depends on the target. Luring ISIS out into the desert and nuking them from the air would accomplish that, and detonating the bomb high enough in the air would render the fallout negligible. There are also some military targets so heavily fortified that nothing short of a nuke is able to destroy them.
 
But neither can the consequences of the proposed alternatives be ignored. Invading or blockading Japan would have killed tenfold more Japanese civilians with ease, probably many times more than that. It’s easy to advocate alternatives without counting the cost; far harder to approve of starving millions of people to death, even indirectly. This is to say nothing of the fact that most of what we know about the horrors of nuclear weapons comes from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This new weapon was something so alien that no one involved in its use, from President Truman down to the bomber crew, could comprehend what it was they were unleashing. The only ones who understood were the people at the Trinity test. Until the world had seen what the A-bomb was capable of, people had no reason to consider it any different from the other ordinance used in the war. 60 million people died in WWII, and 99.7% of them were killed by things other than nuclear weapons. That is the scale of destruction that the decision makers sought to end using something they didn’t understand.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
It’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback a war, especially now that most of the generation that actually lived through it, which included both of my parents and all of my uncles and aunts who survived it (one of my aunts was in it as a military nurse), is dying off. I refuse to engage.
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This is a perfectly reasonable position, and I agree with you, by and large.

It is possible, however, to look back at history and use what we see to determine if the use of nuclear weapons in the future would be morally permissible.
 
At what price, though? Japan’s defeat had to be sufficiently thorough that they would not start another war 20 years later, like Germany did after World War I. Failing to secure regime change and disarmament would set the world on a collision course for World War III in the 1960’s, this time with a nuclear-armed Japan. At least the Soviet Union could be deterred by fear of a full-scale war with the United States, but Imperial Japan was so fanatical that they likely would have considered another war, even a nuclear war, as the only path to redemption from the shame of being defeated. “Death before dishonor” was their motto, and they would have considered themselves a shame to their fathers had they accepted such a peace. This was the nation that invented the kamikaze and the banzai charge- suicide tactics intended to maximize the number of enemy soldiers you take with you when you die, rather than surrender or retreat and live to fight another day when the fight became hopeless. Unless broken of this philosophy, another major war with Japan was extremely likely.
 
Remember too that YHWH ordered the extermination of the Canaanites because they were just that evil. He warned that failure to destroy them would lead to the ruin of Israel, as they would be ensnared by the abominations the Canaanites practiced, and that is indeed what happened when they failed to obey the harem order. He could have exterminated them Himself, as He did to Sodom and Gomorrah, but He instead ordered Israel to destroy them in order to test Israel’s obedience and warn Israel that the same fate awaited them if they followed the example of the Canaanites.
 
Inaccurate, this account; the bombs, not so much. The aiming point for the Hiroshima bomb was the the Aioi Bridge, at the juncture of the Ota and the Motoyasu Rivers. The detonation was roughly 1890 feet above, and 800+ feet south-east of the bridge. As TIbbetts said, best aiming point he’d ever seen.

Your description sounds like you are thinking of Nagasaki. In which case it is wrong, too. The Nagasaki bomb did indeed fall 1.75 mile+ or so off from the original planned aiming point. That was a result of the cloud cover, complicated by the fuel problem Bocks Car had experienced, from the start of the mission, through the aborted bomb runs over the original target, Kokura, and the final attempt to locate the alternate aiming point, over an obscured Nagasaki. The result put the bomb hypocenter closer to the industrial areas along the river, and allowed the Urakami valley to protect the more populated areas to the south east from the explosion. Lives were, in fact, saved by the miss.

Neither bomb used a parachute deployment. That would completely degrade the idea of accurate location of the detonation, which was essential to the maximum effect. The drop time from altitude was (memory says) in the 45+ second range), and the get the heck out of Dodge technique Tibbets had designed, a 150+ degree descending turn, fire-walled,put the maximum slant range between the planes and the explosion. At Hiroshima, that got ENOLA GAY roughly 11 miles out, before the shock wave over took them. Adequate.
 
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GKMotley said:
. They were targeted at the will of the controlling Japanese power structure, particularly to a portion of the Saiko Senso Shido Kaigi, to bring about a quick end to the war, on the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.
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I think that is why the Catholic Church finds the use of nuclear weapons immoral. Bombing directed at the will of those capable of stopping the war, but through the center of two populous cities.
 
And I think you are right. But that judgement would be there same even if the cities were conventionally targeted, i.e. the mixed population and the military value were the targets. Eventually, that would be intended to damage the war capability of the opponent, Which was not the target of the two bombs.
 
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