Why Truman Dropped the Bomb

[pnewton]

Philip P:

No, my contention is that targeting a city with a 1945 era atomic bomb necessarily means also intending the death of every last man, woman and child. I see the death of all the civilians as a proximate (e.g. essential) intent rather than a circumstantial one.

The “No” part is all that is necessary to know that intention can not be determined. It surely should not be assumed as in “necessarily means also intending the death of every last man, woman and child.”

If you changed it to, "necessarily means resulting in the death of every last man, woman and chil, " you would be correct. I do not see how intent can be firmly proven either way. Without deliberate intent, the the possibility of allowing a consequestial evil for the greater good is permissible.

 

[amateurthomist]

pnewton:

The “No” part is all that is necessary to know that intention can not be determined. It surely should not be assumed as in “necessarily means also intending the death of every last man, woman and child.”

If you changed it to, "necessarily means resulting in the death of every last man, woman and chil, " you would be correct. I do not see how intent can be firmly proven either way. Without deliberate intent, the the possibility of allowing a consequestial evil for the greater good is permissible.

What do you mean by “deliberate intent?” It seems to me that at the most, intent, whether deliberate or proximate, can excuse someone from culpability. But intent can never make an intrinsically evil action good. We must specify the nature of the act itself, “indiscriminate bombing of a city.” By the way, I would hold that the bombing of Dresden by the Allies and the fire bombings of London by the Germans were also intrinsically immoral precisely because they were acts of indiscriminate bombing. If we had gone into Iraq and had just decided that the quickest way to end any possible insurgency would be to level Baghdad that would be immoral, no matter our intent.

 

[Sirach14]

Here is an other Editorial on the bombing of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

washtimes.com/op-ed/20050805-091355-7091r.htm

 

[Ani_Ibi]

amateurthomist:

What do you mean by “deliberate intent?” It seems to me that…

‘Proximate intention’ and ‘circumstantial or indirect intention’ is terminology used in the principle of double effect. This principle is used to assess the moral goodness or the moral evil of an object (or action in question) and it is used by the Church. These terms have been defined in details earlier on in this thread.

 

[pnewton]

amateurthomist:

What do you mean by “deliberate intent?” It seems to me that at the most, intent, whether deliberate or proximate, can excuse someone from culpability. But intent can never make an intrinsically evil action good. We must specify the nature of the act itself, “indiscriminate bombing of a city.”

calling the action “intrinsically evil” is begging the question. That is the point under discussion. If killing in during war was intrinsically evil, then you would be correct.

I noticed that you, too, used the word “indiscriminate”. I believe that too is under discussion. If you believe it to be indiscriminate, than do you have any evidence that it was? PhilipP did not. I personally believe targeting decisions were involved and the bomb was not dropped indiscriminately, but I could be wrong, as I never discussed the matter with Truman.

 

[Wolseley]

Philip P:

I, too, have secondary moral questions I would like to ask (such as, would it be moral to have voted for Truman if one knew he intended to destroy these cities), but, like your secondary questions, they must wait until the primary moral question has been answered.

Well, for starters, in 1945 you wouldn’t have voted for Truman. Truman was Vice President, and assumed the Presidency after Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945.

Secondly, even if you had voted for Truman, the bombs wouldn’t have entered into it. Nobody knew about them. There was a sum total of maybe 300 people in the world who knew about the atomic bombs. How are you going to vote for a candidate based on his position if you don’t even know what the reason is for the position to exist?

That’s the problem with these arguments. We always backwards-project our modern knowledge about nuclear weapons to 1945, while ignoring the act that in 1945, nobody knew anything about them. Not even the guys who built the things knew what they would do.

It does little good to say, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were immoral, because the Catechism of the Catholic Church says…”

In 1945, the Catechism of the Catholic Church didn’t exist. Before July 16 of that year, the weapons didn’t exist.

Condemning Truman on the basis of what the Church said in 1992 is a little like condemning Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves, based on Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education in 1951.

 

[pnewton]

Wolseley:

Condemning Truman on the basis of what the Church said in 1992 is a little like condemning Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves, based on Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education in 1951.

Great example.

 

[vern_humphrey]

amateurthomist:

See my post on the other thread but to summarize, the morally permissible alternatives would be:

A) conditional surrender
B) negotiate truce
C) invade Japan

These are not acts, these are outcomes.

State the acts you would perform to achieve these outcomes.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

pnewton:

I noticed that you, too, used the word “indiscriminate”. I believe that too is under discussion. If you believe it to be indiscriminate, than do you have any evidence that it was? PhilipP did not. I personally believe targeting decisions were involved and the bomb was not dropped indiscriminately, but I could be wrong, as I never discussed the matter with Truman.

I believe the Japanese troop concentration was vapourized. I am afraid I can’t put my hands on the link though. The reason I responded to this post is because of the question of guidance systems.

I truly do not know the state of guidance systems in 1945. I am assuming that the guidance systems were 100% human. If anybody has any information on this, it would be useful.

We know that targetting military sites in Europe was extremely hit and miss. Eventually the Allies wised up to the fact that, in being cautious to miss civilian populations, they were missing their military targets and hitting civilians anyway. That was part of the reasoning behind the subsequent massive bombing of the cities.

Several of us have brought up the question of Monday morning quarterbacking. We do need to consider what information and resources Truman had in his time. We have far more information and resources now than he did then. In recent years we have seen television footage taken from bombs themselves en route to their targets and we have seen their pin-point accuracy.

Obviously, if we were trying to decide on how to end the Pacific War then with the information and resources we have now, it might have been a different story altogether. Some of the moral conundrums faced then, have been resolved since then and no longer confront us today.

So, yeah, we have the capability of taking out military targets from the air without incurring major collateral damage. In the fog of war, however, if something can go wrong it will. With all the accuracy available to US airplanes, four Canadians still met their Maker in Afghanistan due to human error.

The really bothersome thing here is not the increased accuracy at our disposal. Accurate guidance systems on nukes or any other kind of bomb maximizes the effectiveness of proximate-intention strategy and minimizes the risks of circumstantial-intention collateral damage. What we have today in the WOT, has nothing to do with proximate intention. It has to do with the means justifying the ends or just simply gratuitous violence.

Nukes are portable now. They can be carried in rucksacks. Terrorists don’t need 100 megaton bombs to do maximal damage. They need low yield bombs – but several of them detonated in a coordinated manner with a certain degree of geographic separation. This creates a firestorm. This kind of firestorm bombing allows maximum damage for minimum expenditure in terms of materiel and personnel. The London bombing with homemade non-nuclear bombs was a dress rehearsal.

 

[Wolseley]

Ani Ibi:

I believe the Japanese troop concentration was vapourized. I am afraid I can’t put my hands on the link though. The reason I responded to this post is because of the question of guidance systems.

Hiroshima’s primary value as a military target consisted of the fact that it was the Headquarters of the Japanese 2nd Army; the entire army was engaged in calisthenics on a parade field in the city center on August 6th when the bomb exploded almost directly overhead. The entire army was vaporized, the equivalent of the entire United States Marine Corps vanishing in a split second. (William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1974, pp. 383-384.)

I truly do not know the state of guidance systems in 1945. I am assuming that the guidance systems were 100% human. If anybody has any information on this, it would be useful.

The United States had no “guidance systems” per se in 1945, at least not in the respect of guided missiles. World War II was fought with gravity bombs, meaning you fly over the target, you open the bomb-bay doors, you turn the bombs loose, and they tumble out of the airplane and gravity does the rest: they fall down on their target. Even the two a-bombs were delivered in this fashion. About the only ones using any kind of guidance system for missles were the Germans, with their V-2’s. It was the technology that we captured from them that led to our present military and space capabilites.

In 1945, we had the Norden bombsight; the bombardier lay on his stomach or crouched over the bombsight, depending on the type of airplane, and peered down through it at the ground, sort of like looking through a microscope eyepiece, and tried to determine where his aiming point was, based on what he knew from maps and aerial reconaissance photographs. When he felt he was over the target, he released the bombs.

That’s a long ways from internal gyro systems and computerized satellite uplinks that guide a missile fired from an airplane directly to a p(name removed by moderator)ointed spot.

Human error? You bet your sweet bippy. Many people don’t know that Nagasaki was never supposed to bombed on August 9th; the actual target was Kokura. However, Kokura was clouded over, so the pilot chose one of his alternative targets. Unfortunately, Nagasaki was also clouded over, so now they faced a choice: either abort the mission and go home, or do a radar drop.

They were low enough on fuel that they couldn’t fly around much longer, and since nobody had ever landed an airplane with a live atomic bomb aboard before, they didn’t exactly relish the idea of being the first—crack-ups on landing were all too common in World War II.

Therefore, the bombing run was made by radar, and they missed their AP by two miles. That the resulting devastation was as great as it was was due to the fact that the Nagasaki bomb was made of plutonium, which had a greater destructive force than the Hiroshima bomb made of uranium.

 

[Petertherock]

amateurthomist:

What is the objective act? Bombing a civilian population. It doesn’t matter what the intentions are. The act is itself gravely immoral, case closed.

Are you saying God was gravely immoral when he destroyed Soddom and Gamorra? Or how about when God flooded the world?

 

[Philip_P]

Ani Ibi:

No Phillip. This is way off. Way way off. Look at my discussion I think it is on the second thread on constant and variables.

I am?

On proximate intention, you said : “Proximate intention: to neutralize the threat of Japanese military command, materiels, and troops to the people and legitimate government of the United States.” (Post 205),

“Neutralizing the command, materiels, and troop concentration was not the circumstantial intention. It was the proximate intention” (Post 235)

In post 239, I said “**Ani **proximate intention: To neutralize the threat of Japanese military command, materiels, and troops to the people and legitimate government of the United States.”

And on circumstantial intention, you said: “The indirect intention may be framed, if you will, as the harm to the civilian population in which the Japanese command, materiels, and concentration of troops were embedded.” (Post 229)

“the circumstantial intention was to harm the civilian population” (Post 235)

In post 239, I said: “**Ani **C_Intention: To harm the civilian population.”

You seem mentioned that it seems as if we’re bogged down. Assuming you haven’t retracted earlier statements, and post 239 is therefore accurate, I want to get past this disagreement on proximate vs. circumstance. Let’s try reformulating and see if that grants greater clarity. Because of post length restrictions, it’s going on the next post…

 

[Philip_P]

Let’s look at proximate and circumstnatial intention, if we can get past this we should break the impasse.

We know that the proximate intention is that which is essential. That is, it never changes. It remains constant, a part of the act no matter what variables are introduced. The circumstantial intention, by contrast, is the part that does change. Simple enough, no?

So, for instance, when using a knife, the proximate, essential intent is to cut whatever comes object softer than the blade that the blade comes in contact with. If a knife blade is applied to an object softer than itself, it will always cut it. That is it’s nature (I say softer than the blade because a knife may cut bread but not, for example, diamonds). Now unless you are cutting something intrinsically evil to cut, this proximate (essential) intention probably is not enough to make the act intrinsically evil (except for Vern Humphrey, who apparently does hold cutting to be intrinsically evil and must, I suppose, have a deadly fear of doctors as a result). A circumstance might be surgery, in which case the act would not be intrinsically evil. Another circumstance might be to cut a random stranger out of a delight in harming them, in which case it would be intrinsically evil. Another circumstance might be that you are being attacked and have only a knife to defend yourself. Whatever the circumstances, though, the proximate intention is always going to be to cut what the knife comes in contact with (provided it is capable of cutting that).

Now when we talk about an atomic bomb, part of it’s nature, what it always does, is to destroy everything within it’s immediate target area. That is it’s proximate, essential intention. For instance, when the first bomb was dropped in Alamogordo, it destroyed any living thing which may have been in the target area – snakes, lizards, everything. That’s what an atomic bomb does. If we had dropped that bomb on, say, a Japanese carrier group, it would have destroyed the carrier group along with anything else in the target area (dolphins, fish, seaweed, etc). When we dropped it on Hiroshima, it was an essential intention that it would destroy the entire city. That is the nature of that bomb. Hence it is accurate to say that the destruction of the city, including cars, buildings, roaches, rats, and all people, was the proximate intention. Now, what if the city was empty, so that there were no civilians? Then they would not have been killed. But that was not the case. There were civilians, and we knew they were there. There was, in fact, an entire city of civilians in the target area. Hence killing them was necessarily a proximate intention.

This could not be the circumstantial, as you would have it, because it is essential to the act, not contingent on circumstances. If the circumstances were, as you have it, that a military base was embedded in the civilian population, then we would have been as justified in dropping the bomb anywhere there was a military base in a city. London, for instance, or Sydney, or WashingtonD.C. That sounds absurd, but the only difference is that we were not at war with Australia or Britain or ourselves. We were at war with Japan. That is the circumstance, not the fact that a military base was embedded.

 

[Philip_P]

Wolseley:

Therefore, the bombing run was made by radar, and they missed their AP by two miles. That the resulting devastation was as great as it was was due to the fact that the Nagasaki bomb was made of plutonium, which had a greater destructive force than the Hiroshima bomb made of uranium.

With a weapon that destructive, it makes no sense to pretend that anything less than the complete destruction of everything within the blast area is the target. This is why I don’t buy the argument that the military base was the target but not the civilians. Everything within range is the “target” with something that powerful. A bit like taking a bazooka to a dartboard and saying that your target was the bull’s eye and not the entire back wall of the bar.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Philip P:

You seem mentioned that it seems as if we’re bogged down…I want to get past this disagreement on proximate vs. circumstance.

I’ll take a look at it again when I can. I have a family thing and I also have the petition to take care of. Double effect can’t really be discussed ‘on the fly’ so give me some more time. Ani.

 

[JimG]

Philip P:

With a weapon that destructive, it makes no sense to pretend that anything less than the complete destruction of everything within the blast area is the target. This is why I don’t buy the argument that the military base was the target but not the civilians. Everything within range is the “target” with something that powerful. A bit like taking a bazooka to a dartboard and saying that your target was the bull’s eye and not the entire back wall of the bar.

This is true with respect to Hiroshima. However, what if a U.S. enemy wanted to target the NORAD operations center at Cheyenne Mountain? That is a strictly military target. Yet, it is so well hardened that I doubt that even a 5 megaton weapon could penetrate it. A direct hit with any large size nuclear weapon would surely destroy the surrounding city, even though the target was a military installation. Aside from the fact that we’re the ‘good guys’ here, could someone claim that that was a legitimate military use of a nuclear weapon?

 

[vern_humphrey]

JimG:

This is true with respect to Hiroshima. However, what if a U.S. enemy wanted to target the NORAD operations center at Cheyenne Mountain? That is a strictly military target. Yet, it is so well hardened that I doubt that even a 5 megaton weapon could penetrate it. A direct hit with any large size nuclear weapon would surely destroy the surrounding city, even though the target was a military installation. Aside from the fact that we’re the ‘good guys’ here, could someone claim that that was a legitimate military use of a nuclear weapon?

Don’t ask your question in a vaccuum. There wouldn’t be a single missile, targeted at a single US facility. There would have been many thousands of missiles, targeted at thousands of cities and facilities.

For technical reasons, a Soviet attack would have come in three waves. Now assuming the first wave is on the way (and the other two waves are already launched), what do we do?

 

[Wolseley]

Philip P:

With a weapon that destructive, it makes no sense to pretend that anything less than the complete destruction of everything within the blast area is the target. This is why I don’t buy the argument that the military base was the target but not the civilians. Everything within range is the “target” with something that powerful. A bit like taking a bazooka to a dartboard and saying that your target was the bull’s eye and not the entire back wall of the bar.

Of course the civilians were targeted.

Nagasaki’s primary value as a military target consisted of the fact that 90% of the city’s labor force worked in a huge complex of manufacturing plants owned by the Mitsubishi company, making torpedoes for the Japanese Navy and small arms for the Japanese Army; all the plants in the city were operating at full production on August 9th when the second bomb exploded. (William Craig, The Fall of Japan. New York: Galahad Books, 1967, pg 88.)

With that type of a situation, why wouldn’t the civilians be targeted?

 

[Melissa]

My grandfather fought in WWII in the Pacific (he was a gunner in a B-29). He has never said anything but that it was a necessary thing to do.

He was there. How many of those who second-guess the decisions decades later can say the same?

 

[JimG]

vern humphrey:

Don’t ask your question in a vaccuum. There wouldn’t be a single missile, targeted at a single US facility. There would have been many thousands of missiles, targeted at thousands of cities and facilities.

For technical reasons, a Soviet attack would have come in three waves. Now assuming the first wave is on the way (and the other two waves are already launched), what do we do?

Well, at that point, deterrence would have failed.

But I asked the question in a vacuum to illustrate a case–admittedly unlikely–where even a very large yield weapon might be targeted specifically to a military target (and be very accurate) and yet destroy a city.

A three-wave first strike, such as you have outlined, while morally abhorrent in itself, inevitably puts the defender in an untenable moral position of being forced into an immediate massive retaliatory strike against cities.

In some ways it gives the attacker the moral ‘high ground:’ Those three waves could all go against military targets. The retaliatory strike has fewer military targets left: they are already in the air or ready to launch.

I would have hoped for a purely defensive option, but that is not available.

(Once, watching a Minuteman launch, I discussed with a friend that if an enemy could place one covert operative at each isolated silo, every missile could be brought down with a high powered rifle shot. --although a heat seeking shoulder fired all missile would be even more effective.)