Why Truman Dropped the Bomb

[Philip_P]

Ani Ibi:

Should we ascertain if a soldier is asleep or awake before we kill him? Like: “Hey you soldiers in that trench! Wake up, I’m going to throw a grenade in there!”

I’m glad you brought up the soldier. If he is in the trench, he is in a field of battle, and so acting as an agressor/threat, hence throwing the grenade is a legitimate act of self-defense, just as if Aunty Ani is in the bomb factory, bombing the factory (along with her) is a legitimate act of self defense.

If the same soldier is home on leave, walking along the beach with his wife and son, and you come up behind him and shoot him, you are now guilty of murder.

If the soldier, on the field of battle, throws down his arms and places himself at your mercy, and you shoot him, you are guilty of murder.

With Aunty Ani, the relevant fact was not that she was asleep, but that she was not at the factory. She was not, in fact, an agressor, but only at the most a potential agressor. I find no where in Catholic teaching justification for killing potential agressors, but if you disagree then show me (your example with the snake is not an example of a potential agressor, but rather still an agressor, as the snake was hiding as part of an active intent to harm. A civilian asleep at home is not preparing an ambush; she is asleep at home).

 

[Philip_P]

Ani Ibi:

The principle of Aunty Ani being a legitimate target because no supplies equals no army holds true for any kind of support systems in place to keep Aunty Ani making bombs. As long as Aunty Ani continues to make bombs then her sleeping time, her eating time, all of her time is fair game. Why? Because that time enables Ani to keep on making bombs.

As soon as she leaves the factory for the day she is no longer making bombs, but only *potentially *making bombs. You assume that tomorrow she will return to the bomb factory, but you do not know that. You may take away the bomb factory, and so render her unable to become an agressor, but you may not kill her merely on the suspicion that she *might *become an agressor (to do so is to dehumanize her to the status of an industrial part, a mechanism of the bomb factory).

 

[qmvsimp]

Philip P:

As soon as she leaves the factory for the day she is no longer making bombs, but only *potentially *making bombs. You assume that tomorrow she will return to the bomb factory, but you do not know that. You may take away the bomb factory, and so render her unable to become an agressor, but you may not kill her merely on the suspicion that she *might *become an agressor (to do so is to dehumanize her to the status of an industrial part, a mechanism of the bomb factory).

Boy, we’re getting into some major grey area here.

If the German hierarchy is asleep in a bungalow outside of the war zone, is it OK to bomb them? I think during wartime, all the people involved are legitimate targets. They are by definition agressors. Agressor doesn’t change definition minute by minute when we’re at war. The one exception: surrender.

I don’t think the lady above is an innocent. If we have a method of rendering what she does useless, or preventing her from continuing her participation in a war against us, then we should use it. If we do not, then bombing her to stop her participation in a war against us, is moral.

Once we have operatives on the ground, then we probably have other options aside from killing her.

 

[Wolseley]

Philip P:

CCC quotes referenced in this reply can be found at:
usccb.org/catechism/text/pt3sect2chpt2art5.htm

Which, once again, wasn’t even in existance until 40+ years after those bombs were dropped.

Do the principles against nuclear weapons contained in the CCC apply now? Yes.

Did they apply then? No.

Why?

Two reasons:

1. The Church had no teaching in effect concerning the use of nuclear weapons at the time, because at the time no nuclear weapons existed.
2. Even if there had been some sort of Church policy, nobody—not the Church, not the military, not the scientists, nobody—knew exactly for sure what the bomb was going to do when it was dropped. This had never been done before.

So what we’re doing here is backwards-projecting our current knowledge to 1945 and condemning an action as immoral, based on current conditions.

As such, it is both a moot point and relatively silly exercise, akin to (as I said before) condemning Thomas Jefferson for the slaves he owned, based on Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education.

 

[BibleReader]

Oh, my Heavens. The liberals here are still going after America for turning-off the Japanese Murder Machine with great big bombs, after exceedingly clear warnings, rejected by the Japanese themselves even after the first bomb was dropped.

I saw an interview on public television last night in which the English-speaking mayor of Nagasaki, in 1995 (the fiftieth anniversary) thoughtfully rejected Japanese responsibility for bringing about the bombing of Nagasaki ( !!! ) and blamed it on President Truman ( !!! ).

This is how clear his rejection was: “You COULD say that it was the fault of the Japanese, for starting the Pacific War; but, in the end, it was the American President who made the decision!”

This would be my response:

origami.no/stoptorture/images/japnbody.gif

…a photo of a Japanese soldier, sent home to family, in which he is smiling proudly as he grasps a human head just severed from a civilian’s body. That was the Murder Machine the Japanese declined to turn off even after the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

 

[amateurthomist]

Wolseley:

Which, once again, wasn’t even in existance until 40+ years after those bombs were dropped.

Do the principles against nuclear weapons contained in the CCC apply now? Yes.

Did they apply then? No.

Why?

Two reasons:

1. The Church had no teaching in effect concerning the use of nuclear weapons at the time, because at the time no nuclear weapons existed.
2. Even if there had been some sort of Church policy, nobody—not the Church, not the military, not the scientists, nobody—knew exactly for sure what the bomb was going to do when it was dropped. This had never been done before.

So what we’re doing here is backwards-projecting our current knowledge to 1945 and condemning an action as immoral, based on current conditions.

As such, it is both a moot point and relatively silly exercise, akin to (as I said before) condemning Thomas Jefferson for the slaves he owned, based on Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education.

Any direct bombing of a civilian population, whether with nukes or conventional weapons, is immoral according to natural law. Such teaching is not exclusively Catholic teaching but belongs to right reason following the natural law.

 

[amateurthomist]

BibleReader:

Oh, my Heavens. The liberals here are still going after America for turning-off the Japanese Murder Machine with great big bombs, after exceedingly clear warnings, rejected by the Japanese themselves even after the first bomb was dropped.

I saw an interview on public television last night in which the English-speaking mayor of Nagasaki, in 1995 (the fiftieth anniversary) thoughtfully rejected Japanese responsibility for bringing about the bombing of Nagasaki ( !!! ) and blamed it on President Truman ( !!! ).

This is how clear his rejection was: “You COULD say that it was the fault of the Japanese, for starting the Pacific War; but, in the end, it was the American President who made the decision!”

This would be my response:

origami.no/stoptorture/images/japnbody.gif

…a photo of a Japanese soldier, sent home to family, in which he is smiling proudly as he grasps a human head just severed from a civilian’s body. That was the Murder Machine the Japanese declined to turn off even after the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

This is a red herring. Moral decisions are not based on the extent to which the other side is good or evil. Moral actions are specified by the nature of the act itself. It it always immoral to make direct war on civilians.

 

[Wolseley]

qmvsimp:

Boy, we’re getting into some major grey area here.

Yes, we are.

My copy of “The Code of Conduct in Combat Under the Law of War”, published by the Judge Advocate General of the USAF and issued to me by the Air Training Command, specifies that you may shoot at a combat aircraft, and if the pilot is killed, that’s fine. However, if the pilot bails out, you cannot shoot at him while he’s drifting down in his parachute. Once he’s on the ground, however, sheds his chute, and pulls out his sidearm, it’s fine to fly down and strafe him on the ground and kill him. The idea is, while he’s in the aircraft, he’s a combatant; while he’s in the parachute, he’s helpless, and a non-combatant; but once he’s on the ground with a pistol in his hand, then he is again a combatant.

One of the men in my flight asked the instructor at this point, “Realistically, is there much difference in killing the guy while he’s in the parachute, or waiting two minutes while he drifts to earth and takes a potshot at you before you blast him to oblivion?”; and the instructor smiled and said, “These distinctions are made by policy-makers in committees in Washington, most of whom have never had the privilege of being shot at.”

Another rule is that you may not fire at houses of worship. A mosque, for example. This policy caused us no end of trouble in Fallujah some months ago when the Mahdi army was holed up in mosque and shooting at Marines from inside, but the Marines couldn’t fire back.

The smart policy would have been to call in an air strike and flatten the mosque, which would have disposed of the Mahdi army problem once and for all, but that, of course, wouldn’t have been politcally correct.

In World War II, the standing order was that such targets as houses of worship were not to be touched—unless they were being exploited by the enemy. Probably the most famous example of this was when the US 9th Air Force dumped 800 tons of high explosive on a Benedictine monastery in Italy, which the Germans had been using as an observation post. (The monks were not in the monastery at the time BTW, having been booted out by the Germans.) My own uncle, who was in the 45th Infantry Division, related stories of calling up tanks and having them shoot the bell towers and belfrys off churches, because the Germans were using these high points as machine-gun emplacements.

 

[amateurthomist]

We must be careful. If we are to say that dropping the a-bomb was morally licit because it was the surest way to end the war, then we have fallen into consequentialist moral reasoning. Once we fall into such consequentialist reasoning, then abortion, contraception, and euthanasia all become legitimate. Keep this is mind. Being in a state of war does not suspend the reality of the moral law and its absolute prohibitions. And by the way, I am no liberal. I think Republicans are too liberal. Why is it that anyone who criticizes the U.S. is automatically labelled a liberal? You don’t have to answer that question. I don’t want to get us off subject.

 

[Wolseley]

amateurthomist:

This is a red herring. Moral decisions are not based on the extent to which the other side is good or evil. Moral actions are specified by the nature of the act itself. It it always immoral to make direct war on civilians.

So if you consider it “moral” to only use small arms and low-grade explosives such as hand grenades against uniformed combatants, and the aggressor feels it’s moral to use 500,000-lb daisy-cutters and poison gas against civilian cities, you allow him to do it, while you stick to the small arms?

Guess what: you just lost a war. And now the aggressor, whether he’s a Nazi, a Japanese Imperialist, a Communist, or an Islamofascist, can come into your country and do whatever he cotton-pickin’ well wants to.

 

[vern_humphrey]

amateurthomist:

Any direct bombing of a civilian population, whether with nukes or conventional weapons, is immoral according to natural law. Such teaching is not exclusively Catholic teaching but belongs to right reason following the natural law.

Do you hold, then, that an unjust aggressor can gain immunity for his military installations and munitions factories by placing them in cities?

If the enemy sets up an artillery battery inside an orphanage, are we not allowed to shoot back?

 

[BibleReader]

amateurthomist:

Any direct bombing of a civilian population, whether with nukes or conventional weapons, is immoral according to natural law. Such teaching is not exclusively Catholic teaching but belongs to right reason following the natural law.

What is a civilian? The entire city of Nagasaki was mechanized for making war. Women and boys worked in the factories, manufacturing ships and guns and shells, so that their men could cross the sea to Southeast Asia and dash out the brains of non-Japanese babies on the furniture in homes the Japanese had no business breaking-into or even being near. The Japanese had the worst human rights record of the war. They murdered by the bushel. And the survivors of Nakasaki, crying into the cameras 60 years later about how unjust The Bomb was, never hold up, for the cameras to see, the pictures sent to them by their fathers of the atrocities their fathers were proudly perpetrating, as the family back home got up early every morning to build murder tools for the Japanese Murder Machine. The Mayor of Nagasaki doesn’t declare on camera that there is still so much pride and denial in the Japanese people – the same pride and denial that motivated the Japanese to decline to surrender *even after Hiroshima *-- that if the Mayor simply makes a public statement in Japan about how incredibly brutal and murderous the Japanese really were, he’ll be drummed out of office in a few days.

 

[wcknight]

The bombing of Dresden in Germany was also questionable. The deaths of any civilians during any war is very tragic, and should be avoided if possible. But the nature of war is that it is mostly chaotic and destruction is often random.

Some things can be better targetted and certainly a bomb could have been dropped other than in a populated area. That was considered but it most likely would not have bought about the end of the war. The US only had 2 atomic weapons at the time, so the targets had to be selected to have the most likelihood of bringing the Japanese to surrender.

The decision to hit cities, from a very objective perspective, was the most likely to bring about a stop to the conflict. As horrible as the result were, Just think how much worse it could have been if the target were Tokyo or a more densely populated area. Or just think how many more lives would have been lost if the war had continued with an invasion of the Japanese mainland.

Dropping the bombs on a secluded factory or a less populated area would probably have been ignored. I am not a big fan of Truman as he was known to have been quite a racist, but I think he made the right decision. The Japanese would not have surrendered on a mere threat or on a demostration in an unpopulated area. It was a horrible time in history and folks will forever second guess the US, but maybe its use during one war will ban its use forever.

But seeing how humans never learn anything from history, sooner or later some nutcase leader will find themselves painted into a corner and repeat doing the unthinkable.

 

[BibleReader]

Last night, I saw the interview of a Japanese woman who survived the bomb when, as a girl, she stood outside her bomb factory, taking a break from making bombs to kill people overseas!!! She complained about the bomb dropped on Nagasaki!!!

Oh, you poor thing!!! Did those bad Americans interrupt your bomb-making???

Question for the liberals here – If Nagasaki, a city dedicated to mass production of invasion barges, battleships and bombs, in buildings peppered throughout the population, was a largely “civilian” city, then aren’t Moslem bomb-makers in Londoin “civilians”? Those poor, poor civilians!!! What is the matter with us? Why do we go to arrest those innocent civilian bomb-makers in London with guns?

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Philip P:

I’m glad you brought up the soldier. If he is in the trench, he is in a field of battle, and so acting as an agressor/threat, hence throwing the grenade is a legitimate act of self-defense, just as if Aunty Ani is in the bomb factory, bombing the factory (along with her) is a legitimate act of self defense.

If the same soldier is home on leave, walking along the beach with his wife and son, and you come up behind him and shoot him, you are now guilty of murder.

You have already said this. My response was to draw attention to the concept of remote material cooperation. Aunty Ani sleeps in a bed, in a house paid for with wages earned at the bomb factory.
Philip P:

If the soldier, on the field of battle, throws down his arms and places himself at your mercy, and you shoot him, you are guilty of murder.

Ah! But the Japanese did not throw down their arms. Before the bombs were dropped leaflets were dropped warning them of what was to come and asking them to surrender. They did not. Even after Hiroshima, they did not surrender.
Philip P:

With Aunty Ani, the relevant fact was not that she was asleep, but that she was not at the factory. She was not, in fact, an agressor, but only at the most a potential agressor.

You’re a potential aggressor before you have aggressed. Aunty Ani had already aggressed on a regular basis and, in the absence of the white flag, could be reasonably expected to aggress again in the morning. In the absence of the white flag.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

amateurthomist:

Any direct bombing of a civilian population, whether with nukes or conventional weapons, is immoral according to natural law. Such teaching is not exclusively Catholic teaching but belongs to right reason following the natural law.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not direct bombings of the civilian population.

 

[oat_soda]

Last night, I saw the interview of a Japanese woman who survived the bomb when, as a girl, she stood outside her bomb factory, taking a break from making bombs to kill people overseas!!! She complained about the bomb dropped on Nagasaki!!!

are you serious? so what about the farmers who make food for the jap soldiers, or the soldeirs parents who give support to their children -are they enemy combatants too? your subjective moral relativistic argument can be used to call anyone a enemy combatant.

did Jesus make other people die for himself, or did he lay down his life for others? is the killing of innocent civilians by the indescriminate bombing of two cities in japan the same spirit that Jesus had when he let himself die for mankind?
you’re supposed to lay you life down for you brother. not kill others to save your life. you can never legitimize the intentional killing of an innocent life -period.

“Hiroshima and Nagasaki are permanent reminders to the entire human family of the grave consequences of total war,” said USCCB president Bishop William Skylstad yesterday in a letter to Bishop Augustinus Jun-ichi Nomura, president of the bishops’ conference of Japan.

The bishop of Spokane expressed the U.S. bishops’ solidarity with the Church in Japan and offered prayers for peace and justice.

He also warned that while the threat of global nuclear war has diminished, the threat of terrorism has increased. Terrorist attacks, like the “total war” exemplified by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, result in “indiscriminate destruction and death to civilians and soldiers alike,” he said.

Both crimes are against God and humanity “and merit the same unequivocal condemnation,” Bishop Skylstad wrote, citing Gaudium et Spes.

2314 "Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation."110 A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons - to commit such crimes.

 

[wcknight]

We know there may be more bomb makers in London, but does it justify dropping an atomic weapon on London to get the bomb makers ?

Nagasaki and Hiroshima may have been industrial cities as part of the Japanese war machine, making them prime targets for destruction. And maybe that was why they were targetted. IF that were the case, Truman may have had legitimate reason to target those cities.

The question you have to ask yourself is, what justifies the mass killing of civilian populations ?

It may be that you can never really isolate military from civilian targets. War is a dirty business and there will probably always be collateral damage. Most folks usually try to minimize civilian causalties. Those that don’t usually end up being tried for war crimes, EXCEPT of course when the culprits happen to be the victors of the war.

I think it is a measure of a society in how it treats prisoners of war and civilians or non-combatants. IF you can still be humane even in the most in-humane of situations, then you may call yourself somewhat civilized.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

amateurthomist:

This is a red herring. Moral decisions are not based on the extent to which the other side is good or evil. Moral actions are specified by the nature of the act itself. It it always immoral to make direct war on civilians.

This is a misapplication of the term ‘direct’ and an equivocation on the term ‘civilians.’ The object of the H & N bombings was not to directly target civilians.

Many of those people who were harmed and who, you say were civilians, were not technically ‘civilians’ because they had chosen remote material collaboration with the Japanese military by manufacturing ordinance, delivery systems, and materiels and by using the benefits obtained by so doing, such as money to pay for housing, food, water, heat, clothing, and so on.

If those ‘civilians’ had chosen to do something else, then the military would have had very little tooth to pose a threat to the Allies in the first place.

 

[wcknight]

Ani Ibi:

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not direct bombings of the civilian population.

I agree with most of what you said, BUT how are they not ‘direct’ bombings ??? Both cities were targetted and destroyed, you can not get any more direct than that. Do folks have to be isolated from the buildings to make it direct ???