JimG:
I have to agree that the atomic bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki were indiscriminate weapons, though in a sense not so indiscriminate as generalized fire-bombing.
Which is my point.
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) concluded that “strategic bombing” had no effect on the outcome of the war. Germany, for example, produced more armored vehicles in the last five months of the war than she had in 1940.
There were two exceptions – the attack on the German oil industry, which accidentally caused the chemical industry to collapse, and the atomic bomb – which DID affect the outcome and did save more lives that it cost.
Those cities may have had factories which were military targets, but our targeting abilities were not so precise then as to be able to hit just those city-embedded targets.
Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris pushed for bombing cities when studies showed the average bomb (from British night bombing) missed the target by 5 miles. He concluded that the answer to that problem was to kill the workers by bombing the cities.
To be fair, the Germans had been doing that since the Spanish Civil War.
And I have to ask: If we had possessed the ability, would we have expended 40 to 60 kilotons of conventional weapons against those targets? Probably not.
Almost certaintly not – in WWII, a “tactical” nuclear war would have been possible, with division assembly areas and airfields being targeted.
Because in the end, I think that these two bombs were a demonstration, rather than a military attack. In fact, the workers who helped make those first two atomic weapons sent a letter to the president urging him to drop the bomb in an uninhabited area of Japan as a demonstration. Would that have succeeded in ending the war? I don’t know.
Dropping the first bomb on a city didn’t cause immediate surrender, so I doubt dropping one on a deserted island would have. And remember, after the Trinity test, we only had two left. We couldn’t waste them.
I also have to ask whether we would ever had used the atomic bombs against Germany.
They were originally intended to be used against Germany, but Germany collapsed before they were ready.
Speaking from the Catholic moral standpoint–i.e., do not target innocent civilians–use of these atomic bombs cannot be justified. Yet, given what others have written about the possibility of ending the war in other ways, it seems that large numbers of people were going to die whether we used them or not. And we had not held to that moral principle in the European theater.
I think the way the Catechism discusses “Just War” you MUST look at proportionality and choose the strategy that promises the least death and destruction.
I stopped by his retirement party expecting the usual good-bye speech. But he began to recount his war experiences, which included the Bataan death march, which he survived, follwed by life as a POW. Then he talked about the dropping of the atomic bombs which ended the war, and how grateful he was to Truman.
In the US, we have no appreciation of how brutal the Japanese were. When I was in Singapore, the Straits Times (the English language paper) printed translatins of Mainland Chinese articles about the war in China as part of the 50th anniversary coverage.
The accounts (many with pictures) were as sickening as the concentration camp stories – and at least as many Chinese died as Jews under these conditions.
In a way, the most worrisome part about nuclear weapons is not that they are so destructive, but that they are not destructive enough. Japan survived them and now prospers. The possibility of survival makes their use more likely. Mutual assured destruction was effective in preventing war because both sides promised full scale destruction and neither side wanted it.
Absolutely. Of course, Japan was only hit by atomic bombs, not by hydrogen bombs.
