Why Truman Dropped the Bomb

[Philip_P]

For those of you who disagree that dropping the bomb was wrong, and have engaged in a serious attempt to apply Catholic moral teachings to this matter, thank you.

For those who instead simply repeat that the Japanese committed atrocities, I really have to question what you wish to accomplish. I don’t think anyone here has said, or even implied, that the Japanese were moral paragons of any sort. But what does this have to do with the question of whether it was right for us to commit atrocities?

The question on this thread is whether or not it was moral to drop the bomb. Unless you’re a relativist, the fact the Japanese committed evil acts does not touch on the question of whether or not we did. It can give us insight into why we performed certain actions, what the psychology of the decision makers was, the historical context, but it does not touch on the morality of dropping the bomb.

Do you carry this same attitude with you into the Confessional? “Bless me Father, for my neighbor has sinned?”

This isn’t about Japan, or Germany, or Italy’s moral standards. This is about our moral standards. So either drop the relativistic nonesense, or else admit that you don’t give a d* about moral standards so long as your side has the bigger guns.

 

[vern_humphrey]

Philip P:

This isn’t about Japan, or Germany, or Italy’s moral standards. This is about our moral standards. So either drop the relativistic nonesense, or else admit that you don’t give a d* about moral standards so long as your side has the bigger guns.

You’re right. But it is fair to point out that many of those who condemn “evil” only do so when the United States is the culprit.

When someone writes a condemnation of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 60th anniversary, it’s fair to point out that the Rape of Nanking killed twice as many people as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined, and no such condemnation of that atrocity was written.

 

[Philip_P]

vern humphrey:

You’re right. But it is fair to point out that many of those who condemn “evil” only do so when the United States is the culprit.

When someone writes a condemnation of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 60th anniversary, it’s fair to point out that the Rape of Nanking killed twice as many people as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined, and no such condemnation of that atrocity was written.

And this has been pointed out, numerous times on this thread. I think it’s safe to assume that anyone reading this thread is well aware of the fact that the Japanes committed atrocities. What I question is repeatedly bringing this up, time after time. The point’s been made. If they disagree that dropping the bomb was immoral, I’d encourage them to follow Ani’s example instead of repeating “but the Japanese committed evil too” over and over again.

 

[Steve_O_Brien]

pnewton:

Can one dissent from a condemnation? I thought the reason we have the catechism is so we can stand by the doctrine of the faith. The article you linked promoted pacifism from a Catholic/Protestant/Buddhist point of view. I think I will stick with the catechism and thereby avoid any dissent.

The *Catechism of the Catholic Church * emphatically teaches the following moral doctrine:

"‘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 [Vatican II, Gaudium et spes, section 80]’. 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" (section 2314).

If a Catholic dissents from this doctrine, he or she is rejecting the Magisterium, through which Christ teaches us in this and every age (*Lk * 10:16). The new catechism tells us (in section 2036) that the “authority of the Magisterium extends also to the specific precepts of the natural law, because their observance, demanded by the Creator, is necessary for salvation.” A Christian who rejects the Magisterium in favor of his or her private judgment is no longer a Catholic, but a Protestant.

The Catholic Church’s condemnation of the nuclear and conventional bombing of civilians is not “pacifism,” at least not in the Quaker or Tolstoyan sense, but rather an inevitable application of her doctrine of non-combatant immunity in war, which is a more fundamental principle and one that is also taught in the new catechism (sections 2312-2313).

I urge everyone to review the Church’s condemnation of total war in sections 79-80 of Vatican II’s document entitled Gaudium et spes.

Among American Catholics, obstinate doctrinal dissent from the Magisterium’s teaching on total war is colored by the refusal to draw a clear distinction between the virtue of patriotism and the vice of jingoism. The kind of jingoism that attempts to justify the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is also condemned in the new catechism when it warns us that “Caesar is not ‘the Lord’” (section 450).

Keep and spread the Faith.*

 

[vern_humphrey]

Philip P:

And this has been pointed out, numerous times on this thread. I think it’s safe to assume that anyone reading this thread is well aware of the fact that the Japanes committed atrocities. What I question is repeatedly bringing this up, time after time. The point’s been made. If they disagree that dropping the bomb was immoral, I’d encourage them to follow Ani’s example instead of repeating “but the Japanese committed evil too” over and over again.

The question is not, did the Japanese commit atrocities, but rather what is the motivation of those who condemn ONLY American atrocities?

 

[pnewton]

Philip P:

For those who instead simply repeat that the Japanese committed atrocities,

Remember, though, that the atrocities, or evil, committed by the Japanese is not a completely irrelevant issue to catholic ethics. Since one of the criteria is that the unintended consequence can not be greater than the evil it is stopping, it is important to understand just how great an evil that generation faced.

Obviously the bombings would have been unjustified to stop an unfair trade embargo, dirty name calling, etc.

 

[vern_humphrey]

pnewton:

Remember, though, that the atrocities, or evil, committed by the Japanese is not a completely irrelevant issue to catholic ethics. Since one of the criteria is that the unintended consequence can not be greater than the evil it is stopping, it is important to understand just how great an evil that generation faced.

Obviously the bombings would have been unjustified to stop an unfair trade embargo, dirty name calling, etc.

We must also consider the facts as known at the time. We were just coming out of two of the most bloody battles of the war, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Okinawa, aside from being the bloodiest, was also a graphic demonstration of what awaited us when we landed in Japan.

The surrender of Japan prevented an Okinawa on a much larger scale. And, as I have pointed out before, any significant delay in the surrender would have left the occuping forces with insufficient time to get enough food and fuel into Japan to prevent a massive die-off in the winter of '45-'46.

Clearly, considering the alternatives we faced at the time, millions of lives were saved by an early surrender.

 

[pnewton]

vern humphrey:

We must also consider the facts as known at the time.

Time, or rather historical perspective is important. I get the impression that we are all sitting back at some huge post game show trying to analyze what the winning team did that was either bad or good.

The initial question of why Truman did what he did can never be answered as he is not around to ask. He had a responsible for millions of lives we can not fathom. The releasing of classified documents do not adequately answer the question of what he knew, at what time and how much weight he could put into each bit of intelligence.

One thing I do not doubt is that his decision spared millions of lives, whatever it was based on. While I deeply regret the loss of the innocent civilians at N. and H., I think it only proper we put the blame where it truly belongs, the Japanese military command. The loss of Japanese lives was the direct result of their evil, imperialist policy.

 

[BibleReader]

Philip P:

For those who instead simply repeat that the Japanese committed atrocities, I really have to question what you wish to accomplish. I don’t think anyone here has said, or even implied, that the Japanese were moral paragons of any sort. But what does this have to do with the question of whether it was right for us to commit atrocities?

The question on this thread is whether or not it was moral to drop the bomb. Unless you’re a relativist, the fact the Japanese committed evil acts does not touch on the question of whether or not we did. It can give us insight into why we performed certain actions, what the psychology of the decision makers was, the historical context, but it does not touch on the morality of dropping the bomb.

Do you carry this same attitude with you into the Confessional? “Bless me Father, for my neighbor has sinned?”

What “atrocity” did we commit? What are you talking about?

Was the firebombing of Dresden and other cities an “atrocity”? We said, “Please, Nazi Murder Machine, please stop mass murdering.”

They didn’t stop murdering.

We firebombed.

They kept mass-murdering.

We said to the Japanese Murder Machine, “Please Japanese Murder Machine, please stop murdering, or we’ll use this great big super duper new weapon we have.”

They didn’t stop murdering.

We incinerated Hiroshima.

They realized, “Uhhhhhh, Hiroshima’s gone.”

We said, “Please Japanese Murder Machine, please stop murdering, or we’ll use this great big super duper new weapon we have again.”

The Japanese consciously decided to NOT lay down their arms, despite the loss of Hiroshima. Their bottom line response was, “WE REFUSE TO STOP MURDERING JUST BECAUSE WE LOST HIROSHIMA!!!” They kept murdering. The smokestacks on the warship factories of Nagasaki kept puffing away. The Catholic men and women of Nagasaki kept going to work at the docks, and they kept explaining to the kids how it was their duty to kill non-Japanese for Emperor and family.

We incinerated Nagasaki.

“Ohhhhh! Look!” they said in the Japanese government, “They’re serious. Uh-oh! This is *bad! *We’d better stop murdering!”

So, over the objections of the military, the Emperor finally put the brakes on the Murder Machine.

The Japanese people sobbed during the radio address. They did not cheer that their national Murder Machine was finally halted. They sobbed.

You are very, very, very, very wrong.

It’s not a question of “atrocity.” It’s a question of convincing a bunch of blood-thirsty goose-stepping morons who the people put in charge AND SUPPORTED, WITH THEIR LIVES, to stop murdering, murdering, murdering, murdering, murdering.

Do you know what those Japanese were? They were just a national version of Charlie Whitman, that sniper who refused to stop murdering passersby from atop the tower at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966. He also refused to “turn off the murder machine,” until police shot him dead.

Dropping the Bomb on Japan was not an “atrocity.” It was the “cops” putting a disgusting, blood-thirsty, sharp-toothed animal, still murdering, murdering, murdering, murdering, murdering, out of its misery.

You’re a dreamer. The ghosts of 19 million Asian murder victims are calling out to you “…what about my wife…what about my child and all of those Japanese soldiers who raped her, and then forced her to murder her father or be raped again…what about my little boy, carved up with a Japanese bayonet as a joke?..Didn’t those bombs stop that???”

 

[Philip_P]

BibleReader:

What “atrocity” did we commit? What are you talking about?

That would be the question we are attempting to answer here. Evidently, however, not one you are much interested in seriously considering.

Again, to the vast majority on this thread who *are *engaged in a serious debate on this question, thank you. I look forward to continuing the discussion.

 

[BibleReader]

Philip P:

That would be the question we are attempting to answer here. Evidently, however, not one you are much interested in seriously considering.

Again, to the vast majority on this thread who *are *engaged in a serious debate on this question, thank you. I look forward to continuing the discussion.

I’m not. 19 million Asian ghosts keep asking me, in disbelief, “B-b-b-b-b-ut didn’t those big bombs finally STOP the Japanese Murder Machine???”

 

[quasimodo]

One of the most painful changes for me was to finally agree that the use of the Atomic bombs was not moral. Just war theory does not allow the deliberate targeting of civilians … even in total war. One may not use immoral means … deliberate targeting of civilians … that good may come of it. Double effect does not apply here because civilians were targeted deliberately as a means to demoralize the population.

(Fire bombing Dresden was immoral because it, too, targeted civilians …largely undefended civilians, by the way. It was purely an act of revenge. There was no strategic or tactical value to bombing Dresden. )

Yes, using the A-bombs saved far more lives than they took … at least by an order of magnitude. Yes, more lives were taken in ordinary bombing raids than by the a-bombs. The problem is that Catholic just war theory does not allow civilians to be targeted: any deliberate targeting of civilians is immoral … whether atomic, firebomb, conventional or otherwise.

Cities were targeted in WWII because there was a theory that the people would be demoralized and press their government to sue for peace. This theory has been thoroughly discredited by the experience of the English, the Germans and the Japanese.

I believe we can thanks Churchill for implementing civilian bombing. He realized England was in deep trouble because the Germans were very successfully bombing his airfields. The RAF could not get planes off the ground to stop them. England was slowly loosing the ability to defend itself. Our friend, Mr. Churchill, bombed German civilians to demoralize the German population AND to try to get Hitler to take his eye off the English airfields. It worked. Hitler was enraged and immediately began bombing population centers, not military targets. The pressure was off the English airfields and the RAF was safe(er). They had time to regroup; time to get the USA to help out a little. Their civilians were being killed nightly but, heck, they had a few to spare, right?

The demoralization of the civilian population tactic never works but the military tactic Churchill employed did work. It was immoral, never the less. We may not use immoral means to acheive a greater good. Period. Because the means are in and of themselves immoral, double effect is irrelevant.

Today, an enemy may rely upon the Main Steam Media to demoralize the population .

 

[Al_Masetti]

World War II is probably useful as a discussion item for various moral principles.

Some of the points I want to make may seem provocative, but there is enough here to let people do some Google searches to learn more.

But it is important to consider a large number of issues.

Someone mentioned the Potsdam conference. One of the issues not brought forth in this thread was the role of the USSR in the pre-war, war and post-war geopolitical realm.

There is a body of thought that suggests the entirety of World War II was fought at the instigation of the USSR. They had a variety of agreements with Germany that provided Germany with fuel and other natural resources as well as with places for the German Air Force to train.

Prior to World War II, the big evil was the USSR. The Communists had taken over Russia and then other nearby countries and forced them into the Soviet Union. In 1917, the Soviet Union established Communist parties in about every country of the world with the aim of expanding militant atheism, all under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

During the war, the US allied with the Soviet Union because it was the only way of defeating Nazi Germany (Nazi being a short hand word for National Socialist - probably different from the kind of socialism we are familiar with, but not by much.)

One of the writers of the Potsdam agreement was Alger Hiss, who we now know was an active agent of the Communists of the Soviet Union. He was the right hand aide to President Roosevelt. The notion of unconditional surrender was chiefly a point pushed by the Soviet Union. The reason supposedly was to make it easier for the Communists to take over after the political and physical infrastructures had been destroyed.

Stalin continuously pressured the Allies to expand the war. He was desperate to get the Allies to open a second front. But the Allies were incapable of invading Europe early in the war, so the air war over Germany became the de facto second front.

Finally (actually, there is a lot more), at the end of the war, the US and Britain were worried that in the devastation, the Soviet Union would pick up where they left off prior to the war and resume vacuuming up countries. Once Germany had been defeated, the USSR focused all its energies to the Pacific theater and China. The U.S. was very eager to prevent the Soviet Union from occupying Japan. So speed was essential after April of 1945. As it was the Soviets got some of the northern Japanese islands. In addition, to prevent the Soviets from learning more than necessary about new technologies, those giant Japanese submarines were taken out to sea and scuttled by the Americans.

World War II was a fight to the finish. It was an unlimited war. There were no boundaries - not in geography, not in ideology, not in weapons. 100 million people died.

Two prominent participants were to all intents and purposes devout Catholics: an American named Curtis LeMay and an Italian named Eugenio Pacelli. LeMay was military. Pacelli, very knowldgeable and politically connected, wrote extensively. Don’t know that Pacelli ever condemned the Americans for excesses. Although a civilian, Pacelli did go nose to nose with the Germans on at least one occasion. An Israeli historian, Pincus Lapide, later credited Pacelli with rescuing about 700,000 Jews from being murdered by the Germans.

Some people are still not in agreement about the aims and goals of the war. Some still say the chief opponent of the United States was the Communist Soviet Union. The political events in western Europe involving the Communists in France, Italy, Greece and elsewhere, the takeover of eastern Europe, the Berlin blockade, the expansion of North Korea into South Korea, and numerous other events all tend to reinforce that idea of WW2 being simply one of many battles between Christianity and militant atheism.

It is instructive to look at other conflicts between the Christian community and people outside Christianity. The battle of Lepanto is instructive. The campaign of 1805 in North Africa is instructive. The battle of Vienna (September 12, 1683) is interesting. [Kohn, Dictionary of War.]

Some say it’s not over.

 

[Writer]

FightingFat:

So, basically you guys think that America was right to drop the bomb?

I have to also say that, based on the information they had available to them, it may likely have been the best choice available to them. Japan should have surrendered much sooner than it did. We did not start the war, but we ended it.

Here is part of a previous post of mine, which was a response to Karl Keating’s comments.

*…Unfortunately, what seems clear to ethicists and thelogians today (sitting safely and comfortably at their keyboards), may have seemed less than clear to a President concerned (and frightened?) with the awesome responsibility of preserving the western world. While the murder of innocents is a horrible action to have to resort to, even Saint Thomas Aquinas supported the right of self defense. The question is whether “moderation” was employed in the way Saint Thomas Aquinas observed was necessary. I have to admit that it’s been a few years since I read Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, but I do believe we are often too quick to judge past leadership without taking the full context of the historical situation or environment into consideration. I argue that fear creates over-reaction, but can we blame the leadership for being fearful? While fear clouds reason, the cause or origin of that fear appears to be the ferocity of the Japanese unprovoked attack. Was it our moral error that we may have overreacted?

Lastly, you say that the Japanese civilians were innocents. I don’t argue that many of them certainly were. However, it is worth pointing out that citizens can rise up against an unjust government to topple it to the ground. The government represents the people and their will. The Japanese will was for greater power and expansionism for their empire–glory for their own people. If the people could have taken up arms to destroy the government but did not, were they entirely innocent? If fear played a part in the Presidents decision to use atomic weapons, can we really blame him today for taking action?

Bottom line… Great debates could be had for hours on this topic, but their effect is pretty meaningless. God knows, and we trust Him to be the judge of right and wrong.

Best regards,

Karl Erickson

PS. As a strange aside to WWII, friends of my grandparents were the only US civilians I believe killed in the Continental US. It was a minister and wife taking children on a church picnic in the hills of southern Oregon. One of the Japanese “balloon bombs” killed the group when they tried to examine the strange object*

 

[Al_Masetti]

I never actually answered the question: should the U.S. have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

WW2 was total war. Even with the maximum effort, the Allies nearly lost World War II. It was a near thing. If the Allies had made one more mistake or if the Axis had made one less mistake, probably the war would have gone the other way. There was case after case of ineptitude. And luck. Did you know that the American part of the Allied invasion of North Africa came all the way across the Atlantic Ocean? Why didn’t the German submarines attack the huge convoys???

We were reading German coded messages, but the German code breakers were reading ours as well… the Gemans for a while even intercepted the supersecret encrypted telephone conversations between Roosevelt and Churchill. By the end of WW2, the Germans had produced nearly 2000 jet fighters and bombers. The Allies had only a handful. At the end of WW2, a shipment of enriched uranium was being shipped by German submarine to Japan… There may have been a plan for the Japanese to use the uranium in some form of “dirty bomb” to make the West Coast of the U.S. radioactive using planes based from giant submarines.

Someone wrote that the Strategic Bombing Survey after the war concluded that the bombing had no measureable effect on the war. This conclusion seems so far fetched that one needs to look at the membership of the Survey team. The bombing probably reduced German war production by a third. About one million men were employed in the defense effort against the bombing, and were thereby diverted from critical battlefields in both the east and the west. Approximately 100,000 artillery pieces were similarly diverted. In addition, the cream of the German Air Force was killed in combat during the bombing campaign. As a result, when the Allies landed in Normandy, although the Allies were substantially outnumbered, the Allies still had air superiority… because the skilled German pilots had all been taken out.

Someone criticized the bombing of German cities… Initially, when the British tried to bomb strictly military targets, they were totally unsuccessful. Navigation was poor – in the beginning they couldn’t find the targets – mapping was very poor. Initially, there were no radio navigation devices. Mechanically, the early bombers suffered numerous failures. The defensive guns were totally inadequate. Aviation fuel was of very low octane. The German radars and night fighters were extremely effective. British Air Force bombers suffered enormous losses. Finally, if the bombers did get through, bombing accuracy was so poor that bombs were lucky to get within five miles of a target.

German defenses stayed effective right up toward the end of the war. At some times, the US bombing effort had to be stopped because we had run out of planes and crews.

Initially, strenuous efforts were made to avoid hitting civilian targets. But, because of inaccurate capabilities, civilian targets were almost the only things that did get hit.

Eventually, the military planners simply bowed to the inevitable… drop as many bombs as you can as close as you can… and hopefully some of them will hit the target.

Because neither the Brits nor the Americans were able to hit a target precisely (a shortcoming not routinely resolved until about the year 2000 ), eventually a Brit named Arfthur Harris decided to simply burn out as many cities as possible. Opposition to his approach was so strong that he was fired as soon as possible and left Britain in disgrace.

One of the reasons for, years later, producing very large nuclear weapons was that bombing accuracy was still so poor that only with a large weapon could the war planners be sure of destroying a target. We weren’t after cities, but we wanted to destroy the leadership and the weapons on the ground. And we knew the Soviets had put a lot of targets underground.

By the way, in this discussion it is important to avoid the use of “newspaper headline” terms or bumper sticker slogans.

So we worked on many new technologies… Germany was also working on many new technologies and was way ahead of us on most of them.

One of the new technologies was the atomic bomb. We used it the way we used any other technology that we had available.

It was a highly concentrated explosive, only requiring one plane instead of hundreds or thousands (we had reached the stage of launching thousand plane raids).

We hated the idea of burning foreign cities to the ground. Many of our own citizens had roots in those cities. But we did it.

Folks who argue we shouldn’t do it, should then outline precisely what alternative military capabilities we had at the time, what the political situation (Soviet, British, German as well as American) was at the time and what precise exact alternative steps they would have taken to end the war.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Steve O'Brien:

The *Catechism of the Catholic Church *emphatically teaches the following moral doctrine:

"'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.

Steve, the key concept here is 'directed to.'

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic ordinance was not directed to indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants.

The object of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki so as to neutralize Japanese military command, materiels, and troop concentration was directed to ending the Pacific War.

The harm to the civilian population was not the proximate intention of the bombing. It was the circumstantial or indirect intention of the bombing. As such the harm to the civilian population reduced the moral good of ending the Pacific War, but did not (could not) change this moral good into a moral evil.

If the Japanese command, materiels, and troop concentration had been in the wildnerness instead of embedded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then:

1. the bombing with atomic ordinance would have been the same and
2. the neutralization of Japanese command, materiels, and troop concentration would have been the same.

(1) is the behaviour of the act. (2) is the proximate intention of the act. Behaviour and proximate intention = the object of the act. The object of the act is what the act is directed to.

In other words the object would have been the same had the Japanese command, materiels, and troop concentration been located in the wildnerness and had the bombs been dropped at that location.

The only thing that would be different was the circumstantial or indirect intention. That is, there would have been no civilian population around to be harmed.

The object is either morally good or morally evil. The circumstantial intention of the object cannot change the moral goodness of the object into moral evil. It can only reduce or increase the moral goodness of the object. Or, if the object is morally evil, it can only reduce or increase the moral evil of the object.

It can be argued that harming the civilian population was a bad thing. Some people disagree, based on the willingness of the civilian population to carry arms and to manufacture materiels. But that is another discussion. It has been argued that ending the Pacific War was a good thing. I don’t think anyone can reasonably disagree with this object.

Harming the civilian population did not (could not) make ending the Pacific War a bad thing. It merely reduced the moral goodness of ending the Pacific War.

Moreover, neutralizing the Japanese command, materiels, and troop concetration was not a bad thing. Why? Because it was not murder. The commandment is ‘Thou shalt not murder.’ The commandment is not ‘Thou shalt not commit acts of self-defence.’ The commandment is not ‘Thou shalt not undertake acts of Just War.’ The commandment is ‘Thou shalt not murder.’

Given the intransigence of the Japanese military at that time: neutralizing their command, materiels, and troop concentration by means of an overwhelming display of military superiority which they fully understood to be mastery of the atomic bomb was the only means to achieve the end of the Pacific War, given the knowledge and resources available to the legitimate government of the United States at that time in history.

That is double effect. That is the teaching of the Catholic Church.

 

[vern_humphrey]

Al Masetti:

I By the end of WW2, the Germans had produced nearly 2000 jet fighters and bombers. The Allies had only a handful.

They had also produced more armored vehicles in the last 5 months of the war than in all of 1940.
Al Masetti:

Someone wrote that the Strategic Bombing Survey after the war concluded that the bombing had no measureable effect on the war. This conclusion seems so far fetched that one needs to look at the membership of the Survey team.

Don’t you think that if the data or the methodology could be refuted, it would have?

As you pointed out, they managed to produce 2,000 jet fighters and bombers. And as I pointed out, their production of armored vehicles was up, not down at the end of the war.
Al Masetti:

The bombing probably reduced German war production by a third.

Do you have data to support that? The USSBS fairly bristles with tables and statistics which, as I pointed out, have never been shown to be inadequate or in error.
Al Masetti:

About one million men were employed in the defense effort against the bombing, and were thereby diverted from critical battlefields in both the east and the west. Approximately 100,000 artillery pieces were similarly diverted.

This is what is sometimes called “arguing from engineering data” – that is, arguing in the face of experience. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The Stratgeic Bombing campaign was not cost-free – and what it cost us to mount it exceeded the damage it inflicted on the Germans.
Al Masetti:

Someone criticized the bombing of German cities… Initially, when the British tried to bomb strictly military targets, they were totally unsuccessful. Navigation was poor – in the beginning they couldn’t find the targets – mapping was very poor. Initially, there were no radio navigation devices. Mechanically, the early bombers suffered numerous failures. The defensive guns were totally inadequate. Aviation fuel was of very low octane. The German radars and night fighters were extremely effective. British Air Force bombers suffered enormous losses. Finally, if the bombers did get through, bombing accuracy was so poor that bombs were lucky to get within five miles of a target.

German defenses stayed effective right up toward the end of the war. At some times, the US bombing effort had to be stopped because we had run out of planes and crews.

Which is the key – they could out-kill our production rate for planes and crews. We never out-killed their production rates with strategic bombing. The exception being the systemic attack on the German oil industry which accidentally wrecked their chemical industry.
Al Masetti:

Folks who argue we shouldn’t do it, should then outline precisely what alternative military capabilities we had at the time, what the political situation (Soviet, British, German as well as American) was at the time and what precise exact alternative steps they would have taken to end the war.

Here, you are 100% correct. Compare the deaths from Hiroshima and Nagaski with the deaths expected from the invasion (both Japanese and American) and from starvation and exposure in the coming winter.

 

[Philip_P]

Al Masetti:

Folks who argue we shouldn’t do it, should then outline precisely what alternative military capabilities we had at the time, what the political situation (Soviet, British, German as well as American) was at the time and what precise exact alternative steps they would have taken to end the war.

This is still consequentialist argument. The moral principal that you may not purposely do evil that good may come of it still holds, no? I have yet to see a convincing argument that deliberately destroying a city is not intrinsically evil. There had been some interesting discussion examining this earlier, but it seems to have been dropped. Apparently we’re back to claiming that the ends justify the means.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

quasimodo:

One of the most painful changes for me was to finally agree that the use of the Atomic bombs was not moral. Just war theory does not allow the deliberate targeting of civilians.

Civilians were not targetted at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese command, materiels, and troop concentration was targetted. It so happened that these were embedded in a civilian population.

 

[vern_humphrey]

Philip P:

This is still consequentialist argument. The moral principal that you may not purposely do evil that good may come of it still holds, no? I have yet to see a convincing argument that deliberately destroying a city is not intrinsically evil. There had been some interesting discussion examining this earlier, but it seems to have been dropped.

And you may not cut a person open just to remove a cancerous tumor. You may not sink an enemy ship just to win a naval battle – who knows how many sailors may not approve of their government’s policy?

On the other hand, you MAY condemn half the population of Japan to die of starvation or hunger, because, hey, we’ll feel better about ourselves for not dropping an atomic bomb.
Philip P:

Apparently we’re back to claiming that the ends justify the means.

It is just as wrong to claim the means justify the end.