The ethics of Hiroshima

[HAL]

amounts to a deafening irony when platitudes tossed about concerning the evils of imperialism by serious-looking folk in suits it something.

[David]

I appreciate your heartfelt post about your experiences in Japan, Tannin, but I still think you're making simplistic binaries. This wasn't some kind of trolley car problem where the Americans had the choice of pulling a lever and killing 120,000 or letting another few million die. The key thing to remember about that Philosophy 101 problem is that 'trolley car situations' rarely (if ever) occur in real life. There are usually many, many options, and I think it's safe to say at least with the benefit of hindsight that, in this case, not all of them involved the deaths of a hundreds thousand of people.

I'll be the first to concede that it's within the realm of possibility that the bomb saved more lives than it destroyed. But that doesn't mean we can actually know that for a fact. Can we have expected the Americans to have made those calculations perfectly, or do we give them a free pass because they had to think quickly under duress? No, we can't. This wasn't some embarrassing spreadsheet typo or an MP taking a few sneaky helicopter trips on the side; this was the murder of over 120,000 innocent civilians, serious injury of another 70,000 or so and families and friends left to grieve their loved ones.

If you kill one person, you'd better have a pretty rock solid excuse. "I thought more people might die if I didn't kill that innocent bystander" doesn't really cut it, not if we have a shred of ethical vigour left. If you kill one hundred thousand people, let's just say that those cartoony utilitarian justifications are one hundred thousand times worse. It's actually kind of sickening to hear them come from otherwise decent and ethical people.

[Tannin]

So, once we strip out your rhetoric - and your absurdly incorrect use of the term "murder" for an act of war normal in all respects bar that it was towards the upper end of the magnitude scale - your argument is this:

"They could have done something else instead".

Right, Einstein. Money where your mouth is. Please have the goodness to say exactly what you think they could have done instead. I'll even make it easy for you: you can have the priceless benefit of full knowledge and 20-20 hindsight. Let's see you come up with something - anything - else they could have done which might possibly have saved lives.

[Tannin]

For Korea, the bombs represent the end of 35 years of brutal direct colonisation; while, as we know, for many other parts of Asia they represent the end of a much longer stint of brutality.

That said, Japan itself was one of its own biggest victims, which gets back to that conflation we often make between systems of power, and the average Joe bludgeoned into obeisance by systems of power. It's the general evil of unchecked power and the nonsense it peddles which ought to be in memoriam here.

Spot on sir!

[Pies4shaw]

Well, more white people, anyway.

No. You need to read the history, Pies4shaw: the bombs cost between 100 and 200 thousand lives. The alternative - the only alternative - was full-scale amphibious invasion at a cost to Japanese civilian life vastly higher. Think a full order of magnitude, very likely more. There is no reasonable room to doubt that: we already know the horrendous cost of the invasions of outlying islands: Japanese servicemen and civilians alike, although faced with palpably hopeless military situations, fought on in a fanatical manner; throwing themselves upon machine guns armed only with sticks, throwing themselves off cliffs into the sea, mothers throwing their babies onto the rocks. These are all historical facts, as well attested as anything in history can be. Japan was in the grip of a fanatical; death cult the likes of which ISIS can only dream about.

Think I'm exaggerating? Nope: they died in their thousands upon thousands. Mostly they died of their own "free will" (or what passed for free will in that extraordinary culture, which subordinated the individual to the state dictatorship in a way probably never seen before in the whole of human history, and certainly never seen since). No possibility of doing harm to the enemy (i.e., anyone from the entire rest of the world) was neglected, even if it meant losing a thousand lives to get just one enemy, even if it meant hiding behind the lines to explode booby traps. Mostly this was their own "free will", but there are well-documented cases where large groups of Japanese civilians were forced to participate at gun-point, or just slaughtered in a mindless bloodletting.

Translate that to the homeland. It is entirely reasonable to expect a death toll not in the hundreds of thousands but in the millions. Absurd, tragic, senseless, yes. But it happened in all the other battles, regardless of their hopeless military situation, and they were simply incapable of acting any other way. In the end, the military government never did surrender: the Emperor surrendered against their advice and wishes, and the military immediately staged a coup to depose him and fight on (which was averted only by a miracle and some very daring subterfuge on the part of the Emperor's loyal personal staff.

But let's pretend that we don't care about saving those hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilian lives and only think about other lives. The Japanese forces under Tojo and his cronies were a brutally murderous lot. They were killing an average of 10,000 foreign civilians per day, every day while the war dragged on - Chinese, Koreans, many others. They herded huge crowds of conquered non-combatants into buildings ast gunpoint and, to save ammunition, burned them all alive. This was routine. Even the Imperial Japanese Navy - in broad a far more humane and civilised service than the army - participated in these terrible crimes in places such as the Philippines.

Over the course of the war, Japan murdered 26 million people - that is more than Hitler, more than Stalin, and it was to less purpose. That wholesale slaughter was still going on until the bombs stopped everything.

It's tolerably clear that a motivating reason the bombs were dropped was to avoid the anticipated Allied casualties from a land invasion. It may be that it also happened to have the consequence of reducing Japanese civilian casualties but that was, at most, a "happy" coincidence.

Of course, I do agree that amphibian invasion was at that stage nothing more than a pipe-dream - Across the Andes by Frog was still 30 years from becoming reality.

[think positive]

I appreciate your heartfelt post about your experiences in Japan, Tannin, but I still think you're making simplistic binaries. This wasn't some kind of trolley car problem where the Americans had the choice of pulling a lever and killing 120,000 or letting another few million die. The key thing to remember about that Philosophy 101 problem is that 'trolley car situations' rarely (if ever) occur in real life. There are usually many, many options, and I think it's safe to say at least with the benefit of hindsight that, in this case, not all of them involved the deaths of a hundreds thousand of people.

I'll be the first to concede that it's within the realm of possibility that the bomb saved more lives than it destroyed. But that doesn't mean we can actually know that for a fact. Can we have expected the Americans to have made those calculations perfectly, or do we give them a free pass because they had to think quickly under duress? No, we can't. This wasn't some embarrassing spreadsheet typo or an MP taking a few sneaky helicopter trips on the side; this was the murder of over 120,000 innocent civilians, serious injury of another 70,000 or so and families and friends left to grieve their loved ones.

If you kill one person, you'd better have a pretty rock solid excuse. "I thought more people might die if I didn't kill that innocent bystander" doesn't really cut it, not if we have a shred of ethical vigour left. If you kill one hundred thousand people, let's just say that those cartoony utilitarian justifications are one hundred thousand times worse. It's actually kind of sickening to hear them come from otherwise decent and ethical people.

Fair point if you look at theory.

Now take a trip to Pearl Harbour, and check out the damage done by the Japanese surprise bomb trick. Stand on the platform over looking the Arizona, which went straight down with all its men. It's still bleeding oil.

Or how about asking a few POWs that were in Changi or working on the Burma railway, how much fun they has sitting out the war.

https://www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/pow ... internees/


Have you seen recent pictures of Hiroshima? It really looks amazing. That's the thing with cruel governments, it's not just the captured opposition that suffer, they take it out on their own people too.

All wars are a bloody waste,

[think positive]

Thankyou Mugwamp.

As I mentioned earlier, I grew up believing that the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible, unforgivable war crimes akin to but even worse than the many other crimes committed by the USA, such as spraying Vietnam with Agent Orange, sponsoring and supporting the Chilean butcher Pinochet against an elected democratic government, and various others too numerous to mention. The atom bombs were, in my youthful view at that time, simply the very worst examples among many.

Over the years, more and more evidence has come out to show that I was right about Chile and about Agent Orange, and indeed about many of the others, but ... no, I'll come to the "but" in a moment.

First, I'll mention that I have seen the unthinkable horror of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki with my own eyes. It was more than 40 years ago that I was there and the scars left by the bombs were still vivid; that day was a decade closer to the day the bombs were dropped than to this day as I write. I went to Hiroshima first but curiously enough, the impact of the Nagasaki blast on me was even greater.

Hiroshima is flat and even then had been largely rebuilt since the war, where Nagasaki is a city of small hills and back then you could stand in a high place and see the devastation spreading out like the blades of a circular fan. Where there was flat land leading away from ground zero, everything as far as you could see was new and modern. A few points of the compass further round, there would be a hill, and behind that hill out to a long way away, the buildings were smaller, much older, and a different colour. This was the old town (or what was left of it) protected from the blast by the shadow of the hill. And then another fan blade of modern concrete on the far side, another hill, another intact shadow, and so on all around the compass.

In Hiroshima, there is a famous pavement - sandstone steps is the memory I have - with some poor victim's shadow etched into them by the fireball. (Reverse etched, actually: the shadow is the part the fireball didn't reach.) That was the enduring image many people took away from that place: the shadow on the steps of the bank as a symbol of all the other lives lost that day. (I believe it has faded with the decades and can't be seen now.) It was a very powerful, sombre thing to see.

But for me, the truly enduring image I have is more powerful still: the shadow etched in positive across the entire city of Nagasaki by the shape of the landscape, then reversed into the negative by the massive reconstruction of the areas where there was nothing left. (I shouldn't imagine that you could see this shadow either now, after 40 years.)

And my "but". As you can understand from the above, I have strong reason to identify with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly so as I have spent time in Japan and loved the place almost as much as the people (who were wonderfully kind to me and happy to share their extraordinarily subtle, beautiful culture with me).

Nevertheless, as my life went by and I learned more about the events of the Pacific War, and especially about the bizarre concluding years of it, I have had to change my mind about the bombs. I did not know about or understand the circumstances or the alternatives available. I was wrong. The Americans, whatever you may think of them more generally, did the right thing.

That hilltop view of Nagasaki remains the most awful and enduring image I have of war anywhere. I know now that the devastation I saw in Nagasaki was just a small thing compared to the full horror of the tens of millions killed by that worst of all regimes; I know that the difference in scale between the one small visible death-shadow in Hiroshima and the one huge death-shadow visible in Nagasaki is repeated when you compare the bomb blast to the full horror the Japanese inflicted on the whole of eastern Asia. Like Chinese dolls, each horror is contained inside and dwarfed by the succeeding one. But I could grasp the death of that poor man on the bank steps in Hiroshima; and I could even grasp the instant death of half a whole city full of people in Nagasaki: I can't grasp, I can't even begin to grasp, the twenty six million deaths that most evil of all regimes inflicted.

That's a brilliant read Tannin, thank you.

[David]

So, once we strip out your rhetoric - and your absurdly incorrect use of the term "murder" for an act of war normal in all respects bar that it was towards the upper end of the magnitude scale - your argument is this:

"They could have done something else instead".

Right, Einstein. Money where your mouth is. Please have the goodness to say exactly what you think they could have done instead. I'll even make it easy for you: you can have the priceless benefit of full knowledge and 20-20 hindsight. Let's see you come up with something - anything - else they could have done which might possibly have saved lives.

First off, slaughtering civilians is not a valid act of war. In every other context, we recognise it as a war crime. Why not here?

'Murder' is putting it lightly.

What else could they have done? I'm no military historian, but let's throw a few possibilities out there: 1) a land invasion; 2) a containment strategy; 3) a 'warning' atomic strike in an unpopulated area; 4) a peace treaty; 5) Slowly grinding out the Japanese over the course of a couple of years. All of those options could have achieved the same effect with far fewer casualties (though not necessarily fewer Allied casualties in all scenarios).

I'm sure you'll come back and explain why all of those options were impossible. Frankly, I don't buy it. They wanted to end the war with a decisive act of military strength. The civilian casualties were just collateral damage. They did not do enough to minimise loss of life, and when you're dealing with the lives of 100,000 people, that is unforgivable.

[Tannin]

They dropped a bomb on a city, David. During that war, various combatants dropped roughly 20,000,000 bombs on cities. Why are you pretending that this one is different?

[David]

Well, we both know why it's different. Most bombing campaigns were aimed at least partially at military targets or production centres. Bombs aimed purely at maximising civilian casualties are war crimes, of course. If they're not, then the term is meaningless.

[Tannin]

Excellent!

Let's look at your alternatives one by one:

• a land invasion Japanese civilian casualties, 10-20 times worse than the bombs cost. Plus some hundreds of thousands of extra Japanese military casualties. Plus some tens to hundreds of thousands of extra Allied military casualties - your grandfather quite possibly being one of them, or mine. Plus six to twelve months extension of the war and some uncountable number of civilian casualties in Japanese-occupied territories in the meantime. Remember, they averaged killing 10,000 civilians a day.
• a containment strategy. militarily very expensive. To contain you need ships and aircraft. That means high casualties on the part of Allied airmen and especially seamen - it only took one brainwashed Japanese fanatic in an aircraft stuffed full of explosive to kill a thousand sailors with a direct hit. Why would you ask your sailors to risk death and mutilation to save the very people who were putting them at that risk? And every day while the "containment" went on, people in the Japanese occupied territories were being slaughtered. For every two weeks wasted on "containment", we see the same number of deaths as both of the bombs caused put together. Oh, and to "contain" you absolutely must prevent a resurgence of the military capacity to resist, and the only way to do that is to keep on bombing every shipyard, every aircraft factory, every industrial centre - in other words, every major city. (I'm working my per-day death toll simply by dividing the war-long figure of Japanese atrocities by the number of days the war lasted, though this may result in an under-estimate as by this time the local Japanese commanders were growing desperate.)
• a 'warning' atomic strike in an unpopulated area That was considered at length prior to the Hiroshima bomb. As the minutes of those meetings make very clear (anyone can read them now, it's all been declassified), it was considered that a warning strike would simply be ignored by the fanatic military government, and we now know that this judgment was 100% correct. The Japanese military junta did ignore the warning strike (Hiroshima) completely even though it was deliberately centred over a largely untouched major city so as to make it as hard to ignore as possible, and it was only when the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki that someone (the Emperor, not the military government) finally acted. Bear it in mind that there was also a severe shortage of fissile material with which to make more bombs, and no immediate prospect of being able to drop any more if the warning shots were ignored. The Americans had enough uranium 235 to make exactly one bomb (this was used up over Hiroshima) and enough plutonium 239 to make exactly three bombs: they used up one in Nevada as a test to see if they would actually work, one over Nagasaki, and held just one more physics package in reserve. One. If that last one didn't stop the war, there were no more chances until 1946.
• a peace treaty the Allies offered peace again and again and again. The military fanatics in Japan knew that they had lost the war beyond all hope, but they refused over and over and over to even consider it, unless the "peace" was to be of such a nature as to constitute merely a pause for retraining and rearmament with the military government of Japan left intact to resume the fight under improved circumstances. This too is abundantly demonstrated by recorded evidence from both sides.
• Slowly grinding out the Japanese over the course of a couple of years. Hopeless idea combing the worst features of all those above. The cost in lives would have been enormous - worse even than #1. It was precisely to avoid this horror of all horrors that #1 was the original preferred strategy until the bomb technology came along to make it unnecessary.

In fact, David, none of those options could have achieved an end to the slaughter at anything like the relatively low cost in human life that the two bombs brought.

"I'm sure you'll come back and explain why all of those options were impossible. Frankly, I don't buy it." Sorry David. Frankly, you don't know what you are talking about. They made exactly the best available choice to minimise loss of life, and they did it for precisely that reason (read the minutes, this is all on the public record), and they weren't just "dealing with the lives of 100,000 people", they were dealing with the lives of (depending on which scenario you pick) anything up to three or four million people. If our current world leaders had one quarter of the humanity and wisdom those guys had (under vastly greater strain) in 1945, the world would be a much, much better place today.

[stui magpie]

They wanted to end the war with a decisive act of military strength.

No, they just wanted the war to end.

Well, we both know why it's different. Most bombing campaigns were aimed at least partially at military targets or production centres. Bombs aimed purely at maximising civilian casualties are war crimes, of course. If they're not, then the term is meaningless.

Really? You must have read some different things to me. Pretty sure the Luftwaffe bombing of London wasn't aimed at many military targets, nor the return bombing of Berlin by the RAAF.

Your idealism is nice but impractical. I have to agree with Tannin on this point, the yanks did what needed to be done. Remember, they took out one city and when they asked Japan to surrender got told to go jump. If they had of folded like a house of cards after one bomb you may be able to argue a point in post mortem that other options could have been tried. Surely the fact that they wanted to keep fighting after 2 bombs says something about the regime.

[Mugwump]

^ Exactly, Stui. The Americans behaved with graduation and responsibility, under the circumstances. They dropped one. Then they gave the Japanese a choice, which they declined. So they dropped another. There was no revenge-bombing, and the peace terms were not the enslavement that the Japanese military government offered to their conquered people, but a path to democracy and economic development.

I don't really think there was much moral difference between the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Perhaps the slow-killing after-effects of the atom bomb are morally distinct. It is still debated how much of that was known, at the time.

Civilian bombing was an accepted tactic of the total war that all nations enacted in WWII. Whether it was necessary or desirable is debatable, but I think it did lead to a remarkable period of stability post-War, as civilian populations came to understand what war meant, and turned away from the rabble-rousing militarism that characterised 1912-1914 and 1933-38. It probably also helped that people came to understand what an atomic bomb really meant. To that extent it was probably an evil that spawned good.

[Doc63]

So, once we strip out your rhetoric - and your absurdly incorrect use of the term "murder" for an act of war normal in all respects bar that it was towards the upper end of the magnitude scale - your argument is this:

"They could have done something else instead".

Right, Einstein. Money where your mouth is. Please have the goodness to say exactly what you think they could have done instead. I'll even make it easy for you: you can have the priceless benefit of full knowledge and 20-20 hindsight. Let's see you come up with something - anything - else they could have done which might possibly have saved lives.

First off, slaughtering civilians is not a valid act of war. In every other context, we recognise it as a war crime. Why not here?

'Murder' is putting it lightly.

What else could they have done? I'm no military historian, but let's throw a few possibilities out there: 1) a land invasion; 2) a containment strategy; 3) a 'warning' atomic strike in an unpopulated area; 4) a peace treaty; 5) Slowly grinding out the Japanese over the course of a couple of years. All of those options could have achieved the same effect with far fewer casualties (though not necessarily fewer Allied casualties in all scenarios).

I'm sure you'll come back and explain why all of those options were impossible. Frankly, I don't buy it. They wanted to end the war with a decisive act of military strength. The civilian casualties were just collateral damage. They did not do enough to minimise loss of life, and when you're dealing with the lives of 100,000 people, that is unforgivable.

If Japan had the bomb, what do you think they would have done with it, being the bastions of humanitarianism that ther were?

[HAL]

What subject would you like to talk about?