The ethics of Hiroshima

[1061]

This is yet another classic David thread splitting example.

I did not start this.

[David]

So goes the orthodoxy. I reckon it's bullshit.

[think positive]

Really? Seriously?

Wow, just wow

[Wokko]

I knew that would come up, I also expected the holocaust.

The 2 atomic bombs were dropped to prevent Russian victory over Japan. The Russians launched a MASSIVE assault on Japanese territory towards the end of the war and the Western Allies had already lost the race to Berlin. They certainly didn't want a race towards Tokyo. Also those bombs where part of WW2, a conflict that certainly took more lives than it saved, but probably (possibly?) prevented humanity living under slavery for centuries (Communist, Fascist... Potato, Potatoe).

War is often necessary, but I believe at least literally David is right that not too many (if any) wars would save more lives than they take.

[think positive]

That's a cop out, that not the way he meant it

Nobody wants war, but sometimes, there is no option.

And I will never sit back and watch members of the armed forces doing their jobs, belittled like that

And by the way, go back a few years, have a look at previous threads on the houlacaust.

[Wokko]

Don't get me wrong, I'm conceding the literal point, not the substance of the argument.

Lives saved/lives lost is not a metric to judge the 'just' nature of a war and generally war will cost more lives than not going to war, but the cost of not going to war can sometimes be much, much higher.

[David]

I agree with that in theory, Wokko—I too was arguing the literal point. But even in cases of 'necessary' wars (and let's remember that the original subject of this thread was most certainly not fighting in one), every killing is a tragedy and an atrocity.

That may seem paradoxical, but think of it this way: even if I were to accept the allied propaganda on Hiroshima—that it was an unavoidable act that saved many more lives than it cost—I still don't understand how anyone could ever see it as anything less than a war crime. So, an atrocity might sometimes conceivably be the least worst option, but it's still an atrocity.

[Mugwump]

^ is it more of an atrocity than Dresden, Coventry ? Is scale really a differentiator, or technology ?

[Tannin]

[1061]

[Tannin]

Here we go -


The Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks had strong moral justification in the eyes of those planning them before the event.

Japan was beaten, but it would not lie down. The Allies could not just stop fighting because the fanatics running Japan's military dictatorship would not accept peace - they were fighting on regardless of all events. This is not my interpretation, it is historical fact - there is a massive pile of evidence there, and very little of it is disputed by anyone. The Japanese military were willing and able to carry on last-man-standing defence tactics from absurdly hopeless military positions. Even though the war was lost, they insisted on doing anything and everything within their power to kill and maim as many Allied servicemen and occupied-territory civilians as possible. They did this over and over and over, in New Guinea, in the Phillipines, on Okinawa, in Burma ..... everywhere the forces were in contact.

The death toll was truly horrifying. Remember, we are not talking the "normal" horror of war here, the war was over, Japan had lost and everybody on both sides knew it, we are talking extra deaths, thousands upon thousands of them, and for no purpose whatsoever. Every day the war went on Americans and Australians and Indians and New Zealanders and Chinese and many others were getting slaughtered. With every Allied advance, despite the overwhelming military superiority and greater numbers of the Allied forces, the Japanese inflicted a truly enormous death toll, and killed even larger numbers of their own troops and vast numbers of civilians too.

The Allied planners carefully considered the ethics of the atom bomb attacks. We know this as the original meeting records are now declassified. There were two key questions:

1: is there any chance that the shock and awe of an atom bomb attack could stun the Japanese leadership into seeing reason?

2: if so, how many lives would that save overall (compared to the planned and indeed inevitable only alternative, the invasion of Japan itself)?

The Allied planners decided, in the end, that the risk was worth it.

History has shown that they were without question right. The combined Hiroshma-Nagasaki death toll is a small fraction of the death toll we would have seen from an even longer war. Many, many thousands of Allied soldiers were still alive in 1946 because of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki raids. That is the key judgment the Americans made - it would save a huge number of Allied lives, both combatants and civilians. But it turns out that the bombs also saved a great many Japanese lives - the number killed by the bombs was smaller than the number who unquestionably would have been killed during the long, brutal, bloody last-man-standing defence of the home islands which was inevitable otherwise.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs worked exactly as planned: they delivered a massive shock to the Japanese government and resulted in the Emperor taking action to make peace. The military government almost succeeded in a plot to capture the Emperor and derail his orders to make peace, but were foiled at the last moment. The Emperor - who had aquiesed to the war in the first place - was the only man with the power to stop it, and he did.

In short, history has shown that the decision to drop those bombs was a wise one that saved many, many lives.

- Two and a half years ago I posted that, and you apparently read it, but seem to have completely failed to understand. This isn't rocket science, nor are the facts under any reasonable dispute. I admire your idealism, David, and mostly agree with you, but your really need to be prepared to let the facts overrule your determination to believe what you believe - otherwise you are no better than those nutters who deny climate change or accept every word of some ancient holy book as exact and scientific history.

[Tannin]

[David]

Yes, I have read your posts on this before, Tannin, and the fact remains that your argument is pure conjecture. Highly-educated and well-researched conjecture, of course, but conjecture nonetheless. You cannot possibly know what other options might have been successfully employed to end the war with Japan, or exactly how many fatalities would have been caused by the employment of each option. As I've argued with people defending the bombings in Gaza, we are never faced with simple binaries in life. There are many choices beyond "kill or be killed".

Now, I'm not necessarily saying that if I had been President of the US in the final days of World War 2 with the knowledge he had, I wouldn't have made the same decision. I'm sceptical, but perhaps it did genuinely seem the most humanitarian option. Regardless, the point I made above stands: it was still a war crime. Perhaps the most humanitarian way of ending World War 2 was through a war crime, but it was still a war crime. How could the slaughter of 100,000 innocent civilians ever be anything but?

[Mugwump]

[David]

This is exactly what I mean by war and doublethink: that a conscious decision to slaughter 100,000 innocents as a means to an end can be described as 'morally impressive' because they didn't cause even more unnecessary deaths. What strength of character, not to thoughtlessly inflict unimaginable suffering and trauma on another few civilian populations!

Rather than "morally impressive", I think the phrase you're looking for is "suggests they may not have been complete psychopaths".