Hiroshima let, Nagasaki right.
I find all of the arguments that are used to support the use of atomic weapons against Japan to be unconvincing. For that matter, I find some of the counter arguments also unconvincing. At the end of the day, what convinces me is that it was a deliberate use of a weapon calculated to cause mass loss of life against civilians.
The United States went to war in 1917 as it was horrified by the German targeting of ships indiscriminately. But by the end of the First World War we seemed to have gotten over such things. The U.S. kept up attacks in November 1918 right until the last moment of the war, causing the loss of life and losing lives that didn't need to die with an Armistice about to take effect. Pershing made statements making it clear that his view was that killing Germans right up to the end was a laudable goal as they posed such a danger to peace. Some would argue that the events of 1939 to 1945 proved him right, but the reality of it is that those November 11, 1918 deaths, were just deaths. They didn't make the world any safer.
But what they do achieve is to demonstrate how the First World War had changed the view of western, and largely Christian, society. By 1918 we were used to the concept of death from above and below, and by means of chemical and fire. In the interwar years people worried, and frankly assumed, that a future war would mean airborne attacks upon cities. The Germans had in fact paved the way with this, as with so many other things, by shelling Parish with long range rail artillery. That had no tactical goal and the strategic one was terror.
By 1920 and throughout the 30s it was assumed that cities would be bombed in a future war and that came to be truly fairly early in World War Two. All sides kept to to targeting only military targets at first, but during the Battle of Britain the Germans began targeting cities, something they at first did accidentally but soon did intentionally. Ironically, that change in targets aided the British as it provided relief to industrial targets and served only to give the British people resolve.
The British retaliated with nighttime raids on Germany which were ostensibly aimed at industrial targets but nighttime accuracy was so bad that large scale civilian deaths were inevitable. When the United States entered the war it attacked targets in Europe during the day in order to be more accurate, but wide scale civilian deaths still occurred. Targeting civilians, however, was never the goal of the USAAF in Europe.
In the war against Japan it became one as the US grew frustrated with Japanese stalwart resistance to US advances and good sense. Japan's industrial base was minor compared to other combatants and ultimately the still controversial decision to fire bomb Japanese cities was made by the US with the intentional goal of making Japanese workers homeless. No home, no work, was the concept. Whatever the logical merits of that argument are, the results are inescapable Civilians were targeted in a way that would result in fiery death.
It is at that point, it seems to me, that we crossed into the clearly immoral. By the time that action was taken Japan's industry was already destroyed and we were acting to a degree in frustration. Even to the extent it wasn't, targeting people in their homes for death isn't a legitimate military action of any kind.
Nor is simply blasting a city into oblivion. No matter what Nagasaki and Hiroshima contained in the way of military targets, that was the goal. We thought that Japan simply wouldn't surrender and it was an attempt to teach them a lesson so they would. It seemed to work.
We know retrospectively that by August 1945 the Japanese were looking for a way out of the war, but we didn't know that then, and we still don't know if they would have found it. Even after the two atomic strikes some Japanese military figures were against surrender and the Japanese military was not above using force to get their way. They might not have surrendered.
And that might have meant a bloody campaign in Japan in 1946.
But, as horrific as it is to say, that would have been a military campaign, and a just one. It wouldn't have been a campaign against civilians with the idea of killing a lot of them in order to force our point.
And it wouldn't have left us with the legacy of being the only nation in the world to use an atomic bomb, and the only one to have used atomic bombs against cities.
That doesn't mean that most of our role in World War Two, and indeed the roles of the Allies in general, wasn't just. It was. And that doesn't take away the legacy of the servicemen who fought in the war. They deserve to be remembered. And it doesn't discount the fact that World War Two was so horrific that we can't even imagine a war like that today. It's simply beyond us.
Rather, it should remind us that in times of stress and strain, it's easy to forget our better selves. And later, it's easy to discount actions we've taken, if taken overall all in the context of a noble goal.
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