November 4, 2007
Paul Tibbets IV Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:20 PM EST I posted on Paul Tibbets and Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons before reading Alexander Burns’s post on the same topic. Mr. Burns writes that “part of the reason why the President’s call was so difficult was because he did have choices, both politically and morally. It’s easy to frame the debate over Hiroshima in binary terms—should Truman have used nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or left them unused altogether? These, however, were not the only options available to the man in the Oval Office. He could have chosen other targets, or issued a warning first, or not dropped the second bomb, or taken any number of alternative courses. I’m not saying America, or the world, would be better off today if Truman had done so. But if one wants to make an effective assessment of the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it makes sense to consider the full range of Truman’s options, and the painful degree of freedom he actually had.” I think much of this is true, and wisely said. Truman had choices other than using both bombs or using neither. What about the choices Mr. Burns mentions? If Truman had attacked Hiroshima but waited longer before attacking Nagasaki, he would still have used a nuclear weapon against a civilian population, and I don’t think he would have escaped much if any of the opprobrium he has since suffered (and Tibbets, who attacked only Hiroshima, would presumably be the object of the same amount of vituperation he has suffered in history as it did happen). Attacking a city with a nuclear weapon is sometimes said to violate one of the principles of just-war theory: It is necessarily indiscriminate. Hiroshima had significant war industry, and there were military camps located nearby, including Field Marshal Shunroku Hata’s 2nd General Army Headquarters, which was responsible for the defense of southern Japan. Hiroshima was also a communications center, storage point, and assembly area for troops. Conventional bombers attacking these targets would have killed a lot of civilians—at least one conventional air raid (the attack on Tokyo on March 9, 1945) killed more people than died in the attack on Hiroshima. But if sufficient restrictions had been made on their use, conventional bombers attacking those legitimate targets in and around Hiroshima would not have killed as many civilians as a nuclear weapon had to kill when used against a city. Another criterion used to judge a military act under just war theory is proportionality: The force used must be proportional to the wrong endured and to the possible good that may come. An earlier end to the war in the Pacific, compared with the costs of later endings, may meet the criterion of proportionality, as my previous post suggested. In any case, I have never met anyone, or read anyone, who seemed prepared to justify Hiroshima, and do so sincerely, but was enraged by the odiousness of attacking Nagasaki. What about a warning that we were about to use a nuclear weapon? The book I linked to in my previous posts argues, I think persuasively, that a warning would have been a good idea but would almost certainly not have affected Japanese decisions. That means that a warning would have been prudent in forestalling accusations of American criminality but in all likelihood would have saved no civilian lives. So while I have never heard a good argument against issuing a warning, I think that conclusion, if you accept it, somewhat lowers the moral stakes when we assess that particular alternative. What about choosing other targets? A demonstration shot, with one of the only two weapons we had, might have significantly reduced the probability of bringing the war to the earliest possible conclusion. Effective use of one of the two weapons, on the other hand, almost certainly risked the charge of a criminal lack of discrimination. So while I agree that Truman had many choices, I am not sure he had many if any prudent choices that would have spared a Japanese city and its civilian population.
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