Should We Have Done It?

I saw the movie Oppenheimer the other night and, reflecting on it on the way home, thought that perhaps the film had been a bit over-hyped. The acting was indeed superb and the recreation of the 1945-era, particularly Los Alamos, was very well done, but the story moved too fast, the welter of characters would've been confusing for someone unfamiliar with the details of the Manhattan Project as well as the post-war political situation, and the sex scenes were insultingly gratutitous.

I also thought the film could've done a better job of explaining how a fission bomb works as well as the difference between a fission bomb and the fusion bomb that Edwin Teller wanted the Project to work on.

In any case, the movie did raise the moral concerns that many of those, including Oppenheimer, working on the bomb had, concerns that for some graded into actual anguish.

Should we have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is it ever justifiable to deliberately target civilians in wartime? Was the use of such a destructive weapon immoral?

Having recently read James M. Scott's excellent account of the firebombing campaign against Japanese cities (Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb) it seemed to me that much of the controversy over the use of the "atomic bomb" was a bit odd.

After all, in terms of the human toll and the ruination of cities, the only difference between using the nuclear weapon and employing incendiary bombs was that the atomic bomb was much more efficient. It took just one bomb and one bomber to accomplish what thousands of incendiary bombs, hundreds of bombers and thousands of aviators wrought on Tokyo on March 10, 1945 and subsequently on 65 other Japanese cities in the months leading up to the August 6th attack on Hiroshima.

In the attack on Tokyo alone between 80,000 to 130,000 civilians perished in the conflagration. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined between 129,000 and 226,000 people died from the blasts. The question, then, is whether the intentional immolation of civilians with any weapon, conventional or nuclear, was morally justified.

In a column at National Review Rich Lowry focuses on the Hiroshima attack, but what he writes applies with equal relevance to the incendiary bombing campaign that preceded it. He argues that use of the atomic weapon was in fact the "right call."

The war was reaping a terrible harvest of human life. The Japanese atrocities against both American POWs and Chinese civilians were horrific. An estimated 2000 civilians were dying every day in Asia, largely from Japanese cruelties. The assaults on islands like Iwo Jima and Okinawa cost thousands of young Americans and tens of thousands of Japanese their lives.

An invasion of Japan was thought by some war planners to be necessary to end the war and such an invasion was projected to produce up to a million American casualties and even more among the Japanese.

Lowry writes:

Whatever the number of American dead would have been — and perhaps there would have been no invasion after all if the projected costs were too high — there can be no doubt that Truman’s decision to drop the bomb saved American lives, whether it was 5,000, or 50,000, or 500,000.

Since, as the leader of the United States, that was his first responsibility, this alone should create a strong presumption toward dropping the bombs being the right call.

The awful truth is that the atom bombs weren’t that different in kind from the incendiary raids already undertaken by Curtis LeMay. Those raids didn’t come out of nowhere. The precision attacks of LeMay’s predecessor, Haywood Hansell, simply didn’t work. As Richard Rhodes notes in his classic The Making of the Atomic Bomb, “in three months of hard flying, taking regular losses, Hansell had managed to destroy none of his nine high-priority targets.”

LeMay took over and worked the problem, revamping tactics and training, and settled on low-altitude firebombing.

The new approach proved hellishly effective. The raid on Tokyo in March 1945 killed more than 100,000 people and injured a million. A U.S. bombing survey said, in an arresting formulation, “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than any time in the history of man.”

LeMay kept going and at one point literally ran out of bombs. The justification for the campaign — that dispersed home industries made a significant contribution to Japan’s industrial effort — wasn’t wrong, although the bombing ranged much more widely.

According to James M. Scott in his recent book, Black Snow, LeMay’s bombers burned down more than 178 square miles of 66 Japanese cities, or an average of 43 percent of the area of the targeted cities.

“Along with home industries,” Scott continues, “America had damaged or destroyed six hundred factories, including twenty-five major aircraft plants, eighteen oil refineries and storage facilities, and six major arsenals.” Significant Japanese voices said after the war that the firebombing was an enormous and consequential blow to Japanese morale.

There’s really no moral case against the atom bombs that doesn’t also apply to the firebombing. So if both of these tactics were to be left off the table, what would remain?

Indeed, were there more moral alternatives to an invasion of the mainland? Lowry continues:

There was a blockade. Less spectacularly than the B-29s, U.S. submarines kneecapped the Japanese economy through their attacks on Japanese shipping. The U.S. was tightening the noose.

Already in 1945, Japan was looking down the barrel of mass starvation, with daily caloric intake constantly dwindling. A Japanese historian has noted that, “immediately after the defeat, some estimated that 10 million people were likely to starve to death.”

The new U.S. bombing campaign near the end of the war was going to go after the Japanese rail system, which would have made the situation immediately more dire. (The mining of Japan’s home waters to hamper shipping further was called, not subtly, Operation Starvation.)

The problem, obviously, with starving a country out is that lots of people are going to die. There are no fireballs, but there is incredible privation and death by the hundreds of thousands or millions all the same.

“Aerial bombardment inflicted,” [historian Richard Frank] writes, “civilian deaths in Japan measured in hundreds of thousands, but the direct and indirect effects of the blockade in China killed noncombatants by the millions, and the blockade against Japan aimed for the same ghastly results.”

Frank points out that there was a reason that, as recently as World War I, blockades were considered unethical, because they didn’t distinguish between civilians and troops.

The Soviets were about to declare war on Japan so maybe we should have let them invade, but it's hard to see how the Japanese would've fared better under Stalin's iron fist than under the American post-war reconstruction.

At any rate, if you're interested in this topic I encourage you to read Lowry's column. As we approach the anniversary of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6th and 9th, 1945) there'll probably be a lot in the news about the morality of what the United States did seventy eight years ago.