> Given those goals that they had, why would anyone expect them to behave 'ethically' or care about the side effects of their activity ?
Possibly, yes. An argument can be made that the atomic bombs dropped on Japan caused less overall loss of life than an invasion or prolonged conflict (even if heavily weighted to one side).
Wars are far more costly in human lives and suffering if neither side can get enough advantage to win and they become protracted.
There's also the question of how many large conflicts were prevented since the time the creation of atomic weapons because it was seen as too costly, or one side was vastly superior because of them.
This is a very complex topic, and regardless of what you think of it, those developing the weapons might have thought differently. When assessing the motivations and considerations of those people, using only your own assessment and moral calculus is insufficient.
What is your "yes" referring to? That was not a yes-no answer.
> An argument can be made that the atomic bombs dropped on Japan caused less overall loss of life than an invasion or prolonged conflict (even if heavily weighted to one side).
Not only completely weighted to one side, but consisting in its vast majority of civilians.
> There's also the question of how many large conflicts were prevented since the time the creation of atomic weapons because it was seen as too costly, or one side was vastly superior because of them.
There has been no "war to end all wars", in spite of hopeful predictions. We haven't had WW3, but "one side being vastly superior" has not prevented the US from being engaged near constantly in various wars since after WW2.
It is indeed a very complex topic, but questioning the ethics of those involved in the development of atomic weapons, especially given all we know about the way it was done, is a completely reasonable stance.
Given the most of the troops were conscripts, does this actually make much difference? When I read the WW1 war poets I find it hard to conclude that their deaths were any more justifiable than civilians who may have voted for or supported the governments directing the war efforts.
Yes. It's silly to distinguish civilian from military deaths without also distinguishing volunteer soldiers from effectively slaves. Civilians too are often largely responsible for wars their countries fight. Especially if they work directly for the war effort manufacturing arms or less directly supporting those who do. I suppose the further removed, the less blame, but also the greater numbers of slightly complicit people.
"When Okinawa was finally declared secure, the cost had been horrific. Some 150,000 Okinawans died, approximately one-third the island's population. An additional 10,000 Koreans, used by the Japanese military as slave labor, died as well. Of the 119,000 or so Japanese soldiers, as many as 112,000 were killed in the battle or forever sealed inside a collapsed cave or bunker. Aside from the human cost, most of the physical aspects of Okinawan culture were razed. Few buildings survived the 3 months fighting. Collectively, the defenders lost more dead than the Japanese suffered in the two atomic bombings combined. The United States lost 13,000 dead: almost 8,000 on the island and the remainder at sea; another 32,000 were wounded.
The loss of life on both sides, particularly among the Japanese civilians, caused immense worry in Washington. New President Harry Truman was looking at the plans for a proposed assault on the Japanese main islands, and the casualty projections were unacceptable. Projections numbered the potential casualties from 100,000 in the first 30 days to as many as 1 million attackers, and the death count for the Japanese civilians would be impossible to calculate. If they resisted as strongly as did the citizens of Okinawa -- and the inhabitants of the home islands would be even more dedicated to defending their homeland -- Japan would become a wasteland. It was already looking like one in many areas. The U.S. bombing campaign, in place since the previous September, was burning out huge areas of Japanese cities. How much longer the Japanese could have held out in the face of the fire bombing is a matter of much dispute; some project that, had the incendiary raids continued until November, the Japanese would have been thrown back to an almost Stone Age existence. The problem was this: no one in the west knew exactly what was happening in Japan. The devastation could be estimated, but the resistance could not.
Thus, with the casualties of the Okinawa battle fresh in his mind, when Truman learned of the successful testing of an atomic bomb, he ordered its use. This is a decision debated since 6 August 1945, the date of the bombing of Hiroshima, and even before. Just what was known of Japanese decision-making processes before that date is also argued to this day. Was the Japanese government in the process of formulating a peace offer, in spite of the demand for unconditional surrender the Allies had decided upon in February 1943? If they were doing so, did anyone in the west know about it? Who knew what, when they knew it, and what effect that knowledge had or may have had on Truman's decision making is a matter of much dispute. Whatever the political ramifications of the atomic bomb on the immediate and postwar world, Truman's decision was certainly based in no small part on the nature of the fighting on Okinawa. Truman wrote just after his decision, "We'll end the war sooner now. And think of the kids who wont be killed."
"The invasion of Okinawa is not at all comparable to a potential invasion of Japan. I won't address your main point. I'm posting to correct a grave misunderstanding about the relationship between Okinawa and Japan during this period. Okinawa is a distinct cultural entity, and the island was viewed by Japan as occupied territory. Japanese forces slaughtered Okinawans, going so far as to use them as human shields. Some Okinawans were ordered to kill themselves and their families to avoid the horrific fate that the Japanese promised at the hands of American troops. Others, including schoolchildren, were pressed into front-line service or sent on suicide missions. Others were simply murdered, whether for their food or supplies, out of paranoia to root out "spies" (those who made the grave mistake of speaking in Okinawan within earshot), or for entertainment. I'm not saying Americans didn't kill Okinawans too. What I'm saying is that the Japanese could not have cared less about the survival of Okinawa: the land, culture, or people.
While the Japanese were certainly willing to use civilians for tactical or strategic gain, one cannot assume that their military forces would have raped and pillaged their own populace in the same manner.
Nonetheless, you can see how a reasonable person could take the stance that developing the bomb was ethical. Being compared to mass murderers and such is just breathless posturing.
Truman's actions here must also be considered in light of the argument that he had been misled about the nature of the targets for the atomic bombings. From his diary in July 1945:
"This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new."
"He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful..."
Truman also ordered the immediate cessation of further atomic bombings without his explicit approval on August 10th (the military was planning to continue the bombings as further cores became available, which were being produced at the rate of a couple per month).
Dropping such bombs on cities cannot be said to be "purely military". Was Truman really not aware of the targets, or was he being dishonest in his diary?
According to the Wikipedia article [1], Truman was not in the Target Committee, but he was for instance approached about removing Kyoto from the list, so he was aware of the nature of the possible targets.
Thank you. It's highly disturbing that such decision could be made with the president not understanding what he is ordering, and not being presented with other options (the "demonstration" before directly bombing a city).
Radiolab actually touched on this during their Nukes special episode[1] recently. It's a fairly good accounting of the history of Nuclear weapons, from their place in our armament to public perception to how the law has changed around their use.
> Note that a persuasive counter-argument was posted by Floegipoky
It's worth mentioning that this is a useful rebuttal for the question of whether the reasons use of the bomb were valid, they don't matter for the justifications for the development of the bomb and whether the people involved thought it was ethical, because that's resolves purely around what they believed, whether based on correct information or not.
In the same way I can defend myself when I think I'm under attack and hurt a friend that was really just trying to scare me, I'm not acting unethically, I'm acting ethically but under bad information.
The counterpoint provided is interesting, but more important would be whether or not Truman had that information, and if he did, believed it to be reliable.
The original point is pretty much spot-on. By all accounts it appears that Truman did the calculus and came to the conclusion that an invasion would have cost far, far more lives. When judging a person for that decision making process, it is irrelevant (and I suspect you would agree with this) that a different conclusion might have or should have been arrived at if the information necessary to come to that different conclusion wasn't readily available or was of low reliability.
It's really easy to look back with 20/20 hindsight and see mistakes that were made. It's much harder to put yourself in the shoes of someone who did not have that kind of hindsight at the time.
I'm not judging the persons who made the decision. However, I do judge the people who justify such war crimes today.
There are people who to this day say that using the nukes was the right decision meaning that they would do it again given the opportunity. That to me is the tragedy.
If we believe this, we can no longer support non proliferation. In fact, we must actively support all nations to develop and stand by these weapons in such a way that they are capable of second strike. The world is worse off as a result.
I'm not saying whether Truman was a bad guy. He likely wasn't. However, we have the benefit of hindsight. We should know better than to say it was the right call.
"Right or wrong, my country" is stupid. Patriotism does not mean we support all the stupidity done in the name of my country.
That is the wrong question. Saving millions of lives to thrust billions into the era of the atom bomb. Now don't you tell me that Russia would have done it anyway because of course but then we could blame Russia for it.
We don't counter and say well someone would have come up with Bohr Model if Bohr wasn't born so why do we insist that Russia would have used the first atom bomb if we had not?
Hmm, the question was never who thrust us into the atomic age, it was whether you'd allow millions of people to die (mostly Japanese) in order not to use the bomb?
The Japanese were ready and willing to surrender before the bombs dropped - and they knew the war was lost as soon as the Soviet Union betrayed its neutrality treaty.
What they were not ready for, was an unconditional surrender. (And, in the end, they surrendered conditionally! The entire sticking point turned out to be moot.)
Truman and his advisers have deliberately pushed a false dichotomy of "Drop the bomb - and then drop a second bomb", versus "Invade the Home Islands." [1]
The reality was that there was a third option available to the US - a conditional Japanese surrender. It chose to commit a war crime for political, not humanitarian reasons - and it never seriously entertained the alternative. Once it had the bomb - the debate was not whether it was going to use it, but where.
"At the very least, waiting more than three days after Hiroshima might have been humane. Three days was barely enough time for the Japanese high command to verify that the weapon used was a nuclear bomb, much less assess its impact and make strategic sense of it. Doing so may have avoided the need for the second bombing run altogether."
"Two months before Hiroshima, scientists at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, one of the key Manhattan Project facilities, authored a report arguing that the first use of an atomic bomb should not be on an inhabited city"
"But the initial target for the bomb, discussed in 1943 (long before it was ready) was the island of Truk (now called Chuuk), an ostensibly purely military target, the Japanese equivalent of Pearl Harbor."
"And, in fact, we do now know that the Soviet invasion may have weighed as heavily on the Japanese high command as did the atomic bombings, if not more so. So why didn’t Truman wait? The official reason given after the fact was that any delay whatsoever would be interpreted as wasting time, and American lives, once the atomic bomb was available. But it may also have been because Truman, and especially his Secretary of State, Byrnes, may have hoped that the war might have ended before the Soviets had entered."
>...The Japanese were ready and willing to surrender before the bombs dropped
Some factions in the Japanese civilian government were willing to surrender with varying amounts of conditions. That doesn’t mean the “Japanese” were willing to surrender nor does it mean that these conditions would have been acceptable to the Allies.
Even after 2 atomic bombs were dropped there was an attempted military coup to prevent the Emperor from surrendering.
>...What they were not ready for, was an unconditional surrender. (And, in the end, they surrendered conditionally!
The japanese were willing to surrender before the bomb, if allowed to keep all of the territories they had conquered. That's a far cry from the conditions we got or deserved.
> What is your "yes" referring to? That was not a yes-no answer.
I misread it as "Would anyone" instead of "Why would anyone".
> Not only completely weighted to one side, but consisting in its vast majority of civilians.
That's nothing new with atomic weapons. There was massive firebombing of Japanese cities prior to the nuclear attack.
From January 1944 until August 1945, the U.S. dropped 157,000 tons of bombs on Japanese cities, according to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. It estimated that 333,000 people were killed, including the 80,000 killed in the Aug. 6 Hiroshima atomic bomb attack and 40,000 in Nagasaki three days later.[1]
That puts the loss of life from the atomic attacks at just over a third of the total loss of life from bombing. The question is how long would the Japanese have decided to prolong the war before losing (or winning, given some unforeseen circumstance) and would more or less people have died before that point. A show of overwhelming force, with the promise of more to come, can go a long way towards stopping hostilities very quickly.
> There has been no "war to end all wars", in spite of hopeful predictions. We haven't had WW3, but "one side being vastly superior" has not prevented the US from being engaged near constantly in various wars since after WW2.
Total loss of life in WW1 is estimated to be around 18 million people (11 million military, 7 million civilian).[2]
Total loss of life in WW2 is estimated to be between 50 million and 80 million.[3]
Any conflict since WW2 hsa been miniscule in comparison. Total casualties in Vietnam are estimated to be below 1.5 million over almost an entire decade.[4]
I would say that we are very lucky there hasn't been a WW3. It likely would have casualties in the hundreds of millions.
> It is indeed a very complex topic, but questioning the ethics of those involved in the development of atomic weapons, especially given all we know about the way it was done, is a completely reasonable stance.
I didn't take the original statement as much of a "question" of ethics, as an assumption that none of them could be expected to act ethically ("why would anyone expect them to behave 'ethically'" is the specific wording) because of the nature of the work. I think it's likely that some of them thought they were working for the greater good, and we cannot assume a failure of ethics in all cases.
Yes, the casualties in WW2 were much higher than those in subsequent conflicts. However, thus turn of events would have been completely unpredictable to the first nuclear scientists. If you look back to the writings and newspaper clippings of the day, society took it for granted that there would be a WW3.
In fact, in the years that followed WW2, even the idea of launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike was not beyond the pale. One of my favorite quotes from John von Neumann: "If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
My argument is that superior military capability (whether through technology or through numbers) may prevent military conflict. This is not a new concept, and would not have been foreign to anyone at the time. It's how European colonization worked. They swept in a proved (or presented) themselves as capable of decimating the countries in question, and subjugated them. Sometimes with relatively little violence, sometimes with a lot.
When in the middle of a war, new technology that might actually end that war, which to that point killed more people than any other recorded war, could be seen as some as a positive. Even if WW3 is assumed, making sure you have the capability to end it quickly and decisively can be seen as ethical, given the alternative they were actively living in.
In the end this discussion is about whether the people involved in the development of atomic weapons could have through they were acting ethically (that's what I was responding to originally). Regardless of what we think of the actual outcome, all these decades later, I think they could have believed they were acting ethically at the time.
That quote might be true, but the only direct reference to it is from a LIFE magazine obituary that does not refer to any source for the quote.
von Neuman also invented "Mutual Assured Destruction" and (correctly) believed the Soviets had more advanced weapons, so it's strange that he honestly advocated attacking Russia.
Well, depending on context, that quote can be taken as advocating for bombing the Russians, or it can be taken as forcing the issue to the point where someone that advocated for leaving the option to do later needed fully justify the reasons for doing so right now or accept that conditions must change before you can consider that action. A sort of "put up or shut up", if you will. I'm sure people existed that wanted to do just that, bomb the Russians preemptively right then, but forcing them to play their hand exposes them, and lets those more conservative see them for what they are.
Also IIRC General Douglas MacArthur wanted to use 30-50 atomic bombs along manchuria during the korean war, he claimed that it would have resulted in a sort border of radiation for 60 years and would prevent any invasion of korea from the north
Increased population and increased industrialization of more countries. Another World War, were it to happen, might pull in more countries that could capably contribute than in the prior wars. Additionally, industrialization is often accompanied by urbanization, which puts people at greater risk as those urban centers are attacked. Tokyo has almost 38 million people in it. That's one city. As I showed above, firebombing killed more people than atomic bombs in WW2, so I don't see any reason there wouldn't be enormous casualties in another World War.
People braid ideas and emotions together to arrive at unsolvable hairballs like the one you're describing (which my rational self totally understands) - while the genie (monster) is out of the bottle, in the closet, getting bored..
When outside 'truth' is incomprehensible, the answer lies 'inside'..
And then it becomes much simpler (not necessarily easier) - the problem is not how to fix the outside world, but a binary 'good' or 'bad' on a fundamental, basic level: is it out of love or fear and which side do I stand on ?
Start building from that and then all that 'strategic' narrative presents itself as stories told by generations of people scared shitless of other similarly scared people on the other side of the planet.
I guess I'm just one of those naive enough to think that wars cannot happen without soldiers and weapons...
The main reason for my response was because of my interpretation of "Given those goals that they had, why would anyone expect them to behave 'ethically' or care about the side effects of their activity ?" which I took as implying anyone that developed if must have been ethically bankrupt. I don't think we can know for sure the goals of the individual people involved in most cases, and we may be somewhat off often about the goals of the organization the worked for as well.
I for one fully believe many of the people involved thought they were doing the right thing. They performed some ethical calculus that let them believe that the development of the weapon they worked on would end up being a net positive. If not by nature of its existence, then by assuming that it would exist and they thought they were better stewards for it than others.
People's ethical decisions are not absolute, they are based on the beliefs and information of the people at the time the decisions were made. Portraying them as different than us in that they do not have the same ethical standards is very dangerous in my eyes. It's tempting to say there is no way we would make the same decisions in the same situation with the same information, but I'm not sure sure.
It's the same reason I think it's very dangerous to put the Nazis on a pedestal as absolute evil. That abstracts away the possibility that it could happen again and that we need to be vigilant for it. By making them "other" than us we assume we could not do the same thing. If we assume the past can't happen again just because we are different than they were, we've learned nothing, because we are no different.
Totally agree with you, especially about the Nazis.
I've tried to explain my method for making ethical choices - remove rationality, remove 'what's good for others - country, nation, etc', remove 'circumstance and context' and think of it at the lowest, absolute level. Take that as primary truth.
In other words, listen to heart more than to the mind.
I've decided that I would choose my own death (physical, professional, etc) rather than do something which my heart tells is very wrong (eg. kill others, cause suffering or pain, participate in wars, etc).
I hope life will not put me to this test, but if it does, well, at least I have a plan.. Death (physical or not) is always a choice and sometimes it is the only solution to a moral problem, and it is always available.
Apart from the stoics, Leo Tolstoy's philosophical works have strongly influenced me and I wholeheartedly recommend reading his later books. Those ideas are powerful tools to have in your mental arsenal.
Possibly, yes. An argument can be made that the atomic bombs dropped on Japan caused less overall loss of life than an invasion or prolonged conflict (even if heavily weighted to one side).
Wars are far more costly in human lives and suffering if neither side can get enough advantage to win and they become protracted.
There's also the question of how many large conflicts were prevented since the time the creation of atomic weapons because it was seen as too costly, or one side was vastly superior because of them.
This is a very complex topic, and regardless of what you think of it, those developing the weapons might have thought differently. When assessing the motivations and considerations of those people, using only your own assessment and moral calculus is insufficient.