On Substack, Nigel Biggar discusses the postwar argument about whether the use of nuclear weapons against Japan was justified or not:
Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, taken from “Enola Gay” flying over Matsuyama, Shikoku, 6 August, 1945.
US Army Air Force photo via Wikimedia Commons.
For pacifists, Christian or otherwise, the answer is clear: since any deliberate killing is wrong, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 was wrong about two hundred thousand times over.
But that clear answer generates further questions whose answers aren’t so obvious. If killing is always wrong, then the United States should never have gone to war against Imperial Japan and therefore its ally, Hitler’s Germany. What, then, would have stopped the triumph of brutally racist Japanese imperialism in Asia and massively murderous Nazism in Europe? The noble witness of innocent non-violence?
Unfortunately, the historical evidence is that the kind of people who ran the slave-labour camps in Burma, and the likes of Dachau in Germany and Auschwitz in Poland, were not at all shamed by the face of vulnerable innocence; on the contrary, it excited their lust for domination and they fed upon it.
On the other hand, those who think that war can sometimes be justified, might judge that the mass killing of civilians by the atomic bombs was, simply by its massive extent, indiscriminate and therefore unjust. But there are two problems here. The first is that the vast majority of people, certainly in the UK and the USA, regard the war against Hitler and his allies as morally justified, notwithstanding the fact that that cost between 60 and 80 million deaths, well over half of them civilian.
Image credit – Wikipedia
And the second problem is that the ethical tradition of “just war” thinking doesn’t say that we may not kill civilians, even on a massive scale; it only says that we may not kill them intentionally. If a military objective can’t be achieved except by risking the possible or probable deaths of civilians, then it may still be attempted, provided that the objective is sufficiently important, militarily, and that all reasonable measures are taken to avoid or minimise the side-effect of civilian casualties. The reason for this permissiveness is that in most circumstances just war would be impossible to prosecute otherwise.
So, for the “just war” proponent, if the intention in dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was to destroy vital military or military-related targets, and if there was no more discriminate way of achieving that end, then the bombing was morally justified. It was deeply, deeply tragic—but nevertheless just.
