On the 65th anniversary of the second and last time a nuclear weapon was used in warfare, we would do well to remind ourselves of the criteria traditionally used in evaluating whether or not a given conflict conforms to the principles of just warfare. These principles are generally divided into ad bellum (whether the war itself is just) and in bello (the just conduct of war) categories. They were developed over many centuries by a number of philosophers and theologians, including Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suarez, and Hugo Grotius. They are accepted by the major branches of Christianity, including Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed.
A. Ad bellum principles:
1. The cause must be justified.
2. The intention must be right.
3. The war must be waged by a competent authority.
4. The war must have a reasonable probability of success.
5. It must be fought only as a last resort.
B. In bello principles:
1. Non-combatants, neutrals and third parties cannot be harmed.
2. Existing laws and treaties, e.g., the Geneva Conventions, must be honoured.
3. The means must be proportionate to the goals.
4. The enemy must know the terms on which peace can be achieved.
5. The goal must be the return of the aggressor to a rightful place among the nations, not its extermination or subjugation.
It perhaps ought to be emphasized that, in just war theory, the primary agent responsible for determining the justice of a contemplated military action is the duly constituted political authority itself, in much the same way that a judge or jury are responsible to determine the guilt or innocence of a defendant on trial. The role played by individual citizens in either of these is necessarily secondary, in part because of the lack of sufficient information available to those not occupying such authoritative offices. In short, we citizens may come to a preliminary assessment, but of necessity such assessment lacks the certainty we might wish for, as well as an authoritative character.
Nevertheless, today’s anniversary provides an occasion to ask a question that, to my knowledge, American Christians have been reluctant to address directly. Given the recent revival of interest in the just war tradition, along with the renewed focus on natural law theories among both Catholics and protestants, how would proponents assess the two bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, given that the latter targeted defenceless civilian populations and failed to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants? Did they violate the in bello principle of civilian immunity? Could they thus be labelled terrorist acts?
August 9th, 2010 | 1:17 pm | #1
[...] question of nuclear weapons is a complex one, that involves distinctions between ius ad bellum and ius in bello, strategic and tactical nuclear devices, and combatants and non-combatants. Kishore Jayabalan has [...]
August 9th, 2010 | 1:41 pm | #2
I believe the decision for the bomb was made in light of our experience and knowledge of the Japanese. They preferred death to surrender. In one Pacific battle, the US lost 1,000 men and the Japanese lost 25,000. Only a couple of hundred Japanese surrendered.
We know that the Japanese civilians were being prepared to fight. They would fight, die, or commit suicide before surrender. The Japanese effectively turned their entire population into combatants if an invasion were to occur.
How do you deal with an enemy that turns its entire population into combatants and apparently has no regard for their own civilians’ lives? An invasion force would be walking into a meat grinder. And an invasion force was standing at the ready when Truman made the decision.
The fact that it took *two* bombs is more evidence that nuclear weapons were required to end the war with Japan. They would not surrender after the first bomb even with thousands already dead.
Of course there were innocent casualties, but the bombs saved hundreds of thousands of lives–both Japanese and US.
August 9th, 2010 | 2:09 pm | #3
Pres. Truman was advised that an invasion of the Japan mainland would cause about a million American casualties and Two Million Japanese deaths. Japan surrendered shortly after dropping a weapon on Nagasaki.
Presidents are required to make terrible decisions in wartime.
August 9th, 2010 | 3:19 pm | #4
I agree with those 2 arguments I think.
However, there is this to think about. Is it right to sacrifice non-combatants so that soldiers would not die?
Yes, the bombs may have saved a millions US soldiers and twice that in Japanese soldiers. But what of the civilians. What of the children? How many of those would have died in an invasion?
I’m not saying it’s easy. Actually I think it’s far easier to say “Yes, the bomb save lives, it’s a good thing it was dropped.” or “War is bad, death is bad, bomb was bad.”
Are soldiers and civilians a 1:1 in war?
I don’t think so. Soldier kill and die, so civilians won’t have to.
I still lean heavily toward the rightness of that evil decision, and can’t imagine the difficulty it must have (or should have) given to the deciders.
August 9th, 2010 | 8:23 pm | #5
Please note that I am not asking what you would have done if you were in Truman’s place. Yes, the decision was a difficult one that involved a rather deadly form of cost-benefit analysis. I honestly don’t know what I would have done had I been in Truman’s position.
Nevertheless, my questions still stand: Did the bombings violate the principle of civilian immunity? and Were they acts of terrorism? This can also be asked of the firebombings of Dresden, Hamburg and, needless to say, London and Coventry by the Germans.
August 9th, 2010 | 11:17 pm | #6
Why do we assume that the people living in Japan should automatically be classified as “non-combatants” or neutral? Isn’t the consensus that the large swaths of the general population would have fought to the death against an invading army? I’m not sure that meets the definition of non-combatant, at least not the one I would use.
August 10th, 2010 | 8:46 am | #7
Dear David Koyzis: To answer your question directly: Yes, it was a violation of natural law and just war principles.
This is not just my opinion. J. Budziszewski, one of the more prolific and clear writers on natural law matters, agrees.
Now, what I would have done myself were I in the President’s position, I don’t know. I might have made the same decision. But the fact remains that a civilian population was deliberately targeted, as a civilian population. If the Japanese had dropped atomic bombs on, say, Oxford or Paris, I don’t think we would be having the conversation on whether or not the bombings were justified.
August 10th, 2010 | 9:32 am | #8
Agreed, Craig.
I know personally of people who were involved in the resistance movements in Europe during the war, and they were faced with a similar issue: they were not uniformed soldiers and they necessarily hid themselves amongst civilians. They would commit such acts as blowing up railways to prevent the Germans from transporting soldiers and weapons to the front and even Jews to the death camps.
These resistance fighters were endangering civilian lives and, by pretending to be civilians, were not exactly playing fair according to the rules of just war. Nevertheless, they did what they believed had to be done under the circumstances. Had any of us been in their shoes, it’s difficult to say what we would have done.
August 10th, 2010 | 5:47 pm | #9
It was the US experience in Okinawa that led military leaders to counsel Truman to use the bombs on Japan proper. US casualties on Okinawa were incredibly high, especially the ratio of wounded to killed,. And Okinawa was not considered by the Japanese to be a true part of Japan but more as a possession. The Japanese Army there essentially fought to the last man. Civilians fought against the invaders. There were mass civilian suicides rather than surrender to US troops. The estimates of casualties of the Japanese mainland were TWO million killed and wounded for US troops and ten million casualties at the very least on the Japanese side. When faced with such a bleak reality, Truman made the only decision he could in good conscience make: drop the bombs. A side note: at the summit meeting in Potsdam between Churchill, Stalin, and Truman following the German surrender, Truman approached Stalin and informed him that the US had developed a weapon that could cause almost unlimited catastrophe. Stalin knew all about Alamagordo and the first test bomb from the Soviet spy at the site Klaus Fuchs. Stalin’s reply to Truman was direct and to the point—Good. Use it on the Japanese. One has to remember that even though Japan did surrender they still had some two million men under arms in Manchuria—blooded, experienced soldiers ready for the US or the USSR, whoever wanted to take them on. The US dropped the bombs and through a back channel in Switzerland let the Japanese keep their Emperor but still kept the demand for unconditional surrender, which they received.
August 10th, 2010 | 9:01 pm | #10
Just to make clear what I previously posted, I do not believe it violated just war principles or was a terrorist act. The emperor turned the population into combatants. Obviously the very young, very old, and sick were not combatants, but there was no way to separate them from the rest of the population which would fight and either die or commit suicide rather than surrender.
The emperor turned the entire population into combatants so the just war principle forbidding the deliberate attack of non-combatants would not apply. There were very few non-combatants and it was impossible to separate them from the combatants.
Also, if memory serves me, I believe the US dropped leaflets the day before the bombings, and told the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasakie what was going to happen. And the leaflets suggested they leave the city immediately. Generally, terrorists (or any enemy) seeking to specifically target non-combatants don’t tell them when and where an attack will take place and how they can avoid it.
August 10th, 2010 | 10:21 pm | #11
“Stalin’s reply to Truman was direct and to the point—Good. Use it on the Japanese.”
Well, at least it’s good that Truman got sound moral counsel from someone.
This is the first I’ve heard (not that I’m a history buff, anyway) of the “leaflets” thing. Where’s that from?
August 10th, 2010 | 10:25 pm | #12
The answers I’ve seen so far smack of sophistry. Anyone can do that: The Valkyries attack my hometown in Iowa. Well, the people in my hometown would probably fight, at least for a while. Therefore, they are presumptive combatants, and it’s okay to bomb them pre-emptively. So the Valkyries are morally justified to bomb ANY non-combatants pre-emptively, anywhere, since the same “reasoning” applies to them all.
August 10th, 2010 | 11:09 pm | #13
Craig,
You’re right. Truman weighed the lives of soldiers against the lives of Japanese civilians.
He was wrong. And ultimately I don’t think he, or anyone else was thinking about saving any lives that weren’t American.
August 11th, 2010 | 11:34 am | #14
Further to in bello principle 1, I guess we need to define “cannot be harmed” to exclude leaving a woman husbandless and children fatherless, depending on the military affiliation of the husband/father. Otherwise you couldn’t kill anyone, and that would be silly.
August 11th, 2010 | 12:39 pm | #15
In bello #1 – isn’t that “intentionally harmed”?
August 12th, 2010 | 6:56 pm | #16
“Well, the people in my hometown would probably fight, at least for a while. Therefore, they are presumptive combatants, and it’s okay to bomb them pre-emptively.”
There’s a difference between any given population having the potential to fight and a population which is already training to fight. When they began training, they became combatants. And we knew very well what that meant. There was no surrender . . . ever. They would kill the US soldiers or be killed by the US soldiers. If put in a surrender situation, they would commit suicide.
There were Japanese soldiers in the Pacific that were still fighting WW2 in the early 1970s because they did not believe the US “propaganda” that the war was over. They lived in the mountains and conducted guerilla raids. When someone finally made contact with one of them, the soldier said he would not stop fighting until his commanding officer told him to do so. So Japan had to track down his commanding officer (who had become a book dealer), fly him to the island, and have him officially tell the soldier to stand down . . . almost 30 years after the war ended.
All of that is to say that we need to take into consideration the culture and mindset of the Japanese at the time when considering combatants.
If someone begins bombing my town, and I grab my shotgun to defend it, that’s one thing. If the government comes to my town, hands out weapons, trains people to fire them specifically for an upcoming battle, and gives them the “no surrender” orders, that’s another.
I admit there is a fine line here, but I believe the right decision was made.
August 17th, 2010 | 8:39 am | #17
The likelihood of fighting back isn’t exactly a defense of nuking the elderly and small children.2 I don’t want to assume without argument that it’s always wrong to kill small children or the elderly, since there might just be circumstances where the stakes are high enough to do something like that, but I wonder if the threshold might have to be a lot higher than just saving a lot of lives of actual combatants. I think I’d go for it if the risk is the entire planet being wiped out, but any sane moderate deontological view that allows for consequences in grave matters to override the strong presumption of a moral prohibition will still emphasize how very strong the presumption is that you not kill those who are innocent with respect to the conflict, and you can’t just focus on adults who have full capacity to defend themselves. They aren’t the only people who died or were harmed, and they weren’t the only ones who could have been foreseen to have been killed or harmed. Truman knew full well that he would be causing the equivalent of boiling babies alive. The only difference with Molech worship is that the Molech worshipers left out the other deaths besides the babies. Truman didn’t, so isn’t what he did worse?
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