That it is incumbent upon us to find other, better ways of helping those who could use help than dropping bombs is the only reasonable conclusion.

Peacenik!

But seriously: great post. One of your best.

An analogy has been made that 9/11 was like Pearl Harbor.  When WWII began for us, the atomic bomb was just a theory.  I wonder if the analogy thread runs true and there are generally unknown or little used technologies that will evolve from our reaction to 9/11 and will one day -- like the atomic bomb -- affect everyone ever after.  Snooping into people private lives for national security, allowing the CIA and FBI to work together for the same reason, smart bullets, even smarter bombs, are just a few I can come up with.  Of course, it's those theories like the atomic bomb that few people know about that are being testing even as you read this that could have the greatest effect on all our futures.

In our 3rd year of the Iraqi War, let us remember that there is a time in any major aggression after which the outcome is greatly different than what was expected by those that initiated the war.  Go ask the Japanese about their expectations when they thought they were giving the U.S. a knock-out blow.  I don't know when that critical time is or whether we've passed it, but it's something to keep in mine.  That's what I liked about the Powell Doctrine.

With regard to the war in Europe, postwar analysis seems to suggest that in fact the bombing of cities was rather ineffective, and when the bombers were eventually directed at oil refineries and synthetic-fuel plants they made a much more significant contribution.   It may well have been a "more brutal" time in Stalingrad and the Pacific, but even so "Bomber" Harris' approach was considered morally dubious by many, and he didn't receive the same honors as other leaders.

In spite of the improvement in accuracy, if you drop a 500lb bomb exactly where you want it in an urban area, you're still going to kill a lot of innocent people (from the specs I've seen for the Mark 82 ? bomb, 50% of people within 60 yards radius suffer fatal injuries).  And while we didn't "vaporize" Fallujah, we did in fact cause substantial damage to a high proportion (at least 30%) of the buildings.

Plus ca change ...

<i>That it is incumbent upon us to find other, better ways of helping those who could use help than dropping bombs is the only reasonable conclusion.</i>

For many peoples and places, these alternatives don't exist.  Your choices are only two: (1) help those who could use help by dropping bombs, or (2) just don't help those who could use help.

If you disagree, please tell me the "better ways" of helping, say, Iraqis from 1980-2003.

Your utopianism is touching, though.

You make some pretty decent points here, but on the other hand, you are also setting yourself up: "Yglesias thinks that atomic bombing is no worse than normal carpet-bombing!" Although you make the case quite well, and I admit that I am convinced, I think you then take the discussion in a more savage direction.

In particular, I cringed at your definition of a "purely military" target. A communications center? And the people in that communications center, then, are "purely military", by virtue of being in a communications center? If we make a decision to stop here and justify these killings, then we are on a slippery slope which will lead us right back to considering the women and children of Hiroshima "military" targets -- after all, killing them did convince the military to surrender!

No. Killing the people in a communications center, or in a tank, is barbaric and wrong too and should be avoided if at all possible. If we eventually develop technology that will let us blow up a tank, leaving the crew lying on the ground, dazed and unharmed, then it would be a savage and barbaric crime to blow it up the old-fashioned way. Wouldn't you agree?

Relating this to general opposition to the Iraq war would make a good subject for a post. It's really a shame that so many people allowed themselves to be tarred as "Saddam-lovers" simply for thinking it's wrong to kill people.

Al,

You seem to have left an important word implicit. Shouldn't it read:

Your choices are only two: (1) help those who could use help by dropping bombs on them, or (2) just don't help those who could use help.

The WWII Allies agreed that their common goal in regard to the Axis countries was 'unconditional surrender'.  In retrospect it is clear that in the case of Japan, the big issue for the Japanese government was somehow preserving the emperor as head of state, and the allies' demand prolonged the war because of that.  Immediately after surrender the US yielded on the emporer issue, and allowed the emporer to remain as a powerless head of state.

In the case of Germany, the unconditional surrender demand played into Hitler's propaganda to the German people that they would be enslaved and returned to the conditions that followed WWI, and to that extent hardened the people's resolve to fight to a bitter ending.

As for strategic bombing in both Germany and Japan, the evidence seems to be that the fighting potential of both countries was reduced but not materially in regard to the willingness to fight and resist surrender. The use of the atomic bomb was just an extension of the strategic bombing concept since it included targeting of civilian populations. Evil in degree but not in kind.

Recall also, that when faced with the prospect of building a 'neutron bomb' in the cold war that would kill people but not destroy property, the public pressure on the US government was not to develop and deploy the bomb on moral grounds.  

It is not clear to me that we have come as far as some think we have in regard to the issue of attacking civilian populations and civilian targets.  The number of civilians killed in Iraq appears to be approaching the number of people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the use of the atomic bomb.

Is there a lesson here?  It seems to me that the most cogent argument is that entering a war is truly a momentus decision that in the case of WWII wasn't a hard choice because we were attacked, but is dubious at best in the case of Iraq.  Once a war is entered, the popular pressure to win and defeat the enemy is such that moral restraints are highly likely to be disgarded to achieve that goal.  

To me, the tragedy of the "War on Terror" is not just a misunderstanding of the real nature of what is needed to repel terrorists, but the fact that use of the War terminology once again casts civilians (including our own people through loss of freedom) as appropriate targets for the engines of war - which are not likely ever to evolve toward anything that can be considered humane.

The hard truth is that humans rarely surrender until the most stubborn among them are eliminated and the cost of continuing to fight is too steep for those who remain. Take Japan, for example.

Even after the Tokyo firebombings and Hiroshima the Japanese leadership wanted to continue to fight.

They wanted to fight on despite the loss of the bulk of their army, their navy and their air force.

They did not surrender until after Nagasaki and the loss of their army in China to the Russians.

And even then there was a fierce debate within the Japanese leadership over whether to surrender and an attempted coup after the decision was made.

Obviously, the Japanese leadership did not value the lives of its citizens to the same extent that we now do. In war, though, it is a luxury to be able to think about how merciful one can be to one's enemy. That luxury is created by winning the fight and avoiding a truly desparate situation.

Remember this when thinking that a bomb that would destroy the tank but leave the tank crew intact would be effective. It most likely would not be as the tank crew would likely just return to the fight.

War, at its essence, is about killing. It is about causing harm and suffering to want to make the opponent stop wanting to fight. The winner is often the most merciless, whether or not the cause of the merciless is just or not.

It was total war, and they started it.

To the extent that total war has now gone out of fashion, and is generally regarded as immoral, well, we can attribute that encouraging development to the fact that we won the last total war.

Although, of course, we have NOT renounced total war, nor should we. What deters an attempted first strike by, say, the Russians against our nuclear arsenal? Of course, it is the likelihood that no first strike could succeed in eliminating our capacity for massive retaliation--and by massive retaliation, we mean the destruction of the other side's civilian population.

"In retrospect it is clear that in the case of Japan, the big issue for the Japanese government was somehow preserving the emperor as head of state, and the allies' demand prolonged the war because of that.  Immediately after surrender the US yielded on the emporer issue, and allowed the emporer to remain as a powerless head of state."

The pre-surrender demand of the Japanese for preserving the sovereignty of the emperor was explicit code for not allowing an occupation.

The U.S. most certainly did not yield on this issue.

"what moral principle could condemn the means by which Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed that wouldn't also condemn earlier actions (Dresden, Tokyo"

Someone in the thread mentioned a 500 pound bomb. 500, 1000, 2000 pound bombs are the usual maximum in our useful arsenal. These are big bombs.

In our less useful arsenal are the 10,20,50 Megaton hydrogen bombs. 10 million times 2000 pounds. Yes, means themselves, unleashing this technology that we are still threatened with, is itself a moral question.

Great post, Matt.

"No. Killing the people in a communications center, or in a tank, is barbaric and wrong too and should be avoided if at all possible."

If you want to be a pure pacifist, fine.

But the rest of us sane folks find an important distinction between military targets and civilian targets.

There is a difference between bombing modern nations like Germany and Japan into submission, then helping them rebuild as democracies, and thinking you can bomb Iraq into the 21st century.

Iraq, and much of the rest of the Islamic world, needs to become a modern nation, and that means equal rights for women. You can bomb a nation into the stoneage, but you can't bomb them into an egalitarian democracy.  

<cite>Anyone who is foolish enough to attack us, or knowingly harbor those who do, should know that annihilation is always a possibility.</cite>

 I believe the re-election of one George W. Bush thoroughly debunks this chest-thumping. No population--not even a democratic one--can be held entirely culpable for the actions of their government, or independent conspirators in their midst.

"War, at its essence, is about killing. It is about causing harm and suffering to want to make the opponent stop wanting to fight."

This is 99% wrong.  War is about making it clear to the enemy that they have to do what you want: most often that is achieved by destroying the enemy's capacity to fight effectively - "killing" is one approach, but interruption of supplies, disruption of command and control, and destruction of weapons are at least as important. 

You find an important distinction, but of course you don't make any attempt to say what it is. Perhaps it's like obscenity.. you know it when you see it?

There is no such thing as a purely military target where human life is involved, unless there is such a thing as a purely military human. The soldiers in the communication center are, perhaps, more military than the citizens of Hiroshima, but the difference between destroying the communication center and destroying the communication center plus everybody inside it is one of barbarism, to use Matthew's well-chosen term. We don't, right now, have the technology to do the former, but if we had it, choosing not to use it would be making a choice in favor of barbarism.

And the people in that communications center, then, are "purely military", by virtue of being in a communications center? If we make a decision to stop here and justify these killings, then we are on a slippery slope

Setting side Iraq (i.e. Just v.s. Unjust War), ...

The answer is yes. An enemy communications center that is sending logistical support to enemy fighters is indeed fair game. Yes, the military might weigh the consequences of bombing this target from a collateral damage point of view, but who might be in that center is completely irrelevant. Whether this decision is moral or not, is irrelevant. The support that center is giving could cause Americans to lose troops or battles. A commander should have no quams about taking it out if so. Your slippery slope is tilted the wrong way. Whether we like it or not, that decision is indeed justifiable in war.

I don't like war anymore than you do. And we must do everything that is possible to avoid it. (Real measures, not half assed measures like the Bush Administration claimed they did.) But if it becomes a reality, and some would say war is inevitable, we can't be making decisions based on your criteria or we will never win.

The best evidence now indicates that:  .  .  . c) there was at the time of the bombing no serious belief at the upper echelons of govt that a land invasion would be necessary  BrianOC

I'm unsure of what you're saying.

Is it that before August 6th the U.S. was pretty certain that Japan would shortly surrender unconditionally and permit total occupation together with war crimes trials?

Or that with the USAAF daily destroying Japan's weapons industry and with the USN dominating the western Pacific, Japan was no longer a threat?

I don't know exactly why that's so. Perhaps it's the emergence of human rights philosophy, or advances in communications technologies that make it impossible to hide away atrocity as effectively as we used to, or perhaps it's simply that we know, in our gut, that our cause in this case is not anything worth dying or killing for on that scale.




I tend to think that the reduction in our capacity for savagery is one of the great contributions of Western civilization. And yet every time I say that, I am reminded that prewar Germany was widely considered the most cultured, educated, "civilized" place in Europe. So that theory certainly only takes you so far. Most of us are capable of more savagery than we know.




The point, though, is that the Bush administration knew this about us. It knew we were too soft, or too humane, or too easily distracted, to fight a brutal war of occupation. If the war they brought us proves to be a war we're incapable of winning, then while it may be true that we deserve blame for being unprepared to be ruthless, they're absolutely to blame for not making sure that we were sufficiently ruthless, and for not telling us honestly that we must be prepared to be ruthless.




I think this is off the mark. Every indication shows that the Administration thought the war and occupation would be a piece of cake. Or, more precisely, they didn't want to hear from anyone who thought otherwise, convinced as they were that niggling doubters were just antiwar types in disguise.




Having thoroughly misread the situation in the postwar occupation, they were then confronted with the political need to minimize the impact on the American people as well as put an optimistic (Pollyannish) gloss on things. Now they are trapped between the need to keep the war out of the lives of most Americans and the need to defeat the insurgency. It's an unresolvable conundrum so its no wonder their polls are so low.

Al,

Here is one possible "better way" to have helped the Iraqis "from 1980-2003": Expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the spring of 1991, and then follow through on President George H.W. Bush's encouragement to the Iraqi people to rebel by supporting that rebellion once it got under way (it enjoyed substantial success before being brutally crushed). The timing of U.S. military force and its integration with indigenous action can be morally as well as practically crucial. The "cooperation" we employed in the current Iraq War -- with an often-questionable group of Iraqi exiles (an admittedly diverse group) rather than with any sizable portion of Iraqis in Iraq -- has been one of the more disastrous decisions we made this time.

For one thing, the alleged "democratization" of Japan after the war never happened.  Witness that the Japanese still have no understanding of the real history of the Second World War, because their educational system was never forcibly reshaped, as was that of Germany.  I well remember a Japanese friend of mine 40 years ago sitting across the table with his mouth gaping as I told him the history of the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, etc., etc.  I suspect I could still have that conversation with any typical 20-year old Japanese male or female today.


Not only that, but the "Liberal-Democratic" Party of Japan today is the old establishment, never changed other than to "demilitarize" it, at least publicly.

And unfortunately, as was reported in the newspapers this past weekend, the "lesson" that the American bombing allegedly taught the Japanese is passing as those old enough to remember those events pass on.  As was pointed out in one article, Japanese students today take a visit to the Atomic War Museum in Hiroshima as something to be endured, about an event they fail to understand and have no interest in.  And as a friend of mine who lives in Japan notes, the Japanese right wing is far more publicly assertive nowadays than ever before since the end of the war.

I remember 40 years ago, when I visited both Ground Zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that the attitudes were far different.  Hiroshimans went out of their way to make an American gaijin feel some sort of guilt for even being there, while the people of Nagasaki were genuinely committed to trying at every opportunity presented to them in their personal lives to advance the cause of "international brotherhood," which the city had decided after the war was the only way to insure such an event never happened again.  I genuinely hope that the people of Nagasaki still believe that - given the history of their city (which makes it truly ironic that the most pro-western place in Japan for literally centuries would have been the place bombed by a crew unable to release their weapon over "real" targets because of weather) I think it likely they will maintain their tradition even if the rest of Japan forgets.

40 years ago, it was still possible to come across the ruins of the fire raids, in areas still to be rebuilt.  They were shocking and jarring because they were unexpected, and - trust me - there was far greater evidence of violence beyond what one can imagine in those sites than at the two Ground Zeros - even given that in those days one could pick up the helmet at the entrance to the Nagasaki Atomic Museum and stare personally at the "ivory" inside - the remains of the soldier's skull, melted into the helmet by the blast.

And some of the Americans of that time had a very good idea what they had done.  Curtis LeMay said in 1946 that, had the war gone differently, it might have been he standing in the dock of the war crimes trials.  My old flight instructor of 30 years ago, who was the lead pilot for his Bomb Group on the Tokyo fire raid, said that of course the raids were a war crime - he then said that in his mind War Is A Crime, so how does one differentiate?  Leonard Cheshire, the British bomber pilot who flew 100 missions over Germany and won the Victoria Cross, visited Hiroshima a month after the bombing, went home and resigned his commission and spent the rest of his life running a hospice for the victims of war, and said he did so as atonement for the crimes of his youth.  

As has been discovered since 1995 with the publication of the unredacted Magic intercepts from that summer of 1945, Japan was not a country looking to surrender, and the US Navy was ready to withdraw its support for the coming invasion of Kyushu when it became known that the Japanese had sent enough troops to the invasion zone that they would have met the invaders 1:1 (usually a fatal condition for invasions).  It turns out that the bombs really were the only thing we had that might make the Japanese sue for peace.  

The more one knows about the end of the Pacific War, the less one is certain of any overall "Truth" to it.  For me, the only truths I know are that my father - whose radar picket destroyer was sunk off Okinawa by the kamikazes and who reported aboard his second DDR on August 8, bound for Kyushu - and my retired Marine father-in-law who was set for the First Wave at Kyushu after surviving Guadalcanal, Saipan and Okinawa - both lived to have fruitful and worthwhile lives (you ride on freeways without worrying the pre-stressed concrete will crumble beneath you thanks to a post-war patent by my father) because of the A-bombs.  As did my Japanese friends who didn't die as the country was led to destruction by a military too moronic to understand "stop."

we are left with history, and there is no documentation for what course history would have taken had we decided to not drop the bombs.

That is not the question.  The question is - did Truman and US top brass believe the bomb was necessary to effect a Japanese surrender

And that's something we can answer with reference to historical documentation.  (Referencing Eisenhower, Leahy, Stimson, Churchill, etc, etc)

And the answer - if we are honest - is no, they did not.

Is it that before August 6th the U.S. was pretty certain that Japan would shortly surrender unconditionally and permit total occupation together with war crimes trials?

Or that with the USAAF daily destroying Japan's weapons industry and with the USN dominating the western Pacific, Japan was no longer a threat?

Mainly the former, though the latter case could also be made