The Enduring Strategic and Moral Debates Over Dropping the Atomic Bombs

It has been 80 years since the atomic age ushered in a new chapter of world history. 80 years after President Truman’s fateful decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thereby forcing Imperial Japan to surrender and saving countless American, Japanese and Chinese lives, we still debate the morality of that world altering decision. I believe that that is a good thing. We all intuitively recognize just how monumental a decision it was to drop the bombs, and I would not want to be a writer on military strategy and ethics in a world where we stopped grappling with arguably the most agonizing decision ever made by a single man in world history.

Much has been written on the 80th anniversary of dropping the atomic bombs. I write this humble contribution to the fray to note just how relevant the enduring moral debate over the atomic bombs continues to be, and how they interact with the tragic world of military strategy. In particular, I would like to focus on the moral imperative to consider alternative choices of action, as well as a brief rethinking and reframing of noncombatant immunity.

Before beginning this analysis, I want to clarify what this essay does and does not aim to do. It will not propose a new system of ethics for strategists, nor claim to offer a better framework than existing traditions. My point is simpler: strategy is never free of ethics, because it is carried out by human beings who cannot act in a moral vacuum.[1] Yet ethical traditions—especially Just War theory[2]—are too often “not well enough designed or employed to offer helpfully practicable navigational guidance on behavior.”[3]

This leaves strategists in a complicated position. Moral debates over strategic action persist, but the systems meant to guide judgment are too often silent or unhelpful. In practice, the long view of strategic history suggests that strategic communities fall back on an ethic of victory and prudence: pursuing survival and success at a tolerable, viable cost.[4] This is not a license to justify anything in the name of victory—moral judgment still matters. But it seems to me that as we continue along another bloody century, we must acknowledge a form of flexibility in moral judgements on strategic action and leaders, a flexibility that has to accommodate the strategic enterprise as it is in our nasty and brutish world.

On the Morality of President Truman’s Decision to Drop the Atomic Bombs

Much of the moral debate surrounding Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs rests on an understanding of the possible alternatives available to him at the time. The standard narrative says that Truman decided to drop the atomic bombs in place of an invasion of mainland Japan, which is likely to have killed scores of US troops in what probably would have been the bloodiest and most ghastly battle of the world’s bloodiest and most ghastly war.[5]

It is worth noting for purposes of clarity and historical accuracy that more recent scholarship suggests that the planned November invasion of Kyushu would probably not have occurred, because, as Richard Frank has shown, the US did not possess the necessary manpower advantage to successfully mount an amphibious assault on Japan (at the time, accepted doctrine was three-to-one. By the time August 1945 comes around, Gen. MacArthur’s invasion force barely has a one-to-one ratio of troops against the enemy).[6] Rather, the most realistic alternative choice available to Truman at the time was to further starve the Japanese people, in a combined tightening of the naval blockade and aggressive bombing campaigns against the railroad network responsible for bringing the already dwindling food supply to the Japanese citizenry.[7] Had this commenced, millions of Japanese would have starved to death in a very indiscriminate fashion.[8]

Given this harrowing possible alternative, and even including the potential invasion of Japan, many moral thinkers argue that Truman chose the best of all bad available options. To quote Fr. Wilson Miscamble, “Truman’s use of the bomb should be seen as his choosing the least awful of the options available to him.” And then, in an important moral challenge, Fr. Miscamble asks: “Given the alternatives, what would any moral person have done in Truman’s position?” [9]

To some moral thinkers, this question deserves no real respect. If the decision to drop the atomic bomb was fundamentally immoral, for it is always immoral to intentionally kill the innocent, it is not necessary to consider the alternatives. Christopher Tollefson, one of the most impressive and vocal moral thinkers who condemns Truman’s decision, writes in response to Miscamble that he (Tollefson) denies “the responsibility to give much consideration to viable alternatives in this case. What the best options were for Truman, once immoral options had been ruled out, was a matter of military expertise and prudence. I am doubtful that those options would have been whittled down to doing ‘absolutely nothing.’”[10]

The Agony of Moral Decision Making

There are two aspects to Tollefson’s position that I find striking. The first is that it reduces systems of moral thinking about war to nothing more than an academic and intellectual exercise, relegated to the Churches and Ivory Tower, with nothing to say about real life. Politics, Machiavelli told us, is the realm of tragedy. If a moral and ethical system cannot accommodate that fact of political life, if it cannot speak to real life and war as we must live and act within it, one’s moral system, it seems to me, lacks morality. I do not say this casually at all. My teacher, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, once noted that fidelity to Halakha, Jewish Law, is at times “agonizing,” and that the role of the posek, a decider on Jewish Law, is one of the most agonizing and painful positions to occupy.[11]

Rabbi Lichtenstein noted that the posek is very often “confronted by situations in which Halakha comes into apparent conflict with human needs – not simply with shallow utilitarian desires, but with genuinely worthwhile needs. Under these circumstances, the process of decision can be soul searing.” In many instances, he notes, the confrontation “may be absolutely irreducible, the result being genuine tragedy.” In other words, the posek’s position is soul searing precisely because he cannot abstain from action. Neither too can the statesman or his strategists. He must take part in a world of action. If we are to live on this side of heaven, genuine values will inevitably compete with one another, especially in that all too human activity we call war.

Great leaders of all stripes, we hope, will rise to the challenge and grapple mightily with that competition of values. They might, like Secretary of War Henry Stimson, have a heart attack because of how brutal and agonizing it is to act in a world of competing values. But a moral system—certainly moral judgement—has to contend with this fact. Moral thinkers who do not and will not contend with the reality that Truman faced, who will not offer or propose serious alternatives in the world of action, engage in a certain dereliction of moral duty that I find too bitter to attempt swallowing. We now know what the alternative courses of actions were available to the president. Knowing that, did he choose wrong? I think not.

What is also striking about Tollefson’s line of thinking that is that the sentiment he expressed over a decade ago is alive and well in contemporary debates over military strategy and ethics (though of course Tollefson expresses it in a way that a great and serious moral thinker does, not in the crass, illiterate way of today’s pundits). One need not look any further than Israel’s just war against Hamas in Gaza. For nearly two years, Israel’s campaign has come under scrutiny, and many have charged it with being a fundamentally immoral campaign. And yet all too often, one finds little serious thinking by those who are quick to condemn Israel about what alternative course of action Israel should or could take.

Piers Morgan, who has dedicated much time on his TV program to the conflict in Gaza, took to Twitter to answer “what should Israel do in Gaza?” and responded with “NOT THIS.” [12] In a podcast conversation with Konstantin Kisin, Bassem Youssef, a pro-Palestinian activist, quite literally did the same.[13] My point here is not even to mention that war is always bloody, that it always takes the lives of innocents, that it is always hell. Rather, I wish simply to point out that this lackluster approach to moral thinking about war is, sadly, alive and well.[14]

Moral condemnation loses much of its import when it fails to account for how else the statesman or battalion should act. To reiterate: strategy is the realm of action. If we are going to hold strategists and leaders to formal moral systems, then moral systems have to be actionable. One cannot abstain from translating morality into strategic action.

The Complexities of Noncombatant Immunity

Another enduring debate over dropping the atomic bombs is the notion of discrimination and noncombatant immunity. There is much here to discuss, but I will limit myself to one particular aspect of noncombatant immunity.

Even though Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets, President Truman knew that there were innocent civilians on the islands. According to those who condemn the droppings, by deliberately deciding that he was going to drop the bomb on the islands, the president intentionally took the lives of innocents in a fundamentally immoral act. Therefore, the decision was immoral.

And yet, there is a curious bit of history that we need to contend with here. Shortly before the first nuclear bomb fell free from the Enola Gay, a US Army Air Force intelligence officer produced a memo which stated: “The entire population of Japan is a proper military target. THERE ARE NO CIVILIANS IN JAPAN” (all caps in original). At first blush, the notion that there are no civilians in Japan seems both terribly racist and empirically untrue. Are there not babies being born that are noncombatants? Is the one-year-old girl in Japan not a civilian?

But here it is important to remember the situation in Japan at the time. As the historian Richard B. Frank has noted, all of Japanese society has been brought into the conflict against the Allies as a whole and the US in particular.[15] Newspapers in Japan are proudly proclaiming that “JAPAN’S 100 MILLION WILL DIE FOR THE EMPEROR!” Such a proclamation was not hyperbole. All men from ages fifteen to sixty, and all women from seventeen to forty, have been required to join the National Volunteer Corps, totaling a staggering 28 million civilians. Little children are going to school to learn how to stab Allied soldiers.

What the Army Air Force memo represents, according to Frank, is “a reaction to the Japanese government’s measure to obliterate any practical means for US servicemen to distinguish combatants from noncombatants in Japan.” In other words, all of Japanese society is weaponized against the United States. A governing body of any type can create a special, tragic class of citizen: a weaponized noncombatant.[16]

By refusing to surrender, by forcibly enlisting millions of its own citizens and by putting its citizens—even the innocent newborn baby—purposefully in harm’s way for the purposes of continuing to wage war, the Emperor of Japan weaponized his entire people, even those who were not wearing military uniforms, and especially those who had no agency to act otherwise. By blurring the line between combatant and noncombatant, the Emperor himself bears the responsibility for their deaths. Deaths of weaponized noncombatants spills blood on the hands of the person or entity responsible for weaponizing otherwise innocent people, not on the hands of those who pulled the trigger. This is a too-often missed moral point.

Wars have to be fought, and for them to be moral and just, they have to be fought in such a way so as to lead to a lasting and durable peace. One is reminded of B.H. Liddell Hart’s quip that “the object of war is a better state of peace.” Sadly—tragically—there is often no way around achieving victory without killing innocent civilians. It should go without saying that all courses of military action that prevent killing innocent civilians have to be considered for their strategic effect, and should be implemented before deciding on a course of action that takes innocent lives.

Tragically, military necessity can often mean resorting to the deliberate killing of innocent civilians (though not intending to kill them, another very important moral difference too often missed).[17] This is true not only because fallible humans wage war and make mistakes, but because to believe in a world where military action will always stop before killing innocent civilians is morally perilous.[18] Would not the enemy always therefore coerce his innocent population into battle, therefore appealing to the values of the liberal statesman and tying his hands from action? Would he not always choose to weaponize noncombatants by, say, employing human shields of innocent children? Is this not what we are seeing take place in Gaza, when both innocent civilians and civilian infrastructure like hospitals and schools are weaponized on behalf of Hamas?

Of course, innocent civilians are innocent, and their lives must be protected.[19] I cannot emphasize this point enough. But their lives cannot come at unlimited cost; to think otherwise would mean to engage in an act of strategic suicide, which I think would be unprecedented in all of strategic history. They certainly, it seems to me, cannot come at the cost of losing a war and letting evil metastasize; here again, the strategic ethic of victory. There is a line of moral thinking, even Christian moral thinking, that understands this fact of war. To cite one example, Fracisco de Vitoria argues that “it is occasionally lawful to kill the innocent not by mistake, but with full knowledge of what one is doing, if this is an accidental effect…since it would otherwise be impossible to wage war against the guilty.”[20]

How else could it have been possible to wage war against the guilty in Japan without killing innocent civilians? Given how Hamas weaponized its entire society against Israel, how else is it possible to wage war there without killing innocent civilians? Putting aside the argument that much of Imperial Japan and modern Gaza arguably and tragically falls into the category of weaponized noncombatant, it seems impossible—dare I say preposterous—to claim that there is a way of fighting that would have prevented innocent deaths. Tragically, given Japan’s conduct of the war and how it treated its own population, I cannot imagine any way to fight that would have spared the lives of the truly innocent, a tragedy that is Japan’s to bear alone. The same, I believe, is to be said about Gaza, where to fight against Hamas means contending with just how much of Gaza Hamas has weaponized. 80 years after innocent lives were taken by the atomic bombs, the very concept of noncombatant immunity and its interplay with strategic action remains contested and complex.

I’ve elsewhere commented that to sit at the corner of strategy and ethics is to sit in a very lonely intersection. But because the two interact, they are worthy of our serious thinking and consideration. 80 years ago, military ethics changed forever with weaponized fission. The debates that surrounded the decision to drop the atomic bombs are still alive and well, and find analogues in our current era of warfighting. As we continue through what promises to be another bloody century, we must insist that strategy find its ethical dimension, that moral judgements take into account the world as it is, not as it ought to be and that the statesman is ready, when necessary, to confront the tragic world we live in.