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Something must have happened on some Aug. 8, but this year, it's just a day between the 50th anniversary of the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the 50th anniversary of the use of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
And, to be honest, there are worse ways to spend an evening than in a discussion of whether the United States should have used atomic bombs against Japan.
I always argue that President Harry S Truman had no choice. He was commander-in-chief of our military forces, and if there was any reason to believe that the bombs would shorten the war and save American lives, then he was duty-bound to use it.
Further, the United States had just invested $2 billion -- serious money in those days -- to build a huge industrial complex. After that magnitude of investment, domestic politics would demand that the bomb be used.
Otherwise, you can imagine budget-cutting congressmen at
work during the McCarthy Era: Then them New Deal
socialist boondogglers, spending our money like it was
water, hire a bunch of pointy-head pinko refuges, and put
them in this ivory tower resort up in the Rocky Mountains,
while good American boys were dying in the trenches and on
the beaches, and them bureaucrats give them immigrants all
these fancy toys to make this here A-bomb. And then they
test it once, kill a few jackrabbits is all that happens,
and there it sits rustin' away while ol' Joe Stalin is
gearing up to swallow Peoria and Chicago just like he took
over Poland and Czechoslovakia...
If Truman hadn't dropped the bomb on Japan, he'd have had to use it on Russia, just to keep the majority of Americans happy in this great manipulated democracy, and only heaven knows what those consequences would have been.
Second-guessing people who made a tough decision is an entertaining and harmless parlor game. But it misses the real moral issue.
If we're going to endure a period of national
soul-searching, shouldn't we be asking ourselves whether it
is proper to slaughter civilian populations wholesale,
rather than pretending that there's moral distinction to be
made between performing that slaughter with thermonuclear
weapons and conducting it with conventional
weapons.
Military theorists call this strategic bombing.
Tactical bombing attacks the tanks and fortifications in
front of your lines. Strategic bombing attacks the enemy's
cities far behind the lines. Since bombing is not a precise
science (despite all those Gulf War photos of smart bombs
entering the proper chimney), this means that thousands of
non-combatants will be maimed or killed.
The justification for this is that it destroys enemy morale, and that people who get bombed will prevail upon their government to change its policies.
For instance, before the Gulf War ground action began, we bombed Baghdad, just as we've bombed other cities over the years. In accordance with American military theory, there should have been these conversations in the bomb shelters:
You know, this is really getting old. I suspect that
we wouldn't get bombed all the time if we'd just get rid of
Saddam Hussein [or Ho Chi Minh, or Adolf Hitler, or Hideki
Tojo]. I believe that I shall vote against him in the next
election.
I see your point, but do you think we should wait
that long? Why don't we send a delegation with a petition
over to his office as soon as the all-clear alarm sounds,
and see if he'll step down now so we can elect a new leader
who will make peace with the United States?
I agree. Those craters where there used to be
buildings, and those funeral pyres where we used to have
our families, have certainly shown me the error of our
ways, and I am positive that our esteemed leader will agree
once we bring it to his attention.
Never mind that most people we bomb don't have elections and would be shot as traitors for organizing pro-American movements.
Even in a democracy like Great Britain, the Luftwaffe's strategic bombing in 1940 did not result on some great groundswell of support for a negotiated settlement with Nazi Germany -- instead, England rallied around Winston Churchill, who promised to fight on the beaches and never surrender.
But a change in English public opinion was the goal of Hitler's strategic bombing, and you can see that it's preposterous. And yet we don't discuss that, and so we don't discuss the morality of incinerating vast numbers of non-combatants in wartime.
Instead, we discuss the morality of the method used for incineration. It's as though you're caught robbing a bank, and you tell the court that you're really a decent person because you could have stolen $100,000 and took only $10,000, and besides, you carried a six-shot revolver instead of a MAC-11.
Most of us can see that the real issue is armed robbery, not which weapon and how much.
However, our vision is not so clear when we ponder Hiroshima and Nagasaki 50 years after the fact.
The issue isn't whether to use atomic or conventional weapons, but whether we should be targeting thousands of non-combatants.
But all this examination of the atomic bomb obscures more important issues of morality.
that's worth
The moral issue wasn't whether to use the atomic bomb or not. That's too late. The moral issue was whether the undiscriminating slaughter of civilians is a legitimate military strategy for this great Christian nation, and well, it is. The technology we use to achieve this goal is irrelevant.
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