I was a bit surprised that some commenters on the recent Harry Truman was a war criminal post thought that I was being vague in some of the things I said. I think a careful reading of the post would take care of the confusion, but I'm also aware that sometimes things need to be explained in more than one way for perfect clarity, so I'm happy to oblige.
In this post let me deal with the issue of the moral use of nukes.
First, let's look at something the Catechism says:
2314 "Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation." A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons – especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons – to commit such crimes.
This passage specifically has in mind the kind of actions that the U.S. committed in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those events are specifically what informs this paragraph.
While this is true, I do think that there are situations in which the moral use of nuclear weapons is morally legitimate, even if it means that a city is destroyed as a result. Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't such cases, but I can imagine scenarios in which this obtains.
How would I square that with the above passage from the Catechism?
They key, I think, is the phrase "indiscriminate destruction." So far as I can tell, this means one of two things.
First, it may refer to an indiscriminate intent on the part of those causing the destruction.That is, those causing the destruction intend to kill everybody in the city or area indiscriminately. They want everybody to die. Everybody is the target. In other words, on the level of intent they do not discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. That's why the destruction is indiscriminate.
In contrast to this there is the attitude of only intending the death of combatants. In this case it is combatants who are the targets, even though it may beforeseen that noncombatants will also die as collateral damage.
If we take this down from the level of destroying a city or a vast area to just a particular building, the difference in intent will be clear: There is a fundamental difference in intent between a person who wants to destroy a building so that everyone in it dies, combatant or not, and a person who wants to destroy a building in order to take out the combatants in it, even though noncombatants may also die.
In the one case the target is everybody in the building. In the other it is the combatants in the building.
This kind of analysis is what allows the moral legitimacy of bombing combat-related targets in wartime even knowing that a certain number of civilians will die also. The point is: You're not trying to kill the civilians.
How much collateral damage can be tolerated in a particular case will depend on the value of the military target that is being taken out. If the military target is a single, lonely private then less collateral damage can be tolerated than if it's the whole leadership of the opposing war machine.
In any event, on this reading of the text, trying to take out a military target with tolerable collateral damage would not constitute indiscriminate destruction because those carrying out the destruction do discriminate between combatants and noncombatants.
But there is another way in which the phrase can also be taken. Instead of referring to the level of intent, it might refer to the level of result. In this case "indiscriminate destruction" would refer to the killing of everybody in a city or area. Period.
A consequence of this interpretation would be that one could never destroy a city or a vast area as a matter of principle. It would be intrinsically evil to do so.
But this seems wrong because at this point we are dealing with matters of scale. What makes something a city rather than a village or a hamlet or just a shack? The number of people. (Not the buildings; the buildings are not in focus.)
But if some collateral damage is tolerable–ever–(e.g., you can blow up a shack containing a terrorist mastermind and his chief lieutenants even though there is a single civilian in there, too)–then reason indicates that a greater degree of collateral damage will be tolerable if the target to be taken out is more valuable.
If some degree of collateral damage is tolerable when the military target has one value then a greater degree of collateral damage will be tolerable when the military target has even greater value. In other words, the amount of collateral damage that can be tolerable is proportionate to the value of the target to be destroyed.
If this kind of situation obtains then it does not seem reasonable to say that, at some arbitrary level, the amount of collateral damage is such that the act suddenly becomes intrinsically immoral. Anyone advocating such a theory would need to say what this level is and why a mere increase in magnitude–leaving everything else the same–makes the act intrinsically evil regardless of the military value of the target.
Why is a collateral damage amount of X potentially justifiable whereas a collateral damage amount of X+1 is all of a sudden intrinsically unjustifiable?
This being the case, it would seem possible to construct scenarios in which there is a sufficiently high value target to justify the destruction of a whole city, and we will look at such a scenario in a moment.
I therefore would say that the passage from the Catechism and Vatican II that refers to "indiscriminate destruction" either should be taken as referring to an indiscriminate intent (i.e., an intent that does not discriminate between targets; it just wants to kill everybody) or, if it refers to indiscriminate results (i.e., everybody dies, regardless of combatant status) then the passage is simply not envisioning the kind of scenario I am about to postulate.
The latter wouldn't be surprising since the Catechism and Vatican II are pastoral documents that are meant to present Catholic principles in a pastoral manner and they are not always phrased in a rigorously technical fashion designed to cover all imaginable scenarios.
Like the following one (which I am very sure the fathers of Vatican II did not have in mind).
Suppose the following . . .
1) We have colonized Luna (or "the Moon," as everyone who lives there calls it) and have set up a city in the Sea of Tranquility consisting of five million people. We'll call it Sea of Tranquility City.
2) There is an evil alien race known as the Zergamoids. They are really evil. Even their name sounds evil (in a cheesy, 1930s-sci-fi way).
3) The Zergamoids have dropped a planetkiller in the middle of Sea of Tranquility City. This particular planetkiller converts zero point energy into gamma rays and, if activated, it will irradiate the entire surface of Earth with as much radiation as a moderately-nearby gamma-ray burster, totally killing all life.
4) There is a Zergamoid ship in orbit around Mars, and it sent the activation code to the planetkiller ten minutes ago.
5) We have no way to stop the planetkiller from receiving this transmission and, since Mars is at this hypothetical time only twenty light minutes from Earth (approximately on the other side of the Sun from Earth), we've got ten minutes until the go-code activates the planetkiller.
6) This is far too little time to evacuate either Earth or Sea of Tranquility City.
7) The planetkiller is sufficiently resistant to damage that the only way to take it out is to use a nuke sufficiently powerful to not only destroy the machine but also destroy Sea of Tranquility City.
In these circumstances, it would be morally legitimate to nuke the planetkiller even though it would mean that Sea of Tranquility City, with its five million inhabitants, would also be destroyed.
Therefore, there are at least hypothetical situations in which the use of nukes in urban areas is morally legitimate.
In such cases you aren't targeting the civilian population. You're targeting something else–a military target (in this case, a planetkiller) that has sufficient value to make the huge foreseen collateral damage tolerable.
Now, I can see some hands going up in the audience, and I can hear the objection being formulated: "But wait! Nothing like this is likely to happen in real life . . . anytime soon."
Quite true.
But the point of a thought experiment is to propose a test case which is clear, regardless of how probable it is. While this situation is quite unlikely to happen any time in the foreseeable future, it does reveal the moral principles needed to show that in some imaginable situations the use of nuclear weapons in urban areas is morally permissible.
That's not to say that we're at all likely to encounter such a situation, or that we ever have or even ever will, but it is to show that such use can be legitimate in a specific kind of situation.
As a result of recent discussion of torture (which is not the subject of this post, so don't veer into that topic in the combox; I may do a post on the subject of torture soon), the question arose on The Daily Show of whether Harry Truman was a war criminal.
He should have stuck to his guns. He was right the first time.
At least, I'd say that with a few of words of clarification.
I am interested in the question from a viewpoint of moral theology, and in that framework the question of what counts as a war criminal will not depend on whether one has violated human law but whether one has violated the fundamental moral jus in bello, or the moral law as it operates in wartime.
A person is a war criminal, as I am using the term, if he commits acts that objectively speaking violate the moral jus in bello.
2312 The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict. "The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties."
One of the things that is never licit is the direct and voluntary taking of innocent human life. John Paul II writes in Evangelium Vitae 57:
[B]y the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral.
For purposes of our present discussion . . .
A person is killed directly if that person is the target or part of the target in the act of killing. That is, the person is not killed as "collateral damage" that results from the attempt to destroy a different target.
A person is killed voluntarily if his death is foreseen as a result of the contemplated action and it is carried out anyway.
A person is innocent if he is not a combatant or a person engaged in proximate material cooperation with combat activities (e.g., military officers who, while not directly in combat, do support work for the war machine; civilians working in munitions plants).
Remote material cooperation in combat activities (e.g., as in the case of farmers who grow food that soldiers eat) is not sufficient to deprive a person of the status of "innocent civilian," for in time of war virtually everyone in society has–at least through the payment of taxes–remote material cooperation in combat activities, which would obliterate the very distinction th
at the Church is at pains to draw in its teaching regarding not killing civilians during wartime.
If one accepts these premises then it follows that Harry Truman's bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes–that is, they occurred during time of war and they violated the moral jus in bello.
This is because entire cities were targeted to produce the greatest psychological effect on the Japanese and these cities included innocent civilians who were part of the target.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a prude about the use of lethal force or about the use of atomic weapons. I can envision hypothetical scenarios in which their use would be legitimate, but a set of rigorous conditions would have to be met. Specifically, there would have to be a sufficiently high value combat-related target to justify the collateral damage incurred from the use of the Bomb and there would have to be no cost-effective alternative that would result in less collateral damage.
Such conditions were not met in the case of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cities themselves were targets, including their innocent civilians.
Harry Truman was thus a war criminal in the sense I am using the term.
In saying this, I don't pass judgment on him. I don't know the state of his soul, and I have no idea whether he has the intellectual formation needed or–given the pressures of wartime–the psychological wherewithal to analyze the issue in the way just presented.
Maybe he did; maybe he didn't. That's between him and his Creator, and I'd be among the first in volunteering to pray for his soul.
But, objectively speaking, he was a war criminal in the sense described.
And I'll go you one better.
The bombings were also acts of terrorism.
While I can't point to an official definition of terrorism endorsed by the Magisterium, it seems to me that sufficient conditions are present for terrorism, morally speaking, if
1) The grave harm of innocents (as defined above) is directly and voluntarily threatened or inflicted and
2) The purpose of (1) is to generate a sense of fear (i.e., terror) in some party and
3) This fear is either an end in itself or a means to accomplishing another goal.
These conditions were present in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Grave harm was inflicted on innocents to generate fear in the Japanese leadership as a means of compelling them to surrender.
SDG here with a quick Decent Films update. Things have been slow lately, but May is going to really heat up.
This week I have two reviews, both pretty lukewarm, but still reviews I had a certain emotional investment in writing that I think makes them kind of interesting. Battle for Terra is up at Christianity Today Movies, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine is up at Decent Films.
In the next couple of weeks I’ll have some very NON-lukewarm coverage of two other movies, Star Trek and Angels & Demons. Star Trek is coming next week, Angels & Demons on the 15th.
Angels & Demons in particular I’ll have a bunch of coverage for — pieces written for Catholic World Report, Our Sunday Visitor, Christianity Today and the National Catholic Register, as well as the actual review of the film.
The last Friday of the month, the 29th, we’ll have the latest Pixar, Up. (I’ll be doing Catholic Answers Live that day; listen for me on Kresta the next couple of Thursdays.)
Pope Benedict XVI walked out of an ecumenical gathering prematurely in Jerusalem this evening.
