On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Sixty years later, Hiroshima remembers the atrocity:
"Though Hiroshima has risen from the rubble to become a thriving city of 3 million, most of whom were born after the war, the anniversary underscores its ongoing tragedy.
"Officials estimate about 140,000 people were killed instantly or died within a few months after the Enola Gay dropped its payload over the city, which then had a population of about 350,000.
[…]
"The true toll on Hiroshima is hard to gauge, however.
"Including those initially listed as missing or who died afterward from a loosely defined set of bomb-related ailments, including cancers, Hiroshima officials now put the total number of the dead in this city alone at 237,062.
"This year, about 5,000 names are being added to the list."
On August 9, Japan will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic bomb attack on another Japanese city, Nagasaki, which has been the epicenter for Catholicism in that country. For a Catholic perspective on the atomic bombings of Japan, see this e-letter by Karl Keating, written to commemorate the anniversary last year. For an overview of Catholic principles of just war, see Catholic Answers’ Answer Guide: Just War Doctrine.
its also interesting to note, the miracles attributed to Our Lady that day. some monks that were in the area when the bomb was dropped were left completely unschathed because they had thier rosaries.
It is really sad. What is sadder still is that now that anti-Japanese sentiment in mainland China is rising, more and more people are holding to the belief that the atomic bombings are a fabrication of the Japanese and American governments.
Sound familiar? Kind of like those idiots who think the holocaust of the Jews did not happen in WWII.
And the moon landing…
Oh heck, nothing REALLY ever happened, did it?
StubbleSpark, I know real flesh and blood people who think the moon landing was fake and that Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene and who think it’s “important to question” the history regarding the events of WWII and the holocaust because the Allies, being the victors, wrote that history. What was that quote of G.K. Chesterton? Something like: “when people stop believing in God, they’ll believe in anything”.
Let us pray that the Lord might bring great good out of the evil that was the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings by ensuring that relations between America and Japan will be peaceful from now until the second coming.
Though on reading the overview, I did wonder about one point: “There must be serious prospects of success.”
How serious? And wouldn’t that kind of depend on the seriousness of the evils the war is fought to prevent? How serious did your chances of success have to be if you were fighting against the Khmer Rogue?
I didn’t realize that Nagasaki was the center of Catholicism in Japan or of the history of Catholics in Japan. I googled on Urakami Cathedral and came across the following:
“During the winter of 1596, 24 Christians were marched bare-foot from Kyoto to Nagasaki, being joined by two others on the journey, and crucified on a hill near Nagasaki on 5 February 1596. Thus begun a long period of persecution of Christians that lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century. This gave rise to the group known as the Hidden Christians who maintained their faith in secret, passing down the prayers and scriptures solely by word of mouth for some 250 years without church or priest”.
http://www.mander-organs.com/portfolio/urakami-c.html
So here’s my problem with the moral condemnation of the atomic bombings: All parties in WWII to some degree used non-combatants as “human shields” — for example, you locate a military base or a fighter plane factory in the middle of a city, so that the legitimate military target is surrounded by civilians. A more radical example would be building an underground military installation directly beneath an elementary school — I seem to recall an incident in the first Gulf War where Saddam did that and the US bombed the bunker anyway, killing a bunch of kids in the process.
The principle of double effect would seem to indicate that dropping a large bomb or a lot of bombs on such a target may be morally permissible, provided (1) the underlying target is a legitimate one, (2) the non-combatant casualties are foreseen but not directly intended, and (3) there is proportionality between the means (the bomb) and the end (destruction of the military target). Number 1 was clearly satisfied in the case of the atomic bombings — Hiroshima, Nagasaki and most other Japanese cities had military installations intermingled with civilian areas, and that fact was in some measure a result of a deliberate strategic decision by the Japanese military commanders. Admittedly, the military value of the particular installations hit was small in comparison to other potential targets. (Hiroshima was HQ to the Japanese Second Army, and the primary target of the second bomb, Kokura, had the biggest munitions factory in Japan. Nagasaki was chosen as a secondary target, but had several munitions factories and a naval shipyard; the torpedoes used in the Pearl Harbor attack came from Nagasaki.)
On number 2, recall that at the time there had only been one previous nuclear explosion (the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert three months earlier) and we had no real idea of the radiation effects of such a detonation on human beings. We had some idea how strong the blast would be, and a case could well be made that it was disproportionate (see below), but I think we have some hindsight bias in assuming that the point of the bombing was mass slaughter of civilians. (That applies especially to some leftist critics, who contend that the point was to slaughter innocents whom racist America regarded as expendable yellow subhumans in order to intimidate the sainted Stalin and destroy the workers’ paradise of the USSR.) I admit it isn’t free from doubt, and I wouldn’t like to answer for my own motives had I been President Truman or a crewman on the Enola Gay, but I think it’s possible that under the circumstances, some or all of the Americans involved in the atomic bombings intended civilian deaths only in the way permitted by double-effect, as foreseen but regrettable consequences of an attack on a legitimate military target.
Finally, on number 3, as I said, one could certainly argue that the A-bomb was disproportionate to the military value of the target and that we knew that it would be so. Again, we didn’t know about the radiation effects, just about the blast. Here, however, it seems that the number of lives saved from the prompt cessation of hostilities is a relevant consideration in assessing proportionality — Karl Keating may not believe that a million casualties were likely from an invasion of mainland Japan, but that was in fact what the War Department was estimating at the time, and given that we lost 50,000 casualties (killed plus wounded) landing on Okinawa, 25,000 on Iwo Jima, and 10,000 in Normandy on D-Day alone, a million for an amphibious invasion of mainland Japan doesn’t seem far-fetched.
The situation is certainly different today, though, given what we now know about nuclear detonations. But I honestly have a hard time seeing the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as being more morally problematic than the firebombings that preceded them.
The moral question where some people go off the deep end is when they maintain the deaths from the bomb were worse than the greater number of deaths from the fire-bombing of Tokyo.
… did I hear someone say DRESDEN?
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/war/dresden-index.html
this shameful attrocity doesn’t look any prettier with 20/20 hindsight.
… did I hear someone say DRESDEN?
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/war/dresden-index.html
this shameful atrocity doesn’t look any prettier with 20/20 hindsight.
Every time criticism of the atomic bombings comes up, I remember learning that the commanders of the planned landings on Shokaku and Honshu had requested permission to use poison gas on the landing zones. There was probably no way to invade Japan without atrocity, and the atomic bombs coupled with the Russian invasion of Manchuria might well have been the least awful.
Every justification for our use of the atomic bomb that I’ve ever seen seems to boil down to, “Let us do evil that good may come of it, or at least that something even more evil does not come.” Surely one can understand why we dropped the bombs — but it’s impossible to justify it.
Jordan,
In a way yes, and in a way no. All invocations of the double-effect principle could be characterized as “let us do evil that good may come.” Especially when there’s a human shield problem involved — I’m attacking a military base (or some other clearly legitimate target) with proportional means (conventional bombs, say, that won’t harm the civilians in the town a mile down the road), but I find out 20 minutes from the target that the enemy has decided to try to shield its military base by building an orphanage there and packing it to the gills with non-combatant moppets. I know that if I drop the bombs, it is highly likely that some or all of the orphans will die, and I may nevertheless drop the bombs. That’s not “do evil (kill orphans) that good (destruction of enemy military base) may come,” that’s just double-effect.
Japan was willing to surrender (but keep their emperor) after the U.S. took Iwo Jima. The U.S. decided (wrongly) that nothing but unconditional surrender suited us.