The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has made three of their articles from the current issue available free online, addressing the question, "Would you have dropped the bomb?"
The promise of retaliation by Robert l. Gallucci Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists July/Aug 2005. Galucci says he would not have used the bomb and extends his thoughts beyond 1945, writing:
But if the issue here is the ethical one, then we should also put President Harry S. Truman's decision to attack Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the context of the plan--the strategy of every president who followed him, including the current one--for defending America from attack with nuclear weapons. The plan is to retaliate against the attacker and destroy perhaps one-half of its population. For Russia, that amounts to not 100,000 innocents, but 100 million. That is the plan. It is called deterrence. That is not only what the United States plans to do, that is what the United States is deeply committed to doing. In this context, the question of whether or not Truman did the right thing in killing Japanese civilians to avoid more American military and naval losses, in a war started by the Japanese, can look a little different, even though he used nuclear weapons to do it. One wants to ask, what were his choices, what were ours all those years during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and what are they now as we consider our continuing deterrent posture with Russia?
Absent the possibility of an effective classic defense by denial, we are forced to resort to deterrence, the promise of retaliation. But that reality does not relieve us of our responsibility to limit the impact on civilians. Our targets should be military forces and leadership, and ultimately any industry directly connected to the prosecution of the war by the enemy. Beyond that, we get into acts that cannot even be justified by allusions to self-defense. This suggests that President Truman should have looked for targets that were primarily military or genuine war industry--targets that involved fewer, rather than more, civilian casualties. It is unlikely that Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be so described. Breaking the will of the enemy or hoping to put future enemies on notice cannot justify the intentional slaughter ofinnocent civilians who certainly did not vote for the government that was conducting the war and did not work directly to support the war.
The dilemma with Galucci's approach is that the "mutually assured destruction" targeting of cities between the US and Russia was considered more stabilizing - and thus less likely to lead to war - than "counter-force" targeting focusing primarily on the other side's nuclear weapons. The latter approach was considered to present a greater risk of a first-strike attempt.
Bearing the burden by Thomas Donnelly Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists July/Aug 2005. Donnelly is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute neoconservative nest. As unpleasant as it is, my own judgment on the use of the bomb is more similar to his than to the others', although I get there by a different route.
Indeed, it's hard not to find more than a little moral vanity in our second-guessing of President Truman from the safe distance of several decades. "Having found the bomb," the president said with typical plainness, "we have used it. We have used it to shorten the agony of young Americans." No commander-in-chief could have acted otherwise. In the Pacific, E. B. Sledge recorded the reaction of his fellow marines to the news of the bombing; that the war might end was heard "with quiet disbelief coupled with an indescribable sense of relief. We thought the Japanese would never surrender. . . . Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. So many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past. So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us. Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy, the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war."
The use of atomic weapons did not bring a world without war, but it did bring to an end the most lethal conflict in human history, during which two fascist regimes employed a variety of ingenious methods to systematically and barbarically destroy tens of millions of their fellow men. Thank God, again, for the atomic bomb--and for Harry Truman's willingness to bear the burden of using it. And if I had been in Truman's place? I hope I would have made the same decision to shortenthe agony that was World War II in the Pacific. Having found the bomb, I would have used it.
Stating it the way Donnelly does is not only ahistorical, it amounts to little more than a justification for ignoring "enemy" civilian casualties. Truman and his advisers did not assume that dropping the atomic bombs would end the war. They were surprised when Japan surrendered as quickly as it did.
And they give us a Pakistani perspective: A victory without spoils by Pervez Hoodbhoy Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists July/Aug 2005 pp. 53
Those of us who fight against the Bomb in Pakistan--and are thus branded agents of America and spied upon by our government--recognize that the horror of Hiroshima is a metaphor that cuts both ways. In a recent and widely watched nationally televised debate between myself and Gen. Hameed Gul--a highly influential pro-nuclear Islamist ideologue and former head of Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency--my opponent snarled at me: Your masters (that is, the Americans) will nuke us Muslims just as they nuked Hiroshima; people like you want to denuclearize and disarm us in the face of a savage beast set to devour the world.
I will not burden readers with my reply to this extremist general. But he was making a point that resonates around the globe. The United States has bombed 21 countries since 1948, recently killed thousands of people on the pretext of chasing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and claims to be a force for democracy despite a long history of supporting the bloodiest of dictators. Do Americans have even a clue of the anger that seethes in the hearts of people across the globe? Do they care? They now need to, because two nascent fundamentalisms--that of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden--are heading toward a dreadful collision.
No comments:
Post a Comment