GOD AND THE ATOM REVISITED
Jerry Harkins
The world recently observed the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first (and so far only) use of the atomic bomb which was dropped by American forces on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and on Nagasaki three days later. Both cities were virtually obliterated and it is estimated that between 129,000 and 226,000 Japanese civilians – men too old to be drafted, women and children – and approximately 20,000 soldiers were killed. The horror and the agony did not come as surprises. When the bomb had been tested three weeks earlier, the chief scientist on the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, murmured the words of the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Almost immediately, the bomb triggered a global debate about the morality of its use. A year later, John Hersey published “Hiroshima” in The New Yorker. It is the story of that morning as recorded in the memories of six survivors interviewed less than a year after the event. It is remarkably free of overt moralizing but it quickly became one of the most influential books of its century, shaping attitudes toward war and peace all over the world. In a way, this was strange. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not, by any means, the most horrific events of World War II. They were eclipsed by the Holocaust and roughly equivalent in both casualties and destruction to the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo. In pure brutality, they ranked with the Japanese “Rape of Nanking” and the German slaughter of the citizens of Lidice. But in both Japanese cities, the horror was compounded because it was the result of a single bomb that wreaked all the death and destruction. Some victims disappeared entirely from the face of the earth, literally leaving only their shadows. For many, there had been no escape, no time even to realize that escape was needed. For those left behind, whether in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, New York, Paris or Cairo, there was only the certainty that the world had changed in an instant. It was now a more dangerous, more frightening place in which to live. The new world was replete with questions including moral ones.
A friend of mine built an elaborate bomb shelter for his family on their 13-acre home in rural Connecticut. After much thought, he installed a doorbell and a welcome mat concluding that hospitality in a disaster was more important than survival. Built for seven, he estimated it might accommodate twenty more. He spent the next ten years worrying about what he would do when the twenty-first neighbor rang his bell.
All of a sudden, everybody was a moral philosopher. The influential Ban the Bomb movement grew up in the United States and elsewhere. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 as, in the words of its founders, “…an emergency action, created by scientists who saw an immediate need for a public reckoning in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One mission was to urge fellow scientists to help shape national and international policy. A second mission was to help the public understand what the bombings meant for humanity.” The debate has continued down to the present day but, from the beginning, it has been bootless and largely irrelevant as far as the use of the bomb in World War II is concerned.
Moral philosophy can be defined as the study of the rationale for societal standards of moral conduct and the definition and application of those standards to contemporary issues. Its practitioners sometimes make it sound dense, as though most of its conclusions were not obvious. But it is important because it deals with the mechanisms that make human community possible. It is difficult because those conclusions are always changing, evolving to accommodate new situations and new understandings. And it is contentious because it runs counter to the individualistic disposition that has come to characterize modern thinking.
The basic question is this: was President Truman’s decision to employ the two bombs a moral one? Which is to say, did it meet contemporary standards of what is permissible in waging a just war? The broader question of whether or not there is such a thing as a just war need not be addressed in this context. It is sufficient to recall the observation attributed to Ernest Hemingway that one should “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” War may be, as Carl von Clausewitz said, “…the continuation of politics by other means” and in some cases – the American Civil War and World War II come to mind – it may be necessary, but it is hard to imagine any war being properly described as just. At a minimum, every war inevitably does great harm to innocent bystanders and is therefore unjust. General Sherman had it exactly right on one occasion when he told a class of cadets, “I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is Hell!”
The rationale for deciding to drop the bomb was based on the belief that the only alternative for ending the war would have been to invade the Japanese home islands at a cost estimated to be between 500,000 and 1,000,000 American lives and many more Japanese lives. This was a conclusion based on the “fanaticism” of the Japanese. The allies had had good evidence of this in the fight-to-the-death spirit which they witnessed during the island-hopping campaigns of 1943 and 1944. They had suffered greatly from the suicidal kamikaze attacks on their warships. Of the 3,912 young men trained as kamikaze pilots, at least 3,800 died in combat. Similar suicidal attacks were made by specially designed torpedo boats and by the banzai charges of ground forces. By western standards, these experiences were conclusive evidence of fanaticism. So the question becomes whether or not there really was no alternative to the bomb.
The most common suggestion, both before and after the bomb had been used, was to have demonstrated its awesome power by exploding one over some unoccupied area on or near the Japanese homeland. But there was little belief that such a strategy would alter the determination of the Japanese government to prevail or die trying and there was the practical problem that there was enough plutonium to make only one more bomb in the short term and not nearly enough uranium for many months.
The only realistic alternative, it seemed, was to “starve out” Japan by interdicting its supply lines. But, if successful, would starvation have been preferable to fire bombing and atomic bombing of civilians? In theory, it would have been because it would have been gradual and would have given the enemy an opportunity to stop the suffering at any point. In practice, however, the American Navy had already done an effective job in cutting Japan’s crucial supply lines and much of its manufacturing capability as well but without diminishing its defensive capability significantly. This was not surprising. The history of warfare is replete with various kinds of blockade strategies, most of which had bleak records of success.
A variation of the blockade approach was to do nothing new, to continue pretty much attacking military and industrial targets, “waiting out” the endurance of a suffering enemy. There was some evidence that some Japanese factions were already exploring ways to end the conflict honorably, that is with as many conditions attached as could be negotiated with an enemy tired of the war. After the fall of Germany, discrete approaches had been made to the Soviet Union to act as an intermediary in seeking such a settlement with the Allies. American policy wanted the Russians to open another front against the Japanese in Manchuria but did not want Russia to have any influence in the post-war Japanese government. Its entry as an intermediary would have been seen as a threat to both these objectives. Meanwhile, the Americans and British had made it clear, first at Casablanca in 1943, that there would be no settlement without “unconditional surrender” which, in effect ruled out any negotiated settlement such as happened with disastrous results in World War I. When the Germans had balked at this, Eisenhower gave them a 54-hour ultimatum to which they acceded. A similar demand was made to Japan at the Potsdam Conference on July 26, 1945, eleven days before Hiroshima. They, too, balked. As late as August 10, four days after Nagasaki, the Japanese government said it would accept the Potsdam demands but added, “the understanding that said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler.” The Japanese capitulated after another four days. In the event, the Emperor was allowed to stay on his throne after renouncing his divinity and accepting a symbolic but face-saving role.
It is impossible to say with certainty that the bomb ended the war, that the war could not have been ended by more humane means or even that more humane means were available. But, on the ground at the time, a decision had to be made. Foresight was dim at best and the stakes were immense. The challenge confronting President Truman was stark: to weigh the moral value of the lives of a large number of Japanese civilians against a much larger but still uncertain number of American and Japanese combatants. He listened carefully to a wide range of opinions and options, made his decision and slept well for the rest of his life.
Not so for some others. Among the disaffected were many of the key members of the scientific group that developed the bomb including Oppenheimer himself. Prominent among the religious dissenters was the Oxford educated British classicist, translator, satirist and poet Monsignor Ronald Knox, the author of God and the Atom which was published only months after the war came to an end. I first read the book as a high school sophomore and developed a dislike for the author, his writing and his logic all of which struck me as pretentious. I pictured him as an English snob, a member of the petit aristocracy. He had an intimidating arsenal of obscure words and antiquated references which made it difficult to decide exactly where he came down on any part of the subject he was writing about. Especially annoying to me was his habit of spending a few paragraphs telling the reader he had no qualifications in science, philosophy, psychology, sociology and a host of other things and then pontificating about them at length. He seemed to think his ignorance gave him special license to sneer at those who had expertise which he regarded as narrow-minded.
Reading the book again many decades later, I realize that my judgment was harsh and perhaps a bit defensive. I now think Knox realized he was inadequate to the task he had taken on and was writing around the question of morality instead of writing on it. He felt strongly about it but was reluctant to share his emotions. So, for example, he devotes considerable attention to drawing a distinction between right and wrong on the one hand and good and bad on the other. He is right that there are differences. In fact, they are so obvious that the attentive reader must be wondering if he is going to conclude the bombing was right but evil or wrong but good. Fortunately, his logic is not quite that warped and his prose is not as clear. Sixty-two pages into a book of 142 pages, the author makes his case as clearly as he can:
Theologically speaking, my thesis is that it would have been a more perfect thing not to bomb Hiroshima. Or, if I must needs talk the language of common life, let me dig up a phrase from an almost forgotten, but not altogether unregretted past, and say that bombing Hiroshima was not cricket.
Now, personally, I am appalled by the description of a city’s ruination as being “not cricket.” Nor do I sympathize with Knox’s being forced to descend to the language of common life. But his real problem is his logic. He offers biblical support for his position that restraint would have been “more perfect” (he meant more nearly perfect) by recalling that King David twice had the life of his predecessor and sworn enemy, King Saul, in his hands but, in spite of his good reason for vengeance, spared him. Knox says, “But we shall all agree that he did a better thing.” It seems he thinks vengeance would have been a moral action, good but not better or best. I think he had forgotten Paul’s instruction in Romans 12:19, “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” Instead Knox says :
And, granted that we had a right to destroy Hiroshima, I say we would have done a better thing if we had emptied that fatal cargo, in the first instance at any rate, by way of demonstration, upon some untenanted mountainside.
This is slipshod logic. To begin with, it is hard to imagine what he meant by a “right” to destroy Hiroshima. More importantly, his biblical exegesis is pure fiction. David does not spare Saul on either occasion out of a desire to be better but rather because, unlike Knox, he remembered the same injunction Paul was referring to which appears first in Deuteronomy 32:35. As he tells his companion, Abishai, (1 Samuel 26:9) “Do no violence to him. For who can reach out his hand against the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless?”
Monsignor Knox applies his garbled version of the David story to Hiroshima by way of implying that President Truman might have done better by refraining from the use of the bomb except as a non-lethal demonstration. The President, however, was aware of the fanatical nature of the Japanese militarists and had reason to believe that a mere demonstration would not impress them. In fact, he dropped the bomb specifically because he was worried that such a minimalist action would only encourage them to fight on resulting in massive American casualties. In a sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were demonstrations. They were meant to persuade the militarists that Japan could and would be annihilated unless they accepted the terms issued at Potsdam. And they worked, not that the end justified the means.
But the real failure of Knox’s analysis is his underlying assumption that every act must be subject to some universal test of morality that America had failed in Japan. There is a vast literature on this and related questions but, ultimately, it is not so that morality can or must always be served. For one thing, throughout history, most wars have been fought by nations that believed their cause was just. Perhaps the case for a necessary war is best buttressed by looking to conflicts that should have been fought but were not.
In his memoirs, President Bill Clinton wrote of his decision not to intervene militarily in the Rwandan genocide of 1994:
Within one hundred days, 800,000 people in a country of only 8 million would be murdered…With a few thousand troops and help from our allies, even making allowances for the time it would have taken to deploy them, we could have saved lives. The failure to try to stop Rwanda’s tragedies became one of the greatest regrets of my presidency.[1]
Addressing Congress, he spoke of the lesson he had taken from that tragedy, saying, “Genocide is no country’s internal affair.” This is a very different calculus from the more common idea of a universal “natural law” as decreed by most moral philosophers and applied in the case of Hiroshima by Monsignor Knox. “Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” are spoken of in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence but there is no evidence that any such thing exists. It is true that some activities are widely condemned and others are widely admired but there are no universal absolutes that admit of no exceptions. The idea of a social contract is a prerequisite to living in community but it is a weak force, a fragile agent of peace and comity. It requires enforcement by legal process including military or police force. This, I believe, is exactly what President Clinton meant by his comment about genocide.
The atomic bomb was neither moral nor immoral. It was tragic. It was horrible. But it was necessary in the sense that it promised to bring an end to the war more quickly and with less loss of life than any feasible alternative. It was just in the sense that ending the war also put an end to Japanese colonialism and, indirectly, to the colonialism of the European Allies. It extended the value of self-determination. And it was productive in the sense that it brought about the understanding that nations must now seek to eliminate total war. These ends may not have justified the means but the means enabled the ends which were certainly desirable.
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