‘Japan was already defeated’: The case against the nuclear bomb and for basic morality

“I was against it on two counts,” Dwight Eisenhower, supreme allied commander, five-star general, and president of the United States, said of dropping nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities. “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

This certainly cuts against the common argument these days: that dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives, certainly the lives of American soldiers, and maybe even Japanese lives on net.

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Since the movie Oppenheimer came out, I have had occasion to opine against the nuclear bombings based on straightforward moral principles. I have repeatedly been told that I am being too precious.

Many view the question of whether to kill the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an example of the “trolley problem.”

The trolley problem is a philosophical exercise meant to test the distinction between the moral weight of the actions we choose versus the consequences of inaction. Is it the better decision to take an action that kills one person versus taking an inaction that results in five deaths?

The implication is that nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima is flipping a lever, rerouting the trolley, and causing the death of fewer people.

It’s a fine ethical exercise, but it’s inapplicable in real life for a million reasons because, in real life, things don’t run like an automated trolley on a track. We know where a trolley will go if we don’t flip a switch because there is a track there. We don’t know what Japan’s military and civilian population would have done had we not flipped the switch.

Defenders of the atomic bomb say that our only alternative to the deliberate slaughter of tens of thousands of noncombatants, including babies and elderly women, was a massive land invasion that would have cost millions of lives. They present this as if it was one of two sets of train tracks available.

People who were very involved at the time disagree. Again, Eisenhower said the Japanese were about to surrender.

Eisenhower told his biographer that he expressed to War Secretary Harry Stimson his “grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”

Was Eisenhower right that the atomic bomb was “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives”? I don’t know! Neither do you! There’s a lot of uncertainty here.

Adm. William Leahy, President Harry Truman’s chief military adviser, agreed with Eisenhower. “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan,” Leahy wrote. “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”

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Again, you can believe other people besides Leahy or Eisenhower. I can’t adjudicate the various claims. But I can conclude that there was lots of uncertainty about where this war was going. There certainly weren’t just two possible paths.

When we are deeply uncertain about the consequences of our actions, where do we turn? We turn to moral principles, including the principle that it is immoral to kill innocent women and children.