Comment by CamperBob2
6 days ago
You're right, in that there's no reason to assume the bombs were entirely decisive by themselves. The truth is that from the target's POV, there was nothing particularly special or interesting about the atomic bombs of the day, except that they were dropped from a single plane.
So no, they wouldn't be considered war crimes, any more than the equally-destructive firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden would be considered war crimes. Meaning, of course they would be considered war crimes, but only if the victims had won the war. That's the idea behind war. War is about doing the worst stuff you can do to the other guys, then doing whatever you can to claim the moral high ground afterward. So it's best avoided when possible.
Szilard was a great guy, and in fact he was behind the original missive to FDR that kicked the program into gear. It's as impossible -- and as inappropriate -- for us to judge him and his motivations as it is for us to second-guess Truman's decision to drop the bombs. However, he's all wet with that particular argument. Unlike Germany there was never any question that the Allied side would win the war, bomb or no bomb. The question was, what would be the cost, and who should pay that cost. I'm fine with Japan paying it. They would certainly have done the same to us, and they would certainly have skipped the subsequent navel-gazing.
By the way, it's easy to argue that the 'slight geopolitical edge' that the Bomb gave us over the USSR saved millions of lives in the future. For instance, it's far from clear that North Korea wouldn't be better off today if MacArthur had been allowed to have his way.
Imagine that the Russians had either somehow beaten us to the Bomb, or had invaded Japan in the absence of our ability to deter them. Given a choice between suffering Hiroshima and Nagasaki at our hands, and suffering a half-century of Communist rule, do you really think Japan would be better off in the latter scenario?
I don't think war is at all about doing the worst stuff you can to the other guy. Different countries approach it in radically different ways. The war in Ukraine is one of the deadliest wars in modern times, but civilians have made up an extremely small percent of all casualties. On the other extreme, Israel's war against Gaza is just a complete slaughter of civilians. And I don't think we should simply lower ourselves to lowest common denominator regardless of whether or not Japan would have done the same. This isn't even necessarily about morality either - it's simply in our self interest. The era when the US was something to look up to was also the time when we behaved in a principled fashion, or at least were perceived to be doing so.
The history of Korea is another example of this stuff, and nothing like people think. After the Korean war South Korea was ruled by a series of US backed brutal dictators. When the first was overthrown, he lived out his final years in Hawaii, just to be replaced by another, and so on. South Korea only started to become what you think of today in the 6th Republic, which began in the late 80s. The only difference between North and South Korea is that we aimed to economically attack North Korea and economically support South Korea. And given South Korea is now having an extinction level fertility crisis, the final page of how things turned out is still yet to be written.
The Ukraine war has a better civilian casualty ratio for a bunch of reasons that are not "Israel is evil and trying to slaughter civilians":
- Soldiers on both sides wear uniforms.
- When they can, Ukraine defends from trenches away from civilians.
- When urban combat seems unavoidable, Ukraine evacuates their civilians.
- Ukraine is a vast country, with plenty of safer areas to move to.
- Other countries have also accepted large number of Ukrainian war refugees.
Gaza is the opposite: Hamas fighters disguise as civilians, they defend mostly from urban areas, they never attempt to evacuate civilians (sometimes the opposite), it's a small territory, and no countries are accepting Gazan war refugees in significant numbers.
There's no military on the planet that could fight Hamas in Gaza without causing significant civilian harm.
Third party observers have observed endless bad behavior from Ukrainian forces. Amnesty International even called them out, in spite of the inevitable blow back it would (and did) receive, for actively locating their military forces in residential areas, launching strikes from civilian areas, turning schools and hospitals into military bases, and more. [1] Ukraine's response was tantamount to saying that rules don't matter for them, because they're the defender and not the aggressor.
Given these behaviors Russian forces would be justified in just carpet bombing these sort of areas that Ukrainian forces are entrenching, but they have chosen not to. By contrast that is precisely what Israel does, and also what the US does not only in WW2 but e.g. in Iraq and Afghanistan where killing dozens of civilians to get somebody who might be an enemy is considered a justifiable engagement.
And again this gets back to what I just said about this not even necessarily being about morality or ethics. Israel is in a vastly worse place now than it was on October 8th 2023, and it's unlikely things will be improving for them in the foreseeable future. Behaving good in war is simply in one's own best interest on any sort of timescale beyond the immediate.
[1] - https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/ukraine-military-e...
4 replies →