Quibbling Over Nomenclature Regarding the Atomic Bombings

Atomic Bomb-Nagasaki, 1945. Battered religious figures stand watch on a hill above a tattered valley. Photographed by September 24, 1945. Official U.S. Marine Corps Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives

Things that are different are not the same.

The distance between the concept of “justified” and the concept of “good” has a river of moral conundrums flowing through it. When talking about dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, Paul Tibbets who flew on the missions put it this way: “I do not dwell on the moral issue. The thing is it did what it was supposed to do. It brought peace to the world at that time.”

While I was watching the Oppenheimer film in the theater, I was mentally braced for how the debate over the dropping of two atomic bombs onto Japan was going to be handled. All in all, as I wrote in my own review of the film which you can read here, I think Christopher Nolan and crew handled it pretty well. The relevant bit.

Using two atomic bombs on Japan is something that humanity will not only always debate but should always debate and wrestle with. The film did a good job covering all the bases and arguments that went into the decision and not only the morals and strategy involved, but how personalities and fears both known and unknown played into it. Lending as much gravity as possible to something so momentous that resulted in so many deaths without getting preachy about is not easy, but Oppenheimer managed it.

Among my other thoughts not written down was the realization that the always simmering online debate over the bombings would be cranked up to a full boil online and elsewhere. Being chronically too-online myself, I rather dreaded that. Mike Cote’s recent piece dealt with the particulars of that debate well enough, and I agree with wide swaths of his writing.

But I cannot agree that, quoting the title of his piece: “Dropping the Atomic Bombs Was Good, Actually.”

Perhaps it is a minor quibble compared to big issues caused by those two history-shaping explosions, but it is the word “good” I object to. Strongly.

Justified and good are not the same. They are different. And that difference is very important when talking about something like atomic bombs and morality.

The logic laid out as to the necessity of the bombs is not what I mean. As Mike went into great detail with, warring with an Imperial Japan that not only swore to fight to the last man but very nearly did is almost unimaginable to modern sensibilities even with all documented evidence we have. The list of atrocities the Japanese military inflicted on civilians and soldiers alike is ghastly to read. It is telling that even after the second bomb was dropped there was still waffling among the powers of the Empire of Japan to struggle on.

With the Nazis trying to build their own, and the frenemy Russians looming after the wartime marriage of convenience is over, and a Japan swearing all 70 million citizens will fight to the end, if I’m in those positions I do the same thing. If I’m Roosevelt, I order the Manhattan Project and give it every priority. If I’m Oppenheimer or any of the untold thousands working on that project, I do my best to see it through. If I’m Truman, I order the bomb to be used. If I’m Tibbets, I’m flying the mission. If I’m bombardier Thomas Ferebee on the Enola Gay, I release the weapon. Every time. Without hesitation.

78 years of history tells us everything we need to know that it was the right decision, the necessary decision, the required decision. That some of history’s worst actors have had the power of atomic and nuclear weapons and have not used them again to date is a strong argument that there was a deterrent from America having done so.

Not good. I understand the meaning of the word in the usage Mike Cote and others are using it here, but I can’t make “good” a synonym of “justifiable” in this case. Nor is dropping the atomic bombs on Japan some ancestral sin for which all Americans henceforth and forever must atone for. But dropping those two atomic bombs is something a country that has the ability to do so again at a moment’s notice if need be is something that needs to be thought over, wrestled with, fully processed as part of the responsibility of having such great power.

As part of the morbid humor insanity of Cat’s Craddle, Kurt Vonnegut dropped a nugget that keeps nagging me every time the ramparts of atomic bombings discourse are mounted:

“After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is sin?”

Even in a twisted, blaring allegory the thoughts of Vonnegut on such things is interesting, as picking up bodies after the Dresden fire bombings as an America POW was a formative experience for the soon to be famous writer. Especially since his own fictionalized novelization of the attack in Slaughterhouse 5 is practically a sacred text to anti-war, anti-American power folks. Which gets it on the reoccurring banned lists when folks culture war over libraries and schoolbooks. To be fair, how you would portray the firebombing of Dresden without vulgarity and graphic violence would be some trick, and Kurt does get over the top with it to prove his point, but that’s what a writer has prerogative to do. At least Vonnegut was actually there for that horror, unlike most of the ensuing narrative since that has become the bloody shirt of choice for certain propagandist when whattabout-ing against America.

Four raids worth of planes full of incendiaries, such as Dresden, versus one plane with one atomic bomb, such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is an argument key to the debate. The atomic bombs were not the worst death tolls by a single air raid in World War 2, and weren’t even the worst by America against Japan. That horrible honor goes to the Operation Meetinghouse firebombing of Tokyo that left 16 square miles razed to the ground, over 1 million people homeless, and cost at least 110,000 lives and probably far more.

No reasonable person calls the fire bombings of World War 2 “good” in any kind of uniformity. Mostly they are just not talked about until some Russian-backed bot on social media starts waving them around as part of Rawr America Bad agitprop. But like the atomic bomb discourse, even in refuting the most extreme positions and arguments surround the event there is a key point that must be acknowledged.

We did do it.

To do a thing of consequence, no matter how justified in the moment, is to also carry the weight of that thing.

Sin, whether against God, Vonnegut, humanity, or otherwise, is a tricky business. Christianity has its rather involved Hamartiology – the theological study of sin – while Shinto Buddhism that is so prevalent in Japan has no such thing, and just about everyone else is someone in between. Sin gets icky; how murder is a sin, but if you defend yourself it isn’t, but killing one person randomly definitely would be, but wiping out an entire city of random people to stop a larger war probably isn’t…

There just ain’t enough ethics classes, religious or otherwise, for all that.

I strive, though probably fail, to have some consistency to such things. I hate war, HATE IT, in a personal way, while understanding the utopian unicorn of peace and pacifism at any cost always ends up with a worse war at the hands of worse leaders because of it. I know evil violence requires a less evil but greater level of violence to stop it. I also know without really tight guardrails and leadership the lesser of two evils never evolves past just being the evil it always was once the mitigating circumstance passes.

Maybe the “Baptist and bootlegger” in me is just so utterly engrained that I cannot call the difference between those things and doing the one to not have the other out and out sin. But I do know it is not “good.” Long before the economist started using that “Baptist and bootlegger” term for regulation, the folks where I come from understood it to be more of a test of hypocrisy without using that word. I tell you from experiece, as I is one, Baptists calling out sin in others is a common occurrence. We are all sinners, as part of Baptist doctrine, thus the need for a hypocrisy test. Which we as Baptist mostly ignore. Which is self-identifying, really. We can justify it, but even at our most hypocritical most of us would never dare claim it as “good” to the Lord or anyone else.

The TL:DR on the practical application of “Baptist and bootleggers”, whether for running shine or dropping nukes: Sometimes you just do your duty, do the right thing as you best understand it, and hope when you stand in judgement for it that was enough.

The chain of command of America’s military in 1945, from President Truman down to bombardiers Thomas Ferebee and Kermit Beahan who physically released the two atomic bombs on Japan, all figured it was their duty to do so. Had I been there I would have done the same. Everyone involved had to live with being a part of unleashing mankind’s mightiest weapons on their fellow humans.

Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, flew escort over Nagasaki, and was instrumental in the planning, commanding, and executing of both atomic bomb drops gave an interview where he talked about morality of the missions, and his rationalization went to another moral principle most folks are familiar with, the Hippocratic Oath of doctors.

Remember, I had come from a peacetime Air Corps, where safety was the rule if you were going to fire a gun or you were going to drop a practice bomb or do something. Well, you had to ascertain by every means available that the range was clear, that nobody could possibly get hurt by the act that you were about to perform.

The first time I dropped bombs on a target over there, I watched those things go down because we could do it in B-17s. I watched them go down. Then I watched those black puffs of smoke and fires in some instances. I said to myself, “People are getting killed down there that don’t have any business getting killed. Those are not soldiers.”

Well, then I had a thought that I had engendered and encountered for the first time in Cincinnati when I was going to medical school. I lived with a doctor. He would tell me about previous doctors, some that had been classmates of his, who were drug salesmen. That is, they were selling legalized drugs for drug houses and so forth and so on, because they could not practice medicine due to the fact that they had too much sympathy for their patients. They assumed the symptoms of the patients and it destroyed their ability to render medical necessities. I thought, you know, I am just like that if I get to thinking about some innocent person getting hit on the ground. I am supposed to be a bomber pilot and destroy a target. I won’t be worth anything if I do that.

Now, I have been lucky because if I had to make up my mind and want to reject something, I can reject it and I do that. So that was one of the things that I was faced with when, as you say, I was on my way to the target. But before that time, Tom, I was clearly convinced in my own mind, and I had people telling me how much property and lives that bomb would take when it exploded because it was nondiscriminatory. It took everything…

I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb. That was the thing that I was going to do the best of my ability. Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. I don’t care whether you are dropping atom bombs, or 100-pound bombs, or shooting a rifle. You have got to leave the moral issue out of it.

That Paul Tibbets could take the moral issue out where I could not, does it make him a better or worse man than me, though I would have done the same? I’m not sure, nor will I judge him for it. Like most things with the atomic bombings, it was a bad drop in an ocean of bad to try and get the bad to stop.

Justifiable. Would have done it myself. But in no way, shape, form, or fashion was it good.

Things that are different are not the same.

Judge that as you will