(Dobbs) Are Ethics In War An Oxymoron?
There are rules. Should they ever be stretched, even ignored?
Hiroshima. It’s an apt setting for the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Japan, flanked by other Western leaders, to meet. It is a reminder not just of past horrors but, if someone goes mad, of future horrors too.
Coincidentally, several weeks before the Biden trip was publicized, Hiroshima became part of a debate with a friend about World War Two. In a way, the issues that came up could have been about today’s war in Ukraine, where the nuclear threat has been voiced.
It started when my friend asked me to name my five favorite presidents. I didn’t put Harry Truman in the Top Five but said he’s in my Top Ten. Why? Because for one thing, he had the plaque on his desk that said “The Buck Stops Here,” and he walked the walk. If other leaders took that path, it would be a better world.
For another thing, because Truman made the heart-rending decision in August of 1945 to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima, then three days later on Nagasaki, to end the Second World War. He told the nation just hours after the first bomb dropped, ”Let there be no mistake, we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.”
Japan had abused that power. It had to be stopped. I saw that as a good thing.
My friend agreed that ending the war of course was paramount, but he believes that what Truman did to end it puts him in the Bottom Ten, not the Top Ten. First, because the president had neither the legal nor the moral right to indiscriminately target the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no matter what it might achieve. And second, because whether you accept the military’s post-war estimate of around 110,000 dead in the two bombed cities, or estimates by anti-nuclear scientists of almost twice that number, the unprecedented and unfathomable death toll might not even be what finally forced Japan to surrender two weeks later.
A well-researched story in The Nation, on the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima, concluded that the decisive factors at the end had been the firebombing of Tokyo earlier in 1945 and the entry of the Soviet Union’s Red Army into the war against Japan. Its headline was, “The War Was Won Before Hiroshima— and the Generals Who Dropped the Bomb Knew It.”
Some said so themselves. Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, declared two months afterwards, “The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.” General Dwight Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs that when he was told of the decision to drop the bomb, he had “grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.” Truman’s own chief-of-staff, Admiral William Leahy, wrote five years later, “The use of this barbarous weapon…was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.”
But whether the A-bombs did or didn’t bring Japan to its knees, did President Truman, in the interest of protecting America’s forces from more Japanese attacks, have the right to drop them?
My own answer is more visceral than scholarly.
I reported from eight different wars over the years, and have long concluded that all were started for a handful of reasons: regional rivalries, territorial conflicts, irreconcilable ideologies, ethnic arrogance, religious dogma, economic ambitions, dreams of empire, megalomania, and greed. Think about every war you’ve ever known or even read about. You’ll see one or more of those motives at work. Sometimes, to be sure, a war is waged to stop bad people, whether terrorists or leaders of sovereign states. And sometimes it’s for self-defense. But those are the exceptions to the rule. Shaped in large part by what I’ve seen, I would be inclined toward aggression against a cruel enemy that starts a war. In the case of the war in the Pacific, after they hit us hard, we had a right to hit them back harder. Japan started that fight, we had a right to end it.
My friend didn’t buy that, particularly in light of how we ended it. He turned to the Geneva Conventions which, at risk of simplification, define what’s lawful in war and what’s not, what we’re allowed to do and what we’re not. To be fair to Truman, atomic weapons were not on the radar of the nations that originally wrote about the rules of war.
But that was then, this is now. In 1977, new articles were added. One says, when there are no legitimate military targets within reach, which was the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, direct attacks on civilians are prohibited. In other words, the rules of war forbid indiscriminate attacks. Shades of Russia’s blanket bombardments in Ukraine. Another says, if the scope of a weapon’s destruction cannot be limited, willfully using that weapon violates international law. In other words, under the Geneva Conventions, using a nuclear weapon when its devastation reaches far beyond military targets is a war crime.
In a broadcast on NPR on the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima, Harvard Law professor Gabriella Blum elaborated. ”Under the current laws of war,” she said, “if you know you are going to impact civilians, you must provide warning, and you must take precautions to avoid harming civilians to the extent possible. There is no doubt none of that was considered, and none of that was seriously weighed in reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The professor was objective enough to point out though that what is clearly illegal under the rules of war today wasn’t so clear back then.
But by another international principle known as the Martens Clause, A-bombing Japan was wrong even in 1945. Since the end of the 19th Century, the Martens Clause has underscored a fundamental set of ethics even in war. What it says is, civilian populations are protected by “the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience.” Of course that leaves another open question: if wars must ever be fought at all, what kinds of bombs are compatible with “the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience?”
Which takes us to Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of a sovereign neighbor is clearly illegal, under the terms of both Martens and Geneva. And beyond the brutal beating he has inflicted on Ukraine, especially with his strategy of pounding them from all sides, Putin several times has made threats to bring nuclear weapons into the war. In his latest he warned, "I signed a decree on putting new ground-based strategic systems on combat duty.” As if he hasn’t already violated the rules of war, that would complete the circle. Then the question is, if he breaks the rules, does Ukraine, and by extension its allies, still have to abide by them?
Legally, it’s unclear, although responding in kind would be a form of self-defense. It’s something each of us would have to decide for ourselves. Ukraine does have to defend itself, the West cannot tolerate unprovoked attacks on allies, Russia does have to be stopped. The question is, where are the limits? At what point do we go no further and let the aggressor win? Are our hands tied if the enemy shows contempt for the treaties that govern wars? I suspect on that one, my friend and I would still come down on different sides.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Counterfactual question - what if the United States had dropped little boy on a much less populated area in Japan? I wonder if this was even seriously considered...
5 years ago we made a point of visiting Hiiroshama while in Japan. This memorial is one of the most powerful I’ve seen. Not sure it would even touch V Putin, but the world must have this reminder.