The Ethics of Nuclear Warfare

the US could have had peace with the Japanese any time they wanted in the summer of 1945

What terms did Japan offer that the US could have realistically accepted before the use of atomic weapons? Any primary sources or documentation to back up this claim?

In either case the military junta did not accept unconditional surrender until the emperor personally stepped in after the bombs were dropped.

So whether or not their delusional leadership was willing to negotiate some vague peace deal with projected allied invasion casualties as leverage hardly seems relevant.
 
Not offered to the US obviously, but Kido's June 9th "Draft Plan for Controlling the Crisis Situation" suggested giving very generous terms for peace and was well received among the top dogs of the Japanese regime, any objections being mostly about trying to give the US one last punch to try to have a better hand at the negotiating table. It also suggests the regime would be unable to contain civil unrest or conduct a war by the end of the year, going somewhat against the idea of the Japanese population being willing to fanatically resist 'till the last man, woman or child.

I'm not at all a pacific war buff (so prepare for an uninformed opinion), but it seems to me the very end of the pacific war hinged mostly on semantics and both sides simply being unwilling to say "the right words" based on principle. The US was unwilling to agree to a peace even with all concessions imaginable unless they heard the words "unconditional surrender", and the Japanese were willing to concede just about anything as long as Japan was preserved as a nation, but absolutely unwilling to use the words "unconditional surrender".
 
Well, it also prohibits those who did sign it from using landmines, which is going to reduce the number of mines being put into the ground, even if it won't get rid of them altogether. It won't fix the problem, but it will mean that fewer people end up being blown up because any one of 133 armies, including those of just about all of Europe, fought a war there and went home without picking them up. That's not the best that it could have been, but it's hardly 'toilet paper' to the people who will end up keeping limbs and children because of it.

A map about this Ottawa Treaty:


For all possible warfares around Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Georgia, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, China, Burma, Vietnam, North Korea and South Korea, this treaty is moot. And I think this this already covered 80% of possible conflicts between "effective regimes". Sub-saharan Africa have problems with irregular warfare, where the belligerent party is not national government, thus they will still use them.
 
A map about this Ottawa Treaty:


For all possible warfares around Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Georgia, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, China, Burma, Vietnam, North Korea and South Korea, this treaty is moot. And I think this this already covered 80% of possible conflicts between "effective regimes". Sub-saharan Africa have problems with irregular warfare, where the belligerent party is not national government, thus they will still use them.

It isn't moot at all if you assume that any of those possible wars will include Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, or a fair few other countries who have been doing rather a lot of active service overseas in the last couple of decades. It should dramatically cut the number of landmines being used in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. Again, it's not going to remove landmines altogether, but there will certainly be fewer, and that's a good thing. Particularly in international politics, you don't get far insisting on calling everything either perfect or worthless: all that you ever have is small steps (hopefully) in the right direction.
 
Ethics of Nuclear Warfare, you ask?

Why not ask the government of the USA?
They are the only ones to have ever used these horrible weapons in real life/history (unlike Gandhi and India in CV).

Makes me laugh how a nation which used Nukes against conventional war fighting opponent (Japan) would just NUKE these opponents, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians just justify those horrible actions by the need to save the lives of its own troops and preventing the conflict from dragging on.

Imagine if the USSR or Russia ever doing that!!!! What would the peace-loving American people (and especially their government) say?!

But hey, here we are, over 70 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the USA is sticking it's long nose into every country's affairs, demanding HUMAN RIGHTS being respected, I mean, talk about Irony!!!
 
Ethics of Nuclear Warfare, you ask?

Why not ask the government of the USA?
They are the only ones to have ever used these horrible weapons in real life/history (unlike Gandhi and India in CV).

Makes me laugh how a nation which used Nukes against conventional war fighting opponent (Japan) would just NUKE these opponents, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians just justify those horrible actions by the need to save the lives of its own troops and preventing the conflict from dragging on.

Imagine if the USSR or Russia ever doing that!!!! What would the peace-loving American people (and especially their government) say?!

But hey, here we are, over 70 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the USA is sticking it's long nose into every country's affairs, demanding HUMAN RIGHTS being respected, I mean, talk about Irony!!!

Or, you know, the beliefs and goals of the current US government are almost completely different than those of the US government circa 1945. When we dropped the bombs, we knew it was going to be bad, but it still wasn't fully understood just how bad. Notice that since we now know just how bad it would be if we started slinging nukes left and right, we have decided that using our nuclear arsenal is pretty much a "last resort" option to defeat an enemy, and even then there would be a lot of hesitation before the order is actually given.
 
Or, you know, the beliefs and goals of the current US government are almost completely different than those of the US government circa 1945. When we dropped the bombs, we knew it was going to be bad, but it still wasn't fully understood just how bad. Notice that since we now know just how bad it would be if we started slinging nukes left and right, we have decided that using our nuclear arsenal is pretty much a "last resort" option to defeat an enemy, and even then there would be a lot of hesitation before the order is actually given.

I heard this said about the First World War - namely, that there's a difference between knowing, in an academic sense, the consequences of an action - the number of casualties, the radius of destruction and so on - and actually knowing it in the sort of way that lets you realise exactly what you're doing - a gap, in other words, between knowing the numbers and truly connecting them with people who are very much not numbers. It could be said that 1945 forced that connection upon us, much like 1914 (or at least 1916) really brought home what it meant to take a country into a large-scale, industrial war - though I suspect the lessons of 1945 might be fading with time (without wishing to make too much of a certain Presidential candidate...), much like those of 1914 did.
 
How many wars have actually been ethically correct?

I assume in 1945 the only goal the commanders had was to save as many of their own soldiers lives and win as quickly as possible, enemy casulties may not have mattered at all because if is the enemy's fault that they take casualties bacuse they have not surrendered.

They bombed the enemy because they could, war is never fair and if they could beat a laying person simply because that person have not surrendered yet they would do it. The only thing they may have feared at that point was that Japan may be invaded and conquered by Soviet so why not show our new weapon.
 
The point is:

NO OTHER NATION HAS TO THIS POINT EVER USED NUCLEAR WEAPONS DURING WAR (or peace) AGAINST CIVILIAN POPULATION EXCEPT "AMERICA-THE BEAUTIFUL"!
,you know, the land of the free, and the home of the brave, and all that baloney.... hahaha

(land of the free?- that's Native north Americans before you guys showed up, Home of the Brave? Again, those indigenous natives you pretty much wiped out to build your "civilization"

Don't teach other nations about HUMAN RIGHTS if you're more than eager to disrespect them as you please, now please, and thank you.

Moderator Action: Can we please be a bit more civil in our posting. leif erikson
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The point is:

NO OTHER NATION HAS TO THIS POINT EVER USED NUCLEAR WEAPONS DURING WAR (or peace) AGAINST CIVILIAN POPULATION EXCEPT "AMERICA-THE BEAUTIFUL"!

So? That's not a moral indictment in and of itself, its just a fact of circumstances of World War 2.
 
the Japanese were willing to concede just about anything as long as Japan was preserved as a nation, but absolutely unwilling to use the words "unconditional surrender".

Keep in mind that the Japanese "nation" in 1945 included Korea, Taiwan, the Liaodong Peninsula, several other Chinese concessions including Imperial assets/property and countless Pacific islands. Korea in particular was considered a vital and integral part of Japan.
 
Or, you know, the beliefs and goals of the current US government are almost completely different than those of the US government circa 1945. When we dropped the bombs, we knew it was going to be bad, but it still wasn't fully understood just how bad. Notice that since we now know just how bad it would be if we started slinging nukes left and right, we have decided that using our nuclear arsenal is pretty much a "last resort" option to defeat an enemy, and even then there would be a lot of hesitation before the order is actually given.

Well, I don't think this is really true at all. The issue is that there are a lot more warheads around and more countries than just the US have them. We knew exactly what we were doing when we dropped the things on Japan, just as we knew exactly what we were doing in the conventional raids on Japan.
 
Keep in mind that the Japanese "nation" in 1945 included Korea, Taiwan, the Liaodong Peninsula, several other Chinese concessions including Imperial assets/property and countless Pacific islands. Korea in particular was considered a vital and integral part of Japan.
And Ireland had been considered a vital and integral part of the United Kingdom, until all of a sudden it wasn't. Politicians are, for their countless faults, a pragmatic bunch.
 
I love America! It's truly a beautiful country (more like a continent really).
It should say "from Ocean to shiny Ocean" and not "from Sea to shiny Sea", in the song, let's be proper.

America offers four and two season weather, from the snow and ice (soon to melt) of Alaska to the deserts of Nevada and Arizona (not only). Well, it bought Alaska from the Russians for a laughable price, didn't the Americans buy Florida from Spain and Louisiana from France as well?
And then there are the vast territories captured in the war(s) with Mexico. And the Indian wars (more like genocides), they brought more land and resources to USA.
Glad CIV devs recognized the heavily Expansionistic nature of Americans (heck, they even invaded (British) Canada but were repelled in the war of 1812) all the way back in CIII. It was even Aggressive/Expansionism at time, I would call it.

On the other hand USA's has been the dominant power and culture (and economy) in the world since (at least) the end of WWII. By the way of negotiation or the use of power, US has spread Democracy and stabilized the world's political situation over the recent decades. Its influence in every aspect of world domination cannot be denied (although China's starting to challenge it).

It's in fact a beautiful country, from the Disneyland, beaches and swamps of humid Florida, to the concrete jungle known as NYC (and the one and only Statue), to the historic New England, to the worth seeing Windy City, Mississippi, the prairies, the Rockies, Hoover Dam, the magnificent Canyon, Las Vegas (I love the night life), California (Hollywood) to Alaska and Hawaii.
Yes, we Canadians are a bit jealous, what do we get here? bit of decent land and lakes and further up north a bunch of tundra, snow and ice(although starting to melt a bit)-yikes! (hey, at least we got the better Niagara Falls!, CN tower, historic/walled Quebec city and Montreal and the spectacular Vancouver BC-and all that skiing you could ask for).

But hey, US should have never Nuked Japan in WWII, Japanese civilians were targets and as result of those died by the thousands, and it's not civililans who declared war against America (more like Japanese Emperor and Military).
 
Don't forget PEI, Cape Breton, and Calgary. Banff and Jasper awesomeness. Drumheller an hour away.
 
True. Unfortunately, in cases of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, pragmatism often took a back seat to dogmatic idealism.
If the Japanese regime consistently placed zeal above survival, Japan would have absorbed as many atom bombs as were necessary to turn it into a sheet of radioactive glass. The logic of the bombings assumes that the Japanese regime was fundamentally pragmatic, or at least that there existed a pragmatic faction within it that could be allowed to take the initiative by a show of sufficient menace, and the Japanese populace was sufficiently war-weary to accept a pragmatic peace.
 
I'm not sure that it's either-or between being dogmatic and pragmatic. You could say that the justification for the atom bombings rested on the assumption that the powers that were in Japan were pragmatic enough to see the threat of imminent nuclear holocaust (with no chance of a glorious, heroic resistance) as a reason to surrender, but dogmatic enough that they wouldn't feel the same about anything else.
 
If the Japanese regime consistently placed zeal above survival, Japan would have absorbed as many atom bombs as were necessary to turn it into a sheet of radioactive glass.

Yeah. Fighting to end was the idea, more or less.

Japan was ruled by a junta of Imperial Japanese Army and Navy officers. To say that their military 'constantly placed zeal over survival' seems like an understatement.

Every single military member of the war council opposed surrender even in the face of nuclear apocalypse and impending invasion. Only the impotent civilian ministers were in favor of accepting the allied terms. Fortunately, the emperor spoke up decided himself.

The logic of the bombings assumes that the Japanese regime was fundamentally pragmatic, or at least that there existed a pragmatic faction within it that could be allowed to take the initiative by a show of sufficient menace, and the Japanese populace was sufficiently war-weary to accept a pragmatic peace.

Actually US commanders didn't expect Japan to surrender. So they deployed the bombs where they believed they'd be most militarily useful rather than for shock and awe value.

ie preparing for the upcoming invasion of Kyushu. Hiroshima was the HQ and logistics center for the Kyushu garrison. The other two targets Kokura and Nagasaki were vital to keeping Kyushu linked and supplied.
 
Yeah. Fighting to end was the idea, more or less.

Japan was ruled by a junta of Imperial Japanese Army and Navy officers. To say that their military 'constantly placed zeal over survival' seems like an understatement.

Every single military member of the war council opposed surrender even in the face of nuclear apocalypse and impending invasion. Only the impotent civilian ministers were in favor of accepting the allied terms. Fortunately, the emperor spoke up decided himself..
I think you're talking around the point, here. The Allies gambled that the Japanese regime and populace were not so wholeheartedly committed to unending resistance as to accept obliteration as an appropriate cost. This proved to be correct. What magical aura did the atom bombs possess, that they could convince the Japanese to realise the jig was up, which the greatest army to menace Japanese shores since Kublai lacked?

Perhaps the Emperor asserting himself was instrumental in forcing Japanese surrender, but he didn't assert himself because atom bombs are scary and vast hosts of invading soldiers are not. That's a a specifically American Cold War anxiety onto a time and place in which it is wholly inappropriate. He asserted himself because Japan had quite plainly lost the war, and the only variable was how much life and land had to be devastated before the regime was willing to accept it. If the bombings had an effect, it was only the timing of his intervention.

Actually US commanders didn't expect Japan to surrender. So they deployed the bombs where they believed they'd be most militarily useful rather than for shock and awe value.

ie preparing for the upcoming invasion of Kyushu. Hiroshima was the HQ and logistics center for the Kyushu garrison. The other two targets Kokura and Nagasaki were vital to keeping Kyushu linked and supplied.
That may have been the rationale for the targets, but very few people involved believe that they were simply a tactical measure. The Allies had already called for the unilateral surrender of Japan, and it's unusual to make that kind of demand so late in a war if you don't at least hope they're going to accept it. The big division was between those who believed that more bombs were necessary to make the point, and that two was already a barbaric excess; the surprise wasn't that Japan surrendered, it's that it surrender after two bombings specifically.

At any rate, the decades of apologia that have since accumulated have stressed the alleged necessity of the bombs to prevent a costly invasion, which, as I said, seems to rely on attributing to a single large explosion some almost magical power to circumvent the normal operation of the Oriental hive-mind that a thousand smaller bombs does not possess. If it turned out that the atomic bombs were instrumental in Japanese surrender only accidentally, that the US high command was quite prepared to accept the incineration of thousands of civilians as a merely tactical measure, then they were every inch the blood-thirsty cannibals their harshest critics made them out to be, they were just stupid, lucky cannibals, which is hardly more flattering.

I'm not sure that it's either-or between being dogmatic and pragmatic. You could say that the justification for the atom bombings rested on the assumption that the powers that were in Japan were pragmatic enough to see the threat of imminent nuclear holocaust (with no chance of a glorious, heroic resistance) as a reason to surrender, but dogmatic enough that they wouldn't feel the same about anything else.
It's unlikely that the Japanese regime had any idea what a "nuclear holocaust" was, though, or any reason to fear it. The bomb had only just been invented and its implications only hazily understood by its builders, let alone by people who only discovered it when the sky over Hiroshima burst into flame. The atomic bombs were an imposing super-weapon, I'll grant, but there wasn't yet any fundamental distinction drawn between them and conventional weapons except in the destructive force you could pack into a single bomb casing. That isn't even something that emerges until a few decades into the nuclear age; 1950s Americans may have worried about the ability of Soviet nukes to flatten every city in the country, but the assumed consequence of that was invasion and occupation rather than radioactive apocalypse. Their terror of the atomic bombs was that they only required a single bomber carrying a single bomb and were therefore far harder to defend against than a swarm of bombers carrying conventional ordinance, and if the Japanese regime was allegedly content to see every city in the Home Islands conventionally incinerated, there's no reason to think they should have been particularly anxious about those cities being atomically incinerated.

Either the Japanese regime were prepared to watch Japan burn and the populace ready to follow them into this collective act of national seppuku, or they weren't. The atomic bombs are in this question nothing but another weapon in the vast arsenal of Allied destructive power.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom