The Ethics of Nuclear Warfare

Situation in 1945 was completely different since Japan already lost large parts of the territories conquered in 1942 so they could not expect to hold on to these territories. Instead I think they proposed or discussed to propose to grant independance to all remaining SEA colonies and asked the allies to do the same ...

Problem with the 1945 negotiations was that the Japanese relied on the Soviets as mediators, which played for time to relocate their european troops to enter the war and occupy as much strategic territory in East Asia as possible before war between Japan and the allies ended ...
The situation in the summer of 1945 is that some of the military leaders of the country were willing to make some kind of peace that preserved both kokutai - an obnoxiously open-ended commitment that could be anything from "keeping the imperial government totally intact" to "keeping the emperor even if only in name" - and national honor, whatever that meant.

The Americans' problem was that they correctly understood that the Japanese government, IGHQ, and the Army and Navy hierarchies were far from of one mind on the topic, they believed that a coup attempt against any peacemakers was probable and would probably succeed, and they also wanted to demonstrate the immense power of the nuclear weaponry at their disposal, especially to the Soviets. To put it bluntly, even if the Japanese government had managed to commit to an unconditional surrender before the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman and his advisors didn't believe in its willingness or ability to carry it through. As the abortive coup attempt shortly after the nuclear attacks showed, they were probably not wrong to think that way. Without the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the American attacks on Japan, it's hard to conceive of the IJA and IJN uniting behind a peace policy acceptable to the Allied powers.
 
Throwing an atomic bomb on an enemy city in Civ6 should probably damage/destroy/pollute not only the center but also most of the surrounding tiles with districts/improvements in the 1st, 2nd and maybe also the 3rd ring. Even when pollution from fallout is cleared, there should be a massive effect on population growth for maybe 50 turns (a generation) due to effects of radiation disease/mutation ... fallout may have global impact on health as well as agricultural production worldwide if a full scale nuclear war is waged ...
(Depending on the degree of Enlightenment of human society, usage of nuclear wepons should have a major impact on all diplomatic relations (crime against humanity) if used in an unnecessary case. )

So, back to how nukes worked in civ2. Or was it civ3?

Funny thing is that arguing over how past civ games worked is "history", from the past millennium and all :D
 
am pretty sure Civ I nukes polluted the environs and that caused massive famine for tons of turns to come . Really depending on the numbers of settlers you had . Never much of a nuker in Civ III but must be the same , only workers and not settlers .

pressing for a relaxation of the supposed 50% of stack dies rule for Civ III Plus ; it should be totally arbitrary .
 
1. You can grab pictures of fire-bombing Dresden and have similar/more carnage. That was pretty horrific, yet is generally not talked about as much because it didn't have the magic "nuked" tag.

2. In today's military tech climate, targeting civilian centers heavily with "conventional" military would be thoroughly ruinous. Grab some updated bombers and put runs over cities like New York, Tokyo, London, Berlin and you'd get more deaths and destruction than the nukes of ww2. That too is routine gameplay in civ! Where's your outcry over that?

3. In the game, years pass quickly and 1 hex represents enormous territory. The idea that you should get 3 hexes of damage from a nuke, especially atomic era nukes, is absurd! The bomb in Hiroshima didn't level 5 other cities and 1/3 of Japan. It had devastating, longstanding consequences, but 1/3 of the island wasn't a smoldering crater. When you back-translate what a hex represents in civ and how many total cities the largest empires have, you're essentially advocating that kind of outcome.

OP is not grounded in logic. Any modern military shelling civilian centers would quickly reach short-term body counts that would make Hiroshima/Nagasaki pale in comparison, especially carpet bombing. That doesn't happen because it's a war crime and doesn't solve anything. However in the game there's not much distinction. I'm not seeing a call to have world-denouncing reactions to carpet bombing a city center, yet somehow a nuke is sooooooo much worse?

Nonsense. If anything, their place in the game is already plenty strong. Over-representing their damage would be a disservice to history and gameplay. When you're ok with attacking a city center with weaponry that could drop millions inside a day with no effort, it's not rational to suddenly ask for larger reactions to weapons that do far comparable, or in the case of previous-era nuclear weaponry, less.
 
You can grab pictures of fire-bombing Dresden and have similar/more carnage. That was pretty horrific, yet is generally not talked about as much because it didn't have the magic "nuked" tag.

The bombing run on Dresden - as horrific as it was - didn't kill much people after the bombings stopped. By contrast, the effects of nuclear attacks are far more insidious; Victims piled up, years after the attacks.
 
Moderator Action: Thread title provisionally adjusted for new forum and world-history focus - please feel free to suggest alternatives. Also, please remember to keep things civil, as usual.
 
No, the atomic bombs caused Japan to surrender and it was a choice between a few hundred thousand people dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or millions dead in an invasion of the Home Islands.

Japan was not going to surrender just because Manchuria fell, they were intending to fight it out to the last and were training civilians to be suicide bombers and soldiers armed with literal pointy sticks. Even after the atomic bombs convinced most of the government that it was time to give up, there was still an attempt to stop Hirohito from delivering his surrender speech by elements within the military.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa argues in 'Racing the Enemy' that the decision to surrender actually comes before the Japanese government and imperial court even know the Nagasaki bomb had been dropped. There were a few confusing reports stating that 'something' may have happened, but that's it.

His argument is that the one thing the Japanese were holding out for more than anything else was for Russia to step in and act as a mediator in peace negotiations. When that possibility no longer existed it destroyed the last hope that Japanese imperialists had of holding on for an honourable peace.

I don't think it is unfair to suggest that atomic weapons helped move things along, but they were not the only (and very likely not even the primary) consideration for the Japanese. Far more were killed in the fire-bombing of Tokyo and still they did not surrender. I think we over-exalt atomic weaponry in 1945 because of the Cold War. It distorts our view of what atomic power was like in 1945, and also how it was perceived.
 
As far as Japanese peace overtures in the summer of 1945, they did exist, and some of them offered terms virtually identical to those ultimately agreed upon in August, but they never had the full backing of the Japanese imperial government. Even if individual ministers or diplomats could have forged a deal there is no guarantee that it would have been accepted by the Japanese armed forces, the emperor and his ministers.
 
For the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they would rank similar to the Tokyo fire bombing and Dresden bombings, we don't need another ethics class/category for early A-bomb.

For the hypothetical nuclear holocaust/WWIII, I would say no ethics would be left in a Fallout aftermath. Human society would degrade into tribal organizations.
 
Limited nuclear war is as morally abhorrent as indiscriminately bombarding enemy cities. I'm pretty sure any use of nuclear weapons is defined as a war crime by international treaty because they definitely ban 'indiscriminate' weapons and if anything is indiscriminate it's a nuclear warhead.
 
The US could have made peace with Japan without invading or bombing them. They were already defeated by the time the bombing of Japan proper had begun. It was the US insistence on unconditional surrender that prolonged the war, and I'm of the opinion that the USSR's invasion of Manchuria was also an important consideration for the Japanese.

The Germans bombed the Dutch in a similar manner explicitly threatening another raid if the Dutch didn't surrender. Does the fact that it ended the hostilities between Germany and the Netherlands justify the Nazi raid there? I think not.
 
Both FDR and Truman were under the assumption that to avoid a third great war the US would have to be long-term directly involved in the post-war of the defeated empires. It wouldn't work without the US imposing its will. You'd just get the tit-for-tat of nation-carving. This is why things like the Marshal Plan happened. The result of which expanded the American empire, so therefore it was agreeable to follow through with it. But imperialism aside, the way WW2 ended was from lessons of how WW1 didn't really end. In fact, it was after the nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima that Truman became convinced he could live with the Emperor having immunity.

If US viewed post-war world as a place US must play a role, and US needed to play against Russia, there's even less incentive to bomb Japan back to stone-age, it would be more beneficial to keep Japan alive and well against Russia in the far east.
 
Limited nuclear war is as morally abhorrent as indiscriminately bombarding enemy cities. I'm pretty sure any use of nuclear weapons is defined as a war crime by international treaty because they definitely ban 'indiscriminate' weapons and if anything is indiscriminate it's a nuclear warhead.

I'm not sure that argument really holds. If anything is indiscriminate, it's a bullet - it hits exactly what you point it at, regardless of what that is. When you throw a grenade through a doorway and storm it with automatic fire, whoever is in that room is dead, whether you're hitting a room full of enemy troops or cowering civilians. Fire an artillery shell at a building - any building - and the building is destroyed. The only difference with a nuclear weapon is the scale and the fallout: as with any weapon, it behooves you to fire it only at the right sort of target, and not to fire it when you can't guarantee the safety of civilians nearby. I'm not too sure about the level of fallout from the tactical variety of those things, but a website gives the radius of radiation from a small nuclear weapon as about 500m, and the amount of radioactivity decays reasonably quickly (if there's x amount of radiation the next day, there's a tenth of that a week later). During the Gulf War, there were discussions about using tactical nuclear weapons in the desert as a response to Scud attacks, and I'd struggle to say that it's more of a crime against humanity to blow up a Scud site with a small nuclear missile than it is to blow it up with a series of air strikes. For those on the sharp end, it works out the same.
 
Perhaps if their use was restricted to military installations in the middle of nowhere, without any civilians nearby.

You don't aim a nuclear weapon at a building, room, or individual, you aim it at a city.
 
A strategic one, certainly. But nobody wants to ban battlefield air strikes because air strikes can be used to flatten cities.
 
But the equivalent, which is indiscriminate reduction of an entire city to rubble by conventional air strikes, absolutely is forbidden.
 
If something serves the tactical and strategical value, then there would be no power to effectively ban this action.

An example is the landmine prohibition treaty (Ottawa Treaty), which is basically toilet paper as Top 3 landmine makers, China Russia US, refused to sign.
 
If something serves the tactical and strategical value, then there would be no power to effectively ban this action.

An example is the landmine prohibition treaty (Ottawa Treaty), which is basically toilet paper as Top 3 landmine makers, China Russia US, refused to sign.

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.
 
The problem is that you and I didn't fight that war. Our observations are through the minds of people who can learn the lessons by sitting down with a cool drink in our hands. I can't pretend to know the mind of our fathers who didn't have the luxury, both Axis and Allies.

This is not a problem at all. You are essentially arguing that the study and analysis of history cannot exist because we weren't there. We have facts at our disposal (in many cases, more facts than people on the ground did since we can collect data from many different sources without the same time pressures and confusion that reign in the moment), and a process of careful analysis to help elucidate controversies and decisions made in the past.

I think a land invasion of Japan would've resulted in much more indiscriminate killings. Let us not forget that vile things were done to the Vietnamese by some US forces. I do not think Japan would've somehow been different, especially if they followed through with plans of resisting to the last child. That is not to say the bombing was justified, but ending the war is justified. It needn't go on longer only to result in more death and more nations being carved up between two powers who would play games with them for the next 40 years.

There is substantial scholarship which suggests that Japan's 'plan' to resist to the last man was an absolute joke. No one seriously was going to implement it. You also ignore the fact that there were multiple potential plans for the assault on Japan. Some advocated an island-hopping campaign which relied on securing Kyushu first. Others advocated a straight decapitation strike launched at Tokyo. The first of these two options would have been decidedly more costly than the second (for everyone involved), and seems to be the option you're assuming. The second option was very real and would have required far less bloodshed.

This also ignores the fact that the US could have had peace with the Japanese any time they wanted in the summer of 1945, and did not 'have' to drop the bombs. It was a choice. One can argue that seeing the frightful effects of the atomic bombs made nuclear war between the US and USSR less likely (an interesting scenario, in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki potentially saved millions of lives), but one cannot argue that using the bombs was 'necessary'.
 
Top Bottom