Nuclear War: A Thing That Would Be Bad

Some thoughts.

Photo by Felipe Albertella on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, Oppenheimer was released in Japan, and as you can imagine, it set off a bit of a discourse about the virtue of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A very silly video that went around accused the US of never grappling with the ethics of that choice. As every American knows, this is nonsense. Every kid learns about this in elementary school, and the ethics of it are a huge part of the discussion. This ethical question didn’t become central until a few decades after the war ended. My grandfather’s generation definitly had no qualms about it, but by the time I was learning about this in the 90s, things had shifted.

The arguments against it are pretty obvious: tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed even though Japan was already going to lose. The argument for dropping the bomb(s) is normally that Truman had been told that a land invasion of Japan would cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and would result in potentially millions of Japanese deaths. We had already firebombed Tokyo, so it’s not like we had some “no civilians” carve out for this total war.

My dad once had a television show on CBS called The Education of Max Bickford, in which he played a college history professor. One of the episodes is about him teaching his students about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the episode, they basically all agree that it was bad.

I’ve always been a little put off by this conclusion, mainly because it feels like Monday morning quarterbacking. We know things that Truman didn’t know. We approach the question with a more enlightened view of civilian casualties, etc… But at the same time, I think it can be colored too much by the “Pandora’s box” element.

The entire last half of Oppenheimer is based on the Pandora’s box idea—that he and his friends invented this thing that will one day kill everyone. But of course, that isn’t true. God invented it when He made it possible for atoms to be split for explosive effect.

If the Manhattan Project had been slower and failed to result in a bomb by the end of the war, it’s not like no one ever would have made one. Someone would have figured it out within the next few decades, and then they would have used them.

The choice isn’t between living in a world with or without nuclear weapons; it’s between living in a world where we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or one in which it was dropped by someone else somewhere a few years later.

And then the question is more complicated. All things considered, dropping the bomb on Japan was a pretty good way of it going.

There is no more virtuous war than WW2. Germany and Japan were bad. They were murderous aggressors that had to be stopped. The worst weapon in history was being chased by a bunch of different combatants in this very morally one-sided war, and using that weapon ended it, with destruction that could not be immediately matched, so humanity had time to be appalled and establish a taboo on further usage.

If, instead, the war had gone on for another year or two while the Allies invaded Japan, the bomb would not have been discovered for years or decades. It might not have been discovered until the world was plunged into another World War, which might have come twenty years later but might also have begun much sooner when the US and USSR went to the mattresses over Europe.

And in that case, the bombs might not have ended a war but would have instead begun a new, unimaginably worse one.

We might not have had the chastening demonstration that was Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We just would have had a situation—like every other war in history—where some terrible new weapon is developed contemporaneously by both sides and then deployed by both sides.

And the fact is, in the first half of the 20^th century, something like 50 million people died violently in world wars. That doesn’t happen anymore. Great Powers don’t go to war. (We fund proxy wars, which can be very bad but are not remotely the same thing.)

This is the “nukes as peacemakers” argument. They represent such destruction that they have forced everyone to keep their dicks in their pants. No one really disagrees with it. It’s just that, well, it makes sense until it doesn’t. If we ever do end up in a full-on nuclear war, then so many people will die that the survivors will look longingly on the cutesy death tolls of WW1 and WW2.