Another Jus in Bello Evaluation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Just finished responding to a jus in bello analysis of Hiroshima and Nagasaki written by an active-duty Marine. He is a Staff Sergeant who is also an assistant instructor at a Naval ROTC program at a midwestern state university. Said Marine wrote an essay stating that using nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally wrong. He was using the same Just War Theory and he sites the exact same facts as I did in my previous post, but he drew the exact opposite conclusion.

Unfortunately his post is private and I don't have permission to republish it here. Below is my hastily-written response. If it wasn't so rushed, I would expand on the "non-combatant vs supporter" theme by writing:

Just War Theorists go through considerable wrangling to determine who is a legitimate target and who isn't. In her text, Frowe talks about how "wide" to cast a net in order to catch the right targets:
     too wide = all combatants plus some non-combatants
     too narrow = some (but not all) combatants plus no non-combatants.
If we do cast too wide, which non-combatants are to be included as targets? The obvious targets, like civilians working in armament plants, makes sense. I would claim that the "journalists" who screeched for war, the politicians who clamored for war, and the defense contractors who profit before, during, and after the war make for far better targets than the actual combatants due to the amount of harm they cause.

An assumption that needs to be checked is the "innocence" of non-combatants. It may be more accurate to call them "supporters" or "enablers," or at least some of them. Their innocence is problematic because of the way the general citizenry frequently get along in a totalitarian country such as Imperial Japan. When Germany was reunited after the fall of the Berlin Wall, lists of collaborators, informants, and other people who worked with the East German Stasi were released, and those were not short lists!

The following is my response to his essay.

Respectfully sir, you are wrong. Here's why...

In Chapter 5, Frowe¹ lays all the cards on the table regarding jus in bello criteria. After giving a straw-man version of "realism," the main part of the chapter begins by saying that jus ad bellum and jus in bello must be kept logically separate. One of the reasons given is that the combatants may be conscripts, therefore the warfighters are tools and cannot be held morally responsible for their leaders. Those who accept that reasoning don't realize that at any point in history where conscription was used, there have always been draft resisters. For those who do volunteer, Frowe states² that "by enlisting, they wave their right not to be killed in battle by the other side. They are therefore not wronged by being killed..." It isn't exactly clear how they give up their right to life, and many would claim that the right to life is one of the reasons why we do fight.

To get the Principle of Discrimination working, Frowe then attempts to distinguish between "combatants" and "non-combatants". A "Realist War Theorist" (the belief system I hold) would instead distinguish between "combatants" and "enablers" or "combatants" and "supporters," but let's continue with her dichotomy. For JWT, this creates a 4-way classification system - friendly combatants, our non-combatants, enemy combatants, and enemy non-combatants. There is much wrangling in Chapter 5 about the "value" assigned to the people in each class. There's nothing wrong with this.

On friendly combatants vs enemy combatants, the Just War Theorist Michael Walzer states³ "the moral status of individual soldiers on both sides is very much the same" and that "they face one another as moral equals." Really? By this, US Marines and soldiers are morally equivalent to the Japanese soldiers who participated in the "rape of Nanking." This was a six week long massacre that started when the Imperial Japanese Army invaded the Chinese city of Nanking⁴ in December 1937, during which 200,000 to 300,000 residents were killed, anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 women and children raped, and 30,000 to 40,000 POWs executed.

An Imperial Japanese soldier, smiling, prepares to publicly behead a Chinese boy. Bettmann/Getty Images

Combining Walzer's position with the above quote from Frowe means our men are not wronged by being killed. As leaders, the men under our command are the most valuable things in the world. Those who have not been in that position would say "if they were so valuable, you would take them out of the combat zone." That only shows a lack of understanding of what warfighters and leading warfighters are all about: they follow you because they wish to follow themselves through you.

The Principle of Discrimination requires friendly non-combatants and enemy non-combatants to also be morally equal: they are both innocents not to be harmed. Really? When I read that, the following comparison jumped to mind: when 9/11 occurred, there were pictures of New Yorkers running away from the collapsing buildings, and there were pictures of people in the Middle East jumping with joy. People who hold non-combatants on both sides are equal must say that those are the same pictures.

Our combatants are more valuable than enemy combatants, and our non-combatants are more valuable than enemy non-combatants. This is why you fight for the men beside you and those behind you. This is also why you don't change sides. Believing this doesn't make you a “rampaging militiaman” as Frowe dismissively states⁵ (she's obviously never met a militiaman), it just means you have your priorities straight.

Regards,
Mike K

Footnotes

1. Helen Frowe, The Ethics of War and Peace.
2. Ibid.
3. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations.
4. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
5. Helen Frowe, The Ethics of War and Peace.

Bibliography

Chang, I. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Basic Books, 2012.

Frowe, H. The Ethics of War and Peace. Taylor & Francis, 2022.

Walzer, M. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. Basic Books, 2015.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a Jus in Bello Evaluation

Introduction

On 6 and 9 August 1945, the United States used nuclear weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in anywhere from 129,000 to 226,000 deaths[1]. In discussing the ethical status of these events at the conclusion of the War in the Pacific, it is common (perhaps universal?) amongst Just War Theorists to treat the two bombings as a pair, that they were morally equivalent, i.e. the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both just or both unjust. Two other possibilities are not mentioned: that the bombing of Hiroshima was unjust but the bombing of Nagasaki was just, or the reverse, that Hiroshima was just but Nagasaki was unjust. These two possibilities are not considered here, subtle and interesting that they may be, and these events will be considered morally equivalent as the jus in bello criteria are applied.

Principle of Discrimination

The Principle of Discrimination presupposes that a distinction exists between people who are threats and those that aren’t, or who are combatants and who are non-combatants[2]. The Principle requires that non-combatants are not to be directly targeted by attacks.

At the time, precision guided weapons were decades away. Also, irregular warfare (assuming terrorist mass-casualty tactics are not employed) is capable of targeted killings (very akin to assassinations) and targeted destruction of infrastructure. America could not wait for precision weapons to be developed, and the War in the Pacific was not an asymmetric war (except for Mao Tse-Tsung's guerrillas fighting the Japanese in China).

The effective discrimination between combatants and non-combatants thus depends on the technology available and the type of war being fought. Evaluation of the use of atomic weapons must be based on those factors.

The targets of the use of the atomic bombs were not chosen to maximize the number of non-combatant deaths. Instead, they were chosen by the Target Committee for their military significance[3]: Hiroshima contained a major military base and embarkation port. Naval ordnance was manufactured in Nagasaki, and that city was also the site of major shipbuilding and ship repair facilities. One proposed target, Kyoto, was rejected because of its cultural and religious significance[4].

Because of all this, the Principle of Discrimination was respected in the use of atomic weapons: the targets were chosen so that facilities relevant to the Japanese war machine would be made unavailable.

Principle of Proportionality

The Principle of Proportionality regarding a particular tactic requires that the value gained by the tactic is "worth" the damaged caused.

No doubt playing in the minds of Americans was the recent (1 April - 22 June 1945) Battle of Okinawa[5]. In this battle, over 150,000 – 260,000 military and civilian personnel were killed on both sides[6]. These numbers are larger than the number of deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Absent use of atomic weapons, the Allies would have to invade the Japanese homeland. That operation, called Operation Downfall, was already under consideration and the number of American deaths were projected to be between 500,000 and one million[7], and that the operation would extend the war at least into February 1947.

It was expected that Emperor Hirohito would surrender following the use of atomic weapons, thus ending the war. If he did not, or if atomic weapons were not used, then the Allied invasion would go forward.

The value gained from the use of atomic weapons was thus the end of the War in the Pacific and the avoidance of what would surely be a costly land invasion. It is reasonable to say that the values gained exceeded the loss of life and damage that the atomic weapons caused.

Conclusion

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were evaluated according to the Principle of Discrimination and the Principle of Proportionality. It is found that while non-combatants were indeed killed, the targets were military in nature. Also, the number of deaths caused by the bombings were less than the number of projected fatalities that would result from a ground invasion of Japan. Thus, the use of atomic weapons to end WWII passes the two jus in bello criteria.

Mushroom Clouds over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right). Photos by George R. Caron and Charles Levy

Footnotes

1. Clayton Chung, Japan 1945
2. Helen Frowe, The Ethics of War and Peace
3. Paul Ham, The Target Committee
4. Ibid.
5. Joseph Alexander, The Final Campaign
6. George Feifer, The Battle of Okinawa
7. D. M. Giangreco, Hell to Pay

Bibliography

Alexander, J. The Final Campaign: Marines in the Victory on Okinawa. U.S. Marine Corps History Division, 1996.

Chung, C. Japan 1945: From Operation Downfall to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Osprey Publishing, 2008.

Feifer, G. The Battle of Okinawa: The Blood and the Bomb. Lyons Press, 2001.

Frowe. H. The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction. Routledge; 3rd edition, August 25, 2022.

Giangreco, D. Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945–1947. Naval Institute Press, 2017.

Ham, P. The Target Committee. Hampress Ltd., 2018.