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Nuclear
Can nuclear war be morally justified?
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(Image credit: Getty Images)

By Richard Fisher

5th August 2020

Was the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki morally wrong? 75 years later,
the question is more difficult to answer than first appears.
I

In the early 1980s, the Harvard law professor Roger Fisher proposed a new,
gruesome way that nations might deal with the decision to launch nuclear
attacks. It involved a butcher’s knife and the president of the United States.

Writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Fisher suggested that instead of a
briefcase containing the nuclear launch codes, the means to launch a bomb should
instead be carried in a capsule embedded near the heart of a volunteer. That
person would carry a heavy blade with them everywhere the president went. Before
authorising a missile launch, the commander-in-chief would first have to
personally kill that one person, gouging out their heart to retrieve the codes.

When Fisher made this proposal to friends at the Pentagon, they were aghast,
arguing out that this act would distort the president’s judgement. But to
Fisher, that was the point. Before killing thousands, the leader must first
“look at someone and realise what death is – what an innocent death is. Blood on
the White House carpet”.

Killing a person with a butcher’s knife may be a morally repugnant act, yet in
the realm of geopolitics, past leaders have justified their atomic acts as a
political or military necessity. Following the nuclear bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki – 75 years ago this month – the decision was justified
only in terms of its outcome, not its morality. The bombing ended World War Two,
preventing further deaths from a protracted conflict, and arguably discouraged
the descent into nuclear war for the rest of the 20th Century.

This article contains details some people may find upsetting

You might also like:

 * Deep ethics: The long-term quest to decide right from wrong

 * How would nuclear war change humanity?

 * Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Women survivors of the atomic bombs



Yet those positive consequences cannot obscure the fact that on 6 and 9 August
1945, two of humanity’s most destructive objects brought the horrifying power of
the atom onto two civilian cities. We can attempt to describe the events through
numbers: at least 200,000 people killed by the flashes, firestorms and
radiation; tens of thousands more injured; an unquantifiable inter-generational
legacy of radiation, cancer and trauma. We can remember the individual stories –
of mothers and children, of priests and doctors, of ordinary lives transformed
in a moment. Or we can memorialise the relics left behind, as described in the
poem No More Hiroshimas: “The ones that made me weep... The bits of burnt
clothing. The stopped watches. The torn shirts. The twisted buttons”.

But there is perhaps no adequate way to capture that scale of human suffering.

Can it ever be right to launch a nuclear attack against civilians? In what
circumstances could such a decision be morally justified? In recent years,
researchers and philosophers have explored the moral questions raised by nuclear
weapons, and their conclusions suggest there are few easy answers.

The survivors are known as "hibakusha" (Credit: Alamy)

The greater good

First, let’s consider the argument that the US government, led by president
Harry S Truman, made for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing. Following the
events, the US framed its decision as an unfortunate but necessary act for the
greater good. “The principal political, social, and military objective of the
United States in the summer of 1945 was the prompt and complete surrender of
Japan,” wrote the US Secretary of War Henry Stimson in 1947. The alternative – a
ground invasion – could have resulted in the death of more than one million US
soldiers, Stimson asserted, and potentially many more on the Japanese side.
Perhaps that explains why in 1945, a Gallup poll found that 85% of Americans
approved of the bombing.

If Truman felt any regret, he did not show it. One of the closest hints of
contrition came from the diary of the secretary of commerce, who wrote that
Truman called a halt to any further bombing after Nagasaki because “he didn’t
like the idea of killing ‘all those kids’”.

A wounded child in Hiroshima (Credit: Alamy)

Yet, while there is no doubt that protracted war between the allies and Japan
would have led to a heavy death toll, some historical accounts suggest that
reality was more complex at the time. By focusing retrospectively only on the
outcome – the end of the fighting and 75 years of nuclear-free warfare –
alternative historical paths were closed off. What would the Japanese have done
if the Americans had elected a show of force first, dropping a bomb in Tokyo Bay
rather than onto two cities? Had the Emperor already resolved to ask his
government to surrender? And was the estimate of one million American deaths
through a ground invasion accurate? These what-ifs will never be known.

The reasoning that Stimson presented for the decision can nonetheless be seen as
a utilitarian argument that the bombing prevented a greater degree of overall
suffering, says the Japanese philosopher Masahiro Morioka. In a recent paper, he
drew parallels between the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings and the utilitarian
dilemmas raised by the “trolley problem”. Originally proposed by philosopher
Phillipa Foot, one of the simplest versions of this thought experiment asks
people to weigh up whether they would sacrifice one person’s life to save five,
by redirecting the track of a runaway trolley to kill that individual.

In his university lectures in Japan, Morioka presented this version of the
trolley problem to his students, and like many people who are asked to consider
the scenario, they told him they would divert the trolley so that only one
person dies. “They were shocked to realise that they made the same decision as
Truman and Stimson,” he says.

President Harry Truman (left) is briefed on the bombing by secretary of war
Henry Stimson (Credit: Getty Images)

Yet Morioka argues that seeing Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the sanitised
logic of a utilitarian greater good argument obscures the perspective of the
dead and injured. “How the victims would think is erased from the problem,” he
explains. “I believe that we should imagine seriously how the killed victims
would think if they were alive here.”

Morioka told me that while he can see the basic logic in the justification of
the bombing, he believes that it lacks humanity. “By making a justification, we
are led to pretend that the perspective of the victims did not exist at all,
which is morally and spiritually wrong, problematic and repugnant.”

Degrees of separation

Perhaps that’s also what Fisher had in mind when he proposed his butcher’s knife
idea. Blood on the White House carpet. The neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe tackles
the moral dilemmas underpinning Fisher’s protocol in a class she teaches on the
science of morality at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (I attended it last
year as part of MIT's Knight Science Journalism fellowship).

Like Morioka, Saxe points out that if the US president was fully committed to
the utilitarian logic of reducing the total amount of suffering during war, they
should have no qualms with carving out the person’s heart to get the nuclear
codes. What is one extra innocent life, if you are prepared to kill tens of
thousands for the greater good?

An injured 21-year-old soldier who was exposed to the bombing with subcutaneous
haemorrhage spots on his body (Credit: Gonichi Kimura/Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Museum/Reuters)

Perhaps some presidents would reach for the knife, but as Fisher’s friends in
the Pentagon pointed out, the horrific proximity of the act might give them
pause. After all, killing a person to get the codes has all the elements that
make a brutal murder prohibited and punishable. As Saxe points out, the act
would be premeditated, intentional, not in self-defence, and instrumental (it
uses people as a means to an end). If you agree that murder by this definition
is always wrong for individuals, can there be a moral justification for leaders
and nations?

Psychologists who study our moral attitudes have described the squeamishness
felt by the idea of murder up close as “action aversion”. When people are asked
to place themselves in a scenario that involves pushing, stabbing or shooting,
for instance, they are less likely to support the idea of killing for the
greater good.

In the trolley problem, a majority of people support the case for switching a
lever to divert the tracks, allowing the trolley to kill one person. But many
hesitate when presented with a different scenario that involves pushing a man
from a bridge to block the lethal trolley. (It is a grim coincidence that this
unfortunate person is sometimes described as a “fat man”, which was also the
code name of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki).

The mathematics of death in this scenario are the same – one life for five – but
something about the act of pushing feels wrong to many people. (Though notably
not all – one study showed that college students with psychopathic traits, for
example, are more likely to endorse utilitarian judgements that involve harm).

Hiroshima and its people from the perspective of a US military plane (Credit:
Library of Congress)

In 2012, one group of psychologists designed an experiment that captured
people’s “action aversion” in a truly inventive way. The researchers asked
participants to perform acts of violence such as striking an experimenter’s fake
leg with a hammer, or whacking a realistic toy baby onto a table. Even though
people knew they would cause no harm, the acts prompted a strong psychological
response, suggesting we may have a hard-wired moral aversion to doling out
direct violence.

As the psychologists pointed out, there is a “dark side” to such action
aversion. Their findings also suggested that when people are detached from the
realities of harm, there are fewer mental obstacles that might otherwise give
them pause. “Signing one’s name to a torture order or pressing the button that
releases a bomb each have real, known consequences for other people, but as
actions they lack salient properties reliably associated with victim distress,”
they wrote.

Perhaps a geographical and temporal detachment from the human realities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 goes some of the way to explaining why so many
Americans still support Truman’s decision. Perhaps Stimson’s case for a greater
good – all those hypothetical American lives saved – also still carries weight
in the national memory. Five years ago, on the 70th anniversary of the bombings,
the Pew Research Center asked Americans again what they thought of the bombing.
While a lower percentage approved compared with the 1940s, 56% of US respondents
said they believed the decision was justified.

The perspective of the Japanese is, unsurprisingly, utterly different. In the
Pew survey, only 15% of Japanese people agreed that the bombing was justified.
And while 40% of Japanese people described the events as “unavoidable” in a 2016
study conducted by the broadcaster NHK, a higher proportion of 49% said “they
can’t forgive even now”. This is despite the fact that an ever-smaller
proportion of Japanese people still survive from 1945: the average age of the
hibakusha – the victims who directly experienced the bombing – is now well over
80 years old.

Other nations, too, would seem to approve less of nuclear attacks than the US,
at least if snapshot surveys are anything to go by. In one poll, people around
the world were asked if “nuclear weapons are morally wrong”. People in the US
were notably less likely to agree compared with citizens of the UK and France,
which are also nuclear powers.

Few houses and buildings were left standing near ground zero in Hiroshima
(Credit: Mitsugi Kishida/Teppei Kishida/Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum/Reuters)

To dive deeper into US attitudes to nuclear weapons, one 2013 study titled
“Atomic Aversion: Experimental Evidence on Taboos, Traditions, and the Non-Use
of Nuclear Weapons” asked Americans to put themselves in the position of a
leader authorising a strike on a base in the Middle East. The researchers
wondered whether there might be a moral “taboo” against using the nuclear
option, compared with a conventional weapon. They found that the people in their
study were actually more likely to make a decision based on the effectiveness of
the weapon and whether or not it would lead to escalation, rather than shunning
nuclear weapons as inherently wrong or taboo.

Yet Brian Rathbun of the University of Southern California argues that there is
more nuance to the morality of the decision-making displayed in this study than
first appears. “There was a presumption that those people were morally
dastardly,” he says, but that conclusion is based on only one very narrow
definition of morality.

Psychologists and neuroscientists once studied moral decision-making
predominantly through the lens of harm, fairness and concern for other people.
For example, one approach was to peer at people’s brains while they caused or
observed pain in others. But around a decade ago, it began to emerge that
people’s “moral foundations” – how they decide what is right and wrong – are
more complex, and crucially, differ according to background, culture and
political ideology.

Progressive liberals, for instance, are more likely to make judgements based on
the moral foundations of “care” and “fairness”, aiming to avoid harm to others,
or embracing political issues such as equality (which might suggest that
scientists previously had spent a bit too much time focused on studying only
liberal morality). Traditional conservatives, by contrast, are often more likely
to prioritise the moral values of “loyalty”, “respect for authority” and
“purity/sanctity”, and so make moral choices that favour traditions, societal
stability, and preserving the way of life of their communities and nations.

It’s not that conservatives are uncaring and liberals disloyal – the moral
foundations can be present across society – but the point is that each person
has different priorities about which values are most important to them when
weighing up what is right or wrong. “We consult these underlying moral
intuitions to figure out our position on an issue that we've never heard,” says
Rathbun.

Consider people’s reasoning for justifying violence. When a conservative
supports policies like the death penalty, torture or military force, they are
not setting aside their ethical values, even if a liberal might strongly
disagree. And a liberal supporting a protest movement that leads to public
disorder and violent clashes with authority might find disagreement with their
political opponents, but they are guided by what they believe is moral.

At least 200,000 were killed and many tens of thousands of people were injured
with burns and worse (Credit: PD)

Last year, Rathbun and Rachel Stein of George Washington University set out to
explore how people’s moral foundations affected their attitudes to nuclear
weapons. Like with the “Atomic Aversion” study, the pair asked participants from
the US to put themselves in the shoes of a leader weighing up whether to make a
nuclear strike against a military base, varying factors such as weapon
effectiveness, the identity of the enemy, and associated casualties.

The pair found that people who prioritised so-called “binding” moral values of
loyalty and respect for authority – which probably evolved to strengthen the
“in-group” and protect against external threats – were more likely to approve of
the use of nuclear weapons in their scenarios. They also, perhaps
unsurprisingly, were more likely to endorse the actions of a leader who had
launched a nuclear attack. Even stronger support for nuclear weapons was found
among people who value the moral rule of “an eye for eye” – perhaps one of the
oldest ethical principles.

People with these binding and retributive values were also less likely to
abandon their position as civilian casualties rose. However, they were not
indifferent – support for the nuclear option dropped fairly steeply once the
casualties exceeded 10,000, and was very low in all groups by the time the death
toll reached a million.

All this suggests that it’s impossible to answer whether the use of nuclear
weapons is inherently right or wrong – whether they should be taboo or allowed
under some circumstances – because it depends on the moral framework of the
individual.

For those who would wish to avoid nuclear war, an arguably more important
question to ask would be how the aggregate moral views of a nation collectively
influence a politician’s choices in the fog of conflict. What matters, says
Rathbun, is that public opinion has the power to influence the likelihood of a
nuclear launch. “Politicians rely on an intuitive sense about what they think
the public will allow,” he says. “They're always operating under a sense of
‘what can I do’ and ‘what can I not do’.”

And as historical trends in polling have shown, public attitudes towards nuclear
weapons can shift over time. While support in the US is overall lower than the
mid-20th Century, there’s nothing to say that this can’t reverse. One recent
study, for example, found that public backing for the ban on US nuclear tests
has declined since 2012. Meanwhile, the current US administration is reportedly
contemplating a resumption of testing on American soil.

A future leader, with their finger hovering over the nuclear button, will always
make their decision under what Rathbun calls a “shadow of morality”.

“The conclusion that's been reached since time immemorial is that international
relations is a realm of human interaction devoid of moral content,” he says.
“From an evolutionary point of view, I think that's impossible. Human beings
just cannot help but moralise.”

Marking the anniversary of the bombings in present-day Japan (Credit: Getty
Images)

The end of everything

There is one final moral dimension to consider when exploring the rights and
wrongs of nuclear weapons, which was articulated by the Oxford University
philosopher Toby Ord in his recent book The Precipice. The explosive power of
thermonuclear bombs is so great in the 21st Century that they pose an
existential risk of triggering a nuclear winter, caused by smoke from firestorms
blocking sunlight for years. “Hundreds of millions of direct deaths from the
explosions would be followed by billions of deaths from starvation, and –
potentially – by the end of humanity itself,” he writes.

Ord argues that human extinction would be a disaster of such magnitude that
working to prevent it should be the world’s number one moral concern. Not only
because everybody on Earth would perish, but also because it would mean that
trillions and trillions of as-yet unborn people would not live – and flourish –
in the coming millennia.

“We stand poised on the brink of a future that could be astonishingly vast, and
astonishingly valuable,” Ord writes. Yet our power to destroy ourselves – and
all the generations that could follow – is outpacing our wisdom. In Ord’s view,
the morality of nuclear war looks quite different if you consider it as an
existential, species-level threat, rather than through the lens of national
conflicts.


> THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION THAT LED TO THE SPLITTING OF THE ATOM REQUIRES A
> MORAL REVOLUTION AS WELL

After WWII, a monument was built at ground zero in Hiroshima. It features the
words: “Let all the souls here rest in peace; for we shall not repeat the evil.”

“The word ‘we’ means not only the people in Hiroshima city, but also all human
beings on Earth, including the entire Japanese and US citizenry,” according to
Morioka, who shows the monument to his Japanese students whenever he discusses
the 1945 bombings with them.

Five years ago at this site, a former US president paid his respects to the
Japanese people, and said the following words: “The very spark that marks us as
a species – our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our
ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will – those very
things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction… Technological
progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The
scientific revolution that led to the splitting of the atom requires a moral
revolution as well.”

It doesn’t matter which president said the words. What matters was that, like 10
other US presidents of varying political affiliations since 1945, he did not
find himself facing the same decisions that led to that terrible week 75 years
ago this month. For all this time, both Republicans and Democrats – along with
the leaders of other nuclear-armed nations around the world – have had the
opportunity and power to reach for the codes that launched an atomic bomb
against their enemies. Roger Fisher’s controversial proposal to embed those
protocols in the heart of an innocent volunteer was, obviously, never taken up.
Yet remarkably, perhaps luckily, no global leader since Truman has ever used
them. Whatever your views on the rights and wrongs of atomic weaponry, that
cannot be anything but a victory.

 

* Richard Fisher a senior journalist for BBC Future.

--

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