Bombing of Hiroshima Raises Some Significant Ethical

¶ … bombing of Hiroshima raises some significant ethical issues. From a military perspective, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as the catalyst for bringing about Japanese surrender, thereby ending the war in the Pacific. However, these attacks on civilian targets were among the most horrific in the history of wartime. Such attacks would be outlawed today under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which was enacted in 1949 partly as a response to the bombings and other atrocities committed against civilians and prisoners of war during the Second World War. It is my view that the bombing of Hiroshima, while violating any reasonable code of ethics, resulted in a net sparing of human life and was therefore a necessary act to bring about the end of the war.

The Bombings

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people were killed, and many more would die later as the result of radiation exposure (History.com, 2012). Some sources attribute the number of dead in the Hiroshima attack to have been 140,000 all told, mostly civilians, making it the most deadly attack on a civilian target in history (BBC, 2012) This attack was followed up three days later with the dropping of a plutonium bomb over Nagasaki. The Japanese issued their surrender six days after that attack.

The war in the Pacific to that point, fought primarily between the United States and Japan following the latter's attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, had been exceptionally bloody. Japan had spent much of the 1930s expanding its empire, and by the time it attacked Pearl Harbor had taken over large parts of China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and other areas in Asia. In the course of the conflict with the Americans, the battle with Japan was fought on a number of islands in the Pacific.

At the time of the attacks, the Fourth Geneva Convention did not exist, so there was no explicit international agreement to not target civilians in times of war. The European theater featured extensive bombing of civilian targets on both sides. The Americans famously leveled the city of Dresden in 1945 towards the end of the war. It had engaged in a similarly aggressive firebombing campaign against the Japanese during July of 1945. With the war in Europe over at that point, the U.S., UK and China called for Japanese surrender on July 26, 1945, the Potsdam Declaration. At this point in the war, the Potsdam Declaration was an attempt to avoid a ground invasion of Japan that would have cost both sides millions of lives, including significant devastation to the country's civilians. The destruction of Japanese infrastructure would also have set that country's ability to recover back by several years. The Declaration, however, was ignored by Japanese emperor Hirohito. In the face of this determination by Japan to continue fighting even if it meant an Allied invasion, the nuclear option was deployed as a last-ditch attempt to force a Japanese surrender.

The Ethics

There are two different views of the ethics of the Hiroshima bombing. One ethical frame that can be used is the utilitarian frame, which weighs the ethics of an action based on the consequences of the action. Utilitarianism is "one of the most powerful and persuasive approaches to normative ethics (Driver, 2009). Distilling it to a single theme, the ethical action is the one that delivers the greatest good for the greatest number. The outcomes for the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific and unprecedented, but arguably those bombings spared a much larger loss of life. The ground invasion of Japan was avoided, saving the lives of millions, including a number of Japanese civilians that could have been as high as the victims of these nuclear attacks. The bloody battles in Guadalcanal and Okinawa that saw tens of thousands of soldiers would have been replicated many times over during a ground invasion. In addition, the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as a warning to the world's nuclear powers about the devastation of those bombs. A case could be made that these bombings prevented other nuclear attacks during the Cold War, such was the fear of the outcomes.

There is a counterargument to the utilitarian case, however, in that the choice to bomb or to invade may not have been a binary one. While the Japanese were unwilling to surrender under the conditions of the Potsdam Declaration, the Allies treated the Declaration, as though there were no other choices. Rather, they could have simply pushed Japan back to its principle islands, and left the war at a stalemate. This approach was utilized later in Korea, for example. Other options could have been to walk away from the Pacific theater, having demonstrated superiority. This option might not have been palatable to China in particular, but may have served the interests of peace. There could also have been further attempts at negotiation with Hirohito in order to avoid further bloody conflict. Or, the bombs could have been detonated offshore, to demonstrate the power without the direct cost on human life. The counterpoint to the utilitarian argument is that there may have been other approaches to solving the problem that would have delivered the same results (Japanese surrender) without the high cost of life that either the bombings or a ground invasion would have had.

Another ethical frame for understanding the decision is the one that is reflected in the Fourth Geneva Convention, the deontological approach based on specific acts always being wrong, regardless of their consequences (Alexander & Moore, 2007). Under this approach, the attack on civilian targets would clearly have been considered in violation of all ethical standards. While there were other attacks on civilian targets throughout the war, ranging from bombing raids to the Holocaust, the nuclear option was unprecedented and has remained without equal in the history of warfare. The attack clearly violates even the loose ethics surrounding attacks on civilian targets at that time. Even though the outcome of the bombings was likely that lives were, on balance, spared, deontological ethics does not allow for consideration of outcomes -- the act is wrong no matter what the cost of not performing that act.