Dropping the atomic bomb in WWII

I received today a very kind invitation from the editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to contribute a short piece - a couple of paragraphs, really - to a special section with many contributors addressing the question of whether, if it had been up to me and me alone, I would have dropped the atomic bomb in the Second World War.

I am terribly flattered by the invitation. I am often a critic of NGOs and civil society organizations, usually for overreaching their political legitimacy, to make themselves into something they are not in order to gain political leverage. I have frequent substantive and philosophical disagreements with the Bulletin. All that aside, however, it has been a profoundly important moral voice since the introduction of the bomb, and a particular voice for the idea that scientists should not see themselves as mere instruments, but as moral creatures. That fundamental ideal is more important than any disagreements about what the content of that morality should be.

I want to say yes - and plan to say yes - to the invitation. But it is quite difficult to figure out how to express one's ambiguity on the issue. I will muse further in this blog about this, but for the moment, I am trying to figure out how to express my sense - deepening profoundly over time and study - of how much on the cusp, morally, the Second World War was, in the sense of the laws of war, the morality of war, the means and methods of war. On the one hand, there were reservations expressed, even at the highest levels, at the Allied bombing of German civilians; on the other hand, bombings went forward. It was a world in which, after the firebombings of Tokyo and Hamburg, Dresden, the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, and, most of all, the fact that the battles and casualties grew only more dreadful as US forces advanced across the Pacific, with only escalation of that to be contemplated in the assault on the home islands ... When I try to teach my students of what the carnage looked like to Allied civilian and military leaders and why, therefore, for them the destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a difference in efficiency but not a difference in kind from the firebombing of Tokyo - they cannot help but see it from the standpoint of the Cold War and its aftermath, from the standpoint of looking backwards from a world of thousands of missiles and warheads pointed at the opposed superpowers' cities. It is virtually impossible for them to see it from the standpoint of those looking backwards at the corpses of the tens of millions already dead in the conflict and what look to be millions more to come - if one can grasp that point of view, then Truman's seeming callousness seems quite different.

I am not quite with Paul Fussell's "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb," but the more I understand about the levels of carnage in the war, I do edge closer. Certainly it leaves me with less patience than perhaps I should have for those for whom the decision to not use the weapon was an obvious and easy moral call.