James Diddams: I’m privileged to introduce our next speaker, my colleague, Marc LiVecche, who is the McDonald Distinguished Scholar of War, Ethics, and Public Life, as well as executive editor at Providence Magazine. He is also a non-resident research fellow at the Naval War College, and most recently is finalizing a book titled Moral Horror: A Just War Defense of Hiroshima. So everyone, please welcome Marc LiVecche.

Marc LiVecche: Thank you very much for being here. For those of you who have come back multiple years, thank you for coming back.

He’s given away a little bit of what I’m going to talk about today, which is a defense not just of Hiroshima, but a defense of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, just to put a finer point to it. But I’m going to preface some of that with canvassing some of the terrain. I’m going to canvass some of the terrain that Paul has already taken us through, in part, because I think you need to hear things multiple times in order for it to sink in.

But my defense of the bombing of Hiroshima isn’t just going to be an out-of-orbit defense, but it’s going to carefully go through the criteria of the just war tradition to argue why the bombing wasn’t just necessary, but it was morally right. I’ll preface all that by pulling way back and just pointing out that as a just war ethicist, as a military scholar, I’m very often asked, and very specifically as a Christian one, by people who are doubtful of my vocation, which it’s fine to be doubtful of our vocation, but they’ll challenge me by asking, “How can a Christian countenance or defend killing someone made in the image of God?” 

How can you countenance killing the Imago Dei? They’ll say we have it on pretty good authority that the central duty of the Christian is to love their neighbor. So isn’t killing one made in the image of God a rather dubious act of adherence to the duty to love your neighbor? I think it’s a good question, but I think the better question is, what do you do when one image of God is kicking in the face of another image of God without justification, and they won’t stop? What do you do then? So the question isn’t, do I love my neighbor in this sense, or in this case, let’s call him my enemy neighbor.

I’m just trying to keep myself honest here. The question isn’t whether or not I love my enemy neighbor. The question is, how do I love my enemy neighbor when my enemy neighbor is kicking in the face of, let’s call him, my innocent neighbor.

Some within the military ethics tradition will say, well, you know, it kind of cashes itself out in this way. You love the victim neighbor now, and you love the enemy neighbor later when the smoke clears. We should discard that out of hand.

That seems, that can’t be right. We have to love both of them now. That should be clear, but it should also be equally clear that we can’t love both of them in exactly the same way, in exactly the same moment, but we are to love them.

So I think Paul said this, but I’m going to double down on it. Just war rationale, the moral framework, isn’t a way of abdicating. We’re finding exceptions to moral duties, Christian moral duties.

There are ways of manifesting these moral duties in the context of history. So I have to love my enemy neighbor, even as he’s kicking apart the face of my innocent neighbor, and I have to love that enemy neighbor even as I resist him. Even if I resist him all the way to death, love has to be filtering my actions all the way through.

We’ll talk a little bit about what that looks like. Paul also encouraged us to understand just war morality as a way of holding on to things that we know to be true, when the crisis hits. This is a good time to do this, left of boom, you could say.

Just like the time to develop a sexual ethic is not the backseat of a car. The time for you all to be thinking about a theology of killing is not when you’ve deployed, or it’s not when you’re already working the helm of government, or advocating on these types of positions. Now is the time, left of boom, in the relative security of the Army-Navy Club.

It’s important to hold on to these things, as Paul has encouraged us, because in the crisis, the easiest thing to do will be to let them go. These are things that are worth holding on to. Just war is all about how to navigate conflict situations, and a conflict situation, at least as I’m defining it, is when two or more moral duties conflict.

By pursuing one moral duty, you almost by definition can’t pursue the other moral duty, at least not to the nth degree, or to the degree that you would be able to, or would desire to be able to, if the circumstances were different. What do you do when moral duties conflict? That’s what this whole tradition is trying to help us adjudicate. What do I do when one neighbor is kicking apart the face of another neighbor and won’t stop? I have a duty to love both.

Those duties are in conflict. What do I do? In a sense, you’re a room full of Christians, right? You’ve read Prince Caspian. The just war tradition is asking us to be badgers.

You’ll remember in Prince Caspian, the badger says, I’m a badger. We hold on. The just war tradition is asking you to hold on to those things that you know to be true, even when they’re incredibly difficult to hold on to.

Nigel Bigger, who’s I think one of the best just war scholars, describes it this way, that yes, you’re holding on to things, but sometimes the holding on is uncomfortable, like when you’re grasping nettles, plants with thorns. This is all about how do you grasp nettles and maintain your fidelity to Christ at the same time. 

I’m going to give a defense of Hiroshima, the bombing of Hiroshima. I think it’s important as a Christian to not equivocate. By this, I mean we should know what it is that we’re talking about. We shouldn’t traffic in euphemisms.

One euphemism nowadays is that we talk about rivals and adversaries. Paul encouraged us to remember actually sometimes talking about enemies. We’re talking about people who do not desire our good or the good of the things we love.

In order to help us avoid trafficking euphemism, I’m going to read a section of a chapter in a book on military necessity with Eric Patterson, who spoke to you yesterday. That’s one place you can find at least an encapsulation of my argument about why it was right to bomb Hiroshima. I’m going to read a little bit of that, just so we all know what we’re talking about.

“On August 6th, 1945, a specially modified U.S. Army Air Force B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber, the Enola Gay, cruised some 31,000 feet above Honshu, the largest of the Empire of Japan’s four main islands. Conditions were good, most clear skies, limited cloud cover. The Enola Gay had no trouble locating her target. At 0815 hours, her bombardier released a 9,700 pound atomic bomb, christened Little Boy, over the port city of Hiroshima. 

Decorated with crude messages for Emperor Hirohito, the device fell for 43 seconds. A crosswind pushed at it, causing it to deviate slightly, just off bullseye. At 1,900 feet above Hiroshima, several thousand pounds of conventional explosives ignited inside Little Boy, discharging a cannon-like mechanism that fired a plug of one subcritical mass of uranium along a barrel and into a second, hollowed out, subcritical mass of uranium. The resulting compression and increased mass forced the two pieces of uranium to become a single supercritical mass, setting off a fission chain reaction that continued until the energy released became so great that the bomb simply blew itself apart.

Little Boy detonated with a force greater than 12 to 15,000 tons of TNT. The temperature at the blast’s burst point eclipsed a million degrees Celsius and ignited the air surrounding it, resulting in a fireball some 840 feet in diameter, with an apparent brilliance ten times the brightness of the sun and a temperature hotter than the sun’s own surface. The blast wave shattered windows over a distance of 10 miles and was felt at a distance of over 37 miles.

With the destruction radius of one mile, the thermal pulse sent fires raging over four and a half miles. People on the ground reported a brilliant flash, a strange smell, and a booming noise. The city toppled. Buildings were ripped from their foundations, bridges twisted. Some 70% of the city’s structures were shoved to pieces.

Radiant heat traveling at the speed of light caused flash burns, charring skin to charcoal. Probably somewhere between 70 to 80,000 souls were consumed instantly. Tens of thousands more would die slowly, succumbing to injuries or radiation sickness and varying degrees of agony days or weeks or even years after. About one half hour later, after the initial blast, a black rain fell from the darkened heavens.

A stew of dirt, ash, and radioactive particles that were sucked up into the air with the mushroom cloud returned to earth. The rain poisoned areas, initially uncontaminated by the detonation. Hiroshima became a place of desolation.

Three days later, the Empire of Japan accepted Allied demands for unconditional surrender.”

 And when the days intervening the blast and the surrender, lots of things happened that built up toward the Japanese surrender. 

“But my argument is that the hit on Hiroshima was the master shock that preceded them all, and that this is causally and morally essential. Dropping Little Boy was necessary to provide the best chance of compelling the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, and thereby to bring the Second World War to the quickest and most durable, proportionate, and discriminant end possible. Peace throughout the Asia-Pacific began in the shape of a mushroom cloud.”

 Those I take to be facts, and those facts are horrific. The book is titled Moral Horror, and I mean that in its double meaning. First, as a compound noun, it was a moral horror. It was an event that ought to shock the conscience.

We shouldn’t sit easily with it. But I also mean moral, as an adjective, that it was a moral horror, which is to say it was right to do, which is to say to not have done it, given the context, would have been morally wrong. So I’m not trying to equivocate on this.

I think it would have been morally wrong to not drop that bomb, given the conditions. All right, that’s the argument. This is important to think about now.

Next year, between this National Security Conference and the next one, we will be observing the 80th anniversary of this attack. There’ll be lots of conversation, almost certainly, that will be generated about it, because I think relatively few people agree with my assessment, right? Or at least that number is decreasing. We can get more into how that view is shifting, if you want.

All right, so how do I possibly justify what I’ve just described? Let’s go back over some of the just war tradition, and I’ll be focusing on the words that I used toward the end, that this was necessary to bring about a durable, a proportionate, and a discriminant end. All right, so Paul broke the tradition into three major sections. He and Eric Patterson like to do this.

I’m okay with doing that, but I’m a simple guy. I got 14% on the math GRE, so numbers are difficult for me. So I just want to stick to the two, right? There’s the jus ad bellum, the jab, right? J-A-B.

This tells you when it is right to fight, and then there’s the jib, the J-I-B, the jus in bello, and this tells you how to rightly fight the fight that’s right to fight. All right, that’s very simple. If the just war tradition were a Windows program, you know, you would click on the criterion of right intent, and there would be a drop-down menu, and then there’d be something that would say justice after war.

You would click on, or it would say peace, so you would click on that, and then it would say justice after war, and then you get all the stuff he talks about, about order, justice, and conciliation. Incredibly important, but I just don’t expand because I think it’s baked in. A part of the reason I don’t expand it is now other people are saying we need a jus ante bellum, right? So justice before going to war, which is also important, but that’s caught up in the criterion of last resort, which we’ll talk about.

So this thing is just going to get carried away if we keep adding to it. That’s my defense, and that’s all I got to say. Sovereignty. Paul reminds us that sovereignty is the first criterion that you need to have in place. You need somebody over whom there is no one greater charge with the care of the political community to make the kinds of responsible decisions, to gather up the nation, and send it into combat. 

The second is just cause. He touched on this, and I’m going to come back to sovereignty in a moment in the context of Hiroshima, but I just want to make a point here. There’s sovereignty, then there’s a just cause, and then there’s the right intent. Augustine said these three things map perfectly onto the primary responsibilities of a sovereign, which is order, so proper authority, a just cause, which is largely justice, and then the right intent, which is peace.

These are the three political goods, and arguably maybe they’re two political goods because peace is a derivative of order and justice, but it’s also in some ways its own thing. But these three political goods are essential if you’re going to have any other political good with any sort of confidence. If you don’t have justice and order, you don’t have peace.

If you don’t have these three things, then other political goods like life and health and general welfare are up for grabs. Backing up to sovereignty. Sovereigns have all sorts of responsibilities. The one that I want to touch on right now is what is sometimes called a special obligation. A special obligation is an obligation that is held by some by virtue of who they are or what they’ve done. So if you make a promise to somebody, you have an obligation to keep that promise to that person that I don’t have because I didn’t make that similar promise.

It’s a special obligation. I am a father. I have a special obligation to care for my children. Anybody have a problem with that? You might if you were to come hiking with my child and you and my child fell into a nest of poisonous vipers. Why might you have a problem with my special obligation to my children? Because I will pull them out first. That is my duty.

To not do that would be a moral perversion. It would be an abdication of my parental responsibilities. Now that’s not absolute. It might be that you and I are walking together and my son, as he typically will, will run ahead and he falls into a nest of poison vipers, unbeknownst to us, and then you run ahead and you jump in after him to try to get him out. And then finally, I come waddling up and I look inside the pit and there’s both of you, and you’ve just been bitten because you’ve just jumped in. My son is already green and bloated and pussy and all the rest.

Change the circumstances, maybe my obligation changes. I pull you out first. But by and large, we have special obligations. So a question to be asked when adjudicating on Hiroshima is what were the obligations of President Truman, Roosevelt prior to him, leading up to making this kind of decision? In any sort of combat scenario, you’re going to have at least three obligations. 

You’re going to want to protect your own forces. You’re going to want to do things that are effective to the mission. So mission effectiveness. And you’re going to want to protect non-combatants. These three things are very often in a very uneasy balance. And I think given the context of the Asia-Pacific in 1945, Truman was right to regard the welfare of post Pearl Harbor volunteers and conscripts on a level perhaps above Japanese civilians. We can get into that if you want. But that was a part of what he was looking at.

He was looking at grotesque series of numbers, and he had to adjudicate who harms were going to be distributed to. Which you’re always doing when you think about war. Harms will come. To whom should those harms come? And he had an obligation as the sovereign of the United States to be concerned for our own troops. Toward the end of this talk, I’m going to talk about the responsibilities of the Empire of Japan and the decisions they made. And what happens to the people that you are responsible for when you indulge in a series of continued bad decisions.

And so sovereignty cuts both ways. And there are costs to the abuse of sovereignty, which is the dereliction of duty. We’ll get into that.

Just cause. The only thing I’m going to say here, Paul talked sufficiently about it. Thomas Aquinas identifies three just causes. Protection of the innocent who have been sufficiently threatened. Taking back things of sufficient value that have been wrongly taken. So requiting injustices. And then punishing evil. 

He doesn’t say defending the innocent. And I just want to put a little bit of a fine point to this. The reason he doesn’t say defending the innocent, or I’m sorry, of self-defense. He doesn’t say self-defense. Why doesn’t he say self-defense? Self-defense can get complicated.

Right? So if I attack you, right? I’m the aggressor. He’s done nothing wrong. Doesn’t deserve my attack. I attack him. And then it turns out he’s a ninja. Right? His father’s a Marine. And he turns the tables on me and starts to pulverize me. Right? And if I pull on my side arm and I shoot him, I can’t claim self-defense. Right? Even though I’m getting the bejeebies kicked out of me. Right? You don’t want to see the bejeebies kicked out of anybody. Right? I don’t have a right to defend myself. And so self-defense, I think, can get complicated.

Self-defense, or righteous self-defense, is already caught up in this idea of protecting the innocent. He has a right to self-defense because he’s innocent. Or at least relatively innocent in this case.

That’s all. The other thing I want to say about just cause is very often in just war reasoning, you’ll see somebody talk about the jab, the jus ad bellum, and when is it right to fight? And then once they’ve ascertained that it’s right to fight, they stop talking about it, and they move into the jib, the how do you rightly fight the fight that’s right to fight, as if these two things are separate. Right? They overlap continually throughout a military campaign in all sorts of important ways.

One of the ways that I want to mention now is that regime type matters. The just cause and the quality of that cause matters. So the obligations that we had for fighting particular ways in World War II where the threats were existential, are different than say the obligations that England had when fighting Argentina over the Falkland Islands.

That was not an existential fight. And if somebody wants to challenge me on that, you can. Maybe I need to be corrected. I don’t think so. So they’re not going to fight that fight to the nth degree. Regime type matters.

What are the causes for war? How significant a threat are they? That’s going to dictate how I’m going to fight. It would have been wrong for England to nuke Buenos Aires in order to win the Falkland Islands. There wasn’t enough at stake. That’s all I’ll say on that. 

Right intent. This gets to this question of durability. So the right intent, as Paul has said, is peace. It’s peace first for the victims of the unjustified aggression. And if at the end of the day that’s all I get by going to war, that’s going to be sufficient.

We shouldn’t be satisfied with it, but the enemy always has a vote. Reconciliation always requires that both of us desire to come together. If they continue in their intransigence and don’t want to come together, that’s a lament.

But I’m still satisfied if I’ve protected the innocent, taken back what’s been wrongly taken, and punished the evildoers. Right? A lesson from the First Great War, and the First Great War was the war to end all wars. That was the one just before World War II.

A lesson from that war is that an implication of just war reasoning is decisiveness in victory. So recall your World War I history. It ends in an armistice. As General Pershing said, the Germans never accepted that they had been licked, and he was right. They were never defeated in the field decisively. You know, we have records of German generals telling German troops in their surrender orders let’s march home in pride.

We are surrendering on enemy-occupied territory. Right? They hadn’t been defeated in field. They go back to Germany, they raise another generation of young men to continue the slaughter. General Pershing begged the Allies not to sign the armistice. He said, give me a week. I will let them know that they’ve been licked.

And he felt that that was essential. And it’s interesting to me that Roosevelt, in defending the terms of unconditional surrender, said something to the effect of, I don’t have the quote, but our enemies will know that they’ve been licked. I don’t know that he’s quoting Pershing. Maybe that language was just, you know, quotidian for the day. But he learned the lesson. And he says, these, these, they need to be defeated decisively

There’s two ways to defeat an enemy. One is by destroying their capability or their will to keep on fighting. And second, ideally both. So to take away their capability and their will to continue fighting. And I think that’s a part of what was behind the decision to bomb Hiroshima. Here, we could get into questions about the status of the Emperor.

People will often say, well, all we had to do was to guarantee the safety of the Emperor. And all would have been well. They would have stood down. One, this goes back to this question of a decisive defeat. They’re beginning to name terms by demanding that. I don’t know that we want to do that.

Two, you would look at the war record of Emperor Hirohito and ask why we would, from the very beginning, guarantee his welfare. He is implicated in all sorts of criminal activities in that war that might need to be adjudicated first before we make any kind of decision.

You will also hear that the Japanese were close to surrender, right? They were just either looking for the status of the emperor or simply looking for a way to stand down. This is a much larger argument, but I think the key phrase is that defeat does not equal surrender. The counter argument will go something like this, that by the summer of 1945, the Japanese strategic position was catastrophic. They’ll point out that in the fall of 1944, after the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Japan had lost any air power they had to continue fighting.

A few months later, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, they lost sea power. These were losses that they could not and did not recover from. So people will say they were defeated. And they knew they were defeated because we have the radio intercepts that have now been declassified, and we can hear the banter back and forth. Japan knew absolutely that they had lost the war, and they absolutely knew that they could not win it. They could not recover.

And then worse, because we had the radio intercepts from the very beginning, we knew that they knew, and yet we dropped the bomb, right? And so here you get into this phrase that defeat does not equal surrender. So in Japan, there was a war committee called the Big Six. And the Big Six had to vote unanimously on any sort of procedure for it to go into effect, and they were continually deadlocked on this question of whether or not defeat should equal surrender, and they said no.

After Hiroshima, they met, and they were still deadlocked. They said no. Three for surrender, three against surrender. The three who were against surrender weren’t simply holding out for the conditions of the emperor, right? They wanted territorial acquisitions, some of what we’ve taken in the South Pacific we should be able to keep.

No war crime tribunals in Japan, or if there are war crime tribunals, we will oversee them. No occupation of Japan, and no demobilization, right? The Japanese military doesn’t need to stand down. These were their conditions. Those are unacceptable, right? After Nagasaki, they were still deadlocked.

After the Soviet declaration of war, they were still deadlocked. They were deadlocked all the way through to the very end. Their plan was a decisive battle on the home front that would be so costly that the Americans would finally sue for terms of surrender more favorable to the Japanese.

They knew they would lose the fight, but they were going fight it anyway because they believed our morale was brittle and that we would not absorb the losses that would be necessary to invade the Japanese home islands. All right, I need to move on. Paul talked about these three things, sovereignty, just cause, and right intent, or what are sometimes called deontological.

You have to have these three things in place before a war can be right. But then there’s another whole set of criteria within the jab that are prudential, these are wisdom categories. So even when a fight is right to fight, there may be reasons for not fighting it.

These are going to be things like, this isn’t the only option left, so last resort. And last resort requires all sorts of things like diplomacy, and maybe acknowledging real grievances and doing something about those grievances to avoid war. There’s also the criterion of proportionality of ends, that the goods we’ll achieve by going to war won’t outweigh the harms that we’ll do.

And so at the end of the day, even though it would be right, it’s going to be so destructive in lives, or treasure, or property, or all of it, that it’s just not prudent, and you stand down. And then the other is this idea of probability of success. We have a reason to fight, and we’re never going to be able to win this thing. So we’re gonna kill people and break things for really no purpose. So you may not launch the war in those circumstances. That doesn’t mean the war would be wrong to fight, it just means it would be imprudent.

And then it doesn’t mean that it’s now right not to fight it, it means it’s a moral tragedy. But life is sometimes like that, we can’t do the things we have to do, right? And that should register as a tragedy. All these things have implications.

Probability of success. There’s one way to address this criterion, and that’s by increasing your capacity for success. So if wars that are right to fight are obligatory to fight, you have a duty to protect your neighbor, to punish evil, to requite injustices. Do you have a commensurate duty to build up your lethality, to build up your nation’s capabilities of winning fights that are right to fight? That’s a question that should be continually asked. 

All right, get into the jib, the jus in bello. How do you rightly fight the fight that’s right to fight? Traditionally, there are two main categories. Proportionality, which Paul mentioned, and discrimination. Some of us have been adding, when I say some of us, I mean classical just war theorists, Christian theorists. We are adding a third category back into the jib that is present in international law, but it’s typically not present in Christian conversations.

It’s implied, but it’s not articulated openly. The implication is of necessity. So before you do anything in combat, it should be necessary to do this thing. That’s a truism. That’s partially why it’s not usually stated, right? If it’s not necessary to do it, don’t do it. Eric Patterson will call this a national stewardship, that’s foreign policy stewardship. I can’t remember what he calls it. It’s a stewardship principle, right? You don’t waste lives and treasure if you don’t have to. 

But it carries a second implication, which is the reason that I really like it in here. If you don’t articulate necessity in the jus in bello, then all you have is proportionality and discrimination. These are good things, but these are restraints. You don’t have the goad. So if you go back to the jab, you have the deontological categories.

So if you have a just cause, that is a spur toward war. It compels you toward war. And then you have the prudential restraints. In the jib, you had none of that. You only have the restraints, right? And that seems unbalanced. So if you put necessity back in, then you recognize there are certain things we have to do because these are essential as we move toward our war aims. These are essential for victory.

If a fight is right to fight, it’s right to win. So another right intent in war is not just peace, but it’s peace through the attainment of a durable victory, decisiveness. Okay, I’ve argued that the bombing of Hiroshima was necessary to have as durable, a proportionate, and as discriminating end of this fight as possible. And all those terms are important, because bombing Hiroshima was not necessary in order to defeat the Japanese.

We could have done that in several other ways. So here we get into the question of proportionality now. And how much good will we do, and what kind of harm will we do? The alternatives to defeating the Japanese were pretty simple. Traditionally, it’s understood that we were really deciding between bombing them or invading them.

I’ve read the history, and I do not think any longer that invasion was going to be on the table much past August. I do not think we would have invaded. Why don’t I think this? The Japanese knew we had Okinawa, we had just won the Battle of Okinawa.

They knew how far our bombers could reach. They knew that if we were going to invade the Tokyo plain, we would need the island of Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan, in order to send bomber support for the land invasion of the main island.

 So they look at Kyushu, and they say, well, where will they build airfields? Will they build them on the top of mountains or on the plains? They’re going to build them on the plains. And if you needed to access these plains in order to build airfields, where would you invade? So we’ve seen their defensive plans, and they had it pegged exactly. We could take our invasion plan and their defensive plan, and they map perfectly. And I don’t remember the numbers, you probably know, Paul, but if you’re trying to do a forcible entry from the sea, it’s helpful to have a certain ratio of invaders versus defenders.

And by August, and certainly by November, when we were going to invade, that ratio would not have been in our favor. So there practically might have been a lot of doubt as to whether we could have pulled the thing off. The plan that was being aired was basically a siege of Japan. I have already said they didn’t have an air force anymore of any appreciable magnitude. They didn’t have a sea fleet of any appreciable magnitude.

We could have besieged them and starved them out. That was on the table. And Japanese historians suggest that would have cost about 20 million lives, Japanese lives. So we wouldn’t have invaded, we would have starved them out. So when you talk about proportionality, you have to start to say, not only what is the proportionality of the thing I’m thinking of doing, but what are the alternatives? 

If I don’t do this, I have to do something. What’s that going to be? And then you mix into this questions of discrimination. I’m going to try to wrap up real quick. You pull into this questions of discrimination, which the discrimination requirement is that you intentionally target only combatants.

So you don’t intentionally target non-combatants. The word intention is doing an incredible amount of work, right? And we could get into that a little bit. There were clusters of innocent people throughout the Asia-Pacific.

And not all of those clusters were going to survive this war because of Japanese intransigence. They knew they were defeated, they should have stood down. They insisted on a fight to the end. And that puts all these lives in jeopardy.

So who were these innocent lives pocketed throughout the Asia-Pacific? For certain, there were innocent Japanese lives in Hiroshima. By innocent, I don’t mean blameless, I mean non-harming. These are people who arguably aren’t going to harm you.

Now you could push back and say, well, they had universal conscription in Japan, this is true. All women, I’m gonna get the ages botched, from 16 to 40, and all men from 14 to 60 were conscripted, and they were being trained. We have these videos of them poking dummies with bamboo spears and rakes and hoes and all sorts of things. And we have good reason to believe that they would have fought, or many of them would have.

There was a song that was popular in the day, A Hundred Million Lives for the Emperor. They had embarked upon a policy of national suicide rather than surrender. But certainly, there were innocent people, those who couldn’t fight, those who wouldn’t fight, children, the infirm, the elderly, all of the rest. So there’s one pocket of innocent people. There are innocent people throughout Japan who are at risk, should we decide not to bomb or invade, but to starve them out, right? That’s an abstract cluster of innocent lives, but we know they’re there, and we know what might happen to them.

And then there’s clusters of innocent lives stretched throughout the Asia Pacific under Japanese occupation. And so to break down an awful lot of data very simply, for every Japanese non-combatant death, there was 17 to 19 non-combatant deaths in other Asian countries. And 12 of those 17 to 19 would have been Chinese. By January of 1945, every single day, there were 8,000 non-combatants dying throughout Asia under Japanese occupation, 8,000 a day, every day.

So that’s about 250,000 a month, right? I’ve already said about maybe a total of 120,000 died in Hiroshima. You add Nagasaki, maybe we’ve got about 220,000 total, right? That’s ghastly, but that number would have been lost just in innocent non-combatant deaths throughout the Asia Pacific. So you look at all these clusters of innocent lives who are now in conflict, not all of them are going to survive this war. I think, if you bear out the argument, that we have reasons to prefer other innocent lives than the innocent lives that were lost in Hiroshima, and that’s ghastly, right? This brings me back to the responsibilities of sovereignty.

The decisions that our political leaders make will affect us for good and for evil. And it is grotesquely unfair that the bad decisions that I make affect my children’s lives. That is grotesquely unfair. But it seems to me that it is more fair that my bad decisions affect my children’s lives than my bad decisions affect Paul’s children’s lives or your lives, right? The responsibilities of sovereignty are enormous. I’m going to end with a quote from Nigel Bigger, who’s quoting Augustine. 

So these are two good people to continually quote. And a part of this is an acknowledgement of the charge that for any of you entering political life, or thinking about it, or military life, there’s a certain charge. And one of those charges I’ve touched on, you’re being called to hold on, And sometimes that holding on is going to be difficult work because you’re gonna be grasping nettles.

You’re going to be trying to choose between duties when duties conflict. And there’s going to be a dimension of moral tragedy in whatever it is you do. So Nigel Bigger quotes Augustine, who writes this.

“On the subject of punishing or refraining from punishing, what am I to say? It is our desire that when we decide whether or not to punish people, in either case it should contribute wholly to their security. These are indeed deep and obscure matters. What limit ought to be set to punishment with regard to both the nature and extent of guilt, and also the strength of spirit the wrongdoer possesses? What ought each one to suffer? What do we do when, as often happens, punishing someone will lead to his destruction, but leaving him unpunished will lead to someone else being destroyed? What trembling, what darkness?”

 And then here he quotes a psalm.

“Trembling and fear have come upon me, and darkness has covered me. And I said, who will give me wings like a dove’s? Then I will fly away and be at rest.”

 And on this, Nigel Bigger writes, “But Augustine didn’t flee. He didn’t run away. He stayed. He continued to shoulder the responsibilities of bishop.”

He held on. All right, and that’s my charge to you. I’m going to end there and take questions or comments, or whatever else. 

Q&A

Question: Hi, Eleanor Henry, Patrick Henry College. I’m not expecting a certain answer from this, I know it’s a tough topic. But one thing I really wrestle with when looking at nuclear warfare and with Hiroshima is the children that were affected. It’s not simply a death by typical weapons that we’re used to seeing. 

It’s not children starving where you can say I want to take them in. I want to provide food and aid. It’s children that now have medical conditions that we can’t really repair and are living in a state of basically inflicted torture.

As a nation that has a very strong stance against torture internationally, how do you kind of come to terms with that, that we did put so many children in a state of agony for months up until the end of the year when I think I think it was like 7,000 children passed by the end of 1945 due to that, or just thousands more throughout the following years. How do we come to terms with that?

Answer: Yeah, with difficulty is the first answer. And answering questions like this, there’s always a peril that one is going to sound glib, right? And glibness should never accompany an answer to a question like that. So that’s the caveat.

Now, let’s sound glib. There were also children, and this does not, again, justify the harms done to those kids. But there were kids who were starving to death throughout the Asia-Pacific for one reason only, that the Japanese had, without justification, invaded their lands and held them under their thumb.

And when the resources got short, the Japanese kept the resources for themselves to feed their military and not the civilians under their occupation and therefore care, right? So you end up, because of independent actions and decisions by moral agents, with having to choose between options that you have no desire to have to choose between. But now you’ve been forced to. And so this is the idea, and this is ghastly.

But we have reason to prefer, as quickly as possible to put the lives of those innocent Chinese children on a path toward recovery and welfare than we do that Japanese child. That sounds horrific. And it’s not, so here’s where intent gets very complicated.

My intent ought not to be, it might be, and then it’s ghastly and a moral monster. My intent should not be the suffering of that Japanese child. My intent should be peace throughout the region, right? Shalom, peace comes in different kinds.

Some kinds of peace that people are content with is simply the absence of conflict. So if you’re being harmed by this guy, I could do nothing, and the rest of us are maybe in some sort of peace, which is macabre, because it’s not peace. Shalom, of course, is comprehensive welfare extending in every direction. We’re not gonna have that in this world, we know that.

But I think we should approximate that as best we can. So my intent structure should never be for the harming of the innocent. But a begrudging, unwilling, lamentable recognition that I am being forced to choose, and because the Japanese military government is making me choose, then it’s right that I’m on the side of the innocent Chinese child.

And that should be a horrific answer, but I think that’s the only answer. The larger question is about the kinds of weapons that we develop, and whether or not there’s a moral obligation to prevent certain kinds of harms. And I go some distance with that.

I mean, we always have to remember that radiation is its own special thing, but even conventional warfare leaves people crippled for life, some people. And in incomparable degrees of agony all their life. So the glib part of me wants to say, well dead is dead, I don’t care how I die.

But that’s probably not true, actually. There are better ways to die than others. I don’t think there should be an absolute prohibition on most kinds of weapons. Even poison gases, I think there are legitimate uses. When people are built underground, gases are heavier than air, they sink in. Sometimes the only way to get to somebody is heavy gases.

So I think there’s accommodations that could be made. The one that I’ve come up with is glass bullets. Like apparently we’ve created glass bullets that on impact they penetrate, but then they shatter.

And the whole idea is that not only are they creating abrasion wounds, but it makes surgery nearly impossible, and infection almost certain. That seems unnecessarily ghastly, right? So, but somebody could justify glass bullets, maybe.

Question: My name’s Canaan Fairley, Abilene Christian University. So I want to go ahead and ask, whenever you answer the question of how do you love your enemy neighbor and your innocent neighbor, you answered it by saying that you love both differently, not particularly in the same manner. I have to ask, is it necessary to particularly dirty your hands in the process of loving your enemy neighbor? 

Response: And when you say dirty hands, do you mean like doing lesser evils? Do you mean doing something morally wrong? Is that what you mean by dirty hands?

Question: It’s something that’s morally wrong, so particularly like how Oppenheimer touched on this. The scientists were dirtying their hands in the process of making that bomb. And how they had such regret afterwards. So, I’m asking if it’s still considered an act of love even if you’re dirtying your hands for it.

Answer: Yeah, right. So let me break that into a couple bits. Dirt comes in different kinds, right? Certain kinds of dirt that some people think were justified in putting in our hands to do good things, I think we ought never to do. So I don’t want anybody to hear what I’m saying today, or ever, to sound like I’m suggesting that Christians should willingly commit sins in order that goods may come.

Like actually, if something is morally evil, we should not do it, period. Which is why I’m arguing in defense of Hiroshima that it was morally right. Not that it was a really wicked thing, but it was somehow worth it on a consequentialist basis or something like that.

So I push against the language quite heavily about dirty hands, because I don’t think we should do things that are morally wrong for goods to come out. So in any of the scenarios that I’m arguing for, to kill an enemy who’s kicking apart the face of another neighbor is not a morally wrong thing to do. So I’ve not dirtied my hands in the sense it’s classically understood that I’ve done something wrong that good may come from it.

Because killing comes in different kinds. Some of it is murder, never do it, period. Some of it is morally permissible, even obligatory. And that’s not a question of dirty hands.

What it does get to, and this comes out of the literature on moral injury. So a moral injury is doing something that goes against a deeply held moral norm. And some people think sometimes you have to do things that go against deeply held moral norms, because you’ve got competing deeply held moral norms, right? So this whole idea of moral conflict.

And my argument is that’s not the case, that in a given moral conflict situation, there is a right thing to do. It’s the greatest possible good that you can do, and that’s what you’re aiming at. So that is to say you shouldn’t receive a moral injury, because technically you’ve done nothing against a deeply held moral norm.

But that isn’t to say that there’s not going to be a bruise that’s left from doing that. So it’s not a full blown injury, but a bruise is an impact trauma. It’s something that wounds you and hurts you.

It’ll leave a mark, but it’ll go away eventually. So the argument is that killing shouldn’t be too easy in war. It shouldn’t also be too hard, but that it should always leave some kind of a residue, because it should always sit uncomfortably.

The Japanese child who dies should sit uncomfortably, and that should leave a mark. That should be a cause of grief, but not all grief is guilt. And that’s essential.