It has been 80 years since the United States finally forced Japan to capitulate subsequent to the use of atomic weapons against the Japanese homeland. President Harry S. Truman famously stated that he never lost a night’s sleep over dropping the bomb because American military strategists had estimated at least 1 million U.S. casualties, not to mention the countless Japanese deaths, if and when the United States invaded the Japanese homeland.1
Truman’s assertion brings to mind several critical elements, most notably his willingness to accept responsibility as president, the issue of whether or not nuclear weapons are something different than other weapons, and whether or not American GIs had certain rights as citizens or lost those rights on the battlefield. This essay, operating from a just war perspective, will look at some of the ethical dimensions that Truman faced.
Today’s fundamental moral issues involving nuclear weapons revolve around the responsibilities and legitimacy of political authority, the first just war principle. More specifically, when it comes to national security in its most general sense, American presidents are faced with the Truman dilemma: what, if anything, does a U.S. president “owe” foreign enemies when he is trying to care for his own citizenry? The second authority issue in contemporary life is the non-legitimacy of those political actors most likely to utilize a nuclear device, such as today’s North Korea or rogue terrorists, and the risks this poses to international security.
Just war thinking is rooted in the Biblical idea that God provides for and expects political order in this world (Romans 13). That political order is shepherded by political authorities, although the New Testament clearly does not endorse any regime type (e.g. Greek demos, Roman Empire, theocracy) as authoritative. The fundamental responsibility of political authorities—the key to their legitimacy—is providing order and security for their populace. Their second important task is to promote justice. In a republic, leaders are selected by the populace within a framework of law to protect and promote the lives, livelihoods, and way of life of the citizenry. Call it a social contract, political compact, or whatever one likes, this is the arrangement upon which Western polities, particularly the U.S., are built.
This brings us back to Harry S. Truman. President Truman was the first U.S. president to have fought under the conditions of modern warfare as a National Guard artillery officer in World War I. He knew that war could be hell, and he rightfully felt a tremendous responsibility to the U.S. service personnel who were fighting in World War II. Moreover, as president he was briefed daily on the Japanese military’s willingness to fight to the last man island by island, at great cost to U.S. and allied forces. Intelligence had surfaced in 1945 that the Japanese would likely annihilate all prisoners of war under their control in the final days of the war, including thousands of Americans, Britons, Australians, and other allies. Intelligence estimates suggested that there would be as many as a million U.S. casualties when the Japanese homeland was invaded. Furthermore, the number of dead Japanese in such an eventuality is difficult to imagine, though certainly would have been very high.2
As president, what was Truman’s responsibility? It was first of all the protection of American lives. This did not simply include American civilians on the home front, but also the thousands rotting away in Japanese concentration camps.3 It also included U.S. troops. This is an important point. Sometimes the literature on the ethics of war suggests that military personnel are second-class citizens. I disagree with this characterization, but its roots are important to understand. The just war “contract” is that individuals who are under the authority of the state and clearly demarcated by uniforms, control structures, and the like, have license to kill under war-time conditions. They can also be killed. This separates them from civilians who are not supposed to kill (that would make them be criminals) and have non-combatant immunity from the battlefield.
Much of the philosophical literature of the past thirty years has put soldiers into such a box as to make them almost morally inconsequential: their job is to protect civilians and they seem to have no rights. They must go to extraordinary lengths to protect civilians, even if it puts them at serious risk. Again, I disagree with the de-valuing of men and women in uniform. Particularly in a democracy, soldiers have inherent moral worth as human beings and as citizens. World War II is an important case in point. Nearly all of those soldiers, airmen, marines, and sailors fighting Japan had been civilians on December 7, 1941. They entered the military out of self-defense. They were citizens first, not second- or third-class persons. For President Truman, their lives should matter. Indeed, his first responsibility was to American lives, in and out of uniform, not to Japanese civilians. The care of Japanese civilians was the first duty of the leadership in Tokyo, not in Washington, DC. It was the actions of those in Tokyo who put their civilians at risk, not President Truman. Indeed, it was the Japanese regime that began to train even its elderly, women, and children how to kill and destroy.
With this in mind, it is apparent that there was moral urgency for President Truman to act decisively to bring World War II to a close and stop the killing of American and allied personnel, from the island hopping campaign to those languishing in Japan’s horrific concentration camps. Indeed, President Truman probably saved more Chinese lives than any other nationality, followed by both Japanese and Allied lives. The bomb provided that opportunity and it worked. The dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused the Japanese empire to finally surrender, and it saved countless Japanese lives that would have been lost in a traditional fight-to-the-last-person Japanese campaign. The cause was just (self-defense following Pearl Harbor, liberation of the Pacific domain). The vast majority of U.S. fighting in the Pacific campaign followed just war principles. Dropping the bomb to hasten the war’s end was just: it saved lives and reduced destruction elsewhere. Then, consonant with the principles of jus post bellum I have written about elsewhere, the U.S. brought order, justice, and even conciliation to the people of Japan.4
U.S. presidents continue to face the Truman challenge of how to protect and promote the security of their citizens in an uncertain world. This is an issue of legitimate political authority. Moreover, the real threats posed by nuclear weapons in contemporary international life typically derive from weak, failing, and/or illegitimate political authority. Today’s leaders should look to Truman, who refused to pass the buck of responsibility and acted to hasten the end of World War II.
Note: Elements of this essay were adapted from Eric Patterson’s 2019 book, Just American Wars (Routledge).
- From Curtis E. LeMay and Bill Yenne’s book Superfortress: The Story of the B-29 and American Air Power. Quoted In Gar Alperovitz and Sanho Tree, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) p. 341. ↩︎
- Curtis E. LeMay and Bill Yenne’s book Superfortress: The Story of the B-29 and American Air Power. Quoted In Gar Alperovitz and Sanho Tree, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 341. Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, a recent national bestseller listed in the bibliography, provides lengthy documentation on these issues in narrative form. ↩︎
- See Richard B. Franks, Tower of Skulls (New York: Norton, 2020). ↩︎
- See Patterson Just War Thinking and Patterson Ending Wars Well. ↩︎
