Reflections on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on its 80th anniversary.
Eighty years ago today, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people were immediately killed, and tens of thousands more died in the months and years that followed.
The bomb virtually wiped Hiroshima from existence.
Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the B-29 that dropped the bomb, remembers seeing “a giant purple mushroom” that
had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, three miles above our altitude, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive. Even more fearsome was the sight on the ground below. At the base of the cloud, fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of bubbling hot tar… The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge. It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire.
I climbed Hikiyama Hill and looked down. I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared… I was shocked by the sight… What I felt then and still feel now I just can’t explain with words. Of course I saw many dreadful scenes after that—but that experience, looking down and finding nothing left of Hiroshima—was so shocking that I simply can’t express what I felt… Hiroshima didn’t exist—that was mainly what I saw—Hiroshima just didn’t exist.
The morality of the bombing has been the subject of debate ever since. But this debate has been based on a mistake about the bombing’s strategic effectiveness. This error has become the basis of the notion that there is a general conflict between military strategy and morality. In fact, the real lesson of Hiroshima may be that this conflict is an illusion that hinders the ability to truly think strategically.
The Debate
The idea that the bombing was justified is possible to entertain only because it appears that it—combined with the atomic bombing of Nagasaki three days later—brought an end to the war. This war was fought with undeniable brutality on all sides. Tens of thousands of people, both combatants and civilians, died every week. Supposing that, but for the atomic bombs, the war would go on as it was for even a few months more, then it seems the decision to annihilate two Japanese cities saved lives overall.
Adding to this argument, the war may have become even more destructive if it hadn’t ended in August. If Japan did not surrender, Allied forces planned to conduct an all-out invasion of mainland Japan. Operation Downfall, as it was called, was set to begin in November and would employ nearly 2 million Allied troops. Given the devastation required to conquer Okinawa and the Japanese plans to vigorously defend the mainland, the invasion would likely have cost the lives of millions of people, both soldiers and Japanese civilians.
In his essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” Paul Fussell asks readers to figuratively wear the shoes—as he was literally at the time—of an Allied soldier fighting in the Pacific in the summer of 1945. Each day hundreds, sometimes thousands of your fellow soldiers are being killed. And each day you encounter more opportunities to join them. The prospect of invading Japan makes you resign yourself to death—the chance of surviving that assault is so slim you might as well forget it. Surely, you would be—as Fussell and his friends were in fact—grateful for the quick resolution of the war, even if it cost hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. He argues that only those who did not face the prospect of dying in the war could be so high-handed as to question the morality of the way the war was ended.
I can surely empathize with Fussell’s feeling of elation when the war was over even though—he believed—it was because of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don’t fault him or others for this experience.
But this gets us only so far. While it is useful to consider the standpoint of those who might have been saved by the bombs, it is also useful, vital even, to consider the standpoint of those who were sacrificed. Alongside the testimonies of Allied soldiers hoping to survive, it’s important to listen to the Japanese people who suffered because of the bombs.
Consider the experience of Yamaoka Michiko, a 15-year-old resident of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. That morning, she was walking to work. At a point about 800 meters from the site of detonation she heard the sound of B-29s:
I thought, how strange, so I put my right hand above my eyes and looked up to see if I could spot them. The sun was dazzling. That was the moment…There was no sound. I felt something strong. It was terribly intense. I felt colors. It wasn’t heat. You can’t really say it was yellow, and it wasn’t blue. At that moment I thought I…would die. I said to myself, “Goodbye, Mom.”
She had the feeling of floating in the air and then came to her senses trapped beneath rubble with fires burning all around her. Her mother and some soldiers managed to pull her out. “Nobody there looked like human beings,” she said. “Everyone was stupefied. Humans had lost the ability to speak. People couldn’t scream, ‘It hurts!’ even when they were on fire. People didn’t say, ‘It’s hot!’ They just sat catching fire.”
“My clothes were burnt and so was my skin,” she continued. “There were people, barely breathing, trying to push their intestines back in. People with their legs wrenched off. Without heads. Or with faces burned and swollen out of shape. The scene I saw was a living hell.”
Though she miraculously survived, Yamaoka was bedridden for a year. She had no hair. Her eye was “hanging down.” Her lip had been burned off and she could not control her drooling. Her fingers were fused together.
Reflecting on the ethics of the bombing, she argues, “From the American point of view, they dropped that bomb in order to end the war faster, in order to create more damage faster. But it’s inexcusable to harm human beings in this way. I wonder what kind of education there is now in America about atomic bombs. They’re still making them, aren’t they?”
Yamaoka captures the spirit of the argument against dropping the bomb. It may have ended the war with fewer casualties than the alternative. But, nevertheless, it was a deeply immoral action. It was a mass murder.
Some of the greatest western moral philosophers of the 20th century—Elizabeth Anscombe, Michael Walzer, and John Rawls—reflected on the decision to drop the bomb. Each insists that, as a deliberate attack on civilians, the bombing was immoral. The rights of noncombatants are not overridden by military strategy. Even if it was necessary to end the war, the bombing was an egregious act of terrorism. It treated the civilian population as a hostage to be used to coerce political leaders. This should never be done, regardless of its strategic value.
Moreover, each author argues that the bombing was strategically necessary only because the Allies were demanding unconditional surrender from the Japanese leadership. This is the most profound sacrifice that can be asked of a government. To unconditionally surrender is to grant complete sovereignty over your nation to the enemy. Anscombe, Walzer, and Rawls each point out that unconditional surrender was not necessary to achieve a stable peace with Japan. Instead of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or invading mainland Japan, the Allies could have offered terms to Japan that were more reasonable. This could have ended the war without any more bloodshed.
This is the classic argument against the bombing. It’s also an effective refutation of Fussell’s and others’ case for the attack.
The Consensus
However, this criticism grants something important to the defenders of the bombing: It worked. The critics acknowledge that Japanese leaders were moved to accept the bitter pill of unconditional surrender because they wanted to spare their population more suffering. For them, Hiroshima is a case of strategically effective, though immoral, terrorism.
So, both sides treat the case as a terrible trade-off. Either you end the war now by murdering tens of thousands of innocent people, or you go on fighting or seek another goal.
The lesson that has been deeply ingrained in ordinary thinking about war is that there is a profound tension between winning war and morality. Many view morality and law as a hindrance to strategic thinking. The role of morality and law in war is to block things that may be necessary for victory. Rationality will often lead strategists to consider things like terrorism, torture, or other acts of brutality. These tactics are commonly effective. Communities can be brought to their knees by viciousness.
In war generally, the thinking goes, military planners will have to choose between doing justice and winning. In this paradigm, military lawyers and ethicists are the gadflies of strategists. They speak different languages; they have divergent goals in mind. The strategists are rational, identifying means to our end. The lawyers and the ethicists are not concerned with rationality; they want something different: justice. Hiroshima stands today as the cornerstone of this idea.
In his classic statement of morality in war, “Just and Unjust Wars,” Michael Walzer embraces this view. He treats the principle of noncombatant immunity as a burden on soldiers that blocks actions that are militarily necessary. He goes to great lengths to convince readers who might face combat that morality must be respected even when it is not useful. He argues, for instance, that soldiers must take on additional risks to themselves to avoid noncombatant casualties.
In the somewhat infamous 16th chapter entitled “Supreme Emergencies,” this tension is brought to a head. Walzer considers the Allied terror bombing campaigns of Germany and Japan. He argues that Britain, between 1939 and 1941, faced an agonizing choice: It could either face defeat at the hands of the Nazis—and all the atrocities and oppression this would entail—or it could bomb German cities. In this instance, Walzer thinks the British decision to bomb Germany was understandable. They really didn’t have a choice.
But, of course, the worst bombings of Germany and Japan occurred after 1941. These attacks, Walzer concludes, were unjustifiable. The difference is that after 1941, in both Europe and the Pacific, the stakes were not as high as they were for Britain before 1942. By that time, more conventional methods of defeating the enemy were available. After 1941, the Allies did have a choice. But Walzer takes for granted that wiping out cities, with conventional or atomic bombs, was strategically useful. Walzer therefore leaves the reader with a picture of a deep tension between strategy and morality.
Teaching ethics at West Point for 13 years, I faced this view on a daily basis. Many of my students assumed that ethics is a kind of luxury. It helps service members defend their actions to themselves and to others. But it doesn’t help them win. I remember one student concluding, “Just war theory is a great way to lose a war.”
This way of thinking has real-world consequences. Current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth takes this perspective to one extreme. In his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth argues that if it wasn’t for the lawyers—or “jag-offs” as he calls them—and other “Pentagon pussies,” the United States could have won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He dismisses the restraints of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy as irrational cowardice. “The fact that we don’t do what is necessary is the reason wars become endless,” he says. “Modern wars never end, because we won’t finish them.”
In a chapter titled “The Laws of War, for Winners,” Hegseth argues that the U.S. military has lost sight of what matters—namely, winning. To show that priorities have changed, Hegseth harkens back to Hiroshima and World War II. He invokes the idea that there was a trade-off between winning that war and morality. Sounding disturbingly like Fussell, he says the American men who fought in this war were the Greatest Generation “because they understood that they were at war …. They killed the enemy. Sometimes in ways that would offend modern sensibilities. Two nuclear bombs ended a war that could have dragged on for years, costing millions more American lives. They won. Who cares.” In other words, if laws or ethics get in the way of winning, so much the worse for laws and ethics.
For Hegseth, war is simply a contest in killing. The side that out-kills the other wins. There is no need to think deeply about the connection between operations and strategy. At bottom, war is really a simple business—kill and keep killing until your enemy surrenders. As he says, “Land warfare, historically understood, is defined by how many people you can slaughter in one space, at one time—limiting the will and capacity of your enemy to fight.”
This is the basis of his vision of military readiness. He is overseeing reforms of the military that he thinks are a return to the military’s “warrior ethos.” Military service members should be focused only on lethality. They are killers, nothing more. Everything else, including international law, inclusivity, and liberal education, is being sidelined or curtailed.
Hegseth has chosen his side in the conflict between strategy and morality that Hiroshima supposedly reveals.
The Mistake
But Hiroshima reveals no such conflict. Contrary to the conventional discourse, many historians have concluded that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not cause Japan to surrender.
Robert Pape, for instance, argues that whatever their impact on civilian morale, the atomic bombings, along with the carpet bombings of more than 60 other cities, did not move Japanese leaders to accept surrender. This is mainly because decision-makers in Japan were simply unconcerned with the suffering of their civilian population and did not face significant political pressure from the people to surrender. It is true that Japanese leaders at the time attributed their decision to accept unconditional surrender to the desire to avoid further bombings, especially with atomic weapons, and the announcement of surrender occurred on the same day as the second atomic bombing, Aug. 9, 1945. Pape and others argue, however, that this was a politically expedient explanation that does not reflect the Japanese leadership’s actual reasons for surrender.
What was most consequential in the eyes of Japanese authorities was not the vulnerability of the civilian population to U.S. bombs, but the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war against them. The Soviets surprised the Japanese by declaring war and invading Manchuria on the same day as the bombing of Nagasaki. The Japanese leadership, who knew that their war was unwinnable for some time, was hoping the Soviets would act as a neutral arbiter of negotiations between Japan and the U.S. so that Japan could end the war while avoiding unconditional surrender. When the Soviets declared war, that possibility was off the table and Japanese leaders saw no better option than unconditional surrender.
Historians have drawn similar conclusions about the terror bombing of Germany. Nicholas Stargardt, for instance, argues that, while it caused much hardship and opened new lines of division in German society, terror bombing actually increased German civilian motivation to continue the war. First, by rendering so many homeless and creating a civilian exodus from urban areas, terror bombing made more civilians immediately dependent on the regime. This enabled the state to appear, at least for a time, an effective protector of the nation and united broad swaths of German society in the effort to care for the civilian wounded and refugees. It also brought huge numbers of former civilians, especially women, into the war effort as part of the air defense force. Second, terror bombing caused some historians to conclude that the Allies were waging a war of extermination against Germans. This conviction about Allied war aims only strengthened the German civilian commitment to not surrender. Third, and perhaps most important, the terror bombing campaign fed an intense desire for revenge among the German population. This desire created support for attacking English cities and, when that was no longer possible, Germans began using Jews as human shields and threatening to execute groups of Jews as reprisals for German civilian deaths. Stargardt finds strong evidence that, by the spring of 1944, the German civilian population was experiencing “a strengthening commitment to resist” as a result of the terror bombings.
So, World War II was not won—in the Pacific or in Europe—by exterminating civilians from the air. The argument that the atomic bomb saved lives is a red herring. The grave immorality of bombing Hiroshima is simply a no-brainer.
Additionally, the cornerstone of the idea that there is a deep conflict between strategy and morality is an illusion. Hiroshima does not demonstrate that wars involve a choice between victory and morality. Bombing Hiroshima did not lead to victory. Indeed, it may have done the opposite. As Stargardt argues in the case of Germany, terrorizing a civilian population can make them less willing to surrender.
One of the many lessons of Hiroshima that we must embrace is that, contrary to the secretary of defense’s assertions, winning wars is not simply a matter of lethality. In fact, thinking of war this way can be a source of defeat. There is no shortage of historical examples of disastrous wars that were initiated, and counterproductive tactics that were adopted, based on the false assumption that winning battles is all that is required to winning wars. You can win all the battles yet lose the war.
Instead of thinking of law and morality as hindrances to victory, perhaps we should see attitudes like Hegseth’s as the real threat to readiness and national security. Law and morality can be important resources to stop us from following irrational impulses to inflict unnecessary harm on others in war. Without these restraints, we are more likely to engage in ill-conceived wars.
