Hiroshima and Nagasaki were indistinct from the rest of the US air campaign

The argument

The American air campaign against Japan was, throughout the war, incredibly cruel. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was, both in its cost of lives and scope of destruction, not morally different. During the war, the United States engaged a directed fire-bombing policy against Japanese urban centres, a particularly destructive method given that many of nation’s cities were built of wood. By 6 August 1945 almost a million Japanese civilians had died in bombings and twenty million had been made homeless. By the summer of 1945 so many Japanese cities were bombed out that American military planners directed attacks against towns of no more than 30,000 people. Taken in this context the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were indistinct. While the nuclear bombing killed more people than previous raids they spared a wider area of the city than incendiary bombing. If the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not distinct then was this policy of bombing ethical in general? American military planners hoped that bombing Japan would inspire civilians to turn on their government and sue for peace. However, even given the massive costs Japanese civilians bore, there was little public dissent in the closing days of the war. Taken in this context the whole bombing campaign is morally dubious.

Context

By August 1945 the United States had destroyed many Japanese cities through a planned air campaign meant to undermine civilian support for the war. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were simply an extension of this plan.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The argument's own structure works against the position it is filed under. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally indistinct from the fire-bombing that preceded them, then they inherit whatever justification the wider campaign had rather than being singled out as unjustified — and the body's actual conclusion is that "the whole bombing campaign is morally dubious", which is a different and weaker claim than that these two attacks were not justified. It also closes on a question rather than an answer. Grounds for the distinction it denies are also available. That a single aircraft could now destroy a city changed the relationship between capability and intent; survivors suffered radiation injury and long-term illness that incendiary attack did not produce; and the weapons functioned in part as a demonstration of a new capability addressed to Tokyo and to Moscow, which is a different kind of act from attrition bombing — a distinction the postwar order recognised by treating nuclear weapons as a category of their own. The argument's own empirical observation cuts the same way: if surrender followed these attacks and the Soviet declaration of war when months of fire-bombing had not produced it, the two were not equivalent in effect, which is precisely what defenders of the bombings assert. And the point that Japanese civilians showed little dissent under bombing supports the conclusion that civilian suffering could not end the war — an argument about the futility of the earlier campaign rather than about the atomic attacks.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] If the atomic bombings were morally indistinct from the fire-bombing before them, they inherit whatever justification that campaign had rather than being singled out, so the premise argues toward a verdict on the whole campaign rather than on these two attacks. [Rejecting P2] Grounds for distinction remain — a single aircraft could now destroy a city, survivors suffered radiation injury and long-term illness, and the weapons served as a demonstration addressed to Tokyo and Moscow — while the premise's own observation that surrender followed these attacks but not months of fire-bombing concedes a difference in effect.