From 2004
On this day, 59 years ago, President Harry Truman did not countermand his previous order to drop an atomic bomb on the undefended, militarily insignificant city of Hiroshima. Three days later, after the Soviet Union had entered the war, another nuclear weapon was dropped on Nagasaki. Why, no one has ever made clear. Civilians in both cases were the targets.
There was a time in Western history when the rules of war specified that civilians were not to be deliberate targets during wartime. These rules had sometimes been violated: in the Thirty Years’ War (1618—48), when Catholics and Protestants made war on each other in Germany, and in America’s wars against the Indians. But these had been considered exceptions. Then, in 1864, beginning with Sherman’s march to the sea and Sheridan’s burning of farms in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the old standard was abandoned.
We live in a world in which civilians are the primary targets: by car bombings, suicide bombings, and helicopter strikes against suspected residences of terrorists, who never seem to be in the buildings, at least not in Iraq. Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) is still operational with respect to the targeting of ICBMs on both sides in the now officially non-existent Cold War. Each side still holds the other side’s civilian populations as hostages.
Heads of state during wartime rarely if ever organize assassination squads against each other. They understand the nature of military strategy: tit for tat. They have an unwritten truce with each other. I would call this highly self-interested. Instead, modern warfare is conducted against civilians. Heads of state try to bring down their rivals by means of terrorizing and bankrupting enemy civilians.
World War II stands out as the most grotesque example of war on civilians in man’s history. It began in 1937 with Japan’s slaughter of over 300,000 civilians in Nanking, China. It escalated in Europe with bombing raids against cities. Americans adopted the strategy with the napalm bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, where 80,000 to 100,000 civilians died — more than at Nagasaki. This took place on Franklin Roosevelt’s watch. We did the same to another 60 Japanese cities before the war ended. That was Gen. Curtis LeMay’s strategy.
August 6 and 9, 1945, set the record for “more bang for the buck” from the man who had this sign on his desk: “The buck stops here.” Truman never went to college, but he read widely in history. It may be accurate to say that he was more familiar with the written record of history than any other modern President, including Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D. (political science). Yet he ignored the advice of most of his senior military commanders when he made the decision to establish America’s unique historical precedent as the first nation ever to use atomic weapons, mainly against civilians. For this, he will be mentioned in history textbooks for centuries.
There are lots of theories as to why Truman did it. One is that he wanted to show Stalin that he was serious. Another is that he wanted to end the war sooner, with fewer American casualties. Another — my preference — is the technological imperative: after having spent all that money on this technology, it seemed wasteful not to use it. If this really was the primary motivating factor, then this is the most horrendous misunderstanding in history of what economists call the doctrine of sunk costs. The doctrine of sunk costs teaches that once you have spent the money on anything, it’s gone. How much a thing cost you is irrelevant because you can’t get the money back. “There’s no use crying over spilt milk.” The only economically relevant question is this: What is the best use of the assets that you presently control?
COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS
The war ended quickly after Nagasaki. In a cost-benefit analysis, it cost less money to bring the war to a close than would have been possible through any other military alternative. But this analysis leaves out the cost of all those civilian lives, as well as the cost of making America the first nuclear combatant — a cost that may eventually be repaid by some terrorist with a discount nuke.
Truman made a political judgment call based on the cost to American taxpayers of extending the war by adopting a starve-them-into-surrender strategy. This is what war does. It places a national leader in a position to make cost-benefit analyses in the name of citizens who live on one side of a battlefield. The leader is expected by his voters to ignore the costs imposed on citizens on the other side. The defensive costs go up on both sides because only the offensive costs are counted. Civilians today bear the brunt of these costs. This is why citizens should do what they can, whenever they can, to pressure their politicians to avoid war. This is self-defense against the adoption of civilian-threatening, one-sided cost-benefit analyses on both sides. Churchill’s line is correct regarding the benefits of diplomacy: better jaw-jaw than war-war.
I am one of those Republican hold-outs who has little use for Harry Truman. The best that I can say for him is that he wasn’t Henry A. Wallace, whom he replaced as Vice President in 1945. Even here, I’m no longer confident. Wallace might not have dropped those bombs. But it has never occurred to me to dismiss Truman as stupid. He was not stupid. He lacked wisdom. He also wanted to extend the government’s power at home and abroad. That is to say, he was a politician.
Why does politics make smart people do stupid things? In 1942, the year I was born, Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter offered this insight:
Thus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.
If politics has this effect on citizens, think of its effect on politicians.
Published on August 6, 2004.
The original is here. This is half the essay. The other half is on George W. Bush.
In response to my August 6 essay on Harry Truman’s twin decisions to drop atom bombs on two defenseless cities, I received the following outraged response:
I think you had better watch your mouth as it is running away from your mind. It is easy for you to sit back and play president in 1945 from the luxury of the future. I gather you never fought in WWII or your father did not fight in WWII? Nor were you living through it as I did as a youngster. I gather further that you never had an uncle who did fight in the marines, won a battlefield commision, received a promotion and got another battlefield commision as a captain, won the navy cross, received silver and bronze stars and numerous other medals which he gave me to play with after the end of the war. I asked him what it was like although I had already seen movies, real life movies including documentaries, and not John Whaneie the whenie movies. He only told me that at the end of the war when he saw the reports of those who were being shipped out with his name on the list, he fainted dead away. That was all he ever said. Or would say about it, then or ever. When you fight, you throw the goddam Kitchen sink at the enemy, you don’t say, gee, I haven’t gone shopping for a long time, now I think I’ll stop fighting for a day. And you really don’t give a good god damn how many of the enemy’s women and children you kill. So shut up about it.
It was signed. Beneath the name was the word “Libertarian.”
There used to be a rule: “Don’t get into a debate with someone who orders ink by the barrel.” In today’s world of digital publishing, the rule needs modification: “Don’t get into an argument with someone who publishes on a Website with the reach of LRC.”
“SAVE MY BUTT: FRY THE KIDS”
This is the heart of my critic’s ethics. It is the ethics of the cannibal.
The cannibal has adopted an ethical position that places his own children at risk, and the children of every man who lives among the cannibals. “Tit for tat” rules in the world of cannibalism. What I do this week, my enemy may do next week. If I may lawfully eat his children, he may lawfully eat mine.
Of course, cannibals might tell an anthropologist that they do it for nutrition’s sake. But it is more than this. It is a religious practice. It is a religion of child sacrifice, what the Israelites were told not to do: pass their children through a sacrificial fire (Deuteronomy 18:10). The prophet Jeremiah told Judah that judgment was coming because the people had violated this law (Jeremiah 32:35).
Moses told the people that at some time in the future, if they broke God’s laws, once-delicate women would eat their own children (Deuteronomy 28:57). This grisly prophecy was fulfilled centuries later during a siege of Israel (II Kings 6:28-30).
Because of the influence of the Bible, the West for centuries opposed cannibalism, abortion, and military violence against civilians. People understood that the lives of the innocent are supposed to be spared, even during wartime. There were repeated violations of this principle, but there was always repugnance and official apologies after the fact. Society returned to the ethics of non-violence regarding the innocent.
Warriors kill warriors. They do not deliberately kill or torture non-combatants.
But the twentieth century saw the end of this tradition. That century became the bloodiest in man’s recorded history. What enemy combatants did not do to civilian populations, messianic leaders did to their own populations. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were only the more famous examples.
MONSTERS FROM THE ID
I am not a big fan of Sigmund Freud, but I am a big fan of Forbidden Planet (1956). When Warren Stevens tells Leslie Nielson — in his pre-Airplane career — that the civilization of the Krell had been destroyed by monsters from the id, he accurately conveyed the ethical problem. The Krell had destroyed themselves by harnessing powerful technology that was controlled directly by their minds. They had ignored what the Apostle James warned his readers: “From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?” (James 4:1). They had wiped themselves out in one nightmare-filled night of terror.
It is a commonplace to say that modern man has advanced technologically far beyond what he has advanced ethically. It is also true. In fact, modern man has retrogressed ethically with every advance in technology. There is no wonder-working tool that someone cannot put to evil purposes. If some team of geneticists ever creates a race-discriminating biological weapon, it will be Krell time for all.
If that day ever comes, we can be sure of this: some self-styled libertarian will recommend launching the bug before the enemy launches his variant.
VON TRAPP
My friend Ernst Winter, the son-in-law of Col. von Trapp, told me of a remarkable event in his father-in-law’s military career. His father-in-law had been a U-boat commander in World War I. He came upon a French military ship. He surfaced, told the captain that he was going to sink the ship, and told him to tell his crew to abandon ship. He was met with explosive resistance.
He took the U-boat beneath the enemy vessel, re-surfaced on the other side, and gave the warning again. More shots. He submerged, fired his torpedoes, and sank the ship. Hundreds of French sailors drowned.
After the War, the French awarded von Trapp a medal.
On the day Truman dropped the bomb, Ernst went to his commanding officer — he was in the U.S. Army — and tried to resign his commission. He was appalled. His request was refused. He had accompanied Patton’s forces into Austria. His father had been the anti-Nazi Vice Mayor of Vienna, 1934-38, who fled the day the Nazis marched in. The family came to the United States.
This was the military tradition of the West for a thousand years. Von Trapp lived to see it die.
THE ESCALATION OF TERROR
In every war, there are those who call for unconditional surrender. Lincoln did. Franklin Roosevelt did. Harry Truman did. Then, to match their announced military policy, they adopted cannibal tactics. Their tactics reflected their policy. Their tactics were an extension of their policy.
There is no wartime cannibal tactic so horrendous that someone will not defend it in the name of high principle. There will be men of all persuasions and political parties who will rush to applaud the Cannibal-in-Chief for his splendid decision to pass those children through the fire. If the enemy is powerless to resist, as the women and children were in the Shenandoah Valley and Georgia in 1864 and 1865, well so much the better. If Japan was unable to fight much longer, then it’s “Bombs away!” We can fry their children. They cannot fry ours. It was the best of all worlds . . . on one side of the conflict.
We now live in an age where capitalism is lowering the price of weapons of mass destruction, where a suitcase nuke or a van filled with anthrax can take out a million Americans. And we still have fools — I select my word carefully — like the one who sent me his letter who comes to the defense of the decision to drop the bomb.
Jeremiah knew better.
Published on August 11, 2004.
The original is here.
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