Edward Feser, Just War, And Hiroshima

Yesterday, August 6, was the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, which began the chain of events resulting in the Japanese surrender in World War II. When I was an Episcopalian, more often than not, this anniversary would be the occasion of a politically correct, self-abnegating homily from the rector on the presumptuousness of the US in claiming to be the world's policeman, blah blah blah. I think at least some in the pews -- I would have been one of them -- simply gritted their teeth and tried not to listen very closely.

More recently, after I'd become Catholic, I ran into an essay in the Catholic Herald by the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser, whom I normally respect a great deal, Weigel’s Terrible Arguments, which is directed at George Weigel's position that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified because invading Japan itself would have been bloodier than the bombings. Instead, Feser argues that destruction of entire cities under Catholic teaching is intrinsically evil, and there can be no balancing of consequences.

The Russo-Ukraine war has captured my interest, especially as it has caused some degree of renewed debate over Catholic just war doctrine. Some people have argued, for instance, that the threat of nuclear weapons alone in the course of the conflict offers the prospect of widespread destruction of cities, which in itself violates just war doctrine. At least so far, this hasn't taken place, while as of the current writing, Ukraine has serious prospects of success in fully defending itself. In fact, let's look at the conditions for legitimate defense by military force in CCC 2309:

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

Further,

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine.

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

When I first looked carefully at CCC 2309 as the Ukraine war started, it was in the context of Clausewitz's On War, and what struck me was how compatible the doctrine was with Clausewitz's view that war is an uncertain and upredictable exercise. After all, who can say with certainty that some other means of averting Putin's invasion might not have worked? Trump claims it wouldn't have happened if he'd been president -- did Putin perhaps see Biden as a weaker opponent than Trump, for instance? Ukraine's prospects of success have risen and fallen over the course of the war; they looked bleak indeed at the start; as of now, the Institute for the Study of War thinks they're pretty good.

Indeed, the idea that "the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated" invites a balancing of consequences that in fact "belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good"; i.e., in the case of Ukraine, President Zelensky and the authorites in NATO and the EU -- and realistically, their judgments are based on Clausewitzian uncertainties of war. To insist that for Ukraine to defend itself is evil, since this has the potential for starting World War III strikes me as a misreading of just war doctrine. Whether Putin will go nuclear ever is an uncertainty that's left to the judgment of the political and military leadership; so far, they seem to be making the correct calls.

Let's turn now to Truman and the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Discussions of Imperial Japan as it relates to just war doctrine tend to minimize the lasting, grave, and certain damage it inflicted on Asian and Pacific nations. An essay by Richard B Frank at the National Churchill Foundation gives pertinent details that fill in the picture:

. . . fewer and fewer Americans know of the horrendous toll exacted by Japan's war of aggression. Although no one can provide a definitive number, historians believe that somewhere between fifteen to seventeen million people died between 1937 and 1945 as a result of Japan's march of conquest in Asia. This total includes at least 10 million in China. There, as elsewhere, the deaths occurred overwhelmingly among noncombatants. More importantly, there was a cost for each day the war continued. In China alone, over 100,000 men, women and children died on average each month, with many thousands of other Asians dying elsewhere, not to mention Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees. Accordingly, one of the profound fallacies of the argument of critics is that while they emphatically stress the terrible costs of atomic bombings, they routinely argue as though the alternatives had no cost. And they particularly refuse to acknowledge that the reality of the daily cost of letting the war continue until the expected November invasion.

To the question of whether all other means of putting an end to the war must have been shown impractical, there's more uncertainty than we might think that an invasion or blockade would have worked. There was in fact serious question among those who had responsibility for the common good. By May 1945,

The staff of the Joint Chiefs began active contemplation of alternatives to Operation OLYMPIC [the invasion strategy]. On August 7, the day after Hiroshima, General Marshall asked General Douglas MacArthur, the designated Army commander for the invasion of Japan, whether he still regarded Olympic as feasible. MacArthur replied that he did not believe the intelligence and therefore he was prepared to forge ahead. After this exchange, however, Admiral King sent copies of both messages to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the designated navy commander for the invasion of Japan, and demanded his views. King knew the answer to the question before he asked it. On May 25, after two months of grueling fighting on Okinawa that generated an American casualty list exceeding any prior campaign of the Pacific War, Admiral Nimitz privately informed King that he could no longer support an invasion of Japan. King's message of August 9 was clearly intended to bring on a full-scale confrontation over the viability of not only Olympic, but also the whole invasion strategy. What now emerges from this evidence is the harsh reality that the key Japanese leaders in the summer of 1945 did not regard their situation as hopeless.

What we see from the historical record is that the US civil and military authorities were actively exercising their prudential judgment in continuing to evaluate conditions based on the changing circumstances and the uncertainty of war. The consensus I've seen is that it took a second nuclear strike on Nagasaki to convince the emperor in particular that the US had more than one such weapon and could continue to use them.

Feser also cites Gaudium et Spes 80,

Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself.

However, even if nuclear weapons might have been behind the Council's thinking here, they are not specifically mentioned, and by 1945, all sides in the war had destroyed whole cities by non-nuclear means, from Nanjing to Rotterdam to Coventry to Stalingrad to Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. It was a war, after all. The catechism still leaves it to the appropriate authorities to evaluate conditions and in fact to effect some type of balance.

In fact, one issue I raised in an exchange in the comments on Prof Feser's blog is that although in the book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed Feser cites scriptural authority for capital punishment, he opposes the destruction of entire cities even though Sodom and Gomorrah and the siege of Jericho provide scriptural authority for just that.

The situation is by no means clear, as of course Clausewiz understood to be the whole nature of war. On the other hand, if Weigel argues that Truman was right to order the bombings merely because it saved some number of US lives in an invasion, it's a weak argument in itself and leaves out the much fuller range of issues that are in fact addressed in just war doctrine.