It seems to me that the Allied bombing of cities in WWII, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were not justifiable under the Just War rubric. I don't understand why the nuclear weapons weren't used against military targets.
“It seems to me that the Allied bombing of cities in WWII, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were not justifiable under the Just War rubric.”
Read “The Rape of Nanking” and get back to us on that justifiable war thingie. The Japanese occupation of China was absolutely brutal and done without any regard to “proportionality”.
The Tokyo newspaper ran a series of stories on two officers in Nanking who had a beheading contest. They got bored with it after each dispatched 140 Chinese and called it a draw.
My take is firebombing cities was unjust because the aim was to attack the innocent, the civilian, with no real proportional military gain.
Make no mistake, many innocent die or suffer in a just war, but as weapons become more accurate the risk of innocents suffering is reduced.
What may have been (by todays standards) an unjust use of force was not the case years ago.
For example, in WWII, to achieve a 90% Pk of a munitions factory in the middle of a city required roughly 9,000 bombs dropped from B-17s. Bombing was that inaccurate but the best we had at the time and the aim of the attack was the factory but innocents suffered. The attack was “just” as long as the military gain was worth the proportional cost to the innocent.
Today, we can achieve that same result by using one JDAM. . .with a huge reduction in the suffering of innocents (collateral damage).
Regardless, all military action is based on “proportionality,” i.e., is the military gain worth the innocent suffering?
The use of Nukes in WWII was defended, and rightly so IMHO, from a Just War perspective because the balance between how many “innocents” were to die if an invasion took place versus how many innocents would not die/suffer if a nuke was used.
(I say “innocents” because they were fanatical and in response to an invasion would take up arms to resist and thereby suffer and die in untold numbers).
Just my opinion. . .
Hiroshima was a major port and also headquarters of the Japanese Second Army, which was responsible for the defense of southern Japan. Like Dresden, it was also a transport hub and center for troop concentration. Unfortunately for the citizens, it was also relatively undamaged and thus was selected both as a military target and as a site where the effects of the bomb could be measured.
Nagasaki was a major industrial center and produced ordnance, ships, military equipment and other war materiel. The target area at Nagasaki was in its industrial center. In fact, the bomb itself exploded between the two principal targets in the city, the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works, which produced torpedoes.
It is a liberal canard to state that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were purely civilian targets. As in the case of Dresden, that is not true.