OK, you’re President Truman.
Choose one:
1) End the war by causing 150,000 civilian casualties and destroy two cities. The four year war has already caused 400,000 American deaths, and over 1,000,000 wounded.The Okinawa campaign has just ended with a frightful number of Americans killed, presaging the difficult bloody fight that will be needed to take Japan. The Navy daily suffers kamikaze attacks, in some cases, wiping out hundreds of Americans in a split second.
2) Invade Japan by land causing up to 9 million civilian and military deaths, destroying many cities, and having 250,000 Americans KIA and another 1,000,000 wounded in a fight to the death.
Choose quickly. Americans are dying daily.
You can pontificate about moral choices until the cows come home. But in reality, Truman made the only correct choice open to him.
And in doing so, he saved countless American and Japanese lives.
We can second guess decisions made 62 years ago, but we dare not disregard the context of the times.
We can take responsibility for Hiroshima, but the Japanese themselves are wholly responsible for Nagasaki. They could have surrendered then, but chose not to. Indeed their military officials plotted to the last second to prevent Hirohito from making his radio broadcast to the Japanese people announcing surrender, even after Nagasaki occurred..
Still losing 75,000-90,000 lives in Hiroshima and saving 9- 10 million is a dirty business but it had to be done to end the fanaticism of an empire that would have sacrificed its own people in a death duel that it knew it could never win.
President Truman made the right decision. As a result not only did the people on both sides live, but they went on to have innumerable children and grandchildren, who would have been cutoff had more people died in Japan in 1945-1946.
And before this War on Islamic Terror is over, similar choices will have to be made.
Here's why:
a) You can't predict what would have been the result. That kind of moral calculus is impossible, and of course the troubled conscience is strongly motivated to continually inflate the estimates of what wouild have happened if #2 had been chosen.
A highly competent writer friend of mine, Mary Meehan --- much more competent in the investigative area than I am --- analyzed Truman's diaries and public statements on this subject. At first, he said the atomic bombing saved "n" lives. As time went on, and the body count from Hiroshima and Nagasaki went higher and higher, his estimates of how many lives it saved went to "2n," "3n," "25n" and so forth. A decent man doing what an appalled conscience needs to do, short of confession and repentance.
b) Saying that we can do any evil, even great evil in the eyes of humanity and God Himself, that greater good may come of it, is a line of moral reasoning that will be used to justify any sin. It's how Eve justified the first one.
Not to invoke the Argumentum ad Hitlerum, or even the Argumentum ad Saddam Husseinium, let's objectively note that it undercuts any possibility of arguing against any grave evil from infant craniotomy on up, if the doer thereof convinces himself that it was necessary to avoid a greater evil.
This boils down to "Thou shalt not commit murder --- unless thou art really, really tempted."
It makes you an enemy of God. Not a good bargain.