Morality, War and the Bomb

When Islamic armies were the most powerful in the world, conquerors of Asia Minor and North Africa, and poised at the gates of Europe in the 8th century, Abu Hanifa, founder of a school of law in the city of Baghdad, proposed that the killing, maiming and raping of civilian noncombatants in war be forbidden. It was one of the first attempts to codify some kind of moral and legal restraints on civilized societies engaged in the dangerously uncivilized practice of warfare.

Though from its inception, the intent of bombing was to terrorize people rather than to destroy military targets, there was still widespread moral opposition to the bombing of civilians and cities, until World War II. The moral outrage expressed in probably the most famous work of art depicting warfare, Picasso’s “Guernica,” immortalized the horror of the first terror bombing of a civilian population in Europe, by German bombers aiding the Franco forces in Spain.

While Americans remember the bombing of Pearl Harbor (a sneak attack, but on a very military target) and the British remember the Blitz, Germans may be justified in recalling the years of nightly bombing by British planes, culminating in the firebombing of Dresden, and Japanese the incessant bombing of practically every city in Japan by Americans.
By the time of Hiroshima, bombing cities with the express purpose of destroying them and killing people was a regular feature of the war on all sides.

But people were still troubled by the morality of killing the innocent, even when they half-believed the half-truths of their governments about the purpose and necessity of the bombing. The atomic bomb was so destructive over so large an area, that any pretence that it was a strategic weapon was impossible to maintain. “In 1945, when we ceased worrying about what the Germans would do to us,” said Leo Szilard, “we began to worry about what the United States might do to other countries.”

When the world began to find out what really had happened in Hiroshima, moral revulsion became attached to the Bomb and its future. After “Hiroshima,” John Hershey’s account of the aftermath was published, this revulsion was particularly acute. Even American military leaders, including General Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral William Halsey and General Curtis LeMay condemned the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. General Omar Bradley referred to “nuclear giants and ethical infants.“

Leo Szilard asked people to imagine what the feeling would be if Germany had dropped an atomic bomb on an Allied city, but still lost the war. Would not that act be added to other war crimes at Nuremberg?

Though some of these figures became nuclear weapons supporters, moral revulsion became a widely and deeply felt reason for why the Bomb had to be controlled, and why it must never again be used.