Aug 6th : Are nuclear weapons less moral...

@divegeester said
Having read this completely now, I think your argument holds up in general terms but not specifically in the Japan case of WWll where the types of alternative highly targeted weaponry didn’t exist. There are commentaries explaining that a typical air and land invasion of Japan in 1945 would have resulted in millions of deaths and much more infrastructure disablement which would have also impacted national recovery.

Sorry not to get back sooner, I haven't looked at this forum for a while. There's three issues that are entangled here.

1) The use of some weapons is intrinsically in contradiction with the principle of distinction. For example land mines can be trodden on by civilians.

2) Whether the availability of precision weapons, or the lack thereof, justifies the use of indiscriminate ones.

3) The specific strategic situation surrounding Japan in 1945.

The question in the thread title was "Are nuclear weapons less moral...", my answer is that their use cannot be considered discriminate. It's almost impossible to use them in a way that avoids large scale civilian deaths. The exceptions to this are their use against a fleet, or against a remote ICBM site, and as part of an anti-ballistic missile system where they're detonated in the exo-sphere to destroy incoming nuclear weapons. In each of these cases civilian deaths cannot be ruled out, but the key words are "large scale". So the scope of my initial response was (1) above, I wasn't really dealing with (2) or (3).

Regarding (2), the general rule is that the outcome has to be militarily necessary and the risk of any potential collateral damage justified by the level of necessity. The allies actually did have a number of precision weapons, and, in any case, they could have used bomber stream attacks to create the same effect. It's not obvious that the use of the Little Boy and Fat Man weapons was connected with damage to materiel so much as morale. They had a single weapon that could do the job of a thousand bombs. The modern term is "Shock and Awe". So, I don't think that the unavailability of precision weapons is a factor here, partly because they had them and partly because that wasn't the point of the bombing.

3) So we come onto whether the specific situation in Japan warranted such a departure from the distinction principle as the use of Atomic Weapons. Given that the allies could have produced more-or-less the same effect using conventional means - bomber stream - it seems that the purpose was to shock the Japanese high command into unconditional surrender. If we assume that it is the case that a conventional invasion would have led to more deaths then there's a prima facie case for the use of the weapons. Whether they were justified in their use, and against the specific targets that were chosen is a matter that requires more knowledge than I have.

However, that does not prevent them from being "less moral" than conventional weapons. They could not be used in a manner that conformed with the principle of distinction, whereas each of the components of the conventional attack on Tokyo could. A bomber stream attack on a city can be regarded in the same way. However, a bomber stream attack on a city still only necessarily affects the city, an atomic weapon produces direct effects beyond the boundaries of a target even as large as a city due to fallout - they would not have understood that well at the time.

@deepthought said
Sorry not to get back sooner, I haven't looked at this forum for a while. There's three issues that are entangled here.

1) The use of some weapons is intrinsically in contradiction with the principle of distinction. For example land mines can be trodden on by civilians.

2) Whether the availability of precision weapons, or the lack thereof, justifies the use of ind ...[text shortened]... arget even as large as a city due to fallout - they would not have understood that well at the time.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

For me war is never morally justifiable even if it is politically, self or nationalistically defensively or emotionally justifiable. Therefore no weapon can be more or less morally in its use.

A soldiers life is no less sacred than a civilians by any measure. Therefore military personnel deaths are no more justifiable than civilian deaths. Furthermore there is no way of quantifying weather or not one particular mode of attack will involve more or less collateral civilian lives than another.

To me it therefore follows that the use of nuclear weapons on Japan in 1945 cannot be deemed as being less moral than a conventional attack.

However it has to be agreed that if it is possible to win a battle or war with a single tactical strike involving no human deaths, then this has to be preferable. Of course.