This has been in the news (and is about to be in the news again with the 65th anniversary coming up) so I think it counts!

In short: Were the atomic bombings of Japan justified? I think so. Watch this video clip.

Watching your father reminded me of own dad, he had the same type of moustache and a similar way of speaking.
He was a Royal Air Force pilot held prisoner in a Rangoon gaol for sixteenth months, the story of which is recounted in the book Rats of Rangoon by Lionel Hudson.
The Japanese were responsible for lots of horrific massacres in China and elswhere but have escaped the condemnation dished out to the Germans for some reason. I've always found it strange that I might owe my survival to something as awful as that, but if anyone had it coming to them I guess it was the Japs.
They have never really faced up to their past either, they seem to live in a world strangely sealed off from the rest of us.

I think that why the Japanese escape the same condemnation as the Germans is purely sheer weight of numbers. Nothing they did quite matches the systematic horror of the holocaust. But at least both these atrocities occurred during major global conflict. Not saying that in any way justifies it.

But the bloody minded genocide of Stalin, Pol Pot, the Rwanda tribes and Serbian generals did not even have that excuse. Civilisation is a thin veneer easily fractured.

There's a wonderful essay by Paul Fussell. I believe it's called "Why I Love the Atom Bomb." He was in training to invade Japan when the bombs were dropped.

Well I haven't said it before and I've often often criticised the US, but thanks America for halting the cruel Japanese incursion.

Isn’t this a bit of a red herring, though? Nobody seriously suggests that dropping atomic bombs on, say, Munich and Heidelberg in the closing months of the war would have been an appropriate response to Nazi atrocities, or that nuking Minsk and Smolensk was ever the right way to address Stalinist atrocities.

The central ethical objection to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was that they intentionally targeted innocent people on a very large scale. I appreciate that the objective of ending the war sooner rather than later was a highly desirable one, but if that particular end justifies the intentional targeting of innocent human life, then I do not think we can condemn, say, terrorism, in general terms. Terrorism, too, would be potentially justifiable by a sufficiently desirable end. So would genocide, come to think of it.

When we get down to it, I'm sure that the Japanese would have been just as impressed if the bomb had been dropped on Haramura.

Civilian casualties caused by the prolonged bombing of German cities may have equalled the losses at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Dresden and Leipzig were targetted with high explosive and incendiary bombs. Both German and Japanese cities had some level of military significance with rail and communication hubs and armament factories. The civilian workforce that staffed these facilities paid a high price for their need to reside close to their place of employment.

To my knowledge, no treaty or convention requires military leaders to avoid civilian casualties, merely to attempt to "minimise" them.

Couple of points:

1. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets precisely because they had minimal military/industrial significance. (The same, to some extent, may be true of Dresden, and perhaps of other targets, though I think the case is less clear there.)

2 On this board, I think we can distinguish between what treaties and conventions require, and what ethics suggests. The fact that something is not illegal does not make it good.

3. You seem to be arguing that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not ethically worse than the bombing of Dresden and at least some other German cities. Even if we grant this, that doesn't establish that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justifiable, does it? It could equally establish that the bombing of Dresden was not.

4. If the bombing of Hiroshima was justified by the desirable end of stopping the war, would not the genocide of the Jewish people have been justified if it had served an equally desirable end? And is that a conclusion we can be entirely comfortable with?

Perhaps the dropping of the atomic bombs on relatively unimportant Japanese cities was simply to see what the effect would be on cities; the effect on open country was already well known to the Brass in America; as I said blowing up Haramura would have impressed the Japanese with the effect of the explosion and only wiped out a few hundred civilians.

The main object of the exercise was not simply to impress the Japanese but to horrify and terrify them; to show them not only that the Americans not only had the power to wipe out entire cities – men, women, children, babies, cats, dogs, the lot – but that they would actually do so. The stated primary objective in selecting the targets was “obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan”, and a Hiroshima bombing was clearly going to do this much more than a Haramura bombing (or an open ocean demonstration blast, which was another possibility). Impressing the Soviets with US destructive power and readiness to deploy it against civilians was the stated secondary objective.

But you’re right; testing the effect on an urban population and environment was also part of it; Hiroshima had been all but untouched by conventional air raids, a deliberate decision so that damage from the atomic bomb, when dropped, could be easily seen and assessed.

There was another factor, a Haramura blast would have given the Japanese an opportunity, if they had chosen to fight on, to at least make a start on improving air defences around more of their cities, population dispersal, etc. Very possibly they would also have moved POWs into urban areas in the hope that they would act as human shields. (A small number of Allied POWs did in fact die in both bombings.)

Finally, the Americans had very few usable atomic bombs; they needed to use each of them to maximum effect.

I think if you had suggested, in the US in August 1941, that US forces would launch catastrophic attacks against undefended cities, with a view to devastating them, killing indiscriminately as much as possible of the civilian population and destroying as many as possible of the buildings, you would have horrified and outraged people, and would certainly have been disbelieved. At best, they would have regarded you as insane. Yet, four years later, that is exactly what happened. The lesson, I think, is how vulnerable ethical standards are.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. While Japan had been trying to make peace for six months before the bombing of Hiroshima, the total destruction of the two cities seemed to hasten an agreement. At least the attacks were carried out against a nation actively at war with the US.

The holocaust involved the death of Jewish people, many of whom were citizens of Germany or of nations already conquered. How could that be considered as contributing to the end of the conflict?

The actual, historical holocaust? It couldn't contribute to the end of the conflict (although I should point out that the Nazis thought it could, in a perverse kind of way).

My question is whether a genocide could, hypothetically, be justified if it did seem likely to contribute to the end of a horrific conflict. It seems to me to follow that, if the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be justified on that ground, then in the right circumstances a genocide - or pretty well anything else - could be justified on that ground.

I am questioning, obviously, the assumption that seems to me to be suggested by some of the contributions to this thread that, because the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings hastened the end of the war, therefore they were justified.

The question I ask myself is; would I sacrifice my father for two cities full of Japanese?
Considering the Japanese were choosing to subject him and many others to various totally unnecessary hardships and mental tortures at the time, I would choose to sacrifice them, yes.

Of course I understand your feelings for your father. But the Japanese people who were subjecting him to hardships and tortures are not the same Japanese people who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All that the two groups had in common is that they were both Japanese. But I don't think you can ethically justify punishing somebody because he shares the same nationality as a wrongdoer. I think there is more to us than our nationality.

Exactly the same reasoning could be used to justify, say, the WTC attacks as a response to injustices perpetrated by Americans, couldn't it? And pretty much the same reasoning was used by Nazis to justify the genocide of Jews.

Perigrinus

It doesn't matter what we say, we're all condemning certain people to death every day, because they are not our preferred people.

Who's heard of the nuclear attack of the people in Fallujah in 2004? It wasn't called a nuclear attack but contained the same deadly components.
A recent scientific report has said that birth defects are eighty times higher than Hiroshima.
thanhttp://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/24-0 . I caught the report on the ABC 24 news service last Sunday. When this eventually makes it to the mainstream media and everyone acts surprised, watch while those responsible engage in legal processes guaranteed to take until they have all safely shuttled off their mortal coils.

Same with the BP oil spill drama. Some communities have to live in the mire of oil for decades, as shown in the link I posted previously. There's no months of front page news time and billions of dollars given to ease their plight.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/ma ... elta-shell

I could go on but I'm sure know many instances like this yourself.