Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer, on physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s role in the creation of the atomic bomb, has proven to be a hit, massively outperforming expectations. In the process, it’s revived an important perennial question: was the United States morally justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Morally speaking, this is an easy question. Targeting civilian populations for mass incineration is intentionally killing innocent men, women, and children. And as the British moral philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe points out in her 1958 essay “Mr. Truman’s Degree,” “to choose to kill the innocent as a means to one’s ends is murder.” There’s no question that Truman (and those who executed his orders) were guilty of murder on a mass scale. And as Anscombe points out,
with Hiroshima and Nagasaki we are not confronted with a borderline case. In the bombing of these cities it was certainly decided to kill the innocent as a means to an end. And a very large number of them, all at once, without warning, without the interstices of escape or the chance to take shelter, which existed even in the “area bombings” of the German cities.
According to the principle of double effect, Catholic moral theology sometimes permits you to do a good action that has some bad side effects. For instance, the FDA might approve a drug that helps most people but hurts a few. An army might fight a battle knowing that innocent bystanders will likely be killed.
But this principle doesn’t apply when the action is itself evil—like if the FDA approved a drug intended to hurt people, or if the army started aiming at the bystanders. In such cases, John Paul II explained, those “choices cannot be redeemed by the goodness of any intention or of any consequence; they are irrevocably opposed to the bond between persons.” Intentionally murdering 200,000 men, women, and children is inherently immoral, even if you are doing so to try to end a world war.
The Church could hardly be clearer on this question. At the time of the bombings, Pius XII was pope, and he described the atomic bomb as “the most terrible weapon which the human mind has conceived up to date.” In one of his Christmas addresses, he envisioned the horror (already realized in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) of “entire cities, even the largest and richest in history and art, annihilated; a black blanket of death over the pulverized matter, covering countless victims with limbs burnt, twisted, scattered, while others groan in spasms of agony.”
This stance has been shared by every pope, and every relevant Church document, over the past three quarters of a century. Pope John XXIII wrote bluntly in Pacem in Terris that “nuclear weapons must be banned.” The Second Vatican Council warned that “any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.” More recently, Pope Francis has echoed this, calling the use of nuclear weapons “a crime not only against the dignity of human beings but against any possible future for our common home,” and describing it as “immoral, just as the possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral. . . . We will be judged on this.” After visiting Hiroshima, Francis described the devastation as “a true human catechesis on cruelty.”
Given the clarity of the Church’s stance on the matter, to say nothing of the clarity of Catholic moral theology, or natural law, or the teachings of Jesus, or the Ten Commandments, it’s perhaps surprising that John Paul II’s biographer George Weigel took to the pages of First Things to claim that the atomic bombings were in fact “the correct choice.”
Weigel’s argument proceeds by first blurring the distinction between military targets and civilian ones, claiming that “the militarist-nationalist fanatics who dominated Japanese policy until Emperor Hirohito’s decisive intervention in August 1945 planned to turn the entire Japanese population into combatants during an American invasion.” But the fact that a civilian might hypothetically become a combatant in the future doesn’t make him a combatant under either international law or Catholic moral principles.
Weigel next insists that “President Harry Truman had three options for ending the Pacific War without the unprecedented bloodletting of an invasion.” He could (1) increase the fire-bombing of Japanese cities; (2) “strangle Japan by naval blockade and starve her into a submission her leaders might not concede until millions, and perhaps tens of millions, were dead”; or (3) “use the atomic weapons developed by the Manhattan Project.” Leave aside the historical question, ignored by Weigel, of whether we could have negotiated a peace agreement with the Japanese. All three of the options Weigel proposes are murder: they’re simply different ways of killing lots of Japanese civilians to force the government to surrender.
In fact, let’s grant (at least for the sake of discussion) Weigel’s core argument: that in murdering roughly 200,000 civilians, Truman “saved millions, even tens of millions, of lives, American and Japanese.” Does that make it morally defensible, or “the correct choice”? I’ll let St. Paul answer: “Why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just” (Rom. 3:8).