Nuclear reaction

The 70th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has produced some predictable wailing and gnashing of teeth about the horrors of nuclear weapons. The Guardian called the dropping of the bombs ‘obscene’, citing the figure of 250,000 casualties, and CND organised a commemorative event where Jeremy Corbyn renewed his call for unilateral nuclear disarmament.

As a conservative and a realist, I don’t have the luxury of moral certainty. Was Harry Truman wrong to take the decision he did? On 16 August 1945, Winston Churchill defended him in a speech in the House of Commons, making what has since become the standard case. Yes, Japan would have been defeated eventually, but the bombings brought the second world war to an end without the need for a land invasion. In Churchill’s estimation, that would have led to the loss of a million American lives and 250,000 British, Canadian and Australian servicemen.

Critics of the bombings dispute those figures, pointing out that Truman received conflicting advice about the likely American casualties. But does the rightness or wrongness of the decision turn on whether it produced a net saving of lives? Even if the bombings indisputably produced a net loss, that wouldn’t necessarily make them wrong. Truman wouldn’t have been much of a president if he’d attached the same weight to Japanese lives as he had to those of his own people. His first priority was not to minimise the loss of human life per se, but to make sure America won the war, with as few American lives as possible being lost in the process.

OK, so that was his duty as president, but what about his moral duty as a human being? Even there, I think you have to take the historical context into account.