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Sunday, November 22, 2009

Of Nuclear Warheads and Suicide Bombers


With this post I will effectively annihilate any future chance I have of becoming involved in American politics.  

The other day I was thinking about nuclear weapons.  And instead of pondering how soon they will be falling upon my city and my subsequent contingency plans (As is my usual custom), my brain turned to ethics.  I wondered why the United States was never tried for war crimes after dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  On August 6th and 9th, 1945 two bombs were dropped in two cities, killing 80,000 people in Hiroshima (140,000 total counting radiation related deaths) and 74,000 people in Nagasaki (A couple of hundred thousand more due to radiation) effectively ending the war.  

I understand that death tolls of this sort are nothing new in modern warfare and that conventionally firebombing Tokyo itself caused around 100,000 civilian deaths.  Yet I pause when I consider the calculation that must have gone into this momentous bombing and the foreknowledge that hundreds of thousands of civilians would die.

At first I wondered if this event would fall under genocide.  Surely there have been those even in recent history who have been prosecuted for rounding up civilians and killing them in a time of war such as in Kosovo and Bosnia.  Yet after talking to my brother, we decided that the atomic blasts would not meet the definition of genocide because they were not targeted at eradicating a certain ethnic group simply because they were Japanese, but because they were at war with us.  (I wonder if this would change if those who planned the attacks hated Japanese people?... Which it is quite possible most Americans did at the time...)  

The argument goes that it was justified to kill all of these civilians because it effectively ended the war and saved many more lives than were taken by the blasts.  Using a Utilitarian ethic, this makes sense.  We kill a couple hundred thousand people to save 500,000 or a million.  The greatest good for the greatest amount of people.  Yet allow me to pose a thought experiment.  

Currently in Pakistan the Pakistani military is undertaking a major offensive against the Taliban in Southern Waziristan.  Meanwhile, the Taliban are attempting to break the political and popular support of the offensive by engaging in numerous suicide bombings targeting military officials and civilians, often detonating explosives in crowded markets.  There is a chance, as has happened before, that the military will call off the attacks under pressure and make a peace treaty with the Taliban. ("We won't bother you if you stop bombing us")  My question is, if the Taliban succeed in stopping the Pakistani fighting through the use of suicide bombers, will they be justified in killing civilians?  Many more Pakistani and Taliban lives would be saved than the number of civilians killed in suicide bombings if the fighting stopped.  The greatest good for the greatest amount of people right?   

So who are more justified? Atomic Bombers? Or Suicide Bombers?