Can nuclear war be morally justified? [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200804-can-nuclear-war-ever-be-morally-justified

Was the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki morally wrong? 75 years later, the question is more difficult to answer than first appears.

In the early 1980s, the Harvard law professor Robert Fisher proposed a new, gruesome way that nations might deal with the decision to launch nuclear attacks. It involved a butcher’s knife and the president of the United States.

Writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Fisher suggested that instead of a briefcase containing the nuclear launch codes, the means to launch a bomb should instead be carried in a capsule embedded near the heart of a volunteer. That person would carry a heavy blade with them everywhere the president went. Before authorising a missile launch, the commander-in-chief would first have to personally kill that one person, gouging out their heart to retrieve the codes.

When Fisher made this proposal to friends at the Pentagon, they were aghast, arguing out that this act would distort the president’s judgement. But to Fisher, that was the point. Before killing thousands, the leader must first “look at someone and realise what death is – what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet”.

Killing a person with a butcher’s knife may be a morally repugnant act, yet in the realm of geopolitics, past leaders have justified their atomic acts as a political or military necessity. Following the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – 75 years ago this month – the decision was justified only in terms of its outcome, not its morality. The bombing ended World War Two, preventing further deaths from a protracted conflict, and arguably discouraged the descent into nuclear war for the rest of the 20th Century.

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