Can nuclear war be morally justified?

[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.

*snip*

[LuvNewcastle]

1. I'm not sure that any kind of war is morally justifiable.

The veterans I've known aren't sure, either. About 80%(at least) of the people on both sides are just fighting because the government made them do it. My grandfather was in WWII and he had might terrors sometimes for the rest of his life. Killing other human beings isn't something you go home and forget about.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

8. It's okay to kill strangers if "the deciders" tell you to do it.

Otherwise it's murder.

Funny how the supposed libertarians seem fine with war, giving away autonomy to others.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. We're starting late this year, I see.

[Jim__]

3. "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."

That's a statement from an article by Jessica Matthews, The New Nuclear Threat, in the August 20th edition of The New York Review of Books. The article is a review of 4 books on nuclear war, and the article itself mostly discusses the recent increased threat of nuclear war. I don't think there can be a moral justification for a war that cannot be won.

The article is available to the public (currently, I think the NYRB sometimes changes the availability of its articles).

An excerpt:

...

Years from now, the Trump administration’s wholesale withdrawal from international agreements, its “unsigning” of treaties, and its weakening of international organizations will stand out from the lies, the corruption, the incompetence, and the breaking of norms as one of its most damaging features. A partial list includes the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, NAFTA, the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran nuclear deal, the Arms Trade Treaty, and, most recently, the World Health Organization. Among these, withdrawals in the nuclear arena may prove to be especially harmful.

The administration’s hostile view of arms control was evident in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review: The US “will remain receptive to future arms control negotiations if conditions permit.” These agreements have their flaws. Negotiations take years and years. Often the sides agree to give up weapons they no longer want. Violations are not uncommon and, to satisfy domestic hawks, both sides frequently build new weapons to compensate for those they negotiate away. Nonetheless, over more than three decades of painstaking effort by Republican and Democratic administrations, a set of agreements was hammered out that built trust between the West and Russia, created a degree of transparency into what the other side was doing, and banned or severely limited particularly destabilizing types of weapons, such as missile defense systems and multiple-warhead missiles. Over time the agreements slowed the arms race from a gallop to a jog. Without them, the two sides might still be holding 65,000 warheads instead of 13,000.

The dismantling of these agreements began with President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001, but in the last few years Trump has wiped away almost everything that was still in place. In 2018 he announced that the US would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Russian violations of the agreement, which Moscow had refused to acknowledge over many years, made this a close—and understandable—call. Still, withdrawing from an agreement gives the other side what it wants. And prompt American testing of a missile banned under the treaty suggests that Washington was eager to dispose of it.

The administration then announced its intention of leaving the Open Skies Treaty, a 1992 multilateral agreement that allows signatories to fly unarmed observation flights over the territory of the others to collect data on military forces and activities. Though its value to the superpowers has diminished with satellite technology, it remains important to European parties and has been a significant contributor to strategic stability.

...

[marble falls]

4. No.

[Nevilledog]

5. That's my answer, too.

[marble falls]

7. Never doubted that!

[SiliconValley_Dem]

6. launching a nuclear weapon is definitely on Trump's bucket list