Bombing of Hiroshima Raises Some Significant Ethical Essay

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bombing of Hiroshima raises some significant ethical issues. From a military perspective, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as the catalyst for bringing about Japanese surrender, thereby ending the war in the Pacific. However, these attacks on civilian targets were among the most horrific in the history of wartime. Such attacks would be outlawed today under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which was enacted in 1949 partly as a response to the bombings and other atrocities committed against civilians and prisoners of war during the Second World War. It is my view that the bombing of Hiroshima, while violating any reasonable code of ethics, resulted in a net sparing of human life and was therefore a necessary act to bring about the end of the war.

The Bombings

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people were killed, and many more would die later as the result of radiation exposure (History.com, 2012). Some sources attribute the number of dead in the Hiroshima attack to have been 140,000 all told, mostly civilians, making it the most deadly attack on a civilian target in history (BBC, 2012) This attack was followed up three days later with the dropping of a plutonium bomb over Nagasaki. The Japanese issued their surrender six days after that attack.

The war in the Pacific to that point, fought primarily between the United States and Japan following the latter's attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, had been exceptionally bloody. Japan had spent much of the 1930s expanding its empire, and by the time it attacked Pearl Harbor had taken over large parts of China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and other areas in Asia. In the course of the conflict with the Americans, the battle with Japan was fought on a number of islands in the Pacific.

At the time of the attacks, the Fourth Geneva Convention did not exist, so there was no explicit international agreement to not target civilians in times of war. The European theater featured extensive bombing of civilian targets on both sides.

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The Americans famously leveled the city of Dresden in 1945 towards the end of the war. It had engaged in a similarly aggressive firebombing campaign against the Japanese during July of 1945. With the war in Europe over at that point, the U.S., UK and China called for Japanese surrender on July 26, 1945, the Potsdam Declaration. At this point in the war, the Potsdam Declaration was an attempt to avoid a ground invasion of Japan that would have cost both sides millions of lives, including significant devastation to the country's civilians. The destruction of Japanese infrastructure would also have set that country's ability to recover back by several years. The Declaration, however, was ignored by Japanese emperor Hirohito. In the face of this determination by Japan to continue fighting even if it meant an Allied invasion, the nuclear option was deployed as a last-ditch attempt to force a Japanese surrender.

The Ethics

There are two different views of the ethics of the Hiroshima bombing. One ethical frame that can be used is the utilitarian frame, which weighs the ethics of an action based on the consequences of the action. Utilitarianism is "one of the most powerful and persuasive approaches to normative ethics (Driver, 2009). Distilling it to a single theme, the ethical action is the one that delivers the greatest good for the greatest number. The outcomes for the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific and unprecedented, but arguably those bombings spared a much larger loss of life. The ground invasion of Japan was avoided, saving the lives of millions, including a number of Japanese civilians that could have been as high as the victims of these nuclear attacks. The bloody battles in Guadalcanal and Okinawa that saw tens of….....

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