The Nukes in WW2 were *Definitely* Mass Murder

The Power of Analytic Philosophy and G.E.M. Anscombe

Still from the original Japanese film, ゴジラ, Godzilla, 1954.

Why study analytic philosophy? It’s likely something you’ve never considered—a question much like, “why not Tango barefoot on a mound of sharpened Legos?”

It makes sense. Analytic philosophy can sometimes masquerade as Algebra¹ 🤮

The plague may seem preferable to this. Thankfully, not all philosophy takes formal logic to explain and understand.

Although many suppose philosophy to be a waste of time, it’s neither meaningless nor unimportant. I want to show you its power—power to move from uncertainty in opinion to clarity and conviction of judgement—by looking at nuclear war.

Until recently, my thoughts on using nuclear weapons against Japan in WWII were vague, with some general, incomplete thoughts floating around. I suspected, by muddied intuition, that it was horribly tragic, but necessary to ultimately save lives.

This kind of confused opinion is where analytic philosophy works its clarifying magic.

Oppenheimer and Putin

The ethics of nukes have been present to mind the past couple of years because of Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed biopic, Oppenheimer, and President Putin’s veiled nuclear threats.

Oppenheimer, based on the excellent biography, American Prometheus, explores the tortured psyche of Robert J. Oppenheimer, the physicist responsible for developing nuclear technology. The ethical gravitas behind creating such a technology weighs heavily in the movie; the act of using the bombs less so.

However, in one memorable scene, the movie portrays President Truman as hostile to Oppenheimer. Although we don’t know what all was said, historically, it’s a fact that they met behind closed doors.

The film presents a tense, fraught interaction, with Truman protecting his moral responsibility for the nukes.

“Mr. President, I feel that I have blood on my hands,” Oppenheimer says, with a cracked, breaking voice.

“You think anyone in Hiroshima or Nagasaki gives a shit who built the bomb?” Truman retorts. “They care who dropped it. I did. Hiroshima isn’t about you.”

Implying, rather sinisterly, that it is about him.

Oppenheimer leaves, and Truman can be heard saying, “Don't you ever bring that crybaby back here ever again.” (He really did say those words.)

Let us say Truman dropped the bomb. Very well; then he murdered around 200,000 people.

That’s what the British analytic philosophy of G.E.M. Anscombe demonstrates.

“Mr Truman’s degree” Anscombe’s pamphlet

I intend² to write an introduction to Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret (G.E.M.) Anscombe soon, so I won’t dwell on her life for long, except to say she was a professor at Cambridge, and an outstanding, preeminent philosopher.

In 1956, Oxford University deemed to award President Truman with an honorary degree. Anscombe protested this by distributing a pamphlet which argued that President Truman indeed committed mass murder by using nukes against the Japanese. She does so logically, with careful definitions (thankfully, without using formal predicate logic), showing the surprising power of analytic thinking.

The upshot of her argument is that it doesn’t rely on debates about whether the nukes saved more lives than it killed—she suspects it did, given the circumstances. Her essay also doesn’t rely on pacifism. She argues vehemently against the pacifist movement.

So, how does the argument go?

“Unconditional surrender?” The third option.

Most people defend Truman’s decision by saying, as Anscombe writes, “It pretty certainly saved a huge number of lives.” How does she respond?

“Given the conditions, I agree. That is to say, if those bombs had not been dropped, the Allies would have had to invade Japan to achieve their aim, and they would have done so. Very many would have been killed… I do not dispute it. Given the conditions, that was probably what was averted by that action.”

Now, we must ask, What were the conditions? “The unlimited objective, the fixation of unconditional surrender. The disregard of the fact that the Japanese were desirous of negotiated peace.”³

The US’s chance to the Japanese was given in the Potsdam Declaration, but this declaration was, essentially, a vaguely worded unconditional surrender.

The character of the Potsdam Declaration is important because it means the bombs were not the only reasonable means of achieving peace—there was leeway, give, somewhere. The US did not only have two options, as some pretend, drop the bombs or a full-scale invasion, but a third, if unsavory option (especially to those seeking revenge), conditional surrender.

Consider a mundane, routine example.

A four-year-old comes to his mom and says, “My sister isn’t sharing… I want to play with the Legos now!”

“Why don’t you try trading with another toy and asking nicely to take a turn?”

The four-year-old marches back to his sister, gripping two measly toy army-men in hand.

“Here. Take these and gimme’ the Legos.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Mom said you have to.”

“No!”

“Moooommm!”

In this case, did the boy exhaust all his options? Did he sincerely want the Legos? He is right that he technically fulfilled his duty by offering a trade. He did not, however, think very creatively.

The reason he did not try very hard was because he could easily call Mom as a, shall we say, nuclear option.

Anscombe again: “It seems plausible to think that the consciousness of the possession of [the nuclear weapons] had its effect on the manner in which the Japanese were offered their ‘chance.’”

It’s perhaps no coincidence, in other words, that the famous Trinity test successfully set off the first nuclear device one day before the Potsdam conference began. It’s with that successful test that Truman helped draft the Potsdam document—essentially an unconditional surrender.

This point is important—but it’s not the final nail in the coffin. Far from it. Many readers, at this point, are convinced already that the bombings were immoral, but even if you disagree so far, Anscombe will still soundly show the bombings were mass murder.

Why the atomic bombs were mass murder

Anscombe proposes a definition of murder. “Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your end.” Seems pretty solid, but we can press her with a few clarifying questions.

“What does it mean to be innocent in war?” Those who are not directly involved in the continual act of attacking.

“But where will you draw a line? It is impossible to draw an exact line.” Her imaginary interlocutor protests.

With her dry British wit, she replies, “This is a common and absurd argument against drawing any line.” The defenders of Truman, she writes, throw “a glaring light on Aristotle’s thesis that you cannot be or do any good where you are stupid.”

She admits that there are sometimes edge cases, but, if we stick to the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we are not speaking of edge cases. The overwhelming majority of people in the cities were civilians engaged in little to no direct support for the war (only ~10,000 of the 200,000 in both cities were soldiers).⁴

We could retort, “Well, the soldiers are mostly conscripts, so they’re innocent too!”

Anscombe doesn’t mean innocent in terms of “personal responsibility,” but, rather, innocent in that they are a non-combatant. “The people fighting are ‘harming,’ so they can be attacked; but if they surrender they become in this sense innocent and so may not be maltreated or killed.” So, we have a good, clear-enough definition of non-combatant.

Given dropping the nukes was, plausibly, not the only option to secure peace, and that killing innocents to any end (including for peace) is murder, how can we still defend Truman?

The final, most common defense, then and now, is that we could say Truman did not intend to kill innocents; he only wanted a swift end to the war. Therefore, he did not mean to kill innocents, and, thereby, did not commit murder.

That is where Anscombe’s argument takes full effect, and the analytic argument convinces any reasonable person.

“The double effect”

“Truman did not intend to kill innocents,” is using an equivocation—which simply means the statement confuses the meaning of a word to make the argument obscure.

Actually, Truman probably did not wish or desire to kill innocents (hopefully not, anyway). However, he did not intend to not kill innocents (if you’ll permit a double negative).

He wished he did not kill them, but make no mistake: He intended to kill them.

Crucially, this is different from the case where you accidentally kill innocents in war.

Anscombe writes,

“For killing the innocent, even if you know as a matter of statistical certainty that the things you do involve it, is not necessarily murder. I mean that if you attack a lot of military targets, such as munitions factories and naval dockyards, as carefully as you can, you will be certain to kill a number of innocent people; but that is not murder. On the other hand, unscrupulousness in considering the possibilities turns it into murder.”

Again, there are unsure, edge cases where the line is difficult to draw.

However, again, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not edge cases.

To understand why, let’s consider a distinction.

We must differentiate between “the foreseen and the intended consequences of an action.”

We can say, for example, that a doctor may administer a pain relieving drug in the case of a mortal illness, knowing the drug might kill the patient if the wound doesn’t first. This is clearly distinct from someone giving the drug with the intention to kill someone.

A husband who gives his jealous spouse a drug to poison her and kill them intends to kill them.

A doctor who gives his mortally wounded patient a drug which might kill him before the wound does, foresees the consequences, but does not intend to kill them.

Indiscriminately destroying an entire city necessarily includes killing large swaths of innocents, and, as part of the chain of reaching the result, requires killing those large swaths of innocents. Truman’s action to drop the bomb and kill ~200,000 innocents was intended, not just foreseen, because killing innocents was the means of achieving the goal of peace.

Put negatively, without killing innocents, the ploy to achieve peace through nukes wouldn’t have occurred.

Whereas, when the Brits bomb a munitions factory, it is not part of the means of the goal to kill innocents. If no innocents are killed, the goal is achieved.

If someone wants to say the same about the nukes, then Truman should have dropped the bombs on the ocean, or on a remote military outpost—but he (along with advisors) chose the cities.

Thus, to achieve their goal of swift peace, they intentionally destroyed cities full of innocent people.

As such, if we agree with the premise, “intending to kill [noncombatants] for another goal is murder,” then the nukes were mass murders.⁵

In this case, then, we have a clear, convincing case that the bombs constituted murder.

And, the power of analytic philosophy is shown.

If you agree that intending to kill innocent people for another goal is murder, then the atomic bombs constituted murder.

Why should you care?

As Anscombe points out, you can admire someone for one thing and denounce them for another. Truman likely did some things well. He inherited a terrible decision when President FDR died suddenly, leaving him with the office. This does not acquit him of the responsibility.

People call him courageous, according to Anscombe, not because he was brave, but because he did the wrong thing at such a terrible scale.

Watch carefully. Politicians especially use “doublespeak” to talk about the “double effect” all the time, especially about intention. Indeed, AP’s archive on Truman’s speech warning the Japanese, in June, 1945 (a month before the atomic bomb tests), has a comment section filled with things to the effect of, “Can’t say we didn’t warn them.” Or, consider this comment, “Truman the only dude to come out and say we will totally annihilate you while wearing a bow tie. Dude was metal.”

Such backward-looking, Nationalist talk is not only unpalatable, but strictly irrational.

Anscombe went on to write extensively about murder, ethics, and action—particularly, intention. She’s best known for her lecture series, which became a book, called simply Intention (1957). It’s been hailed as “the most important work on action since Aristotle.” It was written to explain and defend her views on intentionality given against Truman’s murders.

Next blog, I hope to discuss Anscombe’s life, thought, and her views on Intention (if, God-willing, I can somehow finish it and understand it well enough.)

Her paper called “Mr Truman’s Degree,” and “War and Murder,” in Nuclear Weapons: A Catholic Response, 1961, are both available online.

Oh, and I almost forgot.

Oxford gave Truman the honorary degree anyway.

At least he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Thanks for reading.

Soli Deo Gloria

1. Colyvan, Mark, Jay L. Garfield, and Graham Priest. 2005. “Problems With the Argument From Fine-tuning.” Synthese 145 (3): 325–38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-005-6195-0. This bit of probability reasoning aims to show how inferring from fine-tuning evidence is question begging.

2. No pun intended.

3. The declaration concludes by calling on the “unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces…. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”

4. If you want to say all civilians contribute in some way to war, as some Allied propaganda suggested, you must accept there are no innocents in war—a chilling, fearful prospect. And, besides, you need to account for children and elderly, and, she writes. And this clarifies what we should say about child soldiers—they bear no personal responsibility, but because they are actively harming, they may be killed. The reprehensible responsibility rests on those conscripting children.

5. Notice: This does not lead to pacifism. Anscombe argues vehemently against it in a later paper, meant to clarify her view, “War and Murder,” in Nuclear Weapons: A Catholic Response, 1961. It does, however, mean that individuals should never intend to kill someone, even in self-defense.