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Gatorade Frost · 10-26-2005, 08:46 AM

Today I have an English paper due for my Rhetoric class, and I have it written (all but a conclusion) and I'm hoping that some one could read it and give me some ideas on whether it flows or if it comes across too blocky or too broken? Mainly I'm hoping that it reads well and makes sense. And, well, if you come across some glaring mistakes (Spelling or grammar) you could point those out, too.

Quote:

The Unjustness of the Atomic Bomb

At 8:15 on August 6, 1945 the United States military dropped Little Boy, an atomic bomb containing the equivalent of 13 kilotons of TNT, on Hiroshima Japan with the official purpose of ending the war with Japan. Though the rightness of using the atomic bomb on Japan has been hotly debated for 60 years, there are no strong defendable reasons for the attack to qualify as just under the Just War theory; the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War II violated both the noncombatant immunity and proportionality clauses of the Just War philosophy.

For an attacking nation to be considered moral, they must follow the ideas of noncombatant immunity, the philosophy that military personnel must not directly attack civilians and must also minimize and avoid harm to non-combatants. It must also not use more force than necessary to attain a military objective; in essence the military must “avoid disproportionate collateral damage to civilian life and property” (Just War 81).

The direct attack of a Japanese city using the atomic bomb during World War II defied the noncombatant immunity tenet of the Just War philosophy. When a nation attacks another nation it must do whatever possible to avoid harming the enemy civilians; unfortunately using the atomic bomb on a city teeming with non-combatant men, women, and children does quite the opposite. As President Truman stated to the world in 1945 soon after the attack, the bomb was used to attack the city of “____________” in order to “[destroy] its usefulness to the enemy” (Truman). This statement is important for two reasons, the first of which was that Truman and the military had no specific target with the most military advantage in bombing, thus the speech was left blank to be filled in once Washington found out which city was chosen for the drop, and it is also important because it clearly states the government’s intent to attack a rival nation’s cities as opposed to bombing military bases, air craft carriers, etc. The undertones of this conveys the military’s objective of causing the most damage to the Japanese infrastructure without paying attention to the collateral damage done to the entirety of the city it bombs nor to the civilians who populate it. Also, the simple fact that the dropping of the atomic bomb resulted in a death toll of “122,338 of approximately 254,000 residents” in Hiroshima displays certainty that the US government did not actively attempt to avoid harm to the city’s noncombatant civilians (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Killing half of a city’s population can hardly be considered avoiding harm to the area’s non-combatant civilians, and in fact expresses quite the opposite; the civilians and city were targeted specifically as opposed to the military bases in the area. Finally, in Hiroshima approximately 80-90% of the city’s medical care workers were killed by the blast; the destruction of Hiroshima’s medical facilities crippled the city’s ability to provide health care to the civilians targeted by the atomic bomb. Though the Geneva Convention had yet to be convened at the time of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the idea that “…medical units must be protected…by all sides in a conflict” can be applied retroactively to the Just War theory; as international law now prohibits targeting medical personnel, it is a valid conclusion to include medical personnel into the category of noncombatants and civilians (Geneva Convention I art. 19). If this statement regarding medical personnel is accepted as fact it further proves the inability of the Hiroshima attack to be considered just under the Just War theory.

Additionally, for a war to be just, the damage must be proportional to the goals, and the military must use no more force than necessary to achieve its goals; in this case the goal was to end the war against Japan as quickly as possible. Naturally many authors have defended the use of the atomic bomb as a means to end the war as it avoided invading the Japanese homeland, sparing an expected 1.5 million American and British casualties, a far larger number than the 150,000 Japanese casualties sustained by the use of the atomic bomb. Obviously given the choice between over a million soldiers against 150,000 Japanese civilians, the answer is a fairly simple utilitarian choice, but in this case the options of using the atomic bomb and invading the Japanese islands weren’t the only alternatives. First of all, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that “prior to December 31 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped…” (Barret 1 par 2). This simply proves that at the time of the attack experts circulated intelligence stating that there wasn’t a real need to invade Japan, much less drop the atomic bomb on them, on account of Japan’s eminent and expected surrender before the end of 1945. Additionally, the war against Japan could have ended at any time between the Potsdam Conference and August 12, the final surrender date. The Emperor of Japan had begun “to negotiate for peace as early as February 1945, and [he] had presented various proposals immediately before the Potsdam conference in July 1945;” in each of these proposals the Japanese government included a request for the Emperor’s immunity (Lackey 40). During the Potsdam Conference Truman demanded “unconditional surrender” from the Japanese Emperor, though part of the eventual surrender of the Japanese to the Allies included immunity to the Japanese Emperor (Lackey 40). Had the American government provided immunity to the Emperor in July of that year, the need to drop the bomb on the Japanese to end the war would have been averted entirely. Due to the options between destroying the city of Hiroshima and accepting a conditional surrender from Japan, which the Japanese eventually obtained, the collateral damage caused by the atomic bomb was not proportional to the objective of forcing the Japanese to surrender.