Liberty's Torch: nuclear weapons

Showing posts with label nuclear weapons. Show all posts

Saturday, July 4, 2020

The Weirdest Transference

Blame this one on my memory.

I’ve always been a mouthy sort, free with my convictions and opinions. It’s gotten me into a fair number of battles over every subject under the Sun. Moreover, I’ve never been a “respecter of persons;” I didn’t care about the supposedly greater knowledge or credentials of whoever I’d decided to dispute.

The Sixties were a tumultuous time in many ways, including for the inception of a distinctly anti-military current of belief that infected persons from every walk of life. Contrary to what most might imagine, it didn’t start with Vietnam. The tempest over that affair came second to another campaign that was orchestrated by America’s enemies, especially the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).

The expansion of the Soviet Union’s satellite empire in eastern Europe, formally known as the Warsaw Pact, was checked by NATO, especially America’s “nuclear umbrella” over the NATO nations. Our ground forces in Europe, even at their largest (approximately 330,00 troops), would not have been sufficient to defeat the enormous Red Army. They were there to slow its advance long enough for the U.S. to mobilize and dispatch its nuclear deterrent forces, especially the long-range bomber fleet. At that time Our European containment strategy depended totally on those forces, and on the specter of complete devastation they posed the U.S.S.R.

Naturally, the Communists wanted to see those forces vanish. But the masters of the Soviet Union could make no progress in their “disarmament” initiatives at that time. The Cuban Missile Crisis alerted America’s strategists to the Communists’ intent to expand in the Western Hemisphere. The analysts at RAND, Hudson, and other strategy-oriented think tanks saw the situation too clearly: in the absence of our nuclear deterrent, the Soviets would continue their military advance wherever they had or could establish a beachhead. They had a huge number of men at arms, and were willing to pauperize their subjects to whatever degree was required to provision them.

So the Communists and their fellow travelers attacked America’s nuclear warfighting power “from underneath:” i.e., by striving to turn ordinary Americans against it. Their propaganda campaign emphasized the horror of a worldwide nuclear holocaust. And as has so often been the case with left-wing propaganda efforts, theirs included a strong thrust into the schools. After all, it’s easier to frighten impressionable youngsters than adults with greater knowledge of facts and conditions.

In high school, seldom did a day go by that I failed to hear some sort of anti-nuclear slogan or diatribe. Mostly they came from the teachers. Whenever I had the opportunity, I would argue against them. But of course, a high school student’s views don’t count for much in an argument with a credentialed adult.

Then as now, the most striking aspect of such exchanges was their horror of nuclear weapons themselves. They were “dangerous beyond measure,” “instruments of mass death” that could “poison the whole world.” The prospect was “too terrible even to contemplate.” They simply “had to go,” lest some “warmongers” in the Pentagon decide that there was no point to having them but not using them.

None of the people spouting such drivel ever mentioned the Soviets’ nuclear arsenal, which was growing even faster than America’s. Their focus was always on America’s nuclear forces and the absolute, immediate, imperative necessity of eliminating them.

Perhaps some of them were sincerely afraid of the possibility of a nuclear exchange and what it would do to the United States. Some were definitely pacifists, who opposed the existence of conventional armed forces with equal fervor. But some were enemies of the United States...and not all of them bothered to hide their convictions.

The propaganda campaigns against America’s nuclear forces always focused on the weapons themselves: their massive destructive power and the supposed after-effects of their use. The propagandists strove to inculcate fear of the devices themselves in whoever would listen to them. The mere existence of the weapons, they proclaimed, “puts the whole world at risk.” The weapons’ role in preserving the peace of Europe and checking Soviet expansionism was never mentioned.

Ironically, to this date no one has ever been harmed by an H-Bomb. Even liberal New York Times columnist Russell Baker, himself no great fan of the military, admitted it:

     Although I don’t exactly love the H-bomb, it comes close to my idea of what a bomb should be. First, it fulfills the human need to have a bomb. Second, of all the bombs in circulation these days, it is the one you are least likely to be assaulted with.
     In the more than thirty years since it became popular, it has never been used against anybody. A person could get fond of a bomb like that. There is no other bomb with a comparable safety record.
     [From “Son of H-Bomb,” published on July 31, 1977.]

Compare Baker’s clarity in the above to the hysteria of the anti-nuclear-weapons types and decide which you prefer. I’ve made my choice, and not solely for Baker’s semi-facetious reasons.

The campaign against nuclear weapons foreshadowed the efforts of today’s Left to make young Americans fear guns: not their use but their very existence. That effort moved into high gear only much later. Yet its psychology was exactly the same: Make them fear the inanimate object. Never mention the men who control it.

I could go into all sorts of rhapsodies about the civilizing power of weapons, but there’s no need for that here. What came into sharp focus this morning, as I was contemplating various aspects of our milieu, was this: If you’re focused on A, you’re not looking at B – or anything else.

The propagandists who harped on the unacceptable danger of nuclear weapons knew this. Whether or not they did so consciously, in compelling attention to the weapons themselves they succeeded in deflecting attention away from other important matters. They never addressed the humans who control the weapons, who pondered why and how to use them, and the weapons’ other “merely by existing” effects on international relations.

Nuclear weapons, I’ve argued in other places and at other times, have “democratized” warfare. For some time before them, national “leaders” felt immunized against the personal consequences of war. The H-Bomb and the intercontinental delivery system ruined that for them; they can no longer be certain of surviving an all-out war. Deep bunkers provide only superficial reassurance, as there’s no theoretical upper limit to how large an H-Bomb can be. If detonated at ground level, the Soviets’ 50 Megaton “Tsar Bomba” could destroy any bunker in existence. Larger H-Bombs can be built without straining the physics involved. If any such superbombs exist, they’re a closely guarded secret.

In a world partitioned into States of varying rapacity, the ability to threaten the inescapable annihilation of any would-be warmaker is precious beyond price.

I could go on, but I think the point has been made. Remember always that he who wants you to obsess over one thing is keeping you from giving serious attention to other things. Keep in mind the possibility that getting you to focus on A isn’t his true aim – that what he really cares about is preventing you from thinking about B. Ask yourself: Is this person’s desire that I should become absorbed with his issue really about keeping me from addressing other things of equal or greater importance?

Don’t be satisfied with any easy answers.

Friday, June 9, 2017

A War That Shaped The World

Fifty years ago, a major war was fought and concluded within a six day span. In terms of geopolitical impact, it was the most consequential war since World War II. A tiny nation surrounded on three sides by enemies and on the fourth by the Mediterranean Sea, defeated six much larger nations and in so doing extended its domain well beyond its original borders. At the conclusion of hostilities, the world was on notice: Israel stood ready to defend itself against any array of hostile forces and would do so a outrance.

Yet Israel was perhaps not quite as ready as it wished, for six years later the Yom Kippur War brought Israel briefly to the brink of national annihilation. It had been a matter of policy: Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and Chief of Staff David Elazar had conferred, and had decided to allow Egypt and Syria to strike the first blow. They believed that despite clear and unambiguous foreknowledge of the attacks to come, to strike first would isolate Israel from its chief ally and the source of a great part of its munitions, the United States.

To preserve some vestige of international good will, Israel allowed Egypt, Syria, and their allies to draw the first blood. For three days Israel’s fate hung in the balance. It survived and prevailed largely due to the superiority and fighting spirit of the Israeli armed forces.

Has it mattered? Yes, very much. Had Israel not extended its borders in 1967, allowing its enemies to strike first might have destroyed it. But given the developments since then, Israel’s decision to allow its enemies to strike first, despite the conviction among its political masters that to do otherwise would result in international ostracism, seems to have mattered very little, if at all.

The Islamic states that surround it still hate Israel and work to undermine it in various ways, especially through the exploitation of the “Palestinian” problem. Europe is now hostile to Israel as well; its dependence on Arab oil and its vulnerability to terrorism from its Islamic immigrants have neutered the Old World’s better inclinations. In all probability, were it not for the nuclear deterrent Israel amassed after the Yom Kippur War, the country would have been attacked a third time and overwhelmed decades ago.

Islamic enmity is absolute and eternal. Humiliating military defeats have only sharpened that enmity, for there is nothing so potent in the Islamic soul as its envy of truly civilized societies. The intensity of that envy is at its maximum toward Israel, for Muslims have been taught for centuries to hate and fear the Jews, and to seek their extinction.

A hatred centuries deep will take centuries to quench...if any attempt is ever made to quench it. The consequences for the world have already been dramatic. Should any of the Middle Eastern Islamic states acquire nuclear weapons, those consequences will become apocalyptic. One or more nations will die.

I remember the fears of the adults around me in 1967. They expected both the U.S. and the Soviet Union to intervene. The highest of the worries was a nuclear exchange – and not merely over Israel. The wounded egos of the Soviets, we young ones were told, had barely healed from the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was credible that they would see the war as an opportunity to assert themselves afresh – this time in “their” hemisphere, where American will did not prevail.

I don’t remember any comparable fears over the 1973 conflict. It took a while before I discovered the reason: America’s strategic arsenal had gone to DEFCON 3, an elevation of our alert condition of which the Soviets were surely aware. Had the Soviets elevated their own alert status, America was prepared to strike first.

Should Israel be attacked today, whether the U.S. would do anything that declarative is a matter of conjecture. Yet it strikes me as unlikely. The stakes would be the same, but our national weariness with war is far greater. Bluntly, we are not what we were. We’ll happily sell Israel military goods, but we expect it to look after itself.

Israel could not survive without its nukes. It would be overrun – indeed, it would have been overrun long ago. Yet there are persons who self-righteously condemn nuclear weapons in general, and specifically condemn Israel’s possession of them. That’s worthy of much thought.

As I’ve written before, nuclear weapons, especially the sort delivered by ballistic launchers, put the political elites on the battlefield. They who in earlier times merely commanded others to fight, bleed, and die now have “skin in the game.” No preparation for nuclear bombardment can be regarded as guaranteed protection. Yet no one has ever died as a result of a nuclear exchange. As Russell Baker put it, the H-Bomb has an unparalleled safety record: “You could almost grow fond of a bomb like that.”

If they have the sense God gave a flea, five million Israelis thank Him every night for their nuclear deterrent, and for the men who stand ready to use it.

“Before all else, be armed!” – Niccolo de Macchiavelli

Monday, October 3, 2016

The Wages Of Weakness

“Wars are caused by undefended wealth.” – Douglas MacArthur.

Does it seem to you, Gentle Reader, that the whole world is mobilizing? That the large military powers – other than the United States, that is – are flexing their muscles for the rest of the world to see? That the relatively low international tensions of just a decade or two ago are mere memories fading before the threats of an ever more militarized present?

Yes, even during the Bush I and II years we had some troubles. However, they were not international troubles. I’ve emphasized that word twice now. Perhaps you can see why.

The correlation of rising international militarism and aggressive gestures by Russia, China, and their proxies with the decline of American military power and assertiveness is so strong that it cannot be overlooked. The lesson is there for anyone with eyes to see and a mind that will accept the verdict.

Very few persons – surprisingly to some, more than zero, but still very few – actually look forward to war. Soldiers dislike the prospect more than civilians. Of course they do! Theirs are the lives most immediately endangered by warfare. You’d see no acknowledgement of that in the statements of Leftists, of course. To them, the very existence of a capable military is prima facie evidence that someone, somewhere is hoping for a war.

I’m well acquainted with both human stupidity and the prevalence of wishful thinking. Far too many persons see only what they want to see...even if it isn’t there. But the Left’s habitual condemnation of the military, to say nothing of its hostility to weaponry, reflects so much stupidity (among the rank and file), and expresses so much hypocrisy (among their well-protected “leaders”) that contemplating it brings me near to the point of nausea.

General MacArthur had the right of it.

Violence of any sort is fueled by one of two motives:

Passion;
Profit.

Now and then these will blend: i.e., the rulers of a nation will succeed in whipping the hoi polloi into a passionate war frenzy from which those rulers and their cronies hope to profit, whether politically, materially, or in some combination. But one or the other motive will always be present.

Throughout history, the majority of military aggressions have been animated by the profit motive: nation-states’ version of an armed robbery. And really, how plausible would any other motive be? While personal animus could conceivably account for some of the tiny wars that took place between pre-Westphalian nobles, ever since that time warfare has been the province of the nation-state.

States do not go to war over affronts to “their dignity.” Even in such cases as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, it’s beyond question that the profit motive lurked behind the seeming willingness of the British Parliament to “get angry” at Spanish coast guards’ treatment of Robert Jenkins, an acknowledged smuggler.

To make the inception of a war appear potentially profitable, there must be loot in prospect. For States, the loot is almost always territory, its inhabitants, and its other resources. If such a prize appears to be inadequately protected by military power, the temptation can become too great to resist.

When there are a few Great Powers and many lesser ones, all that restrains the Great from preying on the lesser is the possibility that the other Greats will respond. When such a response is deemed unlikely, the probability of military predation rises toward the tipping point. Indeed, the Great Powers might even enter into a quiet alliance for the divvying up of the world into “spheres of influence:” a polite term for a region in which a dominant nation treats the others as de facto clients, if not hostages to its will. That was approximately the case during the Nineteenth Century.

Such is the geostrategic situation in the world of today.

From about 1990 to about 2010, the military power and strategic alertness of the United States deterred Russia and Red China from undertaking any military predations. I need not go into gruesome detail about what’s happened since then. Nor should any Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch need a meticulous exegesis of the consequences of our diminution.

Not being a fan of America’s “world policeman” role, I’ve often been of divided mind about recent developments. On the one hand, we’re less prone to inserting our olfactory apparatus into the troubles of faraway places than ever before. On the other, aggressive militarism, international violence, and the probability of more are more widespread than they’ve been since World War II. That’s not merely because we’ve refrained from flexing our own might.

The postwar era in which the U.S. did explicitly extend “security guarantees” to many other nations (and implicitly to most of the rest) saw the world’s lesser states draw down their own self-protective capabilities, largely by attrition. This was most visible in Western Europe, where governmental expenditures on military preparedness dwindled year after year in favor of increased funding for ever more lavish welfare states. In effect, the U.S. assumed the burden of Europe’s defense that the European states abandoned. Despite our seemingly relaxed posture in this year of Our Lord 2016, the European states continue to assume that should hostilities break out, “America will take care of it.” That pattern was replicated to a more modest extent among the non-Communist nations of the Western Pacific, despite the steadily growing threat from expansionist Red China.

That the empire-minded Putin regime over Russia and the territory-and-resources-hungry rulers of Red China have reacted by expanding their ambitions – and acting on them ever more assertively – should surprise no one. Why so many Americans express shock and dismay over these developments indicates that far too many of us have never realized that, among states as among men, “you get what you pay for.”

This is a subject I dislike to belabor. It seems too obvious – that a detailed expansion on the mechanisms would constitute an insult to my Gentle Readers’ intelligence. However, the correctives are less than obvious – and more imperative than ever before in modern history.

First and most immediate, the incoming administration in 2017 must make explicit America’s withdrawal from the “world policeman” role. That would include declaring expiration dates for our security guarantees under the North Atlantic Charter and any other relevant treaties. A Trump Administration would be more amenable to this than a Clinton Administration would be. Nevertheless, the need is unyielding. Strategic and military advisors must press the need upon whoever takes possession of the Oval Office.

Second, the states of Europe and the Western Pacific must be encouraged to the verge of compulsion to form regional mutual-defense alliances. The states of Europe must revitalize their militaries. Those with nuclear capability must act to ensure their readiness, which has become dubious in recent years. One or two others – Germany comes to mind – must acquire such capabilities, preferably under American supervision.

The states of the Western Pacific Rim have a harder row to hoe. Japan, Taiwan, and Australia require the protection of a nuclear arsenal. Nothing else will deter Red China. Perhaps they could form a “multi-lateral force” of the sort the U.S. once contemplated forming with our Wester European protectees. The alternative, of course, is for each of those nations to create its own deterrent, once again, under American supervision and with American assistance.

Those who are reflexively opposed to the “proliferation” of “weapons of mass destruction” will of course bridle at this notion. That’s both pointless and foolish. Proliferation is already a fact – and several of the states that have nukes are no friends of freedom. Indeed, the only thing that’s guaranteed the continued existence of Israel these past five decades has been that nation’s (only recently admitted) nuclear arsenal. Consider how swiftly Ukraine’s sovereignty has been undermined since it ceded its nuclear inventory back to Russia.

Nuclear weapons serve the cause of peace for a simple reason: aggression-minded rulers and governments know they’re under the nuclear crosshairs. They cannot escape the personal consequences of their decisions. When nukes are part of the equation, it’s not just soldiers, sailors, and airmen whose lives are in jeopardy from a war. No other variety of weapon makes that threat more definite...or more threatening.

Once such a rebalancing of the international military scales has been accomplished, America could relax its own military readiness somewhat – but not entirely. “Wars are caused by undefended wealth,” and America holds the greatest concentration of wealth the world has ever known. For as long as we’re free and prosperous and determined to remain so, we will need a substantial military and an intercontinental nuclear capability sufficient to deter an “armed robbery writ large.” Consider the situation the late Tom Clancy described in his novel Debt of Honor, and ask yourself how likely his fictional Durling Administration would have been to recapture the islands a freshly nuclear-armed Japan had seized, had an ingenious stratagem not succeeded in destroying those Japanese ICBMs.

There will always be exceptions to any “rule” about the decisions and actions of armed states, and the above skein of reasoning is no exception. As I wrote in 2002 at the old Palace of Reason:

     Conflict-resolution analysts have always based their approaches on the classic, game-theoretic approaches pioneered by John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. These men, themselves mighty geniuses, built atop the economic understandings of David Ricardo and Vilfredo Pareto. The thinking of Ricardo, Pareto, and the rest of the scholium of classical economics took its founding insights from the father of all rational economic reasoning, Adam Smith.
     From Smith to the great thinkers of RAND and Hudson, we can trace an unbroken chain of calm, reasoned analysis, all of which rested on a silent, indispensable postulate: For any given thing a contestant in a contest might want, there is a maximum price he'd be willing to pay, and no more.
     Seems unassailable, doesn't it? The contrary proposition would be that there's someone willing to pay an infinite amount for some good. That would imply that he'd be willing to sacrifice his life, the lives of all his loved ones and friends, and everything else he could manipulate, to achieve some desideratum. Insane! Who would be left to enjoy whatever it was he had purchased?
     Before Black Tuesday, no one would have entertained the notion.
     Somewhere in my time closet, I have a button that says, "If you're willing to die, you can do anything." Perhaps that's a bit of an overstatement, but it points up an unpleasant truth. The sacrifice of one's own life, which has been called "the ultimate price," will buy a lot of things that are available for no other currency. Yet the willingness to make that sacrifice contradicts the unspoken assumption of classical economics. It renders conventional methods of valuation, and the reasoning by which we use them, impotent.
     The line of thought derived from Smith, whose fullest flowering arrived with Schelling, cannot cope with decisions that incorporate a willingness to pay an unbounded price.
     It gets worse when we include the nature of the "purchase" being made by the terror masters of our time: the destruction of innocent others. I mean analytically worse. How do we reproduce, in terms accessible to the non-suicidal mind, the value a terrorist places on carnage dealt to innocent others? The best of us can barely comprehend the possibility of sacrificing our lives to protect a loved one. But to throw away life and all it holds out to us merely to visit horror upon people we don't even know? From whose demise no good can flow?
     That postulate of economic rationality is what makes it possible to think about conflict resolution at all. Once removed, even the brilliance of Thomas Schelling can't cope with the results.

Economic rationality is indispensable to deterrence theory. Because of that there remain unsolved problems: How to deal with an economically irrational, eschatologically minded state such as Iran, whose rulers are willing to see their nation and all its people destroyed if that would bring about the destruction of Israel and the emergence of the “twelfth imam,” for instance.

Food for thought.

Monday, April 11, 2016

Quickies: How Much Further Can Rhetorical Idiocy Go?

Though I’m reluctant to lay a bet, perhaps no further than this:

     HIROSHIMA, Japan (AP) — An emotional John Kerry said Hiroshima's horrible history should teach humanity to avoid conflict and strive to eradicate nuclear weapons as he became the first U.S. secretary of state to tread upon the ground of the world's first atomic bombing.
     Kerry's visit Monday to the Japanese city included him touring its peace museum with other foreign ministers of the Group of Seven industrialized nations and laying a wreath at the adjoining park's stone-arched monument, with the exposed steel beams of Hiroshima's iconic A-Bomb Dome in the distance.
     The U.S. attack on Hiroshima in the final days of World War II killed 140,000 people and scarred a generation of Japanese, while thrusting the world into the dangerous Atomic Age. But Kerry hoped his trip would underscore how Washington and Tokyo have forged a deep alliance over the last 71 years and how everyone must ensure that nuclear arms are never used again.

I knew the man was a useless idiot, but it escapes me how his handlers could permit him to mouth such inanities. To wit:

If anything is horrible about bombing a city, it’s the violence done to non-combatants...but the Germans inaugurated the practice in 1914, and it hasn’t ended yet.
“Hiroshima’s horrible history” – i.e., the A-bombing – helped to end the war and saved at least 300,000 American lives.
Violent international conflict does not arise from weaponry; it arises from evil: in the usual case, evil motives in the ruling cadre. That’s a huge part of what makes nuclear weapons vitally important.
The only way to “ensure that nuclear arms are never used again” is to sterilize the planet – at the very least, to kill every sentient creature on it. Frankly, I’d just as soon not.

I know, I know; stupid presidents pick stupid Cabinet members. All the same, whenever this clown opens his mouth, he jams his feet deeper into it. What more can one say about John F. Kerry that even Hillary Clinton was a better Secretary of State?

Friday, August 7, 2015

But Was It Right?

Some questions never die, not because they haven’t been answered fully and definitively, but because those who ask them:

Appreciate their nuisance value;
Have an agenda to which they lead;
Reject the answer for personal reasons.

One such question, which is posed to me every year at about this time, is this one:

Was the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki morally acceptable?

That’s not the usual wording, of course. Nor is the questioner neutral on the subject. He’s already decided on the answer – i.e., that it wasn’t – and is determined to press the question upon anyone who disagrees. It’s much like the behavior of Helen Thomas, who pestered the spokesmen of President Bush II with questions about the Middle East that embedded the assumption that the “Palestinian” irredentists are the good guys.

Nevertheless, as the question resurfaces at least once per year, it’s well to know how to cope with it...and many conservatives, especially young ones, don’t.

First, a brief quote from one of my novels:

     Christine and Malcolm cleared away the Sunday breakfast dishes and reseated themselves at the kitchen table. Malcolm stared at his coffee mug as if studying it.
     "We have talked," he said, "about all the strategies known to man for dealing with an armed enemy. We have talked about every aspect of deadly conflict. Every moment of every discussion we've had to date has been backlit by the consciousness of objectives and costs: attaining the one and constraining the other. And one of the first things we talked about was the importance of insuring that you don't overpay for what you seek."
     She kept silent and listened.
     "What if you can't, Christine? What if your objective can't be bought at an acceptable price?"
     She pressed her lips together, then said, "You abandon it."
     He smirked. "It's hard even to say it, I know. But reality is sometimes insensitive to a general's desires. On those occasions, you must learn how to walk away. And that, my dear, is an art form of its own."
     He straightened up. "Combat occurs within an envelope of conditions. A general doesn't control all those conditions. If he did, he'd never have to fight. Sometimes, those conditions are so stiff that he's compelled to fight whether he thinks it wise, or not."
     "What conditions can do that to you?"
     His mouth quirked. "Yes, what conditions indeed?"
     Oops. Here we go again. "Weather could do it."
     "How?"
     "By cutting off your lines of retreat in the face of an invasion."
     "Good. Another."
     "Economics. Once the economy of your country's been militarized, it runs at a net loss, so you might be forced to fight from an inferior position because you're running out of resources."
     "Excellent. One more."
     She thought hard. "Superior generalship on the other side?"
     He clucked in disapproval. "Does the opponent ever want you to fight?"
     "No, sorry. Let me think."
     He waited.
     Conditions. Conditions you can't control. Conditions that...control you.
     "Politics. The political leadership won't accept retreat or surrender until you've been so badly mangled that it's obvious even to an idiot."
     The man Louis Redmond had named the greatest warrior in history began to shudder. It took him some time to quell.
     "It's the general's worst nightmare," he whispered. "Kings used to lead their own armies. They used to lead the cavalry's charge. For a king to send an army to war and remain behind to warm his throne was simply not done. Those that tried it lost their thrones, and some lost their heads -- to their own people. It was a useful check on political and military rashness.
     "It hasn't been that way for a long time. Today armies go into the field exclusively at the orders of politicians who remain at home. And politicians are bred to believe that reality is entirely plastic to their wills."

Since Waterloo there have been no examples of the political leadership of a belligerent nation being part of its forces in the field. Those who order armies into the field stay home. Seldom does a ruling-class politician even have a child in his nation’s army. The severance between decision and consequence, between authority and responsibility, could hardly be more complete – and it’s a great part of the reason so many nations are so willing to go to war over any and every issue, no matter how trivial.

The United States, despite its large military and its ubiquity, has displayed more restraint about warfare than other historically dominant nations. There are many reasons for this, but the “citizen soldier” aspect of American military power should not be overlooked. Even a politician who has no blood stake in a contemplated war will have constituents to face, some of whom will have family members in the fight, come election time. He’ll have to persuade them that his decision to go to war was right and necessary. That’s not the case with the satraps of many other nations.

The only way to give an autocrat a blood stake in the war he contemplates is to make it thinkable that he could be one of its casualties. Nuclear weapons, particularly the sort that can be delivered ballistically, do exactly that. Thus, nuclear weapons “democratize” the battlefield for the first time since the Age of the Warrior-King.

Concerning World War II, Japan, and America’s use of A-bombs there, the morality of those actions cannot be predicated on a simple consideration such as the killing of innocents. Innocents are killed in every war. Indeed, a nation that conscripts its young men has guaranteed it, even if it negotiates “scheduled” battles with its enemy and arranges specific, limited venues for them in the style of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Europe. Yet the most moral of nations will go to war under some circumstances, for there are considerations that can make peace the worse choice morally.

We love peace, but not peace at any price. There is a peace more destructive of the manhood of living man, than war is destructive of his body. Chains are worse than bayonets. – Douglas Jerrold

When contemplating the bombing of Japan, President Truman took dramatic steps to preserve the lives of Japanese subjects, including any soldiers or munitions makers in the target zones. He commanded saturation leaflet-bombings, informing the residents of the target cities of what was to come and exhorting them to evacuate, several days before the actual strikes. Here’s what one such leaflet said, translated from the Japanese:

Read this carefully as it may save your life or the life of a relative or a friend. In the next few days, four or more of the cities named on the reverse side of this leaflet will be destroyed by American bombs. These cities contain military installations and workshops or factories, which produce military goods. We are determined to destroy all of the tools of the military clique that they are using to prolong this useless war. Unfortunately, bombs have no eyes. So, in accordance with America’s well-known humanitarian policies, the American Air Force, which does not wish to injure innocent people, now gives you warning to evacuate the cities named and save your lives.
America is not fighting the Japanese people but is fighting the military clique, which has enslaved the Japanese people. The peace, which America will bring, will free the people from the oppression of the Japanese military clique and mean the emergence of a new and better Japan. You can restore peace by demanding new and better leaders who will end the War. We cannot promise that only these cities will be among those attacked, but at least four will be, so heed this warning and evacuate these cities immediately.

The reverse side of the leaflet named several cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The last such leafleting occurred on July 27, 1945: eleven days after the “Trinity test” and ten days before the A-bombing of Hiroshima. That was surely ample time for the residents of that city to get out of the target zone. Perhaps some did. Yet note that many did not. Nor did the destruction of Hiroshima persuade all the residents of Nagasaki to evacuate. On whose hands does their blood belong?

The estimates the Joint Chiefs prepared for President Truman on the cost of a ground invasion of Japan’s Home Islands were horrifying. The smallest casualty estimate was 300,000 American lives; the largest were on the order of 1,000,000. Ground invasions on a strategic scale are guaranteed to kill innocents, whereas the residents of the target cities had the option of saving themselves through evacuation. Assuming the JCS estimates to have been honestly arrived at, the A-bombings, which took about 200,000 lives in total, were the less bloody alternative, at least in retrospect.

Moreover, a Commander-In-Chief is supposed to hold his own nation’s interests above others, in particular above those of an enemy combatant. Were Truman to have made the opposite choice, American casualty totals for World War II would have doubled for that reason alone. Given that the elimination of Japanese militarism, which had committed gigantic atrocities wherever it ranged, could not be brought about by any other means than Japan’s unconditional surrender, Truman’s decision was morally more defensible than the alternative presented to him.

Add this as well: Even as Emperor Hirohito broadcast the surrender of Japan to the United States, troops loyal to Tojo and the militarists were storming the radio station in an attempt to prevent the broadcast. Tojo’s support was non-trivial even after the A-bombings. Kamikaze pilots were still targeting American warships. A Japanese submarine had succeeded in sinking the USS Indianapolis only days earlier. A substantial fraction of the Japanese people were prepared to fight to the death rather than surrender, at what ultimate cost in blood no one can say.

Viewed from that perspective, the A-bombings were the most moral, most humanitarian strokes possible at the time.

It became clear in the aftermath that the A-bomb, as terrifying as it was and is, remained a finite, even survivable weapon. Paul Nitze, in his analysis of the destruction involved, came to the conclusion that a saturation bombing by several thousand B-29 sorties would have had an equally devastating effect:

Nitze found the bomb’s physical effects surprisingly easy to gauge. Unlike [John] Hersey, he even discovered some cause for hope in the seemingly boundless wreckage and debris of the aftermath....The Survey’s unstated conclusion seemed to be that the destruction wrought by the atomic bomb, terrible as it might be, was still finite—and survivable. Nitze believed that he was able to measure the devastation exactly, in the process making the specter of the bomb comprehensible. Exclusive of radiation effects, the damage done to Hiroshima, he calculated, had been equivalent to that of conventional bombs carried by 150 B-29s. For Nagasaki his calculation was 210 bombers.
[Gregg Herken, Counsels of War]

But of even more striking significance was what Nitze discovered about the effect on Japanese attitudes:

To Nitze the greatest surprises in the Survey came with the measurement of the atomic bomb’s psychological effects. He discovered, for example, that civilian morale had not suffered an immediate collapse in the two cities after the bombs fell, despite the suddenness and near-totality of the destruction. The Survey noted how Nagasaki’s prefectural government the day after the bombing had called for “a rehabilitation of the stricken city and an aroused fighting spirit to exterminate the devilish Americans.” [Ibid.]

Apparently the effect on the government in Tokyo, a city that had suffered several saturation-bombing raids by B-29s and was essentially defenseless against them, was somewhat more pronounced.

The question will continue to be asked for the reasons given in the opening segment. They who are determined to invalidate the bombings morally will not rest, for their objection is essentially amoral. What they desire is to invalidate war itself, at least as practiced by the United States in pursuit of American goals. The specific weapons involved are ultimately of no consequence, except as they can be used to further the object of horrifying Americans into an unshakable pacifism.

But that the bombings were moral acts, performed under a sincere conviction that they were the best hope of compelling a Japanese surrender, there can no longer be any doubt.

UPDATE: Tom Kratman advises me that Napoleon III led the French forces at Sedan in 1870. (Apparently he was captured there.) That would make him the most recent case of a head of state leading his nation's forces onto the field of battle. However, I know of no others since 1814.