Kamm versus Anscombe

I suppose it says something about me that I started to read this post as being about the distinguished moral philosopher Frances Kamm (author of Intricate Ethics), and that I was therefore very confused at her apparent sudden loss of everything that makes her distinguished. Seriously though, has Oliver Kamm not heard of the doctrine of double effect?

As far as I’m concerned, dismissing the issue of the military/political goals of the bombings for the sake of a simple syllogism is not a good idea in this case.

If the bombings were absolutely the only way to save millions of lives to be lost during an absolutely necessary invasion – that’s one thing; in this case, I suspect, most people would intuitively feel that it was a justified action.

The problem is – it wasn’t anything like that. And this, I think, is the central issue here and it can’t be avoided.

It should be said that the action against that ferry in Norway (the D/F Hydro) has been criticised repeatedly in Norwegian debates on war ethics. It has been argued that the ends didn’t justify the means (there were at least 14 civilian casualties). The opponents argue that the saboteurs did not have sufficient intelligence to know how little heavy water Norway had produced. Interestingly, when they raised parts of the wreckage recently, the heavy water barrels were found intact, still full of unpolluted heavy water.

Oh, and also, Norway sold heavy water to anyone with cash in the 1950’s. Among them, Israel, India and Romania. So the Hydro operation didn’t really act as a nuclear deterrent for long.

Darius,

Correct. I find it surprising that Chris had to resort to such a weak analogy to attack Kamm on this point.

It’s also rather illuminating to compare Kamm’s claims as to what the current historical consensus is on Hiroshima with actual scholarly literature reviews, such as J. Samuel Walker’s “Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision: A Search for Middle Ground” (Diplomatic History Vol 29 No 2, April 2005). Quite some difference.

Re your point in #6: in what sense was the population of Hiroshima innocent? The Japanese Empire was engaged in total war. Hiroshima was a major industrial centre and shipping hub; it was very much part of the war effort. And in the event of CORONET and OLYMPIC going ahead, much of its adult population would have taken up arms against the invasion. Is there really such a thing as a completely innocent civilian population in a society with conscription and a total war economy?

Yes, the attack was conducted as a demonstration. But suppose this: that the first atomic bomb was dropped as a demonstration on a large concentration of Japanese troops in, say, Manchuria. This wouldn’t have affected the course of the Pacific War – the troops were in the wrong place and probably couldn’t be brought back fast enough. The intent would purely have been “Look, we can destroy your troops in vast numbers at will. Hadn’t you better surrender?”
Why exactly is this morally different? (We’ve already agreed that civilian collateral casualties are acceptable in, for example, bombing a naval dockyard.)

what, even small children?

No, not small children. (At least not those too young to gather chestnuts as feedstock for the production of synthetic aviation fuel for fighter aircraft and kamikaze attacks, as a lot of Japanese children were doing that year. Or those too young to be training with pole mines and bamboo spears.)

See Anscombe: “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.”

Certainly, if one were to bomb, say, an Army barracks, one might well kill children who were living on base with their parents. Presumably, also, it’s unacceptable to bomb a primary school simply because an Army officer happens to be giving a speech there that day. What’s the acceptable ratio?

Oh, and re 16: I think your general air of Olympian disdain would come across better if you simply wrote

I IS SERIOUS AKADEMIK
THIS IS SERIOUS THRED

OMG U R WARD CHURCHIL! DO NOT WANT!

#17: That’s why I suggested talking about Tokyo, Dresden, and Hamburg instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If the issue is simply the deliberate targeting of civilians as a means to an end, then these are harder and more interesting cases.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki come with the peculiar horror of atomic weaponry and also raise questions about their necessity for achieving the end in question (i.e. immediate Japanese surrender). Both these issues seem, from the Anscombe perspective, pretty morally irrelevant.

#18: I believe that Anscombe is not arguing in terms of ratios but in terms of intent. In her view, dropping a bomb on a city in order to terrorize a country into submission is wrong; attacking a strictly military target in a manner that might incidentally kill innocent civilians is not. This is still the case if the first attack happens to overwhelmingly kill soldiers marching through the city in question, while the second attack slaughters many more civilians than military personnel. As someone says above, this is all about the Thomistic doctrine of double effect, which I’ve always felt relies on a rather evasive notion of intent. In what sense does one not intend all foreseeable effects of one’s actions?

Isn’t it important here, re: Kamm anyway, that he’s basically made a living condemning other people for holding (or, sometimes, supposedly holding) precisely the sort of views – it is all right to kill civilians in pursuit of a larger goal – that he proposes here?

The point Kamm seems to have missed, and which I think is being obscured in this discussion, is that for Anscombe, no balance of consequences could justify murder. The numbers don’t count at all. What matters is the distinction between killing innocents as a means to some end (which is murder), and killing innocents as a forseen but unavoidable side-effect of the right action (which is not murder). So, for instance, Ajay’s question about the acceptable ratio of innocents to combatants doesn’t have any purchase on Anscombe’s argument. I don’t intend to support Anscombe, just to note that this is what’s at stake.

“No, not small children. (At least not those too young to gather chestnuts as feedstock for the production of synthetic aviation fuel for fighter aircraft and kamikaze attacks, as a lot of Japanese children were doing that year. Or those too young to be training with pole mines and bamboo spears.)”

I’m trying to figure out if this is supposed to be a serious point. Are we seriously going to argue about whether child laborers doing war work are legitimate military targets?

Okay, if the discussion is now about when we can legitimately kill children, I’d say it’s when one of the little tykes is holding an automatic weapon and spraying bullets at people and there’s no other reasonable way to get the thing out of his hands.

But it might be better to leave this thread in disgust.

Re #22 “In what sense does one not intend all foreseeable effects of one’s actions?”

In the normal sense of the word “intend” surely. Some foreseeable effects of one’s actions are neither one’s goal nor a means to one’s goal. If I fry food I can foresee that my clothes will get splashed with oil, but I do not intend to spoil my clothes in this way.

Anscombe’s view is that the distinction between intended and merely foreseen effects is morally significant. But she does not think that whatever is merely foreseen is necessarily OK. If the foreseen effects are bad enough then I should not take that course of action. The numbers are relevant in this sense, although I don’t know how one would decide in every case what was the right course of action. I shouldn’t think there is a specifiable “acceptable ratio” of innocents to non-innocents.

My own understanding is that states are autonomous and extra-moral (amoral), and that for states everyone whatsoever is fair game. Citizens or subjects of states may think that the state expresses their will, but this is only true insofar as the citizens accept and endorse whatever the state has already decided to do.

Somewhere in “1984”, the representative of The Party explains that it would be right to murder a small child if the benevolent Party needs that done. This is claimed as an example of the evils of fascism and communism, but it applies equally to patriotism and national loyalty. The formal possibility exists for a soldier to disobey orders which clearly violate ethical principles (and the rules of war), but there are lots of reasons why this can rarely happen.

#30: I suppose I don’t see the moral significance of intent in that sense.

Let’s say I’m wearing an expensive item of clothing that I borrowed from a friend. If I fry food while wearing it, I know I’ll ruin it. How would I be less morally responsible for ruining it if I fry food, knowing I’ll ruin it, but with no particular intent to do so, than I would be if, out of spite, I fried food with the specific intent of ruining the shirt?

“Intent” in this sense comes pretty close to “desire,” and the doctrine of double effect seems like a kind of get-out-of-jail free card that allows my moral responsibility to stop where my desire ends, rather than continuing to encompass absolutely foreseeable effects of my behavior that I happen not to independently want.

But I’m (probably obviously) no moral philosopher…

even if the orders might have come down the chain of command, they were not part of the stated aims and conduct of the war.

Well they wouldn’t be, would they?

Oh, snap.

With respect to civilian city bombing in WWII (not specifically the Atomic bombs), surely the nature of the conflict matters very much — that it was global war that killed on the order of 70 million people total and that was generally viewed (on both sides) as fight to the end. And one where the Axis powers genuinely were seeking global domination (and of very worst kind).

Would it have been more just to have taken the Japanese mainland by force rather than bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki? No — not even in terms of Japanese civilian casualties which would likely would have been higher in an invasion.

Would it have been better to negotiate a peace that left the emperor and imperial government in power? Well, if so, at what point would this negotiated peace have been most just? It seems very likely the Japanese might have been willing to negotiate a cessation of hostilities well before Hiroshima. If a negotiated peace could have been achieved even, say, just after the battle of Midway, leaving the Japanese ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ intact, would that have been just given the lives that would have been saved by ending the war in the Pacific years earlier?

And what about in Europe? Tens of thousands would have been saved by a negotiated peace following D-Day. And even more would have been saved by a settlement after Germans were routed at Stalingrad. Would such treaties (that saved hundreds of thousands of lives — perhaps millions — but left Hitler’s regime in power) have been more just?

#34: Sometimes negligence is culpable, but there are such things as innocent oversights and mistakes. Anscombe wants to allow for this kind of distinction (which she sees consequentialism as denying). The doctrine of double effect is not, as Chris Bertram rightly points out, a get out of jail free card.

I think she does allow that some collateral damage can be “OK”, but Chris’s point (I take it) is that she doesn’t say that all collateral damage is necessarily OK just because it is (“only”) collateral damage.

As I recall, her account of the doctrine of double effect is roughly this: it can be OK to do something that you foresee will cause the death of an innocent person as long as neither your means nor your end is something forbidden (e.g. murder), and as long as the probable good results outweigh the probable bad ones.

Hi,

To the survivors, I suppose there is some importance in the semantic distinction between killing and murder, but it’s mostly important only for the perpetrators and their apologists for their self-justification. For the victims, it is a distinction without a difference, and it is poppycock.

Have a nice day!
Antti

One aspect to consider is that the nuclear bombs were to a considerable extent technology tests, not means to win the war. The targets were chosen not for their military significance but because they had not been bombed before so it would be possible to identify the damage by the bombs. The second bomb was intended for Kokura, and could have been dropped there, but haze from a nearby burning city made observation of the effects hard, so the secondary target of Nagasaki was picked. It is really ironic that the Americans dropped their bomb more or less on top of the largest Cathedral in Japan, killing mostly Christian Japanese.

The best analogy IMHO is the attack on Guernica, another “technology demonstration” on a largely civilian target.

Antti – it’s also important for thinking about what we should do, given that we often can’t avoid causing harm one way or another.

This….

It may be impossible to take the thing (or people) you want to destroy as your target; it may be possible to attack it only by taking as the object of your attack what includes large numbers of innocent people. Then you cannot very well say they died by accident. Here, your action is murder.

…seems, indeed, to absolve Anscombe of my prior get-out-of-jail free accusation.

I continue to feel that the distinction she attempts to draw between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the one hand, and the fire bombing of Japanese and German cities by conventional weapons is, by her own lights, an empty one.

As noted above she writes:

In the bombing of [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] it was certainly decided to kill the innocent as a means to an end. And a very large number of them, all at once, without warning, without the interstices of escape or the chance to take shelter, which existed even in the “area bombing” of the German cities.

So what? Is it morally better to murder people with a sword than a submachine gun, because a higher percentage of people might escape with their lives? Certainly, it’s better from the point of view of those who escaped (though people escaped Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course). But is Anscombe really suggesting that the dead of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo were less the victims of murder (again, by her definition) because they had a more sporting chance to hide?

I actually think that there’s a good case to be made that the moral (and international legal) acceptance of strategic bombing against civilian populations (roundly condemned just a few years earlier when the Germans did it at Guernica) was a mistake. But I have a hard time drawing a bright line between the bombing of Tokyo or Hamburg and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

More importantly for this discussion, though Anscombe seems to want to draw such a line, I don’t see how she does this. If one had a different view of the morality of bombing all the considerations about the state of the overall conflict that Anscombe discusses might make a difference. But how do they make any difference if one’s belief is that killing innocents as a means to an end is always murder?

since Anscombe addresses the moral distinction question directly in her essay,

She does – the “sleeping camp” question – but I don’t agree with her analysis. Or, rather, I don’t think it applies in this case. I don’t think that all possible Japanese military targets in August 1945 were “nocent”, and I’m not sure I agree that Hiroshima was “innocent” either.

Her argument is that soldiers are not innocent (ie harmless) because of what they are, rather than what they do. But in my example of using the bomb as a demonstration against a Japanese military unit in Manchuria (or if you prefer, a bypassed island garrison on New Britain or somewhere like that) there is no possible way that the troops could be brought into combat against the US on the Home Islands. In a practical sense, these soldiers are “innocent” (sensu Anscombe) with respect to the US.

In fact, they’re more innocent than much of the population of Hiroshima, who would have been participating in war production in August 1945, and could have joined the civilian militia in the event of an invasion. Hiroshima itself was a “sleeping camp” – it was also an active arsenal and production centre.

I can only conclude that you haven’t followed the links and done the reading but feel entitled to sound off anyway.

You know what the trouble with this blog is? Too many ghastly little people who don’t realize just how insignificant they are compared to Chris Bertram. I think there really should be some sort of quality control procedure.

The number One Enemy of the People said:

…Evidently, a crucial case is omitted, which is far more depraved than massacring civilians intentionally. Namely, knowing that you are massacring them but not doing so intentionally because you don’t regard them as worthy of concern. That is, you don’t even care enough about them to intend to kill them. Thus when I walk down the street, if I stop to think about it I know I’ll probably kill lots of ants, but I don’t intend to kill them, because in my mind they do not even rise to the level where it matters.

So, maybe it’s not murder after all, but ‘involuntary manslaughter’, as someone suggested in the comment thread.

Bloix: not sure. The word “murder” predates most of the legal framework from which, by your account, its content derives. Someone could probably put up decent arguments for thinking it has a legitimate folk meaning independent of any specific legal context. Folk usage might then tie it to some universal moral prohibition, supposing there are such things.

I’m visiting Hiroshima again on Friday to meet my partner. One of the great things about Hiroshima (not really so great, when you think about it) is that it is one of the few places in the developed world where you can really take in what total war means. You inevitably visit the “genbaku domu”, the city hall office whose ruins have been preserved, where everyone inside was burnt alive. It’s pretty much the only building that was left standing within 500m of the bomb. Standing at the main tram stop, you look down and find yourself reading a little sign, which shows you a picture of the main department store a day after the bombing. In the museum they have the steps from a bank, which until 10 years ago were still there, in front of the bank, the person’s shadow still burnt on them. And right next to them is a schoolgirl’s shredded uniform, horribly real because the little dangly thing is sticking out of the pocket, just like all the schoolgirls carry today.

I had my last birthday party in the peace park, and banged my head on the peace bell while I was hunting frogs. Three days earlier 10,000 people were watching lanterns float down the river in memory of the dead. I wonder if the people who think it was okay to do this thing really do make a serious effort to understand what, actually, was done.

Chris Bertram’s premise rests heavily on the idea of killing innocents in order “to persuade someone else to take a decision”. Query: When does one kill someone in order to persuade that person to make a decision?

This is not a pedantic or snide question. What is the significance of “someone else” in your argument, Chris? Logically, it can’t be that killing members of Group A to persuade other members of Group A is fine, but doing so to persuade members of Group B is not. You state:
The simple fact about Hiroshima is that a very large number of people were deliberately killed in order to persuade a different group of people to come to a particular political decision

Thus, you assert that those who were killed were “a different group of people” from the decision-makers. In most senses of “group of people” I think this is wrong; both the decision-makers and the targets were “civilians” in a highly militarized society engaged in total war. A truly military target, such as a navy port, might be a “different group of people” from the decision-makers.

In any case, please clarify what you mean by your groupings of people, and the significance of those groupings for your argument.

It doesn’t seem to me that Anscombe is saying that the area bombings were definitely acceptable, only that they are closer to being a borderline case than the atomic bombings, which are definitely not even borderline cases. (They lack even second- or third-order vagueness.) Earlier in the essay she describes the adoption of area bombing as “the great change.” So I think it’s unfair to say that she’s excusing area bombing.

In any case, it doesn’t make any difference to her arguments against the use of nuclear weapons that they also apply to carpet bombing.

I’m also fairly flabbergasted that people are arguing that no one in Japan should have counted as innocent. Even Alan Dershowitz allows that the targets of his favorite bombs lie along a continuum of civilianity, though he does share the goal of total indifference to civilian deaths.

I am very curious about part of Anscombe’s argument, and I am hoping that someone can provide some insight here.

One aspect of Anscombe’s position is that bombing a military target where civilian casualties are expected is justified in the right circumstances. But at the same time, bombing just a civilian population to achieve a political goal is not justified.

It seems there is a counter-argument here. Bombing a military target is not justified by itself. It is justified by the political goal of winning the war. So the goal in both bombings is the same. If the number of innocent casualties are the same, why are the two acts morally different? It is very odd to me that the mechanism of achieving your end political goal plays a role here, when the cost is the same. What would Ascombe’s response to this line of argument be?

This is where I think Ascombe’s approach runs into danger by not sufficiently considering the degree of the civilian casualties and the effectiveness of a military action. At some fundamental level, the balance between those seems to be the most important factor. If we move from the fundamental to the practical we have to consider that there is a lot of uncertainty in both, and especially in the effectiveness aspect. And this may lead to additional rules about justified killing which reflect the uncertainty that decision-makers must acknowledge. So perhaps that is why bombing of civilians is unjustified- it may not be effective at reaching the desired politcial goal. But this argument still stems from a balance between the undesirability of the means and the desirability of the ends. At least this is my view.

Anderson,

The point is that Chris’s argument treats the entire population of both cities as “a group” distinct from the country’s decision-makers. Neither city was populated entirely, or even primarily, by children and the aged. I’m just trying to get some clarity on Chris’s “groups” and what they mean within his argument, not to justify either position in the larger argument.

Shelby, what about his example where someone’s killing members of your family to convince you do something; does it make the ‘group’ thing more clear? Yes, you and your family are in the same group in a sense, but it doesn’t seem to make them responsible for you refusing to pay your gambling debts (or whatever). In terms of responsibility for your debts they are in a different group.

@66
It is very odd to me that the mechanism of achieving your end political goal plays a role here, when the cost is the same. What would Ascombe’s response to this line of argument be?

I still haven’t read her piece (and probably won’t), but it’s not gonna stop me, of course. Suppose I win 1000 of your dollars playing poker. Now suppose I steal 1000 of your dollars. Same goal, same cost, different mechanism.

Bombing a military target is not justified by itself. It is justified by the political goal of winning the war. So the goal in both bombings is the same. If the number of innocent casualties are the same, why are the two acts morally different?

Because she apparently stakes everything on the intent. If you wanted to kill all those people at the military target, then you’re guilty, if not – you’re in the clear. Which I think is a bit silly, because ‘intent’ is not easily discernable, it’s all too abstract, hypothetical.

The point is that Chris’s argument treats the entire population of both cities as “a group” distinct from the country’s decision-makers.

But how is that incorrect? Whether we *agree* with the decision-makers is irrelevant.

Is the American population “as a group” distinct from the Bush administration? Just the 51% who re-elected Bush? Are there smart bombs that smart?

In short, with apologies for the intemperate tone of my last comment, the issue of the degree of distinction b/t group and leaders is not especially practical, that I can see.

He nowhere explains why the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a completely separate group from those making high-level policy decisions in Japan.

Because they *are*, just like residents of my town are a completely separate group from those making high-level policy decisions in Washington? If you’re arguing for something other than the literal here, then I think maybe the burden’s on you, not on Chris?

I see the circularity perhaps if we *collapse* the distinction, tho I think it’s fallacious — I can kill half a group to persuade the other half. But obviously, it *was* possible to persuade the decision-makers by killing the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Which is a good thing, because I’d hate for the Japanese surrender to be retroactively invalidated on logical grounds.

I don’t think Chris’s argument depends on being able to delineate the two separate groups. Rather, the point is that the American armed forces (and the Allies in the case of the carpet bombings) intentionally killed a very large number of civilians in order to persuade the governments of the country to surrender. The most important contrast is with a legitimate military operation that foreseeably kills civilians, like Kamm’s heavy-water case; in that case the civilian deaths are not the point of the operation, but with the atomic and carpet bombings civilian deaths were the point; if they had not killed many civilians, they would’ve been considered failures from the military point of view.

So in order to refute Chris’s argument—to argue what he says you cannot honestly argue—you have to argue that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki don’t largely count as innocents and civilians. You seem to think that as members of “a highly militarized society engaged in total war” the Japanese weren’t entitled to be considered as civilians. I find that disturbing.

It isn’t necessary Dan. It’s a cheap shot. That Chris spent a week in a bush planning this attack, and this is the best he could come up with, speaks volumes.

Kamm makes his argument for what I consider a bad position well. In contrast, Bertam makes his argument for a good position badly.

On this issue I stand more on the Bertram side, but if I was more concerned with standing on the side who won in a debate I’d pick Kamm any day.

You seem to think that as members of “a highly militarized society engaged in total war” the Japanese weren’t entitled to be considered as civilians. I find that disturbing.

Rightly so, but of course Shelby isn’t making that up; you will find few defenses of carpet bombing that don’t make that argument regarding civilian populations in “the era of total war.”

82- I think you’re obliged to present your case to Kamm without stooping to the abhorrent tactic of bringing in his family. It’s horribly ironic to me that you see this as “necessary” in a post on this subject. Here you compound the error by saying, Well, maybe I did something immoral, but my point holds.

“I think you’re obliged to present your case to Kamm without stooping to the abhorrent tactic of bringing in his family.”

Sometimes it is not only not “abhorrent”, but is truly morally necessary to make a moral argument in personal terms. Of all the abstractions that are bandied about with far, far too little awareness of their implications, the invocation of the “innocent and guilty”, with regard to deserving death, ranks highly. It is as correct to invoke Bertram’s family as it is Kamm’s. As it is mine. Should my sister be sacrificed in the cause of preventing official US barbarity? I should ask this question of myself whenever I advocate that someone else’s sister be similarly sacrificed.

“The simple fact about Hiroshima is that a very large number of people were deliberately killed in order to persuade a different group of people to come to a particular political decision: unconditional surrender.”

As well as murder, this is a textbook example of terrorism, as defined by the US Department of Defense: “the unlawful use of — or threatened use of — force or violence against individuals or property to coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives.”

So, Kamm is in fact advocating terrorism. Aren’t we at war with that particular concept? Does that make Kamm the enemy?

The survey conducted after the war concluded that the Allies’ strategic bombing of Germany was largely ineffective. It’s my impression that the same was true for the conventional bombing of Japanese cities. The atomic bombs do however seem to have brought the war to an abrupt end, so it might be argued that they were less evil than the other cities’ incineration.

The use of aerial bombing in residential areas by NATO in Afghanistan and the coalition forces in Iraq may further instances of a tactic whose efficacy is as dubious as its legality.

We’re veering off topic, but it’s gladdening to think that at least some bombing may have saved lives. That was a desperate struggle.

I’ve read that Hamburg and Dresden were essentially lucky accidents, that back then we didn’t know how to create a firestorm. Soon after, though, we had no difficulty delivering them across Japan. Maybe the B-29’s were that much better than the B-17’s.

Blowing up civilian populations doesn’t seem to work, though. Terrorism in general doesn’t work. Life goes on. Invading armies stay put. At home, the working class of the imperialist state sweeps up the broken glass and carries on.

55: “In some societies even self-defense isn’t accepted as a valid argument.”

Really? I’m surprised to hear that. Which ones? (Not calling you a liar; just interested.)

71: “If one were to look for a silver lining to total war one could say at least it’s tendency to do harm beyond the battlefield has transformed the white feather distributing classes into keen exponents of peaceful co-existence.”

Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet hole in him. — George Orwell

I bet that’s saved a life or two.

Hamburg wasn’t “a lucky [for whom?] accident”. The bomb-load was designed to burn the city down. The Operation GOMORRAH (Bomber Command didn’t fuck around with PR-driven operation names) order is short and to the point. Here’s the last of the numbered paragraphs, quoted in full:

“5. Objective: To destroy HAMBURG.”

PS – The reason that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still standing in August 1945 is that they were on a list of targets being ‘saved’ for the a-bombs. The lucky cities on the list were Niigata and Kokura – the latter the primary target on Aug 9th.

The point of war is to coerce or intimidate others. In the war against Japan, the goal was to coerce the leadership of the adversary to do surrender. It was necessary to kill many people to accomplish that goal. Pacifists believe that it’s always immoral to kill for a political goal and that therefore all war is immoral. I haven’t noticed much support for that view here.

Still, some people here think would have been morally fine to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese conscript soldiers and many, many civilians, plus hundreds of thousands of American conscript soldiers, in an invasion of Japan — but that it was the height of immorality to kill a smaller but still very large number of civilians by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This argument turns on a concept of innocence that I don’t accept. The goal was to to coerce the Japanese leadership to permit Allied military occupation of the islands. It was accomplished in a manner that resulted in fewer deaths and less destruction than the alternative. I don’t see why the civilian or military status of the dead matters. I understand the pathos of the schoolgirl’s uniform. I don’t think her life was more valuable than that of a soldier’s.

Now, you can argue that the goal was improper given the need to kill so many to accomplish it, and that the US should have been satisfied with pushing back Japan to the home islands. Or you can even argue that the US should not have responded to Pearl Harbor militarily at all. But I haven’t detected support for those views here. Does someone want to make the argument?

(Fuck, somehow hit POST by mistake. Continued:)

guns as anti-tank guns, and the argument is that carpet bombing deprived the Germans of guns that could’ve been used on the Eastern Front.

The fallacy is the assumption that it was either carpet bombing, or no bombing. Had we targeted industry with daylight precision bombing, would the Germans not have devoted AA resources to those facilities? Ditto for bridges & rail nexuses.

Leaving aside the morality of burning down a city full of women, children, and noncombatant males in order to divert a few hundred anti-tank guns.

Anderson, if I may continue this slightly OT argument about Dresden, which in any case I’m doing from memory of one book I read a while ago… the figures I recall for the effect of the bombing were quite striking – like, for example, that 25% of all ordnance was diverted to AA guns, and productive capacity was shifted around them. If one were to imagine that the Nazis were really low on artillery ordnance as a result, maybe they wouldn’t have levelled Warsaw, which would be a benefit right?

Also the claim made in the book (and I think directly based on Bomber Harris’ personal view) was that precision bombing had been tried (we’ve all seen dambusters!) and had failed dismally with a high cost in bomber crew. They therefore had to move to bombing industry, either large centres like the Buna plant where precision wasn’t important, or cities. As the war went on they also had an increasing focus on a few elements of those centres, and particularly important in April 1945 (or was it February? can’t recall…) was transport hubs between West and East, to prevent the Germans slowing the Russian advance. So yeah, they focussed on rail nexuses, but the sad reality is that rail nexuses (should that be nexi?) are always in cities.

(Also the Germans had devoted massive AA resources to their industries, so much so that daylight raids on them were suicidal, which is another reason they focussed on cities).

So I think maybe the effect of bombing the cities may have been greater than that original survey suggested; but even if it was, we still have to, as you say, leave aside the morality of burning down a city full of civilians in order to divert artillery (even if the quantity may have been large).

(I don’t support the firebombing campaigns, by the way, but if I understand this Anscombe, the military efficacy can be considered to outweigh the moral imperative…? So no matter how depraved the action, presumably we have to weigh its military efficacy before we judge whether it was right or wrong…?)

Sg: 25% of all ordnance was diverted to AA guns

Dresden was leveled in, what, March 1945? I very much doubt that it suddenly impelled the Germans to take area bombing seriously; but of course I’d have to examine the book & its sources.

Also the Germans had devoted massive AA resources to their industries, so much so that daylight raids on them were suicidal.

Again, I’m skeptical — the Americans seem to have managed.

precision bombing had been tried (we’ve all seen dambusters!) and had failed dismally with a high cost in bomber crew

This is a truth that conceals much. The RAF was miserably unequipped for daylight bombing, because it had used the interwar to prepare for terror bombing. Then in 1939 it turned out the politicians had cold feet about terror bombing, precisely b/c they were frightened for London etc., and precision bombing was ordered, with terrible results.

Had the Brits set out to attempt precision bombing and developed a long-range fighter escort like the P-51, they would have had better luck. But they never succeeded at it because they never seriously tried.

Agreed that it would be silly to argue that the raids had no, or negligible, military effect. Sure they did. But proportional to the human cost? I think we agree that it wasn’t.

(I leave aside the Japanese theater as arguably different — the A-bombs at least brought a shockingly sudden end to the war, thus saving many lives in China & other Japanese-occupied territories.)

sg: It’s interesting to note as well how the two symbolic depravities of the war – concentration camps and aerial bombing – were first developed by the British in the prior 50 years, fighting their own colonial battles in South Africa and Iraq.

No: the first air raids on civilian targets were conducted by German Zeppelins in 1915 against Kings Lynn and Yarmouth in eastern England. The raids in Iraq you’re thinking about were post-Great War.
The first use of the phrase “concentration camp” was to describe Spanish internment centres for civilians in Cuba, before the outbreak of the Boer War.

It is AFAIK true that the planned invasions of Japan in late 1945 and 1946 would probably not have gone ahead, as the Japanese would have been starved out by then: the US submarine blockade was having much more of an effect than the Allies knew, and they had overestimated Japanese economic strength. (As well as underestimating troop strength on the Home Islands, to the point where it is very doubtful whether OLYMPIC or CORONET would have actually succeeded.)

I think this paper (pdf file), though only a bullet-point summary sums up the historical, legal and moral issues quite well.

Matt Weiner, but this is also a discussion about the validity of Anscombe’s position. Why is the distinction between civilian and conscripted military personel relevant? If the unconditional surrender of Japan was a moral political goal. If the two alternatives were an invasion or the bomb. Anscombe’s position seems to be that the bomb would be immoral and but a properly conducted invasion would be okay. Regardless of whether these conditions were actually true, we can hypothesize that they were and ask what implications it has for the argument. And I don’t see how an invasion with a hugely greater expected cost in human lives is more justified than the bomb in those circumstances.

If the unconditional surrender of Japan was a moral political goal.

That’s not to be assumed; Anscombe says in her essay, “It was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil. The connection between such a demand and the need to use the most ferocious methods of warfare will be obvious. And in itself the proposal of an unlimited objective in war is stupid and barbarous.” And her specific claim about Japan, true or not, is that fewer people were killed by the atomic bombs than were killed by the invasion, but that this was only true because of “the fixation on unconditional surrender”; that is, if there wasn’t a demand for unconditional surrender then the alternative wouldn’t have been invasion.

I’m not saying she’s right on the history, but to say “Anscombe’s position seems to be that the bomb would be immoral and but a properly conducted invasion would be okay” is really to distort her views.

As for the distinction between civilians and conscripted military personnel, does anyone think that war can be made more humane by ignoring this distinction? Make your argument that in this case targeting civilians made sense—I’m not sure what I think—but don’t take the devil’s bargain of saying that there’s no difference between civilians and the military. That’s a license for unlimited atrocity.

I think Curtis LeMay could have said much the same thing about the B-29 campaign in the Pacific.

Well, he famously did say he’d have been tried for war crimes if the U.S. had (somehow) lost, which is pretty much what Harris confessed to in the quote you give.

I confess to ignorance as to whether P-51s with drop-tanks could reach the easternmost nooks of Greater Germany.

Frank *does* make a good military case for use of the bombs, tho moral objections are still relevant. Frankly, at the point where you’re deliberating between (1) civilian and military deaths at the hands of the Japanese occupiers, (2) starvation deaths due to blockade, (3) civilian and military deaths after a pretty terrible invasion, and (4) A-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki …

… I don’t think there’s a plausible moral code that really lets one of those choices stand out as unambiguously preferable.

Consider also what an occupation would’ve been like after doubling the number of American war dead in an invasion of the home islands. I doubt it would have gone as well as MacArthur’s did in the actual event. Is that a factor?

“UPDATE: I have edited this post to remove an example that was, on reflection, needlessly offensive.”

Appreciated, Chris.

Kamm versus Anscombe

“C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.”

J Thomas, but what about the children (rilkefan?) who might be reading this discussion? Surely they will be horribly traumatized…

This reminds me of Chris Lightfoot’s cute little images about various “moral defense” committees.

http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/moral.html

@121

Yes, Dave, this point seems to have been lost somewhat in the discussion. And to remind people what was at stake in 1939-45 (indeed, even before the official outbreak of war, considering what Japan was already doing in Korea and China, or what Germany was doing at home and in Czechoslovakia), is not ‘hindsight’. Hindsight is looking at 1945 through 2001 glasses and that view is distorted by what happened postwar. The Allies in 1945 were determined that Japan and Germany would not be left off lightly (would anything less than unconditional surrender have been sufficient for Germany?) and they were entirely right in that determination.

The argument is sometimes made that the A-bomb would never have been used in Europe (on racial grounds). A silly argument, IMO, in light of Hamburg and Dresden. And, unlike the Pacific Theatre, the bomb was neither ready nor needed in the European Theatre. Germany had long since been invaded –from east and west– and was probably more severely punished because of it, especially by Soviet forces. The evidence indicates that had the bomb not been used, Japan would not have surrendered save on what were –for the Allies– unacceptable conditions. The bomb improved those conditions (in the long run for the Japanese too) and surely saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides. That is a strange definition of murder.

Goodness, we’re getting out of whack here. Sure, the racial arguments are stupid; the Bomb was expressly built to be used against Hitler, but the Germans surrendered before it was ready.

However, rationalizing the incineration of babies (to say nothing of the other civilians) as yielding good results … how different is that from the reasoning of the Germans or the Japanese?

There is a world of difference between conceding that the A-bombs might have been the least bad of many bad alternatives … and talking it up as a wonderful solution.

The civilized world before WW2 was generally agreed that terror bombing of civilians was a war crime. That didn’t suddenly stop being true because the Japanese government turned out to be vicious and its people loathe to surrender.

Here’s an argument with the shoe on the other foot. Ian Kershaw is speculating what would have happened if Stauffenberg had successfully killed Hitler:

…the war in Europe would have continued until Germany’s defeat or capitulation. This, though, would almost certainly have come much earlier with Hitler dead. Millions of lives and immense destruction would have been avoided had Stauffenberg been successful.

What about within Germany? Perversely, the chances of democracy being rapidly established might have been diminished rather than enhanced by a successful coup. There would certainly have been a new “stab-in-the-back” legend, of the sort that had bedevilled German democracy. And the leading figures in the anti-Hitler plot, divided among themselves apart from the need to be rid of Hitler and end the war, were not democrats. Some even wanted to hold on to Nazi territorial gains. A natural human reaction is to regret Stauffenberg’s failure to kill Hitler. But it was probably better that Germany’s defeat was total, and inflicted from outside, so that Germans, too, could see the full extent of the disaster which Nazism had inflicted upon their country, and on the world.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/men/article2315329.ece

So Kershaw is arguing that millions of lives and immense destruction could have been avoided (would the Germans have continued to keep the trains rolling to Auschwitz and Treblinka with Hitler gone?)… but the world is better because of it? Strange calculation.

People argue about the nukes, but the bigger problem came earlier. As Keeley points out, the US public probably wouldn’t have allowed us to accept anything less than unconditional surrender, even though this resulted in hundreds of thousands or millions of extra deaths and might in a US invasion of japan resulted in over a million US casualties.

Compare our diplomacy there to a typical hostage situation that our police handle. The outcome is not particularly in doubt — the criminal will be captured or killed within a few days. Do they call in with bullhorns and demand unconditional surrender? No, they negotiate. They arrange to send in food. They offer to accept all but one of the hostages. They do whatever it takes to build up an attitude that they negotiate honestly, that whatever agreement they make they will keep. Because that’s how you get the crazy armed person out of the house and surrendered.

If we had announced that we didn’t require unconditional surrender, that the details could be negotiated, and we actually got the japanese negotiating a surrender, wouldn’t that have had a giant effect on the war? Perhaps in some cases there would be attempts to get japanese military victories to aid the surrender negotiations, but a whole lot of japanese soldiers would have wanted to wait for the surrender.

We could then negotiate some of the things we actually later agreed to after the unconditional surrender. No punishment of the families of war criminals. The emperor lives and keeps at least a ceremonial position. Strictly limited executions of high military officials.

Of course we wanted to kill the military men who planned Pearl Harbor etc. But how many deaths was it worth? How many extra months of war? They were totally opposed to surrender — as it was the emperor had to fool them into letting him announce a surrender — and there’s a strong chance they’d have been less opposed if it hadn’t looked like a death sentence for them personally.

We could have negotiated sending food shipments to japan while the negotiations were going on. They’d have been more desperate starving, but when we’re feeding them it both makes us look more trustworthy and it makes the surrender look more inevitable.

Similarly with the unsurrendered japanese soldiers we were fighting on various islands. We announce that the surrender negotiations with the japanese government are underway, and we offer to accept their wounded as POWs, and we offer to give them food, etc even before they surrender. As it was a lot of them believed (with reason) that they would be killed if they tried to surrender. When you’re going to die anyway, why not die with honor? But the more we treated them as less-than-enemies, the more they’d trust us, and the more they’d surrender to us. That would have been a better result than having to kill them. Easier.

It’s a lot easier to negotiate a conditional surrender. You don’t necessarily have to negotiate away that much. If the enemy is beaten, they know they’re beaten even if you give them some polite concessions. Insisting on unconditional surrender makes wars longer and bloodier, and the gains are intangible — things like perhaps preventing them from starting the next war. WWI shows us that the harsh approach didn’t work so well — quite likely WWII would have been smaller with fewer atrocities after a reasonable conditional surrender ending WWI.

Probably surrender negotiations don’t work for the USA because our public doesn’t like them. But they end wars. They prepare the way for peace after the wars. Police do it. They do constant negotiation with lone gunmen, they explain what he can expect after he surrenders — if it’s 12 to 20 years or what — and give him a clear idea about the alternative to dying where he stands. (Sometimes they lie about that, which I think is a mistake — it leaves the next guy trusting them less.) Even when they have him outnumbered 50 to 1 they don’t just say surrender, take it or leave it and then start shooting. They negotiate small things to give him confidence in the negotiation procedure, and they give him lots of chances to surrender with a clear idea what to expect.

The reason it took nukes to get japan to surrender is that we had already done almost everything in our power to make it hard for them to surrender.

Sunsin, you are very certain in your opinions. I must respect the strength of your belief.

However, you are wrong. You don’t know what you are talking about.

While philosophically none of us can know what the world would be like if it was different, I can guess based on what actually did happen. We dropped two atomic bombs and the emperor told the japanese nation to surrender, and they surrendered. There were very very few incidents of violence by the japanese against the occupation army after the surrender. All the stories you tell were invalidated, because the emperor told his people to surrender.

What would have happened if we dropped the bombs and the emperor had not announced a surrender? Wouldn’t the japanese have attempted to evacuate their cities, and gone ahead sharpening their spears to repel an invasion? By what you say, very probably they would. The atomic bombs did less damage than some of our previous bombing missions; what was special about them was that they were each done with one bomb, plus of course the radioactivity. They did not stop the japanese resistance. What they did was give the emperor an occasion to surrender.

So when you guess at what would have happened otherwise, you are assuming that the emperor would not have surrendered. We could have had a long slow blocade that starved millions of people, or an invasion that killed tens of millions of fighting civilians, and the emperor would not have surrendered…. And how do you know what the emperor would have done? You can only assume it. One man, with human free will, and you assume you know what he would do.

No one can truly know what would have happened if the world had been different. However, we have some hints.

On June 22, the Emperor summoned the Big Six to a meeting. Unusually, he spoke first. “I desire that concrete plans to end the war, unhampered by existing policy, be speedily studied and that efforts made to implement them.”

Still, what we did wrong was to not pay attention. We thought we already knew the truth. We knew things, and what we knew wasn’t so. What consequences will there be the next time we do that?

Oooh “the role of face in Japanese society”, “the kamikaze myth [author’s italics]”, “the divine wind”, I think it might be… is it… yes, it’s that perennial internet phenomenon.. a rightwing cultural essentialist who thinks that knowing one or two words in a foreign language and a couple of commonly repeated Western canards about said country’s culture licenses him to bore everyone with his simplistic and offensive cliches about said people’s inscrutable and irrational ways.

Obviously I didn’t deny that there are differences between national cultures which affect policy decisions. But anyone who drones on pseudo-authorititively about the role of face in Asian society, kamikazes, etc (anthropological “expertise” which may be gleaned from the Society and Culture section of the Lonely Planet) is imho a bullshitter. Moreover, the above post is very simplistic, relies on demeaning stereotypes and canards about the Japanese, reads like a piece of propaganda and is, frankly, pretty offensive. Also, statements like this one

If you keep kids inside a military base, a city full of troops that has been a base for half a century, YOU are responsible if they end up dead.

are highly offensive and are, in fact, in direct opposition to basic principles of humanitarian law, as expressed in the Geneva Conventions.

I choose not to argue with such people. (And the same can be said about many other comments on this rather depressing thread). YMMV.

…a rightwing cultural essentialist who thinks that knowing one or two words in a foreign language and a couple of commonly repeated Western canards about said country’s culture licenses him to bore everyone with his simplistic and offensive cliches about said people’s inscrutable and irrational ways.

Now where did I read words like these before? Oh, yes…

Then it is war. ‘A ceaseless fight to the death’ with Slavdom, which betrays the Revolution, a battle of annihilation and ruthless terrorism — not in the interests of Germany but of the Revolution!

The next world war will cause not only reactionary classes and dynasties but also entire reactionary peoples to disappear from the earth. And that too would be progress.

Among all the nations and petty ethnic groups of Austria there are only three which have been the carriers of progress, which have played an active role in history and which still retain their vitality-the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. For this reason they are now revolutionary. The chief mission of all the other races and peoples-large and small-is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust.

Author of the above? Friedrich Engels.

From his “Democratic Panslavism” and “Hungary and Panslavism”, as quoted by Diane Paul “ ‘In the Interests of Civilization’: Marxist Views of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth Century” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 42, No. 1. (Jan. – Mar., 1981), pp. 115-138.

Moreover Keely, I have to say that this is a serious and not to say painful topic–about the question of whether dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima can be morally justified–so if you really don’t have a more worthwhile contribution to that than to drone on in a vaguely ad hominem, and completely irrelevant, way, about the intellectual sins of Marxist founders, something which adds nothing to the discussion but is essentially just a form of personal abuse directed at me, then I think you should just bugger off.

Keely, describing someone’s comments as “cultural essentialism”, simplistic, and so on, is not ad hominem. Pointing out that Oliver Kamm not in the same league, philosophically, as GEM Anscombe is ad hominem, but it is legitimate. Bringing up, in response to a commenter who uses the screen name “engels”, racist things which Friedrich Engels wrote about the Slavs is not even ad hominem, it is just a pathetic attempt to derail the discussion and smear me, which is not called for by anything I have said here or by my views in general.

As I said above, I have been reluctant to enter seriously into this discussion as it became increasingly dominated by the kind of obnoxious idiots of whom you are an exemplar. Please bugger off and take your miserable apologetics for mass murder with you.

That should refer to comment #128 (not 138).

Back on topic, I’ll summarise some of the above ideas and add my own.

The primary concern here wasn’t a-bombs but area bombing. If we had had agreements with the germans and the japanese not to bomb cities — we could attempt to bomb factories but not attempt to bomb whole cities at random — then we probably wouldn’t have had the mindset to nuke hiroshima. We would have gone ahead and made nukes in case the enemy made them and used them, but we wouldn’t have nuked cities by default. But we didn’t have that agreement.

We didn’t have the mindset to make that agreement. And that led us into tit-for-tat. I’m not a military historian, but the way I heard the story, in the battle for britain the nazis were making some serious gains in the air war — bombing airfields or something like that — and Churchill looked for a way to get Hitler to make a mistake. Churchill ordered citywide airstrikes on berlin — not attempting any particular military targets, just dumping bombs on the city. Hitler got mad and ordered area strikes on london, and he stopped the attacks which had been effective. And so he lost that air battle. And both sides felt like they needed to bomb enemy civilians to cheer up their own civilians who were upset about being bombed.

And so nukes looked like just the same thing, only easier to do. Our nukes at that time weren’t particularly worse than a successful firebombing attack, just much easier to deliver and more likely to be “successful”.

Then there’s the question why we had to invade if we didn’t use nukes. Why couldn’t we try some alternative? Even if a blockade didn’t work, we could try it for awhile before we started an attack that was estimated to cost us a million casualties. When I think about it, it looks like we didn’t have those choices available. Once we decided to schedule the attack on the home islands we couldn’t just delay it.

“Amateurs think about strategy, professionals do logistics.” The invasion demanded a gigantic supply effort, a careful balancing act. We had to move a tremendous number of men and gigantic amounts of material. It strained our shipping and our warehousing. And it was all planned with paper and typewriters. No computing capacity. Sliderules, not calculators. Anything that disrupted that planning would have ripple effects — maybe tidal wave effects. Put off the invasion for a month and you have to feed all the men who’re sitting at random places in the pipeline, and you have to move up food to replace what they eat, and the guys with the sliderules and typewriters have to reschedule on short notice.

Once the invasion is planned — say, six months of planning and at least six months of actually moving stuff around — then if the diplomats can delay the invasion by two months that’s worth a major battle for the japanese. Not only do they get 2 months to prepare their defenses, but our offense has been thoroughly disorganised.

Once we had half the supplies moving for the invasion, *we could not stop*. Only an actual surrender could justify the bedlam we’d get from delaying. Surrender negotiations that had not yet produced a surrender weren’t enough.

“Mercy is the ability to stop.” We couldn’t afford mercy.

The japanese surrender attempts were inside our OODA loop. We couldn’t pay attention to them because we couldn’t stop the invasion in time. Only the bomb could give us the distraction it took to stop the invasion and plan an occupation without the bloody invasion first.

Could we have gotten around that? Build more transport, more warehousing at every little island we stopped at, ship more reserves of all the supplies we might need…. Maybe we could have planned in a way that gave us more flexibility. It didn’t fit our mindset. We were dedicated to ending the war as quickly as possible. A tremendous number of people had their lives on hold, for the duration, and we wanted it over. So we scheduled the invasion about as early as we could, and we didn’t plan to leave a million men sitting for a few months waiting for the diplomats to dicker, before the negotiations broke down and they could get off of guam and okinawa etc and storm the beaches. Maybe it didn’t have to be that way. But it was almost inevitable that it would be that way.

This sort of thing is not unusual. The way I heard it, when WWI started everybody mobilised their troops. If the other guy attacks and your troops are still disorganised at home, you lose. But then the plan was to move the troops over the railroads, and there was no plan to have them sit in place waiting to move. They had to start moving. And from there — once the decision was made to mobilise the troops, there was no opportunity not to actually start fighting WWI.

After Saddam invaded kuwait, it took us a year to move all the men and supplies into position to attack. Saddam started talking like he was willing to negotiate, but it was too late. After we moved millions of tons of munitions in place we were not going to go home with those bombs unexploded.

Once Bush II had sufficient excuse to invade iraq, it took six months to move the supplies into place. Our logistics have improved a whole lot since WWII, when turkey decided at the last minute not to let us invade through their border, we moved the troops around with barely a hiccup. Saddam talked surrender and Bush wouldn’t let him. We were not going to leave those munitions unexploded.

It’s possible that lots of times, things that later look like moral choices were made earlier, when they looked like mere tactical or logistical choices with no moral dimension.

Imagine you’re in a bar, minding your own business, and somebody comes up and attacks you. You hit him in the head with a beer bottle. He doesn’t fall down so you hit him some more. Later the autopsy establishes that any one of your blows should have knocked him out, and you battered him to death without necessity. But you didn’t know that, in the heat of the moment all you noticed was that he was still standing and he looked like a threat. It wasn’t that you were some kind of monster who wanted to kill an unconscious man. Your moral choice was to defend yourself, and you didn’t notice when that slid into murder. It could happen to anybody.

Our choice to firebomb japanese cities wasn’t like that, it was something we grew into. early in the war when things looked bleak we got a burst of enthusiasm when we could make an ineffective air raid on tokyo. A few planes, bomb the city because they didn’t have the luxury to do something precise. We didn’t consider it immoral when it was our only way to strike back, and we didn’t change our minds later.

But our choice to invade japan despite the predicted horrible destruction when something else might have worked better, was that way. We had to make the plans early before we knew how it would be. Once we were underway we didn’t know how to stop the invasion without messing ourselves up.

Oh, as usual I got carried away and forgot the main point.

I think the problem with your theory about the plans that are too difficult to cancel is that typically they develop all kinds of plans, logistics for any possible turn of events.

You have a point with nerve gas. Why didn’t they use it? I don’t know, but I think there must be a logical explanation that Dr. Strangelove would understand, rather than “nobody wanted to go through that again”.

I seem to remember from Slaughterhouse-Five that Germans did carry gas masks around in Dresden, so apparently they fully expected it.