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Moral reflections on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden â and Gaza.
The joint aerial bombing by the British and the United States of Dresden, Germany between February 12-15, 1945, killed up to 25,000 people. They were mostly civilians. The bombings had a devastating effect on Hitlerâs Germany and played a key role in Germanyâs surrender in the Second World War on May 8, 1945.
On August 6th and 9th of that same year, the United States of America detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The explosions killed between 129, 000 and 226,000 people. Less than a month later, the Japanese surrendered, thereby ending World War II and Japanese imperialism.
Unlike most trained ethicists, I have no agonistic hand-wringing moments regarding the scope and breadth of these acts of war against enemy combatants. The moral purpose of war is to totally vanquish the enemy. Attritional warfare is the military strategy that best achieves this goal. Military scholars often quibble over what constitutes attritional warfare; nevertheless, we may surmise that any war in which the agents attempt to win by consistently and mercilessly wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through loss of human life and military resources by any means, is an attritional war. Sometimes critics of attritional war will refer to them as wars of âmass destruction.â …
