AND CULTURAL RESTRAINTS

One way of relating ethical considerations to policy making is to conceive of ethics as a combination of cultural, psychological, and ideological "value struc­tures" that inhibit consideration of all possible policy alternatives in a given situation. They establish limits beyond which certain types of behavior become inconceivable. In the framework of Communist ethics and Stalin's personal values, there was nothing unusual in his suggestion to Churchill in 1944 that one way of permanently resolving the German threat would be to capture the German officer corps of 50,000 men and liquidate all of them. To Churchill, the product of an entirely different political culture, the plan seemed totally abhorrent. He rejected it not only because he knew that the British public would not stand for it (anticipated domestic reaction), but also because he found it personally repugnant.³ Such a scheme had never occurred to Churchill in the first place, and it is in this sense that social values and individual ethical principles limit our perceptions of alternatives. The example also suggests that there is likely to be close correspondence between the ethics, belief systems, and value

. orientations of policy makers and those held generally in their culture. If a

government consistently breaks treaty obligations, practices duplicity in its diplo­macy, and uses force and violence without inhibition, it is probable that the

ma- society in general and the domestic political system in particular condone such

ford

³ Winston Churchill,Closing the Ring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), pp. 373-74.

384 Ethics in Explanations of Foreign Policy

behavior. But how are we to account for decisions and policy actions that are beyond the boundaries of normal social or individual value systems?

Churchill could not imagine exterminating 50,000 German officers, but he ordered, apparently with public acquiescence, Allied bombers to kill hundreds of thousands of German civilians in mass incendiary raids that had only indirect consequences on Germany's military strength. An even more dramatic instance of the seeming absence of ethical restraints occurred in the summer of 1945, when the U.S. government decided to drop the newly developed atomic bomb on Japan. Considering that this weapon was known to be unusually destructive of life, what possible justification could be offered as necessitating its use? How could the government consider such an alternative if it meant so much suffering? The decision to use atomic weapons on Japan is instructive because it illustrates the subtle and complex role of ethics in foreign-policy making.

Three groups of people were involved in the decision. First were the scientists who had been working on perfecting the instrument. More than others, they were able to foresee both the frightening and the spectacular implications of the weapon. Many scientists were deeply concerned that such an instrument of destruction should be used at all, while others saw it as the most efficient way of ending the war quickly. The second group was composed of professional military men directly connected with the bomb project. They regarded the bomb project as just another administrative task, which had to be completed in the shortest time possible so that it could be used against the Japanese to force them to surrender. The third group, composed of high-level civilian policy mak­ers, including the secretaries of war, state, and navy, as well as President Truman, also regarded the weapon as a means of forcing the Japanese to surrender, as well as a method of ending the war before the Soviet Union could become deeply involved in military actions against the Japanese. It was commonly antici­pated that if the war dragged on and Russian troops participated in an invasion of the Japanese islands, the Soviet government would insist upon being rewarded with a zone of occupation such as it had received in defeated Germany.

How did these three groups react to the situation in which they had to decide between employing or avoiding the use of this weapon of unprece­dented destructiveness? Aside from some of the scientists working on the project, no one viewed the choice of using the bomb as essentially a moral or ethical problem. All the policy makers understood that a bomb dropped on a city would cause tens of thousands of deaths and as many injuries, to say nothing of the total devastation of the target cities. The army air force had already been conduct­ing massive fire-bomb (napalm) raids on Japanese cities, causing a loss of life and level of destruction only slightly less than that resulting from some of the most dramatic strategic raids on German cities. In one raid on Tokyo fire bombs destroyed several square miles of the city and caused the death of 83,000 peo­ple—considerably more than were to die several months later at Hiroshima. The secretary of war, Henry Stimson, was the only high-level policy maker to question the morality of these raids. They were destroying Japan's capacity to

385 Ethics in Explanations of Foreign Policy

wage the war, to be sure—but at a fantastically high cost in civilian lives.

When it came to making the decision to use atomic weapons, then, ample precedents for slaughter on a massive scale already existed. Both sides had fought World War II with widespread brutality, and there was no expectation that the atomic bomb would introduce any new dimension in suffering. Wide­spread death would just occur more rapidly. Neither the scientists, the armed-forces officials, nor the civilian policy makers argued against using the bomb on the grounds that it would involve a large loss of life.⁴

In fact, very few of those participating in the bomb project ever ques­tioned that the weapon would be used; this, it seems, was taken pretty much for granted. It was easily rationalized on the ground that the Japanese would never surrender without some dramatic demonstration of force. An invasion of Japan had already been scheduled for the autumn of 1945, and it was antici­pated that from one-half to one million American casualties would result from such an operation, plus an even heavier toll of Japanese lives. The perceived alternatives were either to avoid using the bomb and accept an extremely high loss of life on both sides, or to use the weapon, at a relatively low cost in Japanese lives, hoping that the destruction of one or two cities would induce the Japanese government to surrender. A third alternative—a compromise negotiated peace— was never considered in Washington after the formula of "unconditional surren­der" had been agreed upon by the Allied governments in 1943. It was also ignored probably because neither Congress nor the American people would have accepted less than total victory.

The main arguments concerning the bomb thus revolved around two subsidiary questions, and it is here that ethical considerations became more apparent in the making of decisions. Calculation of deaths occurring by atomic bombing as compared to an invasion of Japan was relatively easy to predict; even on hindsight, the decision to use the bomb seems to have been correct, provided that the alternative of a negotiated peace is left out. The first question flowing from the decision to use the weapon was whether or not the Japanese should be warned in some way about the destructiveness of the bomb. Among the civilian policy makers and the scientists, many argued that the United States should first demonstrate the bomb to the Japanese, either in a test in the United States or by exploding it over some unpopulated area in Japan. Those who argued along these lines felt that the United States was morally obligated to give the Japanese a clear warning and visual evidence of what fate should befall them if they did not surrender. In this way, the basic moral choice would pass from the Americans to the leaders of the Japanese government. If they did

e not surrender, it could not be argued that they had not been given clear warning.

is This point of view was not accepted. The counterargument was based

э-

й ⁴ Many interesting memoirs regarding Japan's surrender have been published. The facts

discussed below are derived from Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision to Drop the Bomb (New York: Coward-McCann, 1965). This study is based on written memoirs, diaries, and interviews of those who were involved in the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan.

386 Ethics in Explanations of Foreign Policy

essentially on the American image of the decision-making process in Tokyo, an image that stressed the fanatic zeal of the military leaders in control of the Japanese government. This image was not far off the mark, for subsequent events in Tokyo revealed that even after the two atomic weapons had been dropped, Russia had entered the war, and the United States had instituted an effective blockade of the Japanese islands, Japanese military leaders were willing to surrender only because the emperor ordered them to do so. Most of the Japanese military group had been trained in the view that the only honorable course of action was to fight to the last man. One officer had suggested that J Japan might be willing to sacrifice 20 million lives to prevent an Allied occupation and destruction of the emperorship. Indeed, after the decision to surrender had been made, some military officials attempted a coup d'etat in Tokyo, hoping to take over the government and continue the war. The American government did not know all these details, of course, but it had ample intelligence information indicating that the Japanese would continue to resist no matter how near defeat they were, and that the peace faction within the Japanese government could not overturn or overrule the military. It was argued in Washington, therefore, that in all probability, no demonstration of the bomb in a New Mexico desert or even in some relatively uninhabited area of Japan would adequately indicate to the Japanese the destructiveness of the weapon. This position was supported by the chief scientist on the project in New Mexico, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer.

A further consideration was that the United States possessed only two bombs, and, since it would take several weeks to produce others, the more that were used for purposes of demonstration and warning, the longer the war would continue, with a high American casualty rate in the Pacific islands cam­paign.

Once the decision to drop one bomb had been made, a second choice remained: Which cities would be destroyed? The American military group se­lected cities that made important contributions to the Japanese war effort. One of these was Kyoto, from a military point of view the most desirable of targets. But this choice was vetoed by the secretary of war, on the grounds that the city was a former capital of Japan and a great center of culture and historical tradition. Even though Stimson was well aware of the great loss of life involved in dropping the bomb on any city, he eliminated the most obvious choice. Clearly, the decision on this target was not made, then, purely on military grounds or reasons of expediency. Other considerations involving moral choices served to restrain action.

What conclusions are we to draw from the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan, the casual suggestion by Stalin, and the Allied fire raids on Germany and Japan? The first is that as the technical means of destruction in wartime have grown, so has tolerance for destructiveness. When gunpowder was first applied to military uses, many were offended. During World War I, the civilized world was appalled at the loss of life in trench warfare, killing of civilians by long-range artillery, maiming of soldiers with mustard gas, and drop­ping of puny bombs from airplanes. In World War II, the Germans were charac-

Ethics in Explanations of Foreign Policy

terized as barbarous and inhumane (the real atrocities were not yet even known) for their massive air raids on Coventry, London, Rotterdam, and Warsaw. Within a year or two, those among the Allied powers who were outraged at these German military actions applauded when their own armed forces retaliated in similar, although more thorough, fashion against German and Japanese cities. Were a nuclear war to break out in our own era, policy makers would still make the same kinds of calculations that they did in deciding to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rather than to invade the islands. Military advisers would probably regard their problems from a professional and technical point of view, quite immune from considerations of individual suffering. It re­mains for civilian policy makers to inject, if they are capable or strong enough, ethical and moral factors in the use of the instruments of violence and to reject certain alternatives offered by their military advisers on the ground that they are ethically reprehensible or politically impracticable.

The second point about these decisions is that they were exceptional rather than typical, taken by policy makers in circumstances of acute tension, of total war. Although, on hindsight, other alternatives might have been possible, the alternatives that were considered would probably have involved even greater suffering.

A third aspect of these decisions is that some, like Stalin's suggestion, were made ultimately by individuals with supreme authority, where their percep­tions of reality, prejudices, and personal ethical orientations were clearly re­vealed. Others, like most foreign-policy decisions, were products of lengthy consultation among many government organizations and individual specialists. Stalin's suggestion of liquidating the German officer corps was not in all probabil­ity a serious policy alternative that had been worked out in the Soviet bureau­cracy. But the decision to drop the bomb or, for instance, to make a loan offer to a developing country is the result of complicated negotiations among various agencies in the government of the donor; it is much less likely to display so dramatically the value orientations of any single policy maker.

Moreover, we must remember that those who make and carry out foreign policies are "role" players. They are officials, which means that they conform more or less to the legal limitations of a particular office, as well as to the expectations of numerous constituents. Role tends to mediate individual atti­tudes and values to such an extent that policy makers are not always free to use their official position to institute their personal ethics, beliefs, or prejudices. As Louis Halle points out, the position of foreign-policy officials is similar to that of corporate directors, who, however much they may believe in charity, cannot give away the stockholders' assets as if they were their own.⁵ Policy makers are responsible for pursuing and protecting collective objectives, and in this capacity cannot always follow the dictates of their conscience. If they honestly disagree with a course of action, they can resign as one means of

⁵ Louis J. Halle, "Morality and Contemporary Diplomacy," in Diplomacy in a Changing World, eds. Stephen Kertesz and MA. Fitzsimmons (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959), p. 32.

388 Ethics in Explanations of Foreign Policy

protest—although in totalitarian governments, such a course of action can lead to imprisonment or even liquidation. Despite the effect of role factors on policy making, it should not be assumed that "state" behavior is necessarily less ethical than private behavior. Given the difficult situations with which officials have to deal, their behavior is frequently no less moral than that of private citizens.⁶

ETHICAL COMPONENTS

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