
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, August 8, 1995                   TAG: 9508300002
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE BOMB

IN THE debate spurred by the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, an ancillary question is whether the use of a second atomic bomb, Aug. 9 on Nagasaki, was necessary.

The matter isn't trivial. At least 35,000 Japanese, perhaps twice that number, died as a result of the bombing. Yet this issue, like much of the argument over Hiroshima, misses larger questions evoked by America's use of atomic weapons.

Writing recently in Foreign Affairs, Stanford University history professor Barton Bernstein asserted: "Whatever one thinks about the necessity of the first A-bomb, the second . . . was almost certainly unnecessary." Bernstein undermines his argument, however, by basing it on "evidence now available about developments in the Japanese government, most notably the emperor's then-secret decision shortly before the Nagasaki bombing to seek peace."

The evidence now available? The emperor's then-secret decision? That leaves a lot of room - and moral justification - for authentic intent to end the war, based on facts then apparent.

More to the point, Bernstein's argument uncritically accepts terms of debate - invoked also in defense of the bombing - that should themselves be a matter of scrutiny and discussion.

Bernstein judges the decision to bomb Nagasaki by its consequences. If the bombing was perceived as necessary to avoid a terrible land invasion and end the war, but was not actually necessary, it was wrong. The same analysis, arriving at a different conclusion, underlies justification of the bombings: They were morally correct because their effect was to save lives.

But utilitarian calculations of consequences are not the only means of assessing morality. As writer Jim Holt noted in a New York Times op-ed piece Saturday, one ethical tradition older than utilitarianism judges acts apart from consequences.

Saint Paul condemned those who assert, "Let us do evil, that good may come." Morality, according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, cannot be reduced to an arithmetical equation - number of lives saved minus number of lives taken. Morality can't be so reduced because humans thereby are reduced to means (in this case, innocents purposefully killed to hasten the end of a war) rather than ends in themselves.

Ethical reasoning is thorny, but it brings us as surely as historians' disputes into confrontation with such issues as: When did it become permissible to target civilians? Will the use of atomic bombs be rendered necessary (thus redeemed) if, in the end, they not only ended a war but helped focus humanity's quest to end all wars?

We need to revisit such questions, and not only on anniversaries.

by CNB