School of War - Ep 220: Marc LiVecche on Hiroshima and Morality

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

Marc LiVecche, McDonald Distinguished Scholar of Ethics, War, and Public Life at Providence and author of The Good Kill: Just War and Moral Injury, joins the show to discuss Just War Theory and whether the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fit in that framework.  ▪️ Times     •      01:23 Introduction     •      01:30 Misspent youth     •      07:51 Moral injury        •      13:27 Conflicting views     •      19:15 Richard Frank            •      28:53 Right not moral          •      39:12 Not the same     •      40:36 Gifts from heaven Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

The American decision to use nuclear weapons in Japan in 1945 remains a live issue of debate all these years later. And how we think about that decision affects our attitudes towards strategy today. We're going to dive into the arguments regarding the justice or lack thereof of the bombings in today's episode. For those who find the question of morality and warfare perplexing, well, today's episode is for you. Let's get into it.

It is for a war. Number 7, 1941, a date which will live in India. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in grand. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender.

For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter. Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, Mark Levecki, who is the McDonald Distinguished Scholar of Ethics, War, and Public Life at Providence, amongst other affiliations. He's published widely on the question of Just War. Mark, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Aaron. It's great to be here. So how did you, how does one get interested in the question of, of the ethics of war, seemingly perverse formulation? How does this work in your life story? Yeah, misspent youth, maybe. I can take you all the way back to sort of the beginning in high school and me just finally getting tired of going out and getting into trouble and doing the knucklehead things that American boys do when they're teenagers and deciding that the fighting and all that wasn't worth it.

And so I started staying home. And when I stayed home, I started reading a lot. And I found myself for whatever reason drawn to war memoirs, to concentration camp memoirs, things like that about, you know, people living sort of life in the margins and making difficult decisions and what makes men and women do brave and virtuous things. You can fast forward to a desert storm. And I think I was just entering college at that point. And I'm reading all about the atrocities of the Iraq Army is committing in Kuwait. And meanwhile, my friends and a lot

of the pundits are suggesting that we shouldn't be there. They're, you know, crying out for American non-intervention, and that didn't make sense to me. I couldn't understand it. You fast forward again to deeper in college, and now I'm kind of also in the background of all of this is I'm sort of having a kind of religious conversion. I'm moving out of agnosticism or atheism or whatever sexy thing I thought I was, and into something at the time like a religious conversion. I'm still contending with what all this means. I'm starting to study the Holocaust, and I'm preoccupied with now, political evil and the nature of evil, things like this. I don't know what to do with it.

In order to procrastinate a whole bunch of different things, when I graduate, I moved to Central Europe. So I find myself in Bratislava, Slovakia, about four and a half hours south of the Auschwitz Burkeneau concentration camp. And I found myself up there during the 50th anniversary commemorations of its liberation. And a particularly striking thing that leads directly to why I am now a military ethic, is at the end of the formal ceremonies, they began to read the names of all the dead. from just that one camp, the concentration constellation system of Auschwitz-Berke now.

And it's an estimated 1.2 million people that died there. And I toured the camp after the ceremonies were over for about three hours. The names were still being read, name after name after name. And I finally found myself in a Polish pub afterward, and the buddy and I that were there together decided we wanted to figure out how long that reading of names would take. And we figured if it took a second to read a name, and they read the names of all 1.2 million people kind of counterfactual.

have all the names. But if we did, and if they read all 1.2 million names, it would have taken 13.8 days to read all those names. And then I go back to Bratislava. I tell my friends about this, and now I'm a new convert to Christianity. And my old Christian friends are asking me what we should do about political evil like the Holocaust, and I'm a little confused. I think it's very clear what we should do. I asked him to clarify, and they say, well, you know, we're pacifists. And so this isn't a confession, but I'm Scotch or Irish and Sicilian, and the capacity for pacifism is not really in the DNA. And so now all of a sudden, I'm afraid I've got to abandon all sorts of things if this new faith is going to take shape.

So this led to research and a lot of further reading, and I was happy to discover that the Hebraic tradition, you know, up through the Christian church and grounded in classical moral philosophy, says something entirely different about when it is right to fight and how you rightly fight fights at a right to fight that accounted for the facts of history far better than pacifism did. And so there's a lot more to say on that about how I got to intractable moral problems specifically. But sort of, you know, the TLDR is, that's how it became a military ethicist. I got to go to Auschwitzberkinau for the first time last year. And it was, you know, I was, I was older than you were, so a little bit more formed already in my views of things. It was still an

unbelievably powerful experience. And it's actually one of the things that really sticks with me from it is, in addition to all those sort of stuff you see, is something that the guide I had said while I was there that's haunted me ever since is why you sort of posed this rhetorical question. You know, why do we know so much about Auschwitz? Why do we talk about Auschwitz? Why is this, you know, it's this theme and literature and history and it's, you know, it's something that sort of the entire world has had to wrestle with ever since. And you don't hear that much about some of the, the other extermination camps. You know, there's no, there's no similar, you know, literature or discourse about, you know,

Maidenic, say, for example. Sure. Now, I don't know the numbers out the top of my head may be that, you know, several hundred thousand fewer people died at Medanek. I don't know, but it's still a lot, right? And the, he then posed the, he proposed an answer to his question, and it's just haunted me ever since. Well, it was Auschwitz was this unusual combination of death camp and work camp.

So you had witnesses. You had hundreds of thousands of witnesses. And so for as much as we, for that reason, kind of indexed on Auschwitz and spend our day, you know, a lot of, a lot of ink has been spilled. A lot of people have wrestled with the question of Auschwitz. The only reason, the only reason we focus there and not at some of these other places, because at these other places, almost nobody survived. That's right. That's right. And at the places where lots of people survived, they didn't have all the elements of the Auschwitz-Burkenau system.

So Auschwitz was, as he said, this hybrid camp where there was both a work function, but also an extermination function. And so Auschwitz, if you want to know something about the Holocaust, you can study Auschwitz, and that thing is there. Yeah. So, you know, if you're going to use the Holocaust as you're jumping off point to understand the justice of military action, that seems like fairly safe terrain. Maybe if I were going to be serious, I would have to defend that.

But I feel confident I could without breaking too much of a sweat. But your work has taken you to what many would probably think is a tough case, which is to say, you know, the only uses of nuclear weapons in human history and combat, which is the American use of the weapons in 1945 in Japan. You are working on a book moral horror, moral horror, a just war defense of Hiroshima. And we are here at an anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How did you come to focus on this episode as something to untangle the ethics? of. Yeah, so if I could take another couple steps back before getting directly to that, the circuitous route that I took was eventually leaving Slovakia. I went there for a year. I stayed for 12 years. Lots of reasons for finally leaving. Most of them had to do with maturing and needing to take

care of a family. But I found myself studying ethics, the University of Chicago, and I wanted to do military ethics. But I needed a framing for that. And the basic question that I was asking is, how do you reconcile killing another human being with, you know, classical moral philosophy and Christian theology? And so that led to a study of just war, which I'm sure most of your listeners know what the just war is. I mean, in a nutshell, just war says that, you know, it could be right to fight a war when a sovereign authority over whom there is no and greater charge with the care of a political community decides that nothing but decisive, proportionate, discriminant force is likely to protect the innocent to take back things that have been wrongly taken

or to punish evil and thereby to restore justice order and peace as quickly and as morally as possible. That's sort of the just word framework in a nutshell. So I reconcile that there's a system of thought that allows for killing the enemy in combat that corresponds with the most deeply held moral convictions. But I recognize right away in talking to military veterans and reading the memoirs and such that even justified killing comes at a cost. And so I run into this thing called moral injury, which at the time was very new to moral theology. And moral injury, as I think you know, has a couple different definitions.

One has to do with betrayal, the other with transgression. And the transgression part has to do with doing or allowing to be done something that goes against a deeply held moral conviction. And when one does something like that, it leaves a mark. And that mark is a moral injury. And at least in the early literature, they drew a strong link between having killed in combat, and it didn't matter the nature of the killing. It could be completely corresponding with the laws of war.

It could be an atrocity. It could be an accidental killing of a non-combatant. Regardless, killing in combat, it was argued, was the number one predictor for a moral injury. The number one predictor for combat veteran suicide is a moral injury. So you could truncate all that and say that having killed in combat is the number one predictor for combat veteran suicide. And this could be seen as a crisis, right? So with that in hand, I write up a book. My first book is called The Good Kill. I realize all of a sudden that all my book titles are fairly macabre, but the Good Kill just war and moral injury, where I lay out a moral

case for killing in combat that I hope serves as a kind of Kevlar for the soul, allowing a warfighter to develop a moral framework for allowing them to do the business of combat, which often includes breaking things and killing people in a way that helps them navigate the morally or potentially morally injurious theater of combat. So that's there. Then I encounter the literature on Hiroshima. There are two responses to people that people give when I tell them I'm writing a book defending the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. The first are from those who think no book like this is necessary because the bombing was obviously catastrophically immoral. And they look at me with a mix of horror and maybe despair.

The second set of responses are those who say, why is such a book necessary? The bomb was clearly required. And they look at me with a kind of chagrin and pity that I'm just one of those moral philosophers who's doing this idle, silly work. The second group of people will very often make an argument that might run something like this. And Michael Walzer was, I think some of his political theory is behind this, they will see the dropping of the bomb is maybe necessary, but nevertheless immoral.

And you've got to do this necessary thing because, you know, to not do it, would have been even worse. But what this lays out is that the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima was morally injurious to the people who argued for it or who dropped it. And that just seemed to me to satisfy. And so I'm not one of those just war theologians or philosophers who will say, there are times where we do morally problematic things or morally wrong things in combat, so that good things result.

And so my question was, can the just war tradition actually defend the dropping of the bomb, rather than does the dropping of the bomb require us because of necessity to abrogate the just war tradition and to do the thing anyway and then maybe apologize or whatever we might have to do afterward? That solution wasn't satisfying to me. So the whole premise is that the just word tradition can defend the bombing, and that the bombing is actually a manifestation rather than a contradiction to the just word tradition. Well, we'll come to that in a minute, and I want to hear your case in more detail. I just also want to make sure we understand the different major alternative views before we dive into your view.

So you identified, I think, three of them just now. There's the thing was obviously a moral obscenity. What are you even talking about, you crazy person? Option one. Option two is obviously we had to do it. What are you even talking about? Option three is a little bit more nuance, which is it was the lesser of various evils. It's still evil, but justified in the way that you can justify lesser evils because

you're avoiding greater evils. And then the, I guess I encounter a fourth point, which I'm not sure if it's an ethical point so much as a strategic point, but this is actually the argument I run into frequently. and which I know you're a big fan as of my eye of Richard Frank. His work seems to me to be mostly designed to combat is the view that under certain circumstances, it could have been justified. But the reality, the historical reality, so goes to this argument,

is that the Japanese were preparing to surrender anyway. Slash, there's kind of variations here, slash they were ultimately compelled to surrender by things other than the dropping of the bombs the biggest, you know, alternative there is the Soviet invasion of Manchria. So because that's the case, because the bomb basically is not the mechanism of surrender and couldn't have been the mechanism of surrender or likely couldn't have been, then what maybe arguably could have been justified under other circumstances, in fact,

historically speaking, was not. I think that's, do you think that's a fourth alternative or subsumed under the three you just laid out? Yeah, I got 14% on the math GRE, so I'm not really good. But it's definitely three or four, and it's an important one, right? So, and I think it gets to the heart of a part of what just war tradition does. And so a word about that, just for tradition is very often seen as this checklist that you kind of peck through. And if at the end of the day, you've got all the boxes checked, you can go to war.

And if you get all the boxes checked, then you fought that war morally. Better, I think, is to see just war tradition as a casualistic framework. And by Kazuistry, I don't mean to drag the C word into this. Gazooistry has a bad rap. A lot of people will see it as a way of promoting sort of moral laxity or denying the rigor. I'm familiar with it only as a pejorative term. Yeah, see, exactly. Kazuistry is a beautiful thing.

And so I guess I'm arguing for two controversial points in today's episode. Kazuistry is just a case-based method of moral reasoning that it tends to the application of moral norms as they relate to very particular concrete historical circumstances. So the move to say, well, the bomb might have been right in certain contexts, maybe not right in other contexts, is to my mind, in simplified form a casuistic move. The casualist analyzes the conflict situation before him. He compares it to normative paradigms or moral rules. He identifies the relevant presumptions that are at play.

He assesses the context, he refers to reason, authority, and experience, and he attempts to move from a general duty, don't kill the innocent, for example, to a specific manifestation of that duty in the present moment, seeking to know how to moral rules work now. And so this is, this is a bargain, this is part of the reason why I'm a fanboy of Rich Frank, is the first job of the ethicist, including maybe especially the military ethicist, is to be a kind of amateur historian. You have to know what's happening on the ground now. So it's sort of the, in informal settings, I call it the five non-blondes mandate. You've heard of that? I haven't, no.

The five non-blons, their song, What's Up? Do you remember this? And so I step outside and I take a deep breath. I remember it sounding different, though. Oh, yeah. It's because it's really good when they sang it. So I should have had a trigger warning. So I apologize for that.

But the final refrain of that is they scream what's going on. And that to me is the first job of the military ethicist. You have to have as grim of grasp of the facts on the ground as possible. And I think in the case of Hiroshima, when you look at the facts on the ground, whatever argument you have against the bombing probably gets turned on its head. So, for instance, if saving innocent lives is your thing, because of the historical context of the Asia Pacific in 1945, if saving innocent lives is your thing, you drop the bomb, which sounds counterintuitive.

But as his Rich Frank on your show a year ago, I guess, argued, you know, that the numbers just don't lie. The bomb saved lives. Now, other people have acknowledged that. Oh, sure, the bomb saved lives, given the conditions in place at the time. And so Elizabeth An Scome and Oxford philosopher in the 1940s and 50s, she didn't argue that, but she did oppose the awarding of an honorary degree to Harry Truman on the grounds that he was a mass murderer. So she said, well, sure, it might have saved lives, but, and then she, her butt involves several things. the demand for unconditional surrender is what set those terms. And had we abandoned the requirement for unconditional surrender, those terms would go away and the dropping in the bomb wouldn't become

necessary. You know, Truman committed mass murder because there were other alternatives. Soviet intervention ended the war. We could have done a demonstration blast, things like that. So you go through those classic arguments, and I think there is a just war moral philosophy response to every one of them. Can we, I mean, people can go back and listen to the Rich Frank episode, which was exactly. And he probably, I mean, I'm not familiar with anyone who is more in the weeds or more master of the TikTok of what actually happened and how, you know, X affected Y and so forth in that, in those weeks of August, 1945 and then, you know, before in July and into September. That said, could you give the sort of just for a few minutes, like the canonical Rich Frank version, just for listeners who may not be up on all the details, sort of remind us. the sequence of major events that led to the decision to drop the two bombs and what the consequences

were. All right. So Richard Frank acknowledges that the context, the historic context of 1945 is pertinent, right? So he will take things in turn. One of the things he will talk about is the unconditional surrender requirement that was in place and that the primary argument against that from Elizabeth Hanscombe forward, is that the Japanese knew they were defeated and that they were ready to surrender by the summer of 1944. And that the Allies knew this because we had radio intercepts of their military and diplomatic communications. So the Allies knew they, knew they were defeated and knew that they wanted to surrender. And so therefore, the dropping of the bomb was immoral. And one of the reasons we would still do it is because, well, don't you know, the dropping of the bomb

wasn't the last shot of World War II. The dropping of the bomb was the first shot of the Cold War. And so we did it more as a demonstration against Stalin and the Soviet Union. He'll take that in turn. He'll say if you read the radio intercepts that we have now been declassified since, I guess, the 1990s that's going off the top of my head, you'll see that even though the Japanese recognized that they had been defeated. And that's incontrovertible.

They did. That that recognition of defeat didn't lead to a willingness to surrender and that those are two very different things. And then when you read the intercepts between the Japanese ambassador to Moscow, for instance, and the Japanese foreign minister where they're communicating about ways to see if they can get the Soviets to mediate a surrender between Japan and the Allies, the Japanese ambassador is constantly arguing for the Japanese leadership to give him surrender terms. Like, we need to give concession terms.

Like, what are we willing to do? The Japanese military won't do this. When they do, they say things like, you know, there will be no occupation of Japan. There will be no demobilization. We will retain territories that we now occupy. Maintenance of the government, including the preservation of the empire and emperor. So terms that would always be, they're not serious surrender terms. He would go on to point out that, so in addition to the unconditional surrender requirement,

he would talk about the, I guess the other main thing that Richard Frank will talk about is he's got this slogan, which I think is appropriate. And he says you have to count, when it comes to the Asia-Pacific War, you have to count all the dead. Right. And you have to treat all the dead with equal dignity. And so here is where it gets into the justification, the historic grounding of my comment that if saving innocent lives is your thing, you drop that bomb.

Because he'll go through. And he does this nice rhetorical move where he says, you know, we talk about World War II as if it began with Pearl Harbor. And that focuses attention on the American-Japanese fight is you have to take it further back to at least 1937 and a wider conflict of Japanese military expansion throughout the Asia-Pacific, which brings in all sorts of other communities that are very often forgotten about, most predominantly the Chinese. And he talks about the ghastly numbers of Chinese dead between 14 and 20 million. He'll talk about the dead in Indonesia and Vietnam.

He'll talk about the innocent Japanese dead, Japanese civilians. But throughout the Asia Pacific, there are tens of millions that are dying under Japanese occupation. And by the summer of 1945, you've got something upwards of a quarter of a million innocent people dying throughout the Asia Pacific every month. And that's not to simply compare numbers and say, ah, well, you know, the numbers make the argument. But again, you know, a high number of dead in Hiroshima Nagasaki is 200 to 250,000. And that's ghastly, which is why my book is titled Moral Horror, right? And I mean that in sort of both ways that that term can be understood. It's a compound noun.

It was a moral horror. But also moral can be an adjective. It was a moral horror, which is to say that however ghastly, the ghastly thing was right to do, which is also to say that given the context to not have done it would have been morally wrong. because as Richard Frank points out, every day that ticked by that that war continued, upwards of 8,000 to 14,000 innocent people under Japanese occupation, died every day, right? And we were going to invade until, you know, what, November, and that was just the southern island.

The main island wouldn't have been hit until March of 46. You know, that's another three to eight months of Japanese occupation in which we could expect that the number of dead would have increased because of the deteriorating conditions of the war. And then Richard Frank's other big move, I think, is to point out that, you know, look, in the end, the classic argument that this was going to be a land invasion or the dropping of the bomb is no longer true. And he has this long argument in which he demonstrates the Japanese buildup on Kyokan, Kusher, the southern island that we were going to first attack. And he points out that allied military planners knew the level of reinforcement on that island and that there was no way

in hell that we would have invaded that island. And so there were alternatives to the bomb. And those alternatives were things like a continued naval siege, which would have required continued conventional and firebombing because Japanese factories would have to be knocked offline so that if nothing else, Kamikaze planes, very rudimentary planes, couldn't be built to try to unblock the naval blockade. So we could have done other things, but all of those alternatives that could have brought the Japanese to surrender

would have resulted in far more innocent dead, both in Japanese occupied lands, but also within Japan itself. And Richard Frank will point out something that we obviously weren't aware of at the time, but that the Japanese rice crop was going to fail. The Japanese government knew that, and had that rice crop failed

while the war was still on, Japanese historians have written that tens of millions of Japanese would surely have starved to death. So there were alternatives, and every alternative was far more ghastly in terms of the loss of innocent lives and the dropping of those bombs. So I want to hear you make the positive case for the morality of dropping the bombs as opposed to the everything else was worse case in a second. And I think I, let me frame the question in terms of my own skepticism, honestly. And that skepticism, and I say this with great humility, because even though I think you and I spend a lot of time

thinking about the same events, it's like we speak completely different languages, you know, coming at these things from a historical or strategic perspective, which is mostly how I spend my days and what the show is really about. And then coming at them from a point of view of ethical or philosophical analysis,

it's just, it's actually striking, you know, how, you know, what a different light it casts on things. So I have not spent time thinking, carefully about the things that you think carefully about. But I find myself just as we talk, and I'm curious, you know, to your response to this, very open to the notion, just to put it in summary form of the lesser evil argument. That is to say, you know, and I'm highly sympathetic to the notion that unconditional surrender was not only a defensible war aim, but the right war aim.

We're highly open to that. And I'm very skeptical of arguments to the contrary. And I don't think for a single moment in my adult life have doubted that dropping the bombs is what Harry Truman should have done. And I think Frank's sort of analysis of the historical realities of the moment, and I don't know anybody who does it better than he does or is more of a master of the material than he is. It adds nuance and texture in some complicated ways, but doesn't fundamentally change anything about that conviction of mine. That all said, I choke, I choke at the step of then. going so far as to call it moral. Now, you could argue that, well, I just said it's the right thing to do.

So isn't that, you know, synonymous with saying it's moral, and maybe you have a point there. But the reality of the thing that you're doing is still pretty awful. And I have this skepticism that, in a way, this is a skepticism about just war theory more generally, right? That this is something we, this language of right and wrong that we're taking into this awful place of war is something. that we're telling ourselves so that we can go home again afterwards. Right. And that actually we're going into a place where every, this, this war place, where everything is awful. And by the way, this, this bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the fire bombing of Tokyo and a bunch of other stuff, is supremely awful.

Like, supremely awful stuff to read about what happens on the ground. I still think Harry Truman should have done it. Yep. And I agree that actually the alternatives were all far worse. The alternatives not only for, for Asians and Japanese, but for American troops. It's all worse. But I just choke at that last step, and you obviously don't, and I want to hear your case for why I shouldn't.

I gag. I might not quite choke, but I certainly can't. And I say it with, and my wife will be angry for me qualifying this, I say it with a lot more confidence than I sometimes feel, not because I'm in doubt as to whether or not I'm right, but because, you know, again, I grasp the moral horror element of it. The, you know, and you would have to say something careful about what one means when they call it moral, because it's obviously not the same kind of moral good as saving a child from drowning, right? It's a different kind of good thing.

And it's a good thing only because of the context and the available alternatives, such that I would say, and I think the rhetorical turn, especially in light of the reality of moral injury is important. But I would say that given the alternatives, what one does in a situation like this, isn't a lesser evil. You are still trying to accomplish the greatest possible good that you can do. So you're still focused on virtuous action. What is the most virtuous thing I can do now? And you're trying to pursue that thing. I think it's something more than semantics that would take a long time probably to unpack.

in several pints. The positive case, I make two probably key assertions. First, as you've just said, the allied demand for unconditional surrender by the Japanese was a morally appropriate, and then I would assert morally required war aim. I think you would agree with that. And then second, the atomic attack offered, and here are the qualifications, the most proportionate and discriminate means possible to obtain the unconditional surrender or the Japanese, and then another qualification, in the quickest possible time.

And so in the summer of 1945, these two qualifications, I think, make the moral case or the positive moral case, that it was the most proportionate. So, you know, if you want to save innocent lives, you drop the bomb, then we can go through that, and the most discriminant. And discrimination is an interesting claim here, because discrimination usually says when you separate combatants from non-combatants, you can target combatants. intentionally, but you can't directly target non-combatants. And I can make a historic case, and I do in the manuscript, as to exactly what the intent

behind bombing Hiroshima was. And obviously, Allied planners knew we're going to kill civilians that's going to happen. And it might have carried some, you know, some value in terms of creating a shock effect. But if you look at the targeting list, for instance, of the short, there was a couple of different lists, but one of the shorter lists included Yokohama, and Nagasaki, and Hiroshima and Kokora, and Hiroshima was the second least populated city on that list. So contrary to some, killing civilians presumably wasn't the aim, because if we wanted to kill civilians as a shock value, there were other cities we could have had far more civilians. We didn't do that, and there's a number of reasons why. I think the primary reason is that the structures in the town were in view. We wanted a town that was intact that had been preserved from conventional bombing to demonstrate the impact of this one bomb.

So in some sense, and this maybe sounds glib, but in some sense, the city was the target and not the people, right? That's to say if miraculously all the people would have fled Hiroshima before we dropped the bomb, I think there's reason to believe we would have still dropped that bomb on Hiroshima. That's the proportion of discriminating. There's more of things to say about that. In the quickest possible time, that also points to the saving evidence in lives and all of that. But maybe a word about this idea about unconditional surrender, why this is a positive worrying that makes a moral case. I think there are two basic ways you can defeat your enemy.

You have to destroy either his ability or his will to continue fighting, or ideally both, right? And there's probably only one way to actually get him to truly surrender, and that's to take away their will to keep fighting. And I say all that because, as I've said already, from the beginning of 1943 onward, Japan had sustained almost nothing but an unbroken series of defeats in the face of the American and the allied counteroffensive, such that. the fall of 1944. They knew they had been defeated. That defeat, as I've already said, didn't turn into surrender, or at least a recognition or a willingness to surrender. But Japan knew the game was up. They could not win. And so as Richard Frank Will says on your podcast, they had embarked upon a plan simply to make the end of the war so costly for America, then America would sue for terms more preferable to the then-defeated Japanese. That was the plan, just to make the war so

ghastly that we wouldn't want to continue fighting it. And this had a lot to do with Japanese perceptions of American character versus the Japanese will to sacrifice for the emperor. And Iwo Jima and Okinawa, in some ways, were sort of demonstrations of the Japanese way of fighting. They wanted Okinawa to dissuade Americans from being willing to invade the Japanese whole islands. And they succeeded in that in ways that they couldn't possibly have comprehended at the time, but they succeeded. You would probably move on from, you know, I think it also pays to remember that the, you know, the middle age and older men who fought World War II had fresh memories

or reasonably fresh memories of World War I. And I think he can draw a very bright line between the, botched peace that came out of Versailles and the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. You know, Marshall was one of General Pershing's aide-de-comps, right? And Pershing is the U.S. general who insisted, who begged the allies not to sign the armistice. And some of his language was such that, like, Germany does not know that they've been licked. Give me a week, and I will teach them.

And he begged for it. And his fear was that Germany not really. believing they had lost the war, would simply, he had not lost the will to fight, and that that will to fight would resurface again later in World War II proves that he was right. There's a lot of generals and emeralds in the buildup to the dropping of the bomb that uses rhetoric that is strikingly similar to what Pershing says. Some of it, the same language, that the Japanese don't know they've been licked. We have to teach them that they've been licked. So part of the moral case is that not only did the need to be militarily defeated, but an idea had to die. And that idea had a lot to do with

the Peshido Code and warrior honor and all of that. And that military defeat alone wouldn't have provided the kind of internal change that would be required to bring the Japanese into any kind of a durable peace. And one of the just war aims is durable peace. And Richard Frank, you know, uses this phrase, that unconditional surrender wasn't just a slogan for victory, but it was a policy for peace. And I think he's drawing on this long tradition that says, you know, at the end of the conflict, the best thing we can do is to not simply take away our enemy's willingness to fight, but to inculcate within our enemy a willingness to live in peace. And I think, you know, the historic case can kind of be made by looking at the relationship we now have with Japan and to wonder how

that relationship might have been different if the Japanese weren't so willing to surrender when they finally did. Yeah. I'm sympathetic to a lot of that. I, you know, part of my skepticism of the first crowd you mentioned some minutes ago, the crowd's like, well, this is obviously, you know, the wrong thing to do and what are we even talking about here? How can you spend years of your life writing a book about how it was the right thing to do?

There's a kind of pomposity about that argument or that view and a failure. and a failure to sympathize with people of 1945, who as you point out are also thinking about the events of the 19th and the first World War. And the way in which unconditional surrender really does become this profound desire for never again. The world in which we want to live is not going to be a world in which this sort of highly ideologized

gangsterism gets to wreck our lives every generation or so. We are going to seek a different world with a different security system. And, you know, we can, we can argue all we want. There are all kinds of interesting arguments that we're still having today about the post-45 security system. And, of course, we've come quite close to doing it again with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And now it seems like we're approaching, you know,

we're in proximity of doing it again with the PRC. But the truth is, since 9045, we actually haven't done it again. And the complicated dimension or a complicated dimension of that that's very relevant to our discussion today is that nuclear weapons played a huge role in that. Absolutely. And the same people who, you know, want to argue that what happened in Hiroshima Nagasaki was so obviously wrong are typically the same people who believe that the very existence of nuclear weapons is obviously an awful thing, which it's a complicated question. And there's a way in which the existence of weapons so awful, like does give one pause.

Nevertheless, the truth is since 1945, they played a pretty big role not in the ending of warfare, because it's been lots of war since 1945. But with respect, you know, and I say this is a veteran myself, it's not the same thing. It's just not the scale. The scale is simply not the same thing. You know, even what, let's try to think of the post-45 wars that have been maximally awful, you know. The Chinese Civil War actually is probably up there near the top of the list. It's just not the same thing. It's not the same thing as the early 40s war.

Absolutely. Your colleague at the Hudson Institute, Rebecca Inericks, has said repeatedly that nuclear weapons have been used every day since August 6th, 1945. And sometimes to my dismay, right? You know, I lived in Bratislava, Slovakia. I have friends in Hungary who in 1956 really wish there was a different response to Soviet incursions in Hungary. But, you know, nuclear weapons kept away certain kinds of actions because of the fear of annihilation and it prevented a lot of really awful conventional war.

So it's tricky business. Mark Levecki, this has been a real interesting conversation. I feel almost like I'm on an exchange program here, you know, dealing with the, because we were interested in the same things, but from fundamentally different angles, and I appreciate the exchange of views and for you making the time to come on the show. Well, it's a pleasure. The overlap area is, of course, a strong desire to serve our warfighters in every way possible, not just without fitting with the best weapons and training,

but also, as I said earlier, Kevlar for their souls that allow them to come home whole. And I don't want to do that in an artificial way, but I don't want them to take on moral burdens that don't exist. And I'm not saying that this isn't morally burdensome, but it might be morally bruising, but it's not morally injurious, some of what we've asked them to do. How did the cruise of the Anola Gay,

and sorry, I can't remember the name of the plane for Nagasaki, how did they make do with it all? You know, we're talking about moral injury. How did they spend the rest of their lives? Paul Tibniz says in his book called the Flight of the Enola Gay that he never lost a night's sleepover. it. He absolutely believes that not only do they save millions of lives, but, you know, they brought about the conditions necessary for peace with Japan. So they had a kind of confidence. And I also want to

push back on because I don't want to make it simply, oh, the saved American lives, that makes it okay. That might not be the case. But I think their moral instincts were pretty intact. They and many people from their generation, including Japanese historians, call them the bombs gifts from heaven. Yeah. So I think they slept well. I recently taught a close. class, which got pretty into the weeds on the events of 1944-45 in the Pacific, then we spent a fair amount of time talking about the fire bombing of Tokyo. And I asked the class, mostly college, late, older college students, young 20-somethings, not, you know, do you think this was right or wrong? Because I personally find with classroom discussion that debate can get kind of tedious pretty quickly.

But actually, I asked them, do you think in the circumstances of the time, you know, you would have been okay with this? And they kind of struggled with that a little bit. And I, I, I guess, gave them my answer, which is not just about myself, but them, which is every single one of you would have signed off on this, every single one of you. And realizing that about yourself is realizing something about the nature of war and the nature of man. And I'm not surprised at all that the pilot of the Inola Gay was untroubled. Surprises me not one little bit. That's right.

Mark, thank you so much. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.