War

"War is not fun. But if you're going to fight, you fight to win."

That's what my chemistry teacher said today. We're covering Nuclear Chemistry, and so he spent a whole day talking about nuclear weapons, Hiroshima, Nagasaki... justifying the use of nuclear weapons in those cases. But his whole point is that nukes aren't any different than regular bomb. Okay, I can agree with that. He says that the Japanese culture would not allow them to surrender until they were dead. I don't know, but that could be true as well.

But bombing cities? Does war always bring out the worst in us? Does the golden rule disappear during wartime, or do we simply regard our own cause as the utmost. Perhaps that's the way it has to be. You couldn't fight if you didn't believe you were absolutely right, perhaps you couldn't bring yourself to exercise justice on the guilty if you ignored the fact that you were harming the innocent. Maybe it was just revenge, maybe we just wanted the blood to end.

But... the death of the innocent was not right. Just because it might have been "called for" doesn't mean that it was right. War isn't right. Just because it has to happen doesn't make it right. It's wrong. And so, when asking if it was right to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, the answer is easy. No. It wasn't right. The whole war wasn't right. The question is really just how wrong was it? Hindsight does nothing to help.