I lean towards it being morally wrong to target civilian areas, but to claim ahistorically that the targets were intentionally purely civilian is false. Being of military importance (military post, arms manufacturing) was a requirement of the choice for both cities. Both had military significance.
But it was a tragedy. Even if you think the decision to drop the bomb was defensible, no one’s conscience should be at ease when making such a terrible decision even if you feel like you’re forced by necessity. Which I don’t think was necessarily the case.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not military targets, unless you define every urban center a military target, by virtue of its productive capacity. Once you do that, the entire idea of separating civilian and military targets becomes an absurdity, and you might as well admit that you consider "enemy" civilians to be fair targets.
Historically, the major reason why the US targeted Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that the US military wanted to test its two bomb designs on large, pristine urban centers. Attacking pristine targets made measuring the effects of the bombs easier. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been significant military targets, they likely would have been bombed much earlier. In a perverse way, they were chosen because they weren't military targets.
It was as close to "purely civilian" as anything could get. A large city with no particular military value, whose urban center was explicitly targeted (rather than any particular industrial site).
By that time, 1945, no city, or town, of any of the beligerents was "purely" civilian anymore. Doesn't excuse the deliberate killong of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants so.
Hiroshima wasn't a major industrial or military target: there was a military base on the edge of the city, but only about 10% of the civilians killed were military workers. Nagasaki is a better example, and the bomb did hit industrial targets. However, this is mostly an accident -- the primary aiming point was the residential center of the city. Bad weather forced the crew of Bock's Car to choose a secondary target, which happened to be located away from the residential center.
This is a simplification that doesn’t really work. Japan decided as part of their war economy to decentralize their war industries to protect them from bombing - literally putting furnaces into small urban and rural environments rather than centralizing production as all the other powers did. This is why they failed to accomplish real industrial scaling during the war.
As the old line goes - in jungle fighting, the Japanese way of war was to fight in the jungle. The Brit’s way of war was to go through and around way the jungle. The Americans simply leveled the jungle.
That’s why the Japanese strategy didn’t work. That decentralization became a liability even before the cities were destroyed and why you can’t divide Japanese cities into civilian and military targets.
This is more or less verbatim the justification given in US public messaging around the bombing of Japan’s cities, and it’s heavily reiterated by Rhodes. The problem is that even if you fully accept the bloody logic of this, it wasn’t what the Interim committee specified for the atomic bomb target list: “the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” This didn’t apply to Hiroshima. It did apply to the secondary target used in Nagasaki, but not to the primary target. The fact that more appropriate targets were passed over in favor of (largely unbombed) residential targets is not some unfortunate necessity of the war, it was a deliberate decision made to show the world how powerful the bomb was. That decision might - in the very long run - have saved more lives than it took. We should talk about that. But we can’t talk about it if we’re busy fooling ourselves.
We were running out of unbombed cities to drop the nukes on. They wanted to see the full effects of only the nuke. They had to request for a few spots to be saved for them even.
In your morals perhaps. If you were to run a utilitarian calculus, bombing such a target could deliver the most morally optimal solution. If the war had not have ended, the Japanese could have continued to potentially kill millions. The bomb was a clear and final “you cannot win if you continue to wage war” that they came to accept. The Americans could have as easily dropped it on Tokyo.
First, by this argument, literally every urban center is a military target. Put another way, it's an argument for total war, in which nothing is off limits, and every "enemy" civilian is fair game. Is that the world you want to live in?
Second, the US did not target any specific industrial areas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In each case, it targeted the center of town, with the goal of inflicting maximum destruction on the city as a whole.
> First, by this argument, literally every urban center is a military target. Put another way, it's an argument for total war, in which nothing is off limits, and every "enemy" civilian is fair game. Is that the world you want to live in?
Industrial bases, military bases, centers of government: these are all legitimate targets in a time of war and all are built in and around cities. The difference today is we have precision weapons so they can be reasonably targeted accurately, and the side-benefit is that night-vision capability favors night-time strikes which minimizes the number of civilians around.
But don't delude yourself into thinking that there's any such thing as a "clean war". It's a war.
They purposely chose purely civilian targets, in order to inflict maximal civilian casualties. If this is not morally wrong, then nothing is.