Ok. Here’s a little quiz for those of you who think about weapons, war, nuclear weapons, and other such happy topics. What’s the single most important false assumption in the field of nuclear weapons? What’s the biggest mistake that nuclear weapons policy makers have made (at least here in the United States) when thinking about policy around nuclear weapons?
I’ll give you just a couple of minutes.
Ok. Pencils down.
Did everyone get: “killing civilians matters in war” as the most important fallacy? Hands up if that’s what you wrote on your paper.
Anyone?
Killing civilians
So let me just talk about two things: why the assumption “killing civilians matters in war” matters so much, and then why the assumption “killing civilians matters in war” is false.
The assumption “killing civilians matters in war” is important because it is at the heart of the claim that bombing Hiroshima with a nuclear weapon “won the war.” And the claim that “Hiroshima won the war” is important because it is the only practical proof we have that nuclear weapons are important, necessary, and the “ultimate” weapon.
But doesn’t testing prove that nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapon? It’s true, nuclear explosions were impressive when the weapons were tested in the 1950s. But tests don’t prove weapons are important. War is a complicated, multivariate activity and the impact that a new weapon will have is extraordinarily difficult to anticipate based on, say, blowing some up in carefully controlled circumstances in the desert. You have to see how soldiers will react, how leaders will react, how the weapon will interact with other weapons present on the battlefield, how it’s affected by terrain, countermeasures, and a hundred other factors, before you have a clear idea of a weapon’s impact and potential usefulness in war. People tested machine guns quite extensively and still wildly misjudged their impact on war.1
The bombings are essential for supporting claims that nuclear weapons are really important weapons because the bombings are the only time the weapons have actually been used in war. If it is true that the importance of a weapon can only be proved in war, then the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are pivotal evidence.
But didn’t the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “win the war”? And doesn’t that confirm the belief that nuclear weapons are essential weapons? Let’s look a little closer. How did the bombings “win the war”? The official line, put forward by retired Secretary of War Stimson in 1947, was that the weapons forced the surrender by “shocking” Japan’s leaders. Stimson didn’t say exactly how the weapons shocked Japan’s leaders, but there are only three ways the weapons might have caused such a shock: speed, destruction, or casualties.
Was it the speed that shocked them? The attack on Hiroshima killed tens of thousands of people, many of them in a single moment. This is impressive, but basically beside the point, because speed doesn’t change the outcome. Whether it takes a split second or eight hours to kill a third of a city’s population, the end result is still the same.
If I give you a shot and it cures you of your life-threatening disease in just ten minutes, you might be surprised and pleased that it worked so quickly. But fundamentally how fast it works is not what you care about. If it takes four hours or even a week to cure you of your disease you won’t really care. The important point is that you’re not going to die. The end result outweighs the means.
Speed might matter in other circumstances, but here it made no practical difference. So speed with which the bombs destroyed and killed wasn’t what “shocked” Japan’s leaders, because fundamentally the speed didn’t change the outcome.
Was it the destruction that shocked them? It’s highly unlikely that the destruction the bombings caused was what “shocked” Japan’s leaders into surrendering because Japanese cities had been experiencing similar destruction all summer long. In some cases, the conventional attacks being made against Japan’s cities were more destructive than the atomic bombings. If you graph the destruction of the 68 city that were attacked by the United States Army Air Force in the summer of 1945, you’ll see that in terms of square miles destroyed Hiroshima was sixth (five conventional attacks destroyed more square miles), and in terms of percentage of the city destroyed it was fourteenth. For example, Hiroshima was about two thirds destroyed, but Toyama (flattened by a conventional attack) was 99% destroyed. Despite losing one city every other day, on average, Japan’s leaders had been ignoring the destruction meted out to their cities for over four months so it probably wasn’t destruction that “shocked” them.
Which leaves casualties. Civilian casualties. If the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war, Japan’s leaders must have been “shocked” by the numbers of civilians those bombings killed.
Civilians in war
When I first started studying the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki closely I was already prepared to believe that Japan’s leaders might not have been shocked into surrendering by civilian casualties. Not because I took the deaths of civilians lightly, but because I had been studying the question of civilian casualties for the previous six years.
Sometime around the year 2000 I realized that the famous destruction of Carthage by the Romans in 146 BC and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945had some things in common. In both cases the cities were annihilated in war. In both cases the population of the city suffered staggering losses. In both cases the physical structures of the city — the buildings, bridges, ports, and so on — were left in ruins. And both events became symbols of city annihilation.
There were differences, of course. The Romans used much more primitive means — swords, catapults, fire, and so on — to destroy Carthage. They didn’t use weapons that rearranged the fundamental constituents of matter to achieve what they did. But perhaps surprisingly, their end results were more devastating. More people died at Carthage — both in total numbers and as a percentage of the city’s population — than at Hiroshima. Carthage was more completely destroyed — the city was burned and leveled so completely that it has been difficult to find any archeological remains. And whereas Hiroshima emerged from its attack and rebuilt relatively quickly, Carthage did not recover in this way.2
Once I noticed the similarity between Hiroshima and Carthage, I asked myself if there were other cases in history where cities were destroyed and civilians slaughtered. Would it be possible, I wondered, to assemble these cases, compare them, and learn things? It seemed like the quintessential way to use history to shed light on the present day. So I set out on what turned into a long, exhausting, six-year journey in search of city annihilations.
I was living near Princeton University at the time and spent long hours in the C basement level with stacks of military history volumes. And I would sometimes go up among the ancient history shelves on the 3rd floor. I worked my way through as much of the world’s history of war as six years would allow. Ancient Egyptian history. Medieval European wars. Twentieth century Asian civil wars. I went back and forth across the record of human civilization searching diligently. What I found was instructive.
There were lots of instances where cities were destroyed and civilians were killed. But with increasing incredulity, I realized that there were none that I could find where annihilating the city led to surrender. I couldn’t find a single case where one side in a war destroyed its adversary’s city and that action led its adversary to surrender.
How could that be? I wondered. How could such grievous destruction and horrifying killing not impact the wars going on around them? Could Carthage and Hiroshima be the only examples of this kind of slaughter in history?
And then it suddenly struck me that Carthage didn’t fit that mold either. Carthage was not like Hiroshima — the city’s destruction did not lead to surrender. The Romans didn’t destroy Carthage and then the Carthaginians surrendered. Once Carthage had been leveled and the survivors sold into slavery, there were no armies, population centers, or leadership left to surrender. It wasn’t city destruction then surrender. It was simply city destruction so total that nothing was left.
Which meant that throughout the length and breadth of history there were no occasions where city annihilation led to surrender. Civilians have often gotten killed in war. There have often been brutal scenes of horrific slaughter in the pages of history. But those scenes of slaughter are not accompanied by surrender. No leader (that I have ever been able to find) has ever said, “Now we have to surrender because too many civilians have died.”
Searching through two thousand years of history left me convinced that there is a clear pattern, perhaps even a rule, for how human beings fight wars: killing civilians doesn’t win wars. Except — supposedly — Hiroshima. What history did, was to prepare me to see the truth behind the widely accepted story about Hiroshima. It prepared me to see that the city’s destruction had not been the cause of Japan’s surrender.3
How wars are won
What my harrowing journey through the history of slaughtering innocents made me realize is that this notion — that because nuclear weapons can kill lots of civilians they are therefore decisive — is simply wrong. The rebuttal to it is embedded in thousands of years of war. It seems to me that people who believe that killing civilians can win wars have misunderstood war. Wars are won by killing soldiers (or getting them to surrender), not by killing civilians.
Consider the Mongol war that conquered the Khwarazmian Empire (roughly modern Iran, Pakistan, and parts of several other central Asian countries). In 1219 Genghis Khan’s Mongols roared out of the east and began slaughtering whole cities of the Khwarazmian Empire: Bokhara, Merv, Samarkand, Urganch, and others. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of civilians, were killed. City after city was annihilated amid scenes of unimaginable brutality. But none of those city annihilations brought the war to an end. The fighting only stopped when the last army was defeated on the banks of the Indus in 1221.
Or take an instance from the Thirty Years War. Catholic forces under General Johann Tserclaes, Count von Tilly captured Magdeburg in 1631 and burned it to the ground. An estimated 30,000 civilians lost their lives. Did this horrific act bring the Thirty Years War to an end? Hardly. The war continued for another decade and more. And far from shocking the Protestants into surrendering, this brutal act of destruction and slaughter brought more financial and military support for the Protestant cause.
And this pattern makes sense. Military conflicts are determined by military outcomes. And while killing civilians may appeal to the bloody-minded, it is not an act that has military consequences. Think of it this way. When Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp, (along with Doc Holiday), fought it out with the Clanton brothers at the O.K. Corral, it wasn’t the side that shot the most bystanders that won the fight. It was the side that shot the most gunslingers that won.
Wars are not won by killing civilians. The harsh facts of the matter are that in wartime, for the most part, civilians don’t matter. Killing them is a waste of bullets. Which means that the most important “use” for nuclear weapons, the paradigmatic way we imagine them being used — annihilating cities — may be spectacular and horrifying, but it has little military significance.
The proof of this comes from the early U.S. war plans drawn up in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When those the veterans of World War II planned for war between the Soviet Union and the U.S. and its allies in Europe, they imagined a war that happened this way: in the opening days of the war the United States would bomb the hell out of the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. Millions of civilians would die and some hefty portion of the Soviet infrastructure and manufacturing capacity would be crippled. But the massive Soviet army, drawn up on the borders of Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and so on, would be largely untouched. That army would roll over Europe, brushing aside U.S. and allied forces and conquering the entire European landmass. Then the U.S. would have to assemble an equally large army, invade Europe, and reconquer it by defeating the Soviet Union’s military forces. The plans, in other words, were premised on the idea that winning the war depended on defeating the army, not wreaking damage and killing civilians.
Harsh facts
The reason that I doubt that nuclear weapons are important, the reason I think they will not “always exist,” and the reason I believe it is possible to eliminate them is that I don’t believe the assumption that killing civilians wins wars. Nuclear weapons are great for destroying cities and killing millions of people. But civilian slaughter doesn’t win wars, beating military forces does. Based on thousands of years of evidence, civilians simply aren’t that important in wartime.
Maybe that sounds harsh. Maybe you’re appalled that anyone could say that in wartime civilian lives don’t matter. But that is what the facts of history tell. And when nuclear war is the issue at hand, there is no excuse for romanticizing the power of a particular weapon, indulging in wishful thinking, or making judgements based on fear rather than fact. The stakes are too high and the potential costs too great. Anything other than the most astringently realistic thinking is unacceptable.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story, German, French, and British commanders wasted hundreds of thousands of lives over three long years repeatedly sending soldiers to try to overwhelm machine guns by charging at them over open ground. Which merely resulted in soldiers being slaughtered in huge numbers. The Germans, French, and British had all tested machine guns before the war — even used them in distant colonial wars. But until they had extensive battlefield experience with them, they didn’t understand what their impact on war was going to be.
Although a new city was eventually constructed on the same site by Augustus Caesar some 200 years later.
If you’re doubtful about this conclusion, you can read the first scholarly article I ever published (in International Security) that lays out some of the arguments why the notion that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t win the war. I’ve since found that there are even stronger arguments, which I might go through in some future column.
I was at a non-violent protest demonstration yesterday at a military base from which weapons are going to Gaza et. al., and the extraordinary killing going on there as that war escalates. It is obvious that killing counts in current wars, as there is so much going on. The good news was that there were no actions taken by the military... have some come to agree?
What if we flipped our thinking?
The most important error "experts" make is thinking that people care about nuclear weapons.
Most people don't think about nuclear weapons.
And even people who care about nuclear weapons will do little about it.
Better to focus on building Peace ... that removes the need and want for violence and any weapons of mass destruction.
Imagine Peace.