A pack of self-styled conservatives this week piled on after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a mournful, humane statement on the reality of nuclear war. Her brief video speaks powerfully for itself. But I feel compelled to respond to her detractors, if only to smack down the poisonous self-confidence of the many war promoters who have insinuated themselves into the political right.
The people who have jumped to dismiss and ridicule Gabbard’s warning against playing around with nukes are doing more to out themselves than to refute her point. For all their cockiness, they’re showing that they’re either simply illiterate when it comes to conservative thought, or, worse, cynically preying on a conservative audience that they believe to be illiterate itself.
This despite the fact that, as I argued in my own policy white paper on disarmament, the aim of minimizing the nuclear threat to humanity’s future is rooted in the principles of a deeply conservative tradition known as Just War Theory.
National Review senior writer Dan McLaughlin, who calls himself a “Reaganite Catholic,” made the childish point that “Japan should have thought about” the horrors of being nuked before it antagonized the world with its own aggression and atrocities. “You’d think someone who once represented Hawaii would remember that,” McLaughlin jeered, referring to Gabbard, a former congresswoman from the Aloha State. Next he added a little saber-rattling against Iran: “This is why an aggressive tyranny such as Iran should never be allowed anywhere near nuclear weapons.”
Talk show host Mark Levin similarly outed himself as either a lightweight or a sinister enemy of Trumpism who aims to undermine the movement from within. After some fear mongering about Iran, he explained that the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki “were dropped because it was believed we’d lose perhaps hundreds of thousands of soldiers if we invaded Japan.”
As if war crimes can be canceled out with a little arithmetic. “Imperial Japan refused to unconditionally surrender until Truman dropped the second bomb,” Levin said. “Much to learn from history. No forever war in WWII. Hard to tell from your video if you agree with Truman’s decision.”
Like Levin, Noah Rothman of the National Review agreed with “Truman’s decision” as if it were a bedrock conservative principle to do so, writing that Gabbard “managed to summon more shame and self-doubt than even Obama could muster.”
The implication is that Gabbard’s warning against nuclear war falls far outside the pale of conservative thought—and that anyone who speaks against the bombings is essentially on trial, bearing the onus to prove themselves moral by accepting that a Democrat’s order to kill civilians and wipe out cities is ethically sound. “Surely you don’t disagree with Truman!” goes the unspoken illogic between the lines. “That would make you guilty of being a traitor to conservatism. How do you plead?”
In fact, the onus is on those rashly defending nuclear bombings at a time when, as both Gabbard and President Donald Trump have repeatedly said, we are more at risk of a nuclear World War III than ever before.
The onus is on the hawks now more than ever, too, since they want to attach themselves to the coattails of a Trump movement that in November won all battleground states and earned the popular vote based largely on its rejection of the Washington establishment’s love of war.
But the onus is also on them in light of a much longer-lived and more deeply rooted tradition of conservative thought. A tradition of thought that never came anywhere near to unanimous support for the nuclear bombings of Japan that these hangers-on are now trying to present as the consensus position among conservatives.
Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, one of the greatest political thinkers of the 20th century, wrote a sharp critique of Oxford’s decision to award Truman an honorary degree in the 1950s. Her argument? The man who dropped those bombs should never be honored by an institution that claims to represent Western values.
“For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder,” she wrote in part. “The dropping of the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were the clearest possible examples of such acts.”
Archbishop Fulton Sheen, a tremendous champion of moral conservatism, identified the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a major inflection point in history—one that undermined all future conservative efforts to oppose immorality in politics. In fact, he marked August 6, 1945, as the origin of all the Leftist cultural and political revolutions that followed—and which America’s modern conservative movement was essentially founded to counter.
“When we flew an American plane over this Japanese city and dropped the atomic bomb on it, we blotted out boundaries,” Sheen said. “There was no longer a boundary between the civilian and the military, between the helper and the helped, between the wounded and the nurse and the doctor, between the living and the dead—for even the living who escaped the bomb were already half-dead. So we broke down boundaries and limits, and from that time on the world has said ‘We want no one limiting me.’”
President Ronald Reagan, another central figure to conservatives, decried nuclear bombings and energetically pursued nuclear arms reductions even in the midst of the Cold War. “A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought,” Reagan famously said. He expressed a desire that nuclear weapons would be “banished from the face of the Earth.”
Even among Truman’s own cabinet and inner circle, numerous U.S. military officials had the moral sense to speak out strongly against the bombing.
Future Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, then supreme allied commander, said after the war that it “wasn’t necessary to hit [the Japanese] with that awful thing… I voiced to [Truman] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary… Secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory.”
Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, outright condemned what he called “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” arguing it “was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.”
“The Japanese were already defeated,” Leahy added. “My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”
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Truman’s commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Henry Arnold, made his own argument after the fact. “It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse,” he said.
Now fast-forward to the statement from Gabbard and the flurry of commentary surrounding it: Who sounds more like the great Catholic philosophers, churchmen, Republican presidents, and World War II military leaders who have weighed in on nuclear war?
I rest my case.
