Some Weapons May Be Too Horrible To Use
Did President Truman do the right thing in ordering two atomic bombs to be dropped on Japanese cities at the end of World War II?
In a few months, an exhibit is scheduled to open at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., that will fuel an already red-hot debate about the morality of using the atomic bomb.
Debates about the morality of developing and using weapons capable of causing great harm somehow seem to belong to our past. Not so. Recent technological advances in laser weaponry give special significance to our willingness to assess what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki five decades ago.
The Smithsonian decided to drop an interpretive exhibit about the first atomic bomb - which the Enola Gay dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 - after veterans groups such as the American Legion complained that it depicted the Japanese as victims and the Americans as aggressors. Those who survived the carnage of places such as Iwo Jima and Pearl Harbor said that the planned exhibit did not adequately address the political and military considerations that led Harry S. Truman to order the use of the bomb. The museum now plans instead to display the B-29’s fuselage without commentary.
But the moral questions raised by weapons of mass destruction do not end at the door of a museum.
Scientists have been at work for some time on a new weapon: laser blinding. Lasers capable of the mass blinding of soldiers and civilians soon will become part of the arsenals of many nations unless outlawed by international treaty.
A laser using the same wavelength as visible light can be constructed so that it focuses on the eye’s retina. That destroys the eye’s blood vessels, resulting in nearly instantaneous and complete blinding. Treatment is impossible.
The lasers capable of wreaking such havoc are portable. They can be carried like a large rifle, with a small battery pack in a harness to provide energy. The weapons are completely silent. All one needs to do is get the target to look at the device, even from hundreds of yards away, and the target’s sight will be lost forever.
Even in war, much less self-defense, the international community has agreed that there are some weapons that are too cruel, too malignant to use. Dumdum bullets, gas and biological weapons all have been banned under various international agreements, including the United Nations’ inhuman weapons convention.
Is the ability to blind your enemy so gruesome and cruel that such weaponry ought to be added to the list of prohibited weapons? Or should we keep the laser-blinding weapon in our arsenal, remembering that 50 years ago, the leaders of this nation decided to use another terrible weapon?
According to The Lancet, a British medical journal, the cost of mass blinding would be enormous. Coping with thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of blind soldiers and civilians would cost more than most societies could bear.
Even if using the first atomic bomb was a morally defensible choice, questioning why it was right requires no defense. In examining and explaining the decision made 50 years ago, we might be able to see more clearly whether it is right to construct new weapons of mass destruction.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Art Caplan King Features Syndicate