The ethics of war: What happens at the end of wars?

August 6, 2025

Eighty years ago, the American bomber the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Why?

The aerial bombings killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict.

During World War II, Allied air forces dropped approximately 2.7 million tons of bombs on Germany, much of the intense bombing towards the end of the war, when the Allies already knew they had won the war. Cities like Dresden and Hamburg were flattened, most of those killed were civilians. Why?

War is a dirty business. In Japan, there was the choice of invading the Japanese mainland and continuing the burning of Japanese cities, killing thousands more civilians, or giving the Japanese the ultimatum to surrender, which they wouldn’t. So, Truman decided to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki. Was Truman right ? That has never been settled. But the nuclear age had started.

Over Germany, there was not a lot of necessity to burn and bomb the German cities. The Allies were making progress through Germany from the West.