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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

War is never moral; it is at best unavoidable and expedient.

When a nation, or an alliance of nations, perceives some threat to their
sovereignty, and when strategic targets or measures have been defined,
whether it is of the scale of surgically precise missile strikes at bases or
plants, in which a few dozen lives are lost, or whether it is of the scale of
the landing at Normandy in which thousands of lives are lost, or the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in which millions of lives are lost, the
fact remains that there is a price to be paid in terms of human life, both
for the enemy and for the invading forces, and the magnitude of loss is
defined and deemed reasonable and necessary. That price is in terms of
human lives lost, on both sides. Casualty and death is an unavoidable
aspect of military actions. Whether only one life is lost, or ten lives or one
thousand lives, or a million lives, is not an issue. We tend to think nothing
of the news report of ten fatalities. We are alarmed by one thousand
fatalities. Should the fatalities reach one million we are revolted by what
we perceive as a morally reprehensible destruction of human life. Yet the
simple fact remains that any human life is of inestimable value, and
taking one life is no more or less disturbing than the sacrifice of 100,000
lives or even a million lives, provided the strategic goal justifies the
magnitude of the loss. It is NOT the number of lives lost, but the
justification of such losses from a strategic point of view. If the loss of
human life amounts to an entire city, or even an entire nation, we
categorize the event as a genocide or ethnocide or holocaust. But, from a
strategic military perspective, the value of the objective is weighed
against the loss of life, and hopefully, strategists are motivated to take no
more lives than might be considered necessary and justified to achieve a
victory. Military and strategic victory will never be equivalent to a MORAL
victory. War and killing is never moral. And there is no war without the
taking of human lives.

In retrospect, with historical hindsight, we can say that IT WAS NOT
necessary to destroy the entire German or Japanese people in order to
put an end to Hitler and the Nazis in World War II. We can see that the
German and Japanese people of today are not the same kind
of "ideological" threat as they were in the 1930's. Times change,
people change, nations change. Even the peoples of the former Soviet
Union are not quite the same as they were in the 1950's. Chinese
ideology poses a threat today, but I dare say one does not yet think of
the annihilation of China as a solution to ensure world peace and
democracy.

Where am I heading with this train of thought? I am simply posing a
theoretical situation in which one part of the world perceived
an "ideological" threat of such magnitude, that the wide-scale annihilation
of an entire nation might be proposed as the only certain method to
ensure a victory and peace. Current weapons of mass destruction are too
damaging to the environment to be deployed on such a large scale as to
achieve the annihilation of an entire nation in an efficient and timely
fashion, and yet leave the land habitable and the natural resources
useable. But, let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that clean,
environmentally safe weapons of mass destruction were developed. And
let us FURTHER imagine that an alliance of nations perceived an
ideological threat of SUCH MAGNITUDE that a simple military defeat and
occupation would NOT ensure world peace. In such a hypothetical
situation, IT IS CONCEIVABLE that a strategic decision might be made to
destroy the population of an entire country, and that the importance of
the military strategic objective would outweigh the price in human life in
the minds of those making the decision in favor of such a pre-emptive
strike. No matter how heinous such a military action might appear to us,
in terms of loss of human life, it is NOT MORE immoral simply because
millions of lives are envolved, rather than only thousands or hundreds of
lives, since the taking of even one human life unnecessarily is in some
sense no less worse than taking a thousand lives or a million lives.

Strategists weigh the strategic importance of the victory against the price
in casuality and mortality which must be paid.

It IS NOT inconceivable that one day an ideological threat of sufficient
magnitude might develop which would make the deployment of such
weapons of mass destruction seem a reasonable, or perhaps even
unavoidable, solution.

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