In December 2022, Time Magazine ran a story, “The Making of the U.S. Military's New Stealth Bomber,” on the development of the U.S. Air Force’s new B-21 bomber.
Unfortunately, the reporter, W. J. Hennigan, Time’s National Security Correspondent, failed to quote any critics of the ethics of building a machine whose only purpose is mass slaughter. Almost the entire article was a paean to the technological wonders involved in the plane’s development and a discussion about inevitable cost-overruns. There is only one quotation from what might be called a critic in the entire article. William Hartung is quoted questioning the bomber’s cost, not its purposes, saying, “The Pentagon routinely understates the costs of major systems, and I expect the B-21 to be no different…. It’s not a question of whether there will be overruns, but how high they will go, and whether they lead to massive additional spending or a reduction in the proposed buy of the planes.”
The B-21 will be armed with both conventional and nuclear weapons, but the article does not address the ethics of large-scale bombing. When the bombing of civilians began in the 20th century (probably when the French and Spanish bombed Moroccan civilians in 1912:), it provoked moral outrage, as later symbolized by Picasso’s painting protesting the firebombing of Guernica by Nazi and Italian fascist bombers backing Franco’s dictatorship during the Spanish Civil war. Two books provide an incisive ethical analysis of the more than a century of strategic bombing that ensued. Susan Griffin’s incomparable A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, is a gorgeously written feminist reflection on the personal, political, and moral implications of strategic bombing in the 20th century. Robin Morgan’s off-puttingly titled but brilliant, The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism is a feminist interpretation of bombing as a form of patriarchal terrorism.
Doolittle’s Raiders: the Moral Quagmire of Strategic Bombing
Despite works like these, and the protests of millions, here in the 21st century, at least in Time, the ethics of strategic bombing don’t warrant a mention. Even the Air Force’s name for the new B-21 bomber, The Raider, is morally obtuse, but it is presented in the Time article without critique:
“The B-21’s nickname, Raider, was inspired by the improbable 1942 U.S. air raid on Tokyo during World War II led by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle.” Examining the implications and history of Doolittle’s raids in a little depth helps to shine a light on the moral quagmire of strategic bombing in general.
As a child in elementary school, I was enthralled by books describing the daring of the U.S. soldiers involved in the Doolittle bombing raids. I might have had a different reaction if I had known that at least 87 civilians were killed by these raids. I didn’t know that one bomber killed 10 civilians, “...some burning to death in collapsing houses.” I hadn’t been told that one pilot “strafed what he thought was a factory, complete with a rooftop air defense surveillance tower. But it was Mizumoto Primary School, where students, like many across Japan, attended half-day classes on Saturdays. After school let out at 11 a.m., many students had stayed to help clean classrooms; one died in the strafing attack. At Waseda Middle School, one of Doolittle’s incendiaries killed fourth-grader Shigeru Kojima.” The incendiary mentioned in the previous sentence was a firebomb designed to burn civilian housing - and 10-year-olds.
Most of the planes involved in the Doolittle bombing raids flew to China, where the raiders sought shelter. The Japanese military slaughtered as many as 250,000 additional Chinese civilians in “retaliation” for the raids. The U.S. is not responsible for the Japanese government’s response to Doolittle’s raids; the moral responsibility for Japan’s war crimes rests with the Imperial Japanese Government. After the raids, the Japanese government also milked the propaganda value of portraying the U.S. government as “savages” for killing civilians. These unintended ramifications should at least be a sobering note to those who uncritically celebrate Doolittle’s raids, or strategic bombing in general, as a “success.”
Bombing Tokyo: Napalm and War Crimes
In the same year as Doolittle’s raids, napalm was invented a few miles from where I currently live, by researchers at Harvard who sought to “improve” Doolittle’s incendiaries. Napalm is jellied gasoline, designed to burn incredibly hot and stick to whatever it lands on - whether Japanese wooden houses or the skin of people trapped under the firebombs. (See the book Napalm: An American Biography by Bob Neer.) The 1942 bombings were a precursor to the U.S. military unleashing napalm on more than 60 Japanese cities starting in March 1945. One of these raids, the firebombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945, killed an estimated 100,000 people in a single night.
General Curtis “Bombs Away” Lemay, who ordered these raids, admitted that the civilians he had ordered killed were "scorched and boiled and baked to death.” The book Black Snow: Curtis Lemay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb by James M. Scott quotes Lemay as saying at the time, “If we lose the war, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” Robert McNamara, the infamous U.S. Secretary of Defense during much of the U.S. war against Vietnam, worked for Curtis Lemay during this time period. McNamara, interviewed by filmmaker Errol Morris in the documentary, “The Fog of War,” also admitted that when planning the strategic bombing of Japan, “...we were behaving as war criminals.”
What does this all have to do with the B-21 Raider? It’s not just the name of the bomber that is objectionable. It’s the moral atrocity that, nearly 80 years after World War II, the U.S. is still building bombers designed to drop napalm – and nuclear weapons. It’s amoral not to at least address these ethical concerns in an article about the building of such literally infernal machines.
War, Peace, and Ethical Journalism
Any responsible article about the pros and cons of military technologies needs to provide space for critics of using our technological genius in the service of causing death, suffering, and destruction. As U.S. World War II General Omar Bradley once said in an Armistice Day speech in Boston in 1948, “Man (sic) is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”Ethical journalism requires us to move beyond the celebration of mere technological brilliance. As I write this, on Martin Luther King Day, 2023, we need to seek the wisdom of peacemaking.
Opposing All War Crimes:
Atrocities By One Side Don’t Justify Atrocities by Another
P.S. I shouldn’t have to say this, but I probably need to in order to prevent misunderstanding: As I indicated above, I am aware of the appalling scale of Japanese war crimes during World War II. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals, while exposing some of them, failed to expose many. Imperial Japanese military aggression during WWII killed between 3 million and 20 million people, including millions in China alone; the wide range of estimates reflects the challenge of obtaining accurate data during a war that stretched from China across Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Pacific. (For attempts at totaling up the carnage, see the work of Dower, Rummel, or Gruhl).
I am not arguing that the U.S. war crimes described above mean there is a moral equivalence between the sides. I am opposed to war crimes committed by any side, and I believe that war itself is a crime. This does not mean that the invaders and defenders in a war are morally equivalent. The crimes of European and U.S. imperialism do not justify the crimes of Japanese imperialism. We should oppose all imperialism. Japanese atrocities do not justify the U.S. targeting of civilians. We should oppose all atrocities. I believe we need to oppose and work to prevent all forms of imperialism, all colonialism, all wars, all atrocities, and all human rights abuses, committed by all sides. Michael Franti and Spearhead’s “Bomb the World” anthem reminds us: “We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can’t bomb it into peace.”
Video set to the music and lyrics of “Bomb the World”