If Only We Could Have Cast the A-Bombs into Mount Doom
What does “The Lord of the Rings” teach us about their use?
The Lord of the Rings is perhaps the greatest and most powerful mythical adventure of the 20th Century, if not one of the greatest in history. This is so because it captures so many truths about mankind and the fallen world we live in. (BTW, Joseph Pearce is a wonderful scholar and writer on this topic and many others. The linked YouTube video is a lecture of his on Tolkien’s work.)
Among many others, two significant truths are explored in the story. The first truth in Tolkien’s world, and ours, is that evil can never be completely stamped out of existence. It can only be defeated for a time by flawed but good people willing to act and guided by divine providence. Sauron, the devil in the story, can be weakened and banished for a time, but he continues to exist and will wait for his next chance to rule again. This is so even at the end of the trilogy.
A second truth explored is that an intrinsic evil should not ever be used, even if its use is intended for a good purpose. The central “McGuffin” of the story, the “one ring to rule them all” is a metaphor for sin and an object of great evil power that is often compared to the atomic bomb. The entire plot of the Lord of the Rings trilogy involves the plan by the Fellowship of the Ring (i.e., the good guys) to keep the power of the ring away from Sauron, and at the same time resist using that evil tool themselves. The plan is to destroy the ring forever by casting it into the fires of Mount Doom, where it was created. This action will effectively destroy it, and this is what ultimately terminates Sauron’s rise, and his armies are defeated.
While the actual ring is destroyed, the defeated evil remains in Middle Earth, and so too remains the idea of the ring. It remains a possibility in that world that somehow, some day, Sauron or a future evil ally of his might gain the ability to create a new ring of power or something similar. Such was the case at the end of WWII, where the U.S. needed not only to defeat the enemy but also significantly destroy any chance of their rising again. And we had the A-bomb as a way to do that.
Was the development and use of the A-bombs in WWII an intrinsically evil act, even if intended to bring an earlier end to the war? This question continues to haunt us every year around the anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
As we understand from history, once the idea that great destructive power could be wrought by splitting atoms, that idea could not be unmade, and the nuclear arms race began. We know now (and military intelligence told the Allies at the time) that Nazi Germany was working on developing its own A-bomb. Even so, the U.S. had no definitive assurance that, one, the bomb would even work, or two, that the Nazis were not on the brink of their own discovery. They had to press on to find out if the technology worked and then to be the first to have it. Surely it was far better for the good guys to have it than the evil Nazis.
But then once they had the power and knew it worked, what to do with it? Like the Fellowship of the Ring, the U.S. held a weapon of unimaginable power that if used would hasten the end of the war. Yet, if used, the weapon had the destructive potential to kill all of mankind. What to do? Could the U.S. have concluded the Manhattan Project by destroying the bombs and the research that went into developing them? That made no human sense, especially as a matter of tactics. They already had the capability of destroying a city with 100 bombers dropping thousands of bombs. Now they possessed something that only required a single bomber and one bomb.
But even so, if they had sacrificed the technology and knowledge of it, unfortunately for all concerned, they could not uncreate the idea. Just so, the plans for the bomb could, and did eventually, fall into the wrong, evil hands.
So, again, what to do? With a war that was not yet won, they decided against a demonstration of the power of weapon, not believing this would be enough to convince the Japanese. In considering the options, we must take into account that there was no precedent for having such a destructive weapon. Who would believe it? They could have dropped a bomb somewhere else as a bluff. But eventually that bluff would need to be acted upon, if called. The Japanese were stubbornly defiant. It seemed that nothing more than an attack directly on the mainland of Japan was called for. And, ultimately as we know, they decided to use the bombs on “marginally” military targets. That it took more than one bomb before Japan would surrender goes to show that a mere demonstration of the power would not have been enough.
As an aside, some historians now dispute whether the bombs were the main reason for the surrender, citing that a new front with Russia was more important in their decision to surrender. This is quite absurd. These modern critics are arguing with straight faces (I assume as I didn’t actually see them) that notes from military communications and meetings prove somehow that the Japanese were more afraid of the Russians than a bomb that could destroy a whole city. Give me a break!
On a related note, critics also dispute the figures often cited for the number of lives, both Japanese and American, that were saved by using the bombs. Whatever calculations that led to the Japanese surrender, most assuredly the bombs were the single most important factor among several in a rapidly deteriorating military situation. The surrender, thus, stopped the war from continuing onto the Japanese mainland, where they expected it, quite reasonably, to be as horrifyingly bad as the fight for Okinawa. We can dispute exactly how many lives would have been lost more or less, but whatever that figure is, it would have to be significantly higher than the losses caused by the bombs. Again, give me a break!
Whatever else, this gave the U.S. the dubious distinction of being the only world power to ever use a nuclear weapon against an enemy. Regardless, what about the other truth illustrated in The Lord of the Rings? That intrinsically evil means should not be used even if for an intended good purpose. The intrinsic evil here is not the bombs themselves, which could in theory be used on strictly military targets. The evil comes in their use to directly kill innocent human beings. To point, the U.S. dropped a bomb over the center of each city, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not the military targets specifically (and consequently these targets were not damaged as much as the cities themselves). While it could be argued that such aim was not practical or even very helpful (i.e., the blast radius would have been about the same), the resulting explosions killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in the process. Questions abound. What efforts were made to warn the Japanese population? It is said that leaflets were dropped, but even so, was that enough? Could the good of saving lives by ending the war have been achieved in some other way? How many must die for it to be considered beyond regrettable but unintended innocent deaths? These questions could be asked as well about the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden, Germany.
Even posing the questions alone makes it difficult for me to justify how the bombs were used. “Good” came of it in that many more lives were saved, just like “good” can come from medical advances resulting from Nazi experimentation on captive Jews. Thus, the taint of evil came with it. Could the same “good” have been accomplished without sacrificing innocent lives? We can only speculate on that now.
Placing it in the context of The Lord of the Rings, it could be re-written so that Gandalf the White acts outside of divine providence by wielding the ring to destroy Mordor. This would have Gandalf the White acting like one of the bad guys. That is hard to imagine, given his Christ-figure status as a character.
As one more important aside, I do not here even attempt to judge the subjective fault of those who made the decisions and carried out the bombing attacks. The horrors of the war, the massive loss of life, and the dread of it continuing on played a deep part in these actions. Only God alone can judge any one person’s individual fault.
Lastly, what is to be done with these weapons moving forward?
Tolkien’s story offers us guidance. We cannot cast our nuclear weapons into the equivalent of Mount Doom. We must now keep them in order to keep evil at bay in this world. The technology is not going away, and neither are the bad guys in this world.
However, as the good guys, we should never again use these weapons in an intrinsically evil way, or we will no longer be the good guys.