The lessons of World War II: war must be limited.

Writing about the anniversary of Hiroshima is never easy; doing it while witnessing the savagery of Bosnia is excruciating but illuminating. Hiroshima and Bosnia frame what Ralph B. Potter once called the moral logic of war. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima was war without limits; it exemplified Raymond Aron's description of this century as the century of total war. For Hiroshima was unique in the kind of weapon used, but not in the strategy of war it served. Hiroshima had a history which extended from Dresden through the fire bomb raids on Tokyo. Charles Krauthammer was not wrong when he wrote recently in the Washington Post: "The A-bomb was nothing more than strategic bombing made easy. The difference between the A-bomb and conventional strategic bombing was technical not moral; a difference not in wrongness but in ease of use."

The instinctive moral reaction to war without limits is often to seek an absolute prohibition of war as a means of policy. Here the awful experience of Bosnia enters: if no one will use force as an instrument of justice, then those who are willing to use it as an instrument of oppression can do so with impunity. The destiny of the defenseless is in the hands of their oppressors: they can be shelled without restraint, shot at a commander's whim, and raped at will. The instinctive reaction to war limits must be collected; the moral logic of war requires preserving the use of deadly force as an instrument of order and justice, while limiting its purposes and methods. Invoking Bosnia (or Rwanda) does not justify Dresden or Hiroshima. it simply frames the precise moral challenge of war: because Bosnia can happen, war must be available as an instrument of policy, but not the policy which governed the end-game strategy of 1945. Legitimate war is limited war.

That proposition is challenged by Bruce Loebs's utilitarian defense of the bombing of Hiroshima elsewhere in this issue (page 11). He invokes a two-tiered consequentialist defense of the Allied strategy. The atomic bomb caused the Japanese surrender, and the loss of civilian life is justified by the aggregate lives (civilian and combatant; American and Japanese) saved.

Such a utilitarian defense of Hiroshima is not original, but it is persistent in the debate about the morality of President Harry Truman's decision. Its persistence is rooted in two qualities. First, it has a kind of common-sense character: Japan had lost the war, but its military was prepared to resist with suicidal ferocity; the Americans were determined to occupy Japan; hence, the bomb did everyone a favor: in affairs of this magnitude, aggregate numbers of lives - rough justice - is the most one can hope for. Second, the decision to use the atomic bomb on civilians appears inevitable: given Dresden and Tokyo, why not Hiroshima; because we had a weapon which could produce the ultimate psychological shock - and avoid a land invasion - could any president not use it? In his magisterial history of the nuclear age, Danger and Survival (Random House, 1988), McGeorge Bundy's detailed and agonized analysis of Hiroshima conveys the context of decision: "Against Japan as against Nazi Germany, the national mood was implacable: Sink ships, bomb cities, kill Japs - this was the mood of the commanders, the mood of the men and women in the street, and the mood of the Congress." Rough justice and a relentless, impatient public frame the consequentialist case for Hiroshima.

Was there another position available? One which could stand against inevitability and cost/benefit calculus? To many careful analysts, it seemed there was not. Bundy's care in reviewing the data and weighing it is relentlessly impressive. When he takes up Michael Walzer's critique of the Hiroshima decision, Bundy observes: "his argument deserves respectful attention, although - or perhaps because - no one put it forward before Hiroshima." A similar comment is made by Thomas Powers in the July issue of the Atlantic Monthly: "Americans are still painfully divided over the right words to describe the brutal campaign of terror that ended the war, but it is instructive that those who criticize the atomic bombings most severely have never gone on to condemn all the bombing. In effect, they give themselves permission to condemn one crime (Hiroshima) while enjoying the benefits of another (the conventional bombing that ended the war)."

In response to these assessments of Hiroshima stands an article which Charles Curran has called the only "classic" in American Catholic moral thought, the Jesuit John C. Ford's 1944 essay in Theological Studies on "The Morality of Obliteration Bombing." Its status as a classic grows from the attention given it since 1944, not to its immediate impact. Bundy depicts convincingly the inner circle of decision making in 1945; the principle of noncombatant immunity (the heart of Ford's essay) had been violated so often on all sides that it no longer held any influence among political or military leaders. Bundy again: "No one ever said simply, do not use it on a city at all."

But John Ford did say it long before Hiroshima with a logic and passion that guarantee he would have said it about Hiroshima. His article applies as specifically to atomic bombing as it did to obliteration bombing with conventional weapons. It is written with a tone of moral certainty which matches the tone of Loebs's article, but with a diametrically opposed conclusion. Ford's long, detailed argument, made in moral and empirical terms, had two objectives: to demonstrate that the classical distinction between combatants and civilians could not be wished away by modem strategists or their apologists, and to assert that British and American bombing policy by 1944 had clearly violated the principle of civilian immunity from direct attack. The tone of the article moves from cold logic (precise definitions, multiple distinctions) to a passionate defense of the status of "innocent civilians." Before he began a listing of occupations twenty-five lines) which in his view must be protected from direct attack, Ford challenged the prevailing character of opinion: "Read the list. If you can believe that these classes of persons deserve to be described as combatants, or deserve to be treated as legitimate objects of violent repression, then I shall not argue further. If, when their govemments declare war, these persons are so guilty that they deserve death, then let us forget the law of Christian charity, the natural law, and go back to barbarism, admitting that total war has won out and we must submit to it." A year before Hiroshima, Ford stood ready to condemn its logic.

It is not sufficient to recall his argument, however prophetic it was. It is necessary once again to make the case that the non-combatant immunity principle is non-negotiable. Two reasons, drawn from different styles of moral reasoning, can be used. First, observance of noncombatant immunity is directly and intrinsically related to the basic justification of any use of force. If killing can ever be justified, it is only if those killed must be restrained in this way from doing grave harm to others by what they do each day. Hence, it civilians are purposefully targeted and/or intentionally killed, the strategy which does so has lost its essential connection to that one reason which justifies it. Morally such a strategy entails murder, not justified killing. Second, even from a consequentialist perspective, the barrier against killing civilians should be "virtually exceptionless" because of the nature of war. In this realm of human activity, both the psychology and the politics of war ("national security," "supreme emergency") produce a dynamic that seeks to eliminate restraint in the name of noble objectives. To lose the absolute barrier against force which civilian immunity represents is to lose morality's hold on conscience and policy in wartime.

Because this principle is so crucial, the way in which Ford's position is received today is encouraging. The public record indicates much greater support for his position in the 1990s than was the case in the 1940s or the 1950s (Korea). The debate on nuclear policy in the 1980s, the Gulf War debate in the 1990s, and even the (discouraging) discussion of what to do in Bosnia has attended to the civilian/combatant distinction in a way that vindicates Ford's argument.

This column is written on the day when the United States, Britain, and France have threatened "substantial air strikes" against Bosnia Serbs. The Serbian architects of the assault on the Muslim enclaves deserve to be struck with substantial force. The announcement of the policy included discussion of the risk to civilians; undoubtedly such a policy will endanger civilians even as it is designed to protect them from Serbian brutality. The difference from Dresden, Tokyo, and Hiroshima, however, is not only an essential difference of magnitude. It is the logic of the policy; civilians may be hit but they are not to be targeted. On that distinction hangs the moral logic of war. World War 11 violated the logic in pursuit of a great good; it is less important to focus on why moral restraint failed then, than it is to observe its rigorous imperative in our own strategy and policy today. The purpose in being clear about the past is to provide a guide for the future. War may be necessary; if so, it must be limited.