The Worst New Idea of the 20th Century
I wanted to add something to my post on Hiroshima the other day. The point of the post was not to argue for any comfort with atomic weapons or the killing of tens of thousands of civilians (mutual assured destruction has got to be the dumbest, scariest, craziest basis for international relations ever conceived). The point was to argue that most arguments about Hiroshima are stripped of historical context, colored by our experience of the Cold War, and based on increasingly popular but incorrect assumptions about the rulers of Japan at the end of the war.
So as an adjunct to that post, I wanted to emphasize that I think civilian bombing (whether conventional or nuclear) to be the worst single new idea of the 20th century. The absolute worst ideas of the 20th century were likely Marxism and genocide, but these were not new to the 2oth century. But strategic bombing of civilian populations far to the rear of the front lines, whether convention or nuclear, by airplane or missile, was almost entirely new. It was an awful, terrible idea that haunts us to this day.
It is in this context that I don't single out Hiroshima for particular opprobrium. It was a change in technology in a horrendous program. The worst of the lot in my mind was Arthur Harris. Harris, head of the British strategic bombing effort through most of the war, did not even pretend to be targeting industries or factories. He thought such precision bombing to be madness. His very specific goal was to kill and "unhouse" as many civilians as possible, and he measured the British bombing effort in those terms.
