Nagasaki and the logic of War

The Boston Globe's recent op-ed titled "The Nagasaki principle" is an eloquent reflection in the same vein as a something I wrote a couple of months back asking whether it is sensible to talk of Just War or honourable ways of using military force. The question being whether the nature of warfare doesn't inherently cause all combatants to commit attrocities.

"The Nagasaki priciple" outlines a similar mechanics of warfare. That you can never use 'just enough' force to defeat an enemy. Because your relative strengths are impossible to determine accurately and because morale is such a key feature of warfare both sides are forced into exponential escalation of violence in hopes of breaking the will of the enemy. So the logic of war implies that 'overkill' is not a tragic mistake that shouldn't ever have happened but a tragic but inevitable side-effect expected in all prolonged conflicts. Every war and every warrior will go "too far." Until they have they don't know that they've gone far enough.

So to bring this back to "Just War" theory the requirement of proportionality--that the response should match the crime--is impossible to maintain in the fog of war.

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