Should We Bomb Cities?

Abstract
The article goes back to the early discussions of the morality of city bombing which
took place before and during World War II and attempts to analyze both the
moral argumentation and its historical context from the 1940s until today. The
development of the doctrine of “collateral damage” which recognized that attacking
enemy factories was permissible even if it cost the lives and homes of civilians
was soon widened beyond its original notion. After the war, the dropping of the
atomic bombs became an issue in its own right, to be considered separately from
the earlier recourse to conventional bombing — even when conventional bombing
achieved equally destructive results. Twin inhibitions have reigned in the issue of
what force against civilians was justified: the reluctance of German commentators
to seem apologetic for the Third Reich, and the difficulty in the U.S. of seeming to
cast any aspersions on those who fought “the good war.”