Why Nuclear Weapons Cannot Be Morally Justified
From Hiroshima to today: Why the world’s most powerful weapons violate every moral principle we hold dear
1. They kill indiscriminately
Nuclear weapons make no distinction between soldiers and civilians. They destroy entire cities in seconds. Heat, pressure, radiation — everything strikes without discrimination. This is precisely what international humanitarian law prohibits.
The First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions (1977) classifies “indiscriminate attacks” as war crimes. The International Court of Justice declared in 1996:
“The destructive power of nuclear weapons cannot be contained in either space or time.”
In other words: The bomb doesn’t just kill today — it kills across generations. Radiation damage, genetic defects, uninhabitable landscapes.
2. They violate the right to life
The United Nations declared unequivocally in 2018: Nuclear weapons that “act indiscriminately and are capable of destroying human life on a catastrophic scale” are incompatible with human rights. They violate Article 6 of the UN Civil and Political Rights Covenant — the right to life.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The ethical litmus test
On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around 200,000 people died, almost exclusively civilians. In Hiroshima, people burned instantly, their shadows seared into walls. The long-term consequences were even worse: leukemia, miscarriages, social stigmatization.
The ethical assessment is clear: Even if one wants to argue militarily — Japan was already on the path to surrender. The bombs were a signal to the Soviet Union, not a military necessity.
Today, many Americans see it similarly: In 1945, 85% of Americans supported the bombing. By 2016, only 43% did. In Japan, nearly 80% consider the bombing unjust.
The bomb as philosophical paradox
Günther Anders: “Being moral is objectively impossible”
The German-Austrian philosopher Günther Anders called the atomic bomb an “ontological unicum” — a thing that escapes all moral control. His argument: The bomb destroys the classical structure of means and ends.
“If you possess the device, being moral is objectively impossible.”
Because: It serves deterrence — precisely by not being used. At the same time, it can only deter if you credibly suggest you would use it. This paradox makes it permanent moral blackmail.
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker: The bomb must never fall — and that’s exactly what makes it dangerous
The physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker put it this way:
“The big bombs fulfill their purpose only if they never fall. They also don’t fulfill it if everyone knows they will never fall. That’s precisely why there’s the danger that they will actually fall someday.”
Deterrence requires uncertainty — and this uncertainty is itself a threat.
The responsibility of science
Robert Oppenheimer was no innocent. He knew what he was doing — and he had doubts. Later, he told President Truman:
“I have blood on my hands.”
After the war, he opposed the hydrogen bomb. He demanded international control of atomic energy. His words:
“In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”
In Germany too, resistance stirred. In 1957, 18 leading nuclear physicists — including Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg, and von Weizsäcker — published the Göttingen Declaration. They urgently warned against a nuclear-armed German military and refused to participate.
The question they posed remains valid today: What does the scientist owe humanity — when his work becomes a global threat?
The interreligious consensus: “Nuclear weapons are evil”
Remarkably clear is the rejection of nuclear weapons by the world’s major religions:
Pope Francis condemned not only the use but also the possession of nuclear weapons as immoral in 2017.
The World Council of Churches, Protestant churches, Orthodox patriarchs, and Muslim authorities — such as the Shiite jurist Ahmed Beheshti — agree:
“Producing nuclear weapons is, from Islam’s perspective, a grave sin and forbidden.”
When religions that rarely agree on anything unite here — that’s an ethical signal.
The Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty — hope or illusion?
In 2017, 122 states adopted the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty (TPNW) within the UN framework. It prohibits the development, stockpiling, possession, and use of nuclear weapons. It entered into force in 2021.
But: None of the nuclear powers signed it. NATO states — including Germany — reject the treaty. Their reasoning: It undermines nuclear deterrence and is “naive.”
From a realpolitik perspective, that may be true. Ethically, it remains a moral bankruptcy.
Deterrence: A necessary evil?
Defenders of nuclear deterrence argue: The possession of nuclear weapons has prevented major war since 1945. If no one has the bomb, the balance could tip.
But that’s precisely the ethical dilemma: Peace rests on a threat that must never become reality — and precisely because of that, it can become reality at any moment.
The philosopher Dieter Henrich called this an “inescapable paradox” in 1990:
“Conditions that can neither be judged as right nor as anything other than threatening must nevertheless be recognized as unavoidable.”
In other words: We live in a world whose state we cannot ethically approve — and which we must nevertheless maintain.
Kant and the warning against “wars of extermination”
In his work Perpetual Peace (1795), Immanuel Kant formulated a remarkable premonition:
“A war that would have to find its purpose in the extermination of both parties would no longer be a war but a game of annihilation, which would allow perpetual peace to take place only in the graveyard of the human race.”
Kant couldn’t have known the bomb — but his warning remains valid. “Perpetual peace” must not be achieved through total annihilation.
Conclusion: An ethical aporia — and a mandate
Nuclear weapons are more than just weapons. They are the symbol of a civilization that has taken itself hostage.
Their existence contradicts:
International law
The human right to life
The moral responsibility of science
Interreligious conscience
Philosophical thinking itself
The Trinity Test was the beginning of an ethical aporia: a dead end from which there is no clean way out. And yet a moral imperative remains:
We must not become accustomed to the unthinkable.
Nuclear weapons are not a legitimate means of politics. They are an open wound in the morality of modernity. If we don’t learn to renounce them, someone will use them again someday.
Whether intentionally or accidentally — the consequence would be the annihilation of everything we call civilization.
Kant was right: Peace must not take place in humanity’s graveyard.