 Michael Walzer offers an argument along these lines in his discussion of “terror bombing” of German cities in World War II. In early 1942, it seemed that Britain would be defeated by Germany and that its military could not prevail while fighting in accordance with the rules of war. Britain was the only remaining obstacle to the subjugation of most of Europe by the Nazis. That was “an ultimate threat to everything decent in our lives, an ideology and a practice of domination so murderous, so degrading even to those who might survive, that the consequences of its final victory were literally beyond calculation, immeasurably awful” (Walzer 2000: 253). Thus Britain was facing a “supreme emergency”: an (a) imminent threat of (b) something utterly unthinkable from a moral point of view. In such an emergency—a case of the “dirty hands” predicament that so often plagues political action (see Walzer 1973)—one may breach a basic and weighty moral principle such as civilian immunity, if that is the only hope of fending off the threat. So for more than three years, the RAF, later joined by the USAAF, deliberately devastated many German cities, killed about 600,000 civilians and seriously injured another 800,000 in an attempt to terrorize the German people into forcing their leadership to halt the war and surrender unconditionally. By early 1943 it was clear that Germany was not going to win the war, and all subsequent terror bombing lacked moral justification. But in its first year, in Walzer’s view, the terror bombing of Germany was morally justified as a response to the supreme emergency Britain was facing. Walzer then expands the notion of supreme emergency to apply to a single political community facing the threat of extermination or enslavement, and eventually to a single political community whose “survival and freedom” are at stake. For “the survival and freedom of political communities—whose members share a way of life, developed by their ancestors, to be passed on to their children—are the highest values of international society” (Walzer 2000: 254).