Seventy-five years ago this week the world crossed an infernal threshold, with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan by the United States. Humankind had gained the technological capability for inflicting mass, instantaneous annihilation.
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki along with over 200,000 lives – 90 per cent of whom were civilians – was not a military act to end the Second World War, as the official American narrative would have us believe. It was a political act to begin the Cold War, deliberately carried out by American leaders to assert U.S. hegemony against the Soviet Union and all others. It was an act of fiendish, premeditated mass murder – genocide – with the political objective of instilling terror against all perceived adversaries of American ambitions for global dominance.
Many historians, including respected American scholars, have verified that the atomic bombing of Japan had nothing to do with swiftly ending the Pacific War and “saving U.S. lives”. It was simply an act of unspeakable barbarism for political aims to do with winning the anticipated Cold War. The bombs were dropped just as the Soviet Red Army entered the Korean Peninsula to augment the fight against Japanese imperial forces, as was previously agreed by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the Yalta conference of war-time allies back in February 1945. However, by the time of August 1945, Washington and London had moved considerably to adopt a more hostile position against Moscow, with a view to challenging the Soviet Union for spheres of influence in the postwar world.
There is no doubt that the indiscriminate mass murder of Japanese civilians with a new weapon of unprecedented savagery was carried out as a demonstration of psychopathic power by the United States. It was to be the ultimate warning. In short, it was a supreme act of terrorism. The earlier British-American aerial bombing of German cities and the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo inflicted more accumulated deaths, but the instantaneous destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki introduced a new terror lever, one that spelt total annihilation with single bombs.
By 1949, Washington’s terror monopoly lost its ace value when the Soviet Union developed its own atomic weapon. For over seven decades, the world has lived under the shadow of nuclear catastrophe, sometimes coming perilously close, as in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
Today, the U.S. and Russia each possess an estimated 6,000 nuclear weapons – accounting for over 90 per cent of the world’s total arsenal. Existing stockpiles are much reduced in number compared with past decades. Nevertheless, each one of these contemporary devices has an explosive power many times that of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is inconceivable that human life and the planet as we know it would survive a nuclear war. For that onerous reason, and to avoid “mutually assured destruction”, Washington and Moscow had cooperated historically to draw up several arms control treaties. But over the past two decades, the U.S. side has revoked treaty after treaty. The Trump administration is threatening to scrap the last remaining one, the New START accord which is due to expire in February next year unless it is renewed, which Washington seems ambiguous about. A policy of calculated ambiguity, it may be averred.
There can be little doubt that the Cold War is back with a vengeance as far as the American government and its propagandist corporate news media are concerned. In recent years and indeed weeks, the vilification and smears heaped upon both Russia and China have intensified to a frenzy. The week-in, week-out paranoia and hostility emanating from Washington towards Moscow and Beijing is on par with the unhinged red-baiting ravings of the McCarthyite era in the 1950s. The return of Cold War mindset in Washington is a concomitant of political and economic crises besetting American power as its presumed global empire lurches towards collapse.
In this context, the remembrance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki takes on an altogether more urgent purpose. It has to be recognized that Washington used nuclear annihilation as a terror weapon and it continues to play the same nefarious tactic to this day. There has never been an official apology out of Washington for the monstrous crime it committed in August 1945 because the American rulers have always wanted to maintain the “right” to terrorize others. The current warmongering out of Washington towards Russia and China amid baseless, provocative accusations, as well as military force build-up in sensitive regions, against the backdrop of unfettered arms control, all can only mean one thing: Washington is trying to use the terror card to subjugate others while running the diabolical risk of inciting a nuclear war.
The world should know that American politicians and their media boosters are collectively acting as a madman. American power ultimately relies on coercive terror. But Russia and China will not tolerate such psychopathic conduct, and, thankfully, have the defensive means to counter-threat. The American pretense of virtue is finally being exposed for the ugly reality that lies beneath.