When I was two years old, my Uncle Bud was in the Philippines training to be part of our invasion force into Japan when President Truman made the final decision to use our atomic bombs. My family never doubted the morality of the decision. Based on Japan’s military tradition of bushido and the fact they would be defending their homeland, it was estimated that America would lose a minimum of 250,000 and possibly up to 4,000,000 soldiers in “Operation Downfall”. From my family’s viewpoint, the loss of 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was justified by Japan’s “pre-emptive” attack on our naval fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 07, 1941. Of course, the average Japanese citizen played no part in and had no control over the Emperor’s and his government’s military strategy. In general, today’s nuclear weapons are estimated to be more than 3,000 times as powerful as either Hiroshima’s “Little Boy” or Nagasaki’s “Fat Man”, with concomitant increases in fallout.
According to a May 13, 2013 article posted on the Internet as authored by Nick Turse from Mother Jones, Politics, if Israel used a nuclear weapon against Tehran, Iran, an estimated 5.6 million people would be killed and another 1.6 million injured. That would be about the same total as the number of Jews the Nazis slaughtered in the Holocaust. Hitler justified the Holocaust by blaming Germany’s Jewish population for Germany’s economic woes after WWI. However, it was not the Jewish citizens but the draconian conditions foisted upon all Germans by the June 28, 1919 Treaty of Versailles that prevented Germany’s recovery. Hitler just used the minority Jewish population as a scapegoat to help the Nazis take power, much as the Zionists in Israel, as aided and abetted by President Trump, are using the Iranians as an excuse to invade Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. It is always helpful to have a group to blame and hate, especially if one can use differing religions to stir the witch’s brew.
President Trump has publicly threatened to bomb Iran and has just dispatched approximately one-third of America’s bombers to be positioned to protect Israel from a counter attack or to prepare for a bombing or land incursion of Iran by our own forces. Just as the United States chose to use its atomic bombs so that my uncle and our other military personnel could avoid the almost certain bloodbath of a Japan landing, Israel, or even the U.S.A., might seek to avoid losses by using nuclear weapons. If so, there are other countries with nuclear weapons who might see “pre-emptive” strikes as the most rational self-defense; China, Russia, North Korea, Pakistan and India are nuclear capable. So are France and the United Kingdom. But even though we have fought two wars against England and a couple of war-lite fights with France, American war with either is currently unlikely.
And it is not just nuclear powers the United States might need to be cautious about. After all, President Trump has challenged Mexico, Canada, Greenland, Denmark and several South American countries, not to mention Turkey which has never been averse to a fight. America need not look hard if we want to turn words, or tariffs, into bombs.
Perhaps we should not assume we and/or Israel can just impose our desires on other countries with impunity. As has been proved for thousands of years, the “Glory of Rome” almost always ends up falling on its own sword or is hoisted on its own petard. Two hundred and fifty years is but a moment of hubris in the panoply of history’s irony.