Seventy years after the greatest carnage of the 20th century was wreaked on a country by the dropping of the very strangely named atom bombs Little Boy on Hiroshima, and three days later of the Fat Man on Nagasaki, killing somewhere between 80,000 and 250,000 people, the saner voices in the world are still questioning the justification of the act. 

Was the bomb at all necessary to subjugate a country whose army had all but capitulated, although the call for 'unconditional' surrender delayed the actual laying down of arms? The paradox is that the eventual Japanese surrender on Sep 2, 1945 was not unconditional since the emperor continued to remain in the exalted position that the Japanese had wanted to see him continue in. It was not Hiroshima and Nagasaki but, as admitted by former Japanese Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoye, "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s." And there was also the fact that the Soviets had informed the Japanese in April 1945 that they were not going to renew the Soviet-Japanese Non-Aggression Pact of 1941.

And this inquiry will go on, perhaps for many more seventy years. But, regrettably, there will be no inquisition of the perpetrators of the worst kind of misery on a people; the after effects are still palpable in more ways than one. And the US government, which seems to believe that wars can be won by killing innocent women and children, has not taken the moral consequence for its action. This, unfortunately, is the psyche that has instigated the thoughts of American leadership in general, right from the time the country was settled and the country's West and South conquered, till recent times, manifested in the illegal occupation of Iraq and war in Afghanistan.

The reprehensible unconcern for human lives on the part of a government compelled by its desire to find and capture overseas markets and hogging the world's strategic resources is reflected in the crass remarks following large scale killings and even rejoicing in civilian disaster and misery. 

The jubilation, displayed by Truman on being told about Hiroshima – he is reported to have exclaimed that the bombing of Hiroshima was the greatest thing in history, and conveying the news of the deaths and destruction of Hiroshima to the American people was the happiest announcement he had ever made – is the most insensate statement from the president of a country that claimed moral leadership of the world.  

The satisfaction, expressed at the death of four hundred natives in the Pequod settlement in Connecticut in 1637, when they were put to the fire to satisfy the colonists' migratory urges, that, "the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice" reminds one of a similar disregard for human lives with the same tone and tenor, expressed not very long ago. Recall Madeleine Albright's reply, when asked in 1996 whether the US sanctions on Iraq, that had cost the lives of half a million children, more than had died in Hiroshima, was worth it. "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price? We think the price was worth it," she had replied. 

Such apathy to human lives can only come from a government hell bent on meeting at any cost the ends of its parochial and self-serving view of national interest. While there were sane and rational politicians in the US that had the gall to tell off the US president, suggesting that, "No US president could be jubilant over any device that could kill innocent human beings," Albright's remarks went un-protested.    

In 1945, there was opposition too to the bomb and the use of it. If the Americans were erroneously led into believing that the bomb was a military necessity one has only to read the views of the two most senior officers of the US military, Admiral William Leahy, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff and General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of US Forces in the Pacific at that time, to notice the fallacy of the official post-Hiroshima-Nagasaki narratives. They were of the view that the bombings were militarily unnecessary and morally reprehensible.

Events have proved the underlying motive of the US government to go ahead with the bombings. Nagasaki – Hiroshima was the message meant for the erstwhile Soviet Union, which the West and America considered their main enemy, and not so much the compulsion to save the lives of American soldiers were an invasion of Japan to happen. Look at the consequences of that – a nuclear proliferation of unprecedented scale. 

If, according to some scholars, the US, by dropping the bombs, had forfeited the moral authority to provide the kind of leadership the world needed following the Second World War, its moral standing in recent times has further eroded after it resorted to falsehood, deceit, fabrication and exploitation of the fear of the enemy, in the systematic destruction of Iraq as a country and society.   

The writer is Editor, Op-ed and Strategic Issues, The Daily Star.