THE MYTH THAT LICENSES EVERY WAR, AND THE CITIZENS WHO CAN END IT
By Janet Kira Lessin, CEO, World Peace Association
ANUNNAKI IDEOLOGY & USE OF MASS CIVILIAN MURDER CONTINUE TO THIS DAY
Americans, like most Earthlings, in thrall with the ancient Anunnaki ideology of domination consciousness, can accept any war, any means, as long as the war makers supply a reason.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki burned and mutilated hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, and children–perpetrated on a Japan ready to surrender.” Despite Truman’s excuse to the public that he had to nuke Japan so that American troops wouldn’t die when they invaded Japan, it was a deliberate lie. He later confessed that his real reason for the mass murder was to make sure that America, and not Russia, would dictate the terms of Japan’s surrender. Truman and his advisers knew that the only condition the Japanese were asking for before they surrendered was that their Emperor be spared and remain in office, albeit with his duties reduced to ceremonial ones. But Truman refused to meet their one condition, and to stop the Soviets from negotiating a surrender that would let the Japanese keep their Emperor, he “insisted on unconditional surrender.
In the spring of 2026, a rumor raced across Facebook, X, and Reddit: Donald Trump had supposedly reached for the nuclear codes during a White House emergency meeting on Iran, and General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had stood up and said no. The story spread rapidly because it sounded like the nightmare many people already feared. Yet as the report circulated, it weakened under scrutiny. The source who repeated it later acknowledged he did not have confirmation. The White House denied it. Fact-checkers found no solid corroboration. The story, at least in its most dramatic form, collapsed.
Still, something real remained underneath the rumor, and that is what deserves our attention.
The United States has repeatedly flirted with escalation against Iran. We know from past reporting that military action against Iran has been discussed at the highest levels before, and we know that senior advisors have, on more than one occasion, tried to slow or prevent rash moves. That pattern matters more than one viral anecdote. The pattern raises a larger and more disturbing question: what makes an American president believe he can contemplate the destruction of a city full of human beings and call it necessary?
The answer lives in Hiroshima. Hiroshima remains central not only because of what happened there, but because the story told about Hiroshima became the moral license for later wars.
Howard Zinn understood this moral architecture with unusual clarity. In his essay “Learning from Hiroshima,” he argued that the bombing of Hiroshima remains sacred to the American establishment because too much depends on keeping it sacred. If Hiroshima falls as a moral justification, much of the mythology of American war falls with it.
Zinn saw that Americans are taught a story about themselves from childhood. It is the story that America, unlike the truly evil nations of history, acts reluctantly, decently, and for good reasons. Other nations commit atrocities. America uses force only when necessity leaves no choice. Hiroshima sits near the center of that civic religion. To question it does not simply question one military decision. It threatens an entire moral identity.
That is why the subject provokes such defensiveness. Once people see Hiroshima not as a regrettable necessity but as the incineration of civilians on a massive scale, they begin to ask dangerous questions. If the “good war” contained such horror, what does that say about the wars that came after? If Hiroshima was wrong, what else has been justified by the same logic of necessity?
Zinn’s point was devastatingly simple. Any nation that believes it may use any means to secure its ends adopts a totalitarian philosophy, even if it calls itself democratic. The burning, mutilation, blinding, poisoning, and irradiation of human beings cannot become morally clean because leaders invoke strategy or patriotism. Once a population accepts that principle, it becomes easier to accept every later war offered under a fresh slogan. Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan: the reasons change, but the moral permission structure remains the same.
If Americans accept Hiroshima, they can be taught to accept almost anything.
The classic defense of Hiroshima and Nagasaki claims that the bombings saved lives. According to the legend, an invasion of Japan would have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, perhaps more, so the atomic bomb ended the war and spared even greater carnage. That defense has echoed for decades in textbooks, speeches, and patriotic memory.
Yet historians and military testimony have repeatedly complicated that story.
Senior American commanders later stated that Japan was already near defeat and that the bomb was not militarily necessary in the stark way later mythmakers claimed. General Dwight Eisenhower stated that he believed Japan was already defeated and that using the bomb was unnecessary. Admiral William Leahy, who chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the atomic bomb a barbarous weapon and wrote that the Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.
The diplomatic record suggests that Japanese leaders were exploring peace feelers. One major sticking point was the status of the emperor. American policymakers understood that if they allowed the emperor to remain as a symbolic figure, surrender might come sooner. In the end, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States allowed the emperor to remain anyway.
That is one of the most revealing facts in the whole story. The concession that could likely have saved countless lives came after the cities burned, not before.
Why, then, were the bombs dropped? Historians such as Gar Alperovitz have argued that the bomb also functioned as a geopolitical message to the Soviet Union and as a tool of postwar power projection. Domestic politics mattered as well. Political leaders often act under electoral pressures, ideological rigidity, and fear of appearing weak. That may sound cynical, but history rarely rewards innocence in such matters.
Hiroshima did not emerge from pure necessity. It emerged from war, empire, fear, calculation, and political ambition. Once we admit that, the myth begins to crack.
The mythology of necessity survives in part because so many people never linger on what the bomb actually did. The nuking was not “necessary”; it was Truman’s calculated murder of civilians whom he killed to support his fear of the Soviets.
The mushroom cloud became the iconic image. The people beneath it became statistics. Yet the real legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lived not in the cloud but in the bodies of survivors and their descendants. The bomb did not simply kill. It was irradiated, scarred, disfigured, and haunted.
The immediate dead numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Many perished in the blasts, fires, and collapsing structures. Many others survived the first hours only to die later of radiation sickness, cancers, burns, infection, and slow bodily breakdown. Survivors, the hibakusha, carried that damage across decades. Leukemia rose first. Multiple cancers followed. Psychological trauma remained constant.
The most heartbreaking evidence concerns the children carried in the womb at the time of the bombings. Scientific and medical reporting documented severe effects on fetal development, particularly when exposure occurred during key windows of gestation. Microcephaly, intellectual disability, and developmental injury became part of the lived record. The bombs did not stop at the skin of the mother. They crossed into the next generation before birth.
The second generation presents a more debated scientific picture. Large official studies over decades have often concluded that no statistically clear transgenerational genetic effect has been definitively detected in postwar offspring of survivors. Yet survivors and their children have continued to challenge the confidence of those conclusions. Even where formal germline mutation remains debated, the social inheritance is unquestionable: trauma, stigma, fear, disrupted marriage prospects, anxiety, and the living memory of contamination.
The bomb became heritable as social reality, whether or not every aspect of biological inheritance has been fully resolved.
That is the human meaning of nuclear warfare. It does not end with the blast. It travels through wombs, bodies, homes, institutions, and generations.
IS IRAN AMERICA’S NEXT TARGET FOR CIVILIAN MASS MURDER AND GENERATIONALLY-TRANSMITTED MUTATION?
Iran is not an abstraction. It is not a talking point, a map coordinate, or a strategic target package. It is a civilization of immense age and memory. It is made of cities, neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, mothers, fathers, children, elders, students, workers, and unborn babies. Tehran alone contains millions of lives woven into a single urban fabric.
A nuclear strike on an Iranian city would not replay Hiroshima exactly. It could be worse. Modern nuclear warheads exceed the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb many times over. The physical destruction would be immense. The medical devastation would spread through burns, trauma, radiation sickness, cancer, contaminated infrastructure, and long-term ecological damage. The suffering would not remain confined within one city’s boundaries. Fallout, fear, displacement, retaliatory escalation, and geopolitical unraveling would follow.
And then, just as before, the reasons would arrive.
We would hear that the strike was regrettable but necessary. We would hear that it prevented a larger war, defended American interests, halted nuclear development, sent a message to adversaries, or saved lives in the long run. The same language that wrapped Hiroshima in moral gauze would be used again, updated for a new generation and a new target. IMHO, we must stop Trump from making Tehran the next Hiroshima.
That is why Hiroshima matters now. The myth of a justified genocide by nuking stands ready to license the next bomb.
Howard Zinn spent his life reminding readers that governments do not act in a vacuum. They act in relation to what populations tolerate, resist, normalize, or refuse.
That lesson matters now because many people feel powerless in the face of military machinery. Yet history tells another story. Workers built unions under violence and repression. Women won the vote. Civil rights activists overturned entrenched systems. Soldiers resisted unjust wars. Whistleblowers disrupted secrecy. Entire movements have altered the course of states by refusing the script written for them.
War persists not only because leaders order it but because populations are trained to regard it as inevitable, necessary, mature, realistic, or patriotic. Break that training, and political space begins to close around the war-makers.
That is why writing matters. Testimony matters. Scholarship matters. Public refusal matters. Every article that challenges the mythology of necessary violence weakens the moral permission structure on which the next war depends.
Refusal is not merely a feeling. It is a practice.
It begins with language. We can refuse euphemisms such as “tactical nuclear weapon,” “limited option,” or “surgical strike.” These phrases sanitize mass death. A nuclear weapon kills children whether strategists call it tactical or strategic. A limited nuclear option still annihilates neighborhoods, hospitals, and human futures.
Refusal continues through political pressure. Citizens can call their senators and representatives, insist on accountability for war powers, challenge media narratives, and support organizations that work on arms control, peace, and nuclear abolition. They can amplify survivors’ testimony. They can share the words of hibakusha who have spent decades warning humanity not to repeat the crime committed against them.
Refusal also belongs to culture. Writers, podcasters, teachers, artists, experiencers, and researchers shape the emotional and moral climate in which decisions become possible or impossible. The myth survives because it is repeated. It weakens when more people tell the truth.
I speak here not only as a writer but as a lifelong contact experiencer. For decades, experiencers have said that nonhuman intelligences seem deeply concerned with humanity’s nuclear capacity. Whatever one makes of the disclosure record, the symbolic and moral meaning is clear enough. Nuclear weapons represent a civilizational threshold. They measure whether intelligence has matured into wisdom or stalled at the level of destructive power.
That is why refusal matters so much. It is not passive. It is the active defense of the future.
Eighty-one years ago, an American president made a choice whose moral consequences still shape the world. The mythology built around that choice has licensed later violence again and again. We stand now in another era of danger, and the old myth waits patiently for its next assignment.
We do not need to learn again from another incinerated city.
The babies of Hiroshima, the injured wombs, the long cancers, the stigmatized families, the hidden griefs, the villages burned in later wars, the children broken by sanctions, drone strikes, bombings, and embargoes—these form the actual record beneath the rhetoric. Human beings have paid for the myth of necessary violence with their flesh, their memory, and their unborn future.
That payment can stop.
Refusal stops it. Refusal that names the lie, documents the cost, amplifies survivors’ testimony, and narrows the political room in which leaders imagine they can act without consequence. Military advisors may or may not hold the line in a crisis. Bureaucracies may or may not restrain a reckless president. But across history, one force has repeatedly altered events: the organized refusal of ordinary people.
In my own mythic and spiritual language, I hear an echo here from Ninmah, the great healing mother of the old stories, who recognized that those who unleash weapons of terror on cities cross a threshold that strips away any claim to civilization. Whether we speak in historical, moral, political, or sacred terms, the principle remains the same.
We learned from Hiroshima.
We do not need to learn again from Tehran.
The choice belongs to us now: citizens, writers, witnesses, experiencers, scholars, and ordinary human beings who still know how to say no.
The bomb does not fall if we refuse to let it.
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REFERENCES
Howard Zinn, “Learning from Hiroshima”
Gar Alperovitz, works on the decision to use the atomic bomb
David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945
Radiation Effects Research Foundation
Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission historical research
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum
Atomic Heritage Foundation
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Testimony of the hibakusha and second-generation survivor community
https://dragonattheendoftime.com
https://aquarianradio.com
https://enkispeaks.com
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