Monday, 11 August 2025

On The Money

The Bank of England has appealed for ideas as to what should be on its next series of banknotes, and even many young people have replied. Yet the Government refuses to protect the right to use cash. This is not about being against cards or apps. I use mine all the time. This is about vulnerable people, local circular economies, and civil liberties. In France, Article 642-3 of the penal code bans traders from refusing cash payment. We need that here. No, the legal tender thing does not cover it. You are not in debt to the vendor until you have the goods.

A suspicious number of those who decry us sceptics of the cashless society also claim that we are under constant threat of cyberattacks, and a surprising number of those who are forthright against the cashless society are enthusiasts for cryptocurrencies, about which the clue is in the name. In the cashless economy, every penny that we spent would be tracked. Cryptocurrencies are beyond democratic political control. And the combination of the two would be, and increasingly is, that level of tracking by those who were thus unaccountable.

That said, democratic political control needs to be vested in the right people. In asserting that “the rider is as big as the horse”, Kemi Badenoch demonstrates her perfect ignorance of the fact that all state benefits were taxable income, that the state pension was a benefit, that two in five Universal Credit claimants were in work, that Personal Independence Payment was an in-work benefit, and that if half of adults were not paying income tax, then, apart from a few very wealthy tax avoiders or evaders, half of adults had gross annual incomes of less than £12,570. On the other side, the economy is positively shrinking, and borrowing is not far off double what had been expected, but Rachel Reeves is still there. There really must be no one else. Well, no one else who usefully did not understand the money supply, anyway.

The issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. It says so on the banknotes. That is another reason to keep them. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control. The responsibility of the Government is to ensure the supply of goods and services to be purchased with that currency.

It is impossible for the currency-issuing State to run out of money. Money “lent” to the Treasury by the Bank of England is money “lent” to the State by the State; such “debt” will never be called in, much less will bailiffs be sent round. Call this “the Magic Money Tree” if you will. There is no comparison between running the economy and managing a household budget, or even a business. There is no “national credit card” to “max out”. “Fiscal headroom” is only the gap between the Government’s tax and spending plans and what would be allowed under the fiscal rules that it sets for itself and changes frequently.

That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to give the currency its value by controlling inflation to a politically chosen extent while discouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while encouraging others, including economic equality, which is fundamental to social cohesion and thus to patriotism. There is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even if those bonds were held by anyone else, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free-floating, fiat currency to redeem them. Say it again that there is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt.

Taxation is not where the State’s money comes from. Nothing is “unaffordable”, every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”. Within and under that understanding, a tax of one to two per cent on assets above £10 million could abolish the two-child benefit cap 17 times over, while merely taxing each of Britain’s 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion, an entire year’s tax take. The taxation of unearned income at the same rate as earnings, as was the case under Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson, could easily abolish the two-child benefit cap as advocated by Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman, restore the £20 per week uplift to the Universal Credit two in five claimants of which were in work, and extend that uplift to disability benefits, all of which would inject money directly into the consumer economy. And so on.

There is no case whatever for cutting the benefits of the sick and disabled as if that would cure them or find them jobs, for retaining the two-child benefit cap, for withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment from anyone, for increasing workers’ bus fares by 50 per cent, for failing to freeze Council Tax, for threatening to abolish the single person discount, for increasing employers’ National Insurance contributions so as to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, for forcing working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to giant American agribusinesses, or for any other form of austerity. There is an unanswerable economic and moral case for the full compensation of, among others, the victims of Orgreave, Grenfell Tower, the Windrush scandal, the Post Office scandal, and the contaminated blood scandal, as well as the WASPI women and those, such as Andrew Malkinson, who were wrongfully imprisoned. All while renationalising the railways, the water companies, and the Royal Mail.

Red Lines, Yellow Journalism

Angela Rayner is the most disappointing British politician of her generation, which is my generation. To secure disaffiliation from the Labour Party and then to build what came next, join Unite Community here. Notice that the gossip about Len McCluskey, which had been doing the rounds for years, was given top story coverage on the day that the Blairs’ bizarre shopping arrangements while in government should have received far more attention, not least because they so resembled the Starmers’. What a thing it was the hear again the name of Carole Caplin, Britain’s Joan Quigley. Every Prime Minister has a little court, but none before, nor any since until Boris Johnson, has been surrounded by quite so undistinguished a bunch as Tony Blair managed. The ear of our Head of Government was had by Caplin, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, Michael Levy, and all that trash.

Rayner made her Prime Ministerial pitch to the Far Right media on the eve of the Durham Miners’ Gala. I had promised on Twitter that I would march with the Prison Officers’ Association after the attack by Hashem Abedi in HMP Frankland. Unable to do so, I was yards away and within easy earshot of the brass bands. Although a High Court injunction prevents Prison Officers from taking industrial action, the crisis in the prisons endangers every workplace in the country, so all other trade unionists should consider taking such action until that crisis had been remedied to the satisfaction of the POA. In September, a motion to that effect should be brought both to the Trades Union Congress, where the story would be that it would pass, and to the Labour Party Conference, where the story would be that it would not.

Among those to whom the Big Meeting gave a rapturous reception were the great Eddie Dempsey, the Palestinian Ambassador Dr Husam Zumlot, and the best man at Dr Zumlot’s wedding in 2010, Jeremy Corbyn. Having long ago ceased to be a member of any political party, and having no intention of ever again joining one, I welcome the foundation of Your Party as a contribution to the struggle for economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends. That said, given the support of someone like Zarah Sultana for Net Zero and for gender self-identification, and their ambivalence about Brexit, why not just join the Green Party? That is not a rhetorical question.

The most obvious answer is that Zack Polanski is personally implicated in the anti-Semitism scam against Corbyn, and that the Greens, of whom he is already Deputy Leader, support NATO and the war in Ukraine, in keeping with the fanaticism of the governing Greens in Germany. Russia hawks, you are now Trump supporters. Trump supporters, you are now Russia hawks. Would it take a heart of stone not to laugh? I famously have a heart of stone, but I am still laughing. Some of us had the sense never to have been happy that Donald Trump was President of the United States, but always to have been delighted that Kamala Harris was not, that Joe Biden no longer was, and that Hillary Clinton never had been. All four are once again on the same side. Your side. The side of Jeffrey Epstein.
 
We who recognised that our objectives were incompatible with anti-industrial Malthusianism, with the denial of material reality, and with the enforcement of global capitalism by undemocratic institutions, should continue to take every opportunity to vote for the Workers Party of Britain and for the Social Democratic Party, in that order. Those parties should continue to provide us with those opportunities, and the SDP should review its support for those who had killed British military veterans who were unarmed aid workers in Gaza, bombing them three times to make sure that they were dead. Otherwise, we may indeed need to vote instead for Your Party in the absence of the Workers Party, although never otherwise.

The British Government refuses to deny that the nightly RAF reconnaissance flights over Gaza, for which the Israelis are not even required to pay, provided the intelligence for that multiple murder. So, that is a confirmation, then. And context for the actions, whatever one may make of them as tactics or as strategy, of Palestine Action, banned by an all-or-nothing measure that required any MP voting against it to vote against banning Maniacs Murder Cult (part of the Order of the Nine Angels, itself part of the subculture that gives me most of my grief) and the Russian Imperial Movement. Legislation against criminal damage was already sufficient against Palestine Action. Branding its members and supporters “terrorists” recalls Labour in Opposition, when it usually abstained rather than oppose the then Governments attacks on civil liberties, and when it never suggested that it might repeal even the ones against which it had voted. Both traditional conservatives and the populist Right, especially in its rapidly emerging unofficial forms, are among those defined as enemies by the ruling class. Think on. Not least in relation to Blair’s digital ID, which Conservative and Reform UK voters overwhelmingly support, with more than a third of each strongly in favour, including Sarah Pochin.

To its great credit, the RAF at every level dissented so fiercely from having to fly those missions that a few days ago, the Government had to contract them out to Sierra Nevada Corporation instead. Ignore any other version of events. The spirit of 1946 lives. There was of course a Labour Government in 1946. Britains best ever, but that is only a relative statement, not exclusively, yet nevertheless especially, where Abroad was concerned. As the Chagos deal unravels in terms that would force the resignation of a Prime Minister who ever really had been a human rights lawyer, remember that both of the previous betrayals of the Chagossians also happened under Labour Governments, and were indeed perpetrated by those whom the Right regarded as its two greatest lost Leaders since Hugh Gaitskell, Denis Healey and David Miliband. How the world turns, with the Palestinian Ambassador at the Gala. Things have come a long way since the days of Sam Watson, after whom a room in the Knesset building is named, who unless I am very much mistaken never served in uniform, and who remains reviled for his long tenure as General Secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association. In what was then that powerful position in the life of the nation, he acted as an unofficial Israeli Ambassador, he conspired to have Aneurin Bevan expelled from the Labour Party, he collaborated with the National Coal Board to close pits, he opposed all local strikes, he instructed local officials to support management over sackings, and accordingly he left the Durham miners with the lowest pay in the country until the strikes of 1972 and 1974, after his death. Why did they not get rid of him? He was backed by Israeli, and American, muscle, and that meant muscle.

Under the late, great Davey Hopper, the DMA was unshakeable in its support for the County Durham Teaching Assistants, whose plight was an important foretaste of Labour in office, and in whose cause I voted for Owen Temple in 2017. As a moderate conservative socially, as an immoderate left-winger economically, as an unrepentant Leave voter, and as an implacable opponent of almost any British military intervention, my politics are hardly those of the more pro-austerity and pro-war party to the Coalition the resumption of which is one of the likelier outcomes of the generally unpredictable General Election of 2029. But even the Liberal Democrats can have their moments. And with their 72 MPs, plus one for their allies in the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, as well as their storming of Conservative municipal barns across the South and the countryside, together with their provision of the Official Opposition to Reform from Durham to Kent, it is scandalous that no national columnist is a Lib Dem, that there is so rarely a Lib Dem panellist on radio or television, and so on. They obviously do not need the publicity. What they need is the scrutiny.

During the Coalition, The Guardian, which had advocated a Lib Dem vote in 2010, published Conservatives, but not Lib Dems. To this day, they are allowed to pretend that they had been in the room only for the increase in undergraduate tuition fees. In 2019, I listened to the Lib Dem candidate for North West Durham bang on for several minutes about the Bedroom Tax. He never spoke to me again after I pointed out that his party had been in government at the time. Both parties to the Coalition were and are to blame for everything that it did, from that, to the war in Libya, to the Post Office scandal, for which Ed Davey was the Minister responsible, to the privatisation of the Royal Mail, which was done by Vince Cable. Oh, the comments that I used to have to reject when I mentioned that the Post Office had had to be cut out of the Royal Mail in 2011 so that the Royal Mail could be privatised, because the City had known, even then, about Horizon, and would therefore have refused to have bought the Royal Mail in its complete form, or to have handled the sale. On 24 May 2024, that was confirmed.

You may say that many commentators already identified as liberals. Well, Eddie Izzard identifies as a woman. But he is not one. I was once sent review copies of Oliver Kamm’s and Douglas Murray’s respective books as a kind of job lot; as essentially a single work. Centrism and official right-wing populism are both con tricks, each pretending to disagree with the other. The populism is in fact massively unpopular, while the centrism is thoroughly eccentric. I knew Edward Dutton at university. He once tried to seduce me after Mass, so I know his little secret. Dutton is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda. In 2018, Dutton secured the publication of this masterpiece in Evolutionary Psychological Science. On the Editorial Board of that is Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard. In 2021, a very short time indeed from 2018 in the life of a quarterly journal, Pinker wrote that, Oliver Kamm’s urbanity, erudition and compassion are raised to the power of two in Mending the Mind. He put them to work in crafting this gorgeous and urgent book, and on every page they remind us of his moral that enviable gifts are no protection against the affliction of depression. Kamm, Pinker, Dutton, Batterjee. Batterjee, Dutton, Pinker, Kamm. Truly, an Axis of Evil. Douglas Murray, indeed.

Murray was a great friend and mentee of Christopher Hitchens, whom Gore Vidal famously named his “dauphin or delfino before outliving him, and whose dauphin or delfino Kamm comically purports to be. But when the time came, who could succeed Peter Hitchens? That old column of Alan Clark’s and Norman Tebbit’s would go to the liberal Right’s golden boy of the moment. Perhaps Sir Jake Berry, Net Zero enthusiast, Remain campaigner, and latest recruit to the party whose only Privy Counsellor is Ann Widdecombe, faithful Junior Minister under John Major, Shadow Cabinet stalwart under William Hague, twice cheerleader for the putative Leadership of Ken Clarke, scourge of foxhunting, only Conservative MP to vote with Gordon Brown for 42-day detention without charge, autobiographical praiser of Michael Heseltine for having killed off the British coal industry, and avowed opponent of the Assisted Suicide Bill only because it contained insufficient “safeguards”. Or Tim Montgomerie, spear-carrier for the Prime Minister of Net Zero, of very big spending long before Covid-19, of the highest net migration ever, of Stonewall, of the lifting of the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, of the lockdowns, of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and of the war in Ukraine. Or Dame Andrea Jenkyns, a Minister in that Government and a fanatical supporter of that Prime Minister.

Blair treated us to his view on the small boats when he had the effrontery to comment on the twentieth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks that he had caused. His solution was digital ID because of course it was. Identity cards have been the solution in search of a problem at least since Michael Howard was Home Secretary, Shadowed by Blair. Ever since, British politics has been largely defined by the unseemly bidding war between them. Now calling for digital ID, Blair is still at it. He did in fact secure passage of the Identity Cards Act 2006, but so little came of it that when it was repealed by the Identity Documents Act 2010, then that was unamended and unopposed, without even any compensation for those who had forked out for the cards. Did you ever see one? It was supposed to have been about terrorism, as everything was in those days, but the latest excuse is the boat people, as it is for everything these days. Yet just as all the 9/11 bombers had had genuine identity documents, and just as identity cards had done nothing to prevent the Madrid bombing, so the small boats are coming from France, which already has identity cards. The fallback option will be to argue that this was necessary to keep under-18s off social media, and thus to preclude events such as those depicted in Adolescence. Again, though, even in its own terms, does that work on the Continent?

The real targets are elsewhere. Both traditional conservatives and the non-Establishment populist Right are at last waking up to the fact that they are as much enemies of our rulers as the rest of us. They would be constantly ordered to show their digital ID as surely as would be, say, pro-Palestinian demonstrators, or trade unionists. The latter need not, and do not, imagine that funding the governing party would make any difference. The Government has picked its side in Birmingham, and no one is remotely surprised. A day on strike is a day without pay, so a month on strike is a month without pay. No one does that for a lark. But an eight thousand pound pay cut is this unacceptable. It ranks with Abedi’s assaults on Prison Officers, who are unjustly precluded from striking, meaning that all other trade unionists should act against the danger that their unsafe workplace posed to every workplace in the country. Stab vests were deemed necessary in order to arrest me, so how can they possibly not be issued to those who had been charged to control Abedi for, realistically, the rest of his life?

Veterans Before Refugees” declared the Twelfth of July bonfire at Moygashel. That was the wrong way of phrasing it, but if they did not mean James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman, then why not? If we are to be so afraid of Iran, then why does the Department for Business and Trade still publish advice on how to trade with it and do business there? Iran’s increasing invocation of its Persian past is both a clear message to Israel and a rebuke to the extremely pro-Israeli, and overtly Israeli-backed, partisans of the ridiculous fantasist Reza Pahlavi, who is supported by a mostly elderly three per cent of Iranian-Americans, heavily concentrated in and around Los Angeles, and by almost no one else in the world. They have been prominent in the off-the-books state and institutional violence against the pro-peace encampment at UCLA. Throughout this century, the Israeli flag has been conspicuous at Far Right events the world over, and on 26 October, a march and rally in support of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon also featured most or all of the Iranian monarchist flags in Britain outside specialist museums of one or more of Persiana, royalty and vexillology. How could Yaxley-Lennon talk his way out of contesting either Nigel Farage’s or Richard Tice’s seat in 2029, with one of his supporters standing against each of Reform’s MPs, and with one of the Ballymena rioters coming for Jim Allister’s majority of 450? Ponder these things.

Not least by pondering the potential lowering of the voting age. Like the proscription of Palestine Action, and like the ongoing transmania of the Hollyoaks that I only watch in prison, this proposal has the feel of a time lag. Sometimes people should be given what they had wished for. The boys would largely vote for the most traditionalist or right-populist candidate on the ballot paper, and the girls for the wokest, who would not be the candidate of Keir Starmer. Corbyn once had a young male following, but that was a different world. Farage seems similarly out of date in his call for Proportional Representation, which if anything might now be introduced to stop Reform from winning.

If you can have sex legally at 16, but you have to be 18 to vote, then if 16-year-olds could vote, then why should 14-year-olds, and thus effectively anyone at secondary school, not be able to have sex without sanction of them or their partners? If we are going to hold the line against allowing 16-year-olds to self-identify as the opposite sex, then we need to hold the line against allowing them to vote. I have always been uncharacteristically agnostic about that one, but while the usual arguments on both sides are rubbish, this changes the game. Intentionally or otherwise, the lowering of the voting age for devolved and municipal elections in Scotland set the scene for it, and must be reversed. The quality of the elections varies widely, but a formal voting age of 18 is very nearly universal. Consider the huge difference in, say, drinking ages, or ages of marriage. Yet the world looks at the question of when to allow people to vote, and overwhelmingly it concludes that, while these things were always going to be arbitrary, 18 would do.

The only notable exception has been the election of two of the last four Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom. There is no minimum age to join the Conservative Party, and even if anyone were checking, then voting rights would officially kick in at the age of 15. Like foreign nationals, overseas residents, and incarcerated convicts, 15-year-olds have officially, and younger children have no doubt unofficially, voted for two of the last four Prime Ministers, who have taken office immediately upon having been declared elected Party Leader while Parliament was not even sitting. If you are going to let the very young exercise that kind of power, then why not let them do anything else?

We give the citizens of the Commonwealth’s other member states the right to vote and stand in elections to our Parliament, but very few of those countries reciprocate; two of the last six Prime Ministers of Australia have had to give up their natal British citizenship in order to sit in the Australian Parliament. The present system enfranchises Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, but not Americans or Israelis. Is that what those who write above the line in the Daily Telegraph want? It says that Ghanaians are more like us than Germans are, and that Swazis are more like us than Swedes are. Is that what those who write below the line in the Daily Mail want? 

Countries join and leave the Commonwealth quite frequently. None of them has any more recent connection to Britain that any member of the European Economic Area has. By any measure, many have less. Some fairly recent additions to the Commonwealth have no more connection to Britain than anywhere else in the world has. Although no less, either. Britain’s superdiversity uniquely combines having people from every inhabited territory on Earth, having some level of ethnic diversity down to every neighbourhood and village, and having a huge and exponentially increasing mixed-race population in the society that accepted mixed-race people and couples more than anywhere else.

Either parliamentary candidates should have to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland, but there would be no nationality requirement for voting. Or there should simply be no nationality requirement either to vote or to stand. Either would do, but it does have to be one or the other. Instead, though, the European Union is overwhelmingly white, and it is only EU citizens whom it is proposed to enfranchise. But beware of tying the franchise to the payment of income tax. 42 per cent of adults have incomes that do not reach that threshold. No, not before benefits. Those are taxable income. Two in five adults have gross incomes, from all sources, of less of than one thousand pounds per month. If that does not sound like the Britain that you know, then you need to get out more. And if a Polish full-time cleaner could not vote because her income was too low for the taxman, then why should a British full-time cleaner be able to vote? So it would begin. So it is already beginning.

The King's Great Matter?

On 12 November, the Labour Party imposed a three-line whip in the House of Commons to defeat a backbench Conservative attempt to remove the Lords Spiritual from the House of Lords. The Government clearly intends to appoint its own supporters, and why not? The present arrangements have never been adequate to fill 26 seats in Parliament, of which three carried lifetime appointment to the Privy Council, with two of those having hitherto promised automatic life peerages on retirement.

At least one of those is at least as hard-fought as any other parliamentary seat. The BBC's recent hit job on the Lord Bishop of Leicester, Dr Martyn Snow, echoes that of The Times on the then Lord Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, in 2002. Also from an Evangelical background, will Dr Snow, too, end up a Monsignor? Those who play the "stalking" and "safeguarding" cards very often do indeed have ties to witchcraft. In questioning Jay Hulme's suitability for ordination when she participated in séances and tarot readings, Dr Snow was taking on the Church of England's informal but considerable links to popular occultism, pseudohistory and pseudoscience; Miss Hulme also imagines herself to be a man. 

Those who preferred that constituency have bitten back, tellingly via Radio Four. To whose benefit? We may find out when, as in 2002, The Tablet and the Methodist Recorder published simultaneous editorials in support of the same, subsequently successful, candidate for this permanent place in Parliament and on the Privy Council. This is politics. Proper politics. They may never again have the chance, since the Government is manifestly planning to move such decisions out of their salons and into its own.

The present Lords Spiritual therefore have nothing to lose, and should all vote against Second and Third Reading of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, if necessary forcing those to a vote at all. Or why are they there? And what of the King? The Treason Act 1351 makes it treasonable to "compass or imagine" the death of the monarch, such as by assisting his suicide, while the Treason Act 1702 and the Treason Act (Ireland) 1703 make it treasonable to attempt to hinder the Succession to the Throne in accordance with the 1689 Bill of Rights and the 1701 Act of Settlement, to which both assisted suicide and formally decriminalised abortion may be said to be potential threats.

Superficially comparable measures have either not applied in England, or not been opposed by the Church of England as such. On the contrary, it pretty much wrote the 1967 Abortion Act, and it assertively supported the even further liberalisation under Margaret Thatcher; abortion up to birth has been legal since 1990 for "severe abnormality" that did not need to be specified, and readily available since 1967, as could have been predicted by anyone who had read the Bill, never mind written it. For example, Michael Ramsey.

As the Coronation Oath reads: "Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?" "All this I promise to do," replied the King.

Thus, within the meaning of the Oath, is the same thing said in four different ways. "The Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel" are defined as "in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law," which is defined as "the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England," which are defined as "all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to [the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge] or any of them."

Those rights and privileges are of course defined by Parliament. Within the understanding of the Coronation Oath, whatever Parliament defines as the rights and privileges, mostly in relation to incomes and property, of the Church of England's clergy are the only meaning of the settlement of the Church of England, thus the only meaning of the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law, and thus the only meaning of the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel.

The King is therefore bound by the Coronation Oath precisely and solely to sign whatever Parliament puts in front of him. That, and that alone, is his sworn duty as monarch. This has always been thoroughly repugnant to many. For as long as anyone has checked, then there have been at least as many Recusants, Dissenters and Nonconformists as there have been members of the Church of England, and there are now vastly more, albeit within an extremely secular society at large.

The status of the late Queen as Defender of the Faith did not preclude Royal Assent to assisted suicide in Canada or New Zealand, both of which retain the title. Pope Leo X did confer the title Fidei Defensor on Henry VIII, but in its present form it derives from its conferral by Parliament on Henry's son, Edward VI, meaning that, again, the Faith to be Defended is whatever Parliament says that it is. "Defender of the Faith" notably remained part of the Royal Title of the Irish Free State throughout that State's existence. Not that it has ever been peculiarly British or English; various monarchs have used it in various times and places, and Popes have conferred it on a number of people.

For example, Catherine of Aragon was a Defender of the Faith in her own right. A generation into his revolt, Martin Luther supported Catherine against Henry VIII. As did William Tyndale, who effectively went to the stake at Vilvoorde rather than return to an England that he did not regard as having really become Protestant at all. Like Luther, Tyndale had no truck with some king who wanted to get divorced because he had got his bit on the side pregnant. The robustly Protestant supporters of Lady Jane Grey sought to write Elizabeth as well as Mary out of the Succession, since while Mary was a Catholic, Elizabeth was a bastard. People who took Protestantism seriously, including as an international movement, lost a Civil War in England.

The reality of that defeat would be brought home for the first time in living memory, as the reality of the defeat of the Catholic England that held sway for a millennium would be brought home for the first time in a good two generations, when Royal Assent was granted to assisted suicide, not in defiance of the Coronation Oath, but pursuant to it, and not in spite of the King's status as Defender of the Faith, but because of it. Put not your trust in princes. Do not necessarily try to get rid of them. But put not your trust in them.

Assuming that the Lords Spiritual had indeed done everything possible to block it, if and when assisted suicide received the Royal Assent that the King would be bound by his Coronation Oath to grant it, then the Church of England would have to reconsider its entire relationship with the monarchy, or else a whole host of others would have to reconsider our relations with the Church of England. As we would if it had failed to oppose that Bill at every opportunity.

Friday, 8 August 2025

How Private Equity Ruined Britain

Gus Carter writes:

What has happened to Britain’s rivers isn’t a mistake. The fact that serious pollution is up 60 per cent on the year, or that only one in seven rivers can be called ecologically healthy, is the result of corporate tactics. It is effluent from the murky world of private equity.

Some 2.5 million people in the UK now work for a business that is ultimately owned by private equity. Since the 2008 financial crisis, Britain has become a prime target for takeovers, driven by low company valuations, favourable exchange rates and a pliable regulatory environment. Everything from Bella Italia to the Blackpool Tower, Travelodge to Legoland, the AA to Zizzi, has been owned by private equity. Today, it claims to make around £7 in every £100 generated for the British economy. In the first half of last year, 60 per cent of the total invested in UK firms via private equity was from abroad.

Many will see this as a success story: British ingenuity attracting international money. Those who worry about foreign investment are seen as misguided and a little jingoistic. The emphasis should be on the investment, rather than worrying that our high streets and infrastructure have been sold off to foreign buyers looking for a good deal.

The reply to these free marketeers can be seen floating down our rivers and in the balance sheets of our creaking water companies. Back in 1991, water firms had a debt-to-equity ratio of 4 per cent. Today it’s around 70 per cent, with some firms having neared 95 per cent. Where did that money go? Clearly not enough of it has been funnelled into infrastructure.

Take Thames Water, which serves a quarter of all British households. In 2006, the utility was bought by a consortium led by the Australian private equity firm the Macquarie Group. Over the next 11 years, Thames Water’s debts grew from £3.2 billion to £10 billion, while £2.8 billion was paid out in dividends. Macquarie borrowed against the value of the business – reservoirs, treatments works, even future cash flow – to pay out even more to shareholders

Thames Water’s parent company became enmeshed in a complex web of intercompany loans and shell structures in places like the Cayman Islands. During the period of Macquarie’s ownership, the company paid just £100,000 in corporation tax. Thames Water is now so heavily indebted, its infrastructure so degraded, that there are serious discussions about renationalisation.

In 1991, water firms had a debt-to-equity ratio of 4 per cent. Today it’s 70 per cent. Where did the money go?

Macquarie defends its behaviour, arguing that they did invest in infrastructure and that Thames Water was never publicly criticised by Ofwat during its tenure. To which one might reply, so much the worse for the regulator. Perhaps that’s why Labour announced this week that they will scrap Ofwat.

As it happens, Macquarie also owned the Hampshire ferry company Wightlink, which under its control saw borrowing increase to pay shareholders, with corresponding timetable reductions, the near doubling of ticket prices and a lack of investment in ferry upgrades. It’s almost as if Macquarie has a strategy.

Of course, not all private equity works in this way. Some companies really do improve the target firms. Pret A Manger is an obvious example, where Bridgepoint helped Pret expand to hundreds of locations before selling it for five times the purchase price, giving every employee £1,000 in the process.

But plenty of people within the world of high finance have expressed concern about some of the practices of private equity. Luke Johnson, the former chairman of Gail’s and former owner of the Ivy, said that in private equity, ‘attention is not directed towards the common wealth, but enriching the management, buyout partners and their institutional backers. That is the nature of the game. To argue otherwise is bogus’.

The former CEO of one of the largest institutional investors in the US, Theresa Whitmarsh, says she was told by one private equity founder that the industry is ‘a zero-sum game, a blood sport’.

This is because growing a business is much harder than squeezing one. If you don’t plan on holding on to a company for the long term, making money can be devilishly simple. First, identify an undervalued business, one that may have struggled but has hard assets that could be flogged on. Then take out loans of up to 80 or 90 per cent of the value of the target company’s assets. Crucially, load the target company with that debt and make them pay the cost of their own acquisition. Next, send in your partners, who will either try to juice the company’s income or slash spending, all while charging fees for these services.

Within the first two years of a public-to-private equity takeover, around 13 per cent of the workforce tends to be laid off. Expert negotiators are brought in to bid down suppliers and assets are sold. There is a laser-like focus on shifting the balance sheet: spend less, earn more, cash in what you can. Never mind the fact that a lack of investment will create problems down the line, that staff turnover rises as wages are squeezed and suppliers abandon the company. Such problems are for the next owner to discover.

Private equity is reaching ever deeper into British life. Take the village of Little-bredy in Dorset. It was recently acquired wholesale by a firm called Belport, which bought all 32 properties in the village from Sir Philip Williams, whose family had owned it for seven generations. One resident who had lived in Littlebredy for 21 years was evicted to make way for an office, while part of the village has been closed to public access. Belport insists that rumours of a mass eviction in January are incorrect. But no one is quite sure what they plan on doing with the estate. Perhaps the village will be turned into a private members’ club like Soho Farmhouse, or maybe it’ll become a high-end holiday park or wedding venue. When private equity comes to town, every asset is sweated for all its worth.

It’s strange to see an English village bought up in the name of shareholder value. But things get much stranger when we look at unloved parts of the British state. The number of children’s care homes that are operated by private equity has more than doubled over the past five years. Many of the larger operators have profits in the tens of millions of pounds and margins sit at more than 20 per cent. According to the Local Government Association, children’s care homes are charging the taxpayer as much as an annual £3.2 million per child – and fees are growing well above inflation. Meanwhile, many local authorities are themselves close to bankruptcy as they scrabble to pay for these services. An independent review into the sector recently found that ‘there are few indicators to suggest that high prices are leading to better quality homes for children’.

Local councils are legally bound to ensure that children with serious disabilities and those without parents are looked after. Most of the time, councils meet these obligations by outsourcing. That means costs can be locked in for the length of the contracts, which makes cash flow easier for local authorities to manage. But it also gives civil servants plausible deniability. When something goes wrong, they can point to the private company and shift the blame. And the likelihood of something going wrong is much higher with private equity, because the portfolio companies are highly leveraged. For every £1 in debt these children’s homes are, there’s just 5p of cash flow for debt servicing. For non-private-equity homes, that figure is around 40p.

This is exactly how private equity is supposed to work – spare cash is a form of inefficiency. So instead that money is redeployed or used to pay shareholders. The problems come with economic uncertainty, when rates spike or credit availability shrinks.

It’s a pattern we see repeated again and again. Southern Cross, a care group for the elderly, collapsed in 2011. Its previous owners, Blackstone, the largest private equity firm in the world, had performed a classic industry trick: sell off the properties, then lease them back and pocket the difference. (Morrisons’ new owners are currently using this sale and leaseback strategy having said during the buyout that they wouldn’t.) Meanwhile, Blackstone expanded the group through debt finance. When the 2008 crash came, social care budgets were squeezed and Southern Cross was unable to repay its debts. Blackstone had already cashed out, making £500 million in the process, while 31,000 residents were thrown into limbo. The group was broken up and sold off, with councils footing the bill for higher operating fees and transition costs.

In many private-equity-run care homes, everything is cut to within an inch of what regulations allow. Workers are kept on minimum wage or brought in from agencies, and the staff-to-residents ratio is kept as low as is permitted. Food is purchased in bulk and for the lowest possible price while maintenance on buildings is deferred. A study in the United States found that care homes owned by private equity have a mortality rate 10 per cent higher than those managed by medical professionals.

Private equity firms tend to have large and diverse portfolios, meaning that expertise doesn’t necessarily translate across the different companies they own. Knowing how to run an efficient biscuit factory doesn’t mean you know how to run an efficient chain of veterinary clinics. The one thing that all businesses have to worry about is tax, meaning this tends to be what private equity firms actually focus on. One study found that up to 40 per cent of the savings brought by private equity come from tweaking tax arrangements. The large amounts of debt often helps. Target companies offset the cost of servicing debts against their tax bill. Gatwick Airport didn’t pay a penny in corporation tax for the six years it was owned by private equity, because its buyout loans were tax deductible.

Selling a company isn’t always even necessary to make a profit. When Toys ‘R’ Us filed for bankruptcy, it emerged that the private equity firms which bought it still ended up in the black. They’d charged Toys ‘R’ Us fees that more than recouped the relatively small amount of capital they’d put up for the acquisition. The staff, meanwhile, saw their pension contributions disappear.

Most of the money for acquisitions is paid by institutional investors like pension funds. Repayments to these limited partners are fixed, but the upsides for private equity can be huge. The irony, of course, is that pensions are supposed to create stability for workers. Yet these savings are being used to acquire companies and often cut costs, sometimes even dismantling pension pots.

Take the Yorkshire mattress manufacturer Silentnight. In the late 2000s, the family-run firm was facing cash-flow problems. It found salvation in HIG Europe, an affiliate of the Miami-based private equity firm HIG Capital. This gave Silentnight a line of credit, allowing the company to weather the effects of the 2008 recession. That was, until HIG suddenly removed it, demanding the debt be repaid. Within days, Silentnight went into administration and was snapped up by HIG.

It’s a classic example of what’s known as loan-to-own. In the process, the private equity firm jettisoned the company’s hefty pensions obligations. Instead, the state-run emergency Pension Protection Fund had to pick up the tab, suddenly making Silentnight an attractive, solvent company once again. The regulator twice accused HIG of engineering an unnecessary insolvency in order to shift pensions on to the public purse. Eventually, after more than a decade, HIG settled for £25 million but did not accept any liability. Staff pensions had been cut by a third, the equivalent of £50 million. HIG was still quids in. Perversely, the state-run Pension Protection Fund is a major investor in private equity firms, some of whom have been accused of offshoring profits to avoid tax.

No one could object to genuine investment, but this type of business practice gives capitalism a bad name. In Britain’s desperation for foreign money, we’ve invited in a whole class of savvy corporate raiders who know how to loot UK Plc – and get away with it. The result is that we’ve been left, quite literally, in the shit.

80 Years On

The atom bomb has been used, but nuclear weapons such as exist today never have been. By anyone. Yet look at the people who have had them, or who still do. It is all a bluff. Just get rid of these wretched abominations. We could pay the affected shipyard workers quite eye-watering sums in compensation, and still save amounts that there would scarcely be the adjectives to describe. Instead of Trident, give an extra £70 billion to each of the British Army, the Royal Navy, and the Royal Air Force. Heaven knows that they need it.

"Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Surveys. That was early as 1946. Even the Japanese condition of keeping the Emperor was granted once the Manhattan Project's cost of $2.2 billion in 1945 had ostensibly been justified, and a meaningless signal sent to the Soviet Union, which had the Bomb within four years.

It gets some people's backs up when Hiroshima and Nagasaki are compared to the Holocaust. But beyond any crude numbers game, there was more than a touch of Josef Mengele to those bombings. No one knew what the effects of an atomic attack would be. So experiments were conducted on perceived racial inferiors, not to end the War, but just to see what would happen. "If we'd lost the War, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals," admitted even Curtis LeMay. He was right.

The Holy Father Leo XIV writes to the Most Reverend Alexis M. Shirahama, Bishop of Hiroshima:

I offer cordial greetings to all gathered to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a particular way, I express my sentiments of respect and affection for the hibakusha survivors, whose stories of loss and suffering are a timely summons to all of us to build a safer world and foster a climate of peace.

Though many years have passed, the two cities remain living reminders of the profound horrors wrought by nuclear weapons. Their streets, schools and homes still bear scars—both visible and spiritual—from that fateful August of 1945. In this context, I hasten to reiterate the words so often used by my beloved predecessor Pope Francis: “War is always a defeat for humanity”.

As a survivor from Nagasaki, Dr. Takashi Nagai wrote, “The person of love is the person of ‘bravery’ who does not bear arms” (Heiwato, 1979). Indeed, true peace demands the courageous laying down of weapons—especially those with the power to cause an indescribable catastrophe. Nuclear arms offend our shared humanity and also betray the dignity of creation, whose harmony we are called to safeguard.

In our time of mounting global tensions and conflicts, Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand as “symbols of memory” (cf. Francis, Letter to the Most Reverend Alexis-Mitsuru Shirahama, Bishop of Hiroshima, 19 May 2023) that urge us to reject the illusion of security founded on mutually assured destruction. Instead, we must forge a global ethic rooted in justice, fraternity and the common good.

It is thus my prayer that this solemn anniversary will serve as a call to the international community to renew its commitment to pursuing lasting peace for our whole human family—“a peace that is unarmed and disarming” (First Apostolic Blessing “Urbi et Orbi”, 8 May 2025). 

Upon all who mark this anniversary, I willingly invoke abundant divine blessings.


Was the USA right to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima 80 years ago? Most people think so, even though they also realise that the attack killed many innocent civilians, often in quite horrible ways which it is hard to face.

Do they excuse those gruesome horrors of burned human flesh and radiation sickness because they simply can’t bear to consider the possibility that it was both a major mistake and a moral crime?

My father, who was a serving naval officer in European waters at the time, was among thousands of British sailors, soldiers and airmen who would say confidently that the bomb probably saved his life, as he expected to be sent to the Pacific for a merciless final struggle against Japan. And, like most at the time, he believed that the Japanese would put up a suicidal last-ditch resistance when British and American forces landed on their home islands.

He was not sorry to have been spared this fate. He’d had quite enough to do, fighting against Germany for the previous six years. For the rest of his life (he died in 1987) this was a perfectly respectable belief. The accepted view was that the Japanese would have carried on fighting to the death, inch by inch.

When the US Army and US Marines, supported by British and Commonwealth forces, invaded the Japanese island of Okinawa in 1945, they faced resistance bordering on the insane, and often actually suicidal. There were hundreds of kamikaze attacks. Allied casualties totalled 50,000, more than 12,500 killed. The Japanese lost more than 100,000 soldiers and sailors, most of them killed. Perhaps 150,000 civilians died.

The battle came to be known as ‘The Typhoon of Steel’. If that was what happened on one small island, what would it be like when the Allies landed on the mainland?

But then along came Japanese-American historian, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. Professor Hasegawa, born in Japan in 1941 but now a US citizen, is also a Russian speaker and expert on that country. In 2005 he published a book Racing The Enemy: Stalin, Truman, And The Surrender Of Japan which upset everything most people had until then believed.

His view, after careful study of Japanese and Soviet archives, is that Tokyo surrendered not because of the Hiroshima bomb, or the Nagasaki bomb three days later, but because the Soviet Union had finally entered the war against Japan on the Allied side.

The Japanese leadership of the time were ruthless, ferocious men who cared little about civilian casualties (or military casualties for that matter). They had been untroubled by the American bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, the single most destructive air raid in human history.

That attack destroyed 16 square miles of the Japanese capital and killed at least 100,000 people. Nearly 300 bombers dropped nearly 1,700 tons of bombs on the city, including napalm and white phosphorus, two of the most merciless weapons of war known to man.

When the fires eventually died down the devastated streets were full of charred human corpses. Only 27 US planes were lost. Yet the Japanese made no move to surrender.

But the Japanese were afraid of Stalin. In a wrongly forgotten 1936-1939 war, the Red Army had decisively beaten the Japanese Sixth Army, finishing the job with a thumping victory at Nomonhan on the border of Mongolia and China. Japan also feared Russia’s ability to enter Japanese territory by land, via the disputed island of Sakhalin, which was then divided between Moscow and Tokyo.

Both countries had maintained a mad-seeming neutrality pact since 1941, in which they had agreed not to attack each other, even though they belonged to hostile alliances which were at each other’s throats. They ought to have been at war.

But at the Yalta conference of February 1945, Stalin had secretly promised US President Franklin Roosevelt and Britain’s Winston Churchill that he would break the pact within three months of victory over Germany.

He kept his word. Three days after the Hiroshima bomb, while the US was bombing Nagasaki, 1.6 million Soviet troops attacked Japanese forces all across North-East Asia, quickly capturing the southern half of Sakhalin and so positioning themselves perfectly for an assault on the Japanese home islands, less than 30 miles away.

They also seized the Kuril islands, a land-grab the Japanese dispute to this day. It was a real and immediate threat with no good outcome for Japan.

Japan’s ruthless military dictatorship may well have viewed this development as a threat to the actual existence of their country. A Soviet Communist occupation regime certainly would not have allowed Emperor Hirohito to remain on his throne, even if he had no power – an arrangement eventually agreed to by the chief of the US occupying troops, General Douglas MacArthur.

Russia, having been humiliated in a war with Japan in 1904, was a dangerous and greedy neighbour that might well keep any territory it took. Russian armies were much less likely than American forces to leave once they arrived.

Professor Hasegawa, who went deep into both Soviet and Japanese archives, concluded that the Russian threat was much more likely than the atom bombs to have triggered the Japanese surrender of August 15.

Addressing the military at the time of the surrender, Emperor Hirohito did not mention the A-bombs but did mention the Soviet threat. Yet, when speaking to the Japanese people, he mentioned the ‘new and cruel’ weapons that had been used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is no final tribunal that can decide for certain why Japan surrendered when it did, or whether it was Stalin or the atom bomb, which clinched the decision. But Hasegawa certainly makes a persuasive and worrying case.

Hasegawa’s view would have been a deep and dangerous heresy until quite recently when the main arguments were over whether the A-bomb should have been used at all.

Before the end of the Cold War, nuclear disarmers would often claim that the newly installed US President Harry Truman – an undistinguished machine politician from Missouri who had been lifted suddenly into the White House by the death of Roosevelt – had dropped the bombs to impress Stalin with America’s overwhelming new power. Perhaps there is some truth in this, too.

But a very perplexing question remains, to which we can probably never find the answer. Would the world be a better place if the atomic bomb had never been invented?

Albert Einstein thought one of his greatest mistakes was to encourage Roosevelt to build the bomb in 1939. The Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, rated as a genius by his scientific fellows, disappeared from the face of the earth in 1938, aged 31. Many believe he deliberately vanished and hid himself in a South American jungle as he’d foreseen that his researches would lead to the atom bomb, and he could not bear to be responsible for it.

Some of the British scientists who had helped build the bomb because they feared Hitler might make one first were grieved to see it used against Japan – and even more so when they discovered, thanks to a brilliant British intelligence coup – that Hitler’s physicists never got anywhere near a working nuclear device.

As war erupts in Ukraine and Iran like an evil disease, the argument that nuclear deterrence would bring peace looks a little threadbare. Long ago, we learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb because we thought it was a force for peace. Maybe we should start worrying again.


Fujio Torikoshi was 14 years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, 80 years ago today. He was eating breakfast with his mother when he heard a rumbling and stepped outside into the front garden. All he could see was a black dot in the sky, when it suddenly burst outwards to fill the sky with a blinding white light. He recalls his last memory of being lifted off the ground by a hot gust of wind. He was more than two kilometres away from the blast, but he could still feel a burning sensation all over his body. That’s when he passed out on his front porch.

Eventually, he woke up in hospital. He was told by the doctors he wouldn’t live past 20. He lived to be 86 years old and died in 2018. In one of his last interviews, he said: ‘All I can do is pray — earnestly, relentlessly — for world peace.’

This week, we remember every single person who was killed by an indefensible act of inhumanity, both on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We also remember the hundreds of thousands of survivors like Fujio — known as the hibakusha. They are the ones who endured the horror of what was left behind. They are the ones who have been campaigning to ensure the horrors of Hiroshima never happen again.

Me and the CND

When I was at school, we had a book club where we could choose a book for class. We chose Brighter Than A Thousand Suns, which told the story of Hiroshima. It had a huge impact on me. Before that book, I didn’t know what a nuclear explosion was. I didn’t know the destruction it could cause. It was that book that taught me that nuclear weapons have one purpose and one purpose only: to cause death and destruction on a colossal scale.

When I was 14, in the 1960s, I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), after following and being frightened by the Cuban Missile Crisis. My first ever demonstration of any sort was with CND, and I have been a campaigner against nuclear weapons ever since. It was at CND where I met Bruce Kent, a leading figure in CND in the 1980s. It was Bruce who said, ‘I want to be optimistic because I don’t think man is intrinsically violent.’ He inspired in us a belief that peace was not just preferable, but possible.

I’ve gotten a lot of flak over the years for daring to say that I would not wish to use a nuclear bomb on human beings. For having the audacity to say that killing millions of people wouldn’t make the world a safer place. For those who are in any doubt over my position: I’m not interested in bombs. I’m interested in peace. 

We also should not forget the impacts of nuclear testing, which began at the end of the Second World War. These programs caused widespread radioactive contamination and generational harm to the people of the Pacific region. It is estimated that more than two million people have died from cancer as a result of these nuclear test explosions.

Joseph Rotblat was a Polish physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, before becoming a fierce critic of nuclear weaponry. I want to share two things he said. One, ‘There is no direct evidence that nuclear weapons prevented a world war.’ Two, ‘Above all remember your humanity.’

Nuclear Disarmament

I grew up in a period where people were fearful of the possibility of global nuclear war. There was a realisation of just how dangerous nuclear weapons are.

A great achievement was the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, signed in 1970. The five declared nuclear weapons states — Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the USA, and China — agreed to ensure that there was no proliferation of their weaponry and to take steps towards their own eventual nuclear disarmament.

Since then, several countries have taken steps that have lessened nuclear tensions in certain places. The most dramatic example was when post-apartheid South Africa, led by President Mandela, announced that it would no longer develop any nuclear weapons and would completely disarm.

That in turn brought about a nuclear weapons-free continent of Africa, also known as the ‘Pelindaba Treaty’, which came into force on 15 July 2009. Those events were followed by nuclear weapons-free zones for the whole of Latin America and for central Asia.

These treaties showed that it is possible to get countries to agree in mutual co-operation, mutual disarmament, and mutual peace. We must continue to push for a renewed adherence to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which bans the development, production, possession, use, or threat of use of nuclear weapons.

The Only Path Forward Is Peace

In 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres addressed the General Assembly and announced that the symbolic Doomsday Clock — which measures humanity’s proximity to self-destruction — had moved to 90 seconds to midnight. (It has since moved to 89 seconds to midnight.) Declaring that humanity was perilously close to catastrophe, Guterres named three perilous challenges: extreme poverty, an accelerating climate crisis, and nuclear war.

Today, the global stockpile of nuclear weapons is accelerating as international relations are deteriorating. After a period of gradual decline that followed the end of the Cold War, the number of operational nuclear weapons has risen again; there are now said to be more than 12,000 warheads around the world. Ninety percent of these weapons are owned by Russia and the United States alone.

It’s been more than three years since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. I want to take a moment to reflect on the hundreds of thousands of lives that have been lost in this ghastly war.

I also want to pay tribute to the thousands of peace campaigners in Russia who opposed this invasion, and have continued to call for a ceasefire. I also want to thank those global figures who have called for de-escalation and diplomacy. That includes the UN Secretary-General, global leaders such as President Lula, President Ramaphosa, and, of course, the late Pope Francis. Three years on, and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, I renew these calls for peace.

The longer the fighting goes on, the more lives will be lost and the greater risk of nuclear escalation. Those who fuel escalation must know that in the event of a nuclear war, nobody wins.

Meanwhile, we have all watched with absolute horror at what is happening in Gaza. Over the past 21 months, human beings have endured a level of horror and inhumanity that should haunt us forever. Entire families wiped out. Limbs strewn across the street. Mothers screaming for their children torn to pieces. Doctors performing amputations without anaesthesia. Home by home, hospital by hospital, generation by generation.

We have not been witnessing a war. We have been witnessing a genocide, livestreamed before the entire world. We must remember that our governments could have stopped this genocide. Instead, they allowed Israel to act with impunity, igniting a much wider war between Israel, the United States, and Iran — and putting the world on the brink of a nuclear conflict in the process.

I echo the call made by the UN Secretary-General: ‘There is no military solution. The only path forward is diplomacy. The only hope is peace.’

Arms Race vs A Better World

The world spends $100 billion every year on nuclear weapons — imagine if we spent that money on renewable energy, social housing, public healthcare, schools, and lifting children out of poverty instead? Think of what we could achieve if the money that was spent on items that can only destroy the planet was instead directed to resources that protected it and all life on earth.

Security is not the ability to threaten and destroy your neighbour. Real security is getting on with your neighbour. It’s when our children can be confident of a habitable future. It’s when human beings are not displaced by poverty, destitution, and war. And it’s when everybody has enough resources to live a happy and healthy life. As Albert Einstein said, ‘In the shadow of the atomic bomb it has become even more apparent that all men are, indeed, brothers.’

So today, we must remember those who were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We mourn the lives that were so needlessly lost. And we must listen to the hibakusha when they say: ‘humans must survive — in peace and prosperity.’ We will only honour their words — as well as the memory of those who perished on 6 August 1945 — when we rid this planet of nuclear weapons once and for all. We are all human beings on one planet. Surely that is enough to try and bring about a world of peace.


In the early hours of 6 August 1945, US bomber Enola Gay took off from North Field, in the Northern Mariana Islands, and headed towards Hiroshima, a naval port on the south coast of Honshu, Japan’s main island. At 8.15am that morning, Enola Gay unleashed its payload.

This consisted of a 9,700lb atomic bomb, known as Little Boy. Designed like a gun, Little Boy fired a bullet of enriched uranium-235 into a hollow cylinder of the same material, to begin a nuclear chain reaction 1,900 feet above the centre of Hiroshima.

The immediate impact was devastating. Many of Hiroshima’s inhabitants were skinned alive, in part or in whole, by the intense heat caused by the explosion of the bomb. In 1951, the US-Japanese Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Atomic Bomb in Japan calculated that 64,500 people – more than a quarter of Hiroshima’s population – had died from the blast by mid-November 1945, and an additional 72,000 had been injured. Furthermore, it is estimated that approximately 30,000 workers conscripted from Japanese-occupied Korea may also have died at Hiroshima.

Three days later, on 9 August, the US dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a city on the island of Kyushu. This killed more than 39,000 – a fifth of Nagasaki’s population – and injured a further 25,000.

The long-term impact of dropping the bombs was horrific. Roughly 400,000 people from the two cities were irradiated and disfigured. Referred to as hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki often faced discrimination when seeking jobs. Their children and even grandchildren still encounter similar problems today.

Eighty years on, amid mounting geopolitical conflict between nuclear powers, it is worth asking what drove America to do something that no other nation had done before or has done since – deploy a nuclear weapon.

For many, the main argument is well established. It was given one of its first public airings by US president Harry Truman in a nationwide radio broadcast on the day of Nagasaki. He said the use of atomic bombs was a reply to the perfidy of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. He denounced ‘those who have starved and beaten and executed’ US prisoners of war. And then came his key argument: ‘We have used it to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.’

The argument that the Bomb shortened the war and therefore saved lives is a familiar one. But it’s been disputed, even by many US militarists, including Paul Nitze and his colleagues on the government’s Strategic Bombing Survey. They declared that ‘certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped… even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated’.

Their view was supported by America’s top military commander, General Douglas MacArthur, who had always opposed the use of atomic bombs. He held that Japan would surrender ‘by 1 September at the latest and perhaps even sooner’. Dwight Eisenhower, president from 1953 until 1961, declared the bombings ‘completely unnecessary’. Top brass Chester Nimitz and William Leahy and even the rabid US airforce general Curtis LeMay thought the same, with LeMay saying: ‘The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.’

To cap it all, in late August 1945, then secretary of state James Byrnes was reported in the New York Times as saying that Tokyo’s request for Soviet mediation in the war was proof of Japan’s recognition of defeat. He learned of this request at the US-UK-Russian Potsdam conference held from 17 July until 2 August 1945 – that is, before Hiroshima.

Academics Lakshmi Singh and Rahul Tripathi have recently described the bombings as ‘one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century, driven by experimental and political motivations rather than pure military necessity’. In many ways they’re right. Hiroshima was driven less by military imperatives than by two other key factors. First, America needed to flaunt its new, fearful domination of the soon-to-be-postwar world, and so strengthen its rearguard action against the rise of Asia and the growth of anti-imperialist, ‘pan-Asianist’ ideology in the East. Second, America and the Allies were motivated by animosity and contempt towards the Japanese as a race.

The road to 6 August

Hiroshima was in part a culmination of America’s determination to demonstrate its vastly superior military power – especially in the air. In the excellent new book, The Hiroshima Men, historian Iain MacGregor notes that at a White House conference on 14 November 1938, barely six weeks after Britain and France capitulated to Hitler and signed the Munich Agreement of 30 September, President Franklin D Roosevelt made sure that air power was ‘the key discussion’ that day. FDR called for America to double Germany’s annual production figure of 12,000 fighters and bombers, and to be prepared to defend the Western hemisphere ‘from the North to the South Pole’.

By the spring of 1939, the US was concerned not just by the prowess of the Luftwaffe, but also by the superiority of Japanese planes flying over China. The global scope of America’s plans was confirmed when, in November 1939, a committee that included Charles Lindbergh sent a report to congress on what was to become Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress, the enormous bomber that was to deliver the atomic weapons of 1945. Its range spoke volumes about America’s objectives: more than 5,000 miles. So did the sense of urgency that surrounded the B-29 – Boeing was paid upfront for it before it was built, or its components tested.

The sums involved were eye-watering. In 1941, the US budget for weapons procurement stood at about three times the $8 billion it had laid out in 1940. It showed that America was intent on reigning supreme.

Indeed, part of Washington’s gameplan in the Second World War was to supplant Britain’s role in the world, and install itself as a more disinterested arbiter of Asian affairs in general and Chinese affairs in particular.

America’s immediate objective was to defeat Japan. Taking a leaf from the RAF’s ‘carpet’ or ‘area’ bombing of German cities, B-29s directed by LeMay firebombed Japanese cities from March to August 1945. In Rain of Ruin, an excellent new book on the atomic bombs, historian Richard Overy quotes a postwar inquest conducted by the British Mission to Japan. It observed that using incendiaries against the population ‘undoubtedly paved the way for the collapse of morale that followed the atomic bombs’. The firestorm campaign prompted Tokyo to put out ‘feelers’ for peace to the US in June 1945. As Overy rightly comments, incendiaries and atomic bombs ‘are often treated as different subjects, but were complementary’.

Evolving attitudes during the course of the war towards the firebombing of cities and towns, which caused immense devastation, paved the way for the use of the atomic bombs. As the atomic physicist, Rudolf Peierls, noted in 1987, indignation may have greeted the aerial bombardment of Guernica in 1937 and Rotterdam in 1940, but Western views soon began to change. ‘The deliberate fire raids on Hamburg [in 1943], Dresden and Tokyo [both in 1945] were considered an acceptable form of warfare. Without this background the atomic bomb raids on Japan might not have taken place.’ MacGregor goes further, writing that the firebombings ‘morally prepared’ the US and its allies for what was to come.

The firestorm raid on Tokyo in March 1945 was particularly destructive. Using cluster bombs and napalm, the US killed 100,000 Japanese, laid waste to 300,000 buildings and forced half the population to evacuate to the countryside. Killing similar numbers using an atomic weapon did not seem like such a big leap.

Furthermore, the destruction visited on the Japanese never occasioned the kind of doubts among the Allies that followed similar incinerations in Hamburg and Dresden. Thanks to the Allies’ racial animosity towards the Japanese, every man, woman and child was deemed a fair target. This was clear during the famous island battle of Iwo Jima in February and March 1945, when the Chicago Tribune led with the headline: ‘You can cook them better with gas’. It argued that Japanese dugouts on the island ‘would be an ideal testing ground to determine whether we can render the enemy impotent and materially reduce our own casualties’.

Washington’s uninhibited antagonism towards the Japanese had deep roots, and was fuelled in part by Japan’s rise during the early 20th century. When clinching its victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the Japanese navy overcame a large Russian force at the Tsushima Strait, which divides Japan from Korea. The following year, a top British military planner described the Battle of Tsushima as ‘by far the greatest and the most important’ naval event since Trafalgar a century before. It was a massive shock to Western self-esteem, and demonstrated Japan’s military strength.

This explains why, after the Russo-Japanese war, America guarded itself with Plan Orange, a series of army and navy war plans for dealing with a possible conflict with Japan. By 1923, that plan included a potential air war with Japan. Five years later, America had drawn up a full war plan, which included intensive air attacks ‘designed’, as Overy says, ‘to make a ground invasion of the Japanese home islands unnecessary’. By 2 March 1943, General Henry Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps, told a State Department committee that ‘complete and utter havoc-bombing’ should assure ‘the total destruction of the enemy on his own soil’.

America soon learned how badly things were going for Japan. After September 1943, MacArthur’s Central Bureau in Melbourne, Australia deciphered the codes used by Japan’s principal attachés in Europe. As a result, the newly constructed Pentagon knew the details of Tokyo’s defensive formations against a final US assault, as well as about Japan’s leanings toward peace.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then, were not simply triggered by a desire to avoid American casualties. The bombings were the climax to 40 years of planning a response to the threat posed by Japan. They were part of America’s determination to vanquish its Pacific rival, and demonstrate its aerial superiority to the entire world.

But the atomic bomb was different to the firebombing campaigns – not so much in the scale of immediate deaths, but in its terrifying and awesome symbolism.

‘A brilliant luminescence’

After a swift win in the Marshall Islands in February 1944, the US found itself able to attack Japanese targets ahead of schedule. By December, inflation and the worst rice harvest in nearly 50 years had reduced Japan still further. By summer 1945, few Japanese cities were left for the US to bombard. The atomic bomb, therefore, was designed not so much to pile on further devastation, but rather to organise a show for the whole world. As war secretary Henry L Stimson wrote in 1947, the atomic bomb ‘was more than a weapon of terrible destruction; it was a psychological weapon’.

At a key meeting between military chiefs and scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico, held over 10 and 11 May 1945, minutes record that it was agreed that the Bomb had to be ‘sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognised when publicity on it is released’. On 31 May, at another key meeting, it was stated that the effect of one atomic bomb would not differ from ‘any Air Corps strike of current dimensions’. However, at that point, Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb, felt compelled to interject. ‘The visual effect of an atomic bombing’, he said, ‘would be tremendous. It would be accompanied by a brilliant luminescence which would rise to a height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet.’ The use of the Bomb was always conceived in spectacular terms.

Covertly delivered by single planes, the atomic bombs were to exterminate thousands through what war secretary Stimson called a ‘coherent surprise shock’. The shock was aimed at the whole world, not just Japan. Moscow was certainly meant to get the message. Leslie Groves, who directed the Manhattan Project and oversaw its security against espionage, said that after two weeks into the job, he never had ‘any illusion’ that ‘Russia was our enemy, and the project was conducted on that basis’.

America was out to impress the whole world. Somewhere, somehow, an enormous number of combatants and civilians had to be burnt to death not over months, nor even in a night’s flames, but in an instant.

The Japanese were in some ways the ideal target. They had been conjured up in the Western imagination as a race apart – a cruel, martial and imperialistic people. The racial thinking went both ways. As historian John Dower explained in his classic, War Without Mercy (1986), in both America and Japan, race was the prism through which international relations were viewed.

Nevertheless, it was America that had developed atomic weapons. And as Dower showed in a later book, the Allies looked on the Japanese almost as a separate species. During a UK-US Conference on Psychological Warfare Against Japan, on 7 and 8 May 1945, speakers claimed that the Japanese were marked by an ‘inferiority complex, credulousness, regimented thought, tendency to misrepresent, self-dramatisation, strong sense of responsibility, super-aggressiveness, brutality, inflexibility, tradition of self-destruction, superstition, face-saving tendency, intense emotionality, attachment to home and family, and Emperor worship’. Little wonder that, later that month, a top-level meeting involving Stimson entertained the use of poison gas against Japan and authorised tests of mustard gas. In June, ‘mass employment’ of gas, ‘throughout Japan’, was mooted.

After 1945, the horrors of the Holocaust discredited racist attitudes in the West. But right up to Japan’s surrender, American animus toward the Japanese was significantly more ferocious than what passes for racism in the US today. Why? Because of Pearl Harbor. Because of Japan’s treatment of American prisoners of war in general and the notorious, 65-mile ‘death march’ it held in Bataan, the Philippines, in 1942 – a forced trek to internment camps, during which hundreds of Americans died of exhaustion, overcrowding, brutality, starvation and disease.

To have these humiliations visited upon Americans instilled the spirit of revenge. While US generals and admirals might have objected to the use of the Bomb on military grounds, Truman, the politician, saw it as an essential lesson to friend and foe alike. World domination, and a world in which the Japanese could never again figure as impudent usurpers, was his aim. To that end, atomic weapons were for him a right and proper means to make these two points.

But America’s victory proved transient. By 1949, Uncle Sam had lost its monopoly of atomic weapons to Moscow, and had lost China to Mao. In retrospect, Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave American imperialism a breathing space – one that it still enjoys today. But they didn’t provide it with the supremacy it wanted. 

The Allies attempted to present mass annihilation as an essential, even life-saving act. Eighty years on, it’s an account that no longer endures.

As Timothy P. Carney wrote in 2023:

“I was against it on two counts,” Dwight Eisenhower, supreme allied commander, five-star general, and president of the United States, said of dropping nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities. “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

This certainly cuts against the common argument these days: that dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives, certainly the lives of American soldiers, and maybe even Japanese lives on net.

Since the movie Oppenheimer came out, I have had occasion to opine against the nuclear bombings based on straightforward moral principles. I have repeatedly been told that I am being too precious.

Many view the question of whether to kill the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an example of the “trolley problem.”

The trolley problem is a philosophical exercise meant to test the distinction between the moral weight of the actions we choose versus the consequences of inaction. Is it the better decision to take an action that kills one person versus taking an inaction that results in five deaths?

The implication is that nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima is flipping a lever, rerouting the trolley, and causing the death of fewer people.

It’s a fine ethical exercise, but it’s inapplicable in real life for a million reasons because, in real life, things don’t run like an automated trolley on a track. We know where a trolley will go if we don’t flip a switch because there is a track there. We don’t know what Japan’s military and civilian population would have done had we not flipped the switch.

Defenders of the atomic bomb say that our only alternative to the deliberate slaughter of tens of thousands of noncombatants, including babies and elderly women, was a massive land invasion that would have cost millions of lives. They present this as if it was one of two sets of train tracks available.

People who were very involved at the time disagree. Again, Eisenhower said the Japanese were about to surrender.

Eisenhower told his biographer that he expressed to War Secretary Harry Stimson his “grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”

Was Eisenhower right that the atomic bomb was “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives”? I don’t know! Neither do you! There’s a lot of uncertainty here.

Adm. William Leahy, President Harry Truman’s chief military adviser, agreed with Eisenhower. “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan,” Leahy wrote. “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”

Again, you can believe other people besides Leahy or Eisenhower. I can’t adjudicate the various claims. But I can conclude that there was lots of uncertainty about where this war was going. There certainly weren’t just two possible paths.

When we are deeply uncertain about the consequences of our actions, where do we turn? We turn to moral principles, including the principle that it is immoral to kill innocent women and children.

As Scott Horton wrote in 2021:

“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” —Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

“In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. … The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’ The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude.” — Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.” — Herbert Hoover

“[T]he Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945 … up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; … [I]f such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the bombs.” — Herbert Hoover

“I told [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all of the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria.” — Herbert Hoover

“MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed. When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” — Norman Cousins

“General MacArthur definitely is appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster. I had a long talk with him today, necessitated by the impending trip to Okinawa. He wants time to think the thing out, so he has postponed the trip to some future date to be decided later.” — Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s pilot, Weldon E. Rhoades

“[General Douglas] MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf. He thought it a tragedy that the bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants…MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off…” — Richard Nixon

“The Japanese were ready for peace, and they already had approached the Russians and the Swiss. And that suggestion of giving a warning of the atomic bomb was a face-saving proposition for them, and one that they could have readily accepted. In my opinion, the Japanese war was really won before we ever used the atom bomb.” — Under Secretary of the Navy, Ralph Bird

“The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.” — General “Hap” Arnold

“The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.” — Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet

“The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war.” — Adm. Nimitz

“The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons … The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” — Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman

“Truman told me it was agreed they would use it, after military men’s statements that it would save many, many American lives, by shortening the war, only to hit military objectives. Of course, then they went ahead and killed as many women and children as they could, which was just what they wanted all the time.” — Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman

“The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. … The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.” — Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command

“[LeMay said] if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” — Robert McNamara

“The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment … It was a mistake to ever drop it … [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.” — Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr.

“I concluded that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by November 1945. Even without the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seemed highly unlikely, given what we found to have been the mood of the Japanese government, that a U.S. invasion of the islands scheduled for 1 November 1945 would have been necessary.” — Paul Nitze, director and then Vice Chairman of the Strategic Bombing Survey

“[E]ven without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” — U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946

“Just when the Japanese were ready to capitulate, we went ahead and introduced to the world the most devastating weapon it had ever seen and, in effect, gave the go-ahead to Russia to swarm over Eastern Asia. Washington decided it was time to use the A-bomb. I submit that it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds.” — Ellis Zacharias, Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence

“When we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs. Many other high-level military officers concurred.” — Brigadier General Carter Clarke, the Military Intelligence officer in charge of preparing summaries of intercepted Japanese cables for President Truman and his advisors

“The commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, Ernest J. King, stated that the naval blockade and prior bombing of Japan in March of 1945, had rendered the Japanese helpless and that the use of the atomic bomb was both unnecessary and immoral. — Brigadier General Carter Clarke

“I proposed to Secretary Forrestal that the weapon should be demonstrated before it was used… the war was very nearly over. The Japanese were nearly ready to capitulate… My proposal… was that the weapon should be demonstrated over… a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo… Would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. It seemed to me that a demonstration of this sort would prove to the Japanese that we could destroy any of their cities at will… Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation… It seemed to me that such a weapon was not necessary to bring the war to a successful conclusion, that once used it would find its way into the armaments of the world.” — Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy Lewis Strauss

“In the light of available evidence I myself and others felt that if such a categorical statement about the retention of the dynasty had been issued in May 1945, the surrender-minded elements in the Japanese government might well have been afforded by such a statement a valid reason and the necessary strength to come to an early clear cut decision. If surrender could have been brought about in May 1945, or even in June, or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the Pacific war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer.” — Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew

And for what it’s worth, then-Army Chief George Marshall wanted only to hit military facilities with it, not cities.

And as John LaForge wrote in 2014:

The U.S. atomic destruction of 140,000 people at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki was never “necessary” because Japan was already smashed, no land invasion was needed and Japan was suing for peace. The official myth that “the bombs saved lives” by hurrying Japan’s surrender can no longer be believed except by those who love to be fooled.

The long-standing fiction has been destroyed by the historical record kept in U.S., Soviet, Japanese and British archives — now mostly declassified — and detailed by Ward Wilson in his book Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).

Greg Mitchell’s Atomic Cover-Up (Sinclair Books, 2011) also helps explain the durability of the “saved lives” ruse. Wartime and occupation censors seized all films and still photos of the two atomic cities, and the U.S. government kept them hidden for decades.

Even in 1968, newsreel footage from Hiroshima held in the National Archives was stamped, “SECRET, Not To Be Released Without the Approval of the DOD.” Photos of the atomized cities that did reach the public merely showed burned buildings or mushroom clouds — rarely human victims.

MacArthur’s Censorship

In Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial (Grosset/Putnam, 1995), Robert Lifton and Mitchell note that Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, “left nothing to chance.” Even before Hiroshima, he prohibited U.S. commanders from commenting on the atomic attacks without clearance from the War Department.

“We didn’t want MacArthur and others saying the war could have been won without the bomb,” Groves said.

In fact, MacArthur did not believe the bomb was needed to end the war, but he too established a censorship program as commander of the U.S. occupation of Japan. He banned reporters from visiting Hiroshima or Nagasaki, expelled reporters who defied the ban and later said that those who complained that censorship existed in Japan were engaged in “a maliciously false propaganda campaign.” That most people in the United States still believe the “saved lives” rationale to be true is because of decades of this censorship and myth-making, begun by President Harry Truman, who said Aug. 6, 1945, “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That was because we wished this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”

In fact, the city of 350,000 had practically no military value at all and the target was the city, not the base three kilometers away.

Taking President Truman at his word, the 140,000 civilians killed at Hiroshima are the minimum to be expected when exploding a small nuclear weapon on a “military base.” Today’s “small” Cruise missile warheads, which are 12 times the power of Truman’s A-bomb could kill 1.68 million each.

Official censorship of what the two bombs did to people and the reasons for it has been so successful, that 25 years of debunking hasn’t managed to generally topple the official narrative.

A Created Myth

In 1989, historian Gar Alperovitz reported, “American leaders knew well in advance that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not required to bring about Japan’s surrender;” and later, in his 847-page The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (Random House, 1995), “I think it can be proven that the bomb was not only unnecessary but known in advance not to be necessary.” The popular myth “didn’t just happen,” Alperovitz says, “it was created.”

Kept hidden for decades was the 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey’s conclusion that Japan almost certainly would have surrendered in 1945 without the atomic bombs, without a Soviet invasion and without a U.S. invasion.

Not long after V-J Day in 1945, Brig. Gen. Bonnie Feller wrote, “Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan’s unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either of these events took place.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general and the supreme allied commander in Europe, said in his memoirs he believed “that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

Adm. William Leahy, the wartime chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in 1950, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material success in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

Feller’s, Ike’s and Leahy’s opinions were conspicuously left out of or censored by the Smithsonian Institution’s 1995 display of the atomic B-29 bomber Enola Gay.

Admiral Leahy’s 1950 myth-busting and censor-busting about the Bomb could be an epitaph for the nuclear age: “I was not taught to make war in that fashion,” he said of Hiroshima’s incineration, “and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”