For long, I had swallowed as gospel the fiction that America was forced to nuke the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to prevent unnecessary loss of lives (American ones that is); and this, despite nagging doubts.

On my second visit to the US in 1997, my mother-in-law offered me a choice of her late husband's books. I'm still taken aback at how life's ironies slyly creep upon one.

Among the books was one by renowned war historian BH. Liddell Hart's 'History of the Second World War'. The scales dropped from my eyes as I read that book and, now I look upon America's desperate attempts force the genie back into the bottle with a wry smile.

Hart put in a tremendous amount of research into the detailed and authoritative book. His towering reputation opened doors to the archives of major figures and governments involved in the planning and executing the war on all sides.

At the time when the atom bomb was developed and tested, the American president was the Democrat, Harry S. Truman.

Sir Winston Churchill, war-time prime minister of Britain, was all for dropping the bomb, but his change of heart came over 300,000 lives too late.

"It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atom bomb. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb dropped, and was brought about by overwhelming maritime power. This alone made it possible to seize ocean bases from which to launch the final attack and force her metropolitan Army to capitulate without striking a blow. Her shipping had been destroyed," he said in his book 'The Second World War'.

Churchill, three weeks before the bomb was dropped, was informed by the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin that the Japanese ambassador in Moscow had expressed his country's desire for peace.

In fact, the Americans already knew about these overtures. They were also privy to the knowledge that a group of pro-peace politicians were gaining ground in that country, according to Hart. But the Americans wanted Japan, already on her knees, prostrate.

To give Churchill his due, he did try to coax the Americans into tempering their demand for unconditional surrender to make it easy for the Japanese to lay down arms; a face saving device, in fact. But the Americans were unbending.

Leahy's uncanny prescience

By no means was the decision to drop the bomb unanimous. Among Truman's two sets of advisers - those for and against the move - was Admiral William Leahy whose prescience on the repercussions of using nuclear weapons seems uncanny now.

Although a military man, Leahy recoiled against using such munitions against a civilian population. He had been Chief of Staff for both President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Truman.

He delivered this warning: "There is certainty that it (the atom bomb) will in future be developed by potential enemies and used against us."

In his book 'I was There', Leahy also wrote: "My own feeling was that, in being the first to use it, we have adopted the ethical standards 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.

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material use in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and successful bombing with conventional weapons."

In startling contrast the present head of the Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff, Genl Richard Myers, waved away a journalist's question last year on Iraqi civilian deaths with the callous comment that they did not keep track of that kind of numbers - the same people the coalition forces led by the Americans had supposedly come to liberate.

Apprehension over the Soviet Union's designs on the Far East and Japan drove Truman to order the devastating strike. As a result the two Japanese cities were incinerated, killing around 340,000.

According to a 1995 New York Times article on the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, Truman, on hearing the news, reportedly exclaimed: "This is the greatest thing in history."

His glee hid the fact that he had let loose an uncontrollable evil into the world. And that it would return in the distant future to haunt the world with the danger of an elusive enemy hitting large population centres with portable dirty radioactive bombs.

Aside from Leahy, the leader of one group of atomic scientists, Prof James Franck also submitted a report on his group's differing conclusion to then Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

The conclusion which echoed most of Leahy's feelings reads in part: " if the United States were the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction on mankind, it would precipitate the race for armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weaponsWe believe that these considerations make the use of nuclear bombs for an early attack on Japan inadvisable."

Truman's long shadow

More than half a century later, the words of the dissenters has seen prophetic fulfillment. Seven countries now openly acknowledge possession of that awful weapon of mass destruction.

The eighth is Israel which refuses to admit it has around 200 nuclear warheads although this is an open secret. North Korea is playing pucks with the US over abandoning its nuclear programmes.

It is also on record that the US had contemplated using poison gas on Japan which could have killed up to five million people. The same weapons, including biological ones, were the reason cited for the US invasion of Iraq.

As they crowed over their initial and stunning victory over an enemy weakened by 12 years of sanctions and bombings, both Washington and London did not realise that they had already lost when the first bombs and missiles rained on Baghdad.

For, it is becoming apparent by the day that events in Iraq have taken on a malignant life of their own and, nobody is really in control. All because the war was based on self-delusion.

While sitting on their respective moral and ethical dunghills, President George W. Bush and his British 'poodle' (as tagged by the UK press) Prime Minister Tony Blair should contemplate the ruin that is Iraq. Both have been forced to admit that the weapons of mass destruction do not exist..

Under intense pressure the two leaders have announced the formation of so-called independent commissions of inquiry to find out how their spies could have failed so monumentally.

Of course, that trick is so wounded it can't even take off. Everybody and their Aunt Aggie knows that this is a bare-faced attempt to find all around absolution for those responsible for the tragic fiasco in Iraq.

However, there's enough in the books to show that the political masters on both sides of the Atlantic should be bear the ultimate blame for moulding deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's military capability to justify the war.

Despite the brave posturing before the war, the leading warmongers, caught with their pants down, have shown themselves to be abject moral cowards. So far there's been no evidence of even a twinge of conscience or word of contrition for the brutal rape of Iraq.

And to prove a negative in order to get rid of one man, they've practically laid waste an ancient city, crippled the country, killed thousands of men, women and children as well as made life wretched for the survivors.

Their credibility in tatters, they have drawn their wagons into a circle by monotonously chanting that they did the right thing in getting rid of Saddam. The more often that particular knell is sounded, the more unconvincing it sounds.

At least with Saddam what you saw was what you got. The hypocrisy of the trolls and ogres that control Washington is unbearable as they go about weaving their webs of deceit while flailing about to free themselves from the ones spun earlier.

The latest chilling news reports - that Pakistan's 'Father of the Nuclear Bomb' Abdul Qadeer Khan has confessed leaking and bartering nuclear secrets to foreign countries for personal gain, and the unearthing of an international black market in nuclear components and expertise - show that Truman continues to cast a long shadow over the globe.

And I, for one, am fervently waiting for the day when Bush and Blair ride their respective dunghills into political oblivion. They leave a heritage of a much fractured and much more dangerous world than ever before despite assurances to the contrary.

A poignant point to mull over is that Bush, reportedly dubbed by most of Blair's cabinet as 'the global village idiot', had shafted his poodle right royally by announcing his move for a commission of inquiry without breathing a word to his un-anointed spokesman.

That move forced an extremely reluctant Blair into following suit. What did I say about ironies? Rich isn't it?