Lavrov Appeals for Impartial Analysis of How World War II Ended

Aug. 6, 2020 (EIRNS)—Just as Russian President Vladimir Putin has appealed for a re-evaluation of the causes of World War II, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is appealing for a similar re-evaluation of how the war ended. In a message to participants in a ceremony in Japan on the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Lavrov said that “an impartial analysis of what happened in August 1945 confirms that the world’s leading capitals could not but realize that World War II was really coming to an end.” According to him,

“the Soviet offensive in the Far East, as part of the agreements between the Allies, not only liberated China and Korea, but also took away Japan’s motivation to continue military operations. In that situation, atomic bombings by the United States were in fact a show of force and an operational test of nuclear weapons on civilians. The United States was the first and only country to use this type of weapons of mass destruction,”

Lavrov stressed.

Former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, in a column in RT on the same topic, quotes both then-Secretary of State James Byrnes and then-Secretary of War Henry Stimson to the effect that the purpose of the bombing was not to end the war against Japan, but to intimidate the Soviet Union. Byrnes, Ritter writes, believed that “Russia might be more manageable” in a post-war reality shaped not by the theoretical possibility of an atomic bomb, but the demonstrated destructive capacity of the new weapon.

Even today, Ritter goes on, the United States continues to develop new nuclear warheads, not on the basis of deterrence but on the basis of “usability,” such as the low-yield W76-2 warhead deployed on U.S. Navy Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines. Ritter also notes that the U.S. Air Force just this week tested a Minuteman III ICBM with three warheads, despite the fact that the entire fleet of 400 missiles had been reduced to one warhead each, in order to comply with warhead limits in the New START treaty. “Intimidation, not deterrence, was, is and always will be the driving force behind America’s nuclear arsenal,” he concludes. “Like any schoolyard bully, the concern isn’t if the U.S. will use these weapons, but when.”

Veteran Australian anti-war activist John Pilger, similarly wrote, in an Aug. 3 article in Consortium News entitled “Another Hiroshima Is Coming—Unless We Stop It Now,” to include similar quotes from Stimson and from Gen. Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, that Russia was always the real target.