We are living with the nihilism of bombs. When Donald Trump says in relation to Iran that “we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out”, he gives voice to the murderous puerility of his war. As with a kid pulling the wings off flies, this brutality is its own purpose. It is all means and no ends. And in this it is the logical conclusion of a process of ultraviolent futility that has been under way since the second World War.

In spring 1945, the leading US economist John Kenneth Galbraith arrived in Germany. His mission was to help lead the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. This was a review commissioned by the US president Franklin D Roosevelt to determine how effective the massive aerial assault on Germany had been. Had it actually worked?

It was obvious in one sense that it had: Galbraith saw with his own eyes what he called in his memoir A Life in Our Times the “utterly sickening sight” of pulverised cities. The human cost was no less evident. But the question Galbraith was tasked with answering was how much damage had been done to the Nazi war economy.

The answer was, to him, quite shocking: “We were beginning to see that we were encountering one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, miscalculation of the war.” What he and his team of analysts found was that “as bombing intensified, war production increased.” Galbraith determined that by September 1944, when the US and British bombing campaign reached its peak, German production of military aircraft was “nearly twice what it was before the raids”.

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Everyone with the slightest interest in the history of modern warfare knows that mass bombing doesn’t work. In his definitive The Bombing War: Europe, 1939-1945, Richard Overy says that “the bombing offensives in the second World War were all relative failures in their own terms. Before 1939, bombing wars were popularly expected to be short and sharp and probably decisive. The major offensives conducted by Germany, Britain and the United States were instead long drawn-out affairs, wars of attrition with high losses of men and machines, with no clear-cut end and a wide gap between ambition and outcome, a Western Front of the air”.

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Short, sharp, decisive – this is the illusion that lured the present US president into his disastrous war on Iran. The wide gap between ambition and outcome – this is the measure of his folly. That gap is an abyss into which human lives are hurled: as of last Sunday, according to the independent Iranian Human Rights Activists News Agency, at least 236 children had been killed by US and Israeli bombing. But it is nonetheless a strategic void.

The horrific failure of mass bombing in the second World War has been repeated again and again. In Korea, the US air force flattened multiple cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people – and achieved nothing. The US dropped three times as many explosives on North Vietnam as it released over Germany – and still lost the war. Its devastating aerial assault on Cambodia led directly to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. The vast bombing campaign in the first Gulf War in 1990 caused immense human and environmental damage, but left Saddam Hussein and his Republican Guard still in control of Iraq.

Most recently, of course, Israel levelled the cities of Gaza from the air and massacred tens of thousands of innocent civilians with the stated aim of “eliminating” Hamas. Hamas is still not merely in existence – it has been able to reassert control over the population. And Russian president Vladimir Putin’s continuing aerial assaults on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure have not weakened its people’s will to resist his invasion.

These mass bombing offensives are supposed to yield what Overy calls “three kinds of dividend: dislocation and destruction of the enemy war economy; progressive demoralisation of the enemy population subjected to bombing; and specific political ends related to the current war situation.”

The evidence is that none of these is generally achieved. War economies survive. Populations are either unable or unwilling to rise up – often, bombing actually makes them more likely to persevere. And regimes tighten their grips on power, not least by using hatred of the bombers to justify even more internal repression.

So why do the Americans in particular persist in this evil illusion? Because they can. The US air force’s budget request for this year is $210 billion (€183 billion). It has a staggering array of aircraft and weaponry. And it has control over Iran’s airspace. Both the US and Israel can pretty much bomb Iran at will.

Yet this absolute power is absolutely corrupting. Gone is any sense of risk – the aircrews 30,000ft over Tehran are pretty much untouchable. And without risk there is no need to balance gains and losses. The only calculation is the literal counting of numbers – how many sorties flown, how many tonnes dropped, how many targets hit. This numbering is morally and politically numbing. It can achieve nothing but destruction – of lives, cities, societies, cultures and ultimately meaning.

What is particular about this war is not that its purposes are confused and its justifications fraudulent – that is par for the course. It is that there is no real pretence of purpose and no real effort at justification. This ostentatious insouciance is novel. When Trump announced that he might bomb Iran’s oil facilities on Kharg Island “a few more times just for fun”, a new note was being sounded in human history – the open relishing of annihilation as entertainment.

Entertainment doesn’t have to work. There will be no need to send today’s equivalent of Galbraith to Iran to figure out how effective all this violence has been. Who bothers to ask how effective a giant fireworks display was? It made a big bang, created an exciting spectacle and cost a fortune. It showed off our wealth and power and was fun while it lasted. We bombed our little hearts out.

© The Irish Times