On the morning of April 7, as a fragile two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran was taking shape through Pakistani intermediaries, Americans woke to the memory of what their president had said just hours earlier: that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

The threat was eventually called off, but U.S. President Donald Trump’s words remained, hanging over the negotiations in Islamabad like a weather system that has passed without fully breaking. It is worth sitting with those words for a moment, not to parse their strategic intent, but to notice what kind of imagination produced them and what history made that imagination possible.

The answer runs through the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and through the 80 years of moral sediment that have accumulated since their nuclear annihilation in August 1945.

© The Japan Times