Oliver Stone: America's brutality started the day we dropped the bomb

Stone believes the decision by President Truman to drop two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki inured the American public to horrific levels of civilian casualties in war, and ultimately paved the way for decades of brutal foreign policy.In particular, the myth that the two atomic bombs were essential to America’s triumph during World War II, a version of events Stone and Kuznick hotly dispute, laid the foundation for the US to take ‘on the rest of the whole world’.‘Without the bomb, we [America] couldn’t act like this,’ he says. ‘It’s not the character of Dwight Eisenhower, or the character of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan.  What it is is the bomb.  It’s the fact that we have it, we are the indisputable nation, because we have proved that we’re willing to blow up anything, to go that final mile, and we’ve maintained military full-spectrum dominance of the world.’‘If we can get away with this behaviour in Iraq—and no one in our country has any sense of shame or guilt or apology about it, in the same way we have no shame or guilt or apology about Vietnam—it’s only because of the bomb.’‘Might makes right, and at the end of the day you get very arrogant when you have might on your side.’

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Graham Bell : 02 Jul 2013 6:51:35a 

Sorry Philip but when I was a kid I listened to the conversations of Americans who would of taken part in the invasion of the Imperial Japanese home islands .... these were private conversations in the company of fellow battle-hardened soldiers and mariners. Among themselves, they admitted being afraid of what lay ahead of them at the time and they had serious doubts about the war being all over by 1947 or 1948, despite all the optimistic reports of bombing damage throughout Japan and their own manifest success against the Imperial Japanese in their recent conquests. In fact, one American admitted believing at the time that the U.S. and its allies could be brought to a stalemate or even lose (he must have been talking about the time when the Soviet Union and the Japanese Empire were still at peace).They all spoke of their disbelief when reports of a new super-bomb came out and of their astonishment when the Japanese Empire SUDDENLY surrendered.Wonder how widespread these feeling were .... and how much former artillery Captain, the U.S. President Harry Truman got to hear of what some of his fighting men were saying among themselves before he decided to use this new weapon? 

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/oliver-stone-history/4787498 

Gus: the inhumanity to humanity is not exclusive to the USA though the USA's foray in this field started against the Indian nations... Before this it was Catholics against Huguenots and way before this — after many battles in the cradle of civilisation, including the Jews, the Egyptians, the Babylonians et al —  was Homo sapiens against Homo Neanderthal... Every time humans invented new weapons, the greater the inhumanity to fellow travellers, humans and other species. In World War I, the invention of ways to become inhuman, including deadly gas, were part of the the continuum that led to the atom bomb...

Lucky, it seems that our inhumanity has become more targeted with precision and the collateral damage is "minimised"..