In the Iran war, a tale of old American dilemmas

Japan in 1945 and Iran today are fundamentally different cases. Nor can the atomic bomb of 1945 simply be compared with today’s sophisticated nuclear arsenals.

By By Milinda Moragoda

Eight decades ago, US President Harry S Truman faced a decision that would change the nature of warfare forever.

Japan was still fighting after the surrender of Nazi Germany. The US possessed a weapon unlike anything the world had seen. Truman and his advisers had to decide how best to use America’s overwhelming military power to end the war.

Today, Donald Trump faces a different problem. Iran has suffered substantial military damage, but military success has not translated into the decisive political outcome the US seeks.

Japan in 1945 and Iran today are fundamentally different cases. Nor can the atomic bomb of 1945 simply be compared with today’s sophisticated nuclear arsenals.

Yet, there is a common strategic problem: How does a great power turn military superiority into a political outcome? If Washington were pushed into a corner — by the cost of the conflict, the inability to compel Iran’s submission or pressure to demonstrate that American power can still deliver a decisive result — the temptation to consider previously unacceptable options could arise.

What would other nuclear powers learn if the nuclear threshold were crossed? The decision-making process surrounding Truman was more complex than the familiar image of a President simply deciding whether to drop the bomb. The views of members of the administration, military leaders and the scientific community were all sought, and they were not identical. The principal US objective was to force Japan to surrender while avoiding the heavy American casualties that an invasion was expected to entail.

An atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. Japan did not immediately surrender. Three days later, Nagasaki was struck. Around the same time, the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan. The sequence matters. Even unprecedented destruction does not automatically translate into political capitulation. Japan’s surrender followed a combination of factors. The decision also had consequences beyond Japan. Moscow was watching. At Potsdam, Truman informed Stalin that the US possessed a powerful new weapon. US officials understood that possession and use of the bomb could affect the emerging relationship with the Soviet Union. Some policymakers hoped that America’s nuclear monopoly might strengthen Washington’s position in dealing with Moscow.

It would be wrong to reduce Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a message to Stalin. The historical debate over “atomic diplomacy” remains contested. But it would be equally wrong to assume that the Soviet Union was absent from American strategic calculations.

We cannot know what is being said privately in the White House, nor should we invent positions for advisers whose deliberations are not public. Trump has not publicly advocated the use of nuclear weapons against Iran. But the possibility has nevertheless entered public debate as the conflict has remained unresolved.

Any American administration confronting an inconclusive conflict with Iran would have to consider not only what further military action might achieve in Iran, but also what its consequences would be elsewhere. Capitals around the world would ask whether an American action demonstrated restraint, established a new threshold or created a precedent. They would examine whether escalation produced political results or merely greater destruction.

The most consequential message may be the precedent that other States believe has been established.

For almost eight decades, nuclear weapons have occupied a peculiar place in international politics: Their paradoxical purpose has been to ensure that they are never used. If that understanding were to change, the consequences would extend far beyond the country against which a weapon was used. Other nuclear powers would examine the circumstances, the justification offered, the international response and, above all, whether nuclear use achieved its political objective. India has its own nuclear doctrine and strategic assumptions. If the circumstances in which nuclear weapons could be contemplated were to change elsewhere, New Delhi would have to examine what that meant for its own security. That would require a serious debate about deterrence, escalation and thresholds.

A great-power action can have several audiences at once. An adversary may see a warning. An ally may see reassurance. A rival may see an opportunity — or a precedent. The meaning of an action is never entirely controlled by the power that takes it. The world of 2026 is also very different from that of 1945. Information travels instantly, and every major use of force is subject to scrutiny by far more actors, each making its own calculations. Military superiority can destroy an adversary’s capacity to fight. It cannot, by itself, determine what comes after the fighting. That is the enduring problem of converting power into political order.

(Milinda Moragoda is founder of the Pathfinder Foundation, strategic affairs think tank. can be contacted via . courtesy Hindustan Times)

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Immigration official arrested over alleged illegal passport for criminal

By Norman Palihawadane

An Assistant Controller of the Department of Immigration and Emigration has been arrested by the CID for allegedly assisting in the preparation of an illegal passport for an organised criminal.

The suspect was arrested on Thursday (17) by officers of the CID’s Special Investigations Unit at the Department of Immigration and Emigration.

Police identified the suspect as a 42-year-old resident of Gampaha.

The CID’s Special Investigations Unit is conducting further investigations into the incident.

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Three-wheeler driver shot dead in brazen daylight killing at Dematagoda

A three-wheeler driver was shot dead in a brazen afternoon shooting beneath the Dematagoda Black Bridge yesterday (17), police said.

The investigators suspected that killing may be linked to notorious underworld figure Mohamed Najim Mohamed Imran, widely known as ‘Kanjipani Imran’ operating from overseas.

The victim, a 50-year-old resident of Udugama, Galle, was killed with a pistol, according to Police Spokesman ASP F.U. Wootler.

The victim was rushed to hospital following the incident. However, police later confirmed that the three-wheeler driver had succumbed to his injuries while undergoing treatment.

Preliminary inquiries have revealed that the deceased had previously served in the Army.

According to police, the gunman is believed to have been travelling in the rear seat of the three-wheeler before opening fire on the driver.

Police suspected that the shooting was carried out by a hireling of Kanjipani Imran – a notorious underworld figure and drug kingpin operating from out of the country.

Police said that weapons and explosives had been supplied by Kanjipani Imran for the recent bomb incident at Dehiwala, where two children were killed in a grenade attack.

According to investigators, the weapons and explosives were supplied to another underworld figure known as ‘Kosmalli’ for the Dehiwala attack. Imran had also supplied narcotics to Kosmalli’s narcotic network, police said.

Further investigations are being conducted by police.

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Twilight of the Dons

by Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

While on holiday last month I was lent a book by a friend, who had borrowed it in turn from my former Dean, Leslie Mitchell, into whose retirement home he too has now moved. It must have appealed to my Dean, as it did to both of us, because it was about Oxbridge dons in the latter half of the last century. Called Twilight of the Dons, by a man called Colin Kidd, it charts the decline of the prestige of dons over that period, from the high point they commanded just after the Second World War.

This was in part because of the yeoman service they rendered during the war, not only in the field where many of them won decorations but also in administration and, in particular, in intelligence work, notably at Bletchley Park, which worked out German ciphers, contributing to effective countermeasures against German aggression, notably at sea.

With prestige thus gained, dons were a notable feature on the media and developed apace in the post war years, not only delivering lectures but also participating in quiz shows which they dominated. And they were in the forefront of developing other universities as well, the red bricks which started earlier and then the many others set up in this period, sometimes characterised as plate glass.

There were some challenges to this hegemony in the first couple of decades after the war, notably a Kidd notes, by Catholics who wanted greater seriousness – a focus of criticism being the then prevalent language philosophy, which was more concerned with arguments about meaning than the world at large. But for a couple of decades there was nothing really disturbing. But then came the student movements of the late sixties which, if nothing like as dramatic as those in the United States of France, started a decline in confidence.

Before he goes on to these, Kidd has two set pieces about the United States and France though he concentrates on peripheral issues. He looks closely at responses in Britain to the Kenndy assassination, or rather what some dons, particularly the conservative Hugh Trevor Roper, saw as the cover up by the Warren Commission of a deeper conspiracy. He was opposed by his fellow conservative, John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, and their exchanges could be acerbic.

The next chapter deals with sociology, a suspect subject at Oxbridge, and the responses of dons who found the theorising of Levi-Strauss suspect. Having helped publicise his approach, they soon despaired of his loose methods, and became increasingly critical.

This last fitted in with one of the criticisms of the students, that Oxbridge academia was too clinical, and they wanted subjects, and subject combinations, that related more clearly to the actual world. This went hand in hand with support of Marxist arguments, more precisely Trotskyists radicalism, which fundamentally challenged the elitist consensus of Oxbridge.

Until the shocks of the sixties, Oxbridge had had a laid-back approach to administration, and its finances. It had never thought about the anomaly apparent to students of a college without undergraduates, All Souls, which provided fellowships for many grandees resident in London, who lived a sybaritic existence when they came to Oxford for weekends.

All Souls was one focus of student criticism, and Warden Sparrow deeply upset, not least when there was graffiti on the walls of Balliol, the most radical of the colleges then, with a Marxist master, Christopher Hill. He demanded that the graffiti be cleaned up, and Hill obliged, to the extent only of removing Sparrow’s name, but allowing everything else to remain, which made him more furious.

Ironically, this Marxist approach fitted in with the next great shock that hit the universities, namely the rigid money for value policies of Margaret Thatcher. She had the support of many conservative dons, some of whom Kidd characterises as Tory Marxists, in opposition to the Whig grandees, who had held unchallenged sway earlier. But not a few of the Tories were overwhelmed by her rigidity, which intensified when Oxford denied her an honorary degree. She changed the funding system to create an agency that was supposed to be evenhanded between all the universities, so Oxbridge soon found itself having to compete with institutions it had previously patronised.

There was, however, another reason for the decline in prestige of the dons, which had to do with shifting priorities as new generations came to the fore. The confidence of the generation which thought it had won the war and laid the foundations for modern Britain – William Beveridge, who institutionalised the welfare state, was the Master of University College, my own – gave way to a new generation which, even if many were of the upper class, had to strive to get to the top.

Furthermore, the domination of generations of undergraduates by dons who lived in college, and entertained them, and developed wider interests through conversations over the hospitality they freely extended, passed when more and more dons lived out and had to help in looking after families. Working wives became the norm, unlike in the earlier period when wives simply supported their husbands, contributing to hospitality at home, as was the case with the epitome of supportive tutors, George Cawkwell of Univ.

He does not figure in the book, the only example given of a don who, while a considerable academic, spent much time with and on students being that of Jeremy Catto, of Oriel, whose death a few years back led to outpourings of grief. Before that he had been part of a group of historians, including Leslie Mitchell, who saw themselves as a last post of civilisation, which they celebrated at regular dinners.

But there are many vignettes of dons who were larger-than-life figures in my time, including Trevor Roper, who had a streak of mischief which led to sometimes radical comments, as when ultra-conservative fellows of Peterhouse Cambridge, where had had been elected head, found him wanting, to be described as ‘the power-house of Troglodyte thought’.

Kidd shows how all that had changed, dons in general now being largely parochial figures, concerned with their families more than with their students, and with research that advances their careers than with students to advance not just their careers but the wider thinking that would make their careers productive.

But I suppose, with now two Prime Ministers in a row who did not come from Oxford, the first such lapse since the Second World War, the shades coming down is not surprising.

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Andrew advances after fighting comeback

Andrew Wijemanne produced a determined performance to advance to the second round of the ITF J60 Tennis Tournament Week 2, being held at the Sri Lanka Tennis Association courts from September 14 to 19.

‎Wijemanne defeated Thailand’s Tachatam Srisen 7-6, 6-0, 4-0 in the first round, with Srisen retiring early in the decisive third set.

‎After edging a tight opening set, Wijemanne raised his game significantly to dominate the second 6-0. He then carried that momentum into the third set, racing into a commanding 4-0 lead before his Thai opponent was forced to retire.

‎The victory sees Wijemanne move into the next round of the international junior tournament with considerable confidence.

‎

‎Boys’ First Round Results

‎Ashling de Silva (Sri Lanka) bt. Jagruth Kasireddy (India) 7-6, 6-3

‎Aahil Kaleel (Sri Lanka) bt. Phasin Sinchalong (Thailand) 6-4, 6-3

‎Rehan Gunawardhene (Sri Lanka) bt. Darsh Khedekar (India) 6-4, 6-2

‎Damsath Peiris (Sri Lanka) bt. Jiho Park (Korea) 6-4, 6-4

‎Nevan Kannangara (Sri Lanka) bt. Abhiram Maurya (India) 6-2, 6-1

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The Horror and the Slow Burn

By Lynn Ockersz

The 9/11 explosion of pent-up hate,

Has left a slow-burning sorrow,

In the hearts of the sensitive few,

Proving humanity yet has some space,

But the root causes of the savagery,

Are being given short shift,

By those who could make a change,

Signaling to the sowers of division,

That their Day of Reckoning,

May perhaps never ever come.

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Seat belts compulsory for all expressway passengers from Sept. 20

Wearing seat belts will be mandatory for all occupants of vehicles travelling on expressways from September 20, following Parliament’s approval of an Order ending the concessionary period granted for compliance with the requirement.

The Order, published in Extraordinary Gazette No. 2493/19 of June 17, 2026, was approved by Parliament following discussions at the Ministerial Consultative Committee on Transport, Highways and Urban Development, chaired by Minister Bimal Rathnayake.

The requirement was introduced through an amendment to the Motor Traffic (Expressways) Order of 2011, published in Gazette No. 2455/29 on September 25, 2025. It requires seat belts to be worn by all persons travelling in vehicles using expressways, with the aim of reducing deaths and serious injuries caused by road accidents.

A three-month grace period was initially granted to allow vehicle owners to install seat belts in seats that had not been fitted with them by manufacturers. The period ended on December 25, 2025.

Following requests from the public for additional time, the concessionary period was subsequently extended from March 20 to June 19, 2026.

Meanwhile, Parliament also approved Orders published in Extraordinary Gazette No. 2489/22 of May 19, 2026, concerning minimum technical standards for vehicles used in passenger transport services.

The standards cover vehicles operated under the National Transport Commission, Provincial Road Passenger Transport Authorities and the Sri Lanka Transport Board, including passenger, school and office transport services and vehicles hired for special tours.

The Committee noted that ensuring the roadworthiness of vehicles has become increasingly important with the rapid growth in the number of vehicles on Sri Lankan roads.

It was also noted that studies on road accidents had identified mechanical defects and poor vehicle maintenance, in addition to driver errors, as contributing factors to serious accidents.

The Chairperson urged MPs to raise public awareness among vehicle owners and the general public on the importance of vehicle safety and proper maintenance.

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