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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