Dave Stockton
Eighty years ago, at 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, the United States opened the nuclear era by dropping a 15 kiloton uranium bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing around 150,000 people.
After decades in which the prospect of nuclear war has receded in the popular consciousness, the world’s great powers are once again rearming and openly engaging in nuclear sabre-rattling.
Three days after Hiroshima, a plutonium bomb called ‘Fat Boy’ was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 74,000 people. Both cities were flattened instantly. Those not incinerated in the initial blast suffered excruciating deaths over the following hours and days. In the months and years that followed tens of thousands more would die from radiation sickness. Survivors and their offspring who experienced deformities and cancers would be stigmatised for generations.
The official rationale, echoed by imperialist propagandists down the decades, was that this mass murder of civilians was necessary to force Japan’s surrender and spare the lives of allied soldiers. This excuse has long been exposed as a cynical lie. In fact Japan had been suing for peace through the Soviet Union: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were used as a live demonstration of the US’ new weapon in act calculated to enforce US supremacy in the post-war carve up of Asia and Europe.
The nuclear bombings inaugurated eight decades of US hegemony. But it also demonstrated that it was not only the fascist powers that were guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity. The imperialist democracies were capable of being equally brutal. The Hiroshima bombing demonstrated the awesome destructiveness of nuclear power, but it was not qualitatively more deadly than the long campaigns of conventional fire-bombing of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo.
Today, the prospect of nuclear war is being openly debated for the first time since the 1980s. The United States and Russia are mobilising their nuclear forces, and arms control treaties have been allowed to lapse. Nuclear armed powers like Israel, Pakistan and India are engaging in more aggressive conflicts against their neighbours.
The maneouvres of the world’s great powers are not idle threats. The US and Russia together possess 90 percent of the world’s 12,000-plus nuclear warheads. The destructive power of modern weapons is incomparably greater than those dropped over Japan. Even the supposedly ‘tactical’ battlefield weapons, which are maintained in ever larger numbers, would lay waste to vast areas of the environment.
Great power competition for markets, resources and political influence is driving a new round of militarism and rearmament, of which nuclear weapons are a significant but by no means the only, or even the principal danger, as any number of wars from Ukraine to Gaza demonstrates. Vast resources are being diverted from addressing famine, disease control, and climate breakdown, into military spending which does not make us ‘safer’ but in fact increases military tension, drives the cycle of escalation, and makes the world more dangerous.
During the first period of nuclear proliferation during the hottest years of the first Cold War in the 1950s and 60s, a huge movement emerged against nuclear weapons, spearheaded by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). This period culminated in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, which ended with the USA and Soviet Union agreeing to remove their nuclear weapons from Turkey and Cuba respectively.
After this brush with Armageddon, the Cold War continued, barbarically enough, by ‘proxy’ with the US and its allies laying waste to Vietnam, Cambodia, swathes of Africa, Central America and Afghanistan. In the 1980s, a major new arms race initiated by the US in an attempt to bankrupt the ailing Soviet economy, provoked a resurgence of the peace movement, and with the disintegration of the USSR and a series of arms-control treaties, the prospect of nuclear war seemed to have receded into the past.
But the era of the US’s unchallenged supremacy is drawing to a close. The rise of new powers, and the United States’ determination to defend and restore its hegemony have put the prospect of imperialist war and its attendant menace of nuclear holocaust firmly on the agenda.
Against this danger we have to be clear about the lessons of the past. The anti-nuclear and peace movements played an important role in rallying working class opposition to the first Cold War’s arms races. But they were not the cause of the various periods of détente, which were precipitated by geostrategic shifts in the balance of power (the Sino-Soviet split, the China-US rapprochement, the collapse of the USSR). Nor did they prevent British imperialism in engaging in its own colonial wars (Malaya, Kenya, the Malvinas) or supporting the US’ adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
Nor should we draw the opposite conclusion and become complacent about the danger of nuclear war, on the basis that the capitalists are ‘rational actors’ who would not destroy the natural and human basis of their own system in a nuclear conflagration. This philistine approach ignores the inherently tendency towards catastrophic destruction, summed up in Rosa Luxemburg’s warning that, under imperialism, the working class is confronted with the choice between ‘socialism or barbarism’.
Imperialist war, whether nuclear or not, is now only one among several existential crises, only possibility in the kaleidoscope of catastrophes being prepared by the breakdown of the international capitalist order. Neither climate change, pandemic, genocide, or the destruction of democratic and human rights, are natural or inevitable products of human nature.
On all fronts of struggle against these manifestations of capitalism’s ingrained tendency to plunder and destroy its own environment, the working class must unite together and behind it the urban and rural poor, in a struggle to overthrow imperialism and replace it with working class power and socialism.
Only by breaking the global dictatorship of the rival billionaires and the warmongers humanity can be saved and imagine the possibility of a world without wars, without exploitation and social oppression. All those already roused to fighting back on these fronts need to unite. Their leading fighters need to speed this development by rebuilding a working class International, a worthy successor to the previous four.
That is the greatest and most useful tribute we can pay to all the victims of the imperialist wars, of all the wars since 1945, and to the future generations who can be saved from a third world war.