Lessons of US bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki

Call for unilateral US nuclear disarmament remains key for working class today

BY MARK THOMPSON

Each year events worldwide mark August 6 and 9, 1945, when U.S. warplanes exploded atomic bombs over the densely populated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed in an act of “deliberate and cold-blooded extermination,” as it was described just days later in a statement by the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party.

It is important for working people to recall this horrific destruction of human life. But it is not just a matter of history. From that time on, the working class has had to face the reality that the imperialist rulers possess the military capacity to annihilate all human life. And, as they showed in Japan, they will unleash these weapons if they judge it necessary to uphold their class rule and advance their insatiable drive for profits.

The U.S. nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki capped the end of World War II. The German rulers had surrendered in Europe on May 7, and the Japanese forces were militarily defeated in the Pacific. Washington had invaded the islands of Okinawa in southern Japan, and the Soviet Union was about to attack from the north.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. warplane Enola Gay dropped a uranium bomb dubbed “Little Boy” over Hiroshima, exploding it almost 2,000 feet above ground for maximum effect. Everything within four square miles was obliterated. Some 70,000 people were killed instantly, many of them incinerated. Within five years the death toll rose to 200,000 as a result of injuries and radiation sickness caused by the bomb. Two-thirds of the city’s buildings were destroyed.

Three days later the U.S. bomber Bockscar dropped a plutonium bomb, “Fat Man,” over the industrial seaport of Nagasaki. Some 40,000 people were killed instantly. Within five years the toll had risen to 140,000.

In an Aug. 9 radio address, President Harry Truman threatened to continue the atomic bombing of Japanese cities unless Tokyo surrendered unconditionally. The Japanese government did so the next day.

The deliberate targeting of civilians, mainly working people, was not unique to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a feature of World War II on all sides, from the German bombing of London to the British bombing of Hamburg and Dresden in Germany. Nearly 600 U.S. bombers dropped 1,665 tons of munitions on Tokyo March 9-10, 1945, creating a firestorm that destroyed 16 square miles and killed 100,000 people, mainly women, children and old men.

‘Capitalism is enemy of the people’

As Socialist Workers Party National Secretary James P. Cannon put it in a speech Aug. 22, 1945, “Capitalism is demonstrating itself every day more and more, in so-called peace as in war, as the enemy of the people. Bomb the people to death! Burn them to death with incendiary bombs! Break up their industries and starve them to death! And if that is not horrible enough, then blast them off the face of the earth with atomic bombs! That is the program of liberating capitalism.”

While the SWP immediately condemned the atomic annihilation in Japan, other currents in the workers movement, like the Stalinist Communist Party, which supported Washington in the war, hailed it as “super-duper.”

To this day, the U.S. government defends its decision to drop the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When President Barack Obama spoke in Hiroshima May 27, the first sitting U.S. president to visit there, he made no apology for what Washington had done.

The decision to use nuclear weapons was a political judgment, not a military one. The first detonation of a small nuclear bomb had been conducted just three weeks earlier in New Mexico. Washington was keen to test its new weapon on a real target and to impress upon the world its supreme power through the obliteration of a whole city by a single bomb.

Imperialist goals in the Pacific

Far from ending World War II, this was intended as an opening salvo in a new war. Washington’s battle with Tokyo had been for control of the Pacific. It considered China, in particular, as its prize and intended to crush the anti-imperialist revolution unfolding there. The U.S. wartime alliance with the Soviet Union was coming to an end, and the U.S. rulers wanted to warn Moscow not to interfere with their ambitions in Asia and the Middle East and were preparing to drive the Soviet army back out of Eastern Europe.

There “can be no compromise,” Truman declared in October 1945. The “atomic bombs which fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki must be a signal” to Moscow.

But the rulers’ plans ran up against the working class. A revolution by the workers and peasants ended foreign domination of China and made it clear that any intervention by Washington would be fiercely resisted. At the same time, mass protests by U.S. troops across Asia demanded, “Bring us home now.”

Instead of a “hot” war to herald a new “American Century,” what followed was four decades of the Cold War. Over that time, Washington considered using nuclear weapons during military conflicts many times: in China, Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s; against Cuba in the 1960s; in Vietnam again in the 1960s and ’70s, and on numerous occasions in the Middle East since 1946. Each time it weighed the political price it would pay and decided against it.

Arms race

A feature of the Cold War was an arms race between Washington and Moscow to develop and test new bombs and missiles, including the hydrogen bomb, and to amass massive nuclear weapons stockpiles. The governments of the U.K., France and China also developed and tested nuclear arms. By 1986, the number of nuclear warheads had grown to 70,300.

Today, there are over 15,000 nuclear warheads worldwide, most of them hundreds of times more powerful than those dropped on Japan. Washington and Moscow each have more than 7,000. This is enough to destroy human life on earth many times over. Moreover, almost 4,000 are actively deployed, of which nearly 1,800 U.S., Russian, British and French warheads are on high alert for use at short notice. The other nuclear-armed states today are India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.

The Obama administration has begun a $1 trillion “atomic revitalization” program to develop new warheads and delivery systems over the next three decades. At the same time it is installing anti-ballistic missile systems in eastern Europe and South Korea, enhancing its strategic position against China and Russia and opening the prospect of a renewed nuclear arms race.

The danger that nuclear weapons will again be used is increasing in the world today, not lessening, as the old world order that was in place over the decades following World War II comes apart. The need to prevent this is a powerful argument for why the working class needs to overturn capitalist rule and replace it with the rule of working people. And, it’s why the Socialist Workers Party continues to demand that Washington unilaterally dismantle its deadly nuclear arsenal immediately.

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