The U.S. ruling class ordered the dropping of newly developed atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan 81 years ago this month, incinerating over 200,000 men, women and children. Today, as Washington and other imperialist powers worldwide race to rearm for a world war once again, that horror is a grim reminder of what the capitalist class is capable of doing to protect their profits and markets.
On Aug. 6, 1945, a U.S. plane dropped “Little Boy,” a uranium-based atomic bomb with the explosive yield of 15,000 tons of TNT, on Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people and razing 70% of the town’s buildings. Three days later, “Fat Man,” a slightly larger plutonium bomb, was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 74,000. At the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan, the names of the 344,306 people who died in the bombings or from radiation poisoning and cancers afterward, are recorded.
Close to 85 million workers’ lives were sacrificed during World War II as the ruling classes of rival imperialist powers fought to come out on top in their war to redivide the earth.
“There Is No Peace!” was the banner headline of the Aug. 18, 1945, Militant at the war’s end. “War is the end result of the ceaseless capitalist hunt for profits, markets, colonies, spheres of influence,” a Socialist Workers Party National Committee statement explained. “It is a lie that war can be prevented by treaties and agreements among the imperialist bandits.”
As the crisis of capitalism deepens, conflicts between the competing ruling classes — intensified by the U.S. rulers’ war against Iran — is driving a massive arms race.
Taking the lead, by far, is Washington. Already spending more on military expenditures than the next six biggest governments combined, the U.S. administration is weighing a $1.5 trillion defense budget for 2027. The U.S. rulers increasingly act on the view that natural resources, entire industries, exploitable labor, strategic locations, and whole countries are theirs to take.
Beijing, with expansionist ambitions of its own, has increased its military spending 31 years in a row. It has the world’s second-largest defense budget, spending $336 billion in 2025.
Across Europe, military spending jumped sharply after Moscow’s attack on Ukraine and Washington’s assault on Iran. The German rulers’ war spending has reached a 36-year high, with plans to spend $228 billion by 2030, along with measures to spur voluntary enlistment. If that fails, conscription will be next, Berlin says.
As during the buildup to the second imperialist world war, Jew-hatred and violence are once again being openly embraced as banners of both the right and left of bourgeois politics in the U.S. and worldwide. Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom, backed by the rulers in Iran, announced they would act on their openly stated goal of carrying out another Holocaust.
Growing threat of nuclear war
If political power is left in the hands of the capitalist rulers, they will utilize scientific advances — not for humanity’s benefit, but to increasingly threaten its very existence in a nuclear war. Washington and Moscow each have over 5,000 nuclear warheads, some 85% of the world’s total. The rulers in China, U.K., France and India are among those with nuclear weapons and access to intercontinental ballistic missiles that are capable of reaching any city in the world.
The only way working people can stop this carnage is to break with the political parties of the capitalist war makers and organize to take power from them, in the U.S. and in a growing number of countries around the world.
The fight to advance that road forward lies in winning working people to oppose the war Washington is waging against Iran today and to demand U.S. troops, bases and warships out of the Middle East.
And to building more and larger street protests against the U.S. rulers’ tightening economic squeeze on the Cuban people and threats of military intervention. Getting out the truth about Cuba’s socialist revolution is central to winning more working people to demand: U.S. hands off Cuba!
This is the course the Socialist Workers Party acts on today. Join us in building the proletarian party needed to organize millions of workers to take power from the capitalist war makers — the only road to peace.