This August marks the 79th anniversary of the single most murderous act of terrorism in world history when the U.S. ruling class—the only rulers to ever use nuclear bombs—dropped atomic bombs on two civilian Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This obliterated a quarter of a million Japanese civilians in a matter of seconds, injured hundreds of thousands more, and left future generations with everlasting genetic defects.

The racist U.S. rulers launched this heinous attack as a political warning to the then-socialist Soviet Union, signaling U.S. imperialism’s launching of the Cold War. Capitalists will stop at nothing when their domination is at stake. This is the natural outcome of a system rooted in the violence of exploitation. 

Today capitalist violence is worldwide and growing. Workers are being slaughtered in profiteering wars from Gaza to Sudan to Ukraine. And the imperialist powers are preparing for world war to redivide the world for plunder. The working class instead needs to turn their guns on the imperialist bosses. Then we can build a world based on human need. For that, we need millions worldwide to organize under an international communist party, Progressive Labor Party (PLP,) to turn the next capitalist atrocity and war into a class war for communism.

The lies and the reality

For over seven decades, U.S. rulers have tried to justify the A-bomb attacks by maintaining they were needed to force Japan’s surrender and avoid a U.S. land invasion and a million U.S. casualties. In reality, Japan’s rulers were ready to surrender before Hiroshima:

 • According to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, a board of military and civilian experts established by U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, “Certainly…in all probability prior to November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped…and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

   • A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, later the U.S. National Security Adviser, “confessed that he had pulled those numbers out of the air to justify the bombings” (LA Times, 8/5/2005).

   • By the spring of 1945, Japan’s entire industrial and military machine had ground to a halt, severing its oil lifeline. By June, U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay complained that there was nothing left to bomb in Japanese cities except “garbage can targets.”

   • General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Pacific commander, considered the A-bombs “completely unnecessary from a military point of view” (James Clayton, The Years of MacArthur, 1941-1945, Vol. II).

A genocide aimed at the USSR

If overwhelming evidence shows that the genocide at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was militarily unnecessary, and that Japan was on the verge of unconditional surrender, why did President Harry Truman order the A-bombs dropped?

The true purpose was to warn the then-socialist Soviet Union that the U.S. had a new and devastating weapon, and was ready to use it against any threat to the U.S. imperialists’ world dominance. The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the beginning of the Cold War between capitalists in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Some supporting evidence:

• With the Soviet Red Army ready to enter the war against Japan by August 8, the U.S. rushed to use the bomb two days earlier, to play what Stimson referred to as a “mastercard”: “Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else….We have to regain the lead…in a pretty rough and realistic way….We have coming into action a weapon which will be unique” (Stimson diary).

• In an implicit indictment of the liberal Democrat Truman administration, Leo Szilard, creator of the the idea of a nuclear fission reactor said, “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities…we would have defined [it]…as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.”

The lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that the U.S. ruling class will stop at nothing to preserve its state power and profit. Which means the next world war is only a matter of time. It remains for the international working class to mete out justice to the most murderous criminals the world has ever known.