There is a tool that can unmake us. It begins with a flash so bright that, through closed eyes and cupped hands, you could see the bones of the people huddled around you.

Within minutes, it evaporates major cities and sends every one of the 12,000 or so airborne passenger aircraft tumbling from the sky. Within days, it sparks anarchy as governments and institutions cease to exist — and food begins to run short.

Within months, it blackens the skies, collapsing temperatures by 20 to 30 degrees celsius, sparking an era of famine. Within years, it erases our collective knowledge, then our memory, so that thousands of years into the future, someone stumbling upon our bones may wonder what kind of animal we were. As Soviet Premier Nikhita Khruschev once remarked: “The survivors will envy the dead.”

This is the grim shadow that has now hung over humanity for 80 years, since the United States first used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

On 6 August 1945, a US Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, dropped ‘Little Boy’, the first atomic bomb ever used in combat, on the city of Hiroshima, killing a third of its inhabitants and maiming thousands more. Just three days later, the US dropped the second nuclear bomb — ‘Fat Man’ — on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. At least 100,000 people died immediately in the two attacks, and perhaps twice as many died slowly in the months and years that followed — victims of the enduring effects of radiation, which deforms our cells and corrupts our very biology.

When the first bomb fell, Japan had already been devastated. The US firebombing of Tokyo killed over 100,000 people in a single night in March 1945, displacing another million. The bombing of Osaka destroyed eight square miles of the city in one air raid, killing 4,000. Some 100 Japanese cities were devastated or destroyed entirely before the ‘Little Boy’ was even loaded onto the Enola Gay. Historical records suggest that the news of the bombings did little to change the political calculus in Japan — transcripts of political discussions from the time suggest that it was the Soviet declaration of war against Japan on 9 August that turned the tide.

Back in the US, news of the bombing provoked widespread outrage. In response, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson helped advance the narrative that the attack was necessary to save millions of US American lives and end the war.

But Stimson knew the truth. US President Harry S. Truman had spoken of the bomb as a “hammer” against the Soviets. In July 1945, he approached Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, telling him that the US had a "new weapon of unusual destructive force”. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than two weeks later was an imperial power play and a chilling exercise in mass murder, a chance for the US to assert its might and a warning to those who dared challenge its moves towards hegemony. As Nelson Mandela said in a 2003 speech criticising the US war against Iraq:

“If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America…. [W]hen Japan was retreating on all fronts, they decided to drop the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki... Those bombs were not aimed against the Japanese, they were aimed against the Soviet Union to say, 'look, this is the power that we have. If you dare oppose what we do, this is what is going to happen to you'.”

Intoxicated by the US’s newfound power, Truman would later threaten to use the atomic bomb to destroy all manufacturing plants from Stalingrad to Shanghai — a threat echoed by Winston Churchill in Britain. The bomb armed white supremacy with seemingly supreme power.

This set the stage for the Cold War — a war so far-reaching in its implications that some historians have described it as a Third World War. "It is particularly inappropriate to call a war ‘cold’ that begins with Nagasaki and Hiroshima," wrote Italian historian Domenico Losurdo. Even though the US and USSR never fought directly, Losurdo argued, the ever-present threat of total annihilation would distort the entire political and economic fabric of the US’s main rival — and, increasingly, the rest of the planet. From Korea to Vietnam, China to Iran, the US has repeatedly used the threat of nuclear warfare to advance its diplomatic and military objectives, pushing the world towards increasing nuclear proliferation.

The atomic bomb’s capacity for total destruction looms over society today. For several decades now, the US has shifted from a doctrine based on the idea of “Mutually Assured Destruction”, which says that no one can win a nuclear war, to one based on “counterforce power”, which assumes that the US could dismantle a rival’s nuclear capacities with a massive first strike. This was the rationale behind the so-called ‘Euromissiles’ — the US nuclear arsenal that arrived in Western Europe in the 1970s and continues to proliferate today.

While most nuclear-armed states reserve the right to use nuclear weapons defensively, exclusively when facing an existential threat, the US has not felt bound by such limits. In 2022, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned that the US would consider using atomic weapons “in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States, its allies, and partners." Hiroshima and Nagasaki remind us that this is no empty threat. The US remains the only country in history to have deployed nuclear weapons in war, and its “interests” now span the globe.

On the gruesome anniversary of the nuclear bombings, we remember the victims of imperialism’s singular capacity for destruction, and reaffirm our commitment to dismantling its war machine and building a new diplomacy of peoples. Everything is at stake in this struggle.

Latest from the Movement

Majority seek end to Israel weapons sales: Survey spanning three continents

This week, new polling from the Global Energy Embargo for Palestine network and the Progressive International revealed a majority of people in five nations – Brazil, Colombia, Greece, South Africa and Spain – believe that weapons companies should stop or reduce trade with Israel as its onslaught on Gaza continues.

Spain showed the highest support for weapons deals to be halted, with 58 percent of respondents saying they should stop completely, followed by Greece at 57 percent and Colombia at 52 percent.

“The message from the peoples of the world is loud and clear: They want action to end the assault on Gaza – not just words,” David Adler, co-general coordinator of Progressive International, told Al Jazeera. “Across continents, majorities are calling for their governments to halt arms sales and restrain Israel’s occupation.”

You can read the results of the polling online now.

The World Transformed 2025

British politics are on the move. With a new left party emerging, Labour crumbling, Greens transforming and Reform surging, there is an urgent need for the movement to assemble and debate strategy, build new networks of solidarity, and prepare for the year ahead. That's exactly the plan for the 2025 The World Transformed conference, which takes place in Manchester in the United Kingdom from 9-12 October 2025. Registration is now open.

Art of the Week

Kenichi Nakano was 47 years old when the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. He found himself 1,300 meters from the hypocenter of the explosion, upstream from the Yokogawa Bridge. He saw the river fill with the bodies of people killed by the blast:

“I kneeled on the riverbank and joined my hands in prayer, having seen such a sight for the first time in my life. Some had been blown there by the bomb blast, some had drowned after jumping into the river to escape the heat. The city’s rivers were full of such dying people. May their souls rest in peace.”

This drawing by Kenichi Nakano is one of many by survivors of the Atomic bomb held by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Hiroshima, Japan.