This year marks the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The attack, carried out by two US B-29 superfortress bombers on 6 and 9 August 1945, resulted in an estimated 340,000 civilian dead, many of whom were burnt to a cinder immediately. Others died later of severe burns and radiation sickness and even later, from radiation-linked cancers.
The justification for this deliberate act of annihilation of two cities and the mass-killing of their populations, was (and still is) that it was "necessary" to force the surrender of the Japanese military forces - and thus end the Second World War on its Far-Eastern front.
Certainly, Japan's Emperor Hirohito formally capitulated after this catastrophe. But the Japanese armed forces were already defeated. Five months previously, on 9-10 March 1945, B-29s had dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo's heavily populated civilian areas as part of "Operation Meetinghouse", killing an estimated 90,000 to 100,000 and leaving over a million people homeless. The US air force followed this up with the systematic incendiary bombing of all of Japan's main cities: Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya and Yokohama, killing and injuring a further million ordinary Japanese, as well as destroying most of Japan's military production sites.
The British scientist, William Penney who, because of his expertise in shock wave theory, was part of the small group of scientists within the Manhattan Project's "Target Committee" (it decided which city would be the "best" target for the A-bomb) describes in his memoirs how at the time, "the Japanese navy was a ghost, the air force a handful of fighters, and the political leadership was already looking for a way out".
Since early July 1945, diplomatic messages had been exchanged between Japan and the Soviet Union which indicated that Japan was looking for mediation. On 8 August, the Red Army invaded Manchuria with the aim of forcing a final surrender, but on the following day, the A-bombing of Hiroshima took place.
So, if, from a military perspective there was no reason to drop the atom bombs, why was this fi nal horror perpetrated? There were two main reasons. Firstly, the nuclear scientists who built the bomb certainly wanted to see precisely how such a bomb affected people and urban infrastructure. The populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their cities represented a real life - or rather, real death - "experiment". And indeed they were carefully "studied" from the moment of the explosion - and ever since - by the world's leading military and medical scientists.
The other reason, spelled out cynically, but also quite eloquently, in several long letters written by US Secretary for War, Henry Stimson to President Truman before and after the bombings, was "to send a message to the Soviet Union".
Declassified minutes from the "Target Committee" read as follows: "...the Committee acknowledges that the Japanese war effort is collapsing; the decision to use the bomb rests on diplomatic considerations, chiefly the Soviet factor".
Initially, of course, the justification for a nuclear weapons programme had been that the Nazis were building an atom bomb. Since many of the world's leading physicists in the 1920s and 1930s were German, they would have been more than capable of designing one. But as it happened, the German nuclear programme had already been abandoned almost a full year before the Manhattan Project was launched in August 1942. Naturally, after the German surrender took place, somewhere else had to be found to "test" this bomb and make a demonstration of its power to any potential future enemy.
Celebrating "Victory over Japan"
Commemorations held at the Peace Memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are attended every year by international guests - as well as "hibakusha", the remaining Japanese survivors. A declaration is read out by each city mayor, calling for "world peace" and for the abolition of all nuclear weapons. But no British Prime Minister has ever attended this peace ceremony.
Instead, on 15 August every year, the British state organises a "Victory over Japan" (VJ), day, to celebrate its own victory over Japanese forces - which took place at the sites of Imphal and Kohima in North-East India in March-June 1944, paving the way for the British reconquest of Burma - now Myanmar. It was there that Mountbatten's 14th Army, along with its Indian and African colonial troops, defeated Japan's 85,000-strong Fifteenth Army in one of the most deadly conflicts of the war: 53,000 Japanese and 16,500 British soldiers were killed.
This August, King Charles the 3rd, bedecked in WW2 medals, made Britain's VJ speech in front of the Burma Star Memorial in Staffordshire's Peace Arboretum, choosing to remember the British soldiers who died during the Burma campaign.
This had been a military disaster for the British army. The rapid advance of Japanese troops westwards in 1942, through the former British colonies of Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Burma, resulted in the mass surrender of 115,000 British soldiers. As POWs they were used as forced labour in the construction of the infamous Burma-Thailand "Death Railway" and the bridge over the River Kwai. As many as 16,000 POWs died due to the harsh conditions in the prisoner of war camps.
Charles did, of course, on this 80th anniversary, also mention the: "immense price paid by the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - a price we pray no nation need ever pay again"... But as he spoke, the people of Gaza, trapped on the Strip for two years and under fi re from the "conventional" bombs of the Israeli military, were paying this price "again". Because proportionally speaking, the 67,000 dead, over a hundred thousand missing and wounded and the flattening of 90% of Gaza's infrastructure buildings - not to mention the long-term consequences of dust, pollution and malnutrition - probably represents even worse devastation.
Anglo-American atomic bombs
The first A-bombs were a US-British collaboration. In fact the British nuclear-weapons programme, "Tube Alloys", started as early as mid-1940 under Winston Churchill's Ministry of Defence - that is, two years before the US "Manhattan project".
In March 1940, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, both theoretical physicists at the University of Birmingham had succeeded in working out mathematically - that is, at least in theory - that a nuclear bomb was feasible. They authored a memorandum in which they explained that "a quantity of uranium-235 exceeding a critical size of about one pound will undergo a rapid, self-sustaining chain reaction and explode with the energy of thousands of tons of TNT".*
The Frisch-Peierls memorandum reached Henry Tizard, a government scientific advisor and chair of the Aeronautic Research Committee, which had developed the first radar system in the mid-1930s. Tizard was aware that letters had been sent to US president Roosevelt in 1939 by the physicists Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller informing him of the possibility of building a nuclear bomb and warning that German scientists were already in the process of trying to do so. They also pointed out that the necessary uranium ore to build a similar bomb existed in the USA.
With this in mind, Tizard wrote to the then Prime Minister Chamberlain, warning that "the United States, although possessing a very capable scientific establishment, is unlikely to make any atomic weapon available to us. [...] Consequently, if Britain wishes to possess an atomic bomb, it must develop it independently and as rapidly as possible".
Indeed, British scientists had, at this point an advantage over their US counterparts. Because what the US scientists lacked were the Frisch-Peierls mathematical calculations. Tizard thus got permission from the British government to develop this work further - although it was likely that it would only be useful as a bargaining chip, in order to get the US military establishment to "make any atomic weapon available" to the British military.
As a result of Tizard's proposal, a committee of scientists was formed to carry out more precise calculations. In June 1940, Churchill, then Defence Minister, decided to allocate funds for a secret atomic project dubbed "Tube Alloys" - named for the A-bomb components (i.e., a "uranium tube" and "metal alloy").
Frisch and Peierls now worked under the supervision of Birmingham University's professor of physics, Mark Oliphant. He knew what he was doing; along with Ernest Rutherford he had invented the first linear particle accelerator. What's more, Rutherford was the first physicist to identify nuclei within atoms, confirming the existence of neutrons in 1933 - less than a decade before this knowledge was exploited in order the develop the most destructive man-made power yet known: neutrons initiating a nuclear chain reaction, by splitting the nuclei of a material like plutonium, leading to a massive explosion.
The Tube Alloys team formulated the equations necessary for the design of the first prototypes of centrifuges to be used to purify uranium into its radioactive form, uranium-235. They also discovered how to reduce the critical mass of plutonium in order to trigger nuclear fission - the splitting of the atom - which now made a plutonium atomic bomb practically feasible. This contribution was mainly the work of Nobel prize-winner James Chadwick and mathematician William Penney.
Having succeeded in making itself indispensable to the Americans by 1943, Tube Alloys was merged into the Manhattan Project, under the so-called the "Quebec agreement", signed between Churchill and Roosevelt.
Chadwick and Penney led the British team at the Project and participated in the so-called "Trinity Test" on 16 July, 1945 in the desert near Los Alamos. This was the first successful test of an atomic bomb; in this case an implosion-design plutonium bomb, codenamed "Gadget", later to be used to incinerate Nagasaki.
The Trinity detonation resulted in an intense flash, a powerful blast wave, and the formation of the now well-known mushroom cloud. Radioactive fallout from the explosion contaminated a large area of the surrounding desert and nearby communities, a consequence the scientists later said they had not "fully anticipated". Today the families of the "downwind" survivors of the radiation blast - known as "Downwinders" - are still campaigning for recognition and compensation.
The other main contribution from the Tube Alloys team was from William Penney, who had to estimate the height off the ground at which "Fat Man" should be detonated. He was also involved in the Target Committee, as mentioned before, which had the responsibility of deciding where exactly the bomb would be dropped. In fact Penney seems to have got everywhere. He also helped supervise the loading of "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" onto the B-29 bombers on Tinian island in the North Marianas, and was in the observation aircraft with Royal Air Force Group Captain Leonard Cheshire from the Joint Staff Mission in Washington which monitored the explosion of "Little Boy" over Nagasaki. As he was considered a leading expert on the effect of explosions, he was part of the team of scientists and military analysts who entered Hiroshima and Nagasaki to examine the effect of nuclear bombs.
Jewish refugee talent
Many of the most accomplished scientists involved in Tube Alloys including Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, were Jewish refugees who had fled to Britain after the Nazis seized power in Germany and Austria. In fact, there were 12 German-Jewish theoretical physicists recruited to Tube Alloys and all in all, 35 German-Jewish scientists worked on the Manhattan Project.
Ironically, the anti-Jewish policy of the Nazi regime had actually deprived it of the science it would have needed to match the research later carried out by their Allied enemies. The "Deutsche Physik" movement, developed by leading physicists supportive of the Nazi Party, had labelled Einstein's relativity theory a "Jewish science", promoting "Aryan" experimental physics over "non-Aryan" theoretical physics. Thus nuclear physics, which is heavily reliant on theory was discouraged - and this meant a permanent set-back for the Nazi A-bomb. The famous German theoretical physicist and pioneer of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, was called a "White Jew" by the Nazis after they came to power in 1933, because he had worked with the Jewish scientist Born and had been nominated for the Nobel prize by Albert Einstein.
In fact already in April 1933, university quotas in Germany and Austria were introduced which barred the way to Jewish students. Then from 1935 onwards, Hitler's Nuremberg Laws prevented Jews from holding any university positions. Many leading academics went into exile, to the benefit of British and US research establishments - but of course, ultimately not to the benefit of humanity, given the aim of the research they were asked to engage in.
It's worth mentioning that Albert Einstein who was Jewish and a socialist, had left Germany for the United States in late 1932, initially to visit the California Institute of Technology. But he decided not to return to Germany after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, officially resigning his university position.
A leading figure in Tube Alloys and then the Manhattan Project, was Klaus Fuchs, the Jewish-German mathematician who had fled to Britain in 1933. But like many German Jews, the British authorities considered him a potential threat and he was interned on the Isle of Mann before he was transferred to a camp in Quebec, Canada. From there, he wrote letters to the physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Max Born, also Jewish-German, who had been his professor at Leipzig University. Max Born and Rudolf Peierls convinced the War Office to allow Fuchs to return to Britain. Considered a "low-risk" internee, he was granted security clearance and joined Tube Alloys in 1941. He joined the Manhattan Project the following year.
In passing it's worth mentioning Max Born's trajectory, after he was suspended from his professorship at the University of Göttingen in 1933 for being Jewish. He came to Britain and found a position at St John's College, Cambridge. He then was appointed Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1936, where he first got to know Klaus Fuchs, who worked in his physics research team. However he became a naturalised British subject on 31 August 1939, one day before World War II broke out in Europe, which no doubt protected him from the idiocy of the British military police and internment.
Revealing atomic secrets: spying or diplomacy?
Fuchs was a Communist by conviction. And for the British political establishment, this was even worse than being a Nazi. He had joined the German Communist Party in 1932, but fled Germany after the Reichstag fire. In the prison camp in Quebec, he became friends with a fellow Communist with whom he remained in contact throughout his period in Los Alamos. He was later accused of sharing the "secrets" of the bomb with her, knowing, as he later admitted, that she might pass technical information on to Soviet physicists.
Fuchs was arrested by the British police after the war and put on trial for spying. He explained to the court why he had consciously decided on this course of action. He said that he believed "the knowledge of atomic research should not be the private property of any one country, but should be shared with the rest of the world for the benefit of mankind".
Ironically, this view was shared by Henry Stimson, who was US Secretary of War from 10 July 1940 to 21 September 1945. As such, he had been in charge of the Manhattan project and never disputed that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary. He justified it on the grounds that the only other way that the US could have forced a surrender by the Japanese was through a ground invasion by US troops - which, he argued implausibly, would have meant the loss of up to a million soldiers - even after the carpet bombing of all major cities... In fact this was a deliberate obfuscation, because as mentioned above, it was Stimson who admitted that the real reason for dropping the bombs was "to send a message to the Soviet Union".
When the writer John Hersey published his essay, "Hiroshima", causing public outcry against the bombing, Stimson countered this with an article entitled "The decision to use the atomic bomb", concluding (mendaciously) that "it had saved the Japanese from themselves"!
Nevertheless, he was of the opinion that the power and destructiveness of the bomb had changed warfare forever and that it should therefore mean the end of all war to solve conflicts. He wrote that the development of a nuclear bomb "caps the climax of the race between man's growing technical power for destructiveness and his psychological power of self-control and group control - his moral power". He therefore argued in favour of sharing the so-called "nuclear secrets" with the Soviet Union, rather than withholding them - and wrote a series of letters to President Truman discussing these options.
This following quote is from his memorandum written on 11 September 1945, less than a month after the nuclear bombing of Japan: "My idea of an approach to the Soviets would be a direct proposal after discussion with the British that we would be prepared in effect to enter an arrangement with the Russians, the general purpose of which would be to control and limit the use of the atomic bomb as an instrument of war and so far as possible to direct and encourage the development of atomic power for peaceful and humanitarian purposes. Such an approach might more specifically lead to the proposal that we would stop work on the further improvement in, or manufacture of, the bomb as a military weapon, provided the Russians and the British would agree to do likewise".
The failure of nuclear non-proliferation
Needless to say, Stimson's advice was dismissed by the British and US political establishments. Instead, Winston Churchill and Truman's successor, Dwight Eisenhower, launched the Cold War against the Soviet Union on the grounds that it posed a threat to the West. "Communism" became a dirty word. In the US, Eisenhower with the help of Senator McCarthy, launched a vicious anti-Communist witch-hunt, culminating in the execution by electric chair of husband and wife, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953, convicted of passing on atomic secrets to the USSR - but whose only real crime was to be members of the American Communist Party.
Unsurprisingly, the attempt by the US and the British establishments to maintain nuclear secrecy had the opposite effect. It led to nuclear proliferation: all those countries under threat from imperialist weaponry and which had the capability, now developed their own bombs, as a "deterrent" against attack...
On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union successfully conducted its first nuclear test explosion. Some sources quote so-called classified documents which reveal that it was the information passed on to Russian physicists by Fuchs which helped them to develop their "bomb". Whether this was the case or not, in February 1950, Fuchs, by then head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in Oxfordshire, was arrested, tried and sentenced to 14 years in prison, for violating the Official Secrets Act.
He spent 9 years in Brixton prison. After his release, in 1959, he went to live in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where he was appointed director of the Central Institute of Nuclear Physics in Dresden.
There was another spy who was never officially unmasked: Melita Norwood, a member of the British Communist Party. She had been secretary to George Bailey, who was head of a department at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research and who was thus also a member of the Tube Alloys advisory committee. Ms Norwood had apparently passed on relevant material to Soviet scientists, but was only identified by MI5 in 1965 (or so the official story goes!), and was never charged with spying. Supposedly the secret service wanted to keep its anti-spy methods secret! A highly fictionalised, suitably anti-Communist (and pretty awful) movie based on her story, entitled "Red Joan" was released in 2018.
The fiction of a "Nazi nuclear bomb"
In their famous memorandum, Frisch and Peierls had written: "Germany is, or will be, in the possession of this [atomic] weapon" and that "the most effective reply would be a counter-threat with a similar bomb". But Germany, as already mentioned, had abandoned its nuclear programme in December of 1941. And while the reasons for this were only publicly clarified after the German surrender, it is hard to believe that US intelligence did not already know all about it. In other words the "threat of a Nazi bomb" and a race for time with Nazi scientists to beat them to it, was a pretext for the Manhattan Project, right from the word go.
In May 1945, the US "Alsos" intelligence mission into Germany arrested leading German nuclear scientists and interned them at Farm Hall, near Cambridge. A big "catch" was Werner Heisenberg. The rooms at Farm Hall were all bugged and the scientists' discussions were recorded. These recordings reveal that most of the interned scientists were morally opposed to the atomic bomb and that some of them had secretly sabotaged its development.
Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, the astro-physicist said, "I believe that the reason we didn't do it was because all the physicists didn't want to do it, on principle. If we had all wanted Germany to win the war, we would have succeeded". Heisenberg explained that "We never had the necessary amount of material nor the technical know-how to assemble a weapon. The heavy-water reactor we were trying to run could not produce an explosive; it was only a research engine. Even if we had succeeded in getting a reactor operating, we would still have needed a critical-mass calculation that we never performed". He said he had never done the calculation and was always opposed to the idea of a nuclear bomb.
Of course, it took over 3 years after the Manhattan Project was set up before the bomb was ready to be dropped. If the years of research done beforehand are added, then the minimum time needed to make an atom bomb - provided fissile material was available - would have been at least 5 years (it took the USSR 4 years). In reality, Hitler had neither the resources nor the time to undertake this project - and the decision was taken to devote the German military-industrial complex to develop sophisticated conventional weapons - which it did successfully with respect to its submarines, for instance. Churchill is quoted as having said "The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril".
And now, yes, the bomb has "proliferated"...
It is the case, probably more by luck than anything else, that 80 years on, there has never been another nuclear bombing. Little Boy and Fat Man are, to date, the only two A-bombs ever exploded in a war situation. So far. However, a nuclear war remains an "existential threat" for mankind. And it could start by accident. There is the 1983 example of how false information was somehow transmitted to Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov's computer screen, showing that five US missiles were in flight, targeting the USSR. Petrov did not trust the computer software and thought that a nuclear strike with 5 missiles was illogical - and he decided to make sure before alerting his superiors. So a potential nuclear war was avoided.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), over the past 40 years the world's nuclear stockpile has actually shrunk: from 64,000 weapons in the mid-eighties to 12,240 in 2025. Today, the biggest nuclear arsenals are in the USA, Russia and China. Apart from Britain, whose nuclear capacity is entirely dependent on the US for maintenance and support, the other countries which have acquired nuclear weapons are France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. The last 4 are not signed up to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Unsurprisingly - according to SIPRI - it is impossible to get them all to agree on disarmament. The smaller and weaker the state, the more it claims to need a nuclear deterrent...
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty initially struck between the USSR and the USA in 1991 is due to expire next year, and who knows given the current hot-cold state of US/Russia relations whether this will be renewed.
All of this said, as SIPRI points out in its 2025 assessment of "Armaments, Disarmament and International Security", that compared to the previous 3 decades, "the 2020s have seen far more numerous armed conflicts... with higher war fatalities and displacement of people" and that "Great power confrontation has returned to levels of intensity not experienced since the end of the Cold War in 1989-91, including the articulation of nuclear threats". It cites the wars in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Gaza, Myanmar and Sudan, commenting that "the international capacity for peaceful conflict management continued to seem not quite up to its extraordinary challenging tasks" - a statement which peacemaker and Nobel Peace Prize aspirant Donald Trump would of course disagree with, having claimed to have "solved" 8 wars already...
Apparently while global spending on arms has increased every year for the past 10 - to $2.7 trillion - this is not historically very high. In 2024 military spending was 2.5% of global GDP, compared to 5.4% in 1964 and 4.2% in 1984... However, SIPRI warns that it would be unwise to assume that the current figure will not rise, given the intention of EU states and Britain to increase their defence spending to 5% or more of their GDPs... That is, of course, if they can afford it, given the general crisis in the world economy and the crisis of state indebtedness, even if weapons always "come first". General conventional weapon rearmament thus seems to be on the agenda. And when this has happened before - also in the context of a recession - it was a prelude to world war.
It would be wrong to think this is inevitable, however. It depends to a large extent on the political consciousness of the working class throughout the world and the ability of this international class to build revolutionary communist parties which are capable of overthrowing capitalism, and which are committed to building a communist world. That is, of course, the only way to end the threat, not only of nuclear war, but all war, for good.
17 October 2025