How U.S. imperialism blackmails the world with nuclear weapons, from Hiroshima to today

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped a uranium-core atomic bomb on Hiroshima, instantly incinerating most of the city. The nuclear blast, radiation, and resulting firestorms killed 90,000 people immediately, with the death toll surpassing 100,000 by the end of 1945.

Just three days later, on August 9, the U.S. struck again, obliterating Nagasaki with a plutonium bomb. The explosion killed 40,000 on impact, while another 70,000 perished by year’s end from burns, injuries, and radiation poisoning. Tens of thousands more later succumbed to radiation sickness, bringing the total death toll to nearly 200,000. Even 80 years later, survivors and their descendants continue to suffer from the bombings’ horrific aftereffects, cancers, birth defects, and generational trauma. Yet the Japanese and U.S. governments have denied them full state compensation and proper medical care, abandoning those who endured this imperialist atrocity.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not acts of war but cold-blooded experiments in mass murder. The U.S. deliberately targeted these cities, relatively untouched by previous bombings, to test its new weapon’s destructive power on a civilian population. This remains one of history’s most aggressive attacks of war, a stark example of U.S. barbaric imperialist will.

Since 1945 the greatest driver of nuclear proliferation has been U.S. imperialism itself. From the Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union to its current triad fronts of war, the U.S. has repeatedly used its nuclear arsenal as a tool of intimidation to suppress adversaries. This strategy has only reinforced the lesson that nuclear deterrence may be the only reliable safeguard against American aggression. Recent history underscores this reality, from the U.S. and NATO’s destruction of Libya in 2011, a nation that abandoned its nuclear program in 2003, to recent attacks on Iranian civilian nuclear facilities led by U.S. and Israel.

Extensive U.S. nuclear tests have also damaged the people’s health and environments in many Pacific islands and atolls, while medical tests in its clandestine laboratories have likewise damaged the health of numerous voluntary and involuntary human test subjects.

Current nuclear weapon flashpoints reflect broader U.S. military strategy and its fight to be the sole hegemonic imperialist power in the world. The three fronts: Eastern Europe against Russia; the U.S.-Israel-Gulf-Turkish alliance against Iran; and an iron web of alliances in the Pacific, including the Australia-UK-U.S. (AUKUS), Japan-South Korea-U.S. (JAKUS), Japan-Philippines-U.S. (JAPHUS), and Japan-Australia-India-U.S. (Quad) against China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) are all marked by the threat of nuclear weapons. The U.S. uses nuclear blackmail against its rivals in the region, painting them as authoritarian, dictatorships, or terrorists while it blatantly drags the people who would be affected by a nuclear catastrophe into wars they never asked for. This U.S. aggression will only breed more anti-imperialist sentiment by the people in the region, uniting against U.S. nuclear threats.

U.S. and Israel against Iran

Nowhere is this strategy more blatant than in the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran. Despite Iran’s adherence to international nuclear agreements, Washington and Tel Aviv have repeatedly sabotaged its civilian nuclear program through covert assassinations of scientists and overt military strikes, all while falsely painting Iran as the aggressor. These actions expose the real objective: crushing any nation that challenges U.S.-Zionist hegemony in West Asia.

Widespread forced starvation and medical crises are afflicting Palestinians in Gaza, a situation that is a direct result of the ongoing U.S.-Zionist blockade and siege. U.S. and Israel justify these controls by citing their own manufactured  “threat of Iran’s nuclear program” and its central role in supporting  the regional Axis of Resistance, including Hamas freedom fighters. U.S. and Israel’s deliberate weakening and bombardment of Palestinians resulting in the starvation and death of children, are defended by the argument, which the world deems inhumane, that humanitarian aid would otherwise be co-opted for military and financial gain.

In the most recent attacks against the Islamic Republic of Iran during the “12 day war,” as Israel’s chief backer, the U.S. could have stopped any direct aggression from the Zionist entity, but instead, it feigned ignorance to evade blame while exploiting the attacks to pressure Iran in nuclear negotiations. After Iran’s assertion of independence and self-defense strikes against Tel Aviv, the U.S. directly attacked three Iranian nuclear facilities: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

The nuclear negotiations between Iran and Western powers have consistently failed to address the fundamental imbalance in nuclear policy enforcement. While Iran has maintained its commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), including full cooperation with IAEA inspections, the negotiations have primarily focused on restricting Iran’s civilian nuclear program rather than establishing reciprocal obligations.

Evidence acquired by Iran indicates discrepancies in the IAEA’s oversight and so-called “impartiality”, including alleged sharing of inspection data with Israel and inconsistent application of safeguards, which likely assisted Israel in its lawless assassination campaign of Iranian nuclear scientists over many years. Notably, while Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities face intense scrutiny, Israel’s nuclear arsenal remains outside any international monitoring framework despite regional security implications.

The U.S. approach to these negotiations has prioritized unilateral restrictions over mutual measures. The U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018 and subsequent sanctions regime demonstrate how diplomatic frameworks led by imperialists are instrumentalized for self-serving political objectives rather than serving as genuine mechanisms for nonproliferation. This asymmetric enforcement of nonproliferation norms undermines the credibility of international institutions and reinforces perceptions of selective application based on geopolitical alignment.

Therefore, Iran has every right to develop nuclear energy, or even weapons, for its defense. Hypocritical warnings about “nuclear proliferation” ring hollow when directed at Iran rather than the U.S., which birthed and spread these weapons to enforce global dominance. 

U.S and NATO against Russia

During the Cold War, the United States pursued a strategy of “nuclear superiority,” particularly after the Soviet Union ended America’s nuclear monopoly. This included stationing of “tactical” nuclear weapons systems that blurred the lines between conventional and nuclear warfare. At the peak of the Cold War, the U.S. and the USSR signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 1987, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) in 1991, drastically reducing the proliferation of U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons.

Today on the Eastern Europe front, like in the era of Cold War stand-offs between the Soviet Union and U.S., the crisis is just as volatile. The U.S. stations around 200 tactical nuclear weapons across Italy, Germany, Turkiye, Belgium, and the Netherlands, while Russia has around 2000 nuclear warheads deployed, dramatically increasing the risk of escalation from the current conflict in Ukraine to a nuclear war. These “tactical nuclear weapons” are designed for short-range use with less explosive yield while still being extremely destructive.

For decades, Washington feared the Soviet, and later Russian, nuclear arsenal, yet instead of pursuing stability, it chose confrontation. The U.S. and EU imposed sweeping sanctions and engineered proxy wars to weaken Russia politically and economically. Through U.S.-engineered coups, Ukraine was manipulated into serving as a pawn and became the battleground for this indirect conflict, which has pushed Moscow to place its nuclear weapons on high alert. Despite repeated Russian warnings through the NATO-Russia Council, the U.S.-led alliance aggressively pursued Ukraine’s de facto NATO integration, violating the Minsk Agreements and other commitments. The U.S. and NATO absorbed Ukraine’s military into their command structure, using its airfields and bases near Russian and Belarusian borders for drills, surveillance, and forward deployments.

The Trump administration unilaterally left the INF in 2017, breaking down a major arms control measure that helped to slow the arms race. Even as Putin proposed new security agreements to limit military expansion, the U.S. obstinately cast Russia as an adversary. In December 2021, Moscow submitted drafts for mutual security guarantees to the U.S. and NATO, only to be ignored. Now, Trump threatens not to renew the New START treaty when it expires in 2026, which would leave the U.S. and Russia without arms control measures to hold back U.S. nuclear aggression for the first time since the Cold War.

The current standoff and arms race between the U.S. and Russian nuclear-armed imperialists can only be resolved by an end to U.S. provocation of regional wars and eastward expansion of NATO.

U.S. and Pacific alliances against China and DPRK

The DPRK’s nuclear program is a direct response to decades of U.S. hostility, a deterrence forged in the fires of threats and direct war on its people. During the Korean War (1950–53), U.S. bombing killed 20% of the North’s population and razed more cities than in Japan or Germany during WWII, to the point that U.S. generals admitted “there are no more targets left in Korea.” The war itself ended with an armistice but no peace agreement to this day, leaving the U.S. still technically in a state of war with the DPRK. This forced the country to pursue any and all forms of defense against further foreign aggression against its people.

Today, the U.S. escalates tensions with reckless military drills near the DPRK’s border, even deploying B-1B bombers capable of nuclear strikes. The DPRK has repeatedly offered to halt missile tests, which it has increased since 2022, in exchange for an end to these provocations, only to be ignored and receive more threats, as when Trump promised “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against the DPRK.

Since the Korean War 1953 armistice, the U.S. has refused to sign a peace treaty or normalize relations with the DPRK. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops, nuclear-capable missiles, and WMDs remain stationed across 15 South Korean bases, a permanent dagger aimed at North Korea. 

It is clear that the DPRK will not scale back its capacity to manufacture and use nuclear weapons without a serious concession from the U.S.. Its nuclear arsenal is considered one of the most powerful weapons against direct U.S. attacks and intervention. The de facto military occupation of South Korea, where U.S. bases, weapons systems, and troops are stationed, keeps South Korea under the U.S. “nuclear umbrella”.

As the DPRK stated multiple times the tensions can only be solved by forging of a peace treaty between North and South Korea, the immediate end of economic sanctions and war games being conducted in its borders and seas, the end of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea, and, following all of these steps, a bilateral and equal agreement on reunification of the peninsula without intervention by the U.S. or other foreign powers.

As the U.S. continuously targets the socialist construction of the DPRK, with its military “pivot to the Pacific” announced by Obama in 2012, the U.S. has also framed China’s economic and military growth as “aggressive,” fueling a new Cold War that risks catastrophic and nuclear conflict.

By arming Taiwan under the pretext of protecting semiconductor supplies, expanding military alliances in Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines, and conducting provocative war games in the South China Sea, Washington is systematically escalating tensions with its chief rival and nuclear power. These actions, from troop deployments to joint drills near China’s borders, are not defensive but incendiary, pushing the world towards a potential world war.

Conclusion and prospects

The U.S. brought nuclear weapons into the world and then made the decision to arm its allies and attempt to use them to impose its will wherever it pleased. The history of nuclear weapons from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the current three fronts of U.S.-led war exposes the fundamental contradiction of nuclear warfare: while imperialist powers use atomic weapons to threaten and dominate, anti-imperialist states have developed them to prevent further war on their people.

Thousands have engaged in advocacy efforts to reduce the U.S. nuclear triad, to demand clean up and compensation for damages, and to block the U.S. 1.7 trillion dollar nuclear modernization program. Even though the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has accumulated 94 signatory states since it entered into force in 2021, making nuclear weapons illegal internationally, the U.S. has no vision in sight towards dismantling its nuclear arsenal or joining the treaty. The U.S.-led war machine has been at the head of the imperialist system for decades, therefore being the main perpetrator and provocateur of nuclear proliferation. We must understand that the U.S. refuses to give up its arsenal and instead is plowing headfirst into a potential nuclear catastrophe, as a result of its imperialist agenda.

Since World War II, U.S. imperialism has leveraged its military sector to stimulate economic growth, a strategy that has consistently led to economic resource dislocation and periodic systemic crisis. The U.S. military industrial complex thus serves to extend and sustain the capitalist business cycle particularly during periods of monopoly capitalist crisis. Consequently, global conflicts often stem directly from the immense profitability of U.S. weapons production. The current expansion of the U.S. war machine on multiple fronts exemplifies the “accumulation of waste”¹ —- the plundering of land, resources and nature, alongside devastation and weakening of human lives. This global war economy allows U.S. imperialism to dispossess and displace populations, swelling the global reserve army of labor, suppressing wages, and physically debilitating working people. 

The U.S.-led war machine has been at the head of the imperialist system for decades, therefore being the main perpetrator and provocateur of nuclear proliferation. The solution is not to impose disarmament on oppressed nations, but the complete dismantling of the imperialist war machine and its nuclear terror apparatus, which must start with the U.S. Because the U.S. will never voluntarily give up its biggest guns, true peace can only come through the total defeat of U.S. imperialism and its junior partners, a victory that will require global solidarity and relentless struggle for just peace.

Notes

1. Ali Kadri, Accumulation of Waste: Political Economy of Systemic Destruction (Leiden/ Boston, Brill, 2023) ↩︎