The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
A Threat Aimed at the Whole World

Aug 4, 2025

By the summer of 1945, World War II was all but over. Germany surrendered in May. The U.S. had controlled the seas around Japan since the battle of Leyte Gulf in October of 1944 had all but destroyed the Japanese Navy. The U.S. Navy cut off raw materials and food, essentially ending Japanese war production and starving the population. By December of 1944, the Japanese government had no choice but to ask for negotiations to end the war.

But instead of agreeing to negotiate, the U.S. proceeded to inflict increasing horror on the Japanese population. Starting in March of 1945, it undertook a massive campaign of firebombing, destroying 64 cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians over the course of five months. Then, on August 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped its new atomic weapon on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, it dropped another bomb on Nagasaki. It was the first time such weapons had been used anywhere in the world.

Few of the 200,000 or so people killed by the bombs died instantly. One Hiroshima survivor, Keiji Nakazawa, recounted part of the horror in his autobiography:

“The bomb blast pulverized the windowpanes…. People who’d been in rooms with windows straight ahead of them had their fronts covered with glass splinters. The glass splinters had pierced even their eyeballs, so they couldn’t open their eyes.... Countless pieces of glass were embedded in their bodies, so that each time they took a step, the glass splinters jingle-jangled.”

Thousands of others were burned to death, or died of radiation poisoning, or were crushed by falling debris. Hundreds of thousands more were severely injured, or rendered homeless.

Many American military commanders, including the leading U.S. generals MacArthur and Eisenhower, said at various times that they thought dropping the bombs was unnecessary to end World War II. Admiral Nimitz, commander of U.S. Naval forces in the Pacific said clearly: “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.” But whatever role these bombs played in ending the war with Japan, their main target was the rest of the world.

In 1945, much of the world was still technically part of the British or French colonial empires, including almost all of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Vietnam, and much of the Caribbean. Other places like China, Iran, and much of Latin America were semi-colonies, technically independent but dominated by the imperialist powers. People in many of these places were already mobilizing against the colonizers, and it was clear that neither Britain nor France had the military strength to retain control over their empires.

U.S. corporations were already drooling at the possibility of taking over control of large areas of the world, and of the money to be made. The war had set up the U.S. to be the predominant economic power with the most extensive and strongest military in the world.

The massive assault on the civilian population of Japan, culminating in the dropping of the two atomic bombs, served as a perfect demonstration of what U.S. imperialism was prepared to do—not only militarily, but humanly.

The only potential rival of the U.S. was the Soviet Union, even though it had lost tens of millions of people in the war and had a huge swath of its territory laid waste by the Nazis. U.S. imperialism had worked with the Stalinist bureaucracy that ran the Soviet Union when it fit U.S. interests, as in defeating Nazi Germany, or keeping a lid on revolutionary movements in Europe after the war. But as warped as it was by that Stalinist bureaucracy, the Soviet Union remained a country with an economy that U.S. companies couldn’t so easily profit from, having come out of a workers’ revolution. The atomic bombings also served as a threat aimed at the Soviet Union.

So as much as they were the last acts of World War II, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also the first acts of the new series of wars the U.S. was preparing to fight to dominate the world.

The U.S. has not again used atomic bombs, but they were an accurate warning of the brutality U.S. imperialism’s domination would mean for the world’s people. This brutality has continued, from mass firebombing campaigns in Korea and Vietnam, to the support for murderous dictatorships across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, to the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, to the current genocidal policies being carried out by Israel, the U.S. surrogate.