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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki

This week millions in Japan and throughout the world will pause to remember those who died in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the last days of the Second World War. On 6th August 1945 Hiroshima was destroyed by an American atom bomb. Nagasaki was hit three days later. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilians, were killed instantly in the atomic blasts. Many more would later perish from flash burns and radiation sickness.

Hiroshima Day is observed on 6th August to commemorate the tragedy, honour the victims and promote global peace and nuclear disarmament. As Jeremy Corbyn says: “On Hiroshima Day, we remember every single person who was killed by an in defensible act of barbarity. We mourn the human lives underneath the statistical horror of the bomb’s death toll which, together with that from the attack on Nagasaki, was more than 200,000 people. And we commemorate the hundreds of thousands of survivors – known as the hibakusha – who endured the horror of what was left behind: nuclear radiation, mass destruction and unimaginable grief.”

The claim that the atom bombs forced Japan to surrender is an enduring myth of the Second World War. The bourgeois politicians who seek to justify this monstrous war crime say that the Americans had to use the atom bomb to force Japan to surrender and bring the global conflict to an end. But Japan was already on its knees begging for an armistice. Hitler was dead in his bunker. Japan was reeling from daily air-raids and a crippling Allied blockade. Communist-led partisans had driven the Japanese invaders out of vast tracts of China, Korea and Vietnam, while the Soviet Red Army delivered the killer blow when they smashed through Japanese-occupied Manchuria in August 1945. But two Japanese cities were wiped out to show the world, and the Soviet Union in particular, what the might of US imperialism was capable of doing.

The Americans thought they had a monopoly on nuclear know-how. They thought their new nuclear weapons would give them the power to dominate the entire world. But they were wrong. Soviet scientists were also unravelling the secrets of the atom and the USSR would soon develop nukes that would more than match anything in the imperialist arsenal.

All the veto-powers on the UN Security Council – Britain, People’s China, France, Russia and the USA – have nuclear weapons. But China is the only one that pledges never to be the first to use them.

People’s China actively supports proposals for multilateral and universal nuclear disarmament. China stands for the complete prohibition and total destruction of all nuclear weapons. China, backed by many other countries, has challenged the West to implement the entire non-proliferation treaty, which was signed in 1968 to halt the nuclear arms race but also committed the signatories to work towards universal nuclear disarmament. In the meantime, China calls on all the major nuclear weapon states to abandon their policy of nuclear deterrence.

These longstanding demands must be projected throughout the anti-war movement in Britain. The NCP supports the efforts of the Stop the War movement, CND and other peace movements for unilateral British nuclear disarmament.

The British ‘deterrent’ is a farce. The UK’s submarine-based Trident nuclear missile system is totally controlled by the Americans. Billions are wasted on maintaining Trident – money that could be better spent maintaining the health service and providing the education, affordable housing and decent state retirement pensions worthy of a country as rich as the UK. We must mobilise to stop the new Burnham government from spending billions more on these needless and useless nuclear weapons; scrap all British nuclear weapons and close down all US bases on our soil.