This year marks 80 years since the United States Army Airforce plane Enola Gay flew over the densely populated city of Hiroshima and dropped the first atomic weapon used in wartime — the gun-type uranium-235 fission bomb “Little Boy”.

Three days later, a larger and more powerful implosion-type plutonium bomb “Fat Man” was dropped over Nagasaki.

Together, these atomic bombs killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people and devastated two cities. Shortly afterwards, imperial Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allied powers.

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Those seeking to justify the US’ bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki claim it ended the war with Japan and prevented a full-scale invasion of the mainland, thereby preventing a greater loss of life. But, in August 1945, Japan was already on the brink of surrender.

White historians tend to attribute victory over the “Yellow Peril” to patriotic US and Australian manhood. However, it was the widespread popular resistance to Japanese colonialism in mainland China that really brought the Japanese military to its knees.

By the time the bomb was dropped, Japan’s population, which had largely supported its aggression on the Asian continent, was war weary. Absenteeism in the factories supplying the imperial war machine was growing and when the Allies occupied mainland Japan after the surrender, they were mostly welcomed by the Japanese as liberators.

The US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not bring about the end of the Asia-Pacific War. Instead, it was the opening salvo in a new Cold War.

After 1945, the US pitted itself against communism, in particular the Soviet Union, which claimed to represent that movement. The Cold War shaped the rest of the 20th century.

The US’ atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki provoked a nuclear arms race, in which states on both sides of its ideologically defined frontier developed and tested ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction.

The Soviet Union conducted its first successful nuclear weapons’ test in Kazakhstan in 1949. The British carried out theirs in the Montebello Islands, off Western Australia, in 1952.

These were closely followed by the US testing newer, even more destructive hydrogen bombs in 1952 and 1954. Not to be left behind in the race towards nuclear Armageddon, France joined the nuclear club in 1960 and China in 1964.

The military........

© Green Left Weekly