Say No to NUCLEAR WEAPONS – Consumers Association Penang

A Quick Killer and Destroyer of Worlds

There is a tool that can unmake us. It begins with a flash so bright that, through closed eyes and cupped hands, you could see the bones of the people huddled around you.

Within minutes, it evaporates major cities and sends every one of the 12,000 or so airborne passenger aircraft tumbling from the sky. Within days, it sparks anarchy as governments and institutions cease to exist – and food begins to run short.

Within months, it blackens the skies, collapsing temperatures by 20 to 30 degrees Celsius, sparking an era of famine. Within years, it erases our collective knowledge, then our memory, so that thousands of years into the future, someone stumbling upon our bones may wonder what kind of animal we were.

This is the grim shadow that has now hung over humanity for 80 years, since the United States first used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

On 6 August 1945, US dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in combat, on the city of Hiroshima, killing a third of its inhabitants and maiming thousands more. Just 3 days later, the US dropped the second nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. At least 100,000 people died immediately in the 2 attacks, and perhaps twice as many died slowly in the months and years that followed – victims of the enduring effects of radiation, which deforms our cells and corrupts our very biology.

When the first bomb fell, Japan had already been devastated. The US firebombing of Tokyo killed over 100,000 people in a single night in March 1945, displacing another million. The bombing of Osaka destroyed 8 square miles of the city in one air raid, killing 4,000. Some 100 Japanese cities were devastated or destroyed entirely before the first atomic bomb was even loaded onto the bombing plane.

The atomic bomb’s capacity for total destruction looms over society today. For several decades now, the US has shifted from a doctrine based on the idea of “Mutually Assured Destruction”, which says that no one can win a nuclear war, to one based on “counterforce power”, which assumes that the US could dismantle a rival’s nuclear capacities with a massive first strike. This was the rationale behind the so-called ‘Euromissiles’ — the US nuclear arsenal that arrived in Western Europe in the 1970s and continues to proliferate today.

While most nuclear-armed states reserve the right to use nuclear weapons defensively, exclusively when facing an existential threat, the US has not felt bound by such limits.

On the gruesome anniversary of the nuclear bombings, we remember the victims of imperialism’s singular capacity for destruction, and reaffirm our commitment to dismantling its war machine and building a new diplomacy of peoples. Everything is at stake in this struggle.

– edited extracts from “Destroyer of Worlds, PI Briefing No.29 in Progressive International (9 August 2025)