Crisis in the World Order and Nuclear Rearmament
August 1945: two atomic blasts – of uranium over Hiroshima and of plutonium over Nagasaki – resulted in more than 150,000 casualties. Another 200,000 would perish in the following five years, due to burns and long-term consequences of radiation exposure. The massacre also had a deliberate class dimension: American decision-makers chose to incinerate the two Japanese cities because of their factories, in order to break the morale of the Japanese working class. Coerced into forced labour, between 20,000 and 50,000 Korean workers also perished, becoming victims twice over: first of Japanese, and then of American imperialism.
In the reckoning of the wars of the 20th century, the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not exceptional in terms of the scale of the massacre, if we consider the incendiary bombing of Tokyo, with 100,000 victims, or that of Dresden. In the century of megadeath
, as defined by Zbigniew Brzezinski, at least 90 million civilians and military personnel died as a direct result of conflicts, including 30 million young people between the ages of 18 and 30. A few years after that August of 1945, in the Korean War, Washington was tempted to use the bomb again, but in the end refrained from doing so. However, between those killed in combat, cities incinerated by napalm, and deaths from starvation in the famine induced in the North, the American military command itself estimated that up to a fifth of the North Korean population was wiped out.
Nevertheless, the fact that a single bomb could annihilate a city or an enemy division had a disruptive effect, magnified shortly afterwards by the H-bomb – a thermonuclear fusion warhead hundreds of times more destructive than the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
One consequence was that military strategy became more rigid with the advent of a weapon which could deal a decisive blow to the enemy, but which was also likely to trigger a retaliatory second strike, in a self-destructive, even apocalyptic spiral. Henry Kissinger was one of the leading figures in the 1950s debate that sought an alternative to the dead end of massive retaliation in the form of a flexible response: a combined and calibrated use of conventional forces and tactical nuclear weapons. The aim was to preserve the link between war and politics theorised by Carl von Clausewitz, overcoming the paradox of a weapon so powerful that it could not be used. Thus, politics makes out of the all-overpowering element of war a mere instrument
, Kissinger quoted him in his Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy [1957]. Politics changes the tremendous battle-sword, which should be lifted with both hands and the whole power of the body to strike once for all, into a light handy weapon, which is even sometimes nothing more than a rapier to exchange thrusts and feints and parries
.
It is revealing that Kissinger himself later wrote in World Order [2014] that, on balance, all such theoretical efforts failed
, and that ultimately both strategic schools, in the US and the USSR, converged at least tacitly
on the concept of mutual assured destruction
:
Based on the premise that both sides possessed a nuclear arsenal capable of surviving an initial assault, the objective was to counterbalance threats sufficiently terrifying that neither side would conceive of actually invoking them.
A second consequence was a nuclear arms race, with a quantitative and qualitative escalation – 65,000 warheads by the mid-1980s, MIRV devices with multiple warheads, and the triad of deterrence from land, air, and sea – escaping even the logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD), since such potential would be capable of annihilating not only an adversary but the entire human race several times over. Such a disproportion between means and ends can be partly explained by the influence of arms industries and the military-industrial complex in both the US and the USSR, with a runaway arms race in the triad's weapon systems.
Moreover, once the series of relaunches around MAD extended to missile defence with Ronald Reagan’s SDI – the space shield which called into question the strategic stability of mutual vulnerability – the burden of rearmament proved fatal for Mikhail Gorbachev’s USSR. The overdevelopment of nuclear deterrents may well have been an unintended consequence of the contention, but, ultimately, Moscow was no longer able to sustain the arms race, once the fall in oil prices reduced the flow of revenue that had financed both the hypertrophy of the military-industrial complex and the delays and low productivity of the USSR's State capitalism.
In the end, behind the screen of equal competition between two global atomic superpowers, it was the objective facts of imperialist power relations that prevailed. The catastrophic outcome of the Cold War in the implosion of 1989-91 confirmed the nature of the true partition between the US and the USSR. Washington and Moscow had never really been on an equal footing, nor had they ever really intended to go to war, let alone nuclear war. The dramatisation of their deadly confrontation, with mutual threats of nuclear annihilation, served to mask their convergence in keeping European imperialism divided. Our Marxist analysis has followed the strategic confrontation over nuclear rearmament over the decades, but if we had limited ourselves to that aspect alone – to its technological-military dimension, its doctrines, its rhetoric for public opinion – without considering all the areas of imperialist confrontation, we would have misunderstood the real power relations between the powers and their dynamics, which were already multipolar when the dominant representation was bipolar.
On the other hand, it is not actually true that those immense deterrents were not and are not used. They are used strategically, as a threat or as a defence against the threat of others, and politically, as a sanction of the status of sovereignty of those who can threaten and cannot be threatened without consequences. The nuclear sceptre is what distinguishes the powers equipped with the ultimate atomic weapon from those that are not. But this is only one dimension of the contention, which is decided by force in the broad sense – economic, political, military – and not by nuclear force alone.
In World Order, Kissinger also suggests that the escalation towards massive nuclear deterrent devices was accompanied by a conceptual drift:
A surreal quality haunted this calculus of deterrence, which relied on ‘logical’ equations of scenarios positing a level of casualties exceeding that suffered in four years of world wars and occurring in a matter of days or hours. Because there was no prior experience with the weapons underpinning these threats, deterrence depended in large part on the ability to affect the adversary psychologically.
Kissinger interprets in this light Mao Zedong’s stance in 1957, when, before a dismayed Nikita Khrushchev, he declared that China would be able to endure the sacrifice of hundreds of millions of lives in a nuclear war. This was seen in the West as a sign of emotional imbalance or ideological fanaticism; in reality it was, in fact, probably the consequence of a sober calculation that to withstand military capacities beyond previous human experience, a country needed to demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice beyond human comprehension
.
It should be added that just five or ten years earlier Mao had seen at first-hand the West’s lack of scruples in Asia, in inflicting an atomic holocaust on Japan and wiping out a fifth of the population of Korea, albeit with the conventional
means of napalm and starvation. In any case, China developed the A-bomb in 1964 and the H-bomb in 1967. According to Raymond Aron [“République impériale”, 1973], the rift between Moscow and Beijing was also due to Khrushchev’s demand to link the granting of atomic technology to China to an integrated nuclear command, as was the case in NATO between the US and its Western European allies and in the Warsaw Pact between the USSR and Eastern Europe.
Charles de Gaulle argued that the atomic weapons of the force de frappe should also safeguard France from the US, in the latter’s role as an abusive protector
; Paris tested its first plutonium bomb in 1960 and the H-bomb in 1968. The disproportionate bravado with which Mao told Khrushchev that he did not fear an atomic holocaust was likewise a rejection of the USSR’s role as an abusive protector of the young Chinese capitalism. The atomic tests of 1964 and, above all, of 1967, sealed Beijing’s independence and, in fact, coincided with the Sino-Soviet crisis. Similarly, the force de frappe confirmed the strategic autonomy of France, which left NATO’s military command in 1966, while maintaining its political affiliation with the Atlantic alliance. It is no coincidence that, since then, France and China have shared the same doctrine of sufficient defence or nuclear sufficiency, i.e., a limited deterrent sufficient to maintain a second-strike capability which would dissuade any adversary from the threat of a first strike.
Within the strategic framework defined in the dominant narrative of US-USSR bipolarity, for both France and China the possession of deterrence was the sanction of a measure of autonomy from the two superpowers, confirming the fact that the notion of bipolarity was, at the very least, insufficient to represent the actual global balance of power. The British deterrent was ambivalent in nature. London tested its fission and fusion devices before Paris, in 1952 and 1957, but remained dependent on Washington for missiles and, to some extent, submarines, and did not abandon NATO’s integrated command: for the United States, supporting the British deterrent became a way of counterbalancing French autonomy.
This brings us to a third consequence of the atomic age that began with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To a certain extent, the world order, understood as a balance between the major powers, was reflected in a global nuclear order; the NPT – the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – has been its sanction and instrument since the late 1960s.
Kissinger also saw a paradoxical aspect of the bipolar component of that global order. It was precisely the context of mutually assured destruction that meant that the most fearsome weapons
, despite commanding large shares of each superpower’s defence budget
, lost importance in the actual crises that arose:
Mutual suicide became the mechanism of international order. When, during the Cold War, the two sides, Washington and Moscow, challenged each other, it was through proxy wars. At the pinnacle of the nuclear era, it was conventional forces that assumed pivotal importance. The military struggles of the time were taking place on the far-flung periphery – Inchon, the Mekong River delta, Luanda, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The measure of success was effectiveness in supporting local allies in the developing world. In short, the strategic arsenals of the major powers, incommensurable with conceivable political objectives, created an illusion of omnipotence belied by the actual evolution of events.
Another paradox, according to Kissinger, is that the great powers concentrated so many resources on atomic deterrents that they opened the door to the asymmetric
tactics of the new regional powers. This involved prolonging wars beyond the limits of the major powers' internal resilience, even as public support for these foreign commitments wavered, as France experienced in Algeria and Vietnam; the United States in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan
.
World Order also deals with the difficulties of non-proliferation and the implementation of the NPT, but here the former American secretary of State’s assessment is omissive. Another paradox is overlooked: precisely in their proxy wars
in various regional theatres, and precisely in managing the emergence of new regional powers, the old nuclear powers, notably the United States, have contributed to nuclear proliferation, or at least tolerated it: this applies to Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea, and, if you like, to the nuclear latency or threshold condition of Japan and, less clearly, Germany. In the material we have collected for the preface to this volume, this is what we have defined as the real NPT, i.e., the actual condition of the nuclear order as it has reflected the changing power relations to date.
If the old global order corresponded to a nuclear order, one wonders what will happen to the latter in the unfolding of the new strategic phase and the crisis in the world order. The preface contains some of our most recent analysis, which can be divided into four strands.
The first is China’s nuclear rearmament. It is expected that within ten years China will possess between 1,000 and 1,500 warheads, deployed across all branches of the triad and therefore at a quantitative and qualitative level comparable to the current deterrents of the United States and Russia. This introduces an unprecedented power equation, a balance between three major nuclear powers, whose strategic and conceptual implications remain completely unexplored. It is known that the new American nuclear doctrine, which is partly classified, plans to increase the number of deployed warheads, perhaps to over 3,000, precisely because of this unprecedented situation of a tripolar confrontation with two other major nuclear powers.
The second strand is Asian rearmament, linked both to China’s rise in power and to the now-obvious doubts regarding the reliability of American extended deterrence. Tokyo has already begun rearming with conventional missiles, which operate in a grey area that some call strategic conventional, due to the capability that such precision weapons could also have against a nuclear adversary, in the case of North Korea or China. This is combined with the nuclear threshold status achieved by Japan, which is mastering the entire reprocessing cycle of nuclear power plant waste into plutonium for military use. Japan’s rapid evolution is mirrored in Korea. In Seoul, more explicitly than in Tokyo, the option of nuclear rearmament is being discussed; an intermediate goal is the acquisition of a threshold status similar to Japan’s, and the programme, agreed with Washington, to build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines. Reflecting the way Tokyo and Seoul mirror one another, this latter possibility is now also being debated in Japan: although this does not constitute a violation of the NPT treaty, it clearly represents a further step towards a deterrence force, and thus influences the entire regional strategic landscape.
The third strand is European rearmament, in a process in which the EU – Germany in particular – mirrors Japan’s accelerated rearmament. The specific feature of the move towards European deterrence is the coordination of the two arsenals in Paris and London, with Berlin and other European capitals preparing to contribute to many non-nuclear aspects of deterrence and defence in general: missiles, satellites, reconnaissance and communication systems, and even mere financial contributions.
Finally, the fourth strand is nuclear proliferation among medium-sized powers, a process already underway, as we have seen from examining the framework of the real NPT, but which is being accelerated by the crisis in the world order. Here, the pivotal region is the Middle East: Iran has suffered a setback with the Israeli and American bombing of its uranium enrichment facilities; Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have concluded a pact that includes forms of nuclear sharing; Saudi Arabia itself, through the Abraham Accords, would aim to obtain Washington’s consent to a nuclear threshold status close or equal to that of Japan; and Turkey and Egypt have the weight as powers to pursue the same ambitions. In the Latin American strategic arena, riddled with tensions induced by the US initiative on Venezuela, Brazil is showing signs of wanting to take at least a few steps towards deterrence capability, launching a programme for a nuclear-powered submarine, like Korea and perhaps Japan.
As can be seen, all four strands converge in giving the general rearmament underway in all the powers of unitary imperialism the specific feature of nuclear rearmament and proliferation: this is the character that the crisis in the world order imparts to the crisis in the nuclear order.
In Franco Palumberi’s text, the issue is addressed from another perspective – that of the industrialisation of science, which, in the 1940s, made the Manhattan Project possible, leading to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is the story of the network of European scientists who ultimately joined the American project – backed by the imperialist power capable of carrying it through, yet one that, in the post-war period, enabled the acceleration of the race for the bomb in France and Great Britain. It is also the story of the nuclear programme in the USSR, where the first plutonium fission bomb was tested in August 1949, and the first thermonuclear bomb in August 1953: the forces of the Russian productive apparatus were stretched to the extreme; the contribution of espionage accelerated things, but it is often underestimated how much the Russian school of physics matched its Western counterparts, with which it was, in fact, deeply intertwined. If the war completed the imperialist transformation of the USSR, the achievement of nuclear power status was its consecration.
The two perspectives with which the question of the bomb is addressed are the strategic and political role of atomic deterrents in imperialist contention, and the industrialisation of science that made them possible. What links them is the demonstration of how much this capitalist society is caught in an unsolvable contradiction. Science and productive forces have transformed the world, but due to the intrinsic nature of capital and imperialism, they have divided it in the struggle between powers to the point of catastrophe in the form of war and atomic holocaust. Capital destroys what it builds.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the culmination of the breakdown of the order in the second imperialist World War. It is said that in the post-war order no nuclear power has ever truly intended to use the bomb; its use has been, in fact, that of threat and deterrence. However, the crisis in the world order is shifting the tectonic forces of power confrontation and also accumulating the destructive forces of rearmament. Who can say whether, with the multiplication of tensions and the proliferation of nuclear actors, in the confrontations between small, medium, and large powers, in the small wars of the crisis in the world order or in a great war of the breakdown of the order, barbarism will be restrained by the rational calculations of deterrence? Only revolutionary strategy can avert the threat of another Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
(from the preface to the forthcoming book La bomba – Industrializzazione della scienza e sterminio atomico)
Lotta Comunista, November 2025