Internationalism No. 82, December 2025 Pages 1 and 2 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 20 th century, the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not exceptional in terms of the scale of the massacre, if we consider the incen...