The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 85, March 2026 Page 15 From the series Atom and industrialisation of science It was only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945, that the Soviet Union became fully committed to the project of acquiring the atomic bomb. The alliance of the US, the UK, and the USSR Producing U-235 accounted for 64% of the total cost of the Manhattan Project, while plutonium production made up another 20%; in total, 84% of the expense went toward producing material for the atomic bombs, as against only 4% spent on research and development [ Lotta Comunista , July-August 2018]. In 1945, the most urgent problems to be resolved for Russian imperialism were not tied to the scientific knowledge required for the atomic bomb, but to uranium and its processing. During the Second World War, under the Lend-Lease Act passed on March 11th, 1941, the United States gave its allies food, oil, and supplies worth $46 billion ...

The dialectic between economic weapons and weapons of war in the crisis in the world order requires specific reflection where concerns European imperialism. Dealing with monetary weapons in their book War by Other Means , Jennifer Harris and Robert Blackwill place great emphasis on the strategic success of the European monetary federation: Through forging the eurozone, Germany has also realized its century-long quest for a pliant European market for German manufacturing. Both of these were things it had previously tried (and failed) to accomplish by force. The long quotation below is from the speech Helmut Schmidt made to the Bundesbank Council in 1978 in favour of the EMS, the European Monetary System that would lead to the euro. Classified as confidential for 30 years, the text was declassified in 2008. There emerges from it a highly political vision of the German use of the monetary weapon and of the strategic weight of a single continental market: What now concerns German pol...