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 ...

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...