The Internationalism

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...

Internationalism No. 80, October 2025 Page 11 From the series News from the Silk Road Zheng Yongnian, a senior political analyst at the Chinese University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen, and a figure to whom the Politburo lends an ear, reflects on the unexpected consequences of the American attack on Iran. The backdrop of the attack is the erosion of the framework established by the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but the catalyst for the crisis is the transformation of the United States from a nuclear guarantor into a destructive factor in the world order. According to Zheng, it is foreseeable that the United States’ attack on Iran’s three nuclear plants will inevitably lead to a new wave of nuclear proliferation all over the world . The NPT framework was the expression of the five postwar powers legitimately armed with nuclear bombs: the US, the USSR, China, France, and the UK. Four countries which did not sign the treaty represent the exception: Isra...