The Long Shadow of Hiroshima: Capitalism and Nuclear Weapons

ABSTRACT

Few realise that amid rising international tensions, inter alia over Ukraine, Taiwan of China, Iran and AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States), nuclear arms control is today almost entirely dismantled and a manifestly declining and desperate US has launched a new nuclear arms, now also targeting China, making war and even nuclear war seem increasingly possible. The political and geopolitical economy of nuclear proliferation and control here highlights the singular role of the US in driving the arms race, arguing that the US desire to dominate the world economy, not the Cold War, caused the nuclear arms race; that the only surviving arms control treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has become more a channel for proliferation than a dam against it; and that the US used the NPT to justify its post–Cold War international aggression against some countries while violating it to aid allies.

KEYWORDS:

• Nuclear weapons
• capitalism
• geopolitical economy
• imperialism
• Cold War

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Henry Heller, co-author of the original conference paper from which this paper developed, for contributing his research. This current paper’s greatly expanded and refined argument was further sharpened and focused by careful comments of Kate Hudson, noted anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons activist, intellectual and General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and Keith Bennett, Co-editor of Friends of Socialist China, former Political Editor of the weekly Asian Times and former National Council member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a scholar and activist with decades of engagement with matters Chinese, Korean and anti-imperialist. I remain, of course, responsible for any errors or omissions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Radhika Desai

Radhika Desai is Professor in the Department of Political Studies, and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group, at the University of Manitoba, Canada.