ON THIS DAY, 75 years ago, US warplane Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city centre of Hiroshima, a busy residential and business district, which was crowded with people going about their daily business. 

The bomb, called Little Boy because of its long, thin shape, contained uranium-235. 

Unimpeded by hills or natural features to limit the blast, the fireball created by that single bomb destroyed 13 square kilometres of the city.

The heart of the explosion reached a temperature of several million degrees centigrade, resulting in a heat flash over a wide area that vaporised all human tissue. 

Within a radius of half a mile of the centre of the blast, every person was killed. 

All that was left of people caught out in the open were their shadows burnt into stone. 

Beyond this central area, people were killed by the heat and blast waves, either out in the open or inside buildings collapsing and bursting into flame. 

In this area, the immediate death rate was over 90 per cent. The firestorm created hurricane-force winds, spreading and intensifying the flames. 

Almost 63 per cent of the buildings of Hiroshima were completely destroyed and nearly 92 per cent of the city’s structures were either destroyed or damaged by the blast and fire. 

The total number of deaths was hard to establish, but at least 75,000 died in the first hours after the bomb was dropped, with around 140,000 dead by December 1945. 

As a result of the radiation released by the bomb, the death toll reached around 200,000 by the end of 1950. 

Today, our world is facing a number of severe interlocking crises which make nuclear weapons use — on a scale far more terrible than that suffered by Hiroshima and subsequently on Nagasaki — increasingly likely. 

These crises expedite the degradation and destruction of human life, our health, the environment and natural world, and indeed threaten the future of our planet. 

But the coronavirus pandemic, climate catastrophe and environmental destruction are not natural disasters — they all result from the way society and production are currently organised. 

As we have seen, the pandemic is not just a global health crisis: it also exacerbates the economic and social crises which follow from almost 40 years of neoliberal globalisation.

So the degeneration of late capitalism is wreaking havoc, not only in environmental and economic terms but politically and in terms of onslaughts on democracy, the ascent of fake news, the brutalisation of communities, the rise of the far right and the destruction of our rights. 

But at the same time, we are heartened by the upsurge of protest, particularly among young people, who refuse to accept this wave of barbarism, both in the United States itself and across the world. 

The Black Lives Matter movement has shown that people power is a force to be reckoned with and we share their goals — of an end to discrimination and peace and justice for all.

In Britain, as in many other countries, the pandemic has exposed the disastrous failure of government policy, which sees security in terms of the capacity to kill and national status in terms of possession of weapons of mass destruction. 

This remains the primary reason for British possession of nuclear weapons — to secure us a seat at the so-called “top table” of global power politics.

But our politicians have failed to make us truly secure. For some years, pandemics have been designated as tier-one threats to our security. 

Successive National Security Risk Assessments have rightly identified such human health crises as worthy of the highest level of concern and planning. 

So why was Britain unprepared for the coronavirus, with insufficient equipment, staff and infrastructure to serve its people? 

We don’t have to look far to see what has gone wrong. The last two security strategies have designated the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation and use as a tier-two threat — below that posed by pandemics.

Yet the governments that produced these risk assessments chose to pour — without question and consideration — £205 billion into a new nuclear weapons system to “meet” this lower-level threat. 

At the same time, our health system was left chronically underfunded by years of austerity cuts and rendered unable to meet the challenge of a pandemic. 

We are also facing an increasingly dangerous military situation driven most alarmingly by Donald Trump’s policies. 

His withdrawal from key treaties and the possibility of the resumption of nuclear testing all increase the risk of nuclear war. 

Of course, we understand the context for this: the US is a declining power economically and seeks to assert itself militarily. 

This has been the case for some time — noticeable under the Bush administration, which sought to compel non-compliant states to bend to the US will. 

“Trump’s drive to war is far more dangerous. The US National Security Strategy focuses on what it describes as strategic rivals or competitors, notably China and Russia. Its goal is to be able to defeat them militarily, to prepare for war on a massive scale.”

And Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review referred to so-called usable nuclear weapons. These are now produced and deployed. 

Taking these two strategies together, it is clear that there is a significant danger of a US war on China and that opposing this is a fundamental task for the movement today. 

This is a conflict where nuclear weapons will be used and we need to work with all our strength to prevent such a war.

There are massive challenges facing humanity and we need to tackle these together as an international community. This is not the time to be manufacturing conflicts.

So all these issues make the abolition of nuclear weapons more pressing and it is profoundly to be welcomed that ratifications of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) are steadily mounting towards the 50 required to bring it into force.

But we are well aware that the British government is opposed to the TPNW, as are the other nuclear-weapons states. 

Once the treaty comes into force, the real challenge will be to make it impact on these countries. 

Mass pressure from citizens is crucial to bring change. We need popular mobilisations, especially in the context of the pandemic, where resources need to move from military expenditure to meeting human need.

The struggle for peace and nuclear disarmament belongs to us all, to our diverse communities, across all borders — there are no national solutions to the problems we face, only international ones. 

And in unity, together, we will prevail. No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis!