Nagasaki mon amour

Capitalism No Comments

Some events, like some people, are inextricably linked together. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one such event.

Two events in reality, following the dropping of an atom bomb on Hiroshima a few days later, 9th August 1945, another atom bomb was used to kill occupants of the city of Nagasaki.

Extract from Socialist Standard November 2019

‘The atom bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 – affectionately named: ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ by the perpetrators – instantly killed 100,000 Japanese people. An additional 100,000 died of injuries and radiation poisoning in the following months. But these bombs are akin to peashooters compared to the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, invented in the 1950s, which packs a punch hundreds of times greater than its smaller cousin.

Alex Wellerstein’s Nukemap model (nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ ) illustrates this bigger punch, by allowing the user to choose the location and size of the hydrogen bomb in a simulated detonation. I chose London as my target and selected the biggest bomb from the drop down menu; known as the ‘Tsar Bomba;’ produced in Soviet Union times, it weighs in at a whopping 100 Megatons (100,000 Kilotons) which makes it around 7000 times the size of the US atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Or, put another way, this single bomb exceeds the total explosive capacity of all munitions used during WWII by a factor of twenty. The result of the simulation indicated that 18 million people would be caught in the blast covering a radius stretching north to Cambridge and south to Brighton; of which around 6 million would be killed instantly and a further 6 million would suffer substantial injuries. The model helpfully clarifies that such casualties do not include the effects of radiation which are apparently too difficult to estimate. In such circumstances advising children to shelter under their school desks is not really going to cut the mustard as a strategy for survival.’

Tim Hart

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2019/11/nuclear-threat-resetting-doomsday-clock.html

Why they dropped the bombs

A two part article from the Socialist Standard.

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/09/why-they-dropped-bombs-2005.html

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/09/blog-post_29.html

Something for the weekend: Great Train Robbery

Capitalism No Comments

On the 8th August 1963 train robbery occurred, the amount stolen was the equivalent of almost forty nine million pounds today. (Bank of England inflation calculator).

‘Mail Train robbery

The two-and-a-half million pound mail train robbery was audacious and glamorous enough to have come from the pen of the most imaginative crime fiction writer.

In that, it was typical of a recent strengthening trend in crime. The big, well planned robbery is becoming increasingly profitable for the crooks and so more and more of a headache for the police.

This is hardly surprising. The existence of private property elevates money into the key to a secure life. The moneyed man is always the privileged man and he does his best to make sure that he keeps both the money and the privileges.

There are plenty of such privileged— and honoured—men whose wealth has been amassed from the exploitation of the other class in society. Or perhaps they inherited it from their ancestors’ historical equivalent of the Cheddington hold-up.

This sort of wealth is respectable—it has come from what has been well called legal robbery, which conforms to capitalism’s needs and so its moralities.

Robbery, forgery, embezzlement, and so on, do not conform and the men who try to get rich by practising them are anything but honoured.

Be that as it may, crime is inevitable as long as capitalism lasts; offences against property make up die overwhelming majority of crimes today. Capitalism without crime, in fact, is simply impossible.

Ironically, it is capitalism itself which asks for some of its crime. Do not the armed forces, so essential to capitalism, encourage just the sort of knowledge and the mental attitudes which are useful in a desperate, quick-fire robbery?

The driver of the Cheddington train said that one of the gang advised him to keep quiet because there were some “right bastards” there. Well, it is the “right bastard” who makes an excellent Commando or bomber pilot.

All of this is not to justify nor to condone the criminal. Indeed, any one who tried to take away from the Cheddington gang any of the money they have stolen would soon find that, in their own unmistakeable way, they are as firm in their support of property rights as any bank boardroom.

Capitalism is an unpleasant social system and crime is only one of its many excrescences.’

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/search/label/Great%20Train%20Robbery

How near to soft rains?

Capitalism No Comments

Only one state has used nuclear weapons on another. On the 6th August and 9th August 1945 the USA dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As of January 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists  Doomsday Clock was set at  85 seconds to midnight, four seconds closer than the 2025 setting.

In 1950 the writer Ray Bradbury had a short science fiction story published in a magazine.

The story was There will come soft rains. The story includes an image directly taken from Hiroshima of an image on a wall.

The story is set in California in August 2026. An AI controlled house that runs for the benefit of the two parents and two children living there continues to carry out its daily chores despite the outside charred wall showing their images imprinted on it by an atomic weapon flash.

We learn that this is the only house still standing here, the rest have been destroyed by nuclear weapons.

In the story, the AI management reads the father’s favourite poem. This is There will come soft rains by Sara Teasdale. Ms Teasdale wrote this in 1918. The poem is anti-war and notes that should humans wipe themselves from the face of the planet, nature won’t care one jot and will carry on quite well without humankind presence.

This, the sole remaining house is destroyed by fire.

The story ends, “Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:”Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…”

Make capitalism history before capitalism makes the human race history on Planet Earth.

NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR

Socialist Sonnet No. 241

Socialist Poetry Uncategorised No Comments

Record Breaking

 

What was seen as this green and pleasant land

Is being relentlessly bleached into straw

By desiccating sun, its dazzling glow

Frazzling all in between mountain and strand.

Our carbon abundant atmosphere acts

As a lens magnifying remorseless rays

Through unremitting procession of days,

Focusing attention on climate facts

That’re surely undeniable unless,

Of course, economic necessity

Requires oil to lubricate equity;

Then the market cannot resist the press.

As long as demand for profit exists

It’ll create naysayers and populists.

 

D. A.

 

Not for sale?

Capitalism No Comments

Infantino’s “shabby, opaque, backroom deal” apparently prepared in secret with private capital is ditched after UEFA and others statement that “demonstrated to FIFA’s President that football is not for sale”.

Hang on!! Football was sold long ago and is increasingly organised to suit pay-to-view media. This explains why fans of EPL and EFL teams now ‘benefit’ from league matches on any day from Friday to Tuesday at kick-off times to suit the TV schedules (and bugger the away fans!). This is also why the mis-named Champions League has so much group-stage dross (similarly for the Copa Libertadores) to plug so many mid-week gaps.

Sadly, the sport I love is now just an interlude between ads for bookies.

Keep out of the water

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Keep out of the water

July 30, 2026

You might expect that a walking trail called the Severn Way would largely be alongside the river from which it takes its name. But in fact most of the section between Shrewsbury and Telford is not along the river at all.

This is just one illustration of the extent to which there is a lack of public access to river banks in England. In almost three quarters of cases, there is no right of way within a hundred metres of the river, with most reservoirs and lakes also being off-limits.

Private ownership of land drastically restricts people’s ability to enjoy the countryside (not just rivers) and seek some relief from the recent heatwaves.

Rough reality

Capitalism No Comments

Andy Burnham pledged ‘to finally end long-term rough sleeping across the UK’. He previously aimed to prevent rough sleeping in Manchester by 2020, and in 2019 the Conservative Party manifesto committed to ending ‘the blight of rough sleeping’. Instead, in 2025 the number of people estimated to sleep rough on a single night in England was the highest recorded, at nearly 4,800.

Rough sleeping is not just about housing. Rough sleepers are among the most marginalised and victimised in capitalist society. Support services, however ‘well-funded’, can only ever offer limited palliatives as they are working within a system that pushes people into homelessness – why previous attempts to end rough sleeping have failed, despite Burnham’s ambition.

worldsocialism.org/spgb/

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