Capitalist imperialism makes nuclear conflict inevitable—we’re on the brink.

In the last year of Trump’s volatile presidency, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has been, and kept it there in 2021, worrying that even “the means by which leaders had previously managed … potentially civilization-ending dangers are … being dismantled or undermined” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Citation2020, 8). The post–Cold War reversal of nuclear arms control accelerated under Trump and the Biden administration changed little. Prosecuting the previous administration’s New Cold War on China with equal if not greater zeal, it made the South China Sea “the most dangerous place on earth” (The Economist Citation2021b), alarmingly migrating a label once applied to South Asia after Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons to a conflict involving the world’s superpowers. Disastrously withdrawing from Afghanistan to focus on confronting China, forming AUKUS with the UK and Australia to do so, the US offered the latter nuclear-powered submarines, raising proliferation concerns (Masterson Citation2021). A few weeks later, Biden declared the US would defend Taiwan region against (yet-to-be-threatened) Chinese attack, and early the next year, rushed headlong into a potentially nuclear confrontation with Russia over Ukraine.

The new prospect of nuclear war arises in an altogether new and more dangerous configuration of international and nuclear power: both major forces that spared the world nuclear war for over three quarters of a century are weaker. Nuclear weapons proliferation appears to have complicated the logic of deterrence and the peace movement stands at an historic ebb with considerable sections of the Left, which once organised and led it, failing to oppose, when they do not outright support, imperialist wars festooned with the hypocrisy of protecting democracy and human rights. The Ukraine crisis, which finds most of the Western Left seduced by Western rhetoric, displays this tendency with a vengeance.

In this context, this article highlights US’s formative role and persisting aggressive posture as the one constant in the story of nuclear weapons and its roots in its distinctive, self-assigned, role in the history of capitalist imperialism predating and long surviving the Cold War. Understanding this can contribute to clarifying the complexities of deterrence and to addressing a key weakness of peace movements historically—their tendency during the Cold War to take an easy “pox on both your houses” stance—to accuse both sides in the Cold War of a “common exterminism” instead of taking a historically grounded anti-imperialist stance.

To make this clarification, this article extends critical analyses initiated in the 1980s. They took the record of the development, use and proliferation of nuclear weapons and the advance and retreat of nuclear arms control out of the usual technical, legal and piecemeal discussions of so much writing on nuclear weapons. Instead, they placed it, as I do here, in the historical political and geopolitical economy of the capitalist world—to wit the dynamics of its international relations. I argue, firstly, that if the US was the first and only power to use nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and became and remained the pace-setter in nuclear armament, it was because the Cold War was merely a phase in the US’s efforts, at once relentless and vain, to dominate the world economy. These efforts long preceded and survived the Cold War. While during the Cold War deterrence and peace movements ensured progress in arms control, it stalled and went into reverse after the Cold War when US imperial policy, now reliant on a declining economy, became at once more unilaterally aggressive, desperate, and less effective.

Secondly, the US imperial project and inevitable resistance to it ensured that the broadest framework for arms control created to date, signed by all five nuclear weapons states (NWSs) it recognised and the overwhelming majority of non-nuclear weapons states (NNWSs), the NPT, would also be deeply ambiguous. It sought to limit proliferation by rewarding NNWS restraint in two ways: by extending them civilian nuclear technology, the prerequisite for nuclear weapons, subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection and by promising to pursue nuclear arms reduction and eventually elimination. However, with arms control stalling and unwinding, the NPT proved to be as much a channel for, as a dam against, proliferation. Finally, I argue that the US has also entangled the NPT in its foreign policy, abusing it to justify aggression against certain targets and violating it to aid allies.

Below, I outline the deterioration of nuclear arms control since the Cold War and waning of popular resistance to nuclear weapons that has brought us to the present dangerous conjuncture. I then place US imperialism in an understanding of capitalism’s geopolitical economy of imperialism, imperial competition and anti-imperialist resistance that has created a pluripolar world consisting not only of several poles of power but also nationally distinct economies, some more and some less effective in defending against the impositions of imperialism. After this brief theoretical prelude, we are ready to understand the US’s singular role in the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons, the limits of arms control and reduction, the recent reversals thereof and the defects of the “common exterminism” thesis. The conclusion argues that the chief obstacle to nuclear disarmament is US and, more widely, imperialist resistance to a plurality of political systems in the world.