Written by: Central Committee, CPA (M-L) on 14 July 2025
This year is the 80th annual August 2 Hiroshima Day observance.
It comes in the wake of the US use of “bunker buster” bombs to prevent Iran’s capacity to develop nuclear power, enabling manufacture of nuclear weapons.
Tensions surrounding the question of nuclear weapons have not abated in the 80 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) joins with the people of the world in commemorating the dropping of the first Atomic Bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We raise 5 popular demands at this year’s Hiroshima Remembrance Day activities. recently voted to identify four key demands for participants in this year’s Hiroshima Day rallies.
The recommendation from our Party reads: “The Central Committee calls for Hiroshima Day activities to feature opposition to imperialist war and calls for nuclear weapons states to agree to declare they will not be the first to use nuclear weapons, and to agree to the complete destruction and thorough prohibition of all nuclear weapons. We call on the Australian government to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. We also call for the freedom of Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. We build the peoples' movement to cancel the US-led imperialist AUKUS pact and the acquisition of nuclear-powered war submarines; we call for closing Pine Gap, the secret US intelligence base and a critical part of the US nuclear command and nuclear war preparations and ending the US-Australia alliance and imperialist war.”
The vast majority of the nuclear stockpiles are held by the US and Russian imperialists. Each has more than ten times the nuclear weapons of third-placed China. According to GlobalMilitary.net, as of mid-2025, nine countries possess nuclear weapons, collectively holding approximately 12,300 warheads. This
Nuclear Warhead Estimates by Country (2025)
Country Estimated Total Warheads Notes
Russia ~5,449 Largest arsenal; includes deployed, reserve, and retired warheads.
United States ~5,277 Includes active and reserve warheads; part of a nuclear triad.
China ~500 Rapidly expanding arsenal; projected to exceed 1,000 by 2047.
France ~290 Maintains a sea- and air-based deterrent; recently enhanced cooperation with the UK.
United Kingdom ~225 Submarine-based deterrent; recently enhanced cooperation with France.
Pakistan ~170 Expanding arsenal; focus on regional deterrence.
India ~180 Developing triad capabilities; emphasis on credible minimum deterrence.
Israel ~90 Unacknowledged arsenal; maintains policy of ambiguity.
North Korea ~50 Continues testing and development; arsenal remains limited.
Note: These figures are estimates based on available data and may not reflect exact counts due to the secretive nature of nuclear arsenals.
The first five in the list are imperialist nations. The US and Russia are the most aggressive in the conduct of current conventional warfare. The rise of Chinese imperialism is a challenge to the global power of the US, and their rivalry continues to increase regional and global tensions. All imperialist and imperialist-backed wars in Ukraine, Palestine, Congo, Sudan and elsewhere must be opposed.
People everywhere must compel the nuclear-armed states to adopt a “no first use” policy as a step towards disarmament. The No First Use (NFU) demand is aimed at the immediate relaxation of international tensions prior to the agreement by nuclear weapons states to destroy their stockpiles. It commits a nuclear-armed state to never use nuclear weapons first under any circumstances, whether as a pre-emptive attack or first strike, or in response to non-nuclear attack of any kind.
To date, China is the only country to have made an unconditional No First Use pledge. It made it when it was still a socialist country under Mao Zedong’s leadership in 1964, following its first nuclear test explosion. The Soviet Union also had such a policy, but abandoned it in 1994 in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise. Since 1998, India has maintained a policy of NFU with exceptions for a response to chemical or biological attacks.
People everywhere must demand the complete destruction and thorough prohibition of all nuclear weapons. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was opened for signature on July 1, 1968, and entered into force on March 5, 1970. Since then, five countries have acquired nuclear weapons capabilities, namely India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea and South Africa. (South Africa is unique in that it developed nuclear weapons secretly and then voluntarily gave them up, becoming the first and only nation to do so unilaterally.)
Countries that feel threatened by nuclear-powered adversaries will be tempted to acquire their own. This was Pakistan’s response to India, and was the reason why Iran felt compelled to work towards nuclear weapons capacity given Israel's possession of a nuclear armament.
The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons leaves nuclear weapons in the hands of those that currently have them, and does not prevent their relocation to other host states (Belarus in the case of Russia; Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey in the case of the US).
The Australian people must call on the Australian government to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. For the first five years of the Treaty, Australia followed the US in voting against it. In 2022, it timidly took a step outside the US shadow and abstained on the vote.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese pledged in 2018 to sign the TPNW, and must be held to his word. We support the campaign led by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) to demand Australia sign the TPNW as a step towards the complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons.
People everywhere must call for the freedom of Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. He is a Moroccan born Jew who at the age of 9 years was taken by his parents to live in Occupied Palestine (Israel). In October 1971, he was conscripted into the Israel Occupation Forces. Following his discharge, he studied physics at university and took a job at the Negev Nuclear Research Centre. He began to develop a critical view of Zionism and supported Palestinians. In 1985, he smuggled a camera into the Centre and took 57 photographs which proved that Israel had developed nuclear weapons.
Visiting Australia in 1986, he converted to Christianity and met a British journalist from the Sunday Times which subsequently published his claims.
As a result, Mossad agents drugged and kidnapped Vanunu during a trip to Rome, took him back to Israel, where he was tried and jailed for 18 years, the first 11 of which were in solitary confinement. Since his release he has been forbidden to talk with foreigners and has restrictions on his movements. He has been jailed several times for violating those conditions.
Vanunu does not wish to remain in Israel. He is kept there by the Zionist authorities who have never admitted to possessing nuclear weapons. By not acknowledging possession of nuclear weapons, Israel avoids a US legal prohibition on funding countries that proliferate weapons of mass destruction. Such an admission would prevent Israel from receiving over $2 billion each year in military and other aid from Washington. Vanunu’s freedom to travel and to speak would be an embarrassment to both the US and Israel.
Vanunu must be granted his freedom to leave, and should he choose to do so, to be granted asylum and citizenship by Australia.
The Australian people must oppose the AUKUS arrangements. They are part of US imperialism’s preparations for war with its rival, China. Former Prime Ministers Keating (Labor) and Turnbull (Liberal) warn that the arrangements tie us to the US in violation of Australia’s sovereignty and independence.
In our view, imperialism and its military industrial complex spawn the proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Mobilised and united working people will put an end to imperialism and its imperialist wars.
We put forward these five demands in the hope that they will continue to be pursued independently of the important Hiroshima Day observances.
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