The dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US without a doubt fundamentally changed the nature of global politics. The act represented not only the end of World War II, but also the beginning of the Cold War and the nuclear age.

       The US, having sustained less damage from World War II, concentrated its huge economic power and became the sole leader of both the post-war global economy and of the new revolution in military affairs, namely, the age of nuclear warfare.

       There are various arguments as to why Japanese leaders accepted the Potsdam Declaration on August 14 and surrendered. The conventional wisdom is that the two atomic bombs forced Japan to accept the surrender. However, recently some historians, including Russian, are challenging this, and they attribute the Japanese surrender to the impact of the Red Army's participation on August 9. A recently declassified Soviet document by Soviet Ambassador Yakov Malik on Hiroshima, issued on September 22, 1945, could also support this interpretation. According to this document, Japanese leaders pretended to surrender to the Allied Nations because of nuclear disaster.

       Still, the Japanese top leadership feared not so much the impact of the Red Army itself, but the domestic unrest among the Japanese army. It is no accident that the Japanese "Peace Party" included former Prime Minister and Navy Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, who referred to both the nuclear bomb and the participation of the Red Army as "Providence (for Peace)." It's no coincidence that Admiral Yonai was an eyewitness of the 1917 revolution in Petrograd. The Japanese expectations that Stalin would serve as mediator to the Allied countries were shut down, and all the elites accepted the US led occupation.

       Still, Stalin had to cope with another dilemma, or the simple fact that the Soviet Union could have become the third target of the nuclear bomb at that time, unless it had sufficient counter measures in place. It is not well known, but the USSR still lacked or could not find enough resources, among others, uranium, to obtain a bomb. Thus, Stalin decided in two weeks’ time, by decision of the State Defense Committee No. 9887, to obtain a bomb at any cost. Stalin and his subordinate Beria ordered the Red Army to get uranium in overseas occupied regions, including Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. Even North Korea seemed promising, where the Red Army had control. Thus, the Cold War geopolitics was set globally by the beginning of December 1945 to February 1946.

       Thus far, global history still neglects the impact of August 1945, including the impact of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin’s pivot to Asia and the beginning of the Cold War, following the demise of the Empire of Japan. However, Cold War historians in Asia are rethinking and revising the accepted view of Asia as the "second front."

       Meanwhile, the nuclear weapon is not easy to use as a weapon, but it is easy to wield politically. At the end of the Cold War, the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev took the initiative to restrict the use of nuclear weapons, and the global community was in favor of abstaining from using them. However, after that, the world community could not prevent nuclear proliferation. The dilemma of national security is such that all nationalistic nation-state leaders openly or tacitly seek to obtain nuclear bombs. Even worse, non-state entities also aspire to get them. The end game of these processes is simply disaster. Both the US and Russian leaders should reengage with the denuclearization process.

       Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.