This week marks two anniversaries that, if we lived in a world with historical memory, would be front-page news.
Aug. 6 and 9 mark 80 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first and only wartime use of nuclear weapons, both dropped by the United States. And just a few days later, Aug. 10, will be 64 years since the U.S. forces began spraying Agent Orange over South Vietnam, initiating what would become one of the most massive chemical warfare campaigns in modern history.
Together, these anniversaries should force a long-overdue historical reckoning: The United States has been, by every historical measure, the most prolific user of NBC (Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical) weapons in modern history. Yet it continues to invoke NBC threats to justify its militarism through wars, invasions, airstrikes, sanctions, and occupations—from Iraq to Iran—while denying any meaningful accountability for its own record.
Let’s start with the facts.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the world’s most brutal case studies of nuclear war. Well over 100,000 civilians were incinerated in an instant. Survivors, known as the hibakusha, endured decades of radiation poisoning, disfigurement, and cancer. The U.S. response? No reparations. No medical care. Just decades of radiation studies carried out on the survivors, often without meaningful consent.
To this day, the U.S. government has never provided compensation or medical support to the Japanese victims of its nuclear bombings. Even symbolic gestures have been carefully crafted to avoid any suggestion of responsibility. President Barack Obama’s 2016 visit to Hiroshima was hailed as historic, but it came with no apology, no reparations, and no policy change.
This is not a matter of historical trivia; it’s a precedent. The U.S. didn’t just use nuclear weapons—it normalized them as a coercive tool of foreign policy. It tested over a thousand nuclear devices across the American Southwest and Pacific Islands, irradiating thousands of U.S. citizens and colonized peoples in the process. The legacy is still being buried—often literally—under toxic soil and classified archives.
Fast-forward to Vietnam. Between 1961 and 1971, U.S. planes sprayed nearly 20 million gallons of herbicides, primarily Agent Orange, across the Vietnamese countryside. The Pentagon insisted these weren’t chemical weapons because they targeted plants, not people. But the dioxins in Agent Orange were carcinogenic and mutagenic. Vietnamese civilians—millions of them—suffered (and still suffer) birth defects, miscarriages, cancer, and premature death. So did tens of thousands of U.S. veterans.
And yet, the U.S. government has never paid compensation to the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange. Not one cent. While U.S. veterans were eventually granted token benefits after years of lawsuits and activism, their Vietnamese counterparts are left to suffer in silence.
For decades, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., introduced legislation in Congress to provide medical care and reparations to Vietnamese Agent Orange victims and their families. Each time, the bills stalled or died quietly in committee. The result? Generations of Vietnamese children still suffer the consequences of a war they never fought, while their government struggles to fund treatment centers with no help from the country that poisoned their land.
Worse, what little progress had been made was reversed this year. After Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, one of his first foreign policy moves was to slash funding for U.S.-Vietnam environmental cooperation, effectively ending Washington’s limited contribution to dioxin cleanup efforts in places like Bien Hoa. One of the few things the U.S. had done to address its chemical warfare legacy was simply scrapped.
The U.S. hasn’t launched biological warfare in combat—but it has come dangerously close. Between the 1940s and the late ’60s, the military conducted open-air biological tests on U.S. cities, spraying “harmless” bacteria like Serratia marcescens over places like San Francisco and St. Louis without residents’ knowledge in an operation known as “Operation Sea Spray.”
The goal? To simulate a Soviet bioweapons attack. The result? Several outbreaks, at least one confirmed death, and a trail of medical mystery that still hasn’t been fully investigated.
No compensation was ever offered to those exposed, just like the hibakusha, just like the Agent Orange victims. The pattern is clear: Whether abroad or at home, the U.S. uses NBC weapons and leaves the victims behind.
Despite this history, the U.S. has consistently weaponized NBC fearmongering to justify its most disastrous foreign policy adventures.
Take Iraq. The 2003 invasion was built on a lie: Saddam Hussein’s supposed chemical and biological weapons programs. Those weapons didn’t exist, because they had already been destroyed. The real weapons of mass destruction in that war were U.S. bombs, tanks, and depleted uranium shells. Hundreds of thousands died, and Iraq still hasn’t recovered.
Or take Iran. Since the early 2000s, the U.S. has imposed crushing sanctions on the Iranian people under the claim that Tehran is building a nuclear bomb. But U.S. intelligence has repeatedly confirmed that Iran has not been pursuing nuclear weapons since at least 2003. That assessment was reaffirmed in 2007, again in 2012, and most recently by the U.S. intelligence community itself in 2023.
And yet, on April 19, 2025, U.S. warplanes carried out a new round of bombing raids on Iranian targets, citing the need to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program. There was no proof of a weapons program; only the recycled language of “preemptive self-defense,” the same phrase that justified Hiroshima, Vietnam, Baghdad, and Fallujah.
This is the fundamental hypocrisy of U.S. NBC policy. The country that dropped atomic bombs on civilians, poisoned entire generations with defoliants, and sprayed bacteria on its own cities now claims the moral authority to police other nations in the name of NBC non-proliferation.
It is as if the arsonist, holding a lit match, demands that others hand over their firewood for the sake of peace.
To be clear: NBC weapons are horrific. They should never be used. This is true of Israel as well, though its “secret” arsenal of 90–200 nuclear warheads is never mentioned in State Department press releases.
But if the global community is serious about eliminating NBC threats, it cannot take seriously the posturing of the only country to have used all three types—nuclear, chemical, and biological—in ways that directly harmed civilians.
Every August, U.S. officials issue solemn statements about the “tragedy of Hiroshima” and the “lessons of the Vietnam War.” But these “lessons” are just shallow rhetoric, because it is clear nothing has been learned.
The lessons that should be learned include:
- Apologizing to and compensating hibakusha and Agent Orange victims;
- Restoring and expanding environmental remediation programs in Vietnam;
- Ending the use of NBC scare tactics to justify war and sanctions;
- Joining international treaties without loopholes;
- Dismantling America’s own vast stockpiles and nuclear “modernization” plans.
Until that happens, the world will continue to live under a doctrine of selective accountability, where NBC crimes are only crimes when committed by the U.S.’s enemies, and always excusable when committed by the empire.
In the meantime, let us truly remember, not just the facts about Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Vietnam, but the pattern. Because the next war waged in the name of preventing a weapon of mass destruction may, yet again, be launched by the only power in history that has used them all—and done nothing for their victims.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views represented here are those of the author.
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