Dr Radhika Desai told Sputnik that most discussion of nuclear arms control proceeds from a dubious assumption that "all parties in this matter are equally to blame."
"If the Americans are bad, so are the Russians, and so are all the sundry other powers who hold small or large numbers of nuclear weapons," she said.
However, "the United States has been the driving force behind the development use proliferation of nuclear weapons," Desai charged.
She argued that the key to ending that danger lay in Washington's hands.
"The US has to change its behavior, and that involves some very fundamental changes in the United States," Desai stressed.
"Capitalism is inherently imperialist. Capitalism manufactures wars and has manufactured wars on a scale never seen in the history of humankind," Desai said. "That's why I cite the whole issue of the US role in the world and the US use of nuclear weapons to the issue of capitalism."
Sunday, August 6, marked the 78th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed three days later by the second nuclear attack on Nagasaki. They remain the only uses of nuclear weapons in anger — against undefended civilian targets, with a combined immediate death toll of 120,000 people.
"For all that the United States, the capitalist country that claims to be in favor of freedom and democracy and human rights, the only capitalistic and leading capitalist country is the only country in the world that has ever used nuclear weapons," Desai pointed out. "And it is the only country in the world that has used such weapons without having any reason."
She said US leaders and historians have since "cried themselves hoarse," claiming that the bombings were necessary to prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of US soldiers in the planned invasion of the Japanese mainland.
"The fact of the matter is, as leading us scholars themselves have pointed out, the United States has absolutely no reason to use nuclear weapons against Japan," Desai said. "Japan was already at the point of surrender."
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