On July 16, 1945, Joan Hinton eluded Army patrols and hid behind a remote hill near Alamogordo, N.M., to watch the first detonation of an atomic bomb in human history. Hinton had been recruited from the physics department at the University of Wisconsin to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project in developing the first atomic weaponry. At the time, Hinton believed that the atomic bomb’s destructive force would be used in a safe demonstration to halt World War II.
 |
Three weeks later, after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had killed roughly 200,000 people, Hinton became an outspoken peace activist. She eventually moved to China and joined the revolutionary movement there in 1948. The imperialist media, in the midst of McCarthyism, called Hinton “The Atom Spy Who Got Away.”
When asked why she had chosen to join the Chinese Revolution, Hinton told National Public Radio, “I did not want to spend my life figuring out how to kill people. I wanted to figure out how to let people have a better life, not a worse life.”
Hinton showed her truly revolutionary nature when she abandoned a certain future of lucrative imperialist scientific research in destructive technology for a life farming in a remote area of China. There, she worked diligently to improve machinery used for the production of dairy by-products and contributed to the advancement of socialist construction.
Later, during the Cultural Revolution, Joan Hinton worked as a translator and stated that she was “100 percent behind everything that happened during the Cultural Revolution.”
Hinton remained a revolutionary through all of China’s so-called market-socialist reforms. She remained a part of the worldwide movement against U.S. imperialism and was an outspoken advocate against the current imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In an article titled, “The Second Superpower,” Hinton described the world as clearly divided between the U.S.-led ruling class of imperialists and the world proletariat.
In the article, Hinton quoted the African proverb that goes, “If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a small room with a mosquito.” She wrote that it was incumbent on “each and every one of us to be the mosquito, to bite where it hurts, and to keep up the pressure! With persistence, patience, and courage, we, the people of the whole world, can win and certainly will win!”
On June 8, the world proletariat lost Joan Hinton, a truly revolutionary woman. But her contribution to the struggle remains, and her bite will continue to be felt by U.S. imperialism as more and more proletarians like herself join the revolutionary movement toward socialism.
