Anti-Imperialism

War, Weapons, the Working Class—and BWXT

March 28, 2026

Four weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the bombs are still falling, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and the war on Iran shows no signs of restraint. While pundits debate geopolitics, a simpler, more brutal transaction is taking place. The working class of multiple nations is paying for war with their labor, their safety, and their lives, while a transnational capitalist class collects the dividends.

War doesn’t merely “cost” the working class; it devours us. In the United States, it is the children of working-class communities who are sent to the front lines, young people whose futures are consumed by a conflict that serves interests far removed from their own.

In Iran, the cost is even more pointed. Over 1,500 Iranians have been killed¹ in the bombing campaign so far. Their love, labor, and futures have been stolen from their families, their communities. The Iranian working class, already squeezed by years of sanctions, now finds itself ground up in a conflict it neither chose nor can escape.

The financial dimension of war is theft. In the U.S., nearly $900 million per day² is being extracted from the public treasury and funneled directly into the pockets of defense contractors. The $11.3 billion³ in munitions expended in the first week of Operation Epic Fury represents a staggering transfer of wealth. Each Tomahawk missile is a product of human labor—factory workers, engineers, supply chain workers—whose efforts have been directed not toward housing, healthcare, or climate stability, but toward destruction.

When the munitions run low, the Pentagon will demand more. Public money flows to private hands; human labor is converted into instruments of death; the defense industry grows fat while communities crumble.

Jonesborough, Tennessee: Pentagon Subcontractor

The supply chain for those weapons passes much closer to home than you may realize. Defense contractor BWXT plans to construct a high-purity depleted uranium (HPDU) manufacturing plant here in Northeast Tennessee.

When operational, BWXT’s plant will produce 300 metric tons of HDPU annually⁴: enough for more than a million rounds of 30mm armor-piercing incendiary ammunition.

BWXT’s third-quarter 2025 revenue reached $866 million, with government operations accounting for 71% of that total⁵. This is public money, generated by the labor of American workers, being funneled into corporate profits. The product of that labor? Depleted uranium weapons already being deployed in active war zones.

Contamination Here and Abroad

The munitions made from HPDU do not simply disappear after a conflict ends. They fracture, ignite, and scatter as radioactive and chemically toxic contamination. The fine uranium oxide dust produced when they burn is readily inhaled, retained in the lungs, and deposited in lymph nodes, bones, the brain, and reproductive organs. It travels by wind and rain, settles into soil and waterways, and enters the food chain. The contamination persists across generations.

The same risks come with the production. Processing HPDU generates small, insoluble uranium particulates. Inhaling or ingesting this DU dust causes kidney damage, while long-term exposure may lead to lung cancer or reproductive harm. DU in soil creates contamination that lingers for decades. Waste from processing raises levels of radioactive material in water—particularly for the families who live closest to the facility. The profits from all of this flow to BWXT and its shareholders. The contaminated groundwater, the radioactive emissions, the ever-present possibility of accidents: those stay right in Jonesborough.

Just this week ten out of fifteen members of the Washington County Board of Commissioners voted to rezone agricultural land—surrounded by homes, farms, and schools—to industrial, because BWXT wanted it and because these commissioners, apparently, like to feel good about producing weapons of war, whatever the cost to the community.

Here is what makes that vote especially hard to swallow. BWXT already has industrially zoned property suited for expanding its operations. “Inside the existing M2 industrial zone…we have enough footprint to fit in the expansion,” BWXT’s President of Tennessee Operations Ron Dailey has told WJHL⁶. The company indicated it would proceed with expansion on that property if the rezoning wasn’t approved. And at the March 23 meeting, we learned that the projected job numbers and tax revenue would be the same wherever they put their facility. Two-thirds of our commissioners gave away use of land that belonged to this community anyway, to a corporation whose product is meant for no other purpose than killing.

Our Fight Isn’t on the Front Lines

The opposition and organization that has arisen here against BWXT represents a refusal to accept that our community should be sacrificed for the profit of the military-industrial complex.

The war on Iran and the expansion in Jonesborough are two sides of the same coin, one that connects the Pentagon to the war machine’s shareholders, the battlefield to the backyard, and the extraction of wealth and health from working communities to the enrichment of the billionaire class.

The American worker has no enemy in the Iranian worker. The enemy is the system that extracts labor, converts it into destruction, and distributes the plunder among the ruling class. The workers who manufacture missiles in Connecticut, or depleted uranium in Tennessee, and the workers who dodge them in Tehran share a class interest in disarmament, in peace, in the redirection of resources to life-sustaining purposes.

The trillions spent on war could fund the transformation to renewable energy, free healthcare and education, dignified housing. That wealth was created by workers. It belongs to us.

The only force capable of ending this cycle is workers themselves, organized across borders, united not by nationality but by class, and determined to build a world where human labor is no longer converted into human death.

The international working class did not start this war. We will, though, as always, pay its bill: in blood, in futures, and in the slow erosion of the public resources that might have built something worth living for.
What is being done to us—in Tennessee, in Tehran—is not a tragedy that fell from the sky. It is a decision made by the powerful. It can be unmade by the many.

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