http://themilitant.com/2016/8023/802320.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 23 June 13, 2016
(editorial)
Demand US gov’t destroy its nukes!
President Barack Obama spoke in Hiroshima last week, where Washington
first unleashed the atomic bomb in August 1945. That destruction should
spark a “moral revolution,” he intoned, with the goal, one day, to
“eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.” His actions as chief
executive officer of U.S. imperialism, however, expose the hollowness of
his words.
It is in the interests of the working class to eliminate all nukes. For
workers in the United States, that starts with demanding the capitalist
rulers in Washington unilaterally dismantle their deadly arsenal!
Together Washington and Moscow hold 90 percent of the world’s thousands
of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy humanity many times over, and both
are modernizing their arsenals. Under the Obama administration, the U.S.
government has reduced the size of its nuclear stockpile at a slower
pace than under any of his three predecessors. And Washington is pushing
ahead with the deployment of an anti-missile system along the periphery
of the former Soviet Union, aimed at giving the U.S. rulers a strategic
advantage against Moscow. It is also advancing its “pivot” to Asia,
aimed at holding back Beijing’s challenge to U.S. supremacy.
The likelihood is growing, not diminishing, that nuclear weapons will be
used in conflicts around the world as rival governments compete for
markets in the midst of the deepening worldwide capitalist economic
crisis. When the Stalinist regime imploded in the Soviet Union at the
start of the 1990s, the U.S. rulers thought they had won the Cold War,
and would dominate the world unopposed. Today that illusion is
crumbling, from the coming apart of the imperialist order in the Middle
East to Washington’s growing economic and military rivalry with Beijing
in the Pacific.
A speech by Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro in November 2005
gives the communist position. “We have never considered producing
nuclear weapons because we don’t need them,” Castro said. “It would mean
joining the game of nuclear confrontation.
“We have a different type of nuclear weapon: it’s our ideas,” he said.
“Our nuclear weapon is the invincible power of moral weapons.”
The capitalist rulers won’t get rid of nuclear weapons, even though they
risk their own destruction. That alone is a powerful reason why working
people need to organize to take power out of their hands on the road to
building a socialist world.
Related articles:
Obama uses Asia trip to push alliances against China
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