http://themilitant.com/2018/8221/822120.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 82/No. 21 May 28, 2018
(front page, editorial)
For a nuclear-free Korea, US troops, weapons out!
Steps taken by the U.S. and North Korean governments to establish
talks about ridding the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons are being
welcomed by working people there, in Japan and across the Pacific.
Whatever the U.S. capitalist rulers’ motivation — which is always to
defend their imperialist interests — the removal of nuclear weapons and
fingers off the triggers of the thousands of conventional weapons
pointed across each side of the Korean border would improve conditions
for working people to fight for their interests.
An agreement would improve prospects to push forward the fight to end
the division between North and South Korea. A message sent April 13 to
the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by Steve Clark for the
Socialist Workers Party states that the party stands “in solidarity with
the seventy-three-year-long struggle to reunify Korea, which Washington
partitioned after World War II as it drowned popular uprisings of Korean
working people in blood.”
The U.S. rulers have stationed their forces there ever since, and waged
a devastating war on the Korean people from 1950-53. They should halt
the provocative joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises, and withdraw
all U.S. troops, missiles, warships and other weapons from the peninsula.
The talks open prospects for an end to sanctions that the U.S. rulers
and their allies have used to squeeze North Korea’s working people.
These punitive measures should be ended immediately and unconditionally,
lessening the relative isolation of working people in North Korea from
fellow workers worldwide. The DPRK’s decision to put the push for
economic development to the fore today — a decision that requires an
agreement with Washington, an end to sanctions and collaboration with
the South — could open the door to advancing the interests of workers in
the region.
Ridding Korea of nuclear weapons can reinforce deep opposition among
working people inside Japan to the capitalist rulers there obtaining
their own nuclear arsenal or stationing U.S. nuclear weapons on Japanese
soil. It would slow down moves by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to remove
parts of the country’s constitution that limit the use of the rulers’
military power as they seek to assert their interests against rivals.
The same wealthy U.S. rulers who are responsible for the social and
economic crisis bearing down on workers and farmers maintain a huge
nuclear arsenal to enforce their class interests. The SWP demands the
U.S. rulers unilaterally destroy their nuclear arms.
As the talks between the two governments come closer, working people
should stand in solidarity with fellow toilers in Korea. That requires
demanding “an end to Washington nuclear ‘umbrella’ and deployment of
nuclear armed warships and submarines in the surrounding skies and
seas,” the SWP message says. For a Korean Peninsula, Japan and Pacific
Ocean free of nuclear weapons! Korea is one!
Related articles:
Korea agreement would open the door to gains for working people
US rulers, NKorea take steps toward pact on weapons
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