[Militant No. 649, 6 May 1983, p. 8 and 9]
The British government recently carried out an underground nuclear test in Nevada.
The press reported that it had been a „small explosion“, equivalent to less than 20,000 tons of TNT, about the size of the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima in 1945. But this bomb was probably just a „trigger“ for a much more powerful H-bomb.
This enormous increase in the destructive potential of weapons underlines the grotesque power of the world ’s nuclear arsenals.
There are now about 50,000 nuclear weapons. On average they are twenty times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. In the course of the second world war three million tons of TNT were expended. This contributed to the death of between forty and fifty million people. Yet present nuclear arsenals have an explosive power equivalent to about 16,000 million tons of TNT.
The difference is, however, that this weaponry would not only wipe out humanity but would permanently contaminate the planet.
It is not surprising, then, that in spite of official propaganda on the need for nuclear defence, the development and stock-piling of these weapons has provoked horror among millions of people, and especially among young people who are overwhelmingly opposed to the bomb. Mass demonstrations in Britain, throughout Europe, and in the United States in the last couple of years show that millions of people feel nuclear weapons cast a black shadow across the future of humanity.
The contrast between the development of new and ever more sophisticated weapons, on the one hand, and the decline and stagnation of industrial production, on the other, is becoming even starker. World defence expenditure has now gone over $600,000 million a year. This works our at more than a million dollars a minute.
In the US, it is estimated that defence department budgets will total $1,600 billion between 1981 and 1986, if Reagan’s present plans are implemented. This will nearly reach the total US defence expenditure between 1946 and 1980, which was $2,000 billion. Yet even in the US one in seven of the population live below the official poverty line.
Globally, there are 600 million unemployed – yet arms expenditure amounts to a million dollars spent a minute.
Internationally the contrast between arms expenditure and poverty is even more grotesque.
About a 100,000 million of the world’s population live in extreme poverty. There are estimated to be about 600 million unemployed. World military expenditure averages $19,300 persoldier, while spending on public education averages $380 per school age child.
Globally there are 556 soldiers per hundred thousand people, but only eighty-five doctors. In the US and the EEC countries $45 per person is spent on military research while only $11 goes on health research.
If the half a million scientists and engineers involved in arms research and production were employed in tackling the problems facing ordinary working people the conditions of millions could be rapidly improved.
Not only the enormous waste but the new twist in American policy under Reagan have sharpened the opposition to nuclear weapons . This is particularly the case with US plans to base Cruise and Pershing II missiles in Britain. The nuclear strategists in the State Department and the Pentagon clearly regard Britain as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for their forward nuclear defences. They see Britain and Europe as the „theatre“ of a „limited“ nuclear war, which some of the strategists are mad enough to believe that the US could „win“.
Thatcher’s claims that weapons based in Britain could not be used without the agreement of the British government can hardly be taken seriously. Indeed, former US military chiefs have spelled it out that the US alone would decide. Even Britain’s own so-called „independent nuclear deterrent“ is in reality dependent on US technology and supplies. Without US approval, no British government could continue to maintain such an „independent“ capability.
The adoption of unilateral nuclear disarmament by the Labour Party is therefore a big step forward. A commitment to stop the basing of Cruise and Pershing II in Britain and to begin moves towards complete nuclear disarmament has been included in Labour’s recent policy statement. This is the result of a long battle by Labours rank and file to commit the party to such a policy.
It is particularly a step forward in the light of the right wing Labour leader’s previous support for nuclear weapons and their servile acceptance of US military policy.
During the 1945 Labour government Attlee agreed to build British nuclear weapons without even informing parliament, let alone consulting the Labour Party. Under the last Labour government, moreover, a secret committee which included Callaghan and Healey decided on a multimillion pound modernisation of Polaris without even informing the rest of the Cabinet.
To ensure that unilateral nuclear disarmament is carried out, however, it is necessary first to ensure the return of a Labour government, and secondly to exert pressure on the Labour leadership to implement party policy. Although unilateralism has been included in Labour’s policy, it is clear that the commitment of right wingers like Healey is less than enthusiastic.
The commitment to end Britain’s nuclear forces is hedged with qualifications about „negotiations with our allies“ and working out „timetables“. Without continuos pressure from the labour movement there is the real danger that a right wing leadership will backslide on this policy.
This makes it clear that unilateralism is unavoidably a political issue. CND and the peace movement generally undoubtedly constitute a very broad movement which has drawn in many thousands of people on the basis of opposition to nuclear weapons. It expresses a positive rejection of the militaristic policies and moral values of a system committed to the build-up of nuclear weapons.
However, the problem of abolishing nuclear weapons cannot be separated from the problem of transforming the system which produces the arms race. If the peace movement is to avoid a repetition of the rise and fall that CND experienced in the 1950s and early ’60s without achieving its aims, it must link itself to the struggle of the labour movement for a programme capable of achieving a fundamental change in society.
Even if a Labour government implemented a unilateralist policy, there is still the fundamental question of whether unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain would in itself guarantee the rest of the world from a nuclear war.
The leaders of CND argue that unilateral action by a British government would serve as a „moral example“, but admit that the question of reducing the superpowers‘ arsenals would have to be left to negotiations between the US government and the Soviet leadership. But the lesson of history is that neither the US rulers nor the Kremlin bureaucracy will respond to peace negotiations, moral appeals, or the pressure of mass peace movements if they consider that their interests are threatened.
In reality, the threat of war, including ultimately the threat of nuclear war, will remain so long as the world is dominated by capitalism.
Under a system based on the exploitation of labour and the oppression of the majority of people, conflict is inevitable. With the development of a new crisis in the world economy, national antagonisms have again been sharpened, increasing international tensions.
The ruling class will not give up its military machine or the weapons which it considers vital for the defence of Ill its wealth and power. This is especially true of the US super power and it is an illusion to believe that if Britain abandons nuclear arms the US will follow the example.
The declaration of a nuclear-free Britain would not, any more than the present nuclear-free Norway, remove the conflict between the super powers, US imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy. This conflict is based on a fundamental antagonism between rival social systems, with the ruling bureaucracy in the Soviet Union inevitably arming in response to the continuous build-up of US armaments.
While this fundamental antagonism exists, both camps will prepare for the ultimate possibility of war. Their strategies will inevitably be based on the most sophisticated and destructive technology available.
If it came to a world war, which would mean nuclear war, no country would be immune from the holocaust. The idea that there can be limited nuclear war is a fiction. Confronted with the use of nuclear weapons, any protagonist would resort to more powerful weapons, inevitably escalating the conflict.
Moreover, the scrapping of Britain’s present nuclear weapons by a Labour government would not even rule out the future use of nuclear weapons by Britain in the future. While the science and technique to produce weapons exists any future capitalist government could re-arm itself. For instance, West Germany and Japan are non-nuclear powers, but both undoubtedly have the capacity to rapidly produce nuclear weapons.
The resurgence of the peace movement in Britain and Europe has been in no small measure a response to the accelerated arms programme of the US. Reagan is widely seen as opening up a new phase of the „cold war“. However, this in itself demonstrates that nuclear weapons cannot be divorced from political developments.
Reagan’s policies are a response to the changed position of US imperialism. He claims that new weapons, particularly the basing of intermediate range missiles like Cruise and Pershing II in Europe, are necessary in order to restore the nuclear balance in relation to the Soviet Union. In reality, US claims that the Soviet Union has established any kind of military superiority over the US are completely false.
For instance, the Soviet SS-20 missiles, which Reagan claims threaten the strategic balance in Europe have been deployed by the Soviet Union since the early 1970s. The US withdrew its own, older intermediate range missiles because it had an overwhelming superiority of strategic nuclear weapons based either in the US or on its submarine force.
At most, the Soviet bureaucracy marginally reduced the US superiority during the early 1970s. In reality, the spokesmen of US imperialism are using completely one-sided, exaggerated claims of increased Soviet power to justify a new phase of arms build-up in order to give the US an even bigger strategic superiority.
In reality, the reason for the new American arms build-up is not a strengthening of Russia’s nuclear weaponry, but the erosion of US imperialism’s world-wide power through the international upheavals and revolutionary movements of the last decade.
The US’s enforced evacuation of Vietnam in 1973 drastically undermined its ability to police the world in the interests of capitalism. Then came the overthrow of puppet regimes such as the Shah in Iran and Somoza in Nicaragua. Other countries which experienced revolutionary upheavals, like Angola and Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan, were taken out of the influence of international capitalism by social changes which abolished landlordism and capitalism.
These developments, which are a symptom of the bankruptcy of capitalism internationally, all meant an undermining of the US’s world power. It is in a desperate attempt to reestablish its power and prestige on the world arena that US imperialism has launched a new phase of the arms race.
Clearly, the Soviet bureaucracy cannot accept Reagan’s “ Zero Option“, which would involve the Soviet Union withdrawing most of its intermediate missiles from European Russia while allowing the US an increased strategic superiority. In practice, the Soviet bureaucracy will feel compelled to increase its own armaments in an effort to limit US superiority, imposing an even bigger burden on the Soviet economy.
Who would deny, in the light of these developments that there is the need for an entirely new international order, which would eliminate conflict and the horrendous waste of arms spending, and provide the framework for harmonious and peaceful development? However, such a new order could only be achieved through the socialist transformation of society in the United States and all the main capitalist countries. It would also require the carrying through of the political revolution in the Stalinist states of Russia and Eastern Europe, overthrowing the ruling bureaucracy and placing democratic control in the hands of the working class.
This is the only way of eliminating the conflict between, on the one side, the interests of capitalist property, and, on the other, the non-capitalist, centrally planned economies, at present dominated by a privileged ruling caste.
With the removal of this conflict the world’s resources, productive capacity and technology could be planned on an international basis and used to improve the lives of the whole of the world’s population.
If the peace movement is to avoid a repetition of the rise and fall that CND experienced in the 1950s and ’60s without achieving its aims, it must link itself to the struggle of the labour movement.
Some sections of the peace movement, however, argue that because of what they regard as an imminent threat of nuclear war, the struggle for world peace must take prededence over the struggle for a socialist society. This view implies that war, and especially nuclear war, is simply a misguided policy or an unfortunate excess on the part of the capitalist class. The task of a mass peace movement, according to this view, should be to persuade the capitalist class to take a more rational view of its defence. If they did so, they would agree to put aside weapons of total destruction, it is argued. Then, with the danger of a nuclear holocaust averted, we could all return to the fight for a change in society.
This approach is based on the fundamental mistake that it is possible to eliminate the danger of war without eliminating the class roots of the social conflicts which produce war. It also assumes that the build-up of arms will in itself lead inexorably to world war, without seeing that military policy and the question of war is decided according to the interests of the ruling class.
Under the existing balance of international forces world war is not about to break out, despite the present acceleration of the arms race.
Nuclear war would not only mean the genocidal destruction of the majority, but also class suicide on the part of the ruling minority. Apart from the threat of nuclear retaliation from the Soviet Union, the enormous power of the working class, which has its organisations and democratic rights intact in the US and all the main capitalist countries, acts as a powerful check on the capitalist class.
Even when the US had a monopoly of nuclear weapons in the immediate post-war years, the serious strategists of US imperialism could not contemplate a nuclear strike against the Chinese revolution or North Korea. Later, US imperialism could not seriously consider the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam, even though it eventually suffered defeat by the Vietnamese revolution backed by the non-nuclear forces of North Vietnam.
Only the emergence of fascist-type military dictatorships, freed from the normal restraints on the ruling class and unbalanced by the crisis in their system could contemplate nuclear war. Such regimes could emerge only after a series of terrible defeats of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries. However, if capitalism is not overthrown and replaced by socialism, there would ultimately be the danger of such authoritarian regimes arising – with the inevitability sooner or later of nuclear annihilation.
Nuclear weapons – and also the horrifying build-up of conventional armaments throughout the world – are a symptom of the rottenness of the existing system. Undoubtedly the labour movement should actively campaign to expose the horrifying waste of defence spending, which is aggravating economic crisis throughout the west. It should campaign to ensure that unilateral nuclear disarmament is implemented by a Labour government, and for a drastic cut in defence spending.
But as the question of war and peace is inseparable from the contradictions of capitalist society, it would be a mistake to think that a campaign for peace should be given priority, while the struggle for socialism is left until later. It is the ultimate threat of nuclear annihilation, if capitalism is not destroyed and replaced by socialism, which makes the struggle for socialism even more urgent.
Schreibe einen Kommentar