Today the U.S. rulers are tightening their military encirclement of Russia - expanding NATO into Eastern Europe, occupying parts of Yugoslavia, building up military forces in the Middle East, and pushing for greater control all along Russia's southern flank. Nuclear-armed U.S. Minutemen missiles are still being upgraded and aimed at Russian cities. The ultimate aim of these moves is the restoration of the conditions for capitalist exploitation and domination in the Russian workers state, which can only be done through force and violence.

While the bourgeois media howls about New Delhi's weapons, Washington, London, and Paris are strengthening their nuclear arsenals. U.S. president William Clinton signed the so-called test ban treaty, but Washington insists on its prerogative to continue upgrading and testing its arsenal of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs.

As U.S. imperialism sinks its tentacles deeper into powder kegs around the world, its involvement in the sharpening conflicts in the Middle East, Yugoslavia, and Asia point to a greater danger of the use of nuclear weapons today, not a lesser one. Washington has not ruled out using nuclear weapons against the Iraqi people, while maintaining its massive war machine in the Arab-Persian Gulf. World capitalism is today is marked by long-term depression conditions and growing social crisis. The sharpening polarization developing in India and Pakistan and growth of rightist forces in both countries is the product of the further disintegration of the old capitalist world order. There will be more proliferation of nuclear weapons and the missiles and planes capable of delivering them. More governments in every part of the world will obtain not only nuclear weapons but also ballistic delivery systems, which each year get cheaper and easier to build.

Only overturning the capitalist system and replacing it with governments of workers and farmers around the globe can put an end to this threat to humanity. Working people in the United States have a particular responsibility to call for the unconditional disarmament of Washington and oppose U.S. sanctions against India and any other nation.  
 
 
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