Vol. 72/No. 10      March 10, 2008

By downing a school-bus sized object flying 17,000 miles-per-hour 130 miles above the earth, Washington demonstrated its capacity to shoot down ballistic missiles and satellites in high orbit.

As U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates announced in a news conference after the shootdown, “the question of whether those [antiballistic missile] capabilities work has been settled.”

Capitalist politicians, military officials, and the big-business press present the antiballistic missile system as a defensive tool aimed at reducing the threat of nuclear war.

This is false. It is a deadly weapon directed at the oppressed and exploited of the world. It is aimed at establishing Washington’s ability to use nuclear weapons unchecked.

The first targets of the antiballistic missile weapons program are governments in the semicolonial world who have the capacity to develop ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads. At the top of this list are the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Iran.

U.S. imperialism holds the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. That stockpile stands at more than 4,000 weapons today, enough to destroy the world many times over.

The U.S. rulers are developing their antiballistic missile technology as they carry out deadly military assaults around the world. Tens of thousands of occupation troops are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars promise to spread, as U.S. imperialism deepens its “war on terrorism.”

In 1945, the wealthy rulers of the United States did not hesitate to use nuclear bombs against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki within weeks of the first successful atomic bomb test.

There is no more stark example than this barbaric act of what nuclear first-strike capacity in the hands of U.S. imperialism means for humanity.
 
 
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