Vol. 73/No. 23      June 15, 2009

Virtually every line in the editorial, reprinted on this page, is a falsehood.

The main concern of the People’s Weekly World editors seems to be that the DPRK’s actions “play into the hands of those in the U.S. who want to derail the Obama presidency.”

“Recent changes in the world make the test all the more irresponsible,” the People’s Weekly World editorial says. “Today, Barack Obama is the U.S. president and as such pledged to reduce nuclear arsenals, to sign a treaty that would ban all nations, including the U.S. itself, from any nuclear tests.

“Unprecedented vows from any U.S. president,” swoon the PWW’s smitten editors, “and one that has been welcomed around the world.”

What are these “unprecedented vows”? Obama has called for a revival of the 1999 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed by then U.S. president William Clinton but blocked by the Senate. Supporters of the treaty argued at the time that the treaty would “lock in U.S. nuclear superiority.”

The truth is that the People’s Weekly World editorial, from start to finish, provides cover for the Obama administration’s moves to crank up U.S. imperialism’s campaign against the DPRK, including military threats as well as the denial of food and fuel.

Contrary to the People’s Weekly World, it is imperialism that threatens “peace and stability in the region,” not North Korea. The U.S. government introduced nuclear arms and delivery systems on Korean soil and waters, and has maintained them for decades throughout the region, despite the DPRK’s longstanding call for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

In April President Obama announced plans to add nearly $1 billion in spending on U.S. weapons programs.

It is Washington that imposed the partition of Korea in 1945 at the end of World War II and has forcibly maintained that division for six decades. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops remain deployed on Korea’s territory to this day, trampling on its sovereignty.

Washington maintains a range of trade and financial sanctions against North Korea, and now the Obama administration is threatening additional and harsher sanctions. The U.S. military routinely conducts joint war exercises with Tokyo and Seoul aimed at North Korea—most recently in March, with 26,000 U.S. troops, 30,000 South Korean troops, and a U.S. aircraft carrier.

North Korean ships have been stopped and searched at sea under the U.S.-led “Proliferation Security Initiative,” through which Washington and its allies assert the right to conduct piracy by boarding any vessel “suspected” of carrying materials to produce “weapons of mass destruction.” The South Korean government has announced it will now fully participate in the PSI.

It is the height of cynical understatement to say, as does the PWW editorial, that the U.S. government “fought in the war” against Korea. The Democratic Party administration of President Harry Truman organized that imperialist assault in 1950-53, with the U.S. invaders using the United Nations blue helmets as cover. U.S. warplanes literally flattened Pyongyang and other cities, using napalm on the population. The Truman administration threatened to employ atomic weapons. It is estimated that 4 million of the 30 million people in Korea were killed in the war.

What’s more, it was not “the war that divided the country in two.” That had already been done by U.S. military forces in 1945, with the complicity of the Stalinist regime in Moscow.

Nonetheless, the PWW counsels the DPRK that building nuclear weapons “can never be justified.” Such advice rings hollow from a newspaper that in August 1945, when it was called the Daily Worker, hailed the U.S. nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which annihilated hundreds of thousands of Japanese along with Koreans living in those cities. The paper’s editors acclaimed the atrocities of August 5 and August 9 as “The Super-Duper Week.”

Class-conscious workers in the United States and elsewhere, as a simple matter of national sovereignty, support Korea’s right to self-defense against imperialism.

Washington, the world’s main nuclear power and the only one to have used nuclear weapons, has no legitimacy to demand that North Korea abandon its development of nuclear technology.

The PWW tries to bolster its argument by noting that “socialist” China and Vietnam condemned the North Korean tests. Beijing has hosted six-party talks between the DPRK and governments of the United States, China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. Washington’s aim is to bring to bear the muscle of Moscow and Beijing—North Korea’s largest source of trade and economic aid—to compel Pyongyang to unilaterally bow to the U.S. rulers’ dictates.

Far from supporting the U.S. capitalist government led by Barack Obama, working people must oppose Washington’s moves and demand: End all sanctions against North Korea! Get all U.S. troops and weapons out of the Korean peninsula!

The only way to put an end to the threat of nuclear war is for workers and farmers—first and foremost right here in the United States—to organize a revolutionary movement capable of waging a struggle to conquer state power and disarm the imperialist war makers once and for all.