Demand end to nuclear weapons as Washington builds up arsenal

BY MAGGIE TROWE

This month Barack Obama will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Japanese city of Hiroshima since Washington unleashed the first atomic bomb there in 1945, and doesn’t plan to apologize. His visit comes as the U.S. government moves ahead with plans to strengthen its massive arsenal, highlighting that the possibility of a nuclear conflagration remains all too real. It is in the interests of working people in the U.S. to demand Washington unilaterally disarm this lethal stockpile.

Obama — who called for “a world without nuclear weapons” in Prague in April 2009, received the Nobel Peace Prize later that year and initiated four Nuclear Security Summits — is backing a 30-year program to spend up to $1 trillion to “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal and production facilities.

Speaking to the House Committee on Armed Forces in June 2015, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work and Admiral James Winnefeld, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outlined steps “to ensure that, as the President has directed, the United States will retain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear force for as long as nuclear weapons exist.”

When combined with sustaining the current arsenal as new systems are built, the plan “will roughly double spending on nuclear weapons,” a December 2015 Arms Control Association report stated.

Thousands of warheads at ready

Washington has some 7,100 nuclear warheads, while Moscow holds 7,700, together totaling 90 percent of the world’s 16,000 nukes. Seven other governments — France, China, United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and north Korea — have the rest. Despite taking some of the weapons out of active use, Washington still deploys at ready around 1,500 nuclear warheads on several hundred bombers and missiles, giving it the capacity to destroy human life on earth many times over.

Washington has some 200 B61 nuclear bombs deployed in five NATO member countries — the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Turkey.

Part of the administration’s plan is to upgrade a version of the B61 bomb, giving it a sliding scale to produce a large or small explosion.

While touted as a way to reduce the danger of nuclear war, the “dial-down” nuke makes it more likely. “What going smaller does is to make the weapon more thinkable,” Gen. James Cartwright, retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former nuclear strategy advisor to Obama, told the New York Times in January.

Moscow is also updating its nuclear arsenal, scrapping many old silo-based missiles while building a new generation of long-range nuclear bombers, truck-mounted ballistic missiles and nuclear-armed submarines. Russian President Vladimir Putin boycotted the most recent Nuclear Security Summit in Washington March 31-April 1.

For decades the Socialist Workers Party has called on Washington to get rid of its nuclear weapons and joined fights to ban nuclear testing. While defending the degenerated workers state in the Soviet Union against imperialist attack, the party explained that “the Kremlin, by participating in this mindless race, is dealing terrible blows against the defense of the Soviet Union,” as SWP leader Joseph Hansen put it in 1977. And the party backs the call by Cuba’s revolutionary leadership for a worldwide ban on nuclear weapons.

Castro: ‘We don’t need nukes’

“We have never considered the idea of fabricating nuclear weapons, because we don’t need them,” Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro said in a 2005 speech, as Washington and its allies ratcheted up their sanctions and military threats against the government of Iran over its nuclear program.

“What sense would it make producing a nuclear weapon in the face of an enemy who has thousands of nuclear weapons? It would mean joining the game of nuclear confrontation,” he said. “We possess a weapon as powerful as nuclear ones and it is the magnitude of the justice we are fighting for. Our nuclear weapon is the invincible power of moral weapons.”

Washington’s bellicose course in shoring up and expanding its nuclear arsenal will continue to provoke an arms race. It’s likely that more countries will seek to produce weapons. In a letter to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro last December, Castro noted, “Security does not exist today for anyone. There are nine states which possess nuclear weapons.” Castro noted it was Washington that dropped two bombs on Japanese cities at the end of World War II, with devastating effects. And he urged the governments of China and Russia to “make the greatest effort to avoid a war and contribute to the peaceful development of Venezuela, Latin America, Asia and Africa.”

In his remarks during the closing of the 7th Congress of the Cuban Communist Party last month, Castro said “the greatest danger hanging over the earth today derives from the destructive power of modern weaponry which could undermine the peace of the planet and make human life on earth’s surface impossible.”

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