Demand US gov’t destroy its nukes!

President Barack Obama spoke in Hiroshima last week, where Washington first unleashed the atomic bomb in August 1945. That destruction should spark a “moral revolution,” he intoned, with the goal, one day, to “eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.” His actions as chief executive officer of U.S. imperialism, however, expose the hollowness of his words.

It is in the interests of the working class to eliminate all nukes. For workers in the United States, that starts with demanding the capitalist rulers in Washington unilaterally dismantle their deadly arsenal!

Together Washington and Moscow hold 90 percent of the world’s thousands of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy humanity many times over, and both are modernizing their arsenals. Under the Obama administration, the U.S. government has reduced the size of its nuclear stockpile at a slower pace than under any of his three predecessors. And Washington is pushing ahead with the deployment of an anti-missile system along the periphery of the former Soviet Union, aimed at giving the U.S. rulers a strategic advantage against Moscow. It is also advancing its “pivot” to Asia, aimed at holding back Beijing’s challenge to U.S. supremacy.

The likelihood is growing, not diminishing, that nuclear weapons will be used in conflicts around the world as rival governments compete for markets in the midst of the deepening worldwide capitalist economic crisis. When the Stalinist regime imploded in the Soviet Union at the start of the 1990s, the U.S. rulers thought they had won the Cold War, and would dominate the world unopposed. Today that illusion is crumbling, from the coming apart of the imperialist order in the Middle East to Washington’s growing economic and military rivalry with Beijing in the Pacific.

A speech by Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro in November 2005 gives the communist position. “We have never considered producing nuclear weapons because we don’t need them,” Castro said. “It would mean joining the game of nuclear confrontation.

“We have a different type of nuclear weapon: it’s our ideas,” he said. “Our nuclear weapon is the invincible power of moral weapons.”

The capitalist rulers won’t get rid of nuclear weapons, even though they risk their own destruction. That alone is a powerful reason why working people need to organize to take power out of their hands on the road to building a socialist world.

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