US hands off Korea! For nuclear free Pacific!

The following is a statement by Mary Martin, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Seattle was released May 3.

The Socialist Workers Party calls for an immediate end to Washington’s economic and financial sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. We demand that the U.S. government withdraw its more than 28,000 troops from the Korean Peninsula, and U.S. planes and ships from Korea’s skies and waters. We stand in solidarity with the more than 70-year-long struggle to reunify Korea, ripped apart by U.S. imperialism at the end of World War II, as well as the Korean people’s aspirations for a nuclear free Korean Peninsula and Pacific.

Ever since 1945, the Socialist Workers Party has never stopped fighting to rid the world of the U.S. rulers’ murderous nuclear arsenal, demanding that Washington dismantle its stockpile unilaterally. The SWP has long called on Moscow and all others who hold nuclear arms to do so, as well.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the U.S. capitalist rulers have made some nuclear arms reductions to bolster the deception they’re on a path to nuclear disarmament. That’s a self-serving lie. They have no such intention.

Today Washington deploys thousands of nuclear weapons — more than enough to incinerate every person on earth many times over. So does Moscow. The U.S. rulers are modernizing their nuclear delivery systems. The Barack Obama administration planned to build a new arsenal of smaller nukes, claiming they would be easier to use and “more ethical!” Democratic and Republican administrations alike claim that Washington’s nuclear arsenal defends “our American interests.” But there is no “we.” Their military forces defend the propertied rulers’ interests against us, the working classes, both here and abroad.

Washington’s campaign that North Korea get rid of nuclear weapons, and insistence that Tehran renounce them, is both cynical and hypocritical, to say the least. But the development of nuclear arms and delivery systems by these governments weakens the defense of the Korean and Iranian people against Washington. It saps the fighting capacities of the toilers in face of imperialism’s dictates, depriving them of the political and moral high ground in the eyes of working people worldwide.

The leadership of Cuba’s socialist revolution provides an example to emulate.

“We have never considered producing nuclear weapons because we don’t need them,” explained Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro in 2005. Having such arms, he said, “would mean joining the game of nuclear confrontation.”

The Cuban government doesn’t take this position because the revolution faces no enemies or military threats. From day one of the revolution in 1959, Washington has worked ruthlessly and relentlessly to overthrow it.

“The one weapon we haven’t renounced,” Castro said, “is the ‘war of the entire people’” — the mobilization and arming of the Cuban people, politically and militarily. Counterposed to this, Fidel said, “a nuclear weapon is a good way to commit suicide at a certain point.”

Working people in Cuba have something worth defending. “We possess a weapon as powerful as nuclear power,” Castro said, “and it is the immense justice for which we are struggling.”

Washington’s refusal to get rid of its nuclear stockpile is another powerful reason to build a working-class leadership in the United States that fights to overturn the rule of the capitalist warmakers and to replace it with a workers and farmers government.

Related articles:
Washington, Beijing put squeeze on North Korea

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