The following statement was issued Jan. 30 by John Studer, Socialist Workers Party national campaign director.
The Socialist Workers Party demands Washington’s immediate unilateral nuclear disarmament and has done so since these weapons were first developed and used against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. rulers in 1945. Like Cuba’s communist leadership, the SWP calls on all governments — the eight other countries that possess nuclear weapons and any whose rulers think they can benefit by developing them — to disarm and forswear development of a nuclear weapons program.
Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro explained in 2016 that a deadly arms race leading to unleashing the destructive power of nuclear weapons can “make human life on earth’s surface impossible.” U.S. imperialism deploys a massive nuclear arsenal, and plans to develop more, to enforce its dominant position in the world imperialist system. The Barack Obama administration planned to build a new range of less-powerful nuclear bombs, saying it would make it easier for Washington to use them whenever the U.S. rulers deemed it necessary.
These same propertied owners who control the U.S. nuclear arsenal also bear central responsibility for the assaults on workers’ conditions and dignity at home and today’s spreading wars abroad. And for the same reason — to advance their class interests.
Washington threatens the people of Iran, saying Tehran should dismantle its nuclear program. The U.S. rulers are pressing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to end its nuclear weapons program.
The SWP demands an end to U.S. sanctions against both Iran and North Korea; that Washington remove its troops, ships and planes from Korea and the Mideast; and for a nuclear free Korean Peninsula, Asia and the world.
“What’s the purpose of producing a nuclear weapon when your enemy has thousands of them? It would be entering an arms race all over again,” Fidel Castro says in My Life, a series of interviews by Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet from 2003 to 2005.
“No one should have the right to produce nuclear weapons,” Castro said, “much less the privileged right demanded by imperialism to impose its hegemonic domination.”
“We possess a weapon as powerful as nuclear ones, it is the magnitude of the justice we are fighting for,” Castro said. “Our nuclear weapon is the invincible power of moral weapons.”
Castro starts from the capacities of millions of working people to organize and fight, because they have a revolution worth defending, an example for toilers worldwide to emulate. A revolution of uncompromising moral standing.
And the internationalist record of Cuba’s revolutionary leadership over decades, including the mobilization of hundreds of thousands to help defeat apartheid South Africa’s invasion of Angola, advanced the fighting spirit and self-confidence of Cuba’s workers and farmers.
A world free of nuclear weapons would create better conditions for working people to advance our struggles against the exploitation and oppression of the capitalist rulers. There is no better reason to build a movement capable of overturning capitalist rule and replacing it with workers power than to be able to take nuclear weapons out of the hands of the propertied rulers and end the possibility of their use.