Russian President Vladimir Putin announced March 1 that Russia is developing new nuclear weapons that he says are capable of evading U.S. missile defenses. This comes shortly after the Pentagon said it would produce nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missiles. The U.S. rulers seek to protect their dominant position in the world imperialist order and advance their predatory interests.
For decades the Socialist Workers Party has fought for Washington’s immediate, unilateral nuclear disarmament. The party believes that all other governments that possess nuclear weapons — China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea, Russia, the U.K. — should get rid of them, and those that seek to acquire them — like Iran — should stop.
Disarming the nuclear arsenals of the capitalist rulers is a burning necessity for workers worldwide. The expansionist drive of the capitalist class, seeking markets and profits at the expense of their rivals, always bears the threat of war and destruction. The U.S. rulers are the only ones to have ever used nuclear weapons — in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Revolutionaries have no need for such weaponry. “No one should have the right to produce nuclear weapons, much less the privileged right demanded by imperialism to impose its hegemonic domination,” explained Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro in his biography My Life.
“We have never considered the idea of fabricating nuclear weapons, because we don’t need them,” Castro said in 2005.
“We possess a weapon as powerful as nuclear ones and it is the magnitude of the justice we are fighting for,” he said. Cuba’s working people made a socialist revolution that is worth defending. And they have proved over decades that they have the capacities to defend this working-class conquest from Washington’s relentless efforts to overthrow it.
“A world free of nuclear weapons would create better conditions for working people to advance our struggles,” said a statement issued by SWP national campaign director John Studer on Jan. 30. “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 owners and end the possibility of their use.”