On Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, the U.S. capitalist rulers unleashed a nuclear inferno on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were instantly incinerated or died agonizing deaths from burns and radiation poisoning. To the U.S. propertied ruling class this was necessary to ensure Washington’s domination of the Pacific and of the imperialist “world order” that came out of its victory in the World War II.
While Washington cynically claimed this slaughter was needed to win “peace,” the Militant headline Aug. 18 said, “There is no peace! Only world socialism can save mankind from atomic destruction in another imperialist war!”
The dog-eat-dog competition of rival capitalist powers drive them to expand their nuclear arsenals in preparation for new wars. The inevitable consequences of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and its attempt to subjugate that country’s people are the moves by capitalist powers worldwide to acquire all manner of armaments to prepare for future conflicts.
The vast military might wielded in every corner of the globe by the U.S. ruling class is the counterpart to the bosses’ assaults on the jobs, wages, families, social conditions and political rights workers face here at home.
Today the logic of imperialist competition and its wars from Korea to Iraq, Vietnam to Afghanistan, is clearer for workers to see — a march toward fascism, war and nuclear annihilation. The stakes for working people in organizing to prevent this are enormous. But before the rulers can inflict the horrors of a third world war, we will have our chance to overturn the rule of the capitalist war makers and take political power into our own hands. Through our battles on the picket lines and in the factories, mines and mills, we can forge the working-class party and Marxist leadership we need — one that can lead millions to take power and establish a workers and farmers government.
The Socialist Workers Party demands Washington immediately and unconditionally abolish its nuclear arsenal. Like Cuba’s revolutionary leadership, the SWP calls on all nine governments that hold nuclear weapons to get rid of them, and any others that are planning to acquire them to renounce doing so.
“We have never considered producing nuclear weapons,” Fidel Castro, the central leader of Cuba’s socialist revolution, told students in Havana in 2005. “We possess a weapon as powerful as nuclear power and it is the immense justice for which we are struggling. Our nuclear weapon is the invincible power of moral weapons.” This is the line of march of the working people.
Cuba’s socialist revolution is a powerful example of what working people are capable of and what we can and must do here. This is the only road to assure once and for all that the capitalist rulers — or any of its equally bloodthirsty rivals — will never use nuclear weapons again.