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In the Shadow of Nuclear World War III:

Mobilize Masses to Build a New Communist World

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Israeli PM Netanyahu’s pre-election speech to the US Congress threatened nuclear war if negotiations with Iran continue.  Obama predicted nuclear war if they don’t.   Iran considers its nuclear weapons program necessary to offset that of Israel (which never signed any nuclear treaty) and to counter a possible US attempt to overthrow its government. 

Some people think that the nuclear war threat disappeared with the end of the Cold War.  They are wrong.  It’s even greater.  It will disappear only when workers win and build communism everywhere in the world. 
When capitalist-imperialists go to war they try to do more than defeat their enemies on the battlefield.  They aim to destroy their rivals’ productive capacity.  That includes workers as well as factories. 
Nuclear weapons serve this purpose well.  When the nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer saw the first A-bomb test in 1945, he quoted the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
When the working class goes to war, our goal must be to destroy capitalism and build communist society on its ashes.  We aim to win over “enemy” soldiers whenever possible, not to kill them.  They are workers in uniform. 
We don’t want to kill masses of civilians.  We don’t want to create huge radioactive wastelands.  We have no use for nuclear weapons.  We are not destroyers of worlds.  We are builders of worlds. 
Soldiers and sailors with access to nuclear weapons will join the communist revolution.  They will immediately deactivate or dismantle those weapons.  That will send a message to the world’s workers more powerful than any bomb.  
Capitalist-imperialists who still hold power will threaten to destroy communist strongholds with nuclear weapons.  We are confident that such threats would spur industrial workers and soldiers there to mobilize the masses for communism.   We must plan internationally and build our international party now!

US Rulers Debate Updating Nuclear Arsenal
In January 2015, two powerful US congressmen asked the US Secretaries of State and Defense to deploy additional nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe.
 Other imperialists responded that this “would add nothing to our security, divert funds from higher priority defense expenditures, likely provoke Russia to deploy nuclear weapons in Crimea, increase the possibility of nuclear war, and be divisive amongst our NATO allies.” (defenseone.com, 2/9/2015)
This is part of a larger debate. 
Cold War US military analysts argued for “tactical” nuclear weapons, believing that the Soviet Union had massive superiority in conventional weapons.  Now the situation is reversed.  The US/NATO bloc, including former Soviet-bloc countries like Poland, has overwhelming conventional superiority over Russia. 

Some US military analysts ask why, then, does the US still need its expensive, outdated ground-based nuclear weapons in Europe?  A 2008 Pentagon review quoted a senior U.S. defense official: “We pay a king’s ransom for these things and . . . they have no military value.” (Foreign Affairs, July/Aug. 2014)
They say it would be cheaper and more effective to fold new “tactical” nuclear weapons into the strategic “triad” of bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
Their opponents ask how the US would respond if Russia used the battlefield nuclear weapons it is now testing in simulated conflicts against superior NATO or Chinese conventional forces.  Would the US/NATO escalate? 
In Asia-Pacific, China’s new ICBM systems allow its nuclear bombs to reach the entire United States.  What happens if the US, honoring its treaties, joins Japan in a war against China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands?  China’s land-based weapons attack US ships.  The US attacks China’s coastal provinces.  China responds with a high-altitude nuclear electro-magnetic blast to disable the electronics critical to US military capacity.  Then what?
According to the 2010 US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the United States has budgeted
$1 trillion to modernize its nuclear B-61 gravity bomb and other nuclear weapons.  It expects to have new models operational, along with the
F-35 delivery system, in 2017-18. The NPR stated clearly that “deterrence” is NOT the sole purpose of the US nuclear arsenal.  The US might actually use nuclear bombs—again.
Tactical nuclear weapons may be “lumped together with other nuclear warheads, bombs, and strategic delivery systems,” say strategic analysts, but “the political and military need for such weapons will continue to exist for the foreseeable future.”
The liberal-pacifist Salvador de Madariaga said after World War I that “nations don’t distrust each other because they are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other.”  Nations are capitalist institutions.  They “distrust each other” because capitalism forces them to compete for market share and maximum profits.  This competition unavoidably drives them to imperialist war.
Communism will eliminate money, markets, profits, nations, competition, and the deadly wars they inevitably cause.  It will build a world based on cooperation and sharing.  This is the future we foresee and fight for.

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