NEW STAGE IN THE NUCLEAR TERROR
Al those who confidently believed that "they"
would never dare to throw nuclear weapons into the balance in a specific conflict received a cruel but salutary awakening in the Cuban crisis.
application of a new military concept publicly proclaimed by the spokesmen of American imperialism called "counterforce strategy"; that is, the possibility of launching preventive nuclear war. While the interminable negotiations about ending the atomic tests continue at Geneva, these and many other signs point to the conclusion that we are fact witnessing a new stage in the terrifying nuclear
It is worth examining the arguments which the strategists of American imperialism use to justify adoption of this new strategy. "old" strategy, a nuclear war in its first phase would see "strikes against the main cities and production centers of the enemy; in a few minutes at least 100 million would perish in the United States and 150 million in the Soviet Union (such relative figures are advanced of course to prove that "the enemy" is even more vulnerable than "we" are, but they indicate in any case the extremely high number of casualties to be expected).
would be completed in a phase—if anything valuable enough remained to destroy. After the principal centers had been obliterated, the allies of both protagonists, and the "secondary" industrial and urban centers in each camp would be destroyed until the nuclear arms were used up. But some time ago scientists estimated that sufficient weapons had been stockpiled to destroy at one blow more than half of mankind. And this calculation did not take into account such long-lasting effects as the deterioration of mankind's genetic capital.
In contrast, the so-called "counterforce strategy" would enable humanity to avoid total catas-
American imperialism has such a huge number of nuclear weapons that it can now concentrate its first strike exclusively on the Soviet rocket sites, hurling such showers of nuclear bombs as to wipe out Soviet striking capacityand still have more than enough nuclear weapons in reserve to conduct an type atomic war. If some Soviet atomic weapons should escape the first American strike, Moscow could not use them out of fear that any attempt to do so would bring instant retaliation in the form of a second American strike that would level all major cities and production centers in the Soviet Union.
This enticing perspective evidently does not take into account the growing Soviet capacity to disperse rocket bases, or the general increasing mobility of rockets (carried on trains, submarines, ships, and airplanes on constant patrol). At the same time, the new strategy abandons completely the old fiction of "defensive nuclear war." . The strategists of U.S. imperialism cynically reveal that they are working in accordance with a doctrine of aggressive and preventive nuclear war. We are also given new
impressive evidence of the geometric increase of nuclear rocket stockpiles, of the capacity to "overkill" the "enemy". . Mankind has been warned what to expect.
Would a world swept by this incalculably destructive power still be habitable? This is a question to which no Marxist, conscious of his responsibiphysicias, the physiologists, the specialist in nuclear can answer. It is up to the biologists, radiation to say. The answers these scientists give are not very reassuring. Would such a world of radioactive ruins be "ripe for communism"? To suppose so means to forget what historical materialism has taught from the beginning, that a communist society cannot be built on mere consciousness and the enthusiasm of the oppressed-however necessary these are for the revolution-but requires a material infrastructure, a given level of development of the productive forces.
Does this mean that a knowledge of the terrifying consequences of a nuclear world war will "demoralize" the masses engaged in the colonial revolution or the proletarian masses of the imperialist countries or that it will hold them back from carrying out their revolutionary duties? way of posing the problem is alien to the method of revolutionary Marxism. Marxist method is based upon truth; it proclaims that the truth is always revolutionary.
Marxism can never take to lies and deception—-in this case a deception so irresponsible as to reach historical proportions—hiding from toiling mankind the exact nature of a threat involving its very exist-
Those who use this argument about the risk of demoralizing the masses reveal in reality an absolutely unjustified lack of faith in the international proletariat. They do not understand that it is precisely the nuclear threat weighing upon the future of mankind that can become the main anticapitalist moblizing force of the masses in many countries today. They do not necessity of explaining to the masses that the choice is no longer simply the one between socialism and a less human, more unjust or even barbaric society, but that the real choice today is between socialism and atomic death, that the world will be socialist or it won't be at all! And they do not understand that if this truth is explained with sufficient persuasiveness to the workers of the whole world, these workers will choose socialism more enthusiastically and resolutely than at any time in the past.
In telling the truth to the masses about the danger of atomic death foreshadowed in imperialism's war preparations, the Fourth International appeals to them not to become resigned or submissive or to fall into the trap of thinking that no hope exists but
"peaceful coexistence" with the enemy. On the contrary, it appeals to them to fight. Its message to the proletariat is summarized in the formula:
the struggle against the nuclear danger is possible and can be effectively waged provided the capitalist is consistently weakened by multiplying the assaults against it until it is finally overthrown in the very centers and fortresses of its world power.
The development of the colonial revolution is undoubtedly a means of weakening imperialism, of reducing the number of its bases and places where it can hole up, thus reducing the openings left to it. Similarly the de facto alliance of the Soviet bureaucracy and the colonial revolution-at least in the sense of its blocking a nuclear attack by . imperialism-greatly reduces probability utilizing nuclear weapons against the revolution in the colonial areas. Washington's latest plans tend to confirm in this respect the experiences of the war in Korea and Vietnam and the attack on Suez and the aggression against Cuba. Imperialism hesitates to use nuclear arms in what it calls a "bushfire" conflict. It prefers to use forces specialized in guerrilla warfare rather than transform these "local wars" waged against the colonial revolution into a full-scale nuclear world war.
This derives from the fact that the imperialist statesmen have reached the conclusion that such a nuclear world war risks becoming suicidal, not only in the social but also in the physical sense of the
Under these conditions, the "final showdown" is unlikely to break out over a conflict in the periphery. More likely it might come as a desperate reaction, a demented attack when all possibility of further retreat and survival is blocked by the inexorable progress of world revolution, by the catastrophic blows the capitalist system will have suffered on all continents.
Can one exclude the possibility that American imperialism will finally capitulate without launching a nuclear world war, after having been beaten on the front of the colonial revolution, after having been completely driven out of several continents, after having lost some of its most important allies, and after becoming involved in increasing economic difficulties until it reaches the verge of being completely outpaced by the technical, military and economic strength of the workers states? 1. Theoretically this hypothesis cannot be excluded, especially world war spells not only social but physical suicide for the American capitalist class as a whole, including its leaders. But it would • be extremely dangerous to consider this hypothesis as the most probable. And it would be totally irresponsible to base the long-term perspectives and strategy of world revolution on this hypothesis.
The example of German imperialism under the
Nazis has shown that at a certain point of its development the logic of the imperialist system becomes transformed into organized madness, and that the blind fury of the crumbling social system overcomes even the instinct of self-preservation. It is not by accident that the extreme right-wing forces in the
United States have raised the slogan "Better dead than red." Moreover, a certain margin of uncertainty will undoubtedly remain as long as American imperialism still controls key forces. The launching of a nuclear world war can then appear not as certain suicide, but rather as a "calculated risk" with some
Under these conditions, the risk of nuclear annihilation will face mankind as long as imperialism sufficient economic, technical and military forces at its disposal to launch a nuclear war.
volutionary strategy exclusively upon the need to weaken as much as possible from the outside; it must also
5 base itself on the necessity of overthrowing it from the inside, the final task being facilitated pared by the progress of the colonial revolution and
It is the proletariat of the imperialist countries and only they who will have the
At the crucial moment, intervention from the outside could immediately provoke a nuclear holocaust, whereas nuclear weapons, if we may venture a historical prediction, can hardly be used in a civil conflict in an essentially urban country United States. It is the proletarian revolution in the United States that will deliver the final and decisive blow to imperialism, thereby liberating mankind from the spectre of nuclear death.
In the meantime, everything working toward the nuclear disarmament of imperialism, everything that makes the masses more conscious of the necessity of such disarmament, everything that mobilizes them toward achieving that goal is highly progressive and contributes objectively to helping. the victory of socialism in the imperialist countries. If the pacifism of the masses was based in good part on petty-bourgeois illusions in the world of inter-imperialist wars, the pacifism of the masses today in imperialist countries threatening nuclear aggression against the workers states is an eminently revolutionary sentiparticipate actively in the movements favoring unilateral disarmament of the imperialist countries, of movements favoring evacuation of imperialist bases on the territories of other capitalist countries. These movements should be directed not only against the nuclear arms bases of the main imperialist powerAmerican imperialism—-they should also be directed against the nuclear armament of secondary imperialist powers: Great Britain, France and a "multilateral nuclear force of NATO" perhaps tomorrow Western Germany or Japan.
While playing an active role in movements fighting for unilateral disarmament of the imperialist powers, revolutionary Marxists will at the same time seek to prevent such movements from running into a dead end. The movement for unilateral disarmament in the imperialist countries is objectively a political as well as an anticapitalist movement. In the long run, it cannot progress without becoming conscious of this double nature of the struggle, without trying to link up with the labor movement, and without in the labor movement all the forces of creating alternative leadership to the existing bureaucracies which are either brazenly pro-imperialist paralyzed by the dogma of peaceful coexistence.
In Britain and Japan, the two countries where the antinuclear movement is most widespread, crisis of perspective manifestations of civil disobedience, sit. downs: all this is good in awakening, interesting and mobilizing the masses. But in themselves, none of these combat methods. can disarmament of imperialist bourgeoisie will be achieved finally only by overthrowing its class power and its state.
That is why it is the duty of revolutionary Marxists in the antinuclear movement to press transitional slogans and actions as will help the masses participating in these movements to become conscious of the fact that this struggle is but one aspect of the general struggle against the capitalist class and the capitalist system and for the socialist reconstruction of human society. they should link this antinuclear struggle with slothe total disarmament of the dominant with slogans for governments to take the place of bourgeois governments really capable of effectively pushing through disarmament as well as a total break with imperialist alliances. struggle for disarmament, consequently should be tied in with the need to organize working class power in the factories, in the work-shops and in the offices, as the only power capable of guaranteeing that no more nuclear weapons will be manufactured, transported or stocked and that all existing nuclear weapons will be destroyed, the only power capable of destroying all military, political and social structures interested in the demented nuclear arms race.
February 20, 1963.