A strategy to disarm the warmakers

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The Mobilization for Survival will hold its 7th national conference Jan. 2022, 1984, to discuss perspectives for the antinuclear weapons movement. Socialist Action staff writer Mark Harris prepared this contribution which we think will be of interest to conference participants and all others active in the movement against nuclear weapons.

-Editors The stakes in the struggle against nuclear war are immense. There are some 50,000 nuclear weapons ready for Boils today they have less than 50 percent of their employees. So much for concessions to save jobs."

Labor tops cave in Like many rank-and-filers, Mix and the layer of union leaders close to the ranks wanted to put up a fight. They were thwarted by the ATU top leadership, which steamrolled the Greyhound workers' bargaining council into recommending acceptance of the takeback contract. The council's Dec. 3 letter gloomily predicted that the company "eventually would have broken this strike and left our members jobless." This set the stage for a demoralized acceptance of defeat by a misled union majority.

This defeatism, typical in the higher echelons of the unions, is not in accord with the real power relation between workers and bosses. Even if ATU President Rosenblum and his colleagues were right in their assessment that the strike could not be won, they would still have been wrong to stampede their membership back to work.

Greyhound was a long way from restoring scheduled service. As a matter of fact, its campaign to gradually restore limited bus service was stopped dead. use in the world today, with the capacity to destroy all human life some 22 times over. As Albert Einstein said, "I don't know what weapons are going to be used in the next war. But I know very well the ones that will be used in the war after that: the bow and arrow."

With this sober realization in mind, nearly five million people took to the streets of Europe's major cities last October in a massive display of opposition to Ronald Reagan's plan for deploying 572 Pershing II and Cruise missiles in Europe. In West Germany alone, where 108 Pershing II missiles will be based, 4,000 protest Reagan visit in Pittsburgh.

Even in main centers like San Francisco and Boston, buses that began to roll through picket lines were virtually empty, and mass mobilizations of strikers and supporters were able to close down all operations on at least two occasions.

Such mass mobilizations could have been repeated and expanded. The labor movement was showing a capacity to respond in solidarity with the Greyhound workers. Many local union leaders and activists saw the Greyhound strike as a focus for rallying labor forces to fight the decade-long assault against their hard-won gains. While the key to a decisive victory in this strike was the strikers' ability to shut down operations, even a serious impairment of Greyhound's schedules could have brought a clear victory to the workers. It goes without saying that it is better to put up a fight than to go down without a fight. In any case, there was plenty of time before it might have become necessary to call off the strike and go back in and the union would have been intact and able to fight another day.

The defeatist outlook of the labor officialdom is founded on the notion (continued on page 9, in “[pitalist Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang of Sun Yat-sen…]”) more than a million people demonstrated on October 23.

Since NATO's decision in December 1979 to base these missiles in Europe, a groundswell of antiwar protest has erupted throughout Europe and the United States. Over a million people gathered in New York City on June 12, 1982, in the largest demonstration in American history, to protest the spiraling nuclear arms buildup. Contrary to Reagan's glib assertion in 1981 that a limited nuclear exchange is possible in Europe, millions of people instinctively grasp the reality that a nuclear war is not "winnable."

The stark truth is that the nuclear arsenal of the United States today equals nearly a million Hiroshimas. From 1970 to 1975 alone, the United States doubled its stockpile of nuclear weaponry. The annual military budget now stands at a record $257 billion, up 12 percent a year in real terms from the 1980 budget of $142 billion. Over the next four years Reagan plans to spend a phenomenal $1.5 trillion on the war budget. Both the Pershing I1 missile and the MX missilewhich • is based in this country-are designed as "first strike" weapons capable of launching a nuclear attack that would destroy the Soviet Union's ability to counterattack. The highly accurate Pershing Il, with its ability to strike the Soviet Union in four to seven minutes, is perhaps the most dangerous weapon in the American arsenal. These additions to the American arsenal qualitatively up the ante in the arms race and increase the likelihood of a nuclear war initiated by the United States.

This latest U.S. arms buildup confirms once again a basic reality of the arms race-every major advance in nuclear weapons technology has been initiated by the United States. The development of the atomic bomb, hydrogen bombs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, multiple warheads, neutron bombs, and now the Pershing Il and Cruise missiles all are products of Pentagon ingenuity.

System on last legs As World War Il drew to a close, the United States proclaimed the opening of the "American century" in the most horrific manner with the atomic bomb explosions on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, the expansionist drive of American imperialism quickly ran up against a new mass upsurge of the colonial peoples. The Chinese revolution wrenched literally hundreds of millions of people from the grip of imperialist exploitation and ended the isolation of the Soviet Union. The establishment of workers' states in Eastern Europe (albeit bureaucratically deformed from the outset), the victory of the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions, and the endless succession of mass struggles breaking out periodically around the world (Greece, Iran, Indonesia, France, (continued on page 2, in “Lessons of Greyhound”)