Nuclear insanity! U.S. threatens N. Korea
2017Jeff Mackler 2017-05Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 12 →
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In the days of my youth, our local peace group began its protests against U.S. nuclear weapons—atomic bombs at that time—by marching across the radius of total incineration, in our instance, the distance from the Ohio-based Strategic Air Command (SAC) Wright Patterson Air Force Base to a location nine miles away. Everything within that radius, we proclaimed in 1959, with facts to prove it, would be totally oblit erated, pulverized, reduced to ashes should the area surrounding the SAC base be hit by an A-bomb.
The A-bombs—the bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945—were soon sup planted by hydrogen or H-bombs, whose destructive power was 5000 times greater. Scientists at that time warned that 10 such bombs dropped in key urban ar eas across the U.S. could obliterate much of the U.S, population, while reducing the country to an unin habitable radioactive nightmare.
Today, there are many thousands of such weapons. If deployed, the insane but not unthinkable oblitera tion of the earth’s people and much of non-human life itself would be assured.
Yet this insanity is routinely contemplated by U.S. imperialism’s chief representatives, whether they be Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump—none of whom has declared that the use of these doomsday weapons is unthinkable. To the contrary, President Obama authorized the development and production of a “modernized” nuclear weapons program at a cost of $1 trillion over the course of the next 30 years.
Last month’s dropping on Afghanistan of the GBU43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB, nick-named by the sick-minded military bureaucrats, “Mother Of All Bombs”) was a warning to North Korea and Syria that the U.S. behemoth had new horrors to inflict on anyone who challenged imperial prerogatives.
U.S. President Harry Truman, a “civilized” president from a middle-class lineage, authorized the dropping of the two A-bombs, nick-named “little boy” and “fat man,” on Japan. Some 250,000 people, almost all ci 12 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2017 vilians, were incinerated, with the rationale that this was preferable to a land-based U.S. invasion of Japan, which Truman argued would have been even more costly in terms of the loss of American lives.
Subsequently, historians have demonstrated that the U.S. was much more concerned that their agree ment with their Soviet Union wartime ally for a joint U.S.-Russian invasion of the Japanese mainland would give the U.S. a reduced postwar role in the occupation of conquered Japan. The A-bomb amounted to a warn ing to the Soviet Union (which had no nuclear weap ons at the time) to stay out. Subsequent research also demonstrated that the Japanese government had al ready accepted the basic surrender terms demanded by the U.S. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated nonetheless, a warning to the entire world.
In recent weeks, some 46 of the 47 major U.S. news papers editorialized in support of Trump’s bombing of Syria, without a shred of proof to confirm Trump’s sarin gas allegations. (See Socialist Action’s statement of the U.S. Syria bombing on p. 2) We hear few, if any, voices among the nation’s ruling elite warning against the Trump administration’s nuclear weapons arsenal or related war threats against North Korea. U.S. impe rialist wars, always justified in advance by the intense demonization of its intended victims and associated pretexts justifying war, are the rule in what passes for “our civilized nation.”
The colonial history of Korea North Korea is once again in U.S. gunsights, includ ing endless caricatures of the “boy dictator” head of state, Kim Jong-un, not to mention the never-denied U.S. cyberwar directed at North Korean military in stallations. (North Korea is ruled by a repressive Stalinist regime that oversees a fundamentally capi talist economy with the military bureaucracy at its center, but it is the task of the Korean people, not the United States, to overthrow it.)
What is left out of this warmongering hyperbole is the colonial history of Korea, including the U.S. postWorld War II occupation of the South, where the vast majority opposed the U.S. occupier’s slaughter of the social forces allied with the Korean Communist Par ty/Workers Party of Korea.
From 1905 to 1945 Korea had been occupied by Ja pan, which sought its permanent incorporation into the Japanese Empire, including the banning of much of Korean culture and the Korean language itself. In opposition to the Korean people, the U.S. occupiers in the South, as they did in Vietnam, initially sought to maintain the previous Japanese-created government infrastructure and personnel as well as the associated semi-feudal social relations.
Korea’s post-World War II history is not qualita tively different from Vietnam’s in many respects. The northern portion was liberated from the Japanese oc cupation by the Soviet army, aided by the Korean re sistance; Vietnam was liberated by the Russian-allied Vietnamese Communist Party, led by Ho-Chi-Minh.
After the war, the southern part of Korea, by “agree ment” with the Stalinized Russian CP, which subordi nated support for national liberation struggles to ac commodation with imperialism to preserve the privi leges of the Stalinist bureaucracy, was ceded to U.S. imperialism. The latter immediately moved to wipe out the Korean Communist forces.
For most of South Korea’s history, the U.S. occupi ers installed a series of dictators, beginning with U.S.educated Princeton graduate Syngman Rhee in 1945. Rhee led the infamous Bodo League massacre or “summer of terror” in 1950, which murdered 100,000 (some estimates put the number at 200,000) Koreans charged with being “communist sympathizers” while orchestrating the U.S.-backed South Korean Army’s incursions into the North.
The insightful Washington, D.C. journalist I.F. Stone authored a valuable book, “The Hidden History of the Korean War 1950-51,” that refutes the U.S. McCarthyera pretext that the Korean War began only with the invasion of 50,000 North Korean troops. Actually, the attempt by Northern forces to re-unify the country had great popular support in the South.