By Prof. Jose Maria Sison

Chairperson, International League of Peoples’ Struggle
March 4, 2014

We, the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, expose and condemn the Nuclear Security Summits as a hypocritical and malicious propaganda platform initiated by US imperialism. This kind of summit pretends to prevent nuclear terrorism but in fact aims to promote and strengthen the oligopoly of nuclear weapons by the imperialist powers headed by the US. These are the real megaterrorists who deceptively accuse of nuclear terrorism those states and other entities outside of their orbit.

US President Obama initiated the Nuclear Security Summit in Prague in 2009 when he called on all imperialist powers to agree on global arrangements to improve the security of nuclear material. The first summit was held in Washington in 2010 and laid down the measures in the so-called Washington Work Plan to secure hazardous nuclear material (highly enriched uranium and plutonium). The second summit was held in Seoul in 2012, in a dramatic show to sanctify the nuclear weapons positioned by the US in South Korea against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and to add to the summit agenda the radioactive sources for “dirty bombs”.

The third summit is slated for 24 and 25 March in The Hague this year, to be attended by 53 countries and four international organizations. The avowed aims of the summit are to reduce the quantity of nuclear material in the world, to better secure existing material, and to improve international cooperation in this regard. The plan of the summit is to issue a final joint declaration: The Hague Nuclear Security Summit Communiqué.

This kind of summit is an excrescence of the nonproliferation treaties that have failed to reduce nuclear stockpiles. It is obviously a scheme to perpetuate and enlarge the nuclear terrorism of the US and its allies, including Israel, and certain tolerated US partners like India and Pakistan. The imperialist powers are exaggerating the threats of mini-terrorist groups like the Al Qaida and others that they themselves have created. They also unjustly condemn as “terrorists” such countries as the DPRK which engage in nuclear research and development for peaceful purposes and self-defense.

What is utterly hypocritical and malicious about the Nuclear Security Summits is that the biggest nuclear powers, especially the initiator US, use these to further license the growing stockpiles of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, depleted uranium-tipped and other radioactive weapons, and the expanding acts of US and NATO military intervention and aggression (as in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Central Asia, and elsewhere), in violation of the national sovereignty and independence of peoples and countries.

The US is culpable for the very first use of nuclear weapons to wipe out entire civilian populations in the hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. It used its nuclear monopoly to terrorize the peoples of the world and force them to accept its hegemony until the Soviet Union broke this monopoly in 1949. By breaking the US nuclear monopoly, the Soviet Union was a major factor in preventing US unilateral use of nuclear weapons and in maintaining world peace despite the Cold War. By the time the US launched a war of aggression against Korea, it could no longer use nuclear weapons with impunity against the DPRK and China.

After being stalemated by the Soviet Union with regard to strategic nuclear weapons, the US proceeded to develop tactical nuclear weapons and other radioactive weapons. In the wake of the full restoration of capitalism in former socialist countries and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has become far more arrogant than ever before, and has found more leeway than ever before in using radioactive weapons on a wide scale, such as depleted uranium-tipped projectiles in Yugoslavia and Iraq.

What has become ever more dangerous and more threatening to humankind and the earth is the fact that all major possessors of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons are capitalist powers. Since the full restoration of capitalism in all major socialist countries, the world has become ever more cramped and ever more crisis-stricken. Thus, the imperialist powers are more than ever driven to struggle for a redivision of the global economic territory. As shown previously in the world wars of the 20th century, the imperialist powers use all available weapons of mass destruction to gain an advantage and do not care about how many people are killed in order to establish their hegemony.

During the Cold War, there was the US-Soviet balance of “mutually assured destruction”. The Soviet Union then referred to the higher principles of socialism over capitalism, upheld the interest of the proletariat and the people, vowed to use the nuclear bomb only as a deterrent, and preempted itself explicitly from first use of the nuclear bomb. It continued to express its stand against war and the first use of nuclear weapons, even after it became monopoly bureaucrat capitalist and social-imperialist. Now, we see the US and NATO trying again to push their way into the the Ukraine in an attempt to threaten and debilitate Russia. Contending imperialist powers are more likely to miscalculate in the absence of a real socialist bulwark in the calculus.

We, the people of the world, must demand the end of the oligopoly of nuclear weapons by the imperialist powers that have long terrorized them and have used their nuclear stockpiles to impose their hegemony. We must denounce and stop the charade of imperialist powers pretending to work for nonproliferation and nuclear security but are in fact expanding and upgrading their nuclear arsenals. It is morally just for us to call for complete and immediate nuclear disarmament and demand that the imperialist powers take the lead and provide the example for destroying their stockpiles of nuclear bombs and other radioactive weapons. If the imperialists refuse as expected, the people must find ways and means of rendering such weapons impotent.

What remains in the hands of the people against the threat of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism by the imperialist powers is the potential to turn imperialist war into revolutionary civil war, to encircle and take control of the nuclear weapons in their respective countries, and to establish or reestablish socialist societies. In the very countries where they are kept, nuclear weapons can be rendered impotent by the successful revolutionary movement of the people.##