Stop Imperialist War Defend the Soviet

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The Potsdam conference: Truman and Stalin- with Labourit The overwhelming support within the workers' movement for a policy of unilateral disarmament and the growing hostility to the imperialist NATO alliance was reflected vividly in the speeches and votes of delegates at the last Labour Party conference.

A massive demonstration is expected on Saturday 26 October on a march called by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament against the new arms race.

The Tories are of course stepping up arms spending-with the decision to purchase four nuclear-armed Trident submarines from the US at a cost of over £5 billion.

But the frantic pace of the imperialist war-drive is being firmly set by the American New US-controlled Cruise and Pershing missiles, targeted on the Soviet Union and East European workers' states are to be installed in European NATO countries in the next three years, dramatically increasing the 2-1 numerical superiority in Europe-based "tactical" nuclear warheads which NATO already enjoys over the forces of the Warsaw Pact.

MX system In addition, the Us is planning over the next seven years to bring into service 3,400 more new Cruise missiles launched not from ground units but from B52 bombers-at a cost of $4 billion.

Within the USA itself, Carter has given the go-ahead to the entirely new $100 billion MX missle system, which will monopolise 22,000 square miles of desert land in the states of Nevada and Utah, _and-they hope-provide the US imperialists with the awsome possibility of mounting a "first strike" against targets in the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile the budget allocated by Carter to military research, development, test and evaluation' of new weaponry is • staggering $16.5 billion for 1981.

The $1.5 billion allotted to the MX missile alone is more than the entire research and development budgets for the US Deparments of Labour, Education and Transportation together with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Drug Administration and the Centre for Disease Control!

The objective of the imperialists in such colossal expenditure is not "Defence" in any conventional sense of the word.

Offensive

They are seeking to achieve sufficient military superiority over the Soviet Union and the workers' states to ensure imperialist control of the colonial and semi-colonial countries.

The bulk of the weaponry now being installed by the US imperialists is in fact offensive in nature. The Cruise and Pershing missiles stationed in Europe are designed not for the "defence" of Europe (which would be largely obliterated in the event of a nuclear conflict in which such "theatre" COI "tactical" nuclear weapons were used) but defence of the USA itself.

Indeed alongside the deploy.

ment of new weapons has come the emergence in the last few years of a new US military In place of the "deterrent" ideas embodied in the old philosophy of 'Mutual Assured Destruction" (MAD) has come a "flexible"

nuclear war between the USA and its subservient NATO allies on the one hand and the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations on the other.

In the summer of 1980 effect to this shift by altering US nuclear targeting strategy.

More and more of the US nuclear arsenal will henceforth be aimed at specific Soviet military rather than economic targets-supposedly to allow the US President of the day (Reagan?!) to threaten selective and limited military action against the USSR short of all-out annihilation.

A key role in this new turn is played by the US weapons to be stationed in Europe.

But far from this increasing the "security" of European nations against the cynical imperialist spectre of a "Soviet invasion" , the siting of such medium range weapons merely guarantees that in any military confrontation that were to erupt, the Soviet military authorities would have no choice but to launch their own missiles against European targets.

And while the American imperialists argue that a "flexible" approach to the use of nuclear weapons eliminates some of the fears of Mutual Assured Destruction, it must make a "limited" nuclear war more thinkable, and thus more likely to occur.

Indeed in Europe itself NATO is engaged at the command of its US chiefs, in "hardening" airfields and other military facilities against nuclear attack, and developing communications systems that would not be blacked out by nuclear explosions. They are preparing La war which imperialist military chiefs increasingly feel Ernest Bevin back left to be a distinct possibility.

As much as four years ago US Defence Secretary James Schlesing er pointed out that:

"We continue to deploy our own theatre nuclear forces in both Europe and Asia. In the case of Europe, we have three basic reasons for our deployments.

First the maintenance of theatre nuclear capabilities in NATO is essential to deterrence. as long as the Warsaw Pact deploys theatre nuclear forces of its own. They help to deter the use of nuclear weapons by the Pact and, along with our strategic nudear and conventional forces, provide a general deterrent across the entire spectrum of possible aggression.

Second, should deterrence fail, our theatre nuclear capabilities provide a source of limited and controlled options other than the early use of US and allied strategic forces.

Third, in keeping with NATO'S flexible responses strategy, we do not rule out the use of nuclear weapons by the United States and its allies if that should prove necessary to contain and repel a major conventional attack by the Warsaw Pact"

Defending USA

For the US imperialists, therefore, European-based weapons are a part of defending not Europe, but the USA, without the 'early use of US and allied strategic forces" . And US chiefs do not even rule out a use of nuclear weapons to stem a hypothetical conventional attack in Europe.

But in fact American plans dating back to at least 1962 go much further than this, and include detailed proposals for the use of nuclear bombs to eliminate resources in "allied" or neutral countries that might be of value if they fell into the hands of Soviet forces.

Far from defending Europe, US planes would under conditions of a real military conflict be flying literally thousands of sorties dropping nudear bombs on cities and civilian targets in the capitalist countries of Western Europe and the Middle East!

Even W. German Chancellor Schmidt, a vigorous defender of US imperialism's war plans for Europe, has admitted that:

«effective defence of Europe would only be possible for a short time or in geographically limited area-and it would lead rapidly to the destruction of Europe ... a war which, though regarded as a 'limited war' by the superpowers, would be no less than a war of annihilation for the countries of the battlefield"

"Theatre"

In fact the use of Europe as an arena for a long-range confrontation between the US imperialists and the Stalinist bureaucracy • in the Soviet Union dates back to the Cold War period of 1948, when the USA first stationed strategic nuclear bombers in Britain.

In the mid-1950s, NATO, under US command, began to deploy "theatre" nuclear weapons in Europe. From then until now NATO has had a numerical and generally a technical superiority over the forces of the Warsaw Pact.

The Soviet bureaucracy responded to this naked threat by, developing its own "theatre"

nuclear weapons alongside its development of strategic long-range missiles and bombers.

Since the early 1960s the USSR has had long-range missiles aimed at Western European targets.

The triple-warhead Soviet SS20 missiles (so frequently referred to by the imperialist warmongers as a "new" threat requiring the introduction of Cruise and • Pershing 2 by P•P0..000000 NAT O) are simply more modern and mobile than their predecesSOIS.

They are deployed not only against Europe in the West but against China in the East.

The difference is that while the SS20-with a maximum range of 4,000 miles-cannot hit targets in the USA, the new US Europe-based weapons are to be aimed at targets within the USSR, and thus constitute a major new threat to the deformed workers' states.

The fact is that while the imperialist powers have sought since the very first days of the Russian Revolution in 1917 to find ways of reversing the historic gains of that Revolution and restoring capitalist exploitation in the world's first workers' state, the Soviet bureaucracy that has emerged since the mid 1920s has attempted above all else to achieve "peaceful coexistence" with the Pursuing Stalin's utopiar nationalist dream of building "socialism in one country"_ albeit an economically backward country encircled by hostile and reactionary regimes -the Kremlin bureaucracy has time and again proved itself more than willing to sacrifice the interests and sabotage the revolutionary struggle of the working class. in the hopes of currying favours with the imperialists.

Alliances

In the wake of Hitler's victory over the German working class in 1933-a victory facilitated by the criminally sectarian policies of the mass German Communist Party under Stalin's directions-the Kremlin leaders increasingly sought Lab S: 0 10/02 0 ạ mg 40 S7 300 SG STOP S: 32 % 0g external stability in alliances with "democratic" imperialist regimes-especially French imperialism.

This produced a search for respectability which from 1934 onwards took the form of "Popular Front" alliances between the European CPs and "democratic" bourgeois parties.

This policy led to the sabotage by the Stalinists of mass strikes and occupations in France, and, more significantly, the defeat of the Spanish revolution at the hands of Franco's fascist forces.

Having failed to establish by such manoeuvres a stable diplomatic foothold with European bourgeois governments,_Stalin took the logic of his Popular Front alliances with bourgeois parties a stage further-and in 1939 signed the notorious Stalin-Hitler Pact which supposedly secured the borders of the USSR against Nazi attack.

The folly of such methods of "defence" was demonstrated vividly in 1941 when Hitler unilaterally tore up the Pact and commenced the invasion of the Soviet Union!

The Red Army-deprived of its best leaders by Stalin's purges and completely unprepared for action was caught unawares.

Only after major setbacks and huge material and human losses was the invasion eventually turned back, the Nazi armies routed, and the Red Army able to drive the German imperialists out of not only the Soviet Union but a whole ring of Eastern European countries, reaching as far as Berlin.

Even then Stalin's main preoccupation in the discussions and deals with the imperialists in the final years of the war was not to carry Soviet influence further into Europe, but to re¡NOINr

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