Workers Socialist League

Socialist Press, Trotskyism Today and the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, 1975–1984

Kremlin must open NATO's books

Socialist Press no. 80, 21 December 1977 · scan pp. 2–3 · about 420 words

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Last week it was revealed that East German agents in the West German Defence Ministry had discovered the detailed location of all NATO's top-secret atomic missile sites in Western Europe.

Secrets lost

The NATO alliance has apparently lost every major military secret.

A NATO official is quoted as saying:

"The seriousness of the situation has yet to be fully realised but there can be little doubt that the disclosures are far more detailed and dangerous than anything Kim Philby took to MOscow.

The scandal is two-fold: first, the major espionage coup of the East Germans; second the leak from West German government sources of the information about the extent of the coup. its secrets but all the knows it has lost them!

The West German Defence Minister and some officials of his department have already been suspended from duty.

The Christian Democratic opposition is demanding the resignation of other Social Democratic government chiefs.

But the government is trying to claim credit. for unmasking the spies who were appointed to their posts during the last Christian Democratic government.

Major consequences

The events could, therefore, have major consequences for the stability of the West German coalition government as well as for the NATO alliance.

Socialist Press welcomes any event such as this which weakens the reactionary antiCommunist NATO alliance. Secrets gone-Schmidt and Soviet bureaucracies were concerned with strengthening the working class movement on a world scale instead of carving up the world between themselves and the imperialists, they would publish the NATO secrets for all the wages).

The workers are now demanding the nationalisation of the firm by the state holding company, INI. It should remain, say the workers' representatives, "under workers" control"

Despite the great material hardship involved, the action of the Babcock workers has been extremely solid. Only three workers out of 5,000 voted against the series of actions which culminated in the one-day general strike.

Sabotage

But the struggle of the Babcock workers is threatened with sabotage by the union's bureaucrats from the Socialist Party, Communist Party and Basque Nationalist Party.

Nonetheless the working class of Viscaye is responding to the calls of the Babcock workers. The Babcock struggle is increasingly being seen as a model by the thousands of other workers threatened with redundancy.

Unemployment in the province (the most industrialised in Spain) has tripled in a year. And there are now in the province 600 firms 'in crisis", , trying to dispose of a

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ITALIST PRESS Wedaesder 21 Decemba. 1977 Rx 3

← Contents of Socialist Press no. 80, 21 December 1977