This IS a Regime That Could Destroy Civilization with Nukes—It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way

June 25, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

From a reader:

“A regime that could destroy civilization. You think you know... but you don’t” says the poster for the film of Bob Avakian’s talk THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America. A Better World IS Possible. Yet many people not only don’t know, but don’t want to know or outright deny this possibility. There is real contention over just how serious a threat does the Trump/Pence regime pose to all of humanity.

It IS hard to imagine and confront the worst-case scenario for the planet that a nuclear war could bring. But just because we don’t think about it, it doesn’t mean it won’t or can’t happen. Trump’s rants threatening to “unleash fire and fury like the world has never seen” (on North Korea, but clearly the warning was meant to be heard far beyond) must be taken seriously, even if the threats have simmered down for now. (See revcom.us analysis on why the situation is still volatile and dangerous.)

People should never forget (and they should learn, if they don’t know) that the U.S. is the first and ONLY country to actually drop nuclear bombs. Under Democrat President Harry Truman, the U.S. nuked two cities in Japan in August 1945, massacring 140,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians. (See Case #97 in revcom’s American Crime series.) Since then, the rulers of America’s global empire have used their ghastly weaponry to terrorize the whole world with nuclear brinksmanship and blackmail.

And NOW, the U.S. demand and drive for global domination has leaped to a whole new, dangerous level with the rise of a fascist regime to power, headed by a demented bully with his finger on the nuclear button. Trump has menacingly said, three times, “If we have nukes, why can’t we use them?” His regime is FULL of Christian fascists whose fanaticism includes yearning to see Armageddon so they can “rapture” (the end-times religious belief about when all Christians, living or dead, are supposed to rise to the sky and join Jesus). This regime has recently assembled a hard-core fascist war cabinet with Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and Gina Haspel.

As of January 2018, the U.S. military was waging war in 76 countries, or nearly 40 percent of the planet, much of it in Africa and the Middle East. As murderous and criminal as these “conventional” wars are, any conflict that involves a nuclear exchange—even a “limited” one—could quickly spiral out of control into a bigger unleashing of nukes involving different powers. Or, as in the case of the Korean Peninsula, U.S. military moves that begin as a conventional war have the real potential to leap to nuclear war, involving not just the U.S. and North Korea but China and others as well. Any such nuclear war would not only directly cause tens and hundreds of millions of deaths—it could interact with the environment and climate change to affect the planet and human civilization in ways that cannot be anticipated. One scientific study¹ noted that even a nuclear exchange limited to India and Pakistan would release unprecedented amounts of soot into the atmosphere and lead to climate change resulting in widespread crop failures and famine for years. One of the study’s authors said that with a larger nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, “we are talking about possible—not certain, but possible—extinction of the human race.”

What if the Trump/Pence regime feels that developments domestically or internationally are seriously threatening their fascist agenda, given all the unpredictable forces and factors in the world not under their total command and control? Couldn’t this be a pull for Trump et al. to, for example, quickly switch tracks on North Korea and manufacture some incident as a rationale to unleash “fire and fury”?

Nuclear conflicts could develop from errors and accidents too. In 2015, the U.S. deployed over 1,000 nukes or about 20 percent of its nuclear stockpile into the world’s waters onboard ballistic missile and attack submarines, aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and supply ships. Nukes brought along on naval exercises, spy missions, navigation demonstrations, and port visits are prone to accidents. Some of these nuked-up vessels have indeed collided, ran aground, caught fire, or sunk.

All this is not to say nuclear war is inevitable with Trump at the nuclear button. Yet the very real possibility of this horror should greatly heighten the urgency for millions to act in the broadest, deepest, and most determined ways to drive out the regime, through mass, sustained nonviolent protest.

But beyond that, there is no necessity for humanity to live with nuclear weapons at all. A horrible end to most or even all of humanity is not the only possibility that exists. It is possible to bring an end to the capitalist-imperialist system—with the aim of ending all class divisions and the relations of exploitation and oppression, and the ideas that enforce those relations. It would take an actual revolution to do this—to overthrow the system by defeating its forces of violent repression, at a time when millions have been won to the need for this revolution and the rulers of the system are in deep trouble.²

There exists today the profoundly challenging, visionary but realistic plan by Bob Avakian for a radically different society to replace capitalism-imperialism—the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America. Among the pathbreaking, liberating components of this Constitution is a part that says:

The New Socialist Republic in North America will not develop, and will not use, nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction. It will wage a determined and many-sided struggle to rid the world of all such weapons—and it will do this as part of the larger, overall struggle to defeat and dismantle all imperialist and reactionary states and forces and to advance toward the achievement of communism, throughout the world, which will finally make it possible for the desires and dreams of countless human beings throughout history, and the fundamental interests of humanity, for a world without war, to at long last be realized.

This Constitution is a great thing, including for all those agonizing and losing sleep over the nuclear mushroom cloud hanging over humanity. There IS a different world to fight for, where we no longer have to worry about our brothers and sisters anywhere being terrorized and blown to pieces by weapons of mass destruction. To get there, what’s needed now is for growing numbers of people to follow the revolutionary leadership of BA and the RCP he leads, joining the Revolution Club and taking up the strategy embodied in HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution. It is past time to GET ORGANIZED FOR THAT.

1. “Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk?”, November 2013, International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War and Physicians for Social Responsibility.  [back]

2. Some of the dynamics involved in how this could be done at such a time when circumstances have changed is addressed by the essay “On the Possibility of Revolution” and in several of Bob Avakian’s works, including Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles—But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon, Part 1 and Part 2; and BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!  [back]