Nuclear Weapons:
If You Want Peace, Prepare for Revolution

Jan 31, 2022

Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.

“We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” That is the first line of the joint statement signed January 3 by the five permanent member countries on the United Nations Security Council: the U.S., China, Russia, the United Kingdom, and France.

As a conference to re-assess the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons approaches, the leaders of the five great powers are far from being inspired by pacifism. They wanted to reaffirm their desire to continue to hold their monopoly over these kinds of weapons, or at least their control over them.

It doesn’t have to be proven anymore that nuclear war is a threat to the survival of humanity. It’s not very reassuring that the leaders of the states capable of triggering nuclear war are aware of the threat. The only times the atomic weapon was used, in August 1945 against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, the U.S. leadership decided to use the bomb with full knowledge of the devastation it would cause.

But the leaders of the imperialist world do not control the mechanisms which will likely lead to more widespread and generalized conflicts, no more than they actually control the capitalist economy and its crises. After all, military conflicts are based on the economic war for markets and zones of influence. As for choosing what weapons to use in future wars, we can be sure that humanitarian considerations won’t matter.

Preparing for revolution and the overthrow of capitalism is the only way to take action to preserve humanity from a nuclear conclusion.