UNAC Alert!  No to Trump’s Threat of Nuclear War on North Korea!

Today’s more overt U.S. imperial warmonger-in-chief, President Donald Trump, threatened North Korea on August 8 with an apocalyptic nuclear “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” 

Within hours, Trump’s imperial threats from his Bedminster, N.J. golf course was backed to the hilt by Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson and Trump’s national security adviser Gen. H. R. McMaster. Both held open the “nuclear option” if the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK/North Korea) refused to terminate its deterrent intercontinental missile and nuclear weapons program. The DPRK has every reason to believe that Trump’s threat to order a pre-emptive military strike is real.

Need we recall that Trump, the candidate, scored President Obama for not bombing Syria to smithereens when Syria was alleged to have crossed Obama’s “red line” with regard to sarin gas? Trump, the president, followed through with his own “red line” pledge to bomb Syria, while 46 of the 47 major U.S. newspapers editorialized in support. Again, no proof was offered to confirm Trump’s sarin gas allegations.

In April, again with hyper warmongering bravado, Trump proclaimed,  “We are sending an armada [to North Korea]. Very powerful. We have submarines. Very powerful, far more powerful than the [USS Carl Vinson] aircraft carrier. That I can tell you.” This was no idle boast. The U.S. Ohio-class Trident submarine is capable of launching 192 nuclear warheads able to simultaneously obliterate/incinerate scores of cities.

Similarly, the U.S. military’s use of its Massive Ordinance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB, nicknamed “Mother of all Bombs”) in Afghanistan was yet another signal that this most powerful U.S. non-nuclear weapon of mass destruction, capable of obliterating everything within a one-mile diameter, was aimed more at intimidating North Korea, if not China and Syria, than it was to destroy underground ISIS tunnels. Indeed, the MOAB was never designed for tunnel destruction.

In recent months, the Trump administration turned its attention to China, demanding that it either pressure the DPRK to cease its missile test or face dire economic consequences as well as another round of unilateral and massive U.S./South Korean coordinated military maneuvers off China’s coastal waters.

Last week’s unanimous United Nations Security Council sanctions against the DPRK reflected this pressure. The unprecedented sanctions are aimed at crippling North Korea’s economy, with its traditional trading partners now banned from purchasing mineral resources and seafood commodities that amount to one-third of its total GDP output. Such sanctions are nothing less than a U.S.-imposed and UN-approved act of war against the North Korean people.

Make no mistake, the demonization of North Korean President Kim Jon-un, as with U.S. imperialism’s demonization of the presidents of Iraq, Libya and Syria, coupled with the invention of various pretexts to justify war and invasion, cannot be dismissed as the idle bluster of a rouge racist, sexist and warmongering president.

Trump is not the first U.S. president to threaten North Korea with nuclear war. Presidents Obama, Clinton and others before them have done the same, albeit with more “diplomatic” or “presidential” language employed to cast a veneer of civility or rationality over U.S. foreign policy as compared to the crude imagery that would-be strongman Trump believes is a requirement when U.S. imperial interests are at stake. And U.S. long-term imperial interests in North Korea, as with Iraq and Libya, are real, with estimates of its vast and largely untapped natural resource and mineral wealth in the range of  $6 to $10 trillion according to the June 29, 2017 Business Insider. (See http://www.businessinsider.com/north-korea-stockpile-minerals-worth-trillions-2017-6?international=true&r=US&IR=T).

Trump, and Obama before him, preside over an unprecedented militarized state, with as many as 1,000 foreign military bases. The U.S. is engaged in simultaneous wars in seven nations as well as covert wars, sanction wars, secret “special operation” wars, and drone wars.

President Obama approved one $trillion to update, over a period of 30 years, the U.S. nuclear weapons program, which already boasts 5,000 nuclear warheads. The annual U.S. war budget exceeds the combined military expenditures of most of the rest of the world.

Today’s Hydrogen or H-bombs have a destructive power that exceeds by a factor of 5,000 the atomic bombs that were exploded by the U.S. over Hiroshima and Nagasaki 72 years ago, almost to the day. Scientists at that time warned that just 10 such bombs, hypothetically launched by the USSR in key urban areas across the U.S., would obliterate the majority of the population, not to mention bring on a life-destroying multiple hundred-years “nuclear winter,” while reducing the country to an uninhabitable radioactive nightmare.

Yet this insanity is today routinely contemplated by U.S. imperialism’s chief representatives, whether they be Bill Clinton, Barack Obama or today, Donald Trump – none of whom have declared that the use of these doomsday weapons is unthinkable.

Indeed, U.S. President Harry Truman, a “civilized” president from middle class lineage, authorized the dropping of the two A-bombs, nick-named “little boy” and “fat man,” on Japan in 1945. 250,000 people, almost all civilians, were incinerated.

What is left out of today’s U.S. warmongering hyperbole is the colonial history of Korea itself, including the U.S. post-WWII occupation where the vast majority of people in what became North and South Korea, opposed the U.S. occupier’s slaughter of the social forces allied with the Korean Communist Party/Workers Party of Korea, who allied with the Soviet Union to defeat the Japanese occupation.

During the Korean war, the U.S. and its allies may have killed as many as one-third of the Korean population and destroyed the bulk of the buildings in the country. 

Today, the US maintains a force of tens of thousands of troops in South Korea; it has installed Thaad missiles and conducts joint nuclear-armed military exercises in the region twice a year.  The DPRK justly sees these as practice for a U.S. invasion.   

As in Vietnam, where the ten-year U.S. war cost the lives of four million Vietnamese, the U.S. is today threatening yet another genocidal war, this time against North Korea, a nation that has never invaded another country. The United National Antiwar Coalition stands opposed to all U.S. wars and threats of war.

We call upon all peace and social justice groups to organize emergency actions against the U.S. war drive.  Please see a list of actions being organized and add your own action by going here: http://nepajac.org/koreaevents.htm.

UNAC demands:

U.S. Hands Off North Korea!

The Immediate and Total Nuclear Disarmament of the U.S. War Machine as a Prelude to the Abolition of All Nuclear Weapons!

No to U.S. Military Exercises Against North Korea and China!

No to the U.S. Military “Pivot to Asia”!

Remove THAAD Missiles and U.S. Bases from So. Korea!