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.
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/
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!