Reagan's phony peace" offensive

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HUNDREDS of thousands may have been marching in Britain and all over the world against the nuclear arms race during the holiday period — but Ronald Reagan is convinced that his latest "arms reduction' proposals are a winner.

• Seeming to concede a little to the anxieties of NATO governments hard-pressed by peace campaigners and to the alarm of millions of ordinary men an woman, lean ama to replace his discredited so-called 'Zero Option'.

His proposals came in the midst of a new wave of Cold War hysteria, involving once again allegations of a 'Soviet build-ap' in Cuba and the Caribbean, phony figures suggesting that the USSR has a nuclear superiority over the USA - and a spate of expulsions of Soviet diplomats in Britain and France.

First came the 'big stick' the much-publicised 'Star Wars' scheme for space-based laser systems to protect the USA against nuclear missiles.

Then Reagan unveiled the arrangement to 'balance' the number of warheads held by the USA and the USSR in Europe.

He claimed total backing of Western European governments for this scheme - which received the predictable rejection from the USSR, and thus enabled the USA to score a rare propaganda victory on the missiles issue.

Of course the reality of the American proposal is very different from a 'peace' plan. It is clearly a part of the overall drive towards unquestioned military superiority for the Pentagon and, if the laser gun scheme ever takes shape in reality, a plan which could leave the USA in a position to mount a 'first strike' on the Soviet Union.

Left out of Reagan's "balance' in Europe are the other missiles and warheads under NATO control - those of Britain and France. Left out are the 240 nuclear capable ‹US aircraft based on carriers in European waters; left out are the land-based US aircraft equipped with nuclear weapons in Europe; and the scheme, while posing as a plan for European arms reduction, insists on a limitation on Soviet missiles in the Asian as węll as the European part of the USSR.

Meanwhile on a global scale the USA is embarked on a major build-up of nuclear weaponry. Reagan has ordered three times as many Pershing missiles as are planned for bases in Europe: others will be sited in the far west of the USA, targeted on the Soviet East. Cruise missiles will not only be housed at Greenham Common: others will be based in the apartheid state of South Africa.

The island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean is to be expanded as a nuclear base. And US bases in Japan and Korea hold nuclear weapons. At home, Reagan still hopes to build the giant MX missile system, each missile carrying 10 warheads.

We are opposed to nuclear weapons: but we are not neutral in the face of this military buildup by American imperialism. As socialists, we defend the Soviet Union, and the countries of Eastern Europe, Asia and Cuba where capitalism has been overthrown, against imperialist attack.

Our method of struggle is not nuclear war but class war -supporting and mobilising the struggles of workers and peasants against imperialism. Such a method is consistently opposed by the Stalinist rulers of the USSR and the deformed workers states — whose reactionary polities flow from their defence of their own power and privilege within the nationalised economies.

But so long as imperialism menaces the workers of the world with nuclear weapons, there is no serious option for the Soviet leadership but to defend itself against this threat. While we fight for the political overthrow of the Kremlin leaders and their hangers-on, this is a task for the working class, not the imperialists - least of all by nuclear war.

Even now Reagan is attempting to undermine and reverse one major revolutionary gain of the recent period - and oust the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

A restoration of imperialist military superiority would encourage such intervention on a world scale and heighten the danger of a confrontation between imperialism and the Soviet Union.

All this means that the prime target of the campaign against nuclear weapons must be the imperialist governments of the NATO alliance - primarily those of Britain and the USA.

Action must be taken, politically, economically, and industrially to paralyse the war drive and build a movement capable of defeating the warmongering governments of the capitalist class.

In Britain this means building massive support for the one-day strike called by the Greenham Common women for May 24. And it means that the growing CND movement must recognise the political tasks ahead - and throw its weight in with those socialists fighting for a Labour victory in the coming election and for that Labour government to be compelled to carry out conference policies of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

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