THE US told the world on Monday that it has 5,113 nuclear war heads operationally deployed.
This arsenal is supplemented by the warheads possessed by its allies France and the UK, plus the arsenal of its ‘strategic ally’ Israel which has a ‘secret’ stockpile of more than 200 nuclear bombs.
The US alone has more than enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the greater portion of the planet.
Both the US and its Israeli ‘mad dog’ are now threatening Iran, which does not have a single nuclear weapon, with the destruction of its nuclear plants and with it Iran’s infrastructure and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iranian citizens.
As the Iranian president pointed out in New York on Monday, the US threat has got to be taken seriously since it is the only state that has used nuclear weapons on human beings. In 1945 it destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese people to demonstrate its power to the emperor of Japan and his military leaders.
The US was the first country to acquire and use these weapons.
However, despite the emergence of the Cold War with Russia, it was forced to and was able to tolerate Russia and then China acquiring nuclear weapons, and then a host of other states, some of which it encouraged, including Pakistan and India, and its main tool in the Middle East, Israel, which is not even a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The US has even been able to negotiate with North Korea, which has the capacity to produce nuclear weapons, and long-range missiles, and which the US has demonised as a member of the ‘axis of evil’.
However, it has become a ‘strategic necessity’ that Iran cannot be allowed even to develop a nuclear industry for peaceful purposes, in this case for the generation of electricity.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday said that Iran’s nuclear programme put the world at risk and called on global nations to rally around US efforts to hold Tehran to account!
Clinton spoke to the meeting of the 189 signatories of the 1970 NPT just hours after Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmadinejad blasted the United States for threatening to use nuclear arms.
Addressing the UN NPT Review Conference on May 3rd, the Iranian president made it clear that Iran did not have any intention of making a nuclear bomb.
He said: ‘Having nuclear bombs is not an honour. It is even disgraceful. Even more shameful is to threaten to use it.
‘This is not comparable with any historical crime. Those who carried out the first nuclear bombing are the most hated individuals in history. . .’
Ahmadinejad continued to say of the imperialist powers, that it is ‘illogical’ to expect them ‘to take voluntary and effective disarmament and non-proliferation measures.
‘This is because they believe that their nuclear weapons are means for their superiority. An Iranian proverb says that a knife would not cut its handle. It is illogical to expect the biggest sellers of weapons in the world to restore security.’
In fact, the US is using the question of the danger of nuclear weapons, which it possesses in abundance, to try and hold back the industrial, technical, and scientific development of Iran, in order to keep it in a state of relative backwardness, because Iran is seen as a major obstacle to the US grabbing the oil and gas resources of the Middle East, the Gulf, and central Asia, the most strategic area of the planet for imperialism.
This is why the US has marked out the Iranian Islamic Republic for destruction.
Workers in the West must defend the right of the Iranian people to develop all branches of science and technology without being threatened with a nuclear attack.
The Iranian leader is right about the nature of imperialism, it will not disarm itself. It will have to be disarmed by the working people of the world in the course of smashing capitalism and imperialism.
