Disarmament vs Armament

Over the course of history, the technological development of armaments has led to an ever-increasing gap between the armaments needed to maintain the internal culture of war and those needed to wage international war and protect the expansion of imperialism. The internal culture of war depends, as always, on the loyalty of large numbers of lightly-armed soldiers and police. For international war, soldiers become obsolete as emphasis is put on increasingly complex systems of unmanned drone aircraft, missiles and satellite reconnaissance.

As a result, international war and imperialism have come to endanger the very survival of humanity. By the end of the Cold War, the US and the USSR were each ready to destroy the world in a nuclear attack at the press of a button with only a few minutes notice. One would have hoped that this would have been reversed with the end of the Cold War, but most of the weapons systems remain in place. The US, for example, continues to build and maintain nuclear-armed, nuclear powered submarines that patrol the oceans of the earth with capacity to destroy all human civilization.

Capitalism and imperialism continue to be caught up in the production of armaments as described by Lenin almost a century ago, and Engels even earlier. The military-industrial complex profits enormously from the armaments industry. In the US, for example, the arms industry is able to buy off the Congress to the extent that one should speak about the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex. Congressional support is bought not only by direct contributions to political campaigns, but also by the belief that military industry provides jobs in the face of chronic capitalist unemployment. For this reason, opponents of the Military-Industrial Complex are challenged to provide conversion plans that retool defense industry to produce civilian products without loss of jobs.

At the same time, imperialism has become increasingly unstable, as described vividly by Mao Tse-Tung and Fidel Castro, among others. Recently, the "guru" of peace research, Johan Galtung has predicted the collapse of the American empire around the year 2020.

There is a race against time. Which will come first, the collapse of the American empire or a global nuclear holocaust at the hands of the American nuclear arsenal? Or is there a chance for nuclear disarmament?

From the 1950's on, nuclear disarmament was put on the agenda of the United Nations by the socialist and third-world countries. For example, the plan proposed in 1961 and initially agreed to by the United States would have achieved comprehensive nuclear disarmament. The United States, as it had done previously, backed out of the agreement. The United States preferred to continue the arms race in the hopes that it would bankrupt the Soviet Union, a policy that eventually succeeded when the Soviet economy collapsed.

The collapse of the Soviet Union provides an important lesson for revolutionary countries. Socialism cannot hope to compete with capitalism and imperialism by investing in a socialist culture of war, but can only succeed by developing a socialist culture of peace.

Once a socialist culture of peace has triumphed on a world scale, it will be possible to ensure peace and security through a rejuvenated United Nations. As Che Guevara said, addressing the UN General Assembly in 1964: "We repeat what our President said in Cairo, and which later took shape in the Declaration of the Second Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries: that there cannot be peaceful coexistence only among the powerful if we are to ensure world peace. Peaceful coexistence must be practiced by all states, independent of size, of the previous historic relations that linked them, and of the problems that may arise among some of them at a given moment."

Keeping in mind the dialectical principle that "the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon," any action for international disarmament contributes to the overall struggle of the culture of peace versus the culture of war.

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