Imperialists Threaten Sanctions After Nuclear Test

Defend North Korea!

OCTOBER 9—North Korea declared today that it had successfully conducted an underground nuclear test, providing a significant deterrent against military aggression by U.S. imperialism. Predictably, the U.S. and Japan responded by whipping up hysteria over the North Korean “threat.” Washington called for UN sanctions against Pyongyang, ultimately backed up by the threat of military attack. These renewed threats underline the duty of revolutionaries to stand for the unconditional military defense of the North Korean deformed workers state against imperialism.

Despite the rule of a nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, the overthrow of capitalism in North Korea—as in China, Cuba and Vietnam—was a historic defeat for imperialism and a victory for the working people of the world. Though the U.S. rulers howl menacingly over weapons of mass destruction in the hands of “rogue states,” it was the U.S. imperialists, under the auspices of the UN, who devastated the Korean peninsula in the 1950-53 Korean War, killing more than three million people. The U.S. is the only power ever to use atomic weaponry, incinerating some 200,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Had the Soviet Union not developed a nuclear arsenal capable of deterring U.S. imperialism, Korea, China and Vietnam might well today be irradiated rubble. The international working class must support the deformed workers states’ possessing and testing nuclear weapons as a means of defense against imperialist blackmail.

Criminally, the Chinese Stalinist regime joined the imperialist-led uproar. On October 8, China joined imperialist Japan in a common declaration that such a test “cannot be tolerated.” When North Korean officials informed their Chinese counterparts that the nuclear test was minutes away, Beijing rushed to give Washington the heads-up. Beijing has long sought to pressure Pyongyang to return to the “six-party talks,” whose aim is to disarm North Korea.

The Stalinists’ illusion that there can be “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism only undermines the defense of the deformed workers states, including China itself, which, after the destruction of the Soviet Union, is the imperialists’ prime target in the drive to “roll back Communism.” This underlines the necessity of proletarian political revolution to oust the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies. Beijing: Stop your craven appeasement of the imperialist drive against North Korea!