US President Obama took the lead, telling students at Hankuk University that the summit’s deliberations on “nuclear terrorism” were part of “our vision of a world without nuclear weapons.” Under his presidency, he declared, the US had signed a new START treaty with Russia to reduce nuclear warheads, committed itself to not developing new warheads, and “narrowed the range of contingencies under which we would ever use or threaten to use nuclear weapons.”
No one should be fooled by this high-blown rhetoric. The ruling classes have always prepared for war under the banner of peace. The slogan of “disarmament” is the means not only for duping working people, but of ensuring military advantage over any rivals, both immediate and potential.
As Obama admitted, even if the START treaty is fully implemented, the US will have a massive nuclear arsenal—more than 1,500 deployed nuclear weapons and around 5,000 warheads—that can obliterate any potential rival or alliance of rivals. As for “narrowing the range of contingencies”, the US has never renounced a first nuclear strike—that is, the “right” to use nuclear weapons in a pre-emptive war of aggression.
While it is not upgrading American nuclear warheads, the Obama administration is committed to spending at least $600 billion over the next decade to modernise weapons production facilities and delivery systems. These include a new generation of land-based ballistic missiles, a new fleet of nuclear-armed submarines and 100 new strategic bombers.
What is under way is not nuclear disarmament, but an arms race. The key index of this new build up is not the absolute number of nuclear warheads, but the sophistication of the delivery systems and their ability to evade detection and defensive measures. Moreover, while limiting the number of “deployed nuclear warheads,” the US retains the ability to rapidly construct tens of thousands of new ones from its huge stockpile of 400 tonnes of highly enriched uranium.
Under the guise of “disarmament”, the US is determined to maintain its absolute nuclear supremacy. The real purpose of the South Korean summit was to bar access to fissile material and thus nuclear weapons to countries that do not already have nuclear weapons. In that way, the US does not have to take a potentially nuclear-armed foe into account as it wages new wars of aggression.
Obama, the evangelist of nuclear disarmament and world peace, also used the opportunity in Seoul to renew his threats against Iran and North Korea. At Hankuk University, he ominously warned Tehran that “time was short” to reach a “diplomatic resolution” to the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program. Having imposed what amounts to an economic blockade on Iran, the US and its European allies are demanding that Tehran dismantle facilities and programs developed legitimately under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).
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