Workers' Liberty

H-Bombs are not weapons of ‘defence’. They are weapons of mass murder, of the threat of mass murder. If they are used it will not be in defence but in murderous ‘retaliation’ against cities and those who live in them - against the civilian population. Their effectiveness rests entirely on that threat.
Therefore, no socialist can support nuclear weapons, or back the threat of their use, and, still less, support their use. The drive by the Iranian regime to acquire nuclear weapons is a drive to achieve the power to inflict mass murder.
Any socialist who wants them to acquire that power abandons the ground of socialism entirely and becomes a native or vicarious Iranian or Islamic chauvinist.
The idea that Iran’s right to have nuclear weapons is an inalienable part of their right to self-determination, is a reducto ad absurdum of the idea elf-determination. Do we want every “truly independent” country to have nuclear weapons?
The more countries that have nuclear weapons, the greater the likelihood of nuclear weapons being used.
In the Iran/Iraq regional imperialist war of 1980-1989, these two powers fought a Middle Eastern equivalent of Europe’s 1914-1918 war. Like the European war, it was a war of attrition in which vast numbers of soldiers were slaughtered. If either Iran or Iraq, or both of them, had nuclear weapons, that might have acted as a deterrent? But atomic weapons might also have been used (as poison gas was by Iraq for example).
The proliferation of nuclear weapons poses a threat to the very future of humankind. All socialists must oppose such weapons.
Israel should certainly not have nuclear weapons. But nobody on the left is going to argue that they should. There are a lot of people who argue explicitly or implicitly that Iran should have nuclear weapons, or has a right to nuclear weapons, a right to defend itself “by any means possible”.
The argument that Israel has nuclear weapons and therefore, in “fairness” ,so should the Arab states and Islamic powers like Iran is also a reducto ad absurdum. It is an argument for the establishment in the region of a “nuclear balance of terror”, such as that which existed between the USA and Russia for half a Century.
As it happened, there was no nuclear war. But on a number of occasions we came close to a world destroying war. The best known of the near-war occasions is the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
No sane socialist can want Iranian nuclear bombs. That would be true whatever the character of the Iranian regime, but it is especially true given the Islamic fundamentalist nature of the regime that has ruled in Iran for thirty years. It is a crazily religious clerical fascist regime: its leaders are concerned more with their imaginary supernatural world than with this.
It is not inconceivable that some of those at the heart of the Iranian state power might come to think of a nuclear annihilation in the way that individual homicide bombers think of their own destruction in an explosion they themselves trigger - as a glorious and sure way to reach martyrdom and the martyrs special place in Paradise.
It is not inconceivable that a half-rational choice might be made by those who call for the destruction of Israel, and see that as gods will, that they might be willing to trade off the full destruction of tiny Israel for a sure nuclear retaliation against large Iran, that could not reek equivalent destruction there to what they would do to Israel.
The idea that Iran would behave with bourgeois rationality and according to its material best interests, and therefore would not conceivably use a nuclear bomb in an attack on Israel, displays a suicidally complacent ignorance of history.
The German bourgeoisie wanted to end the second world war from about 1943, while they could still negotiate a peace from relative strength, and thus avoid the enormous catastrophe of total defeat. They simply could not control the Nazis; or even assassinate Hitler, as was tried in July 1944.
The madman Hitler decided that the German people had let him down, were unworthy of him, and therefore deserved to perish. He would fight to the last German. And there was no “bourgeois rationality” able to control him there, in the strongest bourgeois state in Europe.
Germany went down to utter defeat and ruin. Yet the German bourgeoisie were a far greater force in Germany than are the Iranian bourgeoisie in Iran; and it is highly unlikely that the Nazi ideology had roots as deep and strong in Germany as fanatical Islam has in Iran.
The idea that bourgeoisie rationality and self-interest would act to ensure that an Iranian H-bomb was not used to trigger Armageddon is not just vulgar Marxism, but plain vulgar ignorance.
What if - say in response to Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities - the clerical fascist regime set elements of Hamas or Hezbollah - or has already prepared them - to unleash a “dirty bomb” on Israel? That is far from inconceivable.
The advocates of an Iranian nuclear bomb would accept that as a legitimate example of self-defence, “by any means necessary” (to quote HOPI’s position)? If not, why not? If, as they insist, the Iranian mullah’s regime is entitled to have nuclear weapons — why not?
No, an Iranian nuclear bomb should be opposed by all socialists - if they are socialists, and not vicarious Iranian or Islamic chauvinists.
Yet it isn’t opposed. The case in point here is the Weekly Worker Group (CPGB) and HOPI. The WWG front organisation, HOPI, has a statement of purpose that includes: “The tasks of the anti-war movement in Britain and HOPI is threefold. One to fight against any imperialist attack on Iran and support the Iranian peoples right to defend themselves by any means necessary” .
Later, the same statement reads: “Opposition to Israeli, British and American nuclear weapons. For a Middle East free of nuclear weapons as a step towards world-wide nuclear disarmament”.
Their talk of the Iranian people here is just weaselling. The Iranian people do not have power, the clerical fascist regime does. (People don’t hold power, comrades, classes do; political formations do!).
“By any means necessary” in the current political context, plainly means by nuclear weapons if that is their choice.
By talking about the “Iranian people”, HOPI and the WWG disguise their political capitulation to the clerical fascist regime. Would they care to explicitly justify their position in favour of an Iranian nuclear bomb?
Weaselling support for an Iranian nuclear bomb is also blatant and shameless in the following formulation:
“Opposition to Israeli, British and American nuclear weapons. For a Middle East free of nuclear weapons as a step towards world-wide nuclear disarmament”.
That’s a statement about Israel’s bomb; it’s a smart ass way of deflecting the burning, immediate question of the acquirement of nuclear weapons by the Iranian regime onto a general project for a nuclear free Middle East. The implication is that, meanwhile, until there is a nuclear free zone, it is not at all unreasonable for Iran, which they say should defend itself “by any means necessary”, to want to have nuclear weapons.
WWG are here straightforward Iranian defencists - all the way to defencists chanting, “by any means necessary” and “defence” by way of the development of nuclear weapons.

What the WWG do with their weaselling formulas, whose meaning is all too clear if you think about it, is distort and pollute independent working class politics on these questions, by defending the clerical fascist regime which they equate with the “Iranian people”.
That definition is a radical departure from Marxism in any circumstances: when one remembers that the “Iranian peoples” includes the long oppressed Kurds, it is an obscenity!
In its politics here, WWG is only a less brave embodiment of the poor benighted Workers Power group, with its daft chants of ‘Victory to Iran’.
These things need to be discussed in the working class movement. We challenge those who make HOPI policy, the WWG (‘CPGB’) to debate us publicly on this question, at a time and place and with a chair acceptable to both sides.

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, PO BOX 823, London SE15 4NA