Saturday, February 09, 2019

The INF Treaty - What we said

There has been much in the media about the collapse of the INF treaty with both the USA and Russia withdrawing from it. Commentators warn of a new nuclear arms race. 

It is of interest of what the Socialist Standard wrote at the time of the signing of the INF agreement.

From the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard:

You could be forgiven for thinking that the INF agreement marked the dawning of a new age heralded by those two saintly peace-makers Reagan and Gorbachev. In fact the INF treaty is a paltry little agreement that at best will get rid of just 3-4 per cent of nuclear weapons on both sides — there will still be plenty more left to blow up the world several times over... it is an agreement whose main purpose must be seen as economic and political rather than the removal of the threat of nuclear annihilation...  the INF agreement does not even begin to tackle the real problem of nuclear weapons. Not only does it propose to scrap only a tiny proportion of the total nuclear stockpile but also it raises no questions at all about why we have nuclear weapons, or indeed any other kinds of weapons. In fact to the extent that arms treaties of this kind reinforce the position of political leaders (and hence the capitalist class which they represent) and present them as basically reasonable, benevolent people, then they could be said to also reinforce the capitalist system and all its attendant problems — including war.

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