Even a nuclear spat between Pakistan and India would mean billions dead.

Hiroshima. What one small nuclear bomb can do.

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

What f%#ked up world am I living in? I just read a headline that reads: "Latest News: If a Nuke Hit, US Wouldn't Be Ready"

Ready? All the readiness in the world cannot prepare us for the devastating affects of a nuclear confrontation between two major world powers. The "ready" means the few thousand unelected people who actually rule society. It is they that want to be ready.  A recent study pointed out that a nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan, two "minor" players when it comes to nuclear capabilities, would “trigger a global famine that would immediately kill 2 billion people around the world and spell the ‘end of human civilization’”

“With a large war between the United States and Russia, we are talking about the possible, not certain, but possible, extinction of the human race,” the International Business Times reported in 2013.   I accept this as real. There is no winner in a nuclear conflict, we all die and the possibility of the end of human life on this planet becomes a reality.

The reformists, no matter how honest and decent their motives, hope that capitalism will eliminate this threat, will place a ban or some sort of moratorium on the production of nuclear weapons but this is pure fantasy, utopian musings.

Ira Helfand, the author of the study is optimistic and thinks that a movement to ban nuclear weapons will gain traction. “This is a disaster so massive in scale that really no preparation is possible. We must prevent this,” he says.

But Helfand is wrong. He is wrong not because he is dishonest or stupid. He assumes that the global capitalist class led by the US and possibly China and Russia, will see the light and end this madness. But the opposite is the case. Capitalism is not a system of production that can change its spots no more than a tiger hunting game can.

Capitalism is a state of war. It is a competitive system that forces workers, sellers of labor power, to compete with each other in order to maximize profits for the purchasers of that labor power. It is the unpaid labor power of the worker that is the source of surplus value and the capitalist’s profit.

Helmand has a flaw, a flaw that people with great minds from Hawking to Assange all have. They do not see the working class as the force that can change society and they do not see an alternative to capitalism. They do not see that a democratic socialist society, a world federation of democratic socialist states and the end of capitalism as an economic system of production is the only way we will eliminate this threat.

The US capitalist class in particular is a most ruthless bunch. As Engels pointed out, one source of the violent, brutal nature of the US capitalist class is that when European capitalism invaded this landmass there was no existing organized ruling class. Unlike their English/European counterparts, the new US bourgeois did not have to wage a centuries old battle of ideas against a feudal aristocracy as their ancestors did; it didn't have to defend its ideas. For these transplants it was a matter of wiping out the tens of millions of native peoples and importing labor power, the poor of Europe and forcibly importing millions of African people as slaves forcing them to work for no pay for three hundred years or more. Asians labor also came in droves. Then it was a matter of building the infrastructure.
 The US capitalist class are a crude and ruthless ruling class.

I am confident that the working class can govern. I am confident that a democratic socialist society is not a utopian dream but can become a reality that offers humanity a future.

I am confident that the US and global capitalist class does not make all these nuclear weapons never to use them.