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From International Socialism (1st series), No.59, June 1973, pp.4-5.
Transcribed & marked up by by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The current French nuclear tests at Mururoa atoll involve the detonation of the first French H-bomb. With these obscene, atmospheric poisoning tests, the rulers of France hope to join those of the USA, the USSR, China and Britain in possession of the ultimate means of indiscriminate mass destruction. Their success will make the world that much less safe for everyone.
However the French H-bomb, like the atomic bombs and missile heads they have been accumulating, is a negligible quantity compared to the stockpiles of the two super-powers. Just over a year ago the much heralded SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) agreement between the USA and the USSR put limits on the number of strategic delivery vehicles, the big rockets, that each side could deploy and also upon the number of ABMs (anti-ballistic missiles). No limits were placed on the number of war-heads.
The agreement has affected the form of the nuclear arms race. It has not stopped it. On the contrary it may even have speeded it up. The USA has maintained its enormous lead in the deployment of multiple, independently targeted war-heads (MIRVs). It has increased the number of its thermo-nuclear warheads, operationally deployed, by a staggering one-fifth (19.5 per cent) in a single year – from 5,890 to 7,040 – according to the Sipri Yearbook 1973 produced by the Stockholm International Peace Institute. The Polaris submarine missile, still the mainstay of the British mass slaughter machine, is obsolescent in the US Navy and is rapidly being phased out and replaced by the MIRVed Poseidon. The Russian contribution to the growth of the means of mass destruction is more modest, a ‘mere’ 4 per cent increase in the last year, from 2,170 operationally deployed thermo-nuclear war-heads to 2,260.
These rates of increase would, if maintained, lead to the combined deployment by the USA and the USSR of some 20,000 nuclear war-heads by 1977, enough to destroy all the world’s large cities 20 times over. And, of course, these figures refer only to thermo-nuclear strategic weapons. Tactical nuclear weapons, of which a large but unknown quantity exists, are excluded and subject to no limitation. The insane logic of competition in the mass production of the means of mass destruction ensures that they too are steadily multiplying. The US arms industry is currently engaged in major research projects – state-financed of course – to make possible the large scale production of ‘miniaturised’ nuclear warheads for tactical weapons. No doubt their Russian competitors will follow suit, technology and resources permitting, if they have not already done so. And research and development for the production of improved ABMs continues on both sides. The precarious ‘stability’ of the balance of nuclear terror is precarious indeed.
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