FRFI 209 June / July 2009
On 25 May the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) conducted a nuclear weapons test, followed by three short range missile tests later the same day.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared the tests ‘erroneous, misguided and a danger to the world’. President Obama said the tests ‘pose a grave threat to the peace and security of the world’. Who is a threat to the security of the world? The US has 10,000 nuclear weapons and Britain has 200. The US has 737 overseas military bases. Britain has conducted 129 separate military interventions abroad since the end of the Second World War. Who threatened the peace and security of Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Serbia, where hundreds of thousands of people have been blown to smithereens by imperialism? Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu returned from visiting Obama in May to declare Israel’s responsibility to ‘eliminate’ the ‘nuclear threat’ from Iran. Which other countries has Iran bombed? None! Who has North Korea bombed? Nobody! Nobody asks how many nuclear bombs Israel has. The real threat to the peace and security of the world resides in Washington, London and Tel Aviv. These states are willing to use war repeatedly to sustain their power.
During the 1950-1953 Korean War, the US threatened North Korea with nuclear attack. That war, conducted under the flag of the United Nations, claimed up to three million Korean lives. North Korea knows well the readiness of the US and Britain to kill Koreans and to do so with impunity. That is why North Korea conducted nuclear tests.
Trevor Rayne
