The news that the Soviet Union has the H-Bomb is still reverberating in the press. Wall Street cannot guarantee immunity to American cities in its projected third world war and this fact has proved sobering. Many editors and columnists can expect to be among the 50,000,000 American casualties predicted for the first day of conflict. Some of them are now highly critical of Eisenhower's defense plans, stressing that home shelters are inadequate, that city shelters might prove to be death traps under the rubble of skyscrapers and factories and that there's no way of getting out of range in time.
As a final macabre touch, Prof. George Gamow of George Washington University, a leading nuclear scientist, reminded the world Aug. 12 that besides the various kinds of bomb there is an even deadlier threat. "Biological warfare would be worse. In sheer destructiveness, a little bottle of germs could do more damage than an H-Bomb."
It is obvious to every thinking person that civilization has never faced such peril as exists today. American Big Business and the Stalinist bureaucracy have destructive powers at their disposal transcending the wildest dreams of previous rulers. To take the power of decision away from them has become a matter of life and death.
The question at once arises: How much time is granted the working class to perform this task? The answer is: Not long if we look at the rising curve that marks the tempo of war preparations and compare it with the tempo between World War I and World War II, but longer than might have been expected if we look at Wall Street's blueprint. The fact is that American Big Business has shoved the projected date ahead several times.
This postponement appears strange if we recall that the main intended victim, the Soviet Union, was devastated at the end of World War II while the United States emerged from the war far stronger than at the beginning. Add to this that the U.S. had a monopoly on the Atom-Bomb from 1945 to 1949. Why didn't American Big Business move in for the kill then?
It might be argued that "we" had illusions about the Kremlin, that "we" hoped for an era of peaceful co-existence and that it was not until Stalin knocked these into a cocked hat that "we" were provoked into rearming. This is lying propaganda as can easily be proved.
The ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not yet lost their radioactivity in the fall of 1945 when Gen. George C. Marshall issued his Biennial Report to the Secretary of War. In this report, which I analyzed in the Oct 20, 1945 issue of The Militant, Marshall derided the possibilities of peace. He revealed that the Pentagon was already constructing superweapons for another war.
He said that "With the continued development of weapons and techniques now known to us, the cities of New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, or San Francisco may be subject to annihilation from other continents in a matter of hours."
The General declared that there is no effective defense except the "power of attack." Men are needed to come to "close grips with the enemy and tear his operating bases and his productive establishment away from him. ..."
That was a clear enough statement of intentions for The Militant to warn that "The Third World War is already in the blueprint stage."
Since they were fully aware that their economy at a certain stage requires war if it is to avert depression, what stopped the Wall Street bankers and Pentagon brass from following through when they had the clear advantage?
One of the clues lies in the General's statement: Men are needed to come to "close grips with the enemy and tear his operating bases and his productive establishments away from him. ..."
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The General appeared to have the men —some 10,000,000 of them in the armed forces and tens of millions more working overtime in the war industries to supply them with all the necessary means, including long-range planes and the Atom-Bomb. Why weren't they used?
Something happened — something perhaps unforeseen and unexpected by Wall Street. Politics intervened.
I don't mean that "spies" or "communist agents" wormed their way into key government positions and sabotaged policies, as the McCarthyites try to make out. I mean political intervention in the sense of human will imposing itself and shaping events. And this will was not that of the small clique of capitalists controlling the government, but the will of the American people.
Within a few short months after Marshall had bared the Pentagon's plans, American troops around the entire globe began demanding immediate return home. Their demands were not uncertain in tone. Meetings including as many as 20,000 troops were held. The soldiers sent a flood of protests home at being held overseas. They protested intervening in the affairs of other countries. They collected money for advertisements stating their position in U.S. papers. They even elected joint committees in many areas to fight for a "Get-Us-Home" program. They staged militant demonstrations. And here in the United States their folks backed them up wholeheartedly.
In face of such a rising tide, could Wall Street dream of launching a successful war on the Soviet Union? The American people were busy dismantling the forces needed to carry on a new war. The soldiers needed to "come to close grips with the enemy" were shaking themselves free from Wall Street's own grip.
To have ordered an Atom-Bomb attack at that time would have meant nothing but swift and certain suicide for America's 60 ruling families.
Moreover, the "Get-Us-Home" movement was not all that crossed the war plans of the giant corporations. Even before the troops began their stormy demonstrations around the world, the factory workers had launched a symmetrical movement for higher wages. The auto workers hit the bricks, then the steel workers, and along with them countless others. January 1946 saw the opening of the most powerful strike wave in the country's history.
That movement could easily have turned into a radical political development with the most far-reaching revolutionary implications had American Big Business decided to fly in the face of it and launch another war right then and there. The wiser heads knew they had enough to chew on for the time being.
Those two events, the 1946 strike wave and the "Get-Us-Home" troop movement, have haunted the capitalist war-mongers ever since. When the truce was signed in Korea, one of the first fears expressed by the capitalists and their agents was that another movement might flare up to "Bring the Boys Back Home." And the labor movement, 17,000,000 strong and ready for battle at any major threat to living standards, hangs over their calculations like a nightmare.
In 1953 they must still ask themselves the question that was posed in 1946. What happens if we start another war without first arriving at a more favorable position in relation to the forces of the American working class?
It is quite true that they have been working at this knotty problem since 1946 and have made considerable headway, as we shall see next week, but it is far from solved. They could make no worse error than to think the American workers will go quiescently into another slaughter. And they know it. We may deduce from this that they might have decided to postpone the H-Bomb holocaust just a little longer in order to complete certain essential political chores first.