Letter: Still Trying to Ban the Bomb (1995)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Still Trying to Ban the Bomb

Dear Editors,

We desperately need your help to stop further nuclear testing in the South Pacific by France which has been condemned world-wide, but with no effect. Economic pressure is the only way to persuade France to change its mind.

Please boycott all French products and don't go to France on holiday and ask your friends and colleagues to do the same. Fax your protest to President Chirac (Fax no. 00 33 I 47 42 24 65) informing him that you are boycotting French products and will continue to do so indefinitely if France continues with further tests. (These will be far more powerful than the first one!)

As Britain is one of France's main trading partners your action will make a difference and any pressure you can put on the Government will certainly help. 

Zerina Tata, 

Wembley, Middlesex

Reply:

While we are opposed to all wars and to all testing of nuclear weapons (which add to the level of radioactivity in the world) we do not engage in single-issue campaigns. Instead, we concentrate on working to achieve a world of common ownership and democratic control in which wars and armaments and armies—and nuclear tests—won't exist.

As long as capitalism and its drive for profits exists, then so will states to further the interests of the various national groups of capitalists. And states, in the jockeying for position with other states, must be armed with the most up-to-date and destructive weapons they can afford. These include weapons of mass-destruction such as nuclear weapons. This is why it is the case that as long as capitalism continues so will nuclear weapons and their testing from time-to-time. Protests and boycotts can’t stop this. The only solution is to get rid of global capitalism and replace it with world socialism.

Editors.