On 25 May 2009, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) successfully conducted its second underground nuclear test, thereby significantly boosting its self-reliant, self-defensive military deterrent power, aimed at securing the independence and sovereignty of the country and the socialist system chosen by the Korean people. Alongside this nuclear test, the revolutionary armed forces, the scientists and technicians of the DPRK have also conducted missile launches and taken other steps to defend the security of the country and the dignity of her people.
The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPBG-ML) resolutely and fully supports all the just steps taken by the Korean people, under the leadership of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) and Comrade Kim Jong Il, to boost the country’s defences, with a view to coping with the intensified aggressive challenge by the US and Japanese imperialists and their followers and to open the way to a great, prosperous and powerful socialist nation.
Whether or not to conduct nuclear tests or to develop missile technology is a matter pertaining to the sovereignty of the country. In a world where the leading imperialist powers possess massive nuclear arsenals, and where US imperialism has not only threatened but actually sanctioned their use, our party has always held the view that we unconditionally support the right of socialist countries, and other developing countries bullied and threatened by imperialism, to develop and possess nuclear weapons for their own defence.
In the case of the Korean peninsula, we note that the nuclear issue is one that is entirely of the making of the United States. The US imperialists planned and threatened to use nuclear weapons in their barbarous war against the Korean people, 1950-53. The only reason they were not used, as they were against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is that the Soviet Union had by then succeeded in developing such weapons of its own.
Right from the 1950s, in defiance of the Armistice Agreement it signed, the United States has stationed hundreds of nuclear weapons in south Korea, posing a mortal threat to the entire Korean people as well as to the People’s Republic of China, the former Soviet Union/Russian Federation, and all the anti-imperialist forces of the Asia-Pacific region. The United States has threatened to use nuclear weapons against the DPRK on numerous occasions and to this day keeps the DPRK on its ‘nuclear first strike’ list.
Such being the case, the CPGB-ML has consistently held the view that the DPRK has not merely the right to develop its own nuclear weapons but is also faced with the necessity of so doing. As even Madeline Albright, former US Secretary of State, has pointed out, the blunt truth shown by a comparison of the Iraqi and Korean situations is that you are attacked if you do not possess such weapons and you are not attacked if you do.
The CPGB-ML, therefore, takes this opportunity to warmly congratulate Comrade Kim Jong Il, the Workers’ Party of Korea, the Korean People’s Army, the scientists, technicians, workers and service personnel, and the entire Korean people on the success of their second nuclear test.
It is the height of hypocrisy for Gordon Brown to describe the DPRK as a “danger to the world”, when British troops are marauding in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ireland, the Balkans and elsewhere, and when his government still insists on raiding its bankrupt treasury to spend billions on renewing the Trident nuclear missile programme.
The Obama administration, belying its own promises of change and dialogue, has refused to seize the opportunity to turn a fresh page in the United States’ relations with the Korean people, instead falling back on the old, tried and failed methods of provocation, threat and pressure. By so doing, it made the DPRK’s firm response inevitable.
The acts which the imperialist media denounce as showing DPRK aggression are in fact the only possible method that can be used in the present circumstances to deter imperialist aggression and promote peace on the Korean peninsula. Everybody who loves peace must applaud the DPRK’s courageous, intelligent and unflinching stand in the defence of peace. Despite the roars of frustrated rage emerging from all the world giants of imperialism who are bent on destroying socialism root and branch even in such a small country as the DPRK, the DPRK keeps alight the flame of socialism and peace that leads the working people of the world forward to a bright future.
