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From: tpkq@charm.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Who's deterring whom?
Message-ID: <178@charm.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 18-Nov-83 01:56:13 EST
Article-I.D.: charm.178
Posted: Fri Nov 18 01:56:13 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 19-Nov-83 03:55:38 EST
Organization: Physics Research - AT&T Bell Labs MH
Lines: 27

~
	An important question to consider when talking about the
effectiveness of nuclear deterrence is, who's doing the deterring and
who's being deterred?  The U.S. is the only country ever to have used
nuclear weapons against another country.  And since the destruction of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. government has on several occasions
(that we know about) considered using them again.  The only thing which
stood in the way was the existence of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.
	The Soviet Union has good reason to fear a military attack from
the United States.  The U.S., along with more than a dozen other
capitalist countries, sent troops into the Soviet Union right after the
1917 Bolshevik revolution, and ever since the U.S. has tried to tie a
military noose around the USSR.  The U.S. has over a half million
troops stationed in other countries, and, as of 1980, 110 countries had
U.S. military bases.  A look at the map of these bases shows that a
large number of them are in countries bordering or near the Soviet
Union or on islands in the western part of the Pacific, not far away.
Great Britain, West Germany, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Canada, Italy,
Turkey, Israel, Egypt, South Korea, and Japan, for example, all serve
as U.S. military outposts.
	And now the U.S. is proceeding with plans to use Western Europe
as its launching pad for Pershing II and cruise missiles aimed at the
Soviet Union.
	The U.S. government, and the class it represents, has shown
that its decisions about the use of nuclear weapons are governed not
by any concern for the fate of humanity but by what it can get away
with and how its interests can be served.