by HORACE CAMPBELL
The book ‘Exterminism and Cold War’ edited by E.P. Thompson and others is still worth reading twenty-five years after this book was written to oppose the whole scale investment in weapons to kill millions. Like Bertrand Russell, Thompson had argued that nuclear weapons were so destructive that their use had become irrational for all mankind, regardless of class interest. ‘Exterminism is not a “class issue”: it is a human issue.’ The task, therefore, was not to organise the class struggle so as to eliminate the system which gives rise to war, but to win over all sectors of society, top to bottom, to an ‘alternative logic.’
This mandate of conceiving of a society beyond capitalism is now even more urgent in the midst of this major capitalist depression. In 1998, there was an ‘Atomic Audit’ in the USA that spelt out how the USA had spent over US$5.5 trillion between 1940 and 1998 in the development of nuclear weapons.
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