In those days, the US, through the hand of the Truman administration, became responsible for two of the most heinous crimes ever committed. Executed in a situation in which the process of surrender by Japan was already under way, the aim was to affirm the post-war military supremacy of the USA. Crimes against Humanity set in the criminal logic of imperialist militarism, and for which the authors were never tried. In the most painful way the Japanese people discovered – and are still today forced to live – the nuclear terror and its effects. Together with the direct victims of two atomic explosions, millions of lives were exterminated as a direct and indirect result of the radiations then released. It is to their memory that the PCP today pays homage.
In evoking and paying tribute to those men, women and children victims of the nuclear holocaust, the PCP also alerts to the dangers that now-a-days continue to threaten Humanity.
Six decades later, the world continues under the threat of the use of the nuclear weapon. Only nine countries – including the USA, the main NATO powers and Israel – today possess more than 20 thousand nuclear warheads with a total capacity hundreds of thousands of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. Nuclear weapons which, according to the declarations of political leaders and revision of strategic concepts, may be used, including in a nuclear attack.
In the military budgets of the main NATO powers – notably the military expenditure of the US which in the year 2008 will reach a record 650 thousand million dollars – the allocation for the modernization and development of new weapons has a leading place and constitute a deliberate choice to continue to bet upon the nuclear weapon and other weapons of mass destruction, in the context of a new arms race increasingly feeding the huge profits of the multinationals linked to the military-industrial complex of the main imperialist powers These are numbers and policies which reveal by themselves the hypocritical imperialist propaganda that tries to sell militarism and war as something natural and beneficial to the world. Just as it tried, in a fraudulent manner, in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Six decades later, it is impossible to hide that the system that coldly decided the extermination of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the same that today drives hundreds of million of human beings towards destitution, hunger, unemployment, shameful living conditions and death. It is the same whose main executors, faced with the military and political quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan and the growing instability in the Middle East, which they themselves promoted, decide, in the name of a "nuclear danger" coming from Iran, to pump thousands of millions of dollars in arms into the region, hypocritically hiding the fact that the only nuclear power in the Middle East is Israel, which everyday continues to trample international law by denying the Palestinian people their most elementary national rights and carrying out acts of State terrorism.
Is also in the name of the "nuclear danger" that the US, with the support of the European powers, of NATO and the bureaucracy in Brussels, wants to go ahead with the "anti-missile defence shield" project. While reminding that the US has stationed in Europe hundreds of missiles with nuclear warheads, the PCP denounces this project and expresses its solidarity with all those who in Poland and in the Czech Republic continue the struggle against this re-edition of the "star wars".
The US and its allies, within and outside NATO, do not hide their goals of domination and re-colonization of the globe, nor do they conceal the means they want to continue to use to attain it. It is so in The Middle East; in Africa, with the creation of the US military command and new military interventions under way; in Latin America with the escalade of threats and destabilizing manoeuvres against sovereign countries and peoples who dare to define with independence their path to development; in Asia with the intensification of the war in Afghanistan, the threats against PDR of Korea, the worrying militarist path of the Japanese government or the foreign interferences in East Timor, now consummated with the coup that removed FRETILIN from the Timorese government. It is so in Europe with the operation that aims to impose at all cost a "reform treaty" which, among other objectives, aims to proceed with the institutionalization of militarism and the strengthening of the European Union as a political and military bloc of an aggressive nature, the European pillar of NATO.
Demanding from the Portuguese government a reversal of its foreign policy of clear submission to imperialism – as is being shown by the exercise of the Portuguese presidency of the European Union council – the PCP affirms that Portugal can and should have an autonomous positive role in the defence of an international relations policy centred on cooperation for development, disarmament, abidance with the UN Charter and international law.
At the same time, the PCP appeals to the Portuguese workers and people to continue and intensify their struggle against militarism and war, affirming its solidarity with the peoples who resist and fight for sovereignty and social progress.
Signalling the 62 years of the nuclear Holocaust and alerting to the dangers that hang over the workers and the peoples of the whole world, the PCP also greets the processes of affirmation of sovereignty, the resistances against different imperialist interferences and aggressions which are taking place all around the world and open the doors of hope for the future of Humanity and, above all, inspire all those who, like the Portuguese communists, continue the struggle for a just and lasting peace, for development, for cooperation and social progress, for socialism.
