6. The Uselessness of Nuclear Power in Communist Expansion Through Violence

This impotence in explicit ideological persuasion and economic production naturally presents countless difficulties for the Marxist plan of world hegemony, reducing the specter of its irresistible power to much more modest proportions. In one point and one point only can the communist danger seem great to the eyes of all peoples: brandishing the threat of a nuclear hecatomb, perhaps on a worldwide scale. If communism is nothing as a constructive force, it is something as a destructive force.

Although it is well known that Russia's atomic capability is inferior to America's, through its own natural disposition Russia, as a thermonuclear power, constitutes a greater threat to the world than any other nation. Indeed, by their very nature, the forces of disorder and revolution are less reluctant (if at all) than the forces of order to resort to destruction to achieve their plans. The normal tendency of a highway robber hidden in ambush is to attack. His victim tends to flee rather than fight back. Thus, there is a greater risk of an atomic hecatomb being unleashed by the Soviets or the Chinese than by some nation of the West.

What is this sole point of intrinsically negative superiority worth to communist expansion? Will they overcome the obstacles to this expansion? What would a thermo‑nuclear conflict bring to the communists themselves? Though perhaps victorious initially, they would become the main victims of the hecatomb they themselves unleashed; since their power is inferior to their adversaries', soon after their aggression they would probably suffer reprisals greater than the harm they might have caused, and would finally lose the war.

Indeed, nothing is less probable than a communist victory. And if they did attain a victory, what would be left for them but a world in which the United States and Europe would be reduced to an immense mountain of ruins? How could they build, on these smoking and shapeless ruins, the edifice of socialism which Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Kruschev longed so much to see constructed with a most perfect and advanced technology, able in a word, to compete with America's? Just recently, Pravda, the official organ of the Russian Communist Party's Central Committee, affirmed: "In politics it often happens that the defeats experienced by one side are not necessarily equivalent to victories of the other. The most surprising instance is that of a thermonuclear war, which would be worth nothing to the socialist bloc, even though imperialism were literally pulverized by it" (Pravda, Jan. 6, 1975, from an AFP telegram of the same date to 0 Estado de S. Paulo). This is an acknowledgment of how deadly a hypothetical Soviet thermonuclear victory over the West would be for the communist nations themselves.