Recently, as is well known, the U.S. government was detonating on Enewetak Atoll, the first hydrogen bomb, tens of times greater in destructive potential than the outdated uranium bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in the summer of 1945. To impress us with the terrible power of the “super-bomb”, the world press has warned us that the uranium atomic bomb, already hideously outdated, can hardly be a primer for the apocalyptic H-bomb. To add insult to injury, an agency report put the world on notice that a single hydrogen bomb would be enough to wipe the entire city of London and its inhabitants off of the face of the earth.

But the real secret intentions of the White House regarding this diabolical weapon were revealed by the New York Times, which, immediately after the Enewetok blast, wrote thus, "We are going toward the supreme crisis of our generation and perhaps of all generations since man appeared on earth. This is as true for us Americans as it is for the Russians. What can the advent of Marx’s socialist gospel mean if they are to assert themselves on a scorched and destroyed earth?"

The blackmail is obvious. The supreme bodies of the bourgeois State, the General Staff of world counter-revolution sitting in Washington, delude themselves that the proletarian revolution, vainly derided with the epithet “Marx’s gospel” can be stopped and hijacked by classic “gangsterist” means. It is easily understood that the New York Times was a mauthpiece: those who write there know full well that the hypothetical Russian victory over America, in a likely future world war, would not mean the end of capitalism in the world and the establishment of a world revolutionary regime. That it’s true that they’ve known this for at least a decade, is easily deduced from the historical fact that American imperialism did not hesitate, in 1941, to ally itself with the “socialist” Stalin, against the fascist Hitler. The blackmail, the threat at gunpoint, it’s clear, has for its object, not the very problematic military victory of Russia, but the class revolution of the masses, first and foremost of the American masses, on whose submission stands the monstrous power of the government in Washington. But this itself shows how stupid, and at the same time hysterically fearful, the American leaders are.

Each ruling class, when faced with the oppressed classes, has possessed, over the passage of centuries, its own horrifying threat of destruction as alternative to the rise of its class enemies. Right in the middle of revolutionary Paris stood the Bastille, formidably fortified, militarily impregnable, armed with cannons and ammunition, enough to obliterate the populated urban sprawl, the homes of the sans-culottes. But the Bastille was not taken by the insurgent mob following regular military action, with a siege, etc. It fell from within, symbolizing the landslide that was occurring in the fabric of society: those who should have used the terrible weapon against the insurrectionary masses were themselves stricken by the far more terrible threat that the Revolution forced the stunned ruling class to face.

We’re sure that the same will happen with all the tremendous weapons that international capitalism, especially the United States, makes for its own protection against the threat, now unfortunately only potential, of the Proletarian Revolution. Revolution means the dismemberment of bourgeois society; now only the preservation of the existing social ordering, namely the subjugation of the proletariat to the bourgeois rule allows the bourgeoisie to find those who are willing to carry, against their own interest, “its” weapons.

But at the moment of reckoning, when the social earthquake is unleashed, whic will overwhelm the foundations of the bourgeois State, and the H-bomb will misfire just like the Bastille did in 1789.