UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies

The irrational and horrifying concept of "limited nuclear war" now being promoted by the Reagan administration cannot be divorced from the historic position of the U.S. corporate empire at this time. It is an empire in decline. Its economic and poitical influence waning, it turns to the ultimate weapon of terror, nuclear war, in a blind and desperate attempt to redress the balance and preserve U.S. commercial and military superiority. And the U.S. military-industrial complex appears to be willing to risk the lives of the Filipino people (and everybody else's, for that matter), for this ignoble cause. Should a theater nuclear war in the Mideast or Asia erupt into a general nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, U.S. nuclear installations at Clark, San Miguel and Subic would drag the Philippines in with disastrous results.