UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies

In 1980, the Friends of the Filipino People (FFP) presented a paper to the United Nations Non-Governmental Organizations' (NGO) Conference on Disarmament stating that U.S. bases in the Philippines contravened the principles having to do with national sovereignty, military intervention, and nuclear arms put forward by the Final Document of the 1978 UN Special Session on Disarmament. FFP declared that U.S. bases, by their very nature and existence, undermined Philippine national sovereignty; that they constituted launching pads for U.S. military intervention in the affairs of other nations, as in Vietnam; and that they served as storage depots for U.S. nuclear arms and weapons. The present paper will serve to reaffirm these assertions. At the same time it will focus on a new feature of the present international situation that places these bases in even more pronounced opposition to the principles of disarmament enunciated by the 1978 Special Session: the Reagan Administration's adoption of limited nuclear war as U.S. policy.