Nodutdol condemns Trump’s barbaric attack on Iran. We call on Korean people everywhere to oppose this heinous drive for war and regime change against a sovereign country.
The U.S. has justified its war on Iran based on the lie that Iran is a nuclear threat. However, Iran does not have nuclear weapons, a fact verified by international observers, and even by U.S. intelligence. Iran’s nuclear program is entirely for civilian uses like energy and medicine.
The U.S. has tried to characterize Iran as a uniquely oppressive and violent country. This depiction is intended to reduce our outrage when we see Iranian cities burn. Iran has no modern history of foreign invasions, but it has been repeatedly targeted by the U.S. through coups and proxy wars for almost a century. In comparison, the U.S. has invaded more than half of the 193 UN member states—in addition to Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and hundreds of Indigenous nations on Turtle Island.
In fact, the U.S. has no right to speak of other countries as “nuclear threats.” The only country to have ever used nuclear weapons in war was the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose victims included an estimated 100,000 Korean forced laborers living in Japan. The U.S. also depleted highly radioactive uranium munitions in Iraq, Syria, and Yugoslavia, which continue to poison people to this day.
Even in “peacetime,” the U.S. commits nuclear crimes. In the Marshall Islands, the U.S. conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests that displaced thousands of people from their home islands. The U.S. also uses Indigenous reservations for uranium mining and nuclear waste dumping, including in the Navajo Nation, where the federal government has allowed 500 uranium mines to poison local water for decades.
Israel is also a nuclear criminal under international law. Arms control experts estimate Israel has 90-400 nuclear weapons that it acquired illegally. In spite of this, neither Israel nor the U.S. have ever faced consequences. Only Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have been sanctioned by the UN Security Council for their nuclear programs. These sanctions are economic warfare against the people of Iran and Korea, and are responsible for thousands of preventable deaths.
Iran is a sovereign state with the right to peace, independence, and self-defense. When the U.S. undermines Iran’s sovereignty through economic warfare and sanctions, assassinations, and now open airstrikes, it is endangering the lives of the Iranian people, who are an essential part of humanity. We cannot allow the U.S. government to dehumanize the Iranian people or their government.
As Korean people, we must pay close attention to the barbaric U.S. attack on Iran. Our own homeland is also a target of Washington’s villainization and lust for war. What the U.S. does to Iran today, it intends to do to Korea tomorrow—to our families, our hometowns, and our people.
The danger the U.S. poses to Korea is very real. In 2024, the U.S. conducted 275 days of war exercises in Korea. The recent strike on Iran was practiced last year in a similar U.S.-israeli war exercise. The war crimes the U.S. is committing in Iran are not random—they were planned and rehearsed years in advance, and the U.S. is making similar preparations to commit atrocities against the Korean people.
We cannot afford to remain silent in the face of U.S. imperialism. U.S. imperialism is the greatest threat to the world today. If we surrender to this kind of barbarism, we lose our freedom along with our humanity. The only way to secure a future worth living in for any of us is through solidarity and collective struggle.