Chomsky: World racing toward nuclear ‘precipice’

Leading American political analyst and philosopher Noam Chomsky says the world is racing toward a nuclear “precipice” and the United States poses the “greatest threat” in this regard.

Chomsky said in an interview with Euronews broadcast on Friday that “one [threat to humankind] is environmental catastrophe which is imminent and we don’t have a lot of time to deal with it and we are going the wrong way, and the other has been around for 70 years, the threat of nuclear war, which is in fact increasing. If you look at the record it is a miracle we have survived.”

He revealed that President Barack Obama has just “initiated a trillion dollar program of modernization of the US nuclear weapon system, which means expanding the nuclear weapon system.”

“That’s one the reasons why the famous doomsday clock, established by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has, just a couple of weeks ago, been pushed two minutes closer to midnight. Midnight is the end. It’s now three minutes from midnight. That’s the closest it’s been in thirty years. Since the early Regan years when there was a major war scare,” he added.

Chomsky said that “the US and Israel are the two major nuclear states in the world,” adding, “in international polls, run by US polling agencies, the United States is regarded as the greatest threat to world peace by an overwhelming margin”.

“No other country is even close” to the US, he said, adding the American media outlets refuse “to publish this. But it doesn’t go away.”

When asked about the extent to which the United States and its allies are responsible for terrorist attacks around the world, he said the US itself is the biggest terrorist.

“The worst terrorist campaign in the world by far is the one that’s being orchestrated in Washington. That’s the global assassination campaign. There’s never been a terrorist campaign of that scale.”

He said what he meant by the US global assassination campaign is, in actuality, Washington’s “drone campaign”.

“The drone campaign – that’s exactly what it is. Over large parts of the world, the United States is systematically, publically, openly…carrying out regular campaigns to assassinate people who the US government suspects of intending to harm it someday.”

Elsewhere in his remarks, the eminent American linguist said that the US and Israel are rampaging in the Middle East through carrying out constant “aggressions, violence, terrorist acts, illegal acts”.

Asked about Iran and its nuclear program, Chomsky said, “Iran’s strategic doctrine is defensive, it’s designed to hold off an attack long enough for diplomacy to start,” but Washington and Tel Aviv “do not want to tolerate a deterrent.”

He also said that there is not even one “strategic analyst with a brain function (that) thinks that Iran would ever use a nuclear weapon”.

Iran and the P5+1 group – the US, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany – reached a framework nuclear agreement in Switzerland on April 2. The two sides are working to reach a final deal by the end of June.

Rightwing elements in the United States along with Israel and some of their allies accuse Iran of pursuing military objectives in its civilian nuclear program.

Iran rejects the allegation, arguing that as a committed signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has the right to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

AT/GJH

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