American scholar and political activist Noam Chomsky must reconsider his views about the threat of a nuclear war between the US and Russia because the main threat comes from Washington, a writer and retired professor says.
“Noam Chomsky should rethink his views on the threat of nuclear war,” said James Petras, a professor emeritus of sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada.
“Nuclear war will destroy civilization, he’s right on that, but he has to give more credible analysis of where the threat comes from; it certainly does not come from Russia,” Petras told Press TV on Tuesday.
“To simply say the US and Russia could threaten a nuclear war is a gross distortion when the main threat is from the White House and Russia has played a very rational and peaceful role, especially in the Middle East,” he said.
In an interview with Democracy Now published on Monday, Chomsky warned that the recent wave of “near collisions” between Russian and US forces amid a growing Western military buildup on Russian borders may bring about nuclear annihilation.
Chomsky said tensions between Moscow and Washington have put the world on the verge of “termination for the species.”
He said the symbolic Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which represents a countdown to possible global catastrophe, is moving closer to Midnight, the threat of a nuclear war.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, an organization that assesses nuclear weapon stockpiles, in 2013, Russia had around 8,500 total nuclear warheads, 1,800 of them strategically operational, compared to America’s estimated total 7,700 nuclear warheads of which 1,950 were deemed operational.
Tensions between Washington and Moscow surged in April, after two Russian Sukhoi Su-24 warplanes performed multiple simulated attack passes over the US Donald Cook destroyer off Russia’s coast in the Baltic Sea.
Russia has been targeted by a series of sanctions imposed by the United States and European Union for allegations that Moscow is arming and supporting pro-Russian forces fighting in eastern Ukraine.