Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk

NUCLEAR WAR AND ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE

Preface

If humans choose to work to minimize the existential threats of our time, perhaps the most improbable aspect of remedy is that we will accept modalities based on collaboration and creative adaptation, rather than perpetual combat and domination.[1] It is a stark fact that present and future economies are predicated on a finite energy resource: carbon-based fuels.[2] Consensual science on climate change presents another fact: we may only have a few years to make adjustments in the collective carbon load before we are faced with irreversible consequences. As Christian Parenti in Tropic of Chaos perceptively and correctly points out:

“[E]ven if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped immediately—that is, if the world economy collapsed today, and not a single light bulb was switched on nor a single gasoline-powered motor started ever again—there is already enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to cause significant warming and disruptive climate change, and with that considerably more poverty, violence, social dislocation, forced migration, and political upheaval. Thus we must find humane and just means of adaptation, or we face barbaric prospects.”[3]

Seen in this light, to live collaboratively and creatively is less a radical proposal than a pragmatic one, if we, future generations, and the biosphere are to survive nuclear war and environmental catastrophe.

Laray Polk Dallas, Texas September 2012

Abbreviations

ACHRE: Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments

AEC: Atomic Energy Commission

ALEC: American Legislative Exchange Council

API: American Petroleum Institute

ARPA-E: Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy

BIOT: British Indian Ocean Territory

BLEEX: Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton

BP: British Petroleum

CDB: China Development Bank

CIA: Central Intelligence Agency

CND: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

COP: Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC

CTBT: Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

CW: chemical weapons

DARPA: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

DEFCON: defense readiness condition

DOD: Department of Defense

DOE: Department of Energy

DU: depleted uranium

EPA: Environmental Protection Agency

GE: General Electric

HEU: highly enriched uranium

IAEA: International Atomic Energy Agency

IBM: International Business Machines

ISN: Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies

IT: Information Technology

LEU: low-enriched uranium

MAD: mutually assured destruction

MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

NAM: Non-Aligned Movement

NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NAVSTAR

GPS: navigation system for timing and ranging, Global Positioning System

NEPA: National Environmental Policy Act

NIH: National Institutes of Health

NNI: National Nanotechnology Initiative

NPT: Non-Proliferation Treaty

NSC: National Security Council

NSF: National Science Foundation

NSG: Nuclear Suppliers Group

NWFZ: nuclear-weapon-free zone

OPEC: Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries

OSRD: Office of Scientific Research and Development

PNE: peaceful nuclear explosion

POW: prisoner of war

PTBT: Partial Test Ban Treaty

R&D: research and development

RADAR: radio detection and ranging

SDS: Students for a Democratic Society

START: Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty

TRIPS: Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights

UN: United Nations

UNFCCC: UN Framework on Convention on Climate Change

WgU: weapon-grade uranium

WTO: World Trade Organization

^1.

Environmental Catastrophe

Laray Polk: When we began this conversation in 2010, our starting point was a statement you had recently made in the press: “There are two problems for our species’ survival—nuclear war and environmental catastrophe.” What is meant by “environmental catastrophe”?

Noam Chomsky: Actually, quite a lot of things. The major one is anthropogenic global warming—human contribution to global warming, greenhouse gases, others—but that’s only a part of it. There are other sources of what’s called pollution—the destruction of the environment—that are quite serious: erosion, the elimination of agricultural land, and turning agricultural land into biofuel, which has had a severe effect on hunger. It’s not just an environmental problem; it’s a human problem. Building dams and cutting down the Amazon forests has ecological consequences—there are thousands of things and the problems are getting a lot worse.

For one reason, because of the role of the United States. I mean, nobody’s got a wonderful role in this, but as long as the United States is dragging down the entire world, which is what it’s doing now, nothing significant is going to happen on these issues. The US has to at least be seriously taking part and should be well in the lead. It’s kind of ironic; if you look at this hemisphere, the country that is well in the lead in trying to do something serious about the environment is the poorest country in South America, Bolivia. They recently passed laws granting rights to nature.[4] It comes out of the indigenous traditions, largely—the indigenous majority, they’ve got the government advocating on their behalf. Sophisticated Westerners can laugh at that, but Bolivia is going to have the last laugh.

Anyway, they’re doing something. In the global system, they’re in the lead, along with indigenous communities in Ecuador. Then there’s the richest country—not only in the hemisphere, but in world history—the richest, most powerful country, which is not only doing nothing, but is going backward. Congress is now dismantling some of the legislation and institutions put into operation by our last liberal president, Richard Nixon, which is an indication of where we are.[5] In addition, there’s a great enthusiasm about tapping new sources of fossil fuels and doing it in ways which are extremely environmentally destructive: water and other resources are destroyed through fracking and deep-sea drilling.[6] Anywhere you can find anything that you can use to destroy the environment, they’re going after it with great enthusiasm. It’s like issuing a death sentence on the species.

And what makes it worse is that a lot of it is being done out of principle—that it’s not problematic, that it’s what we ought to be doing. In a sense, the same is true of nuclear weapons. They’re justified on the grounds that we need them for defense—we don’t need them for defense—but the argument for moving forward toward disaster is a conscious, explicit argument that is widely believed. With regard to the environment and the United States, there is also quite a substantial propaganda campaign, funded by the major business organizations, which are quite frank about it. The US Chamber of Commerce and others are trying to convince people that it’s not our problem, or that it’s not even real.[7]

If you look at the latest Republican primary campaign, virtually every participant simply denies climate change. One candidate, Jon Huntsman, said he thinks it is real, but he was so far out of the running, it didn’t matter.[8] Michele Bachmann said something to the effect, “Well, it could be real, but if it is, it’s God’s punishment for allowing gay marriage.”[9] Whatever the world thinks, they can’t do much if this is going on in the United States.

In Congress, among the latest cohort of Republican House representatives from 2010, almost all are global-warming deniers and are acting to cut back legislation to block anything meaningful, and to roll back the little that exists. I mean, it’s surreal. If someone were watching this from Mars, they wouldn’t believe what was happening on Earth.

Hugo Chávez gave a speech at the United Nations at one of the major General Assembly meetings, and, of course, the press was full of ridicule and absurdities and so on. They didn’t mention the talk he gave. You can find the talk, I’m sure, on the Internet, in which he said that producers and consumers are going to have to get together and find ways to reduce reliance on hydrocarbons and fossil fuels.[10] Of course, Venezuela is a major oil producer. In fact, practically the whole economy depends upon it; they’re a lot more reliant on oil than Texas is. So it can be done. We don’t have to be lunatics who are willing to sacrifice our grandchildren so that we can have a little more profit.

Actually, the whole Texas system is interesting. I’m sure you know the history, but back around 1958, the Eisenhower administration introduced an arrangement whereby the United States would rely on Texas oil: exhaust our domestic oil resources instead of using much cheaper and more accessible Saudi oil resources, for the benefit of Texas oil producers.[11] And I think for the next fourteen years, the country relied primarily on Texas oil. Meaning, exhaust domestic resources and later on dig holes in the ground and pour oil back into them for strategic reserve. This was pretty sharply criticized even from a straight security point of view. An MIT faculty member, M. A. Adelman, an economist who is an oil specialist, testified before Congress on this, but it didn’t matter. Profits for Texas oil producers overwhelm even elementary security considerations like reliance on foreign oil.

That’s what it means to have a country that’s business-run, nothing else matters. It is the same reason we can’t have a health system like every other industrial country. The people who matter, the financial institutions, won’t allow it so it’s off the agenda.

The Koch brothers give large amounts of money to universities. In exchange they get a hand in choosing faculty.[12] How corrosive is this practice?

Such practices would be extremely harmful, virtually by definition. If universities (journals, researchers) are to serve their public function in a free and democratic society, the institutions and the faculty must be scrupulous in rejecting outside pressures, particularly from funders, whether these are state or private. Funding should be flatly rejected if it comes with conditions such as those you describe.

Nine out of twelve Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee signed an Americans for Prosperity pledge to oppose regulation of greenhouse gases.[13] To what degree are campaign contributions and pledges like this one stifling the political process on environmental issues in the US? And to what degree does US energy policy impact other countries?

The US is the richest and most powerful state in the world, by a large measure. Its policies on anything impact others. Energy policies in particular have an enormous impact, also on future generations, for reasons too well known to spell out again in detail here. The Republican pledge is simply another indication of abandonment of any pretense of participating in the political system as an authentic parliamentary party, instead taking on the role of lockstep uniformity in service to wealth and power. Dismantling the (much too weak) regulatory apparatus is simply a way of informing future generations that we care nothing about their fate as long as we and those we serve profit now. There is no doubt that campaign contributions have a significant effect on party programs and eventual government decisions, hence undermining democracy, if we understand democracy to be a system in which government decisions reflect the will of the public, not the power of those who can purchase outcomes with substantial contributions.

What are the factors that have led to conservative think tanks, largely funded by industry interests such as the Kochs and ExxonMobil, being able to hold sway over consensual science in terms of public opinion?[14] Even if the science is hard to comprehend for most nonscientists, isn’t it evident what industries that fund climate-change skepticism stand to gain?

It is entirely evident. Major industries and lobbying organizations (US Chamber of Commerce, etc.) have been quite frank about their efforts to sway public opinion to question the overwhelming scientific consensus on the severe threat of anthropogenic global warming. There is no novelty in this. Industries that produce what they know to be lethal products (lead, tobacco, etc.) were able to use their wealth and power for long periods to continue their murderous activities unhampered.[15] The effects have been dire, and continue to be, but they are even more ominous in the case of the intensive efforts to undermine steps that might preserve the possibility of a decent life for future generations—with effects already evident, but only a foretaste of much worse that is all too likely to come.

Is the fossil-fuel industry monolithic?

The industry, like others, is dedicated to profit and market share, not to human welfare. But it is not immune to public pressures, and also recognizes that there is potential profit to be made from development of sustainable energy. The industry is mostly oligarchic, but not a monolith, and there are some conflicts within it. But in general, counting on the good will and altruism of participants in a semimarket system never makes sense, and in this case is virtually a commitment to disaster.

^2.

Protest and Universities

Laray Polk: What was the rationale for the protest when the Iranian students came to MIT in the 1970s?

Noam Chomsky: There was a secret agreement made between MIT and the shah of Iran, which pretty much amounted to turning over the Nuclear Engineering Department to the shah. For some unspecified but probably large amount of money, MIT agreed to accept nuclear engineers from Iran to train in the United States; it could have become a nuclear weapons program. There was not much question about that. They called it nuclear energy. It was being pressed in Washington by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, and Wolfowitz. They wanted Iran to develop nuclear facilities and they were allies at the time. That was pre-1979. Well, the story leaked, as these things tend to do. And what happened then was pretty interesting. The students got pretty upset about it, there was a lot of student protest, and then finally a referendum on campus. I think about 80 percent voted against it. Of course, that’s not binding; that’s student opinion.

But there was enough of a protest that they had to call a faculty meeting about it. Usually nobody goes to faculty meetings—too boring to go to—but at this meeting everybody showed up; it was huge. The proposal was presented by the administration, and then there was discussion. There were maybe five of us, I think, who stood up to oppose it, and it passed overwhelmingly.

How did you present your opposition?

MIT, first of all, shouldn’t be taking support from states developing nuclear capabilities. And if the US government wants to do it, I’ll protest that too, but it shouldn’t be done here. That’s not the task of a university to help other countries develop nuclear capabilities. They shouldn’t do it here either, but certainly not for another country ruled by a brutal tyrant just because it’s an ally. But it was a straightforward argument. Essentially, the students’ argument.

It’s quite interesting if you think about it sociologically. The faculty of today are the students of a few years ago, but the shift in institutional role completely changed their attitudes. So the students were outraged and the faculty thought it was fine.

Incidentally, there are worse cases than this not involving the universities, but the press won’t report on them. Reagan and Bush were practically in love with Saddam Hussein—after the US basically won the war for Iraq in the Iraq-Iran War, Bush wanted to increase aid to Iraq over a lot of objections from the Treasury Department and others, mostly on economic grounds, but he wanted it. In fact, in 1989 Bush invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in nuclear weapons production.[16] Then, in 1990, he sent a high-level senatorial delegation to Iraq led by Bob Dole (later a presidential candidate), with Alan Simpson and other big shots, and their mission was to convey Bush’s greetings to his friend Saddam and also to inform him that he should disregard criticisms that he hears in the American press. They promised Saddam that they would remove someone from the Voice of America who was being critical of Saddam. This was long after all of his worst atrocities—the Anfal massacre, the Halabja massacre—which the Reagan administration tried to cover up, said they were done by the Iranians, not by Saddam. All of that has been deep-sixed. You can find it in congressional hearings, but nobody will report it or comment on it.[17] That’s even worse than what was happening with Iran under the shah. The record is not a very pretty one if you look at it, and it certainly is not one of trying to reduce proliferation.

How can we be sure that any government is going to remain stable? For example, when the Iranian students came, the shah was in power, nobody knew that the Islamic uprising was coming—

They don’t care whether it’s Islamic or not. Take, say, Pakistan, in the 1980s: Pakistan was under the rule of a dictator, the worst of their many dictators, Zia-ul-Haq, who was also pushing a radical Islamist agenda and was receiving extensive funding from Saudi Arabia. They were trying to Islamize society, that’s when they were starting to set up these madrassas all over where the kids just study the Koran and radical Islam and so on. Saudi Arabia is the center of radical Islam, the most extreme fundamentalist state anywhere, and Reagan was supporting it.[18] They don’t care about radical Islam.

Like al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, bin Laden before—

The US supported them. And in fact, they explained why. It had nothing to do with liberating Afghanistan. The head of the CIA mission in Islamabad, that’s where the planning was going on, was frank about it. Basically he said, “We don’t have any interest in liberating Afghanistan, what we want to do is kill Russians.” And this is their chance. Brzezinski, to paraphrase, said things like, “This is great, it’s paying the Russians back for Vietnam.”[19] What were the Russians doing in Vietnam? Well, they were providing some limited support for resistance to US aggression, but that’s a crime, so we’ve got to pay them back by killing Russians and if a million Afghans die, it’s their problem.

Do you think it ever occurred to planners that al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, might come up with their own agenda?

Probably not. You can say the same about Hamas. Israel supported Hamas in the early days because they were a weapon against the secular PLO.[20] The US and Israel have quite consistently supported radical Islamic stands and it goes way back. Back in the early ’60s—in fact, the ’50s and the ’60s—there was a major conflict in the Arab world between Nasser, who was the symbol of secular nationalism, and Saudi rulers, who were the guardians of extremist, radical Islam. Who did the US support? The Saudis, of course. They were afraid of secular nationalism.

The British too. There’s a book by a British diplomatic historian—which will probably barely get reviewed in England—which is about Britain’s support of radical Islam, and it was quite extreme.[21] Same reasons, secular nationalism is much more dangerous. Sometimes you catch a tiger by the tail and don’t expect it. This is pretty much the same with Hezbollah. They developed in reaction to the US-backed Israeli invasion and occupation. That’s the way the world works.

Sometimes it’s called blowback. There are some analysts who argue that this is a self-defeating policy. But I’m not so convinced. I mean, the big mistake is supposed to have been installing the shah and overturning the parliamentary system, but it’s hard to see where that was a mistake. For twenty-five years it kept Iran completely under control, kept the US in control over the energy system. Planning doesn’t go much beyond that. If things work for twenty-five years, that’s a success.

The Tehran Research Reactor requires highly enriched uranium fuel to operate; the same is true for MIT’s reactor. The Department of Energy has told MIT it must convert to low-enriched fuel, but the head of engineering at the reactor said they’re most likely not going to meet the deadline.[22]

I don’t know anything about this.

It’s contentious on two points. One, there’s a reactor in a densely populated urban area. And two—

It’s what they’re using as fuel. So, you can do things with the high-energy fuel that you can’t do with less enriched fuel?

According to a Boston Globe story from 2009, the “MIT reactor could be converted quickly if it were willing to give up some performance.” The same report states the reactor “brings in about $1.5 million a year from commercial work, which covers about 60 percent of the annual operating costs.”[23]

Where do they get that from?

I’m unsure of the specific entities, but mainly from producing radiotherapies.[24]

There hasn’t been an inquiry at MIT into research, as far as I’m aware, since 1969. At that time, under the pressure of the student movement, there was a faculty/student inquiry. Actually I was on the committee, the Pounds Commission, which looked into MIT’s finances and also into war-related activities on campus. It was pretty interesting. It turned out that nobody, even the administration, knew the financial details. It turned out that roughly half of the institute budget was running two classified military laboratories: Lincoln, and what’s now the Draper Lab. The other half of the budget, I think, was approximately 90 percent funded by the Pentagon in those days.

The Pentagon, contrary to what people believe, is the greatest funder there is. They don’t pay all that much attention to what you’re doing; they just know that they’re the way to funnel taxpayer money into the next stage of the economy. We did look into military work. It turns out there was no classified work on campus and no direct military-related work, but anything that’s done is likely to have some military application. The only department that had any war-related work was the Political Science Department and it was being done under the rubric of a Peace Research Institute—straight out of Orwell—which had villas in Saigon where they were sending students for PhDs on counterinsurgency. And they were also running secret seminars in the Political Science Department on Vietnam strategy and so on. I found out when I was invited to take part in one.

Outside the Political Science Department, it was pretty clean. Now, if you take a look over the years, Pentagon funding has declined and funding from the NIH has increased. And I suspect almost everybody understands it. The reason is because the cutting edge of the economy is shifting to biology, away from an electronics-based economy, so you have to rip off the taxpayer in some different fashion. We don’t have a free-market economy. Federal spending, government procurement, and other devices are huge components. Funding is also getting more corporatized. I suspect what is going on here is more corporate funding, and the corporate funding has a general cheapening effect.

Federal funding is long term, it’s nonintrusive, and they just want things to be done. But if big corporations fund something, they’re not interested in the future health of the economy. They want something for themselves. So it means that research becomes more short term, it becomes much more secret. Federal funding is completely open, but a corporation can impose secrecy; they can indicate you’re not going to get refunded unless you keep it quiet. So it does impose secrecy. There are some famous cases that have come out; one big scandal even made the Wall Street Journal.

As long as it stays secret, they can do as they like.

Robert Barsky wrote that during the protests on the MIT campus in the 1960s, you held an extreme position even among the liberal faculty. Basically, you didn’t believe shutting down the labs involved in military research was the solution, but rather, “universities with departments that work on bacterial warfare should do so openly.”[25] What is to be gained by that approach?

These matters came to a head at the Pounds Commission. Its primary concern was the relation of MIT’s academic/research program to the two military laboratories it administered, Lincoln and the Instrumentation Lab (now the Draper Lab). The commission split three ways. One group (call them “conservatives”) favored keeping the labs on campus. A second (“liberals”) favored separating the labs from MIT. A third (“radicals,” I think consisting just of me and the one student representative) agreed with the conservatives, though for different reasons. If the labs were formally separated, nothing much would change in substance: joint seminars and other interactions would continue pretty much as before, but now with formally separate entities. What the labs are doing would disappear as a campus issue. But what they are doing is vastly more important than the appearance of a “clean campus,” and their presence would be a regular focus for education and activism. The liberal view prevailed, and the outcome was much as anticipated—a step backward, I think, for the reasons mentioned.

Pentagon funding was a major device used by the government from the early postwar period to lay the basis for the high-tech economy of the future: computers, the Internet, microelectronics, satellites, etc.—the IT revolution generally. After several decades primarily in the public sector, the results were handed over to private enterprise for commercialization and profit. By the 1970s government funding was shifting from the Pentagon to the biology-related institutions: the NIH and others. The military was a natural funnel for an electronics-based economy. Fifty years ago the small start-ups spinning off from MIT were electronics firms, which, if successful, were bought up by Raytheon and other electronics giants. Today the small start-ups are in genetic engineering, biotechnology, etc., and the campus is surrounded by major installations of pharmaceutical firms and the like.[26] The same dynamics have been duplicated elsewhere.

The Pentagon itself gains little if anything from this, not even prestige. In fact, few even know how the system works. To illustrate, I once wrote an article about a speech to newspaper editors by Alan Greenspan—called “St. Alan” during his day in the sun, and heralded as one of the great economists of all time. He was hailing the marvels of our economy, based on entrepreneurial initiative and consumer choice, the usual oration. He made the mistake, however, of giving examples, each of them textbook illustrations of what I have just described: the role of the dynamic state sector of the economy during the hard part of research and development (along with government procurement and other devices of what amounts to a kind of industrial policy). Greenspan’s illusions are the common picture.[27]

The system as a whole certainly merits critical examination, for one reason, because there is virtually no public input in crucial decision making. But I’ve never seen the force of the argument against employment at a university that is being publicly funded for research, development, and teaching, and it seems of little moment whether the funding technique happens to be via the Pentagon, the NIH, the Department of Energy, or some other formal mechanism.

In general, what matters is what work is being done, not how it’s funded. Biological warfare is no more benign if it’s funded by the NIH or by a private corporation. Universities are parasitic institutions. They don’t (or shouldn’t) be geared to production for the market. If they are to survive, they have to be funded somehow, and there are few options in existing society.

For what it’s worth, while the MIT lab where I was working in the ’60s was 100 percent funded by the armed services (as you can see from formal acknowledgments by publishers), it also happened to be one of the main centers of academic resistance against the Vietnam War, perhaps the main one; not protest, but active resistance.[28] And by the late ’60s MIT probably had the most radical student president of any US campus, with plenty of student support and related activism, which had quite positive and long-lasting effects on campus life.[29]

What are alternative ways of viewing campuses?

A campus is primarily an educational institution. A crucial part of education is coming to understand the world in which we live, and what we can do to make it a better place. Any college, and particularly a research university like MIT, should also be a center of creative and independent thought and inquiry, along with critical evaluation of the directions that such inquiry should pursue, with cooperative participation of the general university community.[30] It should also bring in, as feasible, the outside community. My own courses on social and political issues—which I was teaching on my own time—were usually open to the public, sometimes at night for that reason, others too.

I don’t suggest any of this as an “alternative,” but rather as an ideal, approximated more or less, and a guideline for commitment and choice of action.

^3.

Toxicity of War

Laray Polk: We’ve spoken previously about Reagan’s “Star Wars” program as something that developed as a palatable alternative to nuclear stockpiling. Isn’t there also something to be said about the location of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll, a heavily contaminated area as a result of US atomic testing?[31]

Noam Chomsky: I suppose it reflects the prevailing conception that the “unpeople” of the world—to borrow the phrase of British diplomatic historian Mark Curtis—are dispensable.[32]

The level of contamination left from US atomic testing in the Marshall Islands is immensely troubling, but so too is what might be transpiring in Iraq and other areas of the Middle East due to the use of depleted uranium. There seems to be ample evidence that the use of DU in Iraq by the US is causing a catastrophic health crisis. Some have even referred to it as “low-grade nuclear warfare.”[33] Where do you stand on this issue?

The levels of birth defects, cancer, and other consequences of the US assault on Iraq are shocking. Whether the cause is DU remains uncertain—same in other areas. There are many sources of toxicity in warfare. The authors of the published studies have suggested that DU might be the cause, but report that they cannot be confident. To my knowledge, serious weapons specialists and nuclear scientists deeply concerned about these issues have reached no definite conclusions.

The people of Vietnam also suffer from an inordinate number of birth defects. In comparing that situation to the use of DU in Iraq, is it possible that the inability to reach definite conclusions about health and environmental issues is intentional?[34] Are there political factors that get in the way of scientific research that has the potential to establish causation?

There is a valuable new study of the effects of Agent Orange on South Vietnamese by Fred Wilcox, Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam—a very serious work, beyond anything else I’ve seen. He had an earlier book on its effects on US soldiers: Waiting for an Army to Die: The Tragedy of Agent Orange.[35] Since we last spoke there have been some investigations of the impact of US weaponry in the attack on Fallujah. One technical study found unusually high levels of enriched uranium, presumably from DU, along with other dangerous substances.[36] Another study, reported by Patrick Cockburn in the London Independent and in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that “Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.” The study, by Iraqi and British doctors, found “a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.”[37]

That the marine attack on Fallujah in November 2004 (the second major assault) was a major war crime was evident at once even from the (generally supportive) US reporting. These new investigations surely merit widespread attention (they have received almost none) and serious inquiry, in fact war crimes trials, if that were imaginable. It is not: only the weak and defeated are subjected to such indignities.

There can hardly be any serious doubt that political factors interfere with scientific research in all such cases, massively in fact; and there are quite a few. The vicious US-supported Israeli invasion of Gaza in December 2008–January 2009 is another case that should be investigated. The heroic Norwegian physicians Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse, who worked under horrible conditions at the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza right through the worst days, reported effects of unknown lethal munitions that surely would receive extensive inquiry, bitter condemnation, and calls for punishment if the agents were enemy states.[38]

DU munitions in the US are produced by contractor-owned, contractor-operated facilities. Is this a way to deflect potential liability?[39]

In the case of Agent Orange, the US government claimed not to be aware that it contained dioxin, one of the most lethal known carcinogens. Wilcox provides evidence that the corporations providing the materials to the government were well aware of this, and chose not to remove the lethal components to save costs.[40] That Washington was unaware seems hardly credible, most likely an instance of what has sometimes been called “intentional ignorance.” It should be remembered that when he escalated the attack on South Vietnam fifty years ago from support for a murderous client state to outright US aggression, President Kennedy authorized the use of chemical weapons to destroy ground cover and also food crops, a crime in itself, even apart from the dreadful scale and character of the consequences, with deformed fetuses to this day, several generations down the line in Saigon hospitals as a result of persistent genetic mutations.[41] Somehow none of this exercises those who passionately proclaim their devotion to “right to life” even for the fertilized egg.

However, it is unlikely that the issue of liability will arise for the reason already mentioned. The powerful are self-immunized from even inquiry, let alone punishment for their crimes.[42]

The Radiation Protection Center in Baghdad has found a “clear radiation trail” from tanks hit by DU penetrators to their relocation to scrap sites.[43] What obligations to cleanup do the US and the UK have? How likely is it?

Obligations can be legal or moral. The US and UK invasion was a textbook example of the crime of aggression, “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole,” in the wording of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which sentenced Nazi war criminals to death for committing this crime. We should therefore have the honesty either to concede that the tribunal was judicial murder, hence our crime, or to recognize that George Bush, Tony Blair, and their accomplices should be subjected to the legal principles established at Nuremberg. Cleanup would be one important obligation on legal grounds, but a minor one in context. At the very least, the US and UK are obligated to provide massive reparations for their crimes against Iraq.

Judgment on moral grounds depends on what one’s moral principles are. There is no doubt that cleanup—in fact, far more—would be regarded as a moral obligation if the crimes had been carried out by an enemy. Therefore it is an obligation for us if we are capable of accepting one of the most elementary of moral principles, found in every moral code worth consideration: the principle of universality, holding that we should apply to ourselves the standards we impose on others, if not more stringent ones.

How likely is it? Highly unlikely unless the dominant elites, particularly the educated classes, make an effort to rise to a level of civilization for which there is, unfortunately, no sign. In fact, even raising the issue arouses horror and often hysteria.

Does secrecy in matters of radioactive releases—intentional or unintentional—pose a danger equal to the materials themselves?[44]

Perhaps. But the greatest threat, I think, is the evasion and suppression of what is known, or could easily be known if there were any authentic concern for terrible crimes. Of course there is much anguish when someone else is guilty, but the crucial case, always, is when we ourselves are the perpetrators—clearly the most crucial case for us, on elementary moral grounds. Sometimes there is awareness, though ineffectual. Thomas Jefferson famously said that “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever,” referring to the crime of slavery. John Quincy Adams, the great grand strategist who was the intellectual author of Manifest Destiny, expressed very similar thoughts in reflecting on the “extermination” of the indigenous population with “merciless and perfidious cruelty… among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement.” Their concerns should resonate painfully to the present day. Those who preach most eloquently about their devotion to their Lord express only contempt for such thoughts; and they have plenty of company, needless to say. The US and its intellectual community are breaking no new ground, of course. They are following the course typical of systems of power, throughout history. We should, I think, take all of this as an indication of the great chasm that lies between the most advanced cultures and minimal standards of elementary decency, honesty, and moral integrity. Not a small problem, quite apart from the matters we are discussing.

^4.

Nuclear Threats

Laray Polk: What immediate tensions do you perceive that could lead to nuclear war? How close are we?

Noam Chomsky: Actually, nuclear war has come unpleasantly close many times since 1945. There are literally dozens of occasions in which there was a significant threat of nuclear war. There was one time in 1962 when it was very close, and furthermore, it’s not just the United States. India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the issues remain. Both India and Pakistan are expanding their nuclear arsenals with US support. There are serious possibilities involved with Iran—not Iranian nuclear weapons, but just attacking Iran—and other things can just go wrong. It’s a very tense system, always has been. There are plenty of times when automated systems in the United States—and in Russia, it’s probably worse—have warned of a nuclear attack which would set off an automatic response except that human intervention happened to take place in time, and sometimes in a matter of minutes.[45] That’s playing with fire. That’s a low-probability event, but with low-probability events over a long period, the probability is not low.

There is another possibility that, I think, is not to be dismissed: nuclear terror. Like a dirty bomb in New York City, let’s say. It wouldn’t take tremendous facility to do that. I know US intelligence or people like Graham Allison at Harvard who works on this, they regard it as very likely in the coming years—and who knows what kind of reaction there would be to that. So, I think there are plenty of possibilities. I think it is getting worse. Just like the proliferation problem is getting worse. Take a couple of cases: In September 2009, the Security Council did pass a resolution, S/RES/1887, which was interpreted here as a resolution against Iran. In part it was, but it also called on all states to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That’s three states: India, Pakistan, and Israel. The Obama administration immediately informed India that this didn’t apply to them; it informed Israel that it doesn’t apply to them.[46]

If India expands its nuclear capacity, Pakistan almost has to; it can’t compete with India with conventional forces. Not surprisingly, Pakistan developed its nuclear weapons with indirect US support. The Reagan administration pretended they didn’t know anything about it, which of course they did.[47] India reacted to resolution 1887 by announcing that they could now produce nuclear weapons with the same yield as the superpowers.[48] A year before, the United States had signed a deal with India, which broke the pre-existing regime and enabled the US to provide them with nuclear technology—though they hadn’t signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That’s in violation of congressional legislation going back to India’s first bomb, I suppose around 1974 or so. The United States kind of rammed it through the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and that opens a lot of doors. China reacted by sending nuclear technology to Pakistan. And though the claim is that the technology for India is for civilian use, that doesn’t mean much even if India doesn’t transfer that to nuclear weapons. It means they’re free to transfer what they would have spent on civilian use to nuclear weapons.[49]

And then comes this announcement in 2009 that the International Atomic Energy Agency has been repeatedly trying to get Israel to open its facilities to inspection. The US along with Europe usually has been able to block it. And more significant is the effort in the international agencies to try to move toward a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East, which would be quite significant.[50] It wouldn’t solve all the problems, but whatever threat Iran may be assumed to pose—and that’s a very interesting question in itself, but let’s suppose for the moment that there is a threat—it would certainly be mitigated and might be ended by a nuclear-weapon-free zone, but the US is blocking it every step of the way.[51]

Now that Iran’s reactor at Bushehr is running, the current fear is that they’re going to use the plutonium produced from the fuel cycle to make weapons. The questions raised about Iran’s possible nuclear weapons program are similar to those asked of Israel—[52]

Since the 1960s. And in fact, the Nixon administration made an unwritten agreement with Israel that it wouldn’t do anything to compel Israel, or even induce them, to drop what they call their ambiguity policy—not saying whether or not they have them.[53] That’s now very alive because there’s this regular five-year Non-Proliferation Review Conference. In 1995, under strong pressure from the Arab states, Egypt primarily, there was an agreement that they would move toward a nuclear-weapon-free zone and the Clinton administration signed on. It was reiterated in 2000. In 2005 the Bush administration just essentially undermined the whole meeting. They basically said, “Why do anything?”

It came up again in May 2010. Egypt is now speaking for the Non-Aligned Movement, 118 countries, they’re this year’s representative, and they pressed pretty hard for a move in that direction. The pressure was so strong that the United States accepted it in principle and claims to be committed to it, but Hillary Clinton said the time’s “not ripe for establishing the zone.”[54] And the administration just endorsed Israel’s position, essentially saying, “Yes, but only after a comprehensive peace agreement in the region,” which the US and Israel can delay indefinitely. So, that’s basically saying, “it’s fine, but it’s never going to happen.” And this is barely ever reported, so nobody knows about it. Just as almost nobody knows about Obama informing India and Israel that the resolutions don’t apply to them. All of this just increases the risk of nuclear war.

It’s more than that actually. You know, the threats against Iran are nontrivial and that, of course, induce them to move toward nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Obama in particular has strongly increased the offensive capacity that the US has on the island of Diego Garcia, which is a major military base they use for bombing the Middle East and Central Asia.[55] In December 2009, the navy dispatched a submarine tender for nuclear submarines in Diego Garcia. Presumably they were already there, but this is going to expand their capacity, and they certainly have the capacity to attack Iran with nuclear weapons. And he also sharply increased the development of deep-penetration bombs, a program that mostly languished under the Bush administration. As soon as Obama came in, he accelerated it, and it was quietly announced—but I think not reported here—that they put a couple of hundred of them in Diego Garcia. That’s all aimed at Iran. Those are all pretty serious threats.[56]

Actually, the question of the Iranian threat is quite interesting. It’s discussed as if that’s the major issue of the current era. And not just in the United States, Britain too. This is “the year of Iran,” Iran is the major threat, the major policy issue. It does raise the question: What’s the Iranian threat? That’s never seriously discussed, but there is an authoritative answer, which isn’t reported. The authoritative answer was given by the Pentagon and intelligence in April 2010; they have an annual submission to Congress on the global security system, and of course discussed Iran.[57] They made it very clear that the threat is not military. They said Iran has very low military spending even by the standards of the region; their strategic doctrine is completely defensive, it’s designed to deter an invasion long enough to allow diplomacy to begin to operate; they have very little capacity to deploy force abroad. They say if Iran were developing nuclear capability, which is not the same as weapons, it would be part of the deterrent strategy, which is what most strategic analysts take for granted, so there’s no military threat. Nevertheless, they say it’s the most significant threat in the world. What is it? Well, that’s interesting. They’re trying to extend their influence in neighboring countries; that’s what’s called destabilizing. So if we invade their neighbors and occupy them, that’s stabilizing. Which is a standard assumption. It basically says, “Look, we own the world.” And if anybody doesn’t follow orders, they’re aggressive.

In fact, that’s going on with China right now. It’s been a kind of a hassle, also hasn’t been discussed much in the United States—but is discussed quite a lot in China, about control of the seas in China’s vicinity. Their navy is expanding, and that’s discussed here and described as a major threat. What they’re trying to do is to be able to control the waters nearby China—the South China Sea, Yellow Sea, and so on—and that’s described here as aggressive intent. The Pentagon just released a report on the dangers of China. Their military budget is increasing; it’s now one-fifth what the US spends in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is of course a fraction of the military budget. Not long ago, the US was conducting naval exercises in the waters off China. China was protesting particularly over the plans to send an advanced nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, into those waters, which, according to China, has the capacity to hit Beijing with nuclear weapons—and they didn’t like it. And the US formally responded by saying that China is being aggressive because they’re interfering with freedom of the seas. Then, if you look at the strategic analysis literature, they describe it as a classic security dilemma where two sides are in a confrontation. Each regards what it’s doing as essential to its security and regards the other side as threatening its security, and we’re supposed to take the threat seriously. So if China is trying to control waters off its coast, that’s aggression and it’s harming our security. That’s a classic security dilemma. You could just imagine if China were carrying out naval exercises in the Caribbean—in fact, in the mid-Pacific—it would be considered intolerable. That’s very much like Iran. The basic assumption is “We own the world,” and any exercise of sovereignty within our domains, which is most of the world, is aggression.

Is there any type of nuclear racism involved in these issues?

I think it would be the same if there were no nuclear weapons. I mean, it goes back to long-term planning assumptions, and I don’t really think it’s racism. Let’s take a concrete case. We have a lot of internal documents now, some interesting ones from the Nixon years. Nixon and Kissinger, when they were planning to overthrow the government of Chile in 1973, their position was that this government’s intolerable, it’s exercising its sovereignty, it’s a threat to us, so it has to go.[58] It’s what Kissinger called a virus that might spread contagion elsewhere, maybe into southern Europe—not that Chile would attack southern Europe—but that a successful, social democratic parliamentary system would send the wrong message to Spain and Italy. They might be inclined to try the same, it would mean its contagion would spread and the system falls apart. And they understood that, in fact stated that, if we can’t control Latin America, how are we going to control the rest of the world? We at least have to control Latin America. There was some concern—which was mostly meaningless, but it was there—about a Soviet penetration into Latin America, and they recognized that if Europe gets more involved in Latin America, that would tend to deter any Soviet penetration, but they concluded the US couldn’t allow that because it would interfere with US dominance of the region. So, it’s not racist. It’s a matter of dominance.

In fact, the same is happening with NATO. Why didn’t NATO disappear after the Soviet Union collapsed? If anybody read the propaganda, they’d say, “Well, it should have disappeared, it was supposed to protect Europe from the Russian hordes.” Okay, no more Russian hordes, so it should disappear. It expanded in violation of verbal promises to Gorbachev. And it expanded, I think, largely in order to keep Europe under control. One of the purposes of NATO all along was to prevent Europe from moving in an independent path, maybe a kind of Gaullist path, and they had to expand NATO to make sure that Europe stays a vassal. If you look back to the planning record during the Second World War, it’s very instructive. It’s almost never discussed, but there were high-level meetings from 1939 to 1945 under the Roosevelt administration, which sort of planned for the postwar years. They knew the United States would emerge from the war at least very well off and maybe completely triumphant. They didn’t know how much at first. The principles that were established were very interesting and explicit, and later implemented. They devised the concept of what they called the Grand Area, which the US must dominate. And within the Grand Area, there can be no exercise of sovereignty that interferes with US plans—explicit, almost those words. What’s the Grand Area? Well, at a minimum, it was to include the entire Western Hemisphere, the entire Far East, and the whole British Empire—former British Empire—which, of course, includes the Middle East energy resources. As one high-level advisor later put it: “If we can control Middle East energy, we can control the world.”[59] Well, that’s the Grand Area.

As the Russians began to grind down the German armies after Stalingrad, they recognized that Germany was weakened—at first, they thought that Germany would emerge from the war as a major power. So the Grand Area planning was extended to as much of Eurasia as possible, including at least Western Europe, which is the industrial-commercial center of the region. That’s the Grand Area, and within that area, there can be no exercise of sovereignty. Of course, they can’t carry it off.

For example, China is too big to push around and they’re exercising their sovereignty. Iran is trying, it’s small enough so you can push them around—they think so. Even Latin America is getting out of control. Brazil was not following orders. And, in fact, a lot of South America isn’t, and the whole thing is causing a lot of desperation in Washington. You can see it if you look at the official pronouncements. China is not paying attention to US sanctions on Iran. US sanctions on Iran have absolutely no legitimacy. It’s just that people are afraid of the United States. And Europe more or less goes along with them, but China doesn’t. They disregard them. They observe the UN sanctions, which have formal legitimacy but are toothless, so they’re happy to observe them. The major effect of the UN sanctions is to keep Western competitors out of Iran, so they can move in and do what they feel like. The US is pretty upset about it. In fact, the State Department issued some very interesting statements, interesting because of their desperate tone. They warned China that, this is almost a quote, “if you want to be accepted into the international community, you have to meet your international responsibilities, and the international responsibilities are to follow our orders.” You can see both the desperation in US planning circles and you can kind of imagine the reaction of the Chinese foreign office, they’re probably laughing, you know, why should they follow US orders? They’ll do what they like.

They’re trying to recover their position as a major world power. For a long time they were the major world power before what they call the “century of humiliation.” They are now coming back to a three-thousand-year tradition of being the center of the world and dismissing the barbarians. So, okay, “we’ll just go back to that and the US can’t do anything about it,” which is causing enormous frustration. That’s why they get terribly upset when China doesn’t observe US sanctions on Iran. By now it’s not China and Iran that are isolated on Iran sanctions; it’s the United States that’s isolated. The nonaligned countries—118 countries, most of the world—have always supported Iran’s right to enrich uranium, still do. Turkey recently constructed a pipeline to Iran, so has Pakistan. Turkey’s trade with Iran has been going way up, they’re planning to triple it the next few years. In the Arab world, public opinion is so outraged at the United States that a real majority now favors Iran developing nuclear weapons, not just nuclear energy. The US doesn’t take that too seriously, they figure that dictatorships can control the populations. But when Turkey’s involved or, certainly, when China’s involved, it becomes a threat. That’s why you get these desperate tones.

Apart from Europe, almost nobody’s accepting US orders on this. Brazil’s probably the most important country in the South. Not long ago, Brazil and Turkey made a deal with Iran for enriching a large part of the uranium; the US quickly shot that down. They don’t want it, but the world is just hard to control.[60] The Grand Area planning was okay at the end of the Second World War when the US was overwhelmingly dominant, but it has been kind of fractured ever since—and during the last few years, considerably. And I think this is related to the proliferation issues. The US is strongly supporting India and Israel, and the reason is they’ve now turned India into a close strategic ally—Israel always was. India, on the other hand, is playing it pretty cool. They’re also improving their relations with China.

President Obama recently secured military basing rights in Australia and formed a new free-trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which excludes China. Is this move related to the South China Sea?

Yes, in particular that, but it’s more general. It has to do with the “classic security dilemma” that I mentioned before, referring to the strategic analysis literature. China’s efforts to gain some measure of control over nearby seas and its major trade routes are inconsistent with what the US calls “freedom of the seas”—a term that doesn’t extend to Chinese military maneuvers in the Caribbean or even most of the world’s oceans, but does include the US right to carry out military maneuvers and establish naval bases everywhere. For different reasons, China’s neighbors are none too happy about its actions, particularly Vietnam and the Philippines, which have competing claims to these waters, but others as well.[61] The focus of US policy is slowly shifting from the Middle East—though that remains—to the Pacific, as openly announced. That includes new bases from Australia to South Korea (and a continuing and very significant conflict over Okinawa), and also economic agreements, called “free-trade agreements,” though the phrase is more propaganda than reality, as in other such cases.[62] Much of it is a system to “contain China.”

To what degree are current maritime sovereignty disputes related to oil and gas reserves?

In part. There are underseas fossil-fuel resources, and a good deal of contention among regional states about rights to them. But it’s more than that. The new US base on Jeju Island in South Korea, bitterly protested by islanders, is not primarily concerned with energy resources. Other issues have to do with the Malacca Straits, China’s main trade route, which does involve oil and gas but also much else.[63]

In the background is the more general concern over parts of the world escaping from US control and influence, the contemporary variant of Grand Area policies. Much of this extends the practice of earlier hegemonic powers, though the scale of US post–World War II planning and implementation has been in a class by itself because of its unique wealth and power.

^5.

China and the Green Revolution

Laray Polk: In researching the cutting-edge innovations in energy in the US, it’s pretty much the same players: GE; IBM; Raytheon; the DOE, they’re funding fusion research; and a whole new department called ARPA-E based on DARPA, but with a focus on energy. Soldiers are currently using solar cells in the field and the navy is testing algae-based fuel.[64]

Noam Chomsky: Got to keep the military going, doesn’t matter about the rest of us. Profits and the military: those are the two things that matter. And the military, of course, is not unrelated to profit.[65]

It’s discouraging to see who is developing what. I can’t see any of those entities marketing energy any differently than from the past.

It’s even true of very simple things just take weatherization of homes. That’s not high technology. It could put huge numbers of people to work, it would be a great stimulus for the economy, and it would be quite effective in retarding the effects of climate change. It’s not a solution to the problem, but at least it provides more time to do something about it.

Recently there was a company in England that does weatherization that announced it had essentially done about everything you can in England. Almost everybody had it and they wanted to shift to the United States with a huge untapped market, but they’re not sure it’s going to be economically feasible here because they don’t get any assistance.[66]

And, in fact, that’s what’s happening with the green technology. China provides a support system for development of green technology.[67] The United States does too, but a lot is for the support of military technology. That’s actually a change from the past, a regression from the past. The actual US economy since the colonies has relied quite substantially on government intervention. That goes right back to the earliest days of independence, and for advanced industry in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The American system of mass production, interchangeable parts, quality control, and so on—which kind of astonished the world—was largely designed in government armories. The railroad system, which was the biggest capital investment and, of course, extremely significant for economic development and expansion, was managed by the Army Corps of Engineers. It was too complicated for private business.

Taylorism, the management technique that essentially turns workers into robots, came out of government and military production. The same was true of radio in the 1920s, but the big upsurge was in the postwar period—right where we are, in fact. Down below where we’re sitting, there used to be a Second World War temporary building, where I was for many years, where they were developing—this was the 1950s, and then on through the ’60s and beyond—computers, the beginnings of the Internet, information technology, software, everything that became the modern high-tech revolution. Almost all of it was on Pentagon funding—ARPA, it was then, now it’s DARPA—or just the three armed services, and that laid the basis for the US high-tech industries, very substantially, and, in fact, often with a long delay. Even computers, the core of the modern economy, were being developed from around the early 1950s, mostly with government funding. They weren’t commercially viable for about thirty years.

IBM, by the early ’60s, was finally able to produce its own computer. They had learned enough at the government-funded laboratories to do it. It was the world’s fastest computer at the time, but it was way too expensive for business, they couldn’t buy it, so the government purchased it—I think it was for Los Alamos. In fact, procurement—and not just for computers, but also over the whole economy—has been a huge form of subsidy and it continues.[68]

That’s the way the economy developed. Now we’re screaming at China because they’re doing much the same with green technology, and we’re not doing it. We’ve regressed to the extent that this isn’t done very much anymore, although it still is plenty. If you take a walk around MIT, you’ll see big buildings of drug companies and genetic engineering. The reason is they’re feeding off the government-funded ideas, technology, and development that’s being done at the research labs and research universities like MIT. If you strolled around campus fifty years ago, you’d see small start-ups of electronic firms. Actually, on what’s now Route 128, that became Raytheon, and a high-tech corridor.[69]

There’s nothing new about this. This is the way economies develop. If there is an exception, I haven’t come across it. British development was like this, based on huge state intervention from the early eighteenth century. The same is true for the US, Germany, France, Japan, the East Asian miracles—all of them—China, of course. Market systems don’t yield fundamental innovation and development for obvious reasons. Innovation and development are long-term projects. They don’t give you profits tomorrow. In fact, they give you costs. So the state takes it over; the taxpayer, in other words, pays for it. It’s a system of essentially public subsidy, private profit. And it’s called capitalism, but has little resemblance to capitalism.

And Koch Industries?

You can look right out the window, that’s the Koch building.

So taxpayers’ money goes in, and there’s a mingling of industrial interests with university resources—resources meaning the intellectual capital—

And that’s publicly funded, substantially—

Then innovation goes out but it’s filtered through intellectual property rights—

Which is another form of government subsidy, and a major form. Take a look at the World Trade Organization rules. They’ve imposed patent conditions for the developing countries, which would have killed off industrial development in the rich countries if they had ever had to adhere to them.[70] The United States, for example, relied substantially on technology transfer—what’s now called piracy—from England, which was more advanced. In fact, England did the same for more advanced technology from India and Ireland, and from more skilled workers from the Lowlands, Belgium, and Holland. We did it then to England, and other countries are trying to do it too, but they’re barred from it by what are called free-trade rules, meaning: we protect what we want and we impose a market rigor on you.

There have been some good studies of this. Among the main beneficiaries of the World Trade Organization’s rigorous patent restrictions are the pharmaceutical corporations. They claim that they need it for research and development. This was investigated carefully by, among others, Dean Baker, a very good economist. He went through the records and found that the corporations themselves fund only a minority of their own R&D, and that’s misleading because it tends to be oriented toward the marketing side, copycat drugs, and so on. The basic funding comes from either the government or from foundations. He calculated that if funding for R&D for the big pharmaceutical corporations was raised to 100 percent public, and they were then compelled to sell their goods on the market, there’d be a colossal saving to consumers and no patent rights.[71] But that’s unthinkable; anything that interferes with profit is unthinkable. It can’t be discussed.

What role do politicians play in the distribution of federal funding for R&D, subsidy, and procurement?

Congress of course provides the funds, and the executive is deeply involved in decisions and implementation, with close involvement of industry lobbyists throughout. That aside, the decision makers in government have intimate ties with the corporate beneficiaries of subsidy and procurement in many other ways, ranging from campaign funding to privileged positions in the private sector if they play the game by the corporate rules.[72]

What factors in addition to massive investment have put China in the lead in green technology?

The business press and technology journals describe many factors, among them providing the required infrastructure. In the case of green technology, China began fairly modestly, and has been steadily advancing.

Take solar panels. China began manufacturing them in conventional ways and gained a large market share. A good deal of innovation and development comes directly out of manufacturing experience. This is not labor-intensive industry, so low labor costs were apparently not a major factor. Over time China has taken the lead in advanced solar panel technology, and now substantially dominates the international market. To illustrate how the US is falling behind in advanced manufacturing, US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu described Suntech power, after an on-site investigation, as a high-tech, automated factory that has developed a type of solar cell with world-record efficiencies. That is the result of careful planning in a framework of state industrial policy. It has its failures, but also real successes.[73]

^6.

Research and Religion (or, The Invisible Hand)

Laray Polk: Forty percent of the electorate in most states identify as evangelical. Pew Research indicates evangelical Christians largely reject anthropogenic climate change and are skeptical there is even solid evidence that the earth is warming.[74] So I think the extreme beliefs of the religious right benefit business interests and vice versa.

Noam Chomsky: That’s an interesting combination because the business leadership tends to be secular. On social issues, they’re what are called liberals. They’re perfectly happy to mobilize and support, by what are world standards, extremist religious organizations as their sort of storm troops and they kind of have to do it. Take a look at recent American history: it’s always been a very religious country, but until the past thirty years or so, there wasn’t much political mobilization of the religious right. It took off pretty much in the ’80s, and I think it’s correlated with the fact that the Republicans, who were in the lead on this, began to take positions that are so hostile to interests of the public that they were going to lose any possible votes. They had to mobilize some kind of constituency, so they turned to what are called “social issues.” The CEO of a corporation doesn’t care that much if there’s a law against, say, abortion. Their stratum of society is going to get it anyway, whatever the laws are. They’ll have everything they want.

And if you have to throw some red meat to voters out there whose views you just think are ridiculous, then you do it. In a way, a most striking case is the environment. If you took a poll among CEOs of the major corporations that fund the Chamber of Commerce and so on, I suspect they would be just like faculty members at the university. Maybe they donate to the Sierra Club in their private lives, but not in their public roles. In their public roles, not only do they fund propaganda campaigns to undermine support for global warming, but they also support the political party which is mobilizing those efforts.[75] Quite an interesting split between an institutional role and what are probably private beliefs. In their institutional role they have a function: they must maximize short-term profit and market share. Their jobs and salaries depend upon it. And that institutional role is driving them toward what I suspect is a fairly conscious commitment to longer-term destruction.

Do you think those aligned with the Republican Party are mostly funding doubt—doubt that climate scientists can be trusted?[76]

Or anyone. In fact, if you look at polls now it’s incredible. Last time I looked at a poll on this, I think approval of Congress was in single digits; the presidency, all corrupt, and Obama is probably anti-Christ anyway; the scientists, we can’t trust them, pointy-headed liberals; banks, we don’t like them, too big, but we’re not going to do anything about it except fund them; and so on across the board. Trust in institutions is extremely low, and, unfortunately, that has some resonances rather similar to late Weimar Germany—plenty of differences, but there are some similarities that are worth concern.

And they can appeal to something quite objective. Take a look at post–Second World War history. The first two decades, the ’50s and ’60s, were periods of very substantial growth. In fact, the highest growth in the country’s history—and egalitarian growth. People were gaining things, they were getting somewhere, and they had hope for the future and expectations, etc. The ’70s was a transition period. Since the ’80s, for the majority of the population, life has just gotten relatively worse: real wages and incomes have stagnated or declined; benefits, which were never very much, have declined; people have been getting by on working more hours per family, unsustainable debt, and asset inflation bubbles, but they crash.

So meanwhile, there’s plenty of wealth around. If everything were impoverished, it wouldn’t be so striking. You can read the front page of the New York Times and see it. A couple of weeks ago, they had an article on growing poverty in America, which is enormous, and another column on how luxury-good stores are marking up their prices because they can’t sell them fast enough, might as well mark them up anyway. That’s what the country’s coming to look like, so people are angry—and rightly angry. And nothing is being done about it except to make it worse.

So it’s a natural basis for preying on disillusionment and saying all institutions are rotten, get rid of all of them. The subtext being, you get rid of all of them, and we’ll take control. Unfortunately that’s the actual content of the libertarian conception, whatever the people may believe; they’re effectively calling for corporate tyranny.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber wrote: “Absolute and conscious ruthlessness in acquisition has often stood in the closest connection with the strictest conformity to tradition.”[77] Are there any parallels between Weber’s observations in 1904 and present conditions?

Depends what tradition one is thinking of. In the early days of the American Industrial Revolution, working people bitterly condemned the industrial system into which they were being driven as an assault on their fundamental values. They particularly condemned what they called “The New Spirit of the Age, Gain Wealth forgetting all but Self,” that is, the doctrine of “absolute and conscious ruthlessness in acquisition.”[78] The same was true of the people of England who resisted the enclosure movement and tried to preserve the “commons,” which were to be the common property and source of sustenance for all, and to be cared for by all—also one of the core features of Magna Carta, long forgotten.[79] There are innumerable other examples illustrating the radical attack on tradition by the doctrines of ruthlessness in acquisition. I think Weber would have agreed.

Rick Santorum accused Obama of practicing “phony theology” related to radical environmentalists who have a worldview that elevates the “Earth above man.” Santorum described his theology as “the belief that man should be in charge of the Earth and should have dominion over it and should be good stewards of it.”[80] There seems to be a discrepancy in worldview as to what constitutes good stewardship.

Without speculating on what Santorum is talking about, let’s take the lines you quote. A case can be made that the way to be a “good steward” of the earth is to abandon any thought of “dominion over it” and to recognize, with proper humility, that we must find a place within the natural world that will help sustain it not just for ourselves but for other creatures as well, and for future generations, recognizing values that are often upheld most firmly and convincingly within indigenous cultures.

Richard Land, host of the nationally syndicated radio show For Faith & Family, said the Christian electorate “would love to see a false smarty pants decapitated by a real intellectual … He [Newt Gingrich] would tear Obama’s head off.”[81] He seems to be saying one type of intellectualism is acceptable and the right kind, but the other is not.

When we look over the record of famous debates, we find that they are not “won” on the basis of serious argument, significant evidence, or intellectual values generally. Rather, the outcome turns on Nixon’s five o’clock shadow, Reagan’s sappy smile, lines like “have you no shame” or “you’re no Jack Kennedy,” etc. That’s not surprising. Debates are among the most irrational constructions that humans have developed. Their rules are designed to undermine rational interchange. A debater is not allowed to say, “That was a good point, I’ll have to rethink my views.” Rather, they must adhere blindly to their positions even when they recognize that they are wrong. And what are called “skilled debaters” know that they should use trickery and deceit rather than rational argument to “win.” I don’t know who Richard Land is, and if he regards Gingrich as a “real intellectual,” I don’t see much reason to explore further.

The term “intellectual” is typically used to refer to those who have sufficient privilege to be able to gain some kind of audience when they speak on public issues. The world’s greatest physicists are not called “intellectuals” if they devote themselves, laser-like, to the search for the Higgs boson. A carpenter with little formal schooling who happens to have very deep insight into international affairs and the factors that drive the economy and explains these matters to his family and friends is not called an “intellectual.” There is evidence that the more educated tend to be more indoctrinated and conformist—but nevertheless, or maybe therefore, they tend to provide the recognized “intellectual class.” We could devise a different concept that relates more closely to insight, understanding, creative intelligence, and similar qualities. But it would be a different concept.

Is there any value in skepticism without independent thinking?

Without independent thinking, skepticism would seem to reduce to “I don’t accept what you say.” It may be right not to accept it, but the stance is of value only if it is based on reasoned analysis and accompanied by sensible alternatives.

The current climate in the US—in addition to a lack of forums for reasoned debate—seems to be one of greed and also fear.

This has been a very frightened country from its origins. It’s a striking feature of American culture that is interesting, well studied. Now, it’s fear and also hopelessness. I’m just old enough to remember the Depression; objectively it was much worse. Most of my family was unemployed working-class, but there was a lot of hopefulness after the first few years. There was a sense that things are going to get better, we can do something about it, there’s organizing and government efforts—it’s bad, but we can get out of this. There isn’t that feeling now, and it may be objectively right. If we continue on the path of financialization of the economy and offshoring of production, there’s not going to be very much here for the working population.

It’s kind of interesting if you look back at the classical economists, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. They were sort of aware of this—they didn’t put it in precisely these terms—but if you take a look at Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, the famous phrase “invisible hand” appears once. It appears essentially in a critique of what’s going on right now. What he pretty much says is that, in England, if merchants and manufacturers preferred to import from abroad and sell abroad, they might make profit, but it would be bad for England. He says they’re going to have what sometimes is called a home bias—they’ll prefer to do business at home, so as if by an invisible hand, England will be saved the ravages of a global market.[82]

David Ricardo was even stronger. He said that he knows perfectly well that his comparative advantage theories would collapse if English manufacturers, investors, and merchants did their business elsewhere, and he said he hopes very much that this will never happen—that they’ll have, perhaps, a sentimental commitment to the home country—and he hopes this attitude never disappears. The insights of the classical economists were quite sound, whatever you think of the argument. And that’s essentially the world we’re living in.

^7.

Extraordinary Lives

Laray Polk: In your office, among all the reference materials, you have a rather large black-and-white photograph of Bertrand Russell. Did you have the opportunity to meet him?

Noam Chomsky: We never met. Our only contact was in 1967, when we were about to issue the “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” advocating support for resistance, not just protest, to the Vietnam War. I was delegated to contact well-known figures to ask for their support. The first person I wrote to was Russell, who answered immediately, agreeing to sign the statement.

How much impact do you think Russell’s nonproliferation work has had?[83]

It did not have as much of an impact as it should have. Russell was vilified in the US; there’s a good account in the book Bertrand Russell’s America.[84] Einstein, who often expressed similar views, was generally treated as a nice man who ought to go back to his study in Princeton. Nevertheless, it doubtless had some impact within those circles, then quite narrow, that were seeking to end the severe and immediate threat of nuclear weapons. In later years, that movement grew considerably, becoming a very powerful popular movement by the 1980s, probably a major factor in inducing Reagan to introduce his “Star Wars” fantasies so as to ward off protest. There’s good work on this by Lawrence Wittner.[85]

Another scientist comes to mind, Linus Pauling, also a signatory to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. I think you’ve mentioned having a great amount of respect for Pauling.

Pauling was a great scientist, but also a very dedicated and effective peace advocate. It was in the latter connection that I met him several times, on panels concerned with issues of war, aggression, and nuclear threats.

Also along these lines, you’ve mentioned Peggy Duff and her work with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.[86]

Peggy Duff was a remarkable woman. In the late 1940s, she was active in trying to end Britain’s shameful treatment of POWs after the war’s end. She then became a leading figure in the CND, and soon went on to become the driving force in organizing the international movement of opposition to the Vietnam War, and also other crucial matters, such as the brutal denial of elementary rights to Palestinians. She organized international conferences, and much else, and also published very valuable and informative studies of ongoing events, bringing out a great deal of material that was missing or distorted in the general media.[87] By rights, she should have won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The statement you mentioned, “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” was at the heart of a legal case in which you were named a co-conspirator. Is this the same incident of potential imprisonment that prompted your wife Carol to go back to school in case she had to become the sole breadwinner?[88]

Well before the trials were announced it was likely that the government would prosecute those who they regarded—mostly wrongly—as leaders of the resistance. That’s why Carol went back to school after sixteen years (we had three kids to support). I was an unindicted co-conspirator in the first trial, but on the opening day the prosecuting attorney announced that I would be the primary defendant in the next trial—eliciting an objection from defense counsel. The reason why I was a co-conspirator and others were conspirators was comical, but in fact the entire government case was worthy of the Marx brothers, and provided some interesting insight into the incapacity of the political police to comprehend dissent and resistance.[89]

Pauling said of his nonproliferation work, “As scientists we have knowledge of the dangers involved and therefore a special responsibility to make these dangers known.”[90] It seems that being honest with the science is not enough, that one has to also be engaged in international affairs and have a willingness to explore alternative definitions of what security means. Perhaps it could even be described as possessing a social direction that is different from the aspirations of politicians and others in the expert class.

It illustrates a basic moral principle. Privilege confers opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibility. Expert knowledge is one component of privilege. Politicians may sometimes have special knowledge, but that cannot be assumed.

Russell, Pauling, Duff, and others like them had integrity, and were willing to act in accord with decent values. In every society I know of since classical times there have been honest dissidents, usually a fringe, almost always punished in one or another way. The kind of punishment depends on the nature of the society. In contrast, obedience and subordination to power are typically honored within the society, even though often condemned by history (or in enemy states).[91]

In 1967 George Steiner wrote an open letter in reference to your essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” His letter and your response were published together in the New York Review of Books. Is there anything memorable or significant to you about that exchange?[92]

What is significant is that it took place. There was a good deal of soul-searching then, primarily among young people, about the course to follow as the Vietnam War moved on from major war crime to utter obscenity. And it reached to a certain extent to privileged intellectuals, the kind of people who read and wrote in the Review. One question—proper, and difficult—was whether to move on from protest to direct resistance, with all of its uncertainties and likely personal costs. Actually I’d been involved in it for several years before, in a tamer version: efforts to organize a national tax-resistance campaign in protest against the war. But by 1967, things were moving to a new stage.

What has changed and what has stayed the same since 1967?

One important change is that there have been a lot of victories, sometimes reaching to issues that were barely on the agenda not very long ago, like gay rights. And consciousness has greatly changed in many domains. Easy to list: rights of minorities, women, even rights of nature; opposition to aggression and terror; and much else.

It’s instructive to look back to see the horrendous atrocities that were easily tolerated then, but not today. It’s also instructive to look back at some of the dramatic moments of the ’60s, for example Paul Potter’s SDS speech at the first major mobilization in 1965, where he roused the crowd by declaring that the time had come to “name the system”; he couldn’t go on to name it, though now there would be no such hesitation. He opened by saying that “most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a strong but humble nation, that involved itself in world affairs only reluctantly, that respected the integrity of other nations and other systems, and that engaged in wars only as a last resort.”[93] Few young activists would say that now.

The achievements of the activism of the ’60s and their aftermath leave a significant legacy: it is possible to go on to take up what was cut off then. The fate of the civil rights movement is worth remembering. In the standard version, it peaked in 1963 with the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That’s the usual focus of the rhetoric on MLK Day. But King didn’t go home then. He went on to confront the burning issues of the day: the Vietnam War and the plight of the poor, with organizing in urban Chicago and elsewhere.[94] The luster quickly dimmed among Northern liberals. It’s fine to condemn racist Alabama sheriffs, but state crimes and class issues are off-limits. Few remember King’s speech in 1968, shortly before he was assassinated. He was in Memphis, Tennessee, supporting a strike of sanitation workers, and was intending to lead a March on Washington to found a movement of the poor and to call for meaningful legislation to address their plight.[95] The march took place, led by his widow, Coretta King. It passed through the sites of bitter struggle in the South and reached Washington, where the marchers set up a tent encampment, Resurrection City.[96] On orders of the most liberal administration since FDR, it was raided and destroyed by the police in the middle of the night, and the marchers were driven out of Washington.

The unfulfilled tasks remain, by now with new urgency after the disastrous economic policies of the past generation. And they can be undertaken from a higher plane.

Many of the old difficulties remain. Movements arise and grow and disappear leaving little organizational structure or memory. Most activism begins from almost zero. It also tends to be separated from other initiatives in a highly atomized society that is in some ways demoralized and frightened, despite its extraordinary wealth, privilege, and opportunities. And there are now questions of decent survival that cannot be shunted aside: the persistent danger of nuclear war, and the threat of environmental disaster, already approaching, and likely to become far more severe if we persist on our present course of denial.

^8.

MAD

(Mutually Assured Dependence)

Laray Polk: Kumi Naidoo, the international executive director of Greenpeace, has been criticized for bringing a social agenda, not unlike King’s, to the cause of environmental issues. Naidoo has said in response to his critics: “Ever since I came into this job, I’ve been accused of selling out, but I genuinely, passionately feel that the struggle to end global poverty and the struggle to avoid catastrophic climate change are two sides of the same coin. Traditional Western-led environmentalism has failed to make the right connections between environmental, social and economic justice. I came to the environmental movement because the poor are paying the first and most brutal impacts of climate change.”[97]

Noam Chomsky: I presume that serious environmentalists would agree that saving whales does not get at the root of the problem, and that occupying oil rigs is at best a tactic undertaken to direct attention to deeper causes. On Naidoo, his approach seems to me fully justified, in other respects too. The poor who are (as usual) the victims suffering the most have also often been in the forefront of addressing the root problems. One striking example is the People’s Summit in Bolivia, with its call for a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, an appeal voiced by indigenous people worldwide and a challenge to the predatory and lemminglike pursuit of short-term gain by the rich.[98]

Looking at Bolivia’s ecology, it makes sense why they would have the most robust protections for nature: their glaciers are melting, and they’re losing the ability to predict natural cycles of water distribution necessary for maintaining food crops. Those are conditions not unique to Bolivia or Andean glaciers, yet they’re prepared to act.[99] What aspects of cultural practice prepare some communities for addressing ecological realities head-on? Conversely, what aspects of cultural practice impair—and perhaps immunize—other communities to ecological realities?

Looking at the ecology of the rich societies—the US for example—it also makes sense to move toward robust protections for nature. These past few months provide many warnings.[100]

There are many differences between Bolivia—the poorest country in South America—and the US, which by rights should be the richest country in world history, thanks to its unparalleled advantages.

One difference is that the major political force within Bolivia is the indigenous majority. Not only in Bolivia, but worldwide, indigenous communities (“first nations,” “aboriginal,” “tribal,” whatever they call themselves) have been in the forefront of recognizing that if there is to be a hope of decent survival, we must learn to organize our societies and lives so that care for “the commons”—the common possessions of all of us—must become a very high priority, as it has been in traditional societies, quite often. The West too. It’s rarely recognized that Magna Carta not only laid the basis for what became over centuries formal protection for civil and human rights, but also stressed the preservation of the commons from autocratic destruction and privatization—the Charter of the Forests, one of the two components of Magna Carta.[101]

In contrast, the US is a business-run society, to an extent beyond any other in the developed world. Enormous power lies in the hands of a highly class-conscious business elite, who, in Adam Smith’s words, are the “principal architects” of policy and make sure that their own interests are “most peculiarly attended to” no matter how “grievous” the effects on others, including the people of their own society and their colonies (Smith’s concern) and future generations (which must be our concern). In the contemporary United States there has been an increasing growth in the power of the ideology of short-term gains, whatever the consequences. The US business classes have been admirably forthright in announcing publicly their intention of running huge propaganda campaigns to convince the public to ignore the ongoing destruction of the environment, by now quite hard to miss even for the most blind. And these campaigns have had some effect on public opinion, as polls show.[102]

As for what “immunize [the culture] to ecological realities,” in the US, it is useful to read the public pronouncements of the Chamber of Commerce (the main business lobby), the American Petroleum Institute, and other core components of the dominant business classes. Of course, that requires the contributions of the information and political systems, largely willing to line up in the same parade with only occasional hesitation.

During the Tar Sands Action in Washington, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute told the press, “the protesters are really protesting jobs.” What do you make of API’s statement?[103]

The translation of the API statement to English is easy: “The Tar Sands Action is protesting an initiative that will severely harm local environments and accelerate the global rush to disaster—while putting plenty of bucks in our pockets for us to hoard or spend while we watch the ship sinking.”

From what I know of the Tar Sands Action, it consists of people whose priorities are virtually the opposite of the API’s. They want to maintain an environment in which people can live decent lives, to protect their grandchildren from disaster, and to create far more good jobs by using the ample resources available to develop a sustainable energy future while also rebuilding a decaying society and turning it to different and far more healthy directions.[104] But, admittedly, they have inadequate concern for the bulging profits of the super-rich and their desperate need to run the world to the ground.

The lack of serious media attention seems to me to fall into the normal pattern of downplaying the threat of global warming, along with general dislike of popular activism, which might revitalize democracy and threaten elite control. As for the former pattern, it is standard. Open the morning’s paper and it is likely to be illustrated.

Today (August 17, 2012), for example, the press reports increasing reliance on Saudi oil, welcoming their increased production in response to US demands, but warning of a problem: dependence on foreign sources. Fortunately, the report continues, the problem is only temporary because we will soon have massive supplies from Canadian tar sands and expansion of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico—while also accelerating the race toward environmental catastrophe, a topic too insignificant to mention.[105]

On the “big twin threats of nuclear weapons and climate change” and the fallacy of a “limited nuclear war,” activist and physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote: “Recent studies have concluded that even a limited nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India, for example—involving perhaps 100 warheads—would significantly disrupt the global climate for at least a decade and would kick at least 5 million tons of smoke into the stratosphere. Estimates suggest this would potentially lead to the death of up to a billion people because of the effect of this smoke on global agriculture.”[106]

Any concluding comments on the threat of nuclear war in a world already challenged by ecological collapse?

Sixty years ago President Eisenhower warned that “a major war would destroy the Northern Hemisphere.”[107] Notwithstanding his warning, a few years later President Kennedy was willing to face his subjective probability of one-third to one-half of nuclear war to establish the principle that we have the right to ring the USSR with missiles and military bases, but they do not have the right to place their first missiles beyond its borders, in Cuba, then being subjected to a brutal terrorist attack that was scheduled to lead to invasion in the month when the missiles were secretly dispatched.[108] That was the essence of the issue. We escaped that time, but it was not the last. A decade later, in 1973, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert to warn the Russians to keep their hands off when he was informing Israeli leaders that they could violate with impunity a cease-fire established under US-Russian auspices—so we have just learned from declassified documents.[109] Ten years later, Reaganite adventurism, probing Russian defenses at their borders, led a serious war scare as Russia feared an imminent nuclear attack.[110] There have been all too many cases of programmed missile attacks aborted by human intervention minutes before launch, and while we don’t have Russian records, it’s likely that their performance is worse. Right now President Obama is planning to establish an antimissile system—recognized on all sides to be a potential first-strike weapon—close to the Russian border, leading them to enhance their offensive weapons capacity.[111] According to the German press, Israel right now is loading nuclear-tipped missiles on the advanced new submarines that Germany has transferred to Israel, in the full knowledge that they are likely to be deployed in the Persian Gulf as part of the threat of escalated war against Iran.[112] And there is much more.

All of these crises can be mitigated or overcome. Many of the major barriers to doing so are right at home—a fortunate situation, because these are the factors that we can best hope to influence—hardly easy, but not impossible.

Those who choose to know, do know. The current issue of the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is devoted to the exciting prospects for science in the twenty-first century. The distinguished scientist who introduces the collection reviews these possibilities, adding, rather plaintively, “If we can manage to avoid total human disaster resulting from societal and environmental challenges (matters that in fact demand our most serious and immediate attention).”[113]

Bolivian campesinos understand.[114]

^{Appendix 1}

Conversation between Gen. Groves and Lt. Col. Rea, August 25, 1945

On September 12, 1945, the New York Times published a front-page story by William L. Laurence, “U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales.” The story and the transcript below have a direct correlation: Laurence’s report downplays radiation as the cause of death and suffering as a result of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and portrays symptoms described by the Japanese as propaganda meant to solicit sympathy. Laurence had been hired in March 1945 by the US War Department to write official statements and news stories; in 1946 he won a Pulitzer for a series of ten articles appearing in the New York Times on the “significance of the atomic bomb.”

TOP SECRET

MEMORANDUM of Telephone Conversation between General Groves and Lt. Col. Rea, Oak Ridge Hospital, 9:00 a.m., 25 August 1945.

G: “…. which fatally burned 30,000 victims during the first two weeks following its explosion.”

R: Ultra-violet—is that the word?

G: Yes.

R: That’s kind of crazy.

G: Of course, it’s crazy—a doctor like me can tell that. “The death toll at Hiroshima and at Nagasaki, the other Japanese city blasted atomically, is still rising, the broadcast said. Radio Tokyo described Hiroshima as a city of death. 90% of its houses, in which 250,000 had lived, were instantly crushed.” I don’t understand the 250,000 because it had a much bigger population a number of years ago before the war started, and it was a military city. “Now it is peopled by ghost parade, the living doomed to die of radioactivity burns.”

R: Let me interrupt you here a minute. I would say this: I think it’s good propaganda. The thing is these people got good and burned—good thermal burns.

G: That’s the feeling I have. Let me go on here and give you the rest of the picture. “So painful are these injuries that sufferers plead: ‘Please kill me,’ the broadcast said. No one can ever completely recover.”

R: This has been in our paper, too, last night.

G: Then it goes on: “Radioactivity caused by the fission of the uranium used in atomic bombs is taking a toll of mounting deaths and causing reconstruction workers in Hiroshima to suffer various sicknesses and ill health.”

R: I would say this: You yourself, as far as radioactivity is concerned, it isn’t anything immediate, it’s a prolonged thing. I think what these people have, they just got a good thermal burn, that’s what it is. A lot of these people, first of all, they don’t notice it much. You may get burned and you may have a little redness, but in a couple of days you may have a big blister or a sloughing of the skin, and I think that is what these people have had.

G: That is brought out a little later on. Now it says here: “A special news correspondent of the Japs said that three days after the bomb fell, there were 30,000 dead, and two weeks later the death toll had mounted to 60,000 and is continuing to rise.” One thing is they are finding the bodies.

R: They are getting the delayed action of the burn. For instance, at the Coconut Grove, they didn’t all die at once, you know—they were dying for a month afterward.

G: Now then, he says—this is the thing I wanted to ask you about particularly—“An examination of soldiers working on reconstruction projects one week after the bombing showed that their white corpuscles had diminished by half and a severe deficiency of red corpuscles.”

R: I read that, too—I think there’s something hookum [sic] about that.

G: Would they both go down?

R: They may, yes—they may, but that’s awfully quick, pretty terrifically quick. Of course, it depends—but I wonder if you aren’t getting a good dose of propaganda.

G: Of course, we are getting a good dose of propaganda, due to the idiotic performance of the scientists and another one who is also on the project, and the newspapers and the radio wanting news.

R: Of course, those Jap scientists over there aren’t so dumb either and they are making a play on this, too. They evidently know what the possibility is. Personally, I discounted an awful lot of it, as it’s too early, and in the second place, I think that a lot of these deaths they are getting are just delayed thermal burns.

G: You see what we are faced with. Matthias is having trouble holding his people out there.

R: Do you want me to get you some real straight dope on this, just how it affects them, and call you back in a bit?

G: That’s true—that’s what I want. Did you also see anything about the Geiger counter? It says that the fact that the uranium had permeated into the ground has been easily ascertained by using a Geiger counter and it has been disclosed that the uranium used in the atomic bomb is harmful to human bodies. Then it talks about this, which is just the thing that we thought—The majority of injured persons received burns from powerful ultra-violet rays and those within a two-kilometer radius from the center received burns two or three times, which, I suppose, is second or third degree. Those within three to four kilometers received burns to the extent that their skin is burned bright red, but if these burns are caused by ultra-violet, they hardly felt the heat at that time. Later, however, blisters formed resulting in dropsy.

R: That’s why I say it’s got to be a thermal burn.

G: Then they talk about the burned portions of the bodies are infected from the inside.

R: Well, of course, any burn is potentially an infected wound. We treat any burn as an infected wound. I think you had better get the anti-propagandists out.

G: We can’t, you see, because the whole damage has been done by our own people. There is nothing we can do except sit tight. The reason I am calling you is because we can’t get hold of Ferry and because I might be asked at any time and I would like to be able to answer. Did you see about the Army men who had received burns on reconstruction? “Examination of 33 servicemen, of whom 10 had received burns in reconstruction projects, one week after the bombing took place, showed those with burns had 3150 white corpuscles and others, who were apparently healthy, had 3800, compared to the ordinary healthy person who has 7,000 to 8,000.” This is a drastic decrease. Comes over from Tokyo. On the other hand, servicemen with burns had only 3,000,000 red corpuscles and others apparently healthy had just a little bit more when compared to 4,500,000 to 5,000,000 in the ordinary healthy person.” What is that measured by?

R: You go by cubic millimeters. I would say this right off the bat—Anybody with burns, the red count goes down after a while, and the white count may go down, too, just from an ordinary burn. I can’t get too excited about that.

G: We are not bothered a bit, excepting for—what they are trying to do is create sympathy. The sad part of it all is that an American started them off.

R: Let me look it up and I’ll give you some straight dope on it.

G: This is the kind of thing that hurts us—“The Japanese, who were reported today by Tokyo radio, to have died mysteriously a few days after the atomic bomb blast, probably were the victims of a phenomenon which is well known in the great radiation laboratories of America.” That, of course, is what does us the damage.

R: I would say this: You will have to get some big-wig to put a counter-statement in the paper.

Source: National Security Archive

^{Appendix 2}

Flyer for UCPV Event, October 10, 1967

This event, hosted by the academic community of Montreal, demonstrates the transnational involvement in resistance to the war in Vietnam. It was one of several events where Chomsky and Pauling were coparticipants.

Noam Chomsky

Linus Pauling

DATE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10

TIME: 8:00 PM (COME EARLY TO BE ASSURED A SEAT)

PLACE: LOYOLA COLLEGE, MAIN AUDITORIUM (7141 Sherbrooke St. West, near Montreal West Station)

ADMISSION: 50¢ DONATION

MASTER OF CEREMONY: PROFESSOR JEFFREY ADAMS

THE VIETNAM WAR—WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

NOAM CHOMSKY - Presently, Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics, M.I.T.; Consulting Editor of Ramparts; Author of books and articles on linguistics, also “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” in New York Review of Books, Feb., 1967.

LINUS PAULING - Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 1954; Nobel Prize for Peace, 1962; Taught in Chemistry Department, California Institute of Technology (Pasadena), 1922–64; Research Professor, Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1963–67; Author of numerous articles and books including No More War, 1958.

SPONSORED BY THE UNIVERSITIES COMMITTEE FOR PEACE IN VIETNAM. The UCPV was formed in order to coordinate the efforts of that part of the academic community of Montreal interested in working toward the goal of a peaceful solution to the Vietnam War. Formed last March, its activities have included the holding of public meetings, city-wide leafletting, aid to American war resisters, lobbying and the support of anti-war demonstrations. Its members are drawn from the teaching and professional staffs of Loyola College, McGill University, Sir George Williams University and Universite de Montreal. Inquiries may be addressed to: George Lermer, 5067 Bourassa, Pierrefonds, P.Q.

Source: Special Collections & Archives Research Center, Oregon State University

^{Appendix 3}

Scientists Condemn the Destruction of Crops in Vietnam, January 21, 1966

In response to a front-page article in the New York Times, “U.S. Spray Planes Destroy Rice in Vietcong Territory,” a small group circulated a petition denouncing the destruction of food crops. The petition classifies the activity as indiscriminate chemical warfare and warns such practices would encourage other countries to employ similar tactics. Almost a year later, more than five thousand scientists signed a similar petition calling for a ban on chemical and biological weapons. One of the lead authors of both petitions, Matthew S. Meselson, studied with Linus Pauling at Caltech.

The use of crop-destroying chemicals by American forces in Vietnam was condemned this week in a statement by 29 scientists and physicians from Harvard, M.I.T., and several nearby institutions.

The statement made reference to a New York Times dispatch which reported that, as part of a “large program of ‘food denial’ to the Vietcong,” U.S. aircraft have been spraying rice crops with a “commercial weedkiller, identical with a popular brand that many Americans spray on their lawns.” The Times report added that “it is not poisonous, and officials say that any food that survives its deadening touch will not be toxic or unpalatable.”

The areas involved, according to the report, cover only a “small fraction—50,000 to 70,000 acres—of the more than eight million acres of cultivated land in South Vietnam.” The program was reported “aimed only at relatively small areas of major military importance where the guerillas grow their own food or where the population is willingly committed to their cause.” “Experience has shown,” the Times stated, “that when the chemical is applied during the growing season, before rice and other food plants are ripe, it will destroy 60 to 90 percent of the crop.”

John Edsall, Harvard professor of biochemistry, served as spokesman for the protesting group. The statement follows.

“We emphatically condemn the use of chemical agents for the destruction of crops, by United States forces in Vietnam as recently reported in the New York Times of Tuesday, 21 December 1965. Even if it can be shown that chemicals are not toxic to man, such tactics are barbarous because they are indiscriminate; they represent an attack on the entire population of the region where the crops are destroyed, combatants and non-combatants alike. In the crisis of World War II, in which the direct threat to our country was far greater than any arising in Vietnam today, our government firmly resisted any proposals to employ chemical or biological warfare against our enemies. The fact that we are now resorting to such methods shows a shocking deterioration of our moral standards. These attacks are also abhorrent to the general standards of civilized mankind, and their use will earn us hatred throughout Asia and elsewhere.

“Such attacks serve moreover as a precedent for the use of similar but even more dangerous chemical agents against our allies and ourselves. Chemical warfare is cheap; small countries can practice it effectively against us and will probably do so if we lead the way. In the long run the use of such weapons by the United States is thus a threat, not an asset, to our national security.

“We urge the President to proclaim publicly that the use of such chemical weapons by our armed forces is forbidden, and to oppose their use by the South Vietnamese or any of our allies.”

The signers of the statement were as follows.

Harvard: John Edsall, Bernard Davis, Keith R. Porter, George Gaylord Simpson, Matthew S. Meselson, George Wald, Stephen Kuffler, Mahlon B. Hoagland, Eugene P. Kennedy, David H. Hubel, Warren Gold, Sanford Gifford, Peter Reich, Robert Goldwyn, Jack Clark, and Bernard Lown.

Massachusetts General Hospital: Victor W. Sidel, Stanley Cobb, and Herbert M. Kalckar.

M.I.T.: Alexander Rich, Patrick D. Wall, and Charles D. Coryell.

Brandeis: Nathan O. Kapland and William P. Jencks.

Amherst: Henry T. Yost.

Dartmouth: Peter H. von Hippel.

Tufts: Charles E. Magraw.

Also, Albert Szent-Györgyi, director of the Institute for Muscle Research, Woods Hole, and Hudson Hoagland, director of the Worcester Institute of Experimental Biology.

Source: Science

^{Appendix 4}

Nelson Anjain’s Open Letter to Robert Conard, April 9, 1975

From 1946 to 1958, the US Nuclear Weapons Testing Program conducted sixty-seven nuclear detonations in the Marshall Islands. In 1956, Merril Eisenbud, director of the AEC Health and Safety Laboratory, outlined the benefits of studying a Marshallese population inhabiting an environment known to be radioactively contaminated: “[N]ow that Island is safe to live on but is by far the most contaminated place in the world and it will be very interesting to go back and get good environmental data, … While it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the way Westerners do, civilized people, it is nevertheless also true that these people are more like us than the mice.”

April 9, 1975.

Rongelap Island,

Micronesia.

Dr. Robert Conard

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Upton, Long Island, New York 11790

Dear Dr. Conard,

I’m sorry I was not at home when you visited my island. Instead, I have spent the past few months travelling to Japan and Fiji learning about treatment of atomic bomb victims and about attempts to end the nuclear threat in the Pacific.

Since leaving Rongelap on the peace ship Fri, I have learned a great deal and am writing to you to clarify some of my feelings regarding your continued use of us as research subjects.

I realize now that your entire career is based on our illness. We are far more valuable to you than you are to us. You have never really cared about us as people—only as a group of guinea pigs for your government’s bomb research effort. For me and for the other people on Rongelap, it is life which matters most. For you it is facts and figures. There is no question about your technical competence, but we often wonder about your humanity. We don’t need you and your technological machinery. We want our life and our health. We want to be free.

In all the years you’ve come to our island, you’ve never treated us as people. You’ve never sat down among us and really helped us honestly with our problems. You have told people that the “worst is over”, then Lekoj Anjain died. I don’t know yet how many new cases you’ll find during your current trip, but I am very worried that we will suffer again and again.

I’ll never forget how you told a newspaper reporter that is was our fault that Lekoj died because we wouldn’t let you examine us in early 1972. You seem to forget that it is your country and the people you work for who murdered Lekoj.

As a result of my trip, I’ve made some decisions that I want you to know about. The main decision is that we do not want to see you again. We want medical care from doctors who care about us, not about collecting information for the U.S. government’s war makers.

We want a doctor to live on our island permanently. We don’t need medical care only when it is convenient for you to visit. We want to be able to see a doctor when we want to. America has been trying to Americanize us by flying flags and using cast-off textbooks. It’s about time America gave us the kind of medical care it provides its own citizens.

We’ve never really trusted you. So we’re going to invite doctors from hospitals in Hiroshima to examine us in a caring way.

We no longer want to be under American control. As a representative of the United States, you’ve convinced us that Americans are out to dominate others, not to help them. From now on, we will maintain our neutrality and independence from American power.

There will be some changes made. Next time you try to visit be prepared. Ever since 1972 when we first stood up to you, we’ve been aware of your motives. Now that we know that there are other people in the world who are willing to help us, we no longer want you to come to Rongelap.

Sincerely, Nelson Anjain, Magistrate.

NA: sc

cc: Hon. Gary Hart, U.S. Senate

Hon. Phillip Burton, U.S. House

Hon. Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General, United Nations

Hon. Ataji Balos, Congress of Micronesia

Source: Marshall Islands Document Collection, US Department of Energy

^{Appendix 5}

Marshallese Medical Records in Hands of Gensuikin, July 27, 1976

Robert Conard’s dispatch below seems to validate Nelson Anjain’s concern that interest in the medical affairs of the Marshallese people revolved around tightly controlled record keeping. Most significantly, the letter discloses an alliance formed between those who were exposed to radiation through nuclear bombs and those exposed through nuclear weapons testing.

July 27, 1976

Dr. James L. Liverman

Assistant Administrator for Environment & Safety

Division of Biological and Environmental Research

Energy Research and Development Administration

Washington, D.C. 20545

Dear Jim,

On July 26th a Mr. Murakami, reporter for the Japanese newspaper Asahi in Washington, D.C. called about a story he had received from Japan that some 66 of our Marshallese medical records had been copied and were in the hands of the leftist anti A-bomb group (Gensuikin) in Japan. It was his opinion that they would get a doctor or doctors to review them (presumably in criticism of our examinations) to be used at the anniversary meetings of the Hiroshima bomb next month. I asked how they had gotten the records and he suggested that it may have happened in conjunction with the recent visit to Japan of the two Rongelap young men though he also thought Japanese from that group may have visited the Marshall Islands. I told him we had nothing to hide, but were disturbed about the unethical nature of obtaining the records. I also said that the records in the Marshall Islands were not complete but that we had much more extensive records on all individuals on our examination list at Brookhaven. I answered several questions for him concerning our findings and treatment of the Rongelap people and outlined our examination programs (annual surveys, semi-annual hematology checks and quarterly visits by our resident physician stationed at Kwajalein). He asked why Japanese were barred from visiting the Islands. I told him the only incident I know of was the aborted visit of a Japanese “medical” team (mostly reporters) that had occurred in 1971 due to lack of proper credentials. I told him we had had Drs. H. Ezaki and I. Kumatori from Japan visit us on past surveys and suggested he contact them or the Radiation Effects Research Foundation if he wished to get bona fide Japanese medical opinions about our surveys.

I am sending a copy of this letter to Dr. LeRoy Allen at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation and request that he let us know about any Japanese publicity which may pertain to this matter.

Sincerely, Bob [signed] Robert A. Conard, M.D.

RAC: im

cc: Dr. LeRoy R. Allen

Dr. Bond

Dr. Cronkite

Source: Marshall Islands Document Collection, US Department of Energy

^{Appendix 6}

Memorandum on Iraqi Use of Chemical Weapons, November 1, 1983

In October 1983 Iran began pressing for a UN investigation into Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. US cables from this time period indicate personnel knew about Iraq’s “almost daily use” of CW against Iranians and Kurds, and sought to deal with the problem behind the scenes prior to an official address by the UN. The cable below states immediate intervention is needed in order to maintain credibility regarding US policy “to halt CW use whenever it occurs.”

United States Department of State

Washington, D.C. 20520

November 1, 1983

INFORMATION MEMORANDUM

S/S

TO: The Secretary

FROM: PM—Jonathan T. Howe

SUBJECT: Iraqi Use of Chemical Weapons

We have recently received additional information confirming Iraqi use of chemical weapons. We also know that Iraq has acquired a CW production capability, primarily from Western firms, including possibly a U.S. foreign subsidiary. In keeping with our policy of seeking to halt CW use wherever it occurs, we are considering the most effective means to halt Iraqi CW use including, as a first step, a direct approach to Iraq. This would be consistent with the way we handled the initial CW use information from Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, i.e., private demarches to the Lao, Vietnamese and Soviets.

As you are aware, presently Iraq is at a disadvantage in its war of attrition with Iran. After a recent SIG meeting on the war, a discussion paper was sent to the White House for an NSC meeting (possibly Wednesday or Thursday this week), a section of which outlines a number of measures we might take to assist Iraq. At our suggestion, the issue of Iraqi CW use will be added to the agenda for this meeting.

If the NSC decides measures are to be undertaken to assist Iraq, our best chance of influencing cessation of CW use may be in the context of informing Iraq of these measures. It is important, however, that we approach Iraq very soon in order to maintain the credibility of U.S. policy on CW, as well as to reduce or halt what now appears to be Iraq’s almost daily use of CW.

Drafted: PM/TMP: JLeonard

11/01/83: ph. 632-4814

WANG #2485P

Clearances: PM/TMP: PMartinez

PM/P — RBeers

PM/RSA — PTheros

NEA — DTSchneider

P — AKanter

NEA/ARN: DLMack

INR/PMA: DHowells

Source: National Security Archive

^{Appendix 7}

Open Letter to Africa, December 12, 2011

On December 7, 2011, during the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma delivered a video message aimed at the international delegation: “Today I’m happy to bring you the good news about the complete collapse of the global warming movement and the failure of the Kyoto process…. For the past decade, I have been the leader in the United States Senate standing up against global warming alarmism…. You should know that global warming skeptics everywhere wish we could be with you celebrating the final nail in the coffin on location in South Africa.” Inhofe is the minority leader of the Environment and Public Works Committee. His top campaign contributors include Koch Industries (oil, chemicals, and forest-derived products); Murray Energy (coal); Devon Energy (oil and gas); Contran Corporation (chemicals, metals, and radioactive waste disposal); and Robison International (lobbyists for defense, nuclear energy, GE, and IBM).

US Senator’s Statement At COP17 Disappointed US

We are writing as US citizens to express our grave disappointment about the views expressed by our government representatives at COP17. On December 7, US Senator James Inhofe delivered a video message to the Durban delegation which was ill-informed and mean-spirited.

We, like many others in the US, accept the consensual science on climate change: it is happening and people are suffering from water shortages, the acidification of the oceans, and extreme weather events.

The carbon load in the atmosphere, caused mainly by fossil fuel combustion, is too great and must be reduced. This reduction must begin before 2020.

While it is true that the US is a democracy, it is also true that Inhofe, who serves on a very powerful committee on environmental issues, continues to do the dirty work for industry.

Industry interests are the main impediment to any necessary movement on climate change which must happen on a global scale.

It is more accurate to say we have a democracy that uses free elections to put in place known obstructionists, and a media that disproportionally gives a forum to economically driven ideology over sound science.

JACK MIMS AND LARAY POLK

Dallas

Source: Mercury (South Africa)

^{Appendix 8}

Anjali Appadurai’s Speech in Durban, December 9, 2011

On December 8, 2011, as US climate negotiator Todd Stern took the stage at the UN Climate Change Conference, Abigail Borah, a Middlebury College student, stood up from the audience and gave a short speech before being escorted out by security:“2020 is too late to wait. We need an urgent path to a fair, ambitious and legally binding treaty. You must take responsibility to act now, or you will threaten the lives of the youth and the world’s most vulnerable. You must set aside partisan politics and let science dictate decisions.” The day after Borah’s speech, another student, Anjali Appadurai, addressed the delegation from the podium. Both speeches were met with applause.

AMY GOODMAN: A number of protests are being held today at the climate change conference to protest the failure of world leaders to agree to immediately agree to a deal of binding emissions cuts. Earlier today, Anjali Appadurai, a student at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, addressed the conference on behalf of youth delegates.

CHAIRPERSON: I’d now like to give the floor to Miss Anjali Appadurai with College of the Atlantic, who will speak on behalf of youth non-governmental organizations. Miss Appadurai, you have the floor.

ANJALI APPADURAI: I speak for more than half the world’s population. We are the silent majority. You’ve given us a seat in this hall, but our interests are not on the table. What does it take to get a stake in this game? Lobbyists? Corporate influence? Money? You’ve been negotiating all my life. In that time, you’ve failed to meet pledges, you’ve missed targets, and you’ve broken promises. But you’ve heard this all before.

We’re in Africa, home to communities on the front line of climate change. The world’s poorest countries need funding for adaptation now. The Horn of Africa and those nearby in KwaMashu needed it yesterday. But as 2012 dawns, our Green Climate Fund remains empty. The International Energy Agency tells us we have five years until the window to avoid irreversible climate change closes. The science tells us that we have five years maximum. You’re saying, “Give us 10.”

The most stark betrayal of your generation’s responsibility to ours is that you call this “ambition.” Where is the courage in these rooms? Now is not the time for incremental action. In the long run, these will be seen as the defining moments of an era in which narrow self-interest prevailed over science, reason and common compassion.

There is real ambition in this room, but it’s been dismissed as radical, deemed not politically possible. Stand with Africa. Long-term thinking is not radical. What’s radical is to completely alter the planet’s climate, to betray the future of my generation, and to condemn millions to death by climate change. What’s radical is to write off the fact that change is within our reach. 2011 was the year in which the silent majority found their voice, the year when the bottom shook the top. 2011 was the year when the radical became reality.

Common, but differentiated, and historical responsibility are not up for debate. Respect the foundational principles of this convention. Respect the integral values of humanity. Respect the future of your descendants. Mandela said, “It always seems impossible, until it’s done.” So, distinguished delegates and governments around the world, governments of the developed world, deep cuts now. Get it done.

Mic check!

PEOPLE’S MIC: Mic check!

ANJALI APPADURAI: Mic check!

PEOPLE’S MIC: Mic check!

ANJALI APPADURAI: Equity now!

PEOPLE’S MIC: Equity now!

ANJALI APPADURAI: Equity now!

PEOPLE’S MIC: Equity now!

ANJALI APPADURAI: You’ve run out of excuses!

PEOPLE’S MIC: You’ve run out of excuses!

ANJALI APPADURAI: We’re running out of time!

PEOPLE’S MIC: We’re running out of time!

ANJALI APPADURAI: Get it done!

PEOPLE’S MIC: Get it done!

ANJALI APPADURAI: Get it done!

PEOPLE’S MIC: Get it done!

ANJALI APPADURAI: Get it done!

PEOPLE’S MIC: Get it done!

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Miss Appadurai, who was speaking on behalf of half of the world’s population, I think she said at the beginning. And on a purely personal note, I wonder why we let not speak half of the world’s population first in this conference, but only last.

AMY GOODMAN: That was a speech by Anjali Appadurai here in Durban at the U.N. climate change talks. Just after her speech, as you heard, she led a mic check from the stage, a move inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests around the world. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we broadcast live from Durban, South Africa. Back in a moment.

Source: Democracy Now!

^{Appendix 9}

Point Hope Protest Letter to JFK, March 3, 1961

The Inupiat, one of the oldest continuous communities in North America, successfully protested Edward Teller’s Project Chariot; a scheme to carve out an Alaskan harbor with nuclear explosives in the 1960s. The community faces similar risks today as Shell moves forward with its exploration for crude in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. Critics say the extreme weather conditions of the Arctic and an inadequate oil-spill response plan is a disaster in the making.

Point Hope

Alaska

March 3, 1961

Mr. John F. Kennedy

President of the United States

Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. President:

We the Health Council of Point Hope and the residents of the village don’t like to see the blast at Cape Thompson. We want to go on record as protesting the Chariot Project because it is too close to our homes at Point Hope and to our hunting and fishing areas.

All the four seasons, each month, we get what we need for living. In December, January, February and even March, we get the polar bear, seals, tomcod, oogrook [bearded seal], walrus, fox and caribou. In March we also get crabs. In April, May and June, we hunt whales, ducks, seals, white beluga, and oogrook. In July we collect crow-bell eggs from Cape Thompson and Cape Lisburne and store them for the summer. In the summer we get some seals, oogrook, white beluga, fish, ducks, and caribou. In the middle of September many of our village go up Kookpuk River to stay for the fishing and caribou hunting until the middle of November. In November we get seals again and we need the seal blubber for our fuel. The hair seal skin we used for trading groceries from the store.

The ice we get for our drinking water during the winter is about twelve miles off from the village towards Cape Thompson. We melt snow also to drink and for washing. In spring, May and June we used ocean ice. In the summer we get our water from the village well.

We are concerned about the health of our children and the mothers-to-be after the explosion. We read about “the accumulative and retained isotope burden in man that must be considered.” We also know about strontium 90, how it might harm people if too much of it got in our body. We have seen the Summary Reports of 1960, National Academy of Sciences on “The Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation.”

We are deeply concerned about the health of our people now and for the future that is coming. The signatures on page two accompanying this letter are the names of residents of the village of Point Hope who share this concern and wish to express their protest against Project Chariot.

Sincerely yours,

Officers and members

of Point Hope Village

Health Council

Source: US Department of Energy

Appendix Acknowledgments

Appendix 1

Reprinted with the permission of the National Security Archive

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 162, s.v. “Document 76”

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/76.pdf

Appendix 2

Reprinted with the permission of the Special Collections & Archives Research Center, Oregon State University

Flyer for a presentation by Noam Chomsky and Linus Pauling on Vietnam War, 1967

Appendix 3

Reprinted with the permission of AAAS

“Scientists Protest Viet Crop Destruction” from “Congress: Productive Year Is Seen Despite Vietnam,” Science 151 (January 1966): 309

Appendix 4

“Letter to R Conard, Subject: Treatment of Atomic Bomb Victims and Attempts to End the Nuclear Threat in the Pacific (Marshall Islands), April 9, 1975”

Marshall Islands Document Collection, Office of Health, Safety and Security, Department of Energy

http://www.hss.energy.gov/healthsafety/ihs/marshall/collection/data/ihp2/1976_.pdf

Appendix 5

“Letter to J L Liverman, Subject: RE Story of 66 of Marshallese Medical Records Had Been Copied and Were in the Hands of the Leftist Anti-A Bomb Group (Gensuikin) in Japan, July 27, 1976”

Marshall Islands Document Collection, Office of Health, Safety and Security, Department of Energy

http://hss.energy.gov/healthsafety/ihs/marshall/collection/data/ihp1a/1383_.pdf

Appendix 6

Reprinted with the permission of the National Security Archive

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 82, s.v. “Document 24”

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq24.pdf

Appendix 7

Reprinted with the permission of the Mercury (South Africa)

“US Senator’s Statement At COP17 Disappointed Us”

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-275270064.html

Appendix 8

Reprinted with the permission of Democracy Now!

“‘Get It Done’: Urging Climate Change Justice, Youth Delegate Anjali Appadurai Mic Checks U.N. Summit”

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/9/get_it_done_urging_climate_justice

Appendix 9

“Health Council of Point Hope to J. Kennedy, March 3, 1961, Document #16872”

Coordination and Information Center, US Department of Energy, Las Vegas, NV

About the Authors

Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his PhD in linguistics in 1955. He joined the staff at MIT and was appointed Institute Professor in 1976, gaining international renown for his theories on the acquisition and generation of language. He became well known as an activist and public intellectual during the Vietnam War; he became known as a formidable critic of media with the 1988 release of Manufacturing Consent, a book coauthored with Edward Herman. With the publication of 9/11 in November 2001, inarguably one of the most significant books on the subject, he became as widely read and as an essential a voice internationally as other political philosophers throughout history. That book, like the present volume, was composed from interviews. Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs, and US foreign policy. In 2010 Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, Michael Hardt, Naomi Klein, and Vandana Shiva became signatories to United for Global Democracy, a manifesto created by the international Occupy movement.

Laray Polk was born in Oklahoma in 1961 and currently lives in Dallas, Texas. She is a multimedia artist and writer. Her articles and investigative reports have appeared in the Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, and In These Times. As a 2009 grant recipient from the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, she produced stories on the political entanglements and compromised science behind the establishment of a radioactive waste disposal site in Texas, situated in close proximity to the Ogallala Aquifer.

About Seven Stories Press

Seven Stories Press is an independent book publisher based in New York City. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Martha Long, Luis Negrón, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including Subhankar Banerjee, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Greg Palast, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. In 2012 we launched Triangle Square books for young readers with strong social justice and narrative components, telling personal stories of courage and commitment. For additional information, visit www.sevenstories.com.

Copyright

Copyright © 2013 by Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk

A Seven Stories Press First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chomsky, Noam.

Nuclear war and environmental catastrophe / Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60980-454-1 (pbk.)

1. Nuclear warfare—Environmental aspects. 2. Environmental disasters. I. Polk, Laray. II. Title.

QH545.N83C56 2013

363.325’5—dc23

2012046137

Printed in the United States

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