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So here you have the spectrum, all racing toward disaster, perfectly consciously, a great testimonial to human intelligence. And that’s only the beginning. There’s something else, which–at least this, some people are talking about–there’s another danger, at least as extreme, which is barely discussed. And that’s the greatly increasing threat of nuclear war. Greatly increasing. Not only the nuclear–the new nuclear strategy study, which is bad enough; Obama’s before it was also pretty awful. But also the dismantling of the entire arms control system which has kept us, more or less, barely alive. Anyone who looks at the history of the nuclear weapons period knows that it’s kind of a miracle that we’ve survived this long. Well, there was an arms control regime. One core part of it was the ABM Treaty, which George W. Bush dismantled. The second major part was the INF Treaty, negotiated by Reagan and Gorbachev, that reduced sharply the threat of nuclear war for 20 years. Trump has just abandoned it, and there’s barely a word about it.
And furthermore, immediately after abandoning it, the Pentagon carried out a test, obviously long-planned, of a missile that violates the treaty. Just pleading with the Russians and others, please make up, develop missiles to destroy us. The Open Skies treaty, initiated by Eisenhower–it was a different world then–that’s the next one on the chopping block, won’t do that. The New START treaty is next; the administration’s already said they’re not going to sign it. That ends the arms control regime; we are now free to create more and more destructive weapons to ensure that others do the same. If you read the announcements from Lockheed Martin and other arms control producers, they’re ecstatic, getting huge contracts to figure out ways to destroy us all and to make sure that others do it, too. Hardly a word said about this."
In the first installment of a two-part interview, Robert Scheer meets the renowned thinker for the first time to discuss world politics.
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