You don’t need to have a brain the size of Noam Chomsky’s to figure out that, with 4,650 nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal alone, humans have created a very efficient means of destroying themselves. But when Chomsky, as he does in his most recent book, identifies nuclear war — along with environmental catastrophe — as one of two “dark clouds … threatening decent survival of the species,” you might as well listen.
Chomsky, the linguist whose theory of a universal grammar revolutionized his own academic discipline and changed the directions of many others (including psychology, philosophy, literature, and anthropology), might best be known as the single most indefatigable bulwark against the American imperial instinct. Ever since penning a 1967 essay called “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” in the New York Review of Books, excoriating fellow scholars for dishonestly rationalizing the Vietnam War, Chomsky, a self-proclaimed anarchist, has been speaking and writing about the injustices of U.S. policy, at times putting his career on the line, all the while publishing books faster than most of us fire off single email messages.
On October 23, he will visit Santa Barbara to address the dangers of nuclear weapons at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s annual Evening for Peace before participating in a symposium the following two days. A couple of weeks ago, Chomsky chatted over the phone with The Santa Barbara Independent to explain why the nuclear codes aren’t just a rhetorical device for scaring voters away from the Republican candidate running for president. Following is an edited version of our conversation.