Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe

Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe is a focused discussion on the existential threats of our time, and their points of intersection since World War II. Both nuclear war and environmental catastrophe have the potential for similar outcomes: a world made uninhabitable by the scarcity of water, food and livable land. While a nuclear strike would require action, environmental catastrophe is partially defined by willful inaction in response to human-induced climate change. This short book, a series of interviews with Noam Chomsky by Laray Polk, exposes the economic matrix of dominant countries and the failure of the US to act in the face of exhaustive evidence. Denial of the facts is only half the equation, other factors contributing to degradation of the environment include extreme techniques for the extraction of remaining carbon deposits, the elimination of agricultural land for biofuel and the construction of dams, and the destruction of forests that are crucial carbon sequestration. On the subject of current nuclear tensions, Chomsky revisits the long-established option of a nuclear-weapon-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East, a proposal set in motion through a joint Egyptian-Iranian General Assembly resolution in 1974. This book serves as a warning that further postponement of nuclear disarmament and the productive search for sustainable energy will condemn the human species to catastrophic conditions in the very near future.

Born in Philadelphia in 1928, NOAM CHOMSKY is known throughout the world for his political writings, activism, and for for his groundbreaking work in linguistics. A professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, Chomsky gained recognition in academic circles for his theory of transformational grammar, which drew attention to the syntactic universality of all human languages. But it is as a critic of unending war, corporate control and neoliberalism that Chomsky has become one of the country’s most well known public intellectuals. The 1969 publication of American Power and the New Mandarins marked the beginning of Chomsky’s rigorous public criticism of American hegemony and its lieges. Since then, with his tireless scholarship and an unflagging sense of moral responsibility, he has become one of the most influential writers in the world. Chomsky is the author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (with Edward S. Herman), Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, and over one hundred other books. To this day Noam Chomsky remains an active and uncompromising voice of dissent.