Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine.

My guest today is Professor Noam Chomsky, one of the

most influential public intellectuals in the world. He's written more than 100 books. He is currently

the laureate professor at the University of Arizona and Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department

of Linguistics and Philosophy, author of recently Consequences of Capitalism,

Manufacturing, Discontent and Resistance, co-authored with Mark Waterston, and forthcoming

The Withdrawal, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the fragility of US power with Vijay Prashat.

Professor Chomsky, thank you so much for joining me.

Very pleased to be with you.

Well, so you often,

here's what I want to talk about. You often discuss the fact that there are two twin existential threats to human civilization. There is the threat of climate catastrophe, and then there is the threat of nuclear weapons and global warfare.

I feel like one of these gets discussed more than the other.

We actually had another Professor Chopsky on last week to discuss the climate crisis.

This is the book, Is Science Enough by Professor Avivachovsky.

So we've talked a lot about, on this program about the climate crisis, but I want to talk about

nuclear weapons and war. And I want to actually start in kind of an unusual way. I want to

go back to 1945 because I was reading Daniel Ellsberg recently, his book, The Doomsday Machine.

He talks about how when he was in middle school, he was assigned a paper and they said his teacher told

them that they were talking about a possibility of making a new kind of bomb that could destroy an entire

city. He said his entire class wrote the paper about this bomb,

and they all agreed that if such a thing came into existence, you know, it would be,

it would be so totally destructive for human civilization that it would need to be eliminated

...