by NOAM CHOMSKY & CHRISTOPHER LYDON
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: All we want you to do is to explain where in the world we are at a time—
NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s easy.
When so many people were on the edge of something, something historic. Is there a Chomsky summary?
Well, a brief summary, I think, is if you take a look at thistory ce the Second World War, something really remarkable has happened. First, human intelligence created two huge sledgehammers capable of terminating our existence—or at least organized existence—both from the Second World War. One of them is familiar. In fact, both are by now familiar. The Second World War ended with the use of nuclear weapons. It was immediately obvious on August 6, 1945, a day that I remember very well. It was obvious that soon technology would develop to the point where it would lead to terminal disaster. Scientists certainly understood this.
In 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists inaugurated its famous Doomsday Clock. And it started at seven minutes to midnight. By 1953 it had moved to two minutes to midnight. That was the year when the United States and Soviet Union exploded hydrogen bombs. But it turns out we now understand that at the end of the Second World War the world also entered into a new geological epic. It’s called the Anthro- pocene, the epic in which humans have a severe, in fact maybe disastrous, impact on the environment. It moved again in 2015, again in 2016. Immediately after the Trump election late January this year, the clock was moved again to two and a half minutes to midnight, the closest it’s been since 1953. So there’s the two existential threats that we’ve created—which might in the case of nuclear war wipe us out; in the case of environmental catastrophe, create a severe impact—and then some.
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