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How Many Minutes to Midnight? On the Nuclear Era and Armageddon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Noam Chomsky
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If some extraterrestrial species were compiling a history of homo sapiens, they might well break their calendar into two eras: BNW (before nuclear weapons) and NWE, the nuclear weapons era. The latter era of course opened on August 6 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover effective means to destroy itself, but, so the evidence suggests, not the moral and intellectual capacity to control their worst instincts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 11 , Issue 33 , August 2013 , e1
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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Copyright © The Authors 2013

References

Notes

1 Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, U. of Chicago Press, 1953, Vol. 5, pp. 732-33. Makoto Oda, “The Meaning of ‘Meaningless Death,” Tenbo, January 1965, translated in the Journal of Social and Political Ideas in Japan, Vol. 4 (August 1966), pp. 75-84. See Noam Chomsky, “On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War,” Liberation, September-October, 1967, reprinted in American Power and the New Mandarins, Pantheon 1969.

2 Cited by Stephen Shapin, “How Worried Should We Be?,” London Review of Books, “Vol. 36 No. 2, 23 January 2014. General Lee Butler, letter to Bill Graham, Chair, Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, House of Commons, Ottawa, July 1998.

3 Butler, International Affairs, 82.4, 2006.

4 Shapin, op. cit.

5 Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years. Random House, 326.

6 James Warburg, Germany: Key to Peace (Harvard, 1953), 189f. Adam Ulam, Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 1 (winter 1999).

7 Leffler, Foreign Affairs, July-August 1996.

8 Raymond L. Garthoff, “Estimating Soviet Military Force Levels,” International Security 14:4, Spring 1990. Fred Kaplan, Boston Globe, Nov. 29, 1989.

9 Kenneth Waltz, PS: Political Science & Politics, December 1991.

10 Sheldon Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality, Stanford U. Press, 2012. For further details and sources see Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, Metropolitan, 2003, chap. 4.

11 Noam Chomsky and Irene Gendzier, “Exposing Israel's Foreign Policy Myths: the Work of Amnon Kapeliuk,” Jerusalem Quarterly, Institute of Jerusalem Studies, no 54, summer 2013. To appear as introduction to Amnon Kapeliuk, The 1973 War: the Conflict that Shook Israel, I.B. Tauris; English translation by Mark Marshall of Hebrew original, “Lo ‘mehdal’: ha-mediniut she-holicha le-milhama” (“Not ‘omission’: the policy that led to war”), Amikam (Tel Aviv) 1975.

12 Benjamin B. Fischer, “A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare,” Summary, last updated July7, 2008. Dmitry Dima Adamsky (2013) The 1983 Nuclear Crisis - Lessons for Deterrence Theory and Practice, Journal of Strategic Studies, 36:1, 4-41, DOI: 10.1080/01402390.2012.732015. See also the documents released by the National Security Archive.

13 BBC News Europe, 26 September 2013.

14 Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, Penguin, 2013.

15 President Bill Clinton, Speech before the UN General Assembly, Sept. 27, 1993; Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Annual Report to the President and Congress: 1999 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 1999).

16 “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence,” declassified portions reprinted in Hans Kristensen, Nuclear Futures: Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and US Nuclear Strategy, British American Security Information Council, Appendix 2, Basic Research Report 98.2, March 1998.

17 Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Airpower (Yale, 1987).

18 Jon B. Wolfstahl, Jeffrey Lewis, and Marc Quint, The Trillion Dollar Nuclear Triad: US Strategic Nuclear Modernization over the Next Thirty Years, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey CA, Jan. 2014. Possibly an underestimate; see Tom Collina, “Nuclear Costs Undercounted, GAO Says,” Arms Control Today, July/August 2014.

19 “Remarks by the President at the National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C., March 23 2013”.s

20 Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars, Nation Books, 2013, 450, 443.