Jonathan Schell
Saturday, April 5th, 2008Jonathan Schell, author of The Fate of the Earth, and The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger and visiting lecturer at Yale University, discusses the case against nuclear weapons, the destructive power and military obsolescence of America and Russia’s nuclear arsenals, the treaties the U.S. government has signed promising to dismantle our nukes, the administration’s war against the non-proliferation regime, missile “defense” in Eastern Europe and the first strike option, NATO expansion, the arguments that nukes are good for preventing war among great powers or that North Korea or terrorists could “hold us all hostage” if our governments ceased to hold nukes, nuclear winter, the end of the age of empire, what needs to be done to get going on abolition and Hillary Clinton’s belligerence.
MP3 here. (40:36)
Jonathan Schell is the author of The Fate of the Earth, and The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger. He is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute and a visiting lecturer at Yale University.
Update: Your host’s reference to Hillary Clinton’s denunciation of Barack Obama’s refusal to endorse Harry Truman’s nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was mistaken. I was thinking of this, but that (otherwise wonderful) author was apparently thinking of the time last summer when Clinton denounced Obama for promising not to attack our ally Pakistan with nuclear weapons, “just in time” for the 62nd anniversary of those horrible war crimes against the Japanese.
Sincere apologies to my guest and audience.
