chomsky on nuclear arms race

noam chomsky 是 MIT 的語言學家，按 Institute for Scientific Information 統計，他的說話在當今學者中是最常被學術期刊所引用，而較他為多的就只有 Marx、Lenin、Shakespeare、Aristotle、Bible、Freud。

他也是一位本著良知行事的知識分子，因長期嚴厲批評美國的外交政策和在世界擔當的角色而備受尊重。

前幾天南早刊載了 woo kin-tai 的訪問文章，chomsky 在訪問中表白他對新一輪核武競賽的擔憂和說明為甚麼中國是世界最大的希望。

"[In] this respect, China has a pretty good record. Of all the nuclear-armed states, it has led the way in trying to develop an international framework that would overcome the threat of nuclear weapons and the militarisation of space.

"If you expand your military capacity, you identify someone as an enemy and a strategic threat, and you develop a capcity to attack them. How are they going to respond? They'll respond by defending themselves, and the defence is, in fact, developing offensive weapons capacities. So, sure, that is an action-reaction cycle, continually escalating the threat of war. In this case, war would be terminal.

"China is singled out for the hope of leading the world towards some coalition that will counter aggressive militarism. Whether China can take on that role, who knows? But, certainly, among states, it stands out for having taken positive steps in this direction. Not for long, I think. I think we already know that it is beginning to build up its military space capacity, just as was predicted."