Noam Chomsky On New Zealand's Nuclear Free Policy

Scoop

03-08-2025

I'm a procrastinator by nature, but waiting 36 years to publish this interview with Noam Chomsky on New Zealand's nuclear free policy is slack even by my standards.
My old mate Tim Bollinger has organised an all-day event to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, on Saturday 9 August, and it seems as good a reason as any to revisit the interview and Chomsky's thoughts on nuclear disarmament.
In 1987 the Guardian Weekly ran a very brief review of the Chomsky Reader. I'd never heard of Chomsky but the description of him as America's number one dissident stuck with me.
In those pre-internet days, the mainstream newspapers had a virtual monopoly on international news and voices like Chomsky's were entirely absent.
I was working as a cub reporter on the Hawke's Bay Herald Tribune and the Guardian Weekly - printed on tissue-like paper and airfreighted from the UK – was one of the few sources of in-depth international news available to me.
But even in the Guardian Weekly, America's number one dissident warranted just 200 or so words.
I wouldn't read anything by Chomsky himself until the following year, when I was in Harbin, the capital of China's northernmost province Heilongjiang.
A Chinese American who was studying in Harbin gave me a copy of the libertarian socialist Z Magazine which included a 10,000 plus word feature by Chomsky on his recent visit to Israel and the occupied territories.
Four years previously I'd spent time in Israel and the West Bank and had been grappling with what I'd seen there. Chomsky helped me make sense of it like no other writer had.
I was teaching conversational English at the Harbin Medical University and when I mentioned the Chomsky article to a class of medical specialists I was surprised and delighted when one of them not only knew who Chomsky was but said her husband was studying linguistics with him at MIT.
She mentioned that Chomsky was well known for making himself available to anyone wanting to talk to him.
Six months later I put that to the test and found myself in his MIT office interviewing about New Zealand's then relatively new nuclear free policies.
On my return to New Zealand, I attempted to interest the Dominion and NZ Listener in running an article based on the interview but had no luck.
A lot's changed over the last four decades but it's striking how consistent, insightful, informed and principled Chomsky's views are.
The interview has been edited for clarity.
The Unsettling Spectre of Peace
Rose: Some of those arguing for New Zealand to remain in the ANZUS alliance say the country could do more for nuclear disarmament inside the alliance than outside it. Do you think that's realistic?
Chomsky: New Zealand plainly has a limited range of possible options open to it. It's a small country; it's not a major actor in world affairs.
But it does have at least symbolic significance. Its stand on nuclear issues has certainly raised the question of why we have to rely on widespread proliferation of nuclear bases. And that's good, those questions should be raised.
Whether New Zealand can raise these questions more by being in the alliance or more by being out of it is a kind of a technical question that I don't think it's easy to give an answer to. I presume that the question's academic anyway because New Zealand's going to want to stay in some form of alliance. And the question really is, should it press forward on its resistance to a nuclear strategy?
Supporters of ANZUS typically argue that the US defends democracies, preventing the spread of communism and the so-called domino theory which they claim could see communism spreading down into the South Pacific. Does America defend democracies?
We have plenty of evidence on the question of whether the United States defends democracy. And the answer is pretty definitive, namely support for anything that could rationally be called democracy is an extremely low priority for American policy.
In fact, it's probably something that's generally avoided, unless we mean by democracy something rather special. If we mean by democracy rule by business interests, oligarchy and military linked to U.S. interests and U.S. power, if that's what we mean by democracy, then yes, the United States supports democracy. If we mean by democracy a system in which people have political rights and people can organise and there's access to the media and social activism is tolerated and human rights are preserved, if we mean any of those things by democracy, then the fact of the matter is U.S. assistance and aid are negatively correlated with democracy.
That's been in fact shown in study after study, and you can look at that region of the world, say, take Indonesia. The United States was, like Australia, I don't know about New Zealand, but certainly the United States and Australia were quite pleased at the military coup in 1965, and with the subsequent slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, destroying the largest mass popular organisation in Indonesia. The reactions to that were qualified applause, plainly that didn't establish democracy.
It eliminated any conceivable basis for democracy, and that remains the case. Indonesia remains a very well-functioning police state behind a formal democratic facade, and the United States and its allies are quite pleased with that. And that's very typical.
You look at, say, Latin America, where U.S. influence has been enormous. The United States has been influential in overthrowing democratic systems, in repressing the kinds of popular organisations that might lead to really functioning democracy. It's always called anti-communism, but it has nothing to do with that.
Destroying peasant self-help groups organised by the Catholic Church, is called anti-communism. It's just a name for anything you want to destroy, and there's just no doubt that that's typical of U.S. foreign policy. What's more, it's stated that way.
You don't have to just look at the historical record, you can look at the documentary record. The United States is a very open society, probably the most open in the world. We have great access to internal planning documents.
Secret documents are either leaked or declassified relatively soon and efficiently, and we now have a quite extensive record of secret planning documents through the 1950s, and in fact considerably beyond, and it's very clear and explicit. The U.S. foreign policy at the National Security Council over and over reiterates and emphasises that the major threat to the United States is what are called nationalist regimes, or sometimes ultra-nationalist regimes, which are responsive to pressures from the masses of the population for social reform, for diversification of production, for independence, and so on. It's stated very explicitly, and those are the regimes that must be undercut.
It doesn't matter whether they're from the right or from the left or run by the military or run by some political party that calls itself communist or whatever. It's all the same. If they are nationalist and independent and are not willing to subordinate themselves to the perceived needs of U.S. foreign policy, which means access to resources and investment opportunities and so on, then they have to be overthrown. Democracy has nothing to do with it.
The freedom to rob and exploit
It's what you've referred to as the fifth freedom, isn't it?
It's called the fifth freedom, the freedom to rob and exploit, which is basically, if you want a one-phrase description of foreign policy, which naturally misses some nuances because it's one phrase, that's about as close as you can get. The record with regard to democracy is extremely poor.
You mentioned Indonesia. New Zealand's paranoia about a Russian invasion pre-date the Russian Revolution with gun emplacements being built in 1905. But that fear has been replaced in recent time with a focus on Asia and in particular Indonesia has seemed expansionist…
It's not just seemed. It is expansionist.
Do you think staying on good terms with the US would help protect us against possible Indonesian expansion, even though it seems unlikely they'd ever go as far as New Zealand?
Indonesia expands into third world areas which can't fight back. No one ever attacks someone who can fight back.
So, Indonesia will expand into East Timor, for example, because there they know that they can carry out a major slaughter or something, approaching genocide, with full Western support, which they got, in fact. Again, I don't know about New Zealand, but they got support from every Western power, primarily the United States, but also its allies, right through the worst period of the slaughter. And that they know they can get away with, so of course they'll do it.
Attacking New Zealand would be a different matter. Regardless of whether we were in an alliance. Whether New Zealand is or is not in a formal alliance, its links to international capital are so tight that it would be protected against any Indonesian attack.
Are countries that take part in military alliances with America tacitly supporting the dictatorships of Central and South America and Southeast Asia backed by the US.
That's their choice. Usually the answer, in fact, is yes. There are some exceptions, but those are separate choices.
Being a part of, say, NATO, does not entail that one must support a murderous terror state in El Salvador. In fact, it has that consequence, but that's just a decision of the governments in question. It's not forced on them by their membership in the NATO alliance.
South Pacific Nuclear Free Treaty
The USA, England, and France all refused to sign the South Pacific Nuclear Free Treaty. It was a very watered-down treaty designed specifically to get the USA and UK to sign – France was never going to.
Why do you think the US and UK refused to sign up to it?
I think we have to be a little more cautious here. This is only one of a number of cases.
For example, the United States also refused to support a South Atlantic zone of peace. It was the only country in that case voting against that at the United Nations. To put what you just said in a broader perspective, take a look at the United Nations disarmament votes.
The most interesting and dramatic case is in the fall of 1987, at the time of the summit which led to the INF [Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces] Treaty, so all attention was focused on disarmament. Exactly at that time, the UN had a series of votes on disarmament. There were votes on a comprehensive test ban, on the end to development of weapons of mass destruction, on a number of other such issues.
On some of them, the United States was completely alone. The votes were like 154 to 1. On some of them, it picked up France, so you get votes like 135 to 2. On a few, it also picked up England, so votes like 140 to 3 and so on. That's the picture throughout.
The United States and France are committed nuclear powers, and England just tails along behind the United States. That's what's called a special relationship. They are in the lead, not just in the South Pacific area, in opposing moves towards relaxation of nuclear tensions.
That has to do with their own perceived role as global powers. There are reasons for this. There is a sense in which the United States and its allies are deterring the Soviet Union, but we have to understand that sense.
If you look at the actual planning documents and the actual course of history, and even the public statements, you can see what the sense is. The United States is a global power, and it maintains its dominance by a potential threat of military force and military intervention, which is sometimes carried out. In Vietnam, for example, it intervened 10,000 miles away in a massive war, a war of aggression, in fact, against South Vietnam, which is what it really was.
Intervention globally has been very widespread. The United States considers it to be its right, in fact its duty, to have the potential of intervening using military force basically almost anywhere in the world. That means that there's a chance of intervention, in fact a likelihood of intervention, in areas where the United States does not have a conventional force advantage.
When the Soviet Union intervenes, say in Afghanistan, Poland, Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia, it has an enormous conventional force advantage. It doesn't have to rely on a nuclear threat. But when the United States intervenes, it often intervenes in areas where it's at a conventional disadvantage, and that means it has to be extremely intimidating.
It has to intimidate any potential enemy, so they'll back off. And the way you're very intimidating is by having a nuclear threat. So, there's a good reason why the United States uses the threat of nuclear force constantly.
It wants to prevent anyone from deterring it. It wants to overcome the deterrence of either indigenous forces, which may be able to resist a conventional attack, or the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union deters the United States, there's no doubt about that.
Over and over again, the Soviet Union has deterred the United States. For example, even close by, the United States carried out a long war of terrorism against Cuba, a major terrorist attack of the 20th century, but it did not, after the Bay of Pigs, it did not invade Cuba directly, outright, and basically that's because of Soviet deterrence, which led to the missile crisis and scared people off, and after that there was a kind of backing off on both sides.
How do Gorbachev's liberal reforms fit into that?
It's very interesting to see how American commentators are reacting. So, for example, they are quite publicly saying that they're concerned about Gorbachev's reforms. One reason is that the alleged threat of the Soviet Union has played a very significant mobilising role within the United States.
Every modern industrial society has some mechanism by which the state intervenes in the economy. Massively, in fact. It plays the role of a coordinator, or stimulates production, or organises exports, or one thing or another.
And the United States, despite all the talk of free trade, has a very powerful state component in the economy. In fact, if you look at the two areas of the U.S. economy that are more or less competitive internationally, namely high technology agriculture, capital intensive agriculture, and high-tech industry, they're both state subsidised. Capital intensive agriculture has always received both protection and some very extensive subsidy from the state, and high-tech industry is just a spinoff of the military system.
And in fact, it was understood from early on, about 1950, that the U.S. economy would be able to continue to function, and in fact, European and Japanese industrial recovery would be possible if there was extensive stimulation at that time by the United States, and it would have to come through the military system. That was clearly understood early on. It's often called military Keynesianism.
It's not easy to find an alternative to that. Economists can make up technical alternatives, but they really don't work, because you have to deal with the fact that the public has to be willing to support it. It's very costly.
And furthermore, the state intervention has to be carried out in a way which enhances the prerogatives of private capital and does not interfere with those prerogatives. So, there's all kinds of models that economists make up that won't work, because they infringe on management prerogatives. On the other hand, military spending is just a gift.
It's just a welfare state for the rich. Military spending means that the taxpayer subsidises research and development, and the taxpayer agrees to purchase any junk that's produced. And that's just a gift.
Economic Keynesianism a gift to the wealthy
It's a gift to the wealthy and the management corporations and so on, so naturally that's what they fall into. But to maintain that system, you have to have an enemy. In fact, the Wall Street Journal the other day had an article which the headline was something like, 'The Unsettling Spectre of Peace.'
And it was about how we're going to deal with this. And they say, well, there's some solutions, like we can move to high-tech armaments without any soldiers, so you have all kinds of crazy robots flying around and stuff. Of course, none of it will work.
It doesn't make any difference, none of it's supposed to work. You've got to make sure that there's something going on that allows the United States to keep its technical edge. And this is not weapons.
I mean, look at the history of computers, for example. It's subsidised. It's a spin-off of the Pentagon and the space programme, up until the point where they become competitive, then private industry moves in and makes the profits.
It's public subsidy and private profit. Now, that's one thing. The other is that, as I say, the United States needs – you have to mobilise the population behind the intervention, too.
You can't send half a million troops to attack South Vietnam by simply saying, look, we don't like what's going on in South Vietnam, so we're going to attack it and do our own regime. You can't say that. You have to say you're defending it.
Hitler was defending Germany from the Poles. And the United States was defending South Vietnam against the South Vietnamese. And that sells in countries like the United States and New Zealand and the Western world.
Everybody accepts U.S. propaganda without a second thought. Of course, it's idiotic. I mean, the main war was against the South Vietnamese, clearly. There were bombing and casualty figures and so on. But we were defending it, and ultimately, we were defending it against the Soviet Union and China and the Sino-Soviet conspiracy to take over the world and the same when we attack Nicaragua, we're defending ourselves from the Russians.
When we attack Grenada it's very hard to convince people that a country of 100,000 people that has a little nutmeg is going to conquer the United States. But if it's an outpost of the Soviet Union, well, I mean, you've got to tremble because who knows what those guys are up to with their missiles and terror and so on. If you lose the Soviet threat and it's now being lost, it's going to be very hard to mobilise the population for intervention.
In fact, that's a large part of the reason why all this hysteria is being concocted about drugs. Drugs is a problem, but sending arms to Colombia has nothing to do with the drug problem. In fact, it's probably going to exacerbate it because the Colombian military is doubtless involved with the narco-traffic.
Well, it's all obvious, but it's a way of building up hysteria in the country. You're here now, so you just read the newspapers and look at television. All you see is, boy, we've got to fight this war against drugs.
It's what they tried to do with international terrorism a couple of years ago.
But over the long term, these things don't work very well. People sooner or later are going to begin to see that the drug problem is the destruction of the inner cities.
My neighbourhood isn't being destroyed by drugs. The inner city is. And it's not because the Colombians.
And sooner or later, people will realise that. And that technique of mobilisation isn't going to work. And with the loss of the Soviet threat, or at least the decline of the Soviet threat, they're trying to keep it up because it's going to be serious.
That's why there's concern. On the other hand, there's a feeling that it's to the good because the Soviet deterrent is declining. And that's said very openly.
So, for example, it's very openly stated in editorials, in the Washington Post, in the op-eds, in the New York Times, and so on, that we have to test to see whether Gorbachev is serious by seeing if he allows us a free hand in Central America. So, if Gorbachev continues to support the Nicaraguans in their attempt to defend themselves against our attack, that shows he's not serious. Because that poses certain limits on our attack.
As far as nuclear weapons are concerned you can understand why a global power which depends on the need to intervene anywhere and also needs to be able to get its population to support massive military expenditure such a country is going to support a nuclear strategy.
What can small nations do?
The peace movement in New Zealand seemed to lose momentum after the country passed the nuclear free legislation and the US kicked us out of ANZUS. Is there more that we can do?
There's no question. Small countries, like, say, Sweden, who have been out of alliance for a long time have been able, when they wanted to, to play a pretty constructive role in some areas. The nuclear issue is an issue, and it's a serious one, but it's not the one that really affects people's lives. I mean, the people of East Timor aren't being attacked by nuclear weapons.
They're being wiped out by conventional weapons, just to pick something close by. Or, say, Nigeria and the Philippines, where there's a lot of atrocities going on. You don't have to look very far away to see the use of state violence, either domestically or across borders, which is extremely ugly.
And New Zealand can play a constructive role there as an independent country, just like Sweden sometimes does. So, for example, and it doesn't even have to be local. I mean, the United States is, let's take U.S. policy in Central America, which is extremely ugly.
I mean, several hundred thousand people have been slaughtered there in the last decade, which is not a small thing, and countries have been ruined to the point where they may not survive. Now, I mentioned the Soviet deterrent, but Europe, and countries like, say, Sweden, have also provided a deterrent. They have been able, at some level, to support constructive development programmes, which gives a certain margin of survival for groups that are trying to resist the U.S. plan for the region, which is essentially just subordinated to U.S. needs.
Those are factors that can't be overlooked. The United States is a dominant world power, but it's not a truly hegemonic world power. It may have been around 1950; it certainly isn't anymore.
It's first among many now, and that means that other countries, either by symbolic action or by economic support or by public positions, can have an influence. I mean, after all, internally, the United States is quite free. Comparatively speaking, the citizen of the United States is quite free from state coercion and power.
There isn't much that the government can do to you, comparatively speaking. And that means that the public opinion can make a big difference if it can get organised and mobilised, and support from the outside is often very helpful in developing alternatives.
Is there a risk of US intervention for countries like New Zealand in speaking out forcibly against its policies or do you think that they would keep their hands off Anglo-Saxon western types?
You know, I think there's good reason to believe that something pretty shady took place in Australia with the overthrow of the Whitlam government, and Australia's a pretty big country.
It's not a third-world country. The details of that, as far as I know, are still somewhat obscure, but there's plenty of grounds for suspicion about CIA involvement and external involvement, both from Britain and the United States.
But it's not just that. I mean, there's also economic reprisals. The U.S., again, has a dominant, if not always decisive, role in international law and international economic institutions.
Just the fact that the United States has such a huge market gives it enormous power over other countries. I mean, closing off the U.S. market, for example, can wipe out many countries in the world. That's the main thing that happened in Nicaragua. Much more significant than the Contras was closing off the U.S. market.
That's a way of strangling a small country. Those are all risks that are taken by anyone who pursues an independent authority.
So, it's just being aware of the risks and navigating those?
I think it's a matter of finding other alliances. I mean, for example, the world is really splitting up into a number of different blocs, and that kind of competition leaves all kinds of options open. I mean, with Europe moving towards unification, there's going to be a kind of a German-based bloc, which is not insignificant.
In scale, it's comparable to, even bigger than the United States. It can get its act together to major force in world affairs. The Japan-centred Yen bloc is a major power bloc.
The United States, in fact, is trying to construct its own bloc. That's part of incorporating Canada into the Free Trade Agreement.
The Caribbean Basin Initiative is an attempt to incorporate whatever is viable in that region into a U.S.-dominated system, comparable to the system that Japan has developed in its periphery. And at least these three major economic blocs are going to be competitive, already are competitive, will be even more so. They'll all be trying to get their fingers into the Soviet system, which is just basically a third-world area that they'd like to be able to exploit to send capital to and get resources from and so on.
And in that kind of a complex world, the margin for manoeuvre could be substantial.
An Anglo-Saxon lake
General Douglas MacArthur said the South Pacific should be managed as an Anglo-Saxon lake. And Michael Bedford of Third World reports told me he thought New Zealand's anti-nuclear stance made a far bigger impact than, say, Vanuatu's because we're part of the Anglo-Saxon world. Do you think that's true?
Unquestionably. I mean, that's a major factor in policy. But it's not just that.
I mean, just take a look at the economies of the two countries. Sure, there's a racial overlap. I mean, you can discount what a small third-world country does.
And nobody would even know where Vanuatu is. Probably in Africa. You'd have to be able to say it's in Africa. Because that's where all the weird countries and weird names are.
Lots of people in the US don't know where New Zealand is for that matter.
Former prime minister David Lange, the man largely responsible for bringing the anti-nuclear policy to fruition, has often said that the policy is not for export.
Do you think other countries following New Zealand's or Vanuatu's nuclear-free examples would make the world a safer place?
I think the reduction of nuclear weapons will. The proliferation of nuclear weapons is extremely dangerous. The superpowers have arsenals that are vastly beyond any conceivable strategic need and all of that is enormously dangerous plus harmful just in getting rid of nuclear waste and so.
David Lange argued it was consistent to be anti-nuclea andr remain in an alliance with the US. Do you think that's either consistent or desirable?
That depends very much on what the alliance is. And if the alliance is one of defence of its members against foreign attack. That's quite academic. I don't think there's even a remote chance of that. But if that's what the alliance is for, well, yes, sure, you can be in it.
I mean if nuclear weapons do bind alliances together, that's a threat against their weaker members. If the alliance is a mechanism of suppressing others, you don't want to be in the alliance. You should be against it. You should try to dismantle it. If the alliance is sort of cover for you know economic integration and so on, yes, sure, but you don't want to limit it to these countries. I mean, extend it. I think one should ask what's the alliance for? Who's going to attack New Zealand?
Japan's socialist party looks like it has a real chance of winning an election in the future. The party has a strong anti-nuclear policy. What do you think the US reaction would be to Japan asserting its anti-nuclear constitution?
My suspicion is that ways will be found around any assertion of that policy. So, for example, it's been Japanese policy for decades not to allow warships with nuclear weapons to enter Japanese ports. But although that's the policy, it's never been adhered to.
I don' think it's going to matter much whether it's LDP or the Socialist Party. I mean, Japan is basically run by a state bureaucracy and industrial financial conglomerates. They're going to continue running the country whatever politicians happen to be sitting in office.
So, you don't see much chance of them actually putting their foot down and banning nuclear ships?
Not unless there's major popular support in the country. Something like the revolutions that developed in the 50s and 60s there's no reason to expect the political bureaucracy to change the policy.
There are anti-nuclear movements very similar to New Zealand's in the Philippines, Greece, Spain, Denmark and probably elsewhere. Do you think New Zealand should actively encourage that?
I think a kind of a loose informal alliance among smaller powers that want to see the threat of nuclear weapons decline is a good idea. If they're interested in the survival of the human species and so on, sure, they should band together. They don't have to form a formal alliance.
They should communicate and be mutually supportive and have common plans not just against the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers but against proliferation which is extremely dangerous. Maybe even more dangerous.
Do you have a view on how a country that's decided it wants to be outside of the nuclear umbrella should organise its armed forces. New Zealand's military has been designed primarily to fight in British or later US wars overseas. We've fought in virtually every war instigated by Britain or the US since the Boer War.
I don't think one can have a general policy about that.
My own judgment, for example, is that participation in the Second World War was entirely legitimate. It was obligatory. On the other hand, participation in the in the Indo China war was grotesque. That was like participating in the Russian attack on Afghanistan. So, if an alliance requires participation in all wars, get out of it.
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Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist who writes the Substack, Towards Democracy. Jeremy will talk to David Robie about his book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior at the Aro Valley Peace Talks, Nagasaki Day, Saturday 9 August, 2025.