World abound with weapons of mass destruction: Analyst

Press TV has conducted an interview with Anthony Hall, professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge, to ask for his view on the issue of nuclear-armed countries’ disarmament commitments.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Shouldn’t Shinzo Abe be spearheading a campaign against nuclear armed countries to try to get them either reduce or get rid of their nukes all together? I mean who better?

Hall: Yes, you are breaking up a little bit, but from what I can understand of your question of course we are deluged in the world today with weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear weapons, thousands and thousands of them, were in a precarious position and this onset of the nuclear age; the explosion of bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was a huge project at the core of what we now call the Military Industrial Complex of the United States. It was directed at the Soviet Union really. It was to send a signal to the Soviet Union [that] you are no longer our allies and now that the world is done and the Soviet Union has stopped the advance of the Nazis and the war in the Pacific of course the United States played a major role. So, that has sent a signal that the United States has these weapons, has industrial capacity to do enormous damage, has the political will to use them, to use them on civilians, to send a political signal not to the Japanese who were already defeated essentially, but to the Soviet Union and this will continue with this terror game, this holding humanity hostage to the terror of nuclear weapons. This continues to this day.

Press TV: Don’t you think Shinzo Abe when he was addressing a crowd, he was choosing his words rather carefully not to upset or offend the US? I mean, shouldn’t he be a bit more critical of a country, I understand it’s its ally (US and Japan), that leveled the two of his cities and killed near a couple of hundred thousand people there?

Hall: And then when you think what’s going on at Fukushima where the technology developed for nuclear submarines was applied on land. The Mark 1 General Electric reactor goes up and fails and creates all of this contamination. The General Electric Company is being protected. Much of this technology that failed in Japan was exported from the United States. You know we don’t have insurance against nuclear accidents as such. We have really got to get this genie back in the bottle, a worldwide program to end the hoard of nuclear weapons. And nuclear energy to my view, I think …we shouldn’t allow that to go forward in its present format.     

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