Non-sense - yes he was and yes he directly addressed the comment in the book. There was a part where he and the interviewer talked specifically about that section and how significant or otherwise it is within the overall book. He starts talking about this about 45 seconds into the interview and continues to do so for pretty well all the interview. At about 3mins 30 the interviewer talks about the length of the section in the context of the whole book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7T7barZEeU
So VG - stop posting things that patently aren't true. And can easily be proved not to be true.
You're wrong - I already addressed this in #43675. Rubin asks Harris if he wants to do a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world.
Harris never said in his book that he wanted to do a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world. That is how journalist Chris Hedges paraphrased what Harris wrote in his book, and Hedges used exaggeration to caricature what he perceived was Harris's views when he was criticising Harris. Rubin then questioned Harris about the caricature and asked him if it was true, which obviously it wasn't because it's a caricature.
Hedges had opined that "the danger of Sam's simplistic worldview is that it does what fundamentalists do: It creates the illusion of a binary world of us and them, of reason versus irrationality, of the forces of light battling the forces of darkness. And once you set up this world you are permitted to view as justified military intervention, brutal occupation and even torture, anything, in short, that will subdue what is defined as irrational and dangerous. All this is done in the name of reason, in the name of his god, which looks, like all idols, an awful lot like Sam Harris."
I am not interested in Hedges' take on what Harris wrote - I am interested in what Harris actually wrote. If you watch the video Harris says he was writing in his book about how the certainty some people feel of attaining paradise through martyrdom dilutes the theory of MAD and makes it ineffective as a deterrent. He then comes up with the proposition of a "jihadist regime" with the mindset of the 9/11 hijackers. Except the 9/11 hijackers did not believe that flying planes into buildings was the criteria for being a martyr.
The 9/11 hijackers believed that fighting against what they perceived as US aggression against Muslims e.g. US troops in Saudi, support for Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine, US military and political support for sanctions against Iraq that many people including UN officials perceived as causing the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians, was their religious duty and if they died while carrying out that religious duty they would be religious martyrs and go to paradise. I have already quoted Bin Laden's stated political goals.
So if Harris was contemplating how to deal with a regime with the mindset of the 9/11 hijackers - he would be referring to one say that believed "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" except instead of "fatherland" or "ancestors" they might have substituted "freedom of Muslims in the Middle East from US aggression"
He then stated that his concern was about Western countries being nuked by long-range missiles. He did not mention any concerns about short-range missiles that might nuke non-Western foreigners. Maybe Harris is not really concerned about human survival, just his own. Harris says in the video that he had not mentioned anywhere in his book that we should be nuking Iran, which is true, he hadn't suggested that and no one has accused him of saying that. He then says he was only referring to truly suicidal religious maniacs who might get their hands on long range nuclear weapons. Except his unevidenced assumption of truly suicidal religious maniacs is just a fantasy based on his dismissal of the stated political goals of Al Qaeda and his interpretations of "jihad" and martyrdom.
He then said that he had not come up with the idea of pre-emptive nuclear first strikes and that this was a policy that the US military and other military leaders had come up with, (endorsed by some US politicians presumably) and as this policy exists, the reality is that the US could launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike to kill millions of innocent civilians. Which is true - the US did it before on a smaller scale in Japan.
He wasn't asked in the video to justify his view written in his book that even though a pre-emptive nuclear strike against a regime (based on potentially erroneous assumptions about what that regime might believe) would result in tens of millions of dead innocent civilians in a single day, "it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe."
Yes, perhaps it may be the only course of action available to him - based on his ignorance and his faulty, trigger-happy lunatic fantasies.
