MIT professor Noam Chomsky criticized the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on Friday, saying President Barack Obama could have provoked a nuclear war.

“We were very close to war with Pakistan, which easily could have turned into a nuclear war, which could have destroyed all of us,” he told Jason Liosatos of Global Peace Radio. “The Obama administration was willing to take that chance, though there were other ways of finding and apprehending bin Laden.”