Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky Discuss Nuclear War

good evening everyone my name is John Paul Jones I'm the Dean of the college of social behavioral sciences and it's a great pleasure to welcome everyone here tonight there Howry conversation on nuclear war and featuring here tonight of course senior fellow for the nuclear age Peace Foundation Daniel Ellsberg of the intercept editor-in-chief Betsey Reed and Noam Chomsky laureate professor of linguistics and Agnes Nelms Harry chair at the University of Arizona thank you all for joining us this January my colleagues in geography hosted a talk by distinguished climate scientist Alan robock of Rutgers University he's one of the leading scientist and strongest voices for nuclear disarmament and he and his colleagues have demonstrated that even an imited nuclear war would would abruptly change the climate and starve billions of people in nuclear winter and yet everyone in this room has lived their entire life under the threat of nuclear war their entire adult life we're not all activists so how did we manage the psychic stress of living in the nuclear age through work perhaps or social or familial diversions or perhaps resignation or complacency or perhaps we came to trust that our political and military leaders have built and maintained well-designed institutional and technological safeguards against catastrophe if that's your answer then you haven't read Daniel Ellsberg's new book the doomsday machine it is a harrowing first-person look into the manifold contingencies of nuclear war planning we might be lucky but we are not secure so when valaria Chomsky offered to facilitate Daniel Ellsberg's visit to Tucson to talk with Noam I was delighted and I'm very grateful Thank You valaria and now a few other thanks first to the outstanding professionals from the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and tech and development and outreach and marketing and communication to our long-term partners Arizona public media and to Peggy Johnson in the law cinema where daniel ellsberg will appear for a special event tomorrow evening and forth to michael bloom in SBS alum and CEO of first look media the parent organization of the intercept Michael took an interest in this project and shared with us the talented author and journalist Betsey Reed who will moderate tonight's discussion the intercept is live streaming tonight's conversation to a worldwide audience not last I want to thank the AG nice nomes Howry program in environment and social justice for for first supporting Nome position here at the University of Arizona and second for sponsoring tonight's Howry conversation mrs. Harry's work on behalf of international peace lives on through tonight's event and now I'd like to invite former dean of aua College of Law Regents professor and chair of the Howry program Advisory Council tony Massaro to introduce tonight's panel [Applause] this program is entirely consonant with the future that we want to leave to the next generations and that's a big thing that the hary program is about how to find the courage and the creativity and the political will to make a better world for those who come after us with special attention to how academic institutions and community actors can link arms in authentic partnerships this is the land-grant mission writ large and today's topic strikes deep into our concern about the future the possibility of not having won tonight's program also is consonant with the spirit of mrs. Harry she had a keen intellect she believed in questioning conventional knowledge and she was committed to free and open debate of important matters of public concern mrs. Harry would have been right in front leaning forward with her piercing blue eyes and afterwards she would gently but firmly buttonhole every member of this panel at the close of the talk and ask important questions tonight you have all of you the unique privilege of hearing three people engage about the threats of nuclear war given the global advances in the creation and possession of this doomsday machine first we have our own feels very good to say that professor Noam Chomsky dr. Chomsky is considered the father of modern linguistics he's a towering figure in analytical philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science I love this story I can't resist at age 10 he writes his first article the topic the spread of fascism following the fall of Barcelona to Francisco Franco's forces this is exactly what all 10 year-olds are thinking about one of his earliest memories consisted of watching security officers beat women's strikers outside of a textile plant the memory of injustice in the apprehension of fascism shaped him forever thereafter and this always wedded with an uncommon intellect and the ability to see things anew as he once described what true science is it's the willingness to be puzzled by simple things he has that spark which has enabled him to forge new fields and to speak out eloquently on many topics of urgent concern he received his PhD from Patton he then was recruited to MIT his first book opposed the dominant approach to the study of linguistics and has been described as a revolution in 1959 he published a critique of verbal behavior and challenged the author's entire view of language which cemented his academic reputation is one of the most creative path-breaking and intellectually daring people in his field also one of the most prolific I'm pretty sure he's a hologram he's authored over a hundred works since and he remains amazingly productive but of course dr. Chomsky did not stay in his academic linguistics Lane oh no he was an outspoken anti Vietnam War veteran were activist he wrote multiple pieces on the abuses of the US military overseas and he participated in many protests some of which ended with his arrest he wrote manufacturing consent a really powerful critique of government propaganda he spoke up early and often and still not everybody loved what he had to say he was named to President Richard and Nixon's enemies list you can see that this deterred him he continued to publicly and vigorously oppose military interventions from the Reagan administration's interventions in South America to the war on terrorism but he also maintained the apprehension first expressed at age 10 about fascism and in particular he objects to the way in which repressive regimes right and left suppress discourse he's a passionate defender of free speech even those he would go so far as to defend the right of a Holocaust denier to espouse anti factual views for all of this he's earned countless honors and accolades which he calls absurd but his name is in indispensable and enduringly significant adjective in the field of linguistics to be chomskyan is to signal something a distinctive approach to language and thought almost no intellectuals leave such a deep and distinctive mark on their fields so there are many honors for the work but here I can't resist with the wink and a nod to our own red and blue and beloved Sonoran Desert some have been heard to say that his greatest achievement is joining us others would say not really there's a species of bees named for mr. Chomsky that's pretty cool also suffice it to say we're very happy that he's here among us and that you thought of this program for us tonight mr. Chomsky thank you so much and now his friend and co-conspirator Daniel Ellsberg former consultant to the Department of Defense in the White House responsible as everyone knows for the release of the Pentagon Papers senior fellow of the nuclear age Peace Foundation he earned his degree in economics from Harvard and then attended Cambridge for a year studying on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship and he went back to Harvard to complete his graduate studies in 1954 he enlisted in the Marines mr. Ellsberg was discharged in 1957 as a first lieutenant and went back to Harvard as a junior fellow for two years his PhD dissertation was rooted in decision theory which is a branch of economics related to game theory his work gave rise to what's now known as the Ellsberg paradox basically people prefer the devil they know and we'll take a known risk with low chances of winning over an unknown risk that could guarantee a win and the paradox has given rights to a large body of scholarship another intellectual who became an adjective he worked at the pin in the Pentagon and then overseas in Vietnam and on his return he contributed to the top-secret study that became with respect to the conduct of the Vietnam War that became known as the Pentagon Papers he grew this increasingly disillusioned with the war and he says that upon meeting a draft resister named Randy Keller he had a life-changing reaction quote it wasn't what he said that changed my worldview it was the example I was setting with his life how his words in general showed he was a stellar American and he was going to jail as a very deliberate choice and there was no thought no question in my mind that our government was involved in an unjust war that was going to continue and get larger thousands of men were dying each year and I left the auditorium and found a deserted men's room and wept for over an hour that's the only time in my life I've reacted to anything like that he began producing copies of the Pentagon Papers thereafter and you know the rest of the story in 1971 the New York Times published the first of nine excerpts he was charged with violation of the Espionage Act but all charges eventually dismissed you know - that the publication of the papers sparked a furor that helped to contribute to the end of the war and the diminishing support for it it also resulted in as a teacher of the First Amendment I mean I'm very proud to meet you and say a canonical case by the United States Supreme Court that to this day protects freedom of the press his latest book is doomsday machine I commend it to you these are his words sober bipartisan messages about the American presidency if you can't handle the thought that the president lies to the public for all kinds of reasons you couldn't stay at government at that level or you're made aware of it one week the fact is presidents rarely say the whole truth essentially they never say the whole truth of what they expect and what they're doing and what they believe this historic conversation we're extremely lucky tonight is going to be monitored moderated you try to monitor that well good luck with that bye miss Betsey Reed editor-in-chief of the intercept this is an online news source dedicated to what it calls adversarial journalism here's what she believes she believes in transparency and government institutions in her eyes her role as a journalist is to create a shift government incorporations she's written have a penetrating gaze on all of us and they're gathering all this information and they're allowed privacy and secrecy so she believes her job is to turn that around and apply some transparency to them she's written several books editorial contributions to Blackwater and dirty wars she's talked about written about the private military industry the Obama administration use of drones she's been editor for the essay collection going rogue Sarah Palin an American nightmare which examined the effect of Palin's vice-presidential run on politics she also worked at the nation which has a long and storied history of progressive politics but his read believes that the magazine was preaching to the choir so she made the jump to the intercept because that's not associated with particular political leaning or silos she believes that the intercept is a way to make a difference to reach a wider audience like the one tonight please join me in welcoming three people who share a passion for discovery and communication of matters of urgent public concern people who are human adjectives and agitators who seek disclosure of things that have been both intentionally buried and that hides in plain view before our eyes often clouded bipartisan cataracts [Applause] can everybody hear us yes so I'm delighted to be here with the father of modern whistle blowing and and professor Chomsky and I think it's the first time the two of you have sat on a public stage together even though you've had a dialogue for some 40 years as friends and co-conspirators and one thing I think is extraordinary is that you then really sat in the belly of the beast and and and and you professor Chomsky are the foremost critic of that beast of American Empire so we're just thrilled to be able to see you in in dialogue in public for the first time tonight so I want to start with Dan Ellsberg relating to your book the the the doomsday machine the Pentagon Papers is your most famous contribution to American history but at the same time that you were collecting the thousands of documents that were then leaked about the Vietnam War you were also collecting thousands of other documents right which you've written about now for the first time can you tell us a story what of what those documents mean why did it take almost 50 years to get them out and are they still relevant to the youth the world today mm-hmm well at that very good introduction here of all of us been mentioning my book she mentioned the name of the title the doomsday machine but didn't give the subtitle confessions of a nuclear war planner and when I chose that title it really was more rhetorical in a way you know I thought attention-getting and so forth but in the course of writing finishing it and rereading a lot of my old work and so forth I realized there was more to confess than I had started out by thinking it was a more serious confession as he's in the book in fact people used to think that I had given the Pentagon Papers out of guilt and I would always say no my feeling was not guilt it was one responsibility I was trying to help into war and I felt that I participated in it and that gave me a special responsibility once I realized how wrong it was I smell hopeless him wrongful it was to try to end it and so it wasn't something that I feel particularly guilty about it my wife used to say Patricia you know and she'd hear me and you should feel more guilty than you do as I as I think no would but in fact soon after I started copying for which I expected to be charged with counts that would send me to prison for life and in fact it was 12 felony counts for possible 115 years in prison but having started that I realized it was really more important it seemed to me to inform the world about nuclear matters the dangers of the nuclear era and I had in my safe thousands of pages of notes and estimates and files that I had written over the years that I worked on nuclear war planning in I had been a specialist in the command and control of nuclear weapons starting in the Pacific and then elsewhere the possibilities of unauthorized action and the possibilities of the effects of accident things like that and that got me into looking at the war plans I probably read more war plans in the in the Pacific Command then any civilian had been given access to as far as I ever knew and as a result I was in once the Kennedy administration was in I was given the task of rewriting the Eisenhower guidance for the war plans that had prevailed through the 50s and into early 61 and what I wrote eventually became Secretary of Defense McNamara's guidance to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the annual operational war plan for general war for general nuclear war and that's but a lot of this book is about I had a lot of notes on that and so forth and I really copied everything in my top secret safe that was something that I didn't tell anyone until this book came out really except my one main lawyer not the other lawyers and not my wife actually at the time I didn't want to implicate her in it or my co-defendant Tony Russo and or even the other lawyers so none of them knew that I had done this and really I missed some of what was said here in the introduction because it is my left ear and I didn't get all that but I don't know if she mentioned I heard her talking yes about when I went in the men's room and wept about Randy Keeler I don't know if she used the name did she uh who was a young man who was on the way to prison for graft resistance actually for simply telling his draft board that he would not no longer cooperate with giving his address change of entrance to the draft board that's all it took to go to prison for a twenty year old or 19 year old in those days and as she said I was thunderstruck by this I had just gotten an impression of him as of an exemplary young American or was at a conference of the war resisters International with people from all over the world and I had been thinking I'm glad they get to see it a chance in the Vietnam War that they get a chance to see an American like this and as I was thinking those thoughts I was hearing him saying that he was going to join his other colleagues from the men from the war resisters League office in San Francisco in prison there would be only women left the others were in prison and he said oh I'm happy that I'm about to be joining him then and I hadn't known that that was in prospect and I was totally struck by it and as she said I went to a men's room I cried for a long time at what my country had come to in fact there's a there's a Leonard Cohen song dress rehearsal rag actually what a guy who's about to commit suicide but the chorus of it is his poem is so it's come to this it's come to this and wasn't it a long way down and wasn't it a strange way down and I thought this is my country now where my 13 year old son is bound for prison because that's the best thing that these young men can do against the war and I suspect he will do it too and actually the war was still on five years later when he became 18 and he did turn in his draft card but I I cried as I said at the thought of where my country was and then when I got up from that I thought okay now what can I do to help shorten the war now that I'm ready to go to prison and actually copying the Pentagon Papers were not the first thing I thought of doing because they were history they ended in 1968 is now 1969 a new president a new Nixon he claims during the campaign he was going to end the war it wasn't clear that this history would really do very much and I tried other things to get Democrats to do which they were not willing to do that's another story not for tonight but in the end I felt okay this is a history of 7,000 pages of Lies and crimes and broken treaties deception of the public aggression essentially and maybe it will help to get it up well that's as I say a story I don't want to go into tonight because we have a new subject of the nuclear war but having started that I then decided okay I'll copy all the top contents of my top secret safe and and put that out but what I was leading up to or I said I did see Randy Keeler in San Francisco on his way to prison basically you went there a little after and I told him what I was going to do oh he was the only person I can think of I told that not Tony Russo my helpfully copy by the way when as I say later my chief lawyer but I wanted him to know that he'd had an effect on me you know and that to know that when he went to prison it had not been without effect he was a model for me so he said forget the pen at the Vietnam papers it would call the Pentagon Papers yet we know enough about Vietnam as as know was saying to me this afternoon you know it didn't reveal all that much that was not known to critics of the war what it revealed was that what the critics were saying was well known to insiders and they they understood it but they were going they weren't going on despite that in consciousness of it but despite it so that was the secret in Hawaii but as Randy said the nuclear papers are much more important put those out forget the Viet Nam's front and my answer was I agree with you the nuclear papers are more important but Vietnam is where the bombs are falling right now and I've got to do what I can to try to shorten that and when they've when that is one that of course like I didn't know it that even fact meant after my first trial or during my first trial then I'll put out the nuclear papers and I knew that would put me in prison forever for sure well as you mentioned I gave her implied I gave him to my brother separately for safekeeping and he briefly it's in the book put them in a wooden box inside a green garbage bag and buried them in the town dump in Tarrytown and in a bluff over a road and with a green stove on top of it happened to be there that he couldn't move but it was there and that would mark where he buried the documents so fine so during the that very summer when I was on trial and indicted by that time he informed me that tropical storm Doria hurricane had hit New York and had moved the stove a hundred yards and the the bluff had gone down over the over the side of the road and they were searching for it though but I was I was sure that with his searching he would he would find these and I didn't worry too much about it because he was working every weekend to just find it he had someone actually who used the dowsing rod in parts on weekends and they got a backhoe at one point to shovel up the contents of the dump and they found a lot of garbage bags but not one with top-secret documents inside so eventually it became clear by the end of my trail they were gone and the answer to your try H to your question is when the war ended I did summarize really the first third of this book you know the story about my but I'd file from the war plans and the dangers and was told by a publisher with about nuclear and without documents she said this'll sell 1400 copies so I said well that's one for every member of Congress and just journalists and some academics okay fine she said no that means we won't publish it and that was basically true for for really the last 40 years now pretty much I've done various things in the course of arrests for civil disobedience I've testified under oath to the lot of the contents that was in that book actually in hope that doing it under oath would get a little attention for some of the things they'll talk about tonight but it didn't and I think that the lack of documents was critical to that but this very book was turned down by 17 publishers a few years ago and Bloomsbury finally took it up so this was not a subject that readers were anxious to you know that this would not make the book fly off the shelves but you were able to obtain the documents that were lost through yes well now when you say over time actually a lot of the documents have become Declassified now Freedom of Information Act suits and the National Security Archive of the university has gotten a lot of these out including some of the most sensitive stuff but not not everything that I had and so that helps at least establish that you know what I'm telling is in basis I was afraid that people would would challenge this in reviews you know what does he know it's 50 years ago and things have all changed and no one has said that because all the evidence is from insiders as well it hasn't changed that nothing essentially has changed so the risks are there in fact the the response of those who have read it is pretty good I wanted to ask professor Chomsky I mean you have written extensively about the period that is covered in Dan Ellsberg book did you learn anything from it what did you find anything new I agree with Randi Keller that this book I think which is a central reading I do strongly recommend that you read it is actually more important than releases the Pentagon Papers that was a major contribution but this I think that was even beyond and the topics that are in the book are issues that I've been studying working on for 70 years I thought I knew a lot about it but I did learn from the book and things that I learned were hair-raising so for example I learned and did not know that during the Eisenhower period and basically carried on that was one war plan and the war plan was that if there was a confrontation with the Russians in Berlin whatever may be a small confrontation then immediately we wipe out every city in China I mean the enormity of that idea it takes a while to sink yet there was no alternative plan that was the plan then tried to develop alternative plans but something like that remains another discover other things kind of confirmed surmises that I couldn't really establish but I had the sense all through the forties fifties sixties and on that the scale of the alleged Russian threat was being greatly exaggerated and it turns out from what dad released that the estimates of Russian ground forces were wildly exaggerated the bomber gap didn't exist the missile gap did exist but as then published it was in our favor and the huge buildup of armaments on the US side and the fear mongering and population control that was involved was based on I can't say fraud because people actually believed it but on gross Mis estimates which themselves I think can only be explained by ideological commitments that compelled interpretation of data in a extremely negative fashion some of some of this you could figure out just by reading the documents but the the confirmation from the inside is extremely important and that led to another revelation in the book that I found extremely shocking it turns out that after the fraud the falsity you'll recall the missile gap the when Kennedy was elected there was he was claiming that in fact they and the Air Force actually didn't round agreed that there was the Russians were way ahead of us missiles weapons and could wipe us out at no time soon it was exposed and then was instrumental in exposing it and after it was exposed he points out in the book policies continued with no change it turned out that we were far ahead of the Russians in armaments in technology they had literally no deterrent but the policies of that were based on assuming massive Russian overwhelming force ready to an intent to conquer the world after that was all exposed as untrue the program's remained we continued to follow exactly the same programs and that continues until today this is a an example which I hadn't known of something that you do find I think when you look through the record carefully there's almost we're told all the time that everything has to be done in the name of security but which find is that security at least security of the population that just is not a concern it's so low on the ranking that you can't even find it in the records and this is another kind of striking confirmation of that there are other examples another revelation which is almost unpronounceable and five words for Dan discovered he he demand he requested answers to certain questions which had never parently been asked such as in the one Bork general war plan that exists how many people they expect to be killed when it's carried out turns out maybe a billion you know if you think it through come as he says in the book how can even how can people even dream of having a war plan like this and it could the war could be set up just by inadvertence there's case after case many are discussed in the book where we came extremely close the war just by inadvertence sometimes reckless actions on the part of leaders but sometimes just accidents that happen so one example that I didn't know that comes out in the book is with when the first early warning system was established to detect incoming missiles which would have been 1958 I guess 60 yeah turns out in this new sophisticated system to detect incoming missiles in the first week of operation or stay when they evaporate started on the first day of operation it detected a Russian missile attack with 99.9 percent certainty first day of operation and fortunately nobody paid attention but but that kind of thing happens over and over and the war plans are set up so that if somebody acts on that 99 percent a billion people died I mean this is what we've been living with for 70 years and are continuing to live with today and bear in mind that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists the Doomsday Clock that they established in 1947 shortly after the first the atom bombing in Japan the Doomsday Clock I'm sure most of you know sets the men of hand a certain distance from midnight midnight means terminal disaster for the species at the beginning 47 it was said at 7 minutes to midnight it's kind of oscillated up and back since then the closest it came to midnight was in 1953 when the United States and then Soviet Union exploded thermonuclear weapons and one of the things I learned from the book is that the there was an expectation on the part of US scientists probably Russian scientists that the thermonuclear weapons might set the whole atmosphere on fire and destroy everything they thought it was a pretty low probability but not zero and it turns out some of the estimates that then reviews in the book are everything but and in fact they miss s at they miscalculated the impact by a factor of three I think it was and but and then the minute hand went to two minutes to midnight it's never gotten that close again until last January when it was moving when President Trump was inaugurated it went to two and a half minutes to midnight last January went to two minutes to midnight I think if they had had a chance to look at the Nuclear Posture review which came out a couple months later they might move it forward what you think about that but this is what we've been living with on the page after page of the book contains graphic examples of this kind of you can only call it insanity and in fact n at one point describes the book as a chronicle of human madness which I think captures the character of the era that we've been living with very accurately and we should bear in mind that this is only one of two existential threats the other which is run in parallel fact through the same years is another dramatic illustration of human men the threat of global warming is extremely serious it's not far off right this generation is going to have to decide whether to deal with it seriously and we have this astonishing phenomenon amazing phenomenon of the most powerful country in world history which is refusing to participate in global efforts to address the crisis and worse than that is dedicated to accelerating the crisis it's really hard to find words even to describe this but it's another testimony to human madness alongside but then record so fully and eloquently in doomsday machine and one point in the book and mentions that this seems to be a species pathology something about the species and I think that's something to think about it's very dramatic in fact if you look there's a lot of information looking back into the history of the human species which suggests that somehow there's a lethal streak in the species of extraordinary savagery but just sometimes control sometimes breaks out and shows up in what then rightly calls a chronicle of human madness we received some questions from the audience ahead of this event and a lot of them centered on Trump for understandable reasons there's a lot of fear that that was something was talked about in the campaign in him having his finger on the button this spectacle of the nuclear football and of course that is terrifying and combined with his foreign policy approach but one thing you write about in your book is the the phenomenon of the the sub delegation of authority to to actually initiate a nuclear strike I thought maybe you could one qualification to the idea of the finger on the button is another revelation in the book which is pretty shattering turns out it's not a finger on the button it's lots of fingers on the right that's Eisenhower President Eisenhower as part of the his enquiries actually led to the discovery of this fact the revelation of it that President Eisenhower had had delegated sub delegated authority to launch a nuclear war to the main the the major figures the Admirals and head of SAC I mean the main Admirals they had the authority to launch a nuclear war and the logic was compelling if the logic was that if Washington was suddenly destroyed in a nuclear attack somebody had to retaliate so therefore it was sub delegated but as the influence out there was a problem in that logic the problem is that every one of the people to whom authority was sub delegated followed the same logic suppose I'm wiped out I better have other people down there who were have the authority to launch a nuclear war and it turns out when you look at the details that even bomber pilots said during the who were flying b-52s over half the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis had the possibility of launching a nuclear war and the chances are that none of that has changed so it isn't really a finger on the button is bad enough but it's the reality is much worse and of course the idea that the person with the biggest finger is a Littlefinger totally doesn't make anybody every size figure so he is a remember nobody bigger bigger than he noticed the president's hands were not unusually small but big enough for the for the but it says it's his button that's bigger remember what he said it's good for kim jong on my button is bigger than I guess I don't know what you think you presume that other nuclear powers have the same system that other nuclear powers have the same oh yeah so delegation and I think no no nuclear power probably well certainly not the major when certainly not Russia allows themselves to be paralyzed by a single bomb on Moscow let's say or on Washington so they've made arrangements and my guess is very strong that Kim jong-un has not allowed it to be possible to paralyze their retaliatory power I attack on him either which we rehearse in fact that's one of the issues of the summit that I hope will take place but to address the fact that we do rehearse invasion of North Korea every year and assassination of Kim jong-un and if that's in the belief that that would decapitate them quote I think that's probably as false as it is always been for Russia or the u.s. they've always made arrangements that other people will have both Authority and capability to retaliate in that case whether you know when you were saying you started to say that here we are with the second existential problem of climate but you certify and we're not even negotiating and are taking part in discussions in fact we're going in the wrong direction I actually thought you were going to end the sentence differently when I heard it the fact that this last summer a hundred and twenty two nations you know that signs you know in a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons now that is not likely to affect the bay Denine nuclear states very quickly if at all but very striking me and this is what I thought you were about to comment on the u.s. refused to participate even in the discussion of this and in fact used every kind of muscle it had to keep other its other allies successfully from even participating in the discussion of eliminating nuclear weapons which we are bound by article six of the non-proliferation treaty going back to 68 and 69 nineteen we have a treaty commitment you know the supreme law basically ratified by the Senate that says we will take part in we will negotiate in good faith for the elimination of nuclear weapons on the one hand we are in no such negotiations whatever you know at this time but second there really has never been a day since 1968 when any American leader in good faith thought about eliminating nuclear weapons with the possible exception of the of the brief discussion between Gorbachev and Reagan actually at Reykjavik where even where I think Reagan was amazingly enough we didn't know from outside but he was abhorrence of nuclear war nuclear weapon he didn't sound that way but he was apparently and he did have some discussion of eliminating the only one that's ever been held my knowledge it at almost any level but what took priority of his mind was the air bubble the idea that there would be as Star Wars a Strategic Defense Initiative SDI that would protect us from any nuclear weapons altogether and he he could not give up the idea of space-based tests which would abrogate the anti-ballistic missile treaty so he always had like every other president a higher priority than reducing the threat of the doomsday machine and that's been true for all the presidents so to get back to your question but see it your original question if this didn't start with Trump it has attracted people's attention and that in itself is a good thing if it if the world doesn't blow up as a result people are thinking about it now because Trump has scared them the way that Reagan scared them of course will help build mobilize the freeze movement but back in the 80s but it didn't start with jumping it won't end with Trump as I say no every president is engaged in some discussion of possible imminent use of nuclear weapons mostly in secret from the American public and sometimes in public like what you point out about Iran that every candidate with the acceptance of deception of Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul yes I said with regard to it 1% that all options are open meaning nuclear weapons as an option incidentally that's even those statements are in violation of international law they take a look at the UN Charter the foundation of modern international law article 2.4 core parts as bans the threat or use of force in international affairs we're constantly every president every candidate with those minor exceptions has violated this by calling by spite threatening the use of unlimited force including nuclear weapons in the case of Iran and there's a lot to say about this particular case but it's another example if we look into the details if this time we could of how the United States is basically alone in undermining a very constructive approach to whatever threat anybody thinks here on mypos we will not permit it this is a critical fact which ought to be very prominently discussed I don't know if there's time to go into it people ask whether and what worried them is that we have a president that they think might use nuclear weapons might actually use well they're missing the point I in fact I haven't heard anyone say he is using them he has used them he says even the way that every president has actually not just Trump but use it the way you use a gun when you pointed at somebody's head in a confrontation whether or not you pull the trigger you're using a gun in fact that's a major person reason why people with guns have them who use them at 7-elevens or wherever mugging well they hope they'll get their way without having to pull the trigger but and we haven't pulled the trigger but in a way coming to the with the number of threats that have been made many secrets from the American public not from the people who received the threats as in the case of Vietnam under Nixon now what Trump is doing is saying rather publicly unusually actually we haven't had that he is threatening fire and fury it's interpreted as nuclear weapons or at least a conflict it will likely escalate by one side or the other to nuclear once it gets started it's a conflict that must not get started I would say absolutely not under any conditions because this is the first president since the Cuban Missile Crisis 55 years ago to make direct threats of armed conflict against a nuclear weapons a state that has nuclear weapons most of these other threats we made against North Vietnam or Iran earlier as you're mentioning and Korea and others did not have nuclear weapons Soviet Union did in 1962 and later but North Korea does have nuclear weapons and the smallest attack on North Korea is likely to lead to counter actions that would lead one side of the other to be using nuclear weapons and that would mean a two sided nuclear war for the first time in history and it wouldn't be one that ends most life on Earth like a war with Russia because we don't have enough cities a rather North Korea doesn't have enough cities to burn we haven't talked about nuclear winter here particularly but that's a major aspect of my book and they don't have enough weapons to burn our cities to cause smoke that will cause mass famine but it will be more violence than the world has ever seen in a day or a week or a month millions of people dead so it's of extreme importance that that not happened but I'm just saying Trump in this instance is doing publicly what other presidents like Nixon did privately in 69 threatening using the nuclear weapons to threat yeah well actually then and the book has a list of 25 cases where the threat of nuclear weapons has in fact been used in actual crises and as he says it's very much like walking into a store with a loaded gun and robbing the store when you're in fact using the gun even if you don't shoot it then this is constant furthermore it's worth bearing in mind that this continues after the collapse of the Soviet Union so in 1995 of the Clinton administration came out with one of those shocking documents I've ever read that's the Strategic Command which is in control of nuclear weapons published a document called essentials of cult post Cold War deterrence and that should really be read it's a public diets may been made public essentials of post Cold War deterrence that what it says is that we must maintain for the the right of first strike four first strike meaning devastating use of nuclear weapons and we must make maintain arts our nuclear weapons system because it nuclear weapons cast their shadow over any crisis meaning as long as others know we have this and we might use it that you as an advantage in any crisis and then it goes on to develop the first time I've seen an official document what's known as the madman theory it goes on to say that we must create a national persona of being irrational and vindictive and possibly out of control so that US will really be terrified of us and we must and that this isn't 1995 this is Clinton not from further under it's after the collapse of the Soviet Union an indication of the of what Dan points out repeatedly in the book it's an institutional problem it's not particularly it's an deep institutional problem and when he mentions at one point a species problem I think that's something to think about too you know it's good you picked that up I'm not sure I I quoted that in the book remember I think not it was what I was talking as I was so depressed as to how much I had to leave out of his book yeah I wanted to put in and that's one of the examples and it would have been very very pertinent now of course when I wrote the book I didn't have Trump in mind actually but Trump is you know openly using this notion of unpredictability impulsiveness temper or whatnot to make himself more look more dangerous to other people that is other adversaries and it was been noted that that was the Nixon madman theory which I talk about in the book though which was not known at the time that he had that in mind it was revealed by HR Haldeman later when Haldeman was in prison and published his memoir for lawyers fees and whatnot in reveal this madman theory well Nixon had gotten it he said from Eisenhower essentially in in Korea and in other words it's pervaded the thing something I'm not sure whether a I said as clearly as I might have in the book I am maybe or not but it's just that our policy especially in NATO pointing nuclear first use directly at Russia has always been a threat of an insane action you know it would destroy even when the Russians didn't have many ICBMs against the u.s. we thought they did but they didn't they had hundreds of missiles pointed at your short-range missile medium-range missiles bombers everything if we had carried out our commitment to NATO virtually from the very beginning starts you know around forty nine but but the nuclear part of it doesn't get to be the core of it till the early fifties by the early 50s the core of our NATO commitment was and remains first use if necessary and it was assumed it would be necessary against Russian conventional forces which were thought to be overwhelming well that was at a time when the Russians by that time already had the ability to annihilate West Europe with what they had it was kind of a suicide pact not at first for us but for Europe and in job in that sense I'd say it's we've been relying on a madman theory from the entire NATO of up till the day now West Germany or Germany I should say is no longer worried about invasion but we've extended NATO to the Baltics you know do only on the edge of Russia - there's talk the Republicans wanted order of Ukraine and Georgia coming in on the borders of Russia - in 2008 like now in Poland already yeah so what does that mean - to be threatening first use it means to be threatening to blow up and we haven't gotten to this but certainly Europe let's just talk about that at first Europe gets annihilated so it's been mad from the very beginning let me add a little concrete detail to it and almost quoting earlier about what I discovered when I asked when I drafted the question which was given by Ken in his in the name of Kennedy by his actual assistant for national security for the Joint Chiefs and that was if your plan the existing plans the Eisenhower plan in 61 our carried out as planned hit the targets you have in mind how many people will die in the USSR in China now I won't go into the reasons that are in the book why I narrowed it just to the USSR in China but I did it was actually in the belief that amazingly enough I thought but I'd been told they didn't have an answer to that well I was wrong and people have told me that were wrong because they did have an answer and they gave it without apology within days to the White House and it was top secret it's on the second page of my book erection top secret sensitive eyes only for the president and I was seeing it because I've written the question so in the White House I was shown their answer and the answer was in the form of a chart with a simple linear model of a rising line from the vertical axis a rising line one numbers of dead though it was writing over six months because radioactive fallout would increase the deaths and I've often asked I can say what answers when I've asked this what do you what do you think they told the president and I could do that tonight the lights are in my eyes but I've asked you very actually just the other night I got a unusually low answer a hundred thousand said well no it's higher than that but rather commonly people will say ten million our 1 million ten roots it's higher and so the answer was 325 million people if we struck first so they had an answer it clear they had a model and so I drafted the question in the White House office and send it back down okay how many altogether will be killed and that came back quickly - without without apology or embarrassment or anything else and it was in the form of a table and a cello was in the book so but to fill out because what he was saying another hundred million would be killed in the captive nations slave nation of East Europe Hungary Bulgaria Romania and so for the East Germany East Germany a hundred million from their air defenses attacks on those air bases or not they had to hit the air bases there in praevia they didn't hit the cities in East Europe that the air bases were all nitrous cities and the air defenses were annexed the city so a hundred million would be killed in addition to the 325 million in the USSR in China and then another hundred million in contiguous areas to the Soviet Union and China like neutrals like Afghanistan Austria Finland Japan a neutral India so a hundred million there from radioactive fallout and without another or head landing on West Europe naturally from our attack a hundred million of our allies would be killed by radioactive fallout from East Europe and the Soviet Union depending on which way the wind blew and supposedly dependent which depended on the season but that added up there to 600 million or a hundred Holocaust so I thought this is familiar as Norma said the answer is how do you there's no language he's the linguist here there's no language in human experience first before they like that renter was before nuclear winter was understood that's before I guess before a nuclear winter I'm gonna come to that but you know we comment on with you of all people you know on this question of language remember this was impossible 75 years ago or in the millennia before that you couldn't do that I would I would put to you and I'll ask you whether you know we have language concepts that can really deal with it crime murder but genocide well that fits genocide wait a minute this is a humble humble aside what on the side it's on the side is done Somerville said but well it's strict on the side leader at first not on the side just one third on the side because here's Wade came out they weren't including fire and they never have because they said it's too hard to calculate and you say what that was deliberately excluded yeah it's very well if we do senator warheads you needed for the same effect okay now they weren't including fire so as has been estimated since then like lynnie that would add at least another several hundred meetings so you get up to a billion there and moreover not depending on which way the wind blew Soviet Union would with weapons we could not annihilate people could not tell her because they're too many of them their mobile they're hidden short-range weapons medium-range weapons they would annihilate West Europe for us anyway a hundred million our allies so it would be a billion out of then three billion population so it would be one-third of what John Somerville called on the side which is killing everybody and however what we didn't know for another twenty years till nineteen eighty three twenty two years later when Sagan turbo tuned several taps came up with the estimate of having looked at the question of well weathers fire there's smoke and how much smoke would would be generated but what they really were looking at was not so much how much would be generated but how much by nuclear weapons would be lofted into the stratosphere or it wouldn't rain out like for example the Gulf or fires when they put all the oil things on fire that did not cause what I'm about to say because it stayed loathe it that rained it not rained very much came down nuclear weapons loft the smoke by the 150 million tons possibly of toxic black soot from cities into the stratosphere where it doesn't ring out and where it quickly goes around the globe with him days and brought some 70% of the sunlight which it's your freezing temperatures every night all year and actually possibly much more than that freezing all the lakes and rivers and giving you conditions we haven't seen since the last ice age but above all killing all harvests and it turns out in the last 10 years 11 years since 2007 the studies have shown this lasts a decade or more but a year is enough to starve nearly everyone people some people will probably live Elam Roebuck at Bryan tomb tell me in Australia eating fish and mollusks but it turns out they put it this way I just thought of it rather simply if you're hitting 50 or 100 cities or more and that plan hit every city in Russia at USSR over a hundred thousand and eighty percent of the city's over 25,000 and every city in China all that well if that's hundreds and hundreds you know maybe a thousand city if you hit something like a hundred or two hundred the biggest effect is going to be not the fire that they hadn't accounted for but the smoke from the cities which was never listed among the effects of nuclear weapons why you know a blast prompt radiation heat kill people radio and radioactive fallout they realized something especially from the h-bomb smoke no nobody had figured it for another 20 years well that was 35 years ago people have now told me who are insiders on the plan and quite authoritative Lee plans have never reflected this never taken into account any more than they take the fire into account which means that our own attacks that our own attack would kill nearly everyone and we've known this for 35 years and the plants are still there now if you thought of them as well they're just threats you know the garden is if it weren't loaded it'll never go off you can rest easy I told my wife if I didn't know more than most people know about the accidents you were describing the false alarms how close we've come I wouldn't worry either but and I could think like other people with some other people it's been 70 years we haven't had a two-sided nuclear war since the one-sided one at Hiroshima so we'll go another 70 another 700 whatever you know it's all right I think it's been a miracle that we haven't had a truce at a new pre-war in that period and it will be another miracle if we go another 70 years and that doesn't mean it's impossible it happened but it means it's very unlikely and we have we have gotten away with it so far but as normally saying it's taking a gamble that when you realize it it's hard to describe in moral terms you know you just say immoral evil yes criminal but these words don't seem am I wrong they don't seem quite adequate here we're talking about something that just was not possible before and most people are still unaware that it remains possible 35 years after the Cold War and it's worth bearing in mind that in the face of all of this understanding which is in fact shared by maybe not in detail but in general terms with the a large part of the political class that's involved in decision-making in the face of all of this we are now escalating the danger so if you take a look at the latest Nuclear Posture review of the Trump administration a couple of weeks ago it lowers the threshold for use of nuclear weapons and lowers it in a very dangerous way says we can use nuclear weapons in response to cyberattack a cyber attack can be of all kinds and you don't know where it's coming from you could be almost anywhere so there could be some kind of a cyber attack maybe a tax a little the electrical grid and we blow up the world okay we destroy the world including ourselves it adds new nuclear weapons which are very dangerous like submarine-launched tactical weapons but as was immediately pointed out by the arms control specialists the country that's being threatened with those weapons doesn't know that there are low yield weapons they can't tell all they know is the United States is enhancing the capacity for submarines to have weapons that maybe are not just warning weapons but lethal destructive weapons we're putting the the simple fact of advancing native to the Russian border as George Kennan and others pointed out years ago is virtually asking for disaster I mean if the Warsaw Pact were carrying out maneuvers on the Mexican border we wouldn't tolerate it not in fact it's unimaginable but we're doing that in a way which sets up situations where jet planes jet fighters from the two sides are buzzing each other what if they crash all kinds of things could happen which it's funny you know when you say that I think of the fact in Syria today yeah five of the nine nuclear powers there's nine nuclear weapons States five of them are engaging in conflict in Syria right now US Russia Britain France and Israel okay in the air space and in fact if you look at take Syria the latest missile attack after the alleged chemical warfare use alleged remember nobody still knows for sure what it was was apparently mostly symbolic my guess is it was probably coordinated with the Russians because it seemed to have been designed to avoid any anything beyond symbolic significance that they may have hit a medical research facility and destroyed it's not quite known but it had consequences one of the consequences was that Russia threatened I'm not going to do it but they threatened to a SAP it install advanced anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems in Syria Israel is not going to tolerate that if they come in Israel they announced right away and we'll do it we'll do whatever they can to destroy them that point they get into confrontation with Russians what goes on then what happens at that point I mean these are playing with fire that point after point where in fact diplomatic options are available in North Korea diplomatic options have been available for years in Iran there has been a diplomatic success which is now being probably in a couple of weeks blown up and there are many other diplomatic options which have simply not even been explored because the US won't allow it overall there the and the D emphasis on diplomacy is now becoming a kind of pathological like the State Department's have practically been eliminated the diplomatic services no function just bigger and bigger weapon knowing very well what the consequences might be of even an accidental event of the kind that has happened hundreds of times in the last in the past years if this is not institutional madness as you call it it's hard to imagine what no how do you how do you understand no you know we're how do you understand that it it has come to this it's come to this you in other words why how can you understand at this point in your life well I think part of the answer is given by kind of casual mention in your book when you talk about Los Alamos before the the nuclear weapons bombing Los Alamos was the place where they were putting them the the atom bomb had two phases the one was the Chicago project where they were basically making the ammunition the other was the Los Alamos project where they were making the gun that used to fire it so the Manhattan the Manhattan Project the cargo part was finished earlier the Los Alamos component wasn't finished until the gun went off till the actual bombing it was known at that time that the Germans were not making a bomb they were out of it in fact at the end the Germans were had or even been occupy conquered and occupied though Germans Los Alamos the people at Los Alamos were the collection of the most brilliant the humane cultivated educated people that you could gather in the whole world she tried to make a collection of such people it's approximately what you had at Los Alamos turns out that there was no discussion at Los Alamos about what they were doing even after it was known that the Germans were out of the war they were focused entirely on the technical the exciting technical problem of seeing if this would work now there's something about us which allows us to get involved in solving interesting technical problems within a framework in which we never asked the question what's next what's outside it and I think we're probably all familiar with this in one at one level of another but here is a case where it's just a spectacular example of how the most remarkable group of people you can imagine bringing together and isolating were subordinated to the technical problem of seeing if this gun would work and not asking what they were doing in fact there were questions serious questions raised like by Leo Gilardi which comment on but they were raised from Chicago after their phase of the enterprise was over these are very interesting things to contemplate to ask ourselves what is it about our our culture our our picture of the world our understanding that allows us to function in this fashion you know I very okay good good response and I think there's a lot there I would take issue with one word you used these men were brilliant intellectuals scientific it's funny the word okay I think of my friend and mentor here as in a class by yourself know himself the word genius is something that I apply to people like these people it los alamos generally hard sciences or artists musicians artists a sorcerer and really I only only one person in the social sciences that I know I've never said this to you but I've said it to other people that that's the word that I use for you I think you know in social sciences it's a in a class by yourself but and now here's something that came to me this afternoon the word that they were brilliant among hard scientists among mathematicians among physicists and always they were at the top but you said humane not particularly as individual as I think they were well you could I'm all right that's your it's not the way I would use the word particularly because let me make a point that for a quite a while I've had a linguistic semantics issue with people who taught who use the word inhuman as a synonym for inhumane and they use human as a synonym for humane and I think that's a mistake it's a misconception it's a it's a wrong self-image that we have generally have that to be more human is to be more decent concerned caring compassionate truthful all these things actually not I would say it's not a it's not a joke it's it may do as him very well as you know and I'll tell you something ahead this afternoon from from your from our discussion together which I loved we had a several hours which are always marvelous for me with my ears to nose lips here so a very good discussion but I'll tell you something in the head afterwards I thought of I've been having a discussion with another friend of mine who's very much in favor of evidence-based thinking and supposed to just feeling and just emotion you know and so forth ideology Authority and whatnot no reason rationality I think of myself in recent years as having belong very long to religion of reason of rationality the Vatican was RAND Corporation actually with decision theory and rationale my honors thesis at Harvard was theories of rational choice under uncertainty and I've come as I get older and I mean we can talk tomorrow about this but you know what we've all learned since we were 15 what not what what I've learned I've learned to be much more skeptical of the degree to which were protected by rationality and reason because that is so often so often in the service of a stakin terrible premises or just terrible desires you know unless it can be the people I was with in the office of Secretary of Defense and we ran were very very right but we were working on problems that were making the world more dangerous while thinking we were doing the opposite and that's that's not uncommon it's very common and now okay I'll tell you what I thought of this afternoon no it really wasn't okay no one more capable of intellectual analysis than you and so really over the years our information has mainly been a one-way flow from from known to me except on a few subjects forehead personal experience as and it's strictly not happened to have been having this argument with somebody about reason and rationality and the idea of evidence look the people who had evidence of WMDs in Iraq no weapons of mass destruction there was evidence actually and I think they actually believed what they were saying that there were WMDs there weren't any but of course that was very familiar to me because the Tonkin Gulf had been an example of a war started on a false alarm which I happen to know huh no one could know from outside but I think the people inside McNamara and LBJ like myself believed on August 4th 1964 which was my first day in the Pentagon that there had been an attack there was evidence for it it was not that there was no evidence was the question what do you believe and what do you want to believe and what they said was by the way was there was unequivocal evidence as of these WMDs and a years later well that was a flat line we knew it was unequip it was equivocal it was ambiguous there was contradictory evidence but they believed it for a day or so until more and more evidence was accumulating and so forth and that is an example actually where we started the bombing on what was effectively a false alarm and WMDs to the extent that they really cared about those I think there was a belief by Cheney and the others that there must be WMDs here what these weapons of mass there must be because we wanted that they had to be there to justify what we were doing yeah so it was not that there was no reason and no analysis but it was based on these selective evidence you know okay that's very much like the estimates of Russian military OHL you want to believe okay well wait it's a perfect example if I may say you you mentioned it but without giving actual figures let me give you the figure which by the way you mentioned that I revealed this actually not I revealed it to the RAND Corporation yeah but in the Pentagon or any intelligence you know I was reading the estimate but I didn't come to them but here I'll make it brief as I can it's a great detailed in the book but the estimates I was working on the idea of a missile gap at Rand that the Russians had as everybody all my colleagues believed very much superiority of Russian missiles and they were the first to test an ICBM ours came considerably leaders are kept collapsing and whatnot so they were ahead of us fear they put a satellite up there which showed that they could you know was accurate enough for an ICBM and so forth so there was there was reason to believe they were ahead of us but then the estimates became that how much ahead of us well we had 40 Atlas and Titan ICBMs in 1961 and about 120 Polaris missiles in range of Russia we had a lot more than that in a way of planes the estimate was that they had at least a hundred and sixty some said 120 but the Strategic Air Command in August of 1961 when I went out there to discuss the my draft of the plans I was informed that the head Tommy powers of Strategic Air Command was sure there were a thousand Russian ICBMs this was in August 1961 well that was much higher than the Air Force estimate even which was like 160 he was very much higher but a thousand he believed he was telling that to the president a month later they discovered satellites or the corona of the system and code name just had full coverage of their sights for the first time then cloud cover before they've been flying them for about a year but they didn't have full coverage they finally had full coverage and what they turned out the Russians had were four I see now at 160 and not a thousand but four we had 10 times as many you know I don't know if you notice I I think I mentioned in the book that Richard Rhodes is the best and a Pulitzer Prize winning and deservedly so historian of the a-bomb and then the h-bomb and others 30 or 40 years later he was saying what we'd said at the time that the Russians had about 40 well that's about as many as we had ICBMs that's 10 times more than they had actually which meant they had essentially nothing but anything or a made public what it had already been made public that they only had four well they had a hundred many two bombers that could reach the United States we had something like 3,000 armors within range of Russia and by the way in this year as you mentioned something that struck you in the book was I said you know 600 million altogether maybe a billion over a hundred million of those were Chinese every city in China was to be hit in the event of a conflict over Berlin and actually general Shoop who was the common man to the Marine Corps and actually had been he had been the speaker at my graduation from basic school and so happened it was the Marine Corps commandant he was the Marine Corps commandant and he was he had the Medal of Honor by the way because he had conducted the attack on Tarawa from the beach under alive Japanese bunker where they had snipers just keep him from being shot while he was directing the attack on the beach anyway a very brave guy later very much against the Vietnam War by the way okay so Shoop it's the one person who raises a question about this plan and they were all describing at the Joint Chiefs as a very good plan wonderful it's the Eisenhower plan that I was modifying which killed over a hundred million Chinese and so Shoop is the one person who said this is not a good plan any plan that kills a hundred million Chinese when they have not been part of the fight it's not a good plan that is not the American Way but it was the American plan and it remained so and it remained so for years thereafter well the reaction what was the reaction to troops coming well nothing you know it just went on Conner is actually the guy who describes this who was present said things went on you know it was just ignored essentially okay look I'll tell you something I learned in the course of the book of ready oh no after I'd written the bulk of the Commodore we actually are what are running out of time so I was gonna suggest that you say whatever you know we haven't said I know we could go on for four hours and I was hoping for you know at least a little sliver of light [Laughter] I love reading the transcript I read all interviews you know and in one case somebody at the end of the thing said professor Trotsky do you know any jokes he said all I know are some George jokes you've both dedicated your lives in different ways to activism and I wonder I mean it does seem like today the the anti-war left is much more focused on on various other threats on you know the destruction of Yemen and and and all of the sort of war mongering of this administration but what so attention is not focused on what we've been discussing tonight on nuclear proliferation so how I mean you you're both contributing to that that raising of consciousness that's so necessary but what can citizens do I think we can do a lot the if people understand these things and also understand something we really haven't gotten to that in every single one of these crisis situations there are feasible solution peaceful solutions if you go through if we had time you go through them one after the other North Korea Iran Russian border New START treaty you know cutting back nuclear weapons every one of these cases there are very clear in fact I might say at some level well-known that means the evidence is available means to approach the situations from the point of view of not threatening greater destruction but pursuing diplomatic options they do exist in every case and with enough citizen dedication activism and pressure I think governments can be compelled to pursue those off all right well I think that is a great note to end on thank you I'd like to thank the University the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences professor Chomsky Dan Ellsberg it's been a real wonder to hear from you tonight so thank you and thank you for for coming out everyone you should tell them about our fur hunt meeting in October 67

Channel: The Intercept

Views: 58,118

Rating: 4.8930635 out of 5

Keywords: daniel ellsberg, noam chomsky, university of arizona, nuclear war, pentagon papers, the doomsday machine

Id: imXAiv53_o8

Length: 91min 40sec (5500 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 26 2018