Daniel Ellsberg with Daniel Bessner 'The Doomsday Machine'

I am so happy to be here I I have been waiting for this moment for over a year to introduce you to a man and to a woman that I've fallen deeply in love with and I'm so excited that you're going to get to meet them and to hear about Daniel Ellsberg's book the doomsday machine I want to tell you that it was in October of 2016 before the fall before that day that I got an email from in my inbox from Daniel Ellsberg asking to review a book manuscript to help out with a book manuscript and I said oh what me what's is going on Daniel Ellsberg well it turned out we were going to the same conference at the nuclear age Peace Foundation and he had written virtually every one at that conference asking for help in this book and there were well there were 12 of us it wasn't that big a conference and one of them was Noam Chomsky and the other was Richard Falk so and whatever it was John mecklen it was a tremendous crowd but not knowing any of that my husband David and I jumped into Dan's book and we spent the next two months October November December three months going through it with a hair comb I'm working with in on the book and I it was the only thing to leaven the horrible thing that happened last November I need to say thank you their innumerable thank-yous certainly to town hall for all you've done for the community and bringing us here tonight through the temple Church which I remember better for the temple day care center your winner of our daughters is to go she's now 43 and I want to thank the University Bookstore for for selling Dan's book and helped me with the promotion I particularly want to call out and thank Bruce Amundsen and the Washington physicians for Social Responsibility it's true that I founded the organization in 1979 and it's true that I worked like Topsy with a whole nuclear issue until the Berlin Wall came down and until 1991 and then I have to admit that my husband and I kind of took a break and in 2008 we I went and played hooky and lived in Costa Rica I want to thank Bruce for dragging back and plunging us back into the drama on horror of nuclear war and I wanted to tell you that the purpose of tonight's meeting this is really important is that this is not an ending this is not just oh you can go just the Pope's ring you can meet a historical figure Daniel Ellsberg the man who did more than anything to end the Vietnam War that's true he is a national hero but he's not here tonight so you can sit on your butt's gives his ring and go home that's not the point the point is to go from here out to the lobby there'll be thirty-two organizations represented there who are part of our national our coalition to abolish nuclear weapons don't leave here without signing up with at least one affinity group and committing yourself to making this your life purpose that's what this book is about that's what this store biographies anybody with a smartphone can look on the Wikipedia and you can look up you can I'm sorry anybody with smart can look up the technical details of these two amazing gentlemen yeah Beck Telford and dr. bessner what I want to tell you in particular though about dr. Bester is that he has a book coming out in April called democracy and exile and we're very much hoping that another time that we'll be gathering here will be to celebrate his book coming out it's about the role of intellectuals in military planning and kind of the military industrial academic conflicts so I've looked at the preview and it looks really interesting to me he's a newcomer to our area so we're delighted to have him and I want to mention one other thing about dr. Ellsberg about Dan I've thought about this a lot in my mind the thing that is most singular about Daniel Ellsberg is that he went to hell and played the devil's game he was a author of nuclear war fighting plans now admittedly what he was trying to do was to limit or mitigate or put an off-switch into mutually assured destruction but he personally wrote plans for fighting and winning nuclear wars that was his job so in this book the doomsday machine he tells about a transformation what changed from being a military strategic intellectual who wrote books like were articles on things like the mathematics of blackmail look at his technical papers they're full of differential equations he's a mathematician he went from being a cold-blooded military scientist to the passionate extraordinary man he is today so my question is what caused the transformation from going and being in hell to being not really a saint and I go to Camus he's not a saint but he like the hero and the plague he strives against pestilences and that's the best any of us can do so thank you for giving me this wonderful memory of speaking to a crowd thank you for allowing me to present my hero and his noble wife Patricia who I would like to introduce as well I'm sure you'll have an extraordinary evening and please let's let's not be strangers let's see you again thank you [Applause] thank you everyone very much for coming is the mic it is listed as on the mic is not on check check check this one works check check check ok great ok thank you very much for coming everyone for coming and I'd like to thank dr. Daniel Ellsberg for also joining us here tonight and experiencing the weather that Seattle has to offer really appreciate everyone coming out so I think the first thing to start with here really is what motivated this book at this time why now why after all of these years come out with a book warning everyone about nuclear war besides the obvious case of our commander-in-chief in office right now better late than never can I say I really intended is I don't suppose anyone here is actually ready to either book Kevin can I see hands if anyone has okay just two or three but it starts off in the introduction by revealing something it was very much of a secret during my trial and really ever since until then which is that when I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969 which were a 747 volume top secret study called history of us decision-making in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968 can you hear me and back all right no wait okay can you hear me now back yes okay better good i when they said to hold this way too close to my throat it's my mouth I had to think I should really have a Kleenex over because I've been had a cold okay okay sorry I copy the 7,000 pages top-secret gala the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and ultimately 217 newspapers after four injunctions were brought against them The Times The Washington Post and then two other injunctions that this st. Louis post-dispatch and the Boston Globe and then they they stop trying to enjoin it but actually that was a 71 the copy was in 69 and at the same time that I was copying those pages I was copying everything else in my top secrets sake in my office in ran things that I in many cases was the only one authorized to be seen it looks like that included the Pentagon Papers themselves but most of what I copied really had to do with my years of work on command control of nuclear weapons and devising nuclear war plans as a consultant from the RAND Corporation and then part of the time as an employee of the Defense Department in 64 and my intention was to put that all out after the Pentagon Papers had had their trial or their trials several were scheduled on that actually I was put on trial for copying the Pentagon Papers there was another grand jury going on in Boston at the same time for the distribution of the Pentagon Papers which I would have been involved in and which by the way did the focus on indicted Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith and other journalists when people say now that no journalist has yet been indicted that's true but it's not true that they've never thought of indicted a journalist before Nixon did have that in mind until the peculiar way like my case not injured and that grand jury was taught but I thought that after depending on papers had had what effect they could have in shortening the Vietnam War as of 69 or 71 that then I would put out the material on the Pentagon in the nuclear and just briefly why that didn't happen then I had given it to my brother for safekeeping he had put all the material I've given him he didn't know what it was especially into a it was in a cardboard box he put it in a large green car bridge bag and put it in his compost heap and he moved it to a trash dump which was just in time because the neighbors said the FBI were poking that compost heap the next day after he moved it with long flexible rods so he had it under a green stove in there in the Tarrytown trash heap dump to mark its location in a bluff on the side of a road and while I was on trial in 71 and that continued until 73 tropical storm Doria came a small hurricane and scattered a trash dump all over the landscape the stove itself was blown apart by about a hundred yards so they couldn't tell where it had been the bluffs went down the side of the hill and my brother and a friend of his spent weekend this for a year while I was in trial trying to recover that garbage bag they even hired a back hole at one point and found a lot of green garbage bags in the trash dump but none with top-secret documents you know I eventually had to give up at about the time of my trial ended in 73 that those documents were unrecoverable and I tell this story now one reviewer frame Ellison said why didn't he tell this story 45 years ago I could think of no reason I would have told this story 45 years ago it I always felt a baby looked like a schlemiel basically having lost these documents and we didn't have the documents to show so there was no nothing much to be gained by telling that story I just tell it in passing now in the book partly an answer to the question you raised why now the fact is that the other part of the answer is I did what I could to transcribe for my lawyers what a 500 page transcript of what I'd worked on in the Pentagon that might come up during the trial and I used that as a basis for submission to my publisher at that time and the editor said this book would sell 1400 copies and I said well that's one for every member of Congress that's all right you know some other people working on arms control said no that means we wouldn't publish it and really several other times I've run into the same same result and essentially this time I just went ahead and decided well I'll do it myself if I have to this book was turned down by seventeen publishers on commercial grounds no one wants to read about no clear water period which I've heard from other people for a long time in fact an earlier agent had told me he wouldn't represent me on a book about nuclear weapons nuclear war so we'll see it is true that I am rewarded now by the presence of Donald Trump in the White House which has has focused people on that problem for the first time in many years so there's a silver lining to anything even the end of the world here in terms of sales I hope you will read the book that's the point of it and all of it including something that no one has yet commented on actually even in the reviews I've gotten good reviews but they hardly any have commented on the fact that I really spend a fair amount of time in the last part of the book telling about strategic bombing in world war two because I've always thought it's not possible to imagine to believe credit the nature of our strategic war planning now nuclear war planning without knowing its roots in the fire bombing of world war two about which most Americans know almost nothing anymore let this is a prejudicial analogy but oh you'll see it'll probably come up in the evening any more than Japanese know a lot about the rape of Nanjing they really don't learn it much in their high schools and very few Americans in fact I'll even ask right now how many people here feel that you know when and what was the greatest act of terrorism in human history and by terrorism I mean the deliberate killing massacring of civilians non-combatants were not threatening anybody for political purpose killing civilians for political purpose what was the largest single night of terrorism in human history when we see don't be modest let me see how many hands well that's almost more than I might have expected let me just take one what was that what would you say what couldn't you know Hiroshima and night that's a good guess okay but it's not the case he wrote Hiroshima and Nagasaki or not yes right the night of March 9th and 10th 1945 five months before Hiroshima 1945 general Curtis LeMay head of our strategic bombing in the Pacific use the results of months and years of experimentation with killing civilians by fire with burning people to death as it happened most people will remember Dresden how many people here have heard of The Dresden that's God was in Dresden a couple of years ago well a third a third and here and so forth okay but Dresden was by far not the largest case of actual burning of fire perhaps 38,000 people died in Dresden actually at the time some people put another zero on that project they thought there was more than a hundred thousand but actually was 38,000 according to the best records in the city then on March 9th and 10th just after Dresden which was mainly British operations Dresden along with us participation on the second day general Curtis LeMay said his fire bombers in at low altitude loaded with incendiary bombs and burned to death between 80 and a hundred and twenty thousand people in one night and they did not die well I won't it may even be worth going into a little bit what that means but there's no question about it what we did was we brought the ovens to the civilians in their beds or in their shelters in their homes and killed about a hundred thousand people one night I think had that not been done and then imitated in each of the next sixty four cities in population of Japan but they never got a fire running for killing about 900 thousand civilians before Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan they say okay now that I've said it have I charged your memory how many people now remember having heard of that bombing can I see hands because it ok perhaps 20 so roughly yeah well 320 that's that's part of a thirty part of our history that the Japanese know pretty well but we don't and the fact is that having done that there really was no decision to be made about Hiroshima in a moral nature or strategic nature people search for what was the reason what was the overpowering overwhelming reason that led people to drop this bomb once it had been developed and the answer was there was no decision to be made and none was raised no issue was raised we did with one bomb what we've been trying to do success is sometimes successfully every night for five months we'd spent that time killing as many civilians Japanese as we could night by night except they never again got a big firestorm going which is another story we have to get Becton but that's as I say I felt that was quite an important part of the book and the last part I wrote and I hope the people read read that part and don't just skip over this history so that leads to a couple of I think really interesting questions the first question is what do you think it was in in LeMay who was obviously general Curtis LeMay it was a very famous Air Force general who was known for his to be a character to say the least what do you think it was the moral switch that allowed the United States to participate in these sorts of fire bombings or trying to engender these sorts of fire bombings and then emerging from that as World War two is often of course seen in the American imagination and memory as the good war and so I'm wondering if you think that it's impossible for there to be moral strategic bombing is it is it impossible for there to be a moral strategic bombing well look people ask right now whether it's possible to have a nuclear war that doesn't violate humanitarian law international humanitarian law and as the that's easy to answer in a way war not so easy but a use of nuclear weapons the u.s. always brings up where the British brings up and he submarine war where the explosion is under the surface space war perhaps air war high altitude over the Arctic or something where nothing or the desert by the desert is not quite so hypothetical to have used nuclear weapons for example against the trench lines of the iraqis in 1991 what would really have threatened very few civilians it would have been aimed at aggressors in Kuwait would have killed them probably been fairly effective in doing that you know I'm tempted to give a detail here in a way I'm definitely about doing it to anybody at any unison not over the dinner table here we are in church but let me mention one thing to Jews in a church novia what to Jews in a church to people of Jewish descent in a church okay well just this little detail open I was talking now asked to speak to my children's my son's school as we approached the Gulf War in 1991 and there had been a lot of publicity that the Iraqis were masters of field fortification so-called field entrenchment during the Iran war with Iran which we had supported both sides actually encouraged Saddam to attack Iran and then given targeting information to each side against the other including the materials for poison gas in some cases so we sort of been deeply involved in that when even before we sent our troops over but in Iran I've been a Marine platoon leader infantry platoon leader and a rifle company commander in peacetime in Camp Lejeune North Carolina but I and then I used that training and training are given as a battalion operations training officer in Vietnam where I was a civilian and I walked with troops here having had this training do what I was doing in the field and saw combat up there fairly close so I had that experience low level experience when I saw the entrenchments that the Iraqis had where they're in their positions in Kuwait which they had invaded in 1991 which involved field after field of barbed wire trenches deep slit trenches very hard to kill people in trenches actually as they found in World War one and but nuclear weapons would do it the idea of Marines actually a marine was going to be sent up north the coast against those four and as a former infantry officer in peacetime but also we're gonna get Nam it made my blood run cold to think of how it would be like World War one you know let's go over the top man into the barbed wire and against the machine guns and the artillery coming down and just suicidal and I I actually I felt very very dismayed at the thought that we were going to attack those positions head-on and in fact what actually happened was that they had planned to do that but instead short scoffs devised what they called a Hail Mary maneuver they moved people very far flanking the other side and came on them from the other side xxx didn't make a frontal attack on the end what just came into my head because it relates to the subject of this evening I think a great deal is this fact they did have a device for dealing with the troops in the trenches they bulldoze the trenches with huge bulldozers and they buried the people alive on they we the Americans did that now that was a tactic I had not learned in infantry school exactly as I say the thought of going charging bayonets fixed and so forth charging those people with blood-curdling but something about there were even pictures of the arms and legs sticking out of these trenches that had been buried alive by bulldozers okay the subject here is how do people come to do that or plan to do that and the answer is fairly easily actually it's something humans are capable of being heartless toward other humans to a degree that we just denied to ourselves it's a denial it's it's not part of our identity that humans act this way in warfare and not only in warfare but in warfare in particular and one way of selling yourself I've I've said for a long time when we say this is inhuman take know no other species does this it's very human humane is not a synonym for human and vice-versa human is not a synonym for humane and when I say it ties him with what we're dealing with yours how do people come to make plans for killing and we haven't really got to this yet but killing but you say vast numbers of other civilians and I'm saying historically Americans have become almost addicted to bombing because we've thought of ourselves as having or I should say the Air Force thinks of itself as having won a war second world war with bombing not Germany it took troops on the ground to do it in Germany but in Japan they feel they won the war and especially with fire bombing levain mentioned we had great misgivings about using the atom bomb at all as did his boss spots there's a his superior in the Pacific because they could see right away how do you justify a large air force after the war when you can do the job of 300 bombers with one bomber and that that worried them as a matter of fact but the idea was and the Americans didn't quite start that the first to do it as I tell in the book by the way and chronologically are probably the Japanese in China and then a Granik a-- i was just funny i was doing an interview this morning i was not supposed to do it with in Italian for república in Italy and as I found myself talking to I mentioned some of this background I said Guernica and I put in the little known footnote Italian has participated most Cellini's air force participated in Guernica it wasn't just the German Condor Legion I wonder how many of the readers would have picked that one up before but anyway the Dilber destructions of course is depicted by picasso and his painting Guernica Elfi actually remember they what is the scene of a bull rearing you know in fear and anger and I believe there are sort of Liam the severed limbs that you see in the course of this well the Nazis did it they did it in the London Blitz straight terror bombings but people in the RAF had long been waiting for the ability to use their bombers in just that fashion and they found the German use of it liberating for them as a matter of fact weren't what yeah the Liberator bombers that was hideous bomber I think right b-24 but we they did it immediately then afterwards they found that for just operational reasons they couldn't fly during the day - any of them shot got got shut down British bombers they weren't able to fly high enough enough Roman think we're getting shot down they had to go at night at night you couldn't pick out you were asking now what kind of target a base or a port or a factory in practice our bombers with the Norden bombsight had actually rehearsed in Arizona in Texas hitting a particular corner of the factory that's what upper sights they thought they were well actually the British discovered they had to go at night and going at night it was hard to find the right time the right city which couldn't take a target meaningfully less than a city or in particular the built-up parts of the city and to get the most effect he used in Sindhi areas where the wherever it landed the fire could spread - closely packed housing and so forth eventually the u.s. picked up that tactic for much the same operational reasons hard to bomb through clouds to bad weather radar wasn't good enough and so forth so by the time of Tokyo then we were LeMay took on what his superiors wanted which was fire bombing that would in sin it would burn to death as many people as possible and I used to think I was 414 at that point that we didn't know they were really doing that but I was very struck in it's in the book I reproduced the headlines from the first page so rather astonishing not only did Time magazine at the time I remember this phrase you have it in the book last night general Curtis Lemay's firebirds demonstrated that properly kindled Japanese cities would burn like autumn leaves well the cities of course were cities of people but even so I didn't see a number attached to that Japan thing except that in May when they went over again they put an over estimate of how many were killed on this second wave of attacks in Tokyo and the headline in the New York Times which I wasn't reading then in Detroit the headline was 1 million killed now that was a subheading not a big astonishing thing just 1 million killed and in fact they didn't describe it in the textual almost the end of the article no protest no questions raised in Congress no nothing you know they didn't kill a million on that occasion and anything close to it but they were able to say that saying we had become in a certain sense we had become depraved simply both the Bombers and the people who accepted this and we talked about patan depth marks as did an in answer to your question again what was Truman's announcement when he first announced the bomb last night we bombed a military base Hiroshima a military base well there was a military base in Hiroshima Hiroshima but it was at the edge of the town it was not damaged it was not targeted he tired it was the center of the town and it was days I understand reading the history before people really understood there was a city associated with that military base actually the city was the target I'm saying if you understand this you can understand how the Air Force went ahead then building bombers and making plans for the purpose of incinerating many many many but what's really interesting and I think you bring this up in the book in a really illuminating way is that one of the reasons that these sorts of horrific absolutely of course so one of the really interesting things that you bring up in the book is how these actions especially during World War two were justified by arguing either that the evil not the Nazis in this case but that the Japanese Imperial armies were a existential threat to the United States and to Western democracy and therefore if we wanted to defeat an enemy we would have to adopt aspects of terror bombing and basically tactics that were understood to be against democratic tradition but what's so interesting and you talk about this in the book is how this sort of ideology was very neatly assimilated into the logic of the early Cold War so I was wondering as someone who lived through it and who decided to work for the RAND Corporation in the 1950s which was a think-tank very much dedicated to fighting the Cold War why did you at the time view the Soviet Union as an an existential threat that was analogous to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan it makes sense a little bit when you're talking about with Stalin but Stalin dies in March 53 so how come after March 53 everyone still seems to think that the Soviet Union is Nazi Germany reincarnated to some degree and this really I think is a really critical intellectual underpinning for strategic bombing for the development of all of these nuclear war plans and really for the arms race so I'm curious one why did you at that time make that intellectual choice and then to what got you out of it what got you thinking that the Soviets actually aren't bent on killing everyone like the Nazis were well I presume you realized that when you asked why did you why did Daniel Ellsberg think this you're aware everybody I knew thought that I mean this was in the air Henry waffle if everybody knew we see then but for example Henry Wallace 95 distributed leaflets for Henry Wallace on 1948 on election day saying away from the polling places and I was strongly backing Henry Wallace because I was very interested in the labor work but I I majored in labor economics for the first three years at Harvard with the intention of being either a labor organizer rather romantically or a labor economist I joined the UAW when I was seventeen and I worked in the Dodge Hamtramck plant for when I was seventeen with that intention next year different kinds of work and how I got out of that is another story but in part because the labor movement was retrenched in the course of the Cold War it was kind of swallowed up the the Democrats actually this is a bit of a satiric history and no expert in it but they pretty much co-opted the labor movement by getting anti-communist labor leaders like my hero Walter Reuther of Detroit against more left-leaning or communist oriented labor leaders in United electric and in the faction of the UAW so in effect moved him away from foreign policy any emphasis that Wallace was involved in they pretty much deprived Wallace most of his backing in 48 by red-baiting and saying that only communists would back him well that was not at all true in 47 48 he was extremely popular but by the by the time they'd finished demonizing him others had dropped away and pretty much communists were his core was support at that point but I came to believe by the way what that my own brother who was a very leftist was ignoring the realities of what was going on in East in Europe at that very time and I was very impressed by the Berlin Blockade looking back at it it's extraordinary to think fifteen when the war ended 14 I'm sorry 14 when the war ended but during the war you know raid the star and wonderful things about the bravery which was realistic actually on the Eastern Front in Russia and they were so they were our allies very much so but it's rather extraordinary to think that three years after the war ended Americans in masse myself very much included and now 17 were determined to stand with the brave Berliners against this tyranny you know when they were now our allies and we were Curtis LeMay actually this is the the best action of his life probably was in charge of the airlift which was bringing in even coal in airplanes for the people of Berlin the switch was to perceive as you say Stalin as and after 49 a Hitler armed with nuclear weapons but in the Berlin Blockade 48 we had the monopoly of nuclear weapons we sent Truman sent b-29 b-29 bombers known as the atomic bomber which had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki sent them over to Britain for the first time with a lot of publicity and LeMay with them symbolizing you know LeMay was the symbol of using nuclear weapons and we were sending nuclear bombers over there to assure the Russians they if they stopped our air supply which they could easily do because Berlin was 100 miles inside it was inside East Germany their air could have quite an easily harassed and interfered with our air operations they didn't do that for fear that that would start a nuclear war by who by us now whether in fact our nuclear threats were critical or not Truman believed they were and even general Marshall who was very stable admirable personally in most respects came to believe that the nuclear threat enabled us to keep hold of Berlin as a freedom as a free city inside a tyranny in East Europe so that the nuclear threat had succeeded in that and as I'm saying once you believe that the threat is work you tend to use it again but in my case and everybody's case it wasn't that hard to imagine that we had another Hitler here which is what we were hearing because it was it seemed little question but that the people of East Europe were being held captive down in effect against their will in 1953 as a significant uprising in East Berlin actually which was scared the hell out of the Russian leaders and led to very great repression but it was clear I think in looking back and I have put it this way in the book the reality of that was this Stalin was as ruthless as Hitler as a matter of fact in terms of body counts he probably killed more people than Hitler and killed more communists than Hitler did and that's not a irony result that what happened we're hearing about Ukraine now and their relations with Russia well Ukraine in the early 30s had been left to starve by the tens of millions but actually what amounted to more than 10 million people starve so you couldn't get more ruthless Hitler wasn't so Stalin dies in 53 yes in 53 but the story was which was quite wrong but the story that I never here's the other foot I never heard questioned was that the heirs of Stalin were the heirs of the Bolshevik doctrine that Stalin had simply exemplified or was the executive manager of a doctrine of cold-blooded doctrine for world domination and for taking over and that his heirs were Bolsheviks who were simply as tough as ruthless which was not true at all why were they holding down all of East Europe other than to take over Europe as a whole as a base yes we stopped them well there was an answer and so now how far denial and how broad denial can be and how deep it isn't that obscure an idea the Russians had been invaded by Germany twice in the same century and there was no issue more critical in their minds and we knew it than to keep from being invaded another time from Germany and not to go through the whole history as I now understand it but from its perspective entirely different from what I held throughout the Cold War their motives put this as a hypothesis a hypothesis that was not in my mind at that time that their grip on East Europe was to assure that Germany if it was going to be rearmed by the West which it was would be divided and would confront a buffer heavy buffer zone before it could do anything to rush them before they could do anything to rush again I have to say this may sound astonishing but I just put it to you the following I don't think it ever occurred to anybody I knew of to think of the tyranny and it was a genuine tyranny of the Russians the Soviets any syrup as being defensive which they thought of it almost exclusively rightly or wrongly as being defensive that was not in our heads at all the difference is between thinking whether climate right now is man-made in some degree you know the climate changes or not and you know if you believe one thing it's almost hard to put yourself in as in some of it at least here is an issue where that particular division is in the public domain people know there's a controversy about it to say the least there was no controversy about this at the time our elites in the in the Congress in the academies entirely and daily unions which were almost had come to be by 48 49 50 purged of left-wing elements and were entire old warriors and so everywhere you turned actually for advice you've got this idea we are holding back an expansionist power and what I was about to say was the ruthlessness was not exaggerated the tyranny was not exaggerated it wasn't Aaron s dictatorship not different in that respect from Nazi Germany but in terms of a willingness to expand a great risk it's suicidal risk and recklessness not there at all and yet that was not even raised as I hypothesis that there wasn't that difference so if I may say my friend Judith here was who by the way Judith and her husband City or David Koresh and Judith Lipton went over my manuscript so carefully that I really feel I can't be blamed for any remaining errors they say the book I've always wanted to say that you're a little book but it's true in this case I don't I don't see how they can in good conscience escape responsibility for any remaining errors but one thing though that you did say was that I had played the devil's game and that I had made a great change about nuclear weapons now I would always have said and I would still say right now my attitudes toward nuclear weapons did not actually change very much in the course of my life as I say in the book and I won't go repeated here but I must happen to be in a minority of Americans and I won't tell the reasons why who was very dismayed and made very uneasy and anguish by the bomb when I was 14 years old and I never really changed that attitude even though later I was working on war plans now how could that be and the answer is the same way and not to give myself airs here I'm talking about a 14 year old boy 20 year old to compare myself with states of Leo's the Lord or wrote plot later we'll share the Nobel Peace Prizes representing the international physicians for prevention Lutheran one Joseph wrote but they worked on the Manhattan Project because they were sure that they were in a race with with the Russians Germans who had after all actually discovered fission first achieved it and then explained it Germans and there was every reason to think that in a theoretical way at least they were ahead of us in exploiting the possibility of a bomb and so really as they of course like Jill art in particular but a coup and a number of others like rabinowitch who is eugene rabinowitch who is the later the publisher of the bulletin of the atomic science and established the Doomsday Clock under his editorship from The Bulletin of Atomic Sciences that did not represent a change for him from his working on the bomb during the war because the purpose during the war was to sure if possible that there would be no nuclear war that the Germans would not have a monopoly of nuclear weapons which they thought of as an ultimate terror and in fact if Germany and this is just a real-life speculation of my pardon your destroy him I put it to you if Hitler was not being pressed to military expansion by anyone known to me I've studied this quite a bit I don't remember ever reading somebody who was to the right wing of Hitler on this little war militaristic certainly not his generals but he was telling them in 37 of the hosts like memorandum in 39 his plans for expansion now that was not because everybody realized you've Germany doesn't expand you know they're in deep trouble no that was Hitler who got it in part from Albrecht hotel for the CHEO politician what if Hitler had waited the fission is in 1938 the Munich is in 38 but his takeover a prod the risk of Czechoslovakia the beginning of 39 so what no resistance because of threats they were making against provide straight blackmailed if you don't let us in Gehrig was saying to ha ha the president of Czechoslovakia our bombers will burn prod to the ground let me assure you we have laid on very generously on this nothing will remain in front and when hakka finally signed the agreement allowing the Germans to come in to the rest of Czechoslovakia he said to his foreign minister our people will curse us forever but we have saved their lives he said ok so that blackmail actually worked in 38 the war wasn't on 39 war wasn't onion September 1st 39 he attacks Poland what if he delayed that until they had the bomb there was every reason to believe and if anybody here we can talk later but I'd love to hear a contradiction of this if somebody knows better but to the best of my knowledge not as an expert but as somebody's read a lot of others the Germans indeed we have the best scientists they had expelled you know a whole slew of Jewish scientists which was very closely to them let me take that back the Jewish scientists didn't win the war in Germany Hitler didn't suffer from that specifically the Japanese did you might say and there is but they still had Heisenberg from the uncertainty principle but no better nuclear physicist in the world to study this and the basic inhibition they came up with us we can't do this in less than 4 or 5 years and Hitler was very impatient a factor of his of his character and what an historical events and he had it had to be now it had to be now one of the were over fast so he didn't pursue nuclear energy what if instead they had convinced him that you should delay this for several years till we have the bomb I think there would be a Nazi Eurasia right now or at least uh I don't think you've got no no it's an interesting counterfactual because I think he was worried about it it's an interesting counterfactual because yeah that's counterfactual but I was missing what then followed since he didn't have it was that we had the monopoly we were supposed to we were facing somebody was holding down East Europe to say may Hitler head held down East Europe pretty much okay look very similar there and the idea that they wanted that they wanted the West but there's analogy very much to something right now there's a number of analogies right now Chris Jeff did want to get West Berlin under East German control absolutely why did it matter so much well I was just reading a book about North Korea by a Russian expert on Korea was a professor in Seoul Wayne Wayne Clough the other day saying South Korea represents an enormous threat to the North Korean regime simply by existing next door to it speaking the same language same background same relatives everything and being enormous Lee freer and Richard so that North Korea has to nail down every type of communication to keep their people from understanding how big the difference is between North Korea and South Korea and that they all the North Koreans know from one way or another that South Koreans have it somewhat better but they don't know they have no comparison well it West Berlin was the same way West Berlin was a rich subsidized very subsidized but rich free city in the midst of a tyranny why attorney because Jarvis who hadn't figured worshiped toys didn't really want to be run by Russians or by a communist regime and they had to be sat on hard to keep them from becoming anti-russian anti-soviet so that West Berlin represented a threat to the stability of the East German regime so he wanted to get that well I'm gonna come back in some torn allergies now but which are rife but the one here is both Korea and Ukraine smothers which is this salon is West Berlin persistent two hundred miles inside East Germany thought any access it was a danger in part because of defection people were draining Lee the the brain drain they called it by the tens of thousands into West Berlin and then into West Europe how do we defend West Berlin there was one way in one way only to defend West Berlin from being walked into by the Russians and that was to threaten nuclear war well we did that in 48 with the b-29s now actually the b-29s we first sent over were not configured for use with atomic bombs they had to have special bomb Bay's special racks they didn't have those and we didn't send any nuclear warheads with them though eventually we get but that plus worked that's when we had a monopoly later then when Khrushchev raises the threat again of basically blockading or simply walking in to West Berlin the threat under Eisenhower and then under Kennedy under us was that threatens World War three meaning what meaning in here I was involved in some of the planning in a kibbutz in role primarily wasn't my main my main field but the idea was well we send troops in if they try to buck hey if they stop those troops we send a bigger brigade you know test it and if they stop those armed conflict and what does that mean there were 22 Soviet armored divisions within that part of Germany there was no way in the world we could force our way into Berlin to give them access and what if they stopped air access this time as well and so you couldn't hold it by air we would use tactical nuclear weapons okay but by this time the Russians had hundreds and hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons and medium-range weapons they could obliterate Europe this is before they got ICBMs even take the US and but they could wipe out Europe what we were threatening was a threat of insane action a threat of as zeros in Vietnam destroying the village in order to save it literally sacrificing Europe in order to keep her limb from being occupied now that's a threat of an insane action and it's tempting to say it's an insane policy and actually I will say that now but at the time you could also say no it's a threat of an insane action of a suicidal undecide election and it can work and it did work and nothing else would have worked so that's where we were then now we move up to however I would say to have threatened essentially what we then thought of not as nuclear winter not a homicide we didn't know that was in the cards yet but we did know total annihilation of Eurasian Europe a nation and within a few years the u.s. as well okay that's the threat for the place and it Edward I would say insane immoral to prepare that to rely on that well what's the alternative the alternative was to find some other way of providing for the security of Europe the extent it was needed for example you could transport every Berliner into West Germany and you could take every block you could take every brick of Berlin and if you wanted and move it out on an airlift Lord simply rebuild it on cetera for a fraction of the cost we were spending on the ability to destroy life in the northern hemisphere in order to do that but that was not even raised as a possibility we just make the threat now move up to what's happening right now North Korea feels that we intend regime change there right regime change has been in the minds of the White House Democrat and Republican for a generation here we exercise invasion annually of North Korea with South Korean forces and we're doing it last month exercising the invasion of North Korea we exercise and prepare for and we deploy Special Forces units openly described as meant to assassinate Kim jong-un and quote decapitate the regime what this little fat little rocket man has his paranoid fantasy that he might be under some threat from the u.s. just because we do stuff like that it just he's you know what can you do with him so he feels that he needs a deterrent against this attack which we are constantly exercising and he has for reasons I won't go through all the history but he acquired now nuclear weapons but they only have the range to annihilate South Korea and large parts of Japan well you might say that should be pretty deterrent it would deter me except that we have Lindsey Graham now the confident of the president who has now said repeatedly on television that in course of golfing conversations on weekends at mar-a-lago with President Trump he said he said face-to-face to me and I agree with him remember the casualties will all be over there repeat except thousands and thousands will die but they won't be over there they won't be over here okay now statements like that in the press give Kim Jong on the feeling that his deterrent isn't fully adequate against this administration and he must have the ability to kill Americans as well I lived through an analogy to this that is exact Chris joy found that he was going to lose the one Ally that he had in the world Cuba that had not become communist through Soviet troops going into it they had even a sentimental attachment to Cuba and for that reason me reminded them of their revolutionary past and their fathers they loved Che Guevara but also they would be blamed by China for losing Cuba and not being able to do anything about it but at that time if we had gone into Cuba they could have walked into Berlin and Kennedy had that very much in his mind if we invade Cuba as he was exercising during 1962 the biggest exercises we had done since World War two against a mythical dictator named art sack Castro spelled backwards as as Christoph noticed and Castro said I used to play a game like that when I was a kid yes backwards spelling of names so we were exercising invasion of kestrel so Khrushchev feeling that his evident ability to annihilate Europe was not as sufficient to turn decided to put missiles in range of the US by sending them to Cuba and by the way no Americans to speak of outside the CIA in the White House and a handful in the Pentagon were aware that we were preparing invasion plans and were attempting to assassinate Castro with the help of the Mafia under both Eisenhower and Kennedy in to some degree under Johnson later so we didn't know that but they knew that so they were responding to that in a feint and we're looking right now at a country kim jong on that is faced with what is no longer covert absolutely opened in intentions and efforts to overthrow them know how much can you sympathize with North Korea a tyrannous murderous regime a dictatorship closed couldn't be worse particularly expansionist a threat to the United States how so and is it possible that they could do without ICBMs and h-bombs people who know the story of North Korea not me but rather people that said yes they are open to negotiating no longer missile tests or warhead tests at least there's every reason and the Chinese and Russian propose just that that that could do it they then would not have a threat to the u.s. directly they can by the way just put a warhead on a boat send it over here very easily and they've always been able to do that so when Lindsey Graham says the casualties will all be over there he's not quite right we would come Los Angeles would go Los Angelos Beach Harbor would go probably from a boat not in 30 days under 30 minutes but in 30 days but as if now they're trying to get ICBMs the idea of getting them to give up ICBMs in each bombs is set by everyone who knows anything about Korea to be very possible and worth doing to get them to give up their existing fission atom bombs which they regard is the only deterrent to the death of Kim jong-un and his regime is not feasible and Trump is saying that as condition of negotiations right now which is not possible Kim thinks he would be crazy to give up those weapons and that's not the kind of crazy here's the kind he is crazy it seems is that he thinks that if it comes to war the important thing is to get in the first blow give the other side severe bloody nose and cause them to back off that's the only way you can you can do it can't live in the end over it can't defeat the United States but he could cause them by hitting their local bases and what not to say oh this is costing too much let's make turns that's crazy and it's the nature of NATO planning for 40 years pretty much the same plans we had and today's news is in the Wall Street Journal elsewhere behind a paywall but someone gave me a copy that our plans that we're now considering under HR McMaster the special security adviser is quote to give the North Koreans a bloody nose to show them that we are determined we really do want them to give up their nuclear weapons and to show it we hit their missile sites we hit command and control we do something else the chance of that actually ending hostilities is as close to zero as anything could be nothing is quite zero come to that but that's very close to zero that's not gonna happen both sides in other words are under the crazy impression that it's better for them to go first and second and if they're convinced that war is coming or in Trump's case that it's the only way of getting rid of their nuclear weapons he might do it and actually he's not wrong about this there is no other way no other military solution let me quote one of my favorite authorities Stephen balland who has been saying throughout before he was fired there is no military solution in Korea one of the reasons he was fired well when he's right he's right it's possible to be both crazy and smart in the same head and in fact it happens all the time and so Trump on the other hand if he really believes that he can for each armed aggressor he can give the North Koreans a bloody nose and it will stop there it's crazy and okay the theme of my book is was expressed in an earlier form of the title a clinical of madness that the nuclear epic has been one in which vary widely leadership's in in both sides have entertained have believed have held crazy beliefs as to what was possible what was necessary and what was justified and they've been allowed to do that to a large extent just as Republicans let's say will go along now with the idea that there is no manmade climate change and say wafer patrician I was flying up here tonight and looking out thank god this isn't New York or flying into right now so they're able to live through what's happening in New York right now and emboss them and say no no no climate change well likewise our military planning for nuclear war has been based on the idea sort of well if we have to carry this out here's how we'll do it and it's different ways of planning near extinction of the human species and on that happy note I think it's time for some questions yep so my name is Edward I'm from the town hall staff I invite you to come line up we have a brief amount of time for questions before we get to them two quick logistical announcements after Q&A there will be a book signing if you would like to get your books sign to purchase it from the University Bookstore table in the lobby and line up against the west wall here mister ellsberg will be signing in front of the stage one other announcement the Washington physicians for Social Responsibility will be convening a follow up conversation about tonight's event here in the church on Wednesday January 24th if you don't get your question answered or come away from tonight with any more questions and want community around that you can pick up information on the WPS our table in the lobby but for now we have time for a few questions so sir your first question last night Rachel Maddow talked about Mike Gravel and how you gave him information to get try to get the Pentagon Papers released today Dianne Feinstein released the papers I'm curious of your observation about how history seems to be repeating itself and what you went inside you can give us about what's happening I think I've thrown up a number of clues in effect to my feelings about the extent to which history was repeating itself which is unhappily over and over in as we see things right now for example something I don't deal with in the book enough was something that really only became clear a year or two ago for the first time which was that 1983 was one of the most was perhaps the most dangerous part comparable to the Cuban Missile Crisis 20 years earlier and we didn't even know that and the reason was that the then Soviet leader former KGB head Andropov had come convinced that the u.s. Reagan was planning a first strike against the Soviet Union now Reagan was not that was absolutely wrong but what could have given that clue that idea how consistent Reagan himself was astonished when he was finally convinced by a defector that Andropov really had feared that and that his reaction to his actions in part were in response to that fear how could he have imagined that well Reagan was conducting the largest fastest buildup of nuclear arms since John F Kennedy we're now involved in the third such buildup no but Reagan's was that trillion-dollar buildup like that second Reagan to put the Soviets off guard was doing exercises off the Soviet coast and sending reconnaissance planes even into Soviet airspace testing their defenses as if preparing for an invasion this was very secret almost nobody in the government knew that he was doing that when they saw Russian reactions such as the shoot-down of kaal double-oh-seven a Korean airliner hardly anybody realized that that followed actions of penetration that had been happening and that they'd confused that with an a military reconnaissance claim at that time third we had a president who regarded the Soviet evil empire as he said openly and one that should be eliminated essentially he even joked at a microphone on one occasion which he didn't realize was an open microphone and he was just testing it before him and he said the the Soviet Union has been banned the bombing will begin in 15 minutes and so forth showing a sort of same mind and forth the Reagan was batting down the idea of a nuclear weapons freeze of the kind of freeze word that's come out recently in connection with North Korea stopping exercises on earth or stopping testing on their part well the idea of a bilateral nuclear weapons freeze with no more nuclear weapons which I was a big part was had to be patted down by Reagan's very very hard he was putting first strike weapons like Pershing two into East Germany with an ability to hit Moscow within minutes and finally this just came out if in the last year at almost 30 years later that they had gotten from a defector from a spy a very super-secret higher than top-secret plan and maydel for the decapitation of Soviet command and control which did you follow which scared the hell out of them and as I say this only became available in the last year that they had this plan for cyber warfare basically and for hitting various command and control point which looked exactly like a first-strike plan that we might think might work so here we had gotten and applause into thinking that we were preparing to use an exercise which was a nuclear weapons exercise in Europe called a bowl Archer would be the cover for an actual surprise attack and he had a huge intelligence thing going on to this point a it's exactly like the present both with respect to Russia and North Korea and be one little factor him here and drop off the KGB former chairman and now now the Prime Minister the President believes that Reagan was crazy he wasn't the only one who thought that actually too many people at the time and just a little footnote right now it's it's in the news this week or that Reagan was showing evidence of Alzheimer's in the White House and in which of course later became very evident but he regarded it was crazy it's we have an open discussion going right now of whether we have a crazy president or whether he's only pretending to be crazy and whether that makes a difference all of that all of it leading up to the notion that they feared that this person might actually launch a surprise dad okay all that is similar and now but no one who's commented on this crisis I take it you've you've studied with the able archer so forth nobody comments of the fact that and reports readiness to respond to that was to preempt the attack to hold first go second first don't wait for the first one to go don't do like Barbarossa in World War two where where Hitler's armies captured millions and millions of Russians with a surprise attack no go first in a nuclear era but that's insane that's insane go first the world and that's when you go first went as a win when did we learn that 1983 that's the year of abel archery in that year carl sagan and the others came out with the the news for the first time that the smoke from burning cities would be lofted into the stratosphere by fire storms and here we're asked whether history repeats itself in world war ii we were only able to get fire storms going three times mainly though there were two other Rather's very small fire storms of hamburg president and tokyo and a fire storm is a very special kind of a fire very silent you have to have simultaneous fires over a long a widespread area which create updrafts from low pressure zones then in the heated air rises and Britain's winds either in a rolling congregation across if there's a ground wind or from all sides creating temperatures now that are of enormous lehigh 1500 degrees Fahrenheit 1200 degrees in some cases 1500 in others temperatures you don't get under any other conditions except a nuclear weapon Hiroshima created a firestorm but nothing between Tokyo on March 9th and 10th and Hiroshima on August 6 created a firestorm that's why they only killed 900,000 people of whom a hundred thousand were on one night because that was the firestorm it lost now what they discovered was in 1983 the smoke from the burning City will be lofted by the firestorm the force of these updrafts into the stratosphere where it doesn't rain out and it goes around the globe very quickly obstructing sunlight for what we now know is more than a decade perhaps 70% of sunlight would be obstructed this is assuming many cities hundreds of cities being hit simultaneously which would happen in our plans for Russian plans okay the harvests would all be destroyed it would be aborted they would be ended there will be no harvest very little vegetation left and nearly everyone would starve on earth nuclear winter not only a matter of the lakes freezing in the rivers freezing in terrible cold and drought but not but the death of the harvest would mean that the world food supplies of about 60 days would be over it wouldn't be it would take longer than 60 days for the US because a lot of it is concentrated here so we wouldn't export it anymore so the people who rely on exports of us food or Chinese soybeans when a they start first we starve later with any year now that is what would be that's what's being threatened foul by any initiation of nuclear war that was discovered in 83 but Russian scientists Sencha coffin some of the others had discovered it a little before artists at 8281 gorbachev referred to this so andropause plan of pre-empting the attack was he was he crazy no one ever said andrew puff was crazy but this was a crazy plan it was exactly like ours all this time and the idea pre-empting right now on North Korea nuclear winter is not at stake of nine nuclear states only one cannot flat out enough sunlight to starve at least two billion people the Indians and Pakistanis can do that the others can do more North Korea whether it has twenty or thirty or sixty weapons can't cause nuclear winter and they don't have enough cities so their first loss that much smoke but what would be involved is the death of several million people more in one day or a week than has ever been seen in the history of the world see the biggest number one is Tokyo a hundred thousand eighty two hundred and twenty thousand this would be several million within a day or a week so bigger bigger than ever but not nuclear winter and applause however but not a good idea for North Korea as North Korea thinks it's a good idea to start a war with the United States raw thoroughly that would be wrong on the other hand if he has made provision to assure nuclear response to his being killed Kim Jong uh that's like every other ruler pretty much on this you know Hitler himself Hitler was willing to see Germany burned to the ground if he was going to get killed I would say that ideas of decapitating kim jong on our as reckless and murderers as they could be but come back to andropause petrol puff was not Donald J Trump and yet his plans were to preempt and here's what I put to you done I haven't seen anyone comment on that no one he said and by the way this plan because it's so familiar it's a sac plan a strategic air command that's what we would do with the same effect exactly so we are building now another trillion dollars perhaps 1.6 trillion dollars I am allowing for inflation in the next thirty years for weapons to do exactly to preempt and attack with this effect right so I'm saying that's it's a it's a craziness altogether and an answer to your question does history repeat itself it hardly changes it just goes on so I want to say we are running very low on time and there's many people who want to ask questions so I'm sorry we will not be able to get many more questions but we can do one last question here I'm sorry so Dan I have a one-sentence question about the increasing automation of military operations and warfare by the way Peter lumps Dan from the ground zero Jeep action in Nevada back in the 80s and the Vandenberg mx campaign so my question is how do you think that the rapidly accelerating rise of corporate military robotics and artificial intelligence effect the challenges and resistant strategies for the human race in this century there is talk now of automating drone warfare almost entirely you know under Obama the rules of engagement were raised for the drones it's at one point and I think it was under Petraeus in particularly in Afghanistan to allow drones to attack anyone who fitted certain profiles of movement or of communications and various things they didn't have to be any intelligence specifying them they didn't have to be wearing carrying special weapon as their uniforms or anything else but they acted in a certain way if they communicated in a certain Hellfire missiles come down and hit wedding party after wedding party after wedding party and funeral parties and then when people come up to the funerals of the people when kidding before they get hit - because they're a convocation of vehicles in the desert doing all together like that anyway so this is horrible but that's what happens well you can automate that pretty easily you know if you have a set of criteria for launching the criterion that's all it takes in fact at one point they said any male between what was at 14 and 14 something like that is to be what any combatants enemy combatants well a computer can figure that one out you know I mean facial recognition isn't isn't too great but it's good enough for that basically so you can automate that in the book I quote going back now into the 50s general coder who was at one had various jobs at one point he was head of North American Air Defense Command another time specific Air Command was saying that herb York who was then the director of research and engineering I don't know no I think at that time he was still director of Livermore Lab a later under Kennedy was research and engineering so he tells that if you they were just starting on ABM work he said anti-ballistic missile and he said you know that the timing is so fast there the missiles are coming over you can't wait for human decision you know you've got to automate this link in this link and so forth and herb York was sort of going along with this up to a point and then he said of course eventually we get it to the point where it's entirely computerized and York says you know they'll recognize it they'll go against it and remember one of the things always in their mind on you said nuclear weapon this was in the air there's no problem that's not quite true if you happen to be underneath where the explosions are happening but in general it's up in the air it's in space you could relatively delegate it you know and actually North American Air Defense Command was the first to be delegated the authority to use nuclear weapons without the president doing it in the mid-50s okay so Kurtis is but eventually will get it so it's totally automated and your kids oh no we're never gonna do that and he reports coder looked at him and said well we might as well surrender right now then and the answer then on in AI and artificial intelligence I believe is there are many people who do not shrink from the idea of a terminator type warfare you know a world in which the computers are waging war with us underneath essentially you know it happening or or in the midst yes this this does have to change since I've mentioned York I want to winch and one other thing could be York so I came to know later like later in his life had once gone back to Livermore Lab the second nuclear design lab there are two major nuclear design labs both of them campuses of the University of California all of our nuclear weapons from the atom bomb first one the fat man a little bit to the neutron bomb to everything else have all been designed at an American University one University University of California now the status the relationship has changed a little bit in part because they administrative problems they were having about security with them but anyway York went back to Livermore and said I've asked myself how many weapons it takes deterred someone rational enough to be deterred how many does it take so what would you say well I mean candidates here I'm hearing one one well that's what York said one you said one but maybe you'd say you needed a few more in case they thought they could get the one or what a city they might be willing to sacrifice something that maybe 10 and then he went at it from another point of view he said what's the largest amount of destruction he would want one man one person one woman to be able to inflict in a brief period of time is there some ceiling on that or is there or is there a too much and he said how about the total casualties of World War two 60 million maybe the ability to kill 60 million people in a week or so should be the limit for what somebody can control says well that would take about a hundred weapons 100 kiloton weapons he said you could calculate might get up to 200 but not probably not it would be a hundred or less she said the number needed to deter nuclear attack which by the way Judith is where I started you know how do we deter this attack the number needed would be quote one to ten to a hundred but closer to one than a hundred it's okay that would be by the way 49 if so if North Korea has 60 in which they probably don't that's probably less that's more than you could justify on this ground every other nuclear weapons state has many more than that when Eisenhower came into office in 1953 we had 1,000 fission weapons the type that destroyed Nagasaki only most of them more powerful by that time than Nagasaki but fission weapons a thousand that Truman left when Eisenhower left office we had 23,000 mostly thermonuclear weapons the earlier thermonuclear weapons used Nagasaki weapons need nitro sake weapons as their detonator as their percussion cap as their fuse you might say the early earliest of our each box it's easier to make a big one and a small one actually were a thousand times more powerful than the Nagasaki so we had 23,000 of those eventually in 1967 under under Johnson C I was in Vietnam in 67 in 67 we had 37,000 nuclear weapons the Russians had over 30 close to 40,000 at that point to it at the height there was a total in the world of about 67 thousands of nuclear weapons come back to Herbert's point one to ten to a hundred and closer to one than a hundred is it desirable to keep North Korea from getting an h-bomb and an ICBM yes was also desirable that Pakistan not get them women Egypt and that India not get them at cetera cetera in fact all of the others in effect would that be the end of the world or is there any reason to believe by the way that know that North Korea would use those weapons against the US out of the blue unprovoked actually no reason is it impossible no I wouldn't say it was impossible he could have a false alarm he could go crazy something like that except we desirably not have them are there ways of keeping him from getting them other than attacking probably yes according to the people who know North Korea best you'd have to have a peace treaty with North Korea after there we don't have one since the Korean War have to lower or drop the sanctions you'd have to stop exercising assassination and invasion those things that doesn't seem impossible demands somehow well that means we give up regime change how can you give up regime change just because there are another country and you know the state of the United States well since Iraq we've talked about regime change which is the definition of empire a country that believes it has the right in the power and the readiness of the attention to determine who rules another country and we are in fact a covert Empire in my opinion covert in a sense of plausible denial meaning the fact that we are an empire that we have this determination to decide who runs this country in that country his covert we deny it plausibly our people I Plaza me well our people are educated to think well that's not us that's not who we are actually it is who we are but will we deny that it's a and dung he said it moreover the means or covert assassination bribery paramilitary coos and what not so it's a denied Empire pretty much if we gave that up we would have a chance of keeping a good chance of keeping North Korea from not moving ahead with ICBMs that would be good the military alternative is the almost certain death of several million people mostly over there our allies mostly South Korea and Japan so we are running very very long but and I said that that would be the last question but folks in the line brightly pointed out one final question Daniel Ellsberg if you could very briefly if you could very briefly before we go give this audience advice on what they can do as citizens to respond to the information you have presented to us tonight I would say the current situation calls for the highest degree of the one can imagine I can't imagine what would be too much non-violently and truthfully to do to convey to Congress but above all to the executive branch there must not be an attack on North Korea H that should be heard in letters to the editor deserted town hall meetings like this thank you for raising the question I apologize for not raising it earlier and I think Judith and David are going to raise this more about the discussion of what to do but I would put it the highest priority avoiding a war with North Korea and keep in touch with that in a way you couldn't do years ago but now it's possible on the internet to find out the tremendous amount is leaking out to be sure to the year to the rage of Trump I can certainly say by the way that if someone in the administration there must be hundreds of people thousands of people who have access to estimates in the administration that officially tell that not all the casualties would be over there and that the casualties over there are absolutely intolerable that's not the word that would be used officially they would just say Millions and by the way it's not only that the effects of this war would not only be measured in casualties in my opinion let me take one minute on that because I believe we are in a crisis right now not unlike the cuban missile crisis or the 83 crisis except in the scale we're not looking at the end of the world by the way when i say that the san francisco mayn't goal as a result of this it's not the end of the world but you know it's it's it's what it is it's a horrible horrible but behind the casualties if there is an attack on this country in retaliation which i would think is not certainly the highly likely come on Tracy is pretty much over in this country I think this country becomes one large airline airport terminal security area total surveillance ID cards going through metal detectors everywhere you turn around martial law to large extent I'm talking about assuming that there is an attack let's say on a city from a weapon in a container in a container freight from North Korea as a result of this otherwise in the world I think not proliferate is over non-proliferation is over proliferation is on essentially once it becomes clear that nuclear weapons are used and usable on both sides despite the horrible effects say well the effects are horrible but better to have them and not have them so Japan and others South Korea Iran South Korea is pretty much gone actually at this point Indian Pakistan get H bombs instead of a bombs testing resumes with almost certainty I have not seen this in print anywhere it said have you seen anybody say that well just put it to you from my experience after that war in which is testing you know they'll be looking at all the measurements the first two sided nuclear war ever we're right now making the first threats against a nuclear weapon the state that have ever been made since the Cuban Missile Crisis fifty five years ago so I think testing resumes Indian Pakistan moves from having fission bombs Nagasaki type bombs to H bombs and the difference that makes is that if they have a war and they've come close to it several times in the last 20 years over casually hurt over Kashmir now they would starve because of the effect on sunlight one to two billion people one third of the Earth's population with h-bombs their nuclear winter control seven billion they can do everything that's not a good change the idea of moving away from our current hair-trigger doomsday machines I think is essentially over for not just for my lifetime which isn't that long but for as long as you can see for a long time not to be a very different world generations from now to move away from the film estate machines after the war which is being told we are considering it we are preparing it we're ready to do it and this is that daily like today so there should be Committees of Correspondence there should be tongue townhall meetings as there were for instance there were meetings with legislators when they come back for publican and Democrat as there were when the issue arose of war with Syria over the gas attack in Syria and it was the American public not really particularly triggered by activists as far as I'm aware that told their legislators in what was this 2013 we don't want another Middle Eastern war and there's a case by the way we're in Syria is a horrible situation Assad murderous tyrant and where I think that US intervention could only have made matters worse even worse than they actually were so we managed to get out of that with the help of poky actually and Barack Obama the ultimate thing they'll go beyond this crisis which is right now this month next month is I would say a necessary element is we need a new Congress there has to be a Democratic House and/or Senate and it has to be different Democrats from the ones we've seen so the last time you haha but that hardly gets us anywhere well with Democrats I'm not different from the ones we've seen in this I think that the possibility for investigation for raising all the issues that I raised for allowing the public to be heard on this it becomes possible and it's not only bad things that happen as surprises I've lived long enough to see several secular miracles and one of them is the downfall of the Berlin Wall the ending of the Warsaw Pact that we were talking about earlier followed not necessarily but followed by the u.s. incorporating that in and moving firstyou threats right up to the border of Russia Poland okay now there was Nelson Mandela came to power no one foresaw that so no one can say it's impossible to change this yeah is it likely that the military-industrial people who make money out of keeping these doomsday machines on alert on both sides Russia now has a profit motive where they build this stuff in addition to the bureaucratic audience just as we do there is essentially no other motive for keeping our intercontinental ballistic missiles which are nothing but lightning rods for attack essentially so to reproduce those is reproducing a doomsday machine without any justifiable rationale that can be it's not impossible it will be very difficult to change that but it's not impossible and that's what we was to Daniel Ellsberg professor Daniel Besner thank you so much for being here I'm sorry that went so long but this is a very powerful and important conversation one more plug

Channel: Town Hall Seattle

Views: 7,787

Rating: 4.7333331 out of 5

Keywords: Town Hall, Town Hall Seattle, Daniel Ellsberg, Dan Bessner, The Doomsday Machine, Nuclear conflict, policies, nuclear weapons, defense, analyst, whistle-blower, strategy, conversation, foreign policy, Trump administration, Department of Defense, war

Id: WKd-A-wK7Po

Length: 101min 20sec (6080 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2018