"The Doomsday Machine": Confessions of Daniel Ellsberg, Former Nuclear War Planner

this is democracy Now democracynow.org The War and Peace report I'm Amy Goodman today we remember Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg who died June 16th at the age of 92 just months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 2017 Dan Ellsberg joined us to talk about his book the Doomsday Machine Confessions of a nuclear war planner the book is based in part on his role drafting the nuclear war plans for defense secretary Robert McNamara in 1961 while John F Kennedy was President so you made copies of top secret reports for plans about nuclear war years before you copied the Pentagon papers and released them to the Press essentially my notes and sometimes verbatim excerpts not the entire plants themselves but on plans that were then unknown to the president to begin with to President Kennedy I briefed his Aid with George Bundy in his first month in office on the nature of the plans and some of the other problems like the delegation of authority to theater commanders for nuclear war by President Eisenhower which was fairly shocking to McGeorge Bundy even though Kennedy chose to renew that delegation as other presidents have but I was given the job of improving the Eisenhower plans which was not a very high bar actually at that time because they were on their face the worst plans in the history of warfare a number of people who saw them but very few civilians ever got to look at them in fact The Joint Chiefs couldn't really get the targets out of General Lemay at the Strategic Air Command and there was a good reason for that they were insane they called for First Strike plans which was by order of President Eisenhower he didn't want any plan for limited war of any kind with the Soviet Union under any circumstances because that would enable the Army to ask for enormous numbers of divisions or even tactical nuclear weapons to deal with the Soviets so he required that the only plan for fighting Soviets under any circumstances such as an encounter in the Berlin Corridor the access to West Berlin or over Iran which was already a flash point at that point or Yugoslavia if they'd gone in however the war started with an uprising in East Germany for example however it got started Eisenhower's directed plan was for all-out war in a first initiation of nuclear war assuming Soviets had not used nuclear weapons and that plan called in our first strike for hitting every city actually every town over twenty five thousand in the USSR and every city in China a war with Russia would inevitably involve immediate attacks on every city in China in the course of doing this there were no reserves everything was to be thrown as soon as it was available it was a vast Trucking operation of thermonuclear weapons over to the USSR but not only the USSR the captive Nations the east Europe satellites in the Warsaw Pact were to be hit in their air defenses which were all near cities our transport points there are Communications of any kind though they were BT they were to be annihilated as well uh I couldn't believe when I saw these that the Joint Chiefs actually had ever calculated how many people they would actually kill in this course in fact Colonels were friends of mine in the air staff told me they'd never seen an actual figure for the total casualties we had exact figures of the number of targets and how many planes would be needed and every sort of thing many calculations but not victims so I drafted a question which the aid to make George Bundy Bob Comer sent to the Joint Chiefs in the name of the president and the question was in the event of you're carrying out your general nuclear war plans which were first strike plans how many will die first I asked in the USSR in China alone in the thought that by the way they'd be embarrassed to discover to say we have to have more time we've never really calculated that I was wrong and my friends were wrong in the Air Force they came back with an answer very quickly 325 million people in the USSR and China alone well then I asked all right how many all together and a few days later a hundred million in east Europe the captive Nations another 100 million in West Europe our allies from our own strikes by Fallout depending on which way the wind flew and however the wind blew a third hundred million in adjoining countries neutral countries like Austria and Finland or Afghanistan then Japan Northern India and so forth a total a 600 million people that will do time by the way when the population of the world was 3 billion and that was an underestimate of their casualties a hundred holocausts it was very clear that they hadn't included I hadn't asked actually what would Russian retaliation be against us and against West Europe they were thought at that time wrongly to have hundreds of weapons against the U.S but they did have hundreds of weapons against West Europe no question West Europe would go under any circumstances if we were defending West Europe Germany for example we were planning to destroy the continent in order to save it 600 million that was a hundred holocausts and when I held the piece of paper in my hand that had that figure that they'd sent out unembarrassedly you know proudly to the president here's what we will do I thought this is the most evil plan that has ever existed it's insane the weapons the Machinery that will carry this out this is no hypothetical plan like Herman Khan might have conceived at the Doomsday Machine that he thought up that the Rand Corporation is my colleague this was an actual War plan for how we would use the existing weapons so many of which I'd seen already that time well Dan Ellsberg the Colossal Carnage that they were envisioning as a result of the of this first strike use was uh doubly made W worse as you reveal by the fact that the image that we have that the president is the one who who holds the the switch or or has his hand on the button it's not true that there were many people have the capacity to initiate a nuclear warfare you can talk about that as well to start with even if it were only the president no one man really no one nation should have the ability the ability even to threaten her to carry out a hundred holocausts at his will that Machinery should never have existed and it does exist right now and every president has had that power and this President does have that power but the recent discussions of that which emphasize his sole Authority to do that don't take account of the fact that he has authority to delegate and he has delegated every president has delegated I don't know the details of what president Trump has done or since the Cold War every president in the Cold War right through uh Carter and Reagan had delegated in fact to theater commanders in case Communications were cut off that means that the idea that the president is the only one with sole power to issue an order that will be recognized as an authentic authorized order is totally false how many fingers are on buttons probably no president has ever really known the details of that I knew in 61 for example that Admiral Harry felt and thinkpac's commander-in-chief Pacific for whom I worked as a researcher had delegated that to his seventh fleet down to various commanders and they in turn had delegated down to people so when you say how many altogether feel authorized if their Communications are cut off and that happened part of every day in the Pacific when I was there Communications got better but the delegations never changed uh there's a it's we've never allowed it to be possible that an enemy could paralyze our retaliation by hitting our president or on command and control and neither did the Russians when President Carter and then President Reagan advertise the fact that their plans emphasized decapitation hitting Moscow above all which the French and British always planned to do by the way with their smaller forces and when that became clear the Russians instituted what they called a dead hand a perimeter system in Russian which assured that if Moscow was destroyed other commanders would have the power and would be told to launch their strikes there was even a plan to do that automatically by computer as a number of our military always recommended to make the whole thing computerized as in the Doomsday Machine of Herman Khan and Stanley Kubrick but generally they allow for lower level Majors kernels to decide the time has come we've lost our commanders the time has come to go that's almost certainly true in North Korea right now Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg speaking on Democracy Now in December 2017 about his book the Doomsday Machine Confessions of a nuclear war planner two years later in 2019 I spoke to Dan Ellsberg a day after the justice department charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for publishing U.S military and diplomatic documents exposing U.S war crimes Assange is locked up in the belmarsh prison in London he faces up to 175 years in prison if extradited and convicted in the United States yesterday is a day that will be live in the history of Journalism of law in this country and of civil liberties in this country because it was a direct attack on the First Amendment an unprecedented when there hasn't actually been such a significant attack on the freedom of the press the First Amendment which is the Bedrock of our Republic really our form of government since my case in 1971 48 years ago but this is I was indicted as a source and I warned newsmen then that that would not be the last indictment of a source if I were convicted well I wasn't convicted the the Chargers were dropped on governmental misconduct and it was another 10 years before anybody else faced that charge under the Espionage Act again Samuel Loring Morrison and it was not until President Obama that nine cases were brought as I'd been warning for so long but my warning really was that it wasn't going to stop there almost inevitably there would be a stronger attack directly on the foundations of Journalism against editors Publishers and journalists themselves and we've now seen that as of yesterday that's a new front in president's uh Trump's war on the Free Press which he regards as the enemy of the people and [Music] Usher is not a journalist that's why he is not protected by the First Amendment in the face of this new indictment uh which and let me correct something that's been uh said just a little wrong uh by everybody so far he doesn't just face 170 years that's for the 70 uh 17 counts on the Espionage Act each worth 10 plus he's still facing the five-year conspiracy charge that he started out with a few weeks ago I was sure that the administration did not want to keep Julian Assange in jail just for five years so I've been expecting these Espionage Act charges I really expected them later after he was extradited because adding them now makes it a little more complicated for Britain to execute him now as I understand it they're not supposed to extradite for political offenses or for political motives and this is obviously for both political motives and political offenses so from Julian Sandra's point of view it makes extradition a little more difficult why then did they bring it right now well coming back to the uh to the case by the way that I faced I faced only 11 felony act charges each worth 10 years in prison plus a conspiracy charge worth five so I was facing exactly 115 years in prison he's facing exactly 175. now that's not a difference it makes any difference in both cases it's a question of a life since I think that the reason they brought these charges so soon because they had until June 12th was to lay out the necessity to lay out for a tradition all the charges they planned to bring and I don't assume these are the last ones they've got a couple weeks left to string up some new charges they started out with a charge that made Julian look something other than a normal journalist the help to hacking a password sounded like something that even in the digital age perhaps most journalists wouldn't do and that would hope to separate him from the support of other journalists in this case when they had to lay out their larger charge this is straight journalism they mentioned for instance that he solicited in investigative material he solicited classified information terribly he didn't just passively receive it over the transom I can't count the number of times I've been solicited for classified information starting with the Pentagon papers but long after that and that's by every member of the responsible press that I dealt with the times the post AP uh you name it that's journalism so what they have done is recognizable I think this time to all journalists that they are in the crosshairs of this one they may not have known enough about digital uh performance to help us Source conceal her identity by using new passwords as Julian was charger they may not be able to do that but every one of them has eagerly received classified information and solicited it so every journalist and not only in this country and not only at the federal level already Brian Carmody in San Francisco has had his house broken into with sledgehammers to get all his material looking for his source in a local dispute Daniel Hale the NSA has uh has been brought I think that President Trump has in effect opened the doors to these kinds of constitutions in state and Country jurisdictions State and County are meant to say jurisdictions and undoubtedly in other countries as well that may not have a First Amendment but have looking to some precedent for the United States that's what it's what it's able to do so there's a full-scale multi-front war going on not only in this country and president Trump is leading the way we end our show with Daniel Ellsberg in his own words May 18 2018 when I spoke to him at a right livelihood Laureate gathering at University California Santa Cruz I asked him what message he had for government insiders who are considering becoming whistleblowers my message to them is don't do what I did don't wait till the bombs are actually falling or thousands more have died before you do what I wish I'd done years earlier in 64 or even 61 on the nuclear issue and that is reveal the truth that you know the dangerous truths that are being withheld by the government at whatever cost to yourself whatever risk that may take consider doing that because a War's worth of lives may be at stake or in the case of the two existential crises I'm talking about the future of humanity is at stake so many graduating classes I think have been taught have been told year after year for half a century that they face a Crossroads or that much depends on what they do that's no exaggeration right now it's this generation not the next one that the people living right now that have to change these problems fast and I think truth-telling is crucial to mobilize that what is the information that you think most needs to be revealed right now well I'm certain that there are studies in the Pentagon and CIA and the NSC right now that reveal two things that would be disastrous catastrophic to go to war against North Korea even though the immediate casualties would be measured in millions rather than billions which is the nuclear winter problem and likewise it would be catastrophic to be at war with Iran a nation four times the size and population of Iraq and as I say we've never faced up to the human cost of that war Iraq so I'm sure there are studies top secret secret confidential or higher than top secret that make this very clear I would say that Mattis John Mattis the Secretary of Defense should not wait until the bombs are falling before he reveals those truths to Congress and the public and if he doesn't do it and he's very unlikely to do it then his secretary or his aides or assistant secretaries should risk sacrifice their careers to avert these wars which must not happen Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg died June 16th at the age of 92. just months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer our deepest condolences to his family his wife Patricia his children Robert Mary and Michael his grandchildren and his great-granddaughter that does it for our show I'm Amy Goodman thanks so much for joining us

Channel: Democracy Now!

Views: 59,259

Keywords: Democracy Now, Amy Goodman, News, Politics, democracynow, Independent Media, Breaking News, World News

Id: snF2FeRiIJo

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023