08/06/12 – Daniel Ellsberg – The Scott Horton Show

All right, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our first guest on the show today is Daniel Ellsberg, heroic liberator of the Pentagon Papers and anti-nuclear activist, anti-war activist of many different descriptions and many great accomplishments.
He's also the author of the book Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
And then there's a new one about the nuclear war issue, which I believe is coming out soon but is not finished yet.
Is that correct?
Dan, welcome back to the show.
Thanks.
Glad to be back.
No, it's not very soon.
It's due in January.
It's called the American Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, which is what I was 40 years ago, 50 years ago.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
What's it like to plan a nuclear war?
Well, in the late 50s and early 60s, I was in the belief that there was a missile gap in favor of the Soviets, which is what the intelligence estimates said, that they were on a crash effort to develop an ability for a surprise attack against the U.S. or a major threat against the U.S.
So what I was helping plan was to assure them that if they did that, there would be retaliation, and we couldn't do that without being destroyed themselves, and thus we hoped to deter them from doing that.
Now, in actual fact, that was like deterring Saddam Hussein from using his nuclear weapons in 2003.
He didn't have any.
He didn't have a program and hadn't had for virtually a decade.
The same virtually was true of the Soviets.
They did have a nuclear program, but at a time when we had thousands of nuclear weapons poised to attack them and a tremendous number that were ready to deal with any surprise attack by them, they had no ability for a surprise attack against us.
They had exactly four missiles in 1960 and 61, 61 being the year of the Berlin Crisis, a time when Kennedy was asking the nation to build home fallout shelters, led to a fallout shelter craze in case there was an attack by the Soviet Union with their four ICBMs.
So it was a totally illusory situation.
You ask what it felt like.
Well, it felt desperate to keep them from using their illusory nuclear weapons, just as, by the way, we're being told right now they were in a desperate race to keep the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon, whereas actually there is no evidence that they're seeking a nuclear weapon.
Now, I've got to ask you, Dan.
I know that around the time of the whole controversy with the Pentagon Papers, you had a lot of new leaves to turn over, and you did.
But I'm curious as to how you ever could have become a nuclear war planner in the first place when you were one of the few Americans who understood about nuclear weapons before they were actually used, and who, as you write in your article at truthdig.com Hiroshima Day, you knew better.
You disagreed with the decision to use nuclear weapons against the Japanese.
How did you ever even get into that position?
I think I answered that in answer to your first question, Scott, if you think about it for a moment.
I definitely had learned by, well, not only that I was very dubious and skeptical of the wisdom and rightness of using a nuclear weapon against Japan in 1945 because I'd been studying what the implications of that were for the future.
It so happens.
And a piece, I take it you've read, that's on my archive, Ilford.net, did realize that there would be a U-235 bomb, and that that would open an arms race that would have very sinister implications for humanity.
After that, within the next decade or so, I had learned that we'd been totally misled about the occasion for using the atom bomb at Hiroshima, that the reasons given for it, which purported to justify it, were entirely falsified.
And that's another story.
So that lends weight to your question even, how could I possibly have gotten involved?
And the answer was that whereas Japan, we knew, was a non-nuclear nation that we were using an atom bomb against, Soviet Union, we were led to believe, at the RAND Corporation by top-secret intelligence estimates, was not only a nuclear nation, which meant that it would be, it seemed like, insanity to initiate nuclear war against them, was a nation that might, we were told, initiate war against us.
And that the only way of stopping that in the world was to assure them of retaliation.
If that had been true, that they were in a crash effort to achieve that capability against us, and might use it in a surprise attack, and were like Hitler, that was the Cold War psychology of the time, that they could not be negotiated with, they could not be stayed in any form by any concessions or agreement or inspection, from launching this surprise attack like Hitler, had that been true, then I would have to say, even now, it would be hard to say that one should not develop a retaliatory capability.
I can't say, for example, that the Soviet Union or China were wrong, although the long-run effects on the arms race are very ominous, but I can't say they were wrong to develop a deterrent retaliatory capability against the U.S.
And had the Soviets been in this superior position in 58-59, which our intelligence people believe they were, I think that a retaliatory capability had to be developed.
Of course, the reality was that our top military people really knew those intelligence estimates were false, as the Army and Navy had been saying against the Air Force for a couple of years by that time.
And knowing that, the plans I was working on were actually relevant only to a U.S. first strike, as in a war developing in Europe or over Berlin, where we might have struck first in escalation of that war.
There was no chance whatever of the Soviets launching an attack on us any more than Saddam could have launched an attack on us in either 1991 or 2003.
But our leaders, both Republican and Democrat, misled us on that point.
Well, a couple of real big misleadings there that need addressing.
I guess, well, I'll save the Hiroshima question until after we get back from the next break.
But can you talk about what you're alluding to there?
I believe what you're trying to say is that they knew that it wasn't true, what they had told you, that the Soviets, that there was this missile gap, and that they were way ahead, and that we need all our Dan Ellsbergs to help us make more and better hydrogen bombs to defend ourselves from the Russians.
They knew that wasn't really right, is that what you're saying?
Well, yes and no.
I think that in 1958, when the word of missile gap first arose in a strong way in the intelligence community, that was one year after the Soviets had put up Sputnik, which we weren't yet really able to do, and had launched an ICBM, which we weren't yet able to do.
So they did seem to be ahead of us in developing these weapons.
And in 1958, I think the projection that they would develop a lot of weapons before we had them was probably sincerely helped by people who were in the grip of the Cold War ideology, which was that it equated Stalin and his successors with Hitler, as aiming at world conquest and trying to get the drop on us totally.
In retrospect, that was not the case.
They were certainly holding on to an empire in East Europe, in particular as a defense against Germany, and doing so in a totally authoritarian police state fashion.
But they were not aiming at invasion of the West, West Europe, or taking over the world.
And they well understood that they were number two, and always would be, in terms of military power, compared to the United States.
But that was not perceived by anybody I knew, certainly in the late 50s.
Now, what I was referring to was that by 1960, the Army and Navy intelligence had been saying for two years now that the Air Force and the CIA were wrong, that they had developed only a handful of missiles, which was right.
The way I learned this as a kid, Dan, was that John Kennedy accused Nixon and Eisenhower of being soft on this issue, and Nixon couldn't refute him because it was secret information, and so he had us let the attack stand.
I'm sorry, we have to go out to this break.
We'll be right back with the heroic Daniel Ellsberg, liberator of the Pentagon Papers, and author of this article, Hiroshima Day, at Ellsberg.net.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
The website is scotthorton.org.
Find all my archives there.
I'm talking with Daniel Ellsberg, heroic liberator of the Pentagon Papers, author of the book Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and the new one that he's working on, the American Doomsday Machine.
His own website is ellsberg.net, and if you look there or at truthdig.com, you can find this great article, Hiroshima Day.
America has been asleep at the wheel for 64 years.
So when we left off, Dan, we were talking about the missile gap, and the way I learned it as a kid was that Kennedy knew he was making it up when he said that Ike and Nixon had let the Soviets get way out ahead on nuclear missiles, but Nixon couldn't refute him without revealing what I am assuming is the Army report you're referring to about the state of Soviet missile technology at the time.
Eisenhower knew, the president at the time, knew that there was no missile gap, and he knew that because we were flying the U-2 over Russia, Soviet Union, and he didn't make that public because he felt that would lead the Soviets into more of a crash.
I don't know.
It would have ruffled the Soviet-U.S. relations considerably, possibly push them into more of an arms race if he revealed their humiliating situation that they couldn't then shoot down the U-2, which they did eventually in 1960 with a surface-to-air missile.
But since he kept that secret very well from the American public, not from the Soviets, who knew that the U-2 was flying over, he couldn't use it in the campaign, or Nixon couldn't use it, knowing that we knew that they did not have, or we had adequate knowledge that they did not have it.
The situation's a little more complicated than that, but that's basically the case.
And certainly by early 1961, and especially later in 1961, when we were flying reconnaissance satellites, it confirmed that the Soviets had only four ICBMs at a time when we had 40, plus thousands of bombers within range of Russia.
You've asked me how I got into this kind of planning.
I think I've implied by saying that even today, with my total abhorrence of nuclear war, had the situation been what it was purported to be by the CIA and by the Air Force, and the NIRAD Corporation that I was working for at the time worked for the Air Force and believed the Air Force estimates, had that situation been true, I would have to say that it was not only reasonable, possibly even obligatory to try to have a kind of retaliatory capability.
That wasn't the real situation, so that wasn't the policy we should have been on.
We were going in the wrong direction.
But in early 1961, I became aware that the, as is in another piece on Ellsberg.net, which you can find along with that Hiroshima piece, discovered that the force they had built, in supposedly what I understood to be for retaliation or for deterrence, actually proposed to kill 600 million people in the world, including 325 million in the Soviet Union and China alone, and the Chinese were to be killed in any conflict with the Soviet Union, just to take care of them at the same time.
But also virtually 300 million people outside that, not only in East Europe but in West Europe and in Afghanistan and India and Japan and other countries who were in the neighborhood of the Soviet Union.
So that went so incredibly far behind any reasonable requirement for deterrence, for deterring an attack, that it was a plan that, as some people in the administration called it, Eisenhower himself, overkill or redundant or wasteful, unnecessary, all of which it was.
But better words would be immoral, insane, evil.
And that has been the nature of our nuclear planning from that day to this, and that's 50 years ago.
All right, now, I want to talk about a lot of that because you have, I guess, at least two or three great pieces at Truthdig and at Ellsberg.net about the war planning in general and the planning for complete human extinction, basically.
But still, I want to talk about Hiroshima, the inaugural event of our nuclear age, really, the attack.
It's the anniversary, of course, today.
And you said earlier, and I think it was very important, you said that the reasons for the Hiroshima attack that were given to the American people were falsified.
Can you please elaborate on that?
Well, this is one of the great hoaxes of human history, one could say.
The justification that was given for the bomb, which everyone knows, and nearly all Americans believe, is that the only alternative to, the only satisfactory alternative for ending the war, to using the bomb, was an invasion later in the year, in 1945, and in early 1946, which was variously estimated by the army.
It had having 40,000 killed, the actual estimate that they made at the time, but described by Truman and others as a quarter of a million, half a million, sometimes as a million U.S. dead, and many Japanese dead, of course.
So to avoid that, the only way of doing it was by dropping the bomb.
Reality.
Virtually almost none of Truman's advisors, civilian or military, believed by July 1945, when you could say the final decisions were made to drop the bomb, believed that an invasion would be necessary by that time.
The public didn't know that.
The public had seen very fierce fighting in Okinawa, up until that point, fighting to the death, even suicidally, by the Japanese, and they expected the same performance in Japan.
The intelligence community, and the commanders involved, and the civilians, knew that that was not the case, that contrary to the performance on Okinawa, the Japanese government was, led by the emperor, was suing through the Russians for peace negotiations, and that the key element there was that they wanted was assurance that they could keep the emperor, which, in fact, we had decided we wanted them to keep order in Japan, under MacArthur, and we wanted the emperor to be able to say surrender to his troops, get them down, and to provide order.
Whether or not that was a good decision, doesn't matter, that was the decision.
So the main thing they wanted, the Japanese wanted as assurance for surrender, was something that we were politically, and in policy terms, expecting to give them.
But, rather than announce that, which nearly all of Truman's advisors urged him to do, to propose that to the Japanese, prior to the Potsdam meeting in July, and prior, of course, to the bomb, rather than do that, Truman and Burns postponed any such offer, deliberately, until the bomb had been demonstrated, which had a number of benefits for them, justifying a $2 billion expense on the program, which otherwise they expected would be questioned and investigated.
But in particular, showing to the Russians that we were prepared to use that weapon against an adversary, even when the Russians knew, and we knew, it was not necessary.
That was a very powerful threat to the Russians, and Stalin did not fail to get that message.
Okay, now can I keep you one more segment here?
Yeah.
Okay, great.
Everybody, it's Daniel Ellsberg, heroic liberator of the Pentagon Papers, and keeper of the website Ellsberg.net.
I highly urge you to read chapter one of his book, Secrets, which you can find there and elsewhere on the net.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
The website is ScottHorton.org.
2,500 interviews there going back to 2003.
ScottHorton.org.
We're talking with Daniel Ellsberg, heroic liberator of the Pentagon Papers, his website is Ellsberg.net, and his book is Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
I tried to cram it in there real quick before the end of the last segment, and it didn't quite work.
Chapter one is available.
You've got to search around for it.
I think it's at Ellsberg.net, but it's at other places online, too.
Chapter one of Secrets is about, I guess, Dr. Ellsberg's first day on the job at the Pentagon as undersecretary of covering things up or whatever it was, and that was the day of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
You can get the full insider's view of that in chapter one of Secrets.
It's online.
Go and find it.
And by the way, I didn't mention this.
I mentioned it earlier in the show, but I forgot to mention it during this interview.
There's an excellent documentary.
I mean, it's really great.
It's called The Most Dangerous Man in America, all about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.
You've got to take a look at that.
I'm really serious about it.
But now we're talking about nuclear war, and, well, particularly the nuking of Hiroshima because today's Hiroshima Day.
And now, so you laid out really well the narrative about why it was necessary, Dan.
But the problem is, for me, is that even the narrative of why it's necessary, if you buy it at face value, that somehow it was just okay to insist on unconditional surrender, whether without the emperor or whatever, or to kill women and children, to nuke a city in the name of protecting the lives of American G.I. s who were going to have to invade the island.
Now, again, taking at face value that that was even true, which I'm not saying we should necessarily, but for the sake of argument, would the Americans ever be justified in rounding up all of the women and children of Hiroshima and machine-gunning them to death like the Nazis would have done or something like that?
If that is what it would have taken to make them surrender?
For some reason, the instantaneous poof and they're all dead makes it more justifiable than if it was a machine-gun massacre.
You know what I mean?
It seems like such a bogus argument, even on its face.
All right.
Scott, you know, I congratulate you for raising that point because it's really, really made, the argument you've just made or questions you've just raised, are really very unusual in the half-century and more of the discussion of this issue.
The problem here is this.
First of all, when I was 14, having, when the bomb was used, I already, you know, at that young age, was extremely uneasy about the implications of that having been done.
The public was very applauding of it on the whole, with a number of other people also being very alarmed and uneasy about it at first.
But that was so covered by the joy at the fact that the war was over and the misbelief that it would not have ended so quickly, otherwise, without the bomb.
That was a fraudulent belief but very plausible in terms of, you know, ad hoc, prostitute, the bomb was dropped, the war ended.
Almost no Americans were aware that the Japanese had been suing for surrender secretly through the Russians who were telling us, and we knew that through intercepting their intelligence and their communications and decoding them at that time.
So the public didn't know that.
The troops who thought they were on their way to Japan didn't know that.
So they were very happy at this big surprise that the Japanese were willing to surrender.
The leaders knew that.
The Americans did not.
They thought from Okinawa that they would not surrender under any conditions and that only the bomb, the amazing bomb, had brought this about.
Now, coming though right to your point, there's more to say on that other point, but on your point, even given the rationale, you could say were Americans justified in feeling happy that the war was over at the cost of these, killing these civilians?
Women, children, babies, hardly any able-bodied men were in Hiroshima at that time.
There were some troops there, as a matter of fact, home troops, but generally it was civilians who were killed.
So the truth, the fact that I would put to you is that unfortunately the American people did accept the morality of that, which was virtually unprecedented in terms of public consciousness because it meant accepting the morality of a terrorist act, of killing civilians, non-combatants, for a political purpose, ending the war.
People would not threaten us individually or together.
And wiping out, including infants.
That was the largest, well, it was the third, or the second largest act of terrorism in history.
The first having been also by the U.S. on March 9th and 10th, 1945, which was the firebombing of Tokyo in which 80,000 to more than 100,000 people had been burned to death, as they were essentially in Hiroshima, burned and blasted to death there and died of radioactivity.
But burning alive in the firestorm of Tokyo was no more humane than what the people of Hiroshima experienced.
And we had been doing that deliberately to every major city in Japan from March 9th to 10th on.
In other words, for five months we'd been killing Japanese as fast and as many as we possibly could.
And that was a lot.
It added up to about 900,000 Japanese civilians before Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
So put this in the moral context then in the following way.
For Truman and his other leaders, the others around him, he was not, many of which were not eager to see the bomb used, unlike Truman and Burns and Groves and Oppenheimer and Bush and a few others, but many others unhappy to see it used.
But nevertheless, it offered no new moral issue for them because it did exactly what we'd been doing for the last five months.
It did it a little more cheaply and efficiently with one bomber instead of 300.
But we had 300.
We had more than 300 and we're using them every day.
So there was no new moral issue.
Now, for the public, they hadn't had their noses rubbed in that exactly.
It hadn't been a total secret what we were doing to Japan, but there wasn't a lot of publicity either.
And of course, nobody on the ground, no photographs or anything like that.
So it wasn't too much in their consciousness.
For the first time, they were really confronted with Hiroshima that we had blotted out a city, not a military target, but civilians.
And they had to consider whether that was justified.
And they did, given the explanation they were given that this was the only way to avoid an invasion, no consideration given to having changed the surrender terms to terms we were willing to accept, actually, keeping the emperor.
Not knowing that, I'm sorry to say, the American people from that day to this accepted that that great act of terrorism was justified.
And that is a terribly dangerous moral, let's call it immoral, but it's a form of morality which says that this is a lesser evil and it's acceptable.
And that's, of course, been the basis for our acceptance of our threats of nuclear weapons from that day to this.
And we're threatening them right now against Iran when we say all options are on the table, no options are off the table.
And that doesn't just mean military attack, which would be aggression, a crime against peace if Israel or the U.S. or both of them together attacked Iran now, it would be under the U.N. Charter that we've ratified, clear-cut aggression, even without nuclear weapons.
And they've added to that that yes, we don't rule out the use of nuclear weapons against their underground sites.
We're making threats, in other words, of another Hiroshima right now, which means that we're using the weapons because we're using them like a gun you point at somebody's head, whether you pull the trigger or not, we're using that weapon and that's true of both major candidates right now as it was four years ago.
All right, now, we're almost out of time for this segment.
Is there any chance I could keep you one more or do you got to go?
Yeah, I'm okay.
Okay, great, because I want to ask you all about modern-day nuclear weapons and H-bombs and possible extinction of mankind.
And again, Dan Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner, so he actually really knows something about this, not just from the Wikipedia entry or something, about how many humans could be expected to die in a week worth of nuclear war or something like that.
Some of these kinds of questions that you've written about at truthdig.org I want to talk with you about.
So hang tight, everybody.
It's Dan Ellsberg.
Ellsberg.net is his website.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Scotthorton.org is the website.
Keep all the archives there, including quite a few with Daniel Ellsberg on, of course, the Pentagon Papers, as well as Iraq War stuff and nuclear war stuff, which he's been writing about for the past, say, three years or so.
Got a new book coming out, The American Doomsday Machine, I guess early next year, you said, right, Dan?
No, I'll be finished early next year, I hope.
No, it'll be a while.
It'll be later in the year before it comes out.
By the way, let me mention on my website, Ellsberg.net, the pieces we've been referring to to find them, you go to Ellsberg.net and then look up archive.
There's a button for archive.
And then under archive, nuclear.
And you'll see a bunch of nuclear articles, including the Hiroshima Day One three years ago, which you referred to.
And then another one you referred to, not by name, U.S. nuclear war planning for 100 Holocaust.
That's what I was referring to moments ago when I said that I discovered that our planning in 1961 estimated that the effects of our using our first strike capability would be 600 million dead or 100 Holocaust.
Amazing.
Now, at least in the Truthdig.com version, I'm not sure if it's like this on your website, but you reprint this chart of how many fatalities are to be expected.
That's the one I'm referring to.
The title under my archive and under nuclear is U.S. nuclear war planning for 100 Holocaust.
But you know, something that wasn't known then in 61, which I...
Okay, two things that the planners themselves didn't know at that point.
And certainly I didn't know.
One, they were not accounting of all things for fire from the effects.
They were looking at blast and immediate radiation as the cause of lethality.
Fire is the main effect of these thermonuclear weapons, and yet they weren't calculating casualties based on that on the ground.
It was too hard to estimate, too hard to predict.
Depends on fuel and time of day, the weather, things like that.
Actually, they could have estimated, but they chose not to.
That would have doubled the casualties from 600 million to about at least over a billion, 1.2 billion or so.
But even that was not really the measure of what we had prepared to do, because it took 20 more years from 61.
It took until 1982 and 83 for Carl Sagan and Turco and a bunch of other scientists to reveal the probability of nuclear winter resulting from this, which was again an effect of the fire, namely the fire on cities, on combustible material, and on forests, which would cause smoke, something that no one had figured, that would cause hundreds of thousands of tons of smoke to be lofted into the stratosphere by the effects of the weapons, where it would remain for what was, in the 1980s, thought to be a year or two, what we now know from the latest calculations to be more like a decade.
And that smoke would blot out the sunlight or reduce it to winter levels or fall levels in either case, destroying the crops, destroying the harvests, and leading the world to, well, to starvation of all humans, ourselves included, but all humans, and really all primates, all mammals, all animals dependent on vegetation and dependent on harvests and crops.
A year, ten years of twilight at best, which made growing impossible, which causes the extinction of our species and many, many other species, all so-called complex species.
In other words, it was a true doomsday machine, a machine for extermination of life, complex life on Earth.
The bacteria would remain, the viruses would remain and take over, and perhaps some animals, very low, what we regard as very simple animals, but otherwise doomsday.
And that could have happened in the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 or any year thereafter, including this one.
We are still poised with a doomsday machine which the Russians, as I've said earlier, didn't have at that time.
They hadn't built one.
But getting rid of Khrushchev in part because of our, quote, victory in the Cuban Missile Crisis, replacing him with Brezhnev who gave the military what they wanted, what the military wanted was what the U.S. had, exactly what the U.S. had, which they achieved and in some respects surpassed for what that was worth, which was worth nothing.
It bankrupted them.
And the effect was then there has been two doomsday machines poised at each other, each prepared to go first in the event of a false alarm, of a kind of electronic false alarm that had actually happened a number of times, even as recently as 1993, a very serious false alarm, another one in 1983, still could happen today, could set off one or the other or both of these doomsday machines and end life on Earth.
Now, Dan, let me ask you this real quick.
I read this great article by a guy from the Los Alamos Study Group or something like that.
It's an anti-nuclear activist group.
I think I interviewed the guy, actually.
And they made the case that there is this extremely powerful nuclear bomb manufacturer lobby in Washington, D.C.
There's billions and billions, tens of billions of dollars at stake in the construction and the facilitation of this to continue on indefinitely.
And there's virtually no one to oppose them.
Do you have a take on that?
Well, I wouldn't say no one, but no one in Congress to speak of except Dennis Kucinich, whom we're losing, and some other members, no doubt, of the Progressive Caucus.
Lynne Wolfey was good on this subject.
She's leaving Congress at the end of this year.
So there is, on the other hand, an ICBM caucus.
That's a subset of what you were talking about in terms of a lobby.
There's an actual caucus called the ICBM caucus from states where ICBMs are located, where they have...
They're not even ashamed of it.
...local jobs are involved in maintaining the doomsday machine, in maintaining Minuteman missiles on alert ready to go on a false alarm any moment, and to maintain the jobs, the restaurants, the barbershops, or whatever, of the people in Idaho and Montana and North Dakota where these things exist, and in Utah where they're serviced, the missiles are serviced.
Those four states give us eight senators, not from the most populous states in the country, you notice, eight senators who are for maintaining the doomsday machine.
So for the purpose of these jobs and the votes that they involve, the ability with our Minuteman missiles to end life on Earth, those missiles should not exist.
They should not have existed as vulnerable land-based missiles subject to our own preemptive attack or to the Russians' preemptive attack.
They shouldn't have existed for the last 40 years or so.
Even inside the Cold War ideology, the deterrence ideology of needing retaliatory strength, we have had Poseidon submarines, Polaris Trident submarines now, at sea for all that time and more, totally invulnerable to Soviet attack, not a temptation to the Soviets to attack or even given a false alarm, not under a temptation to launch quickly like the Minutemen, lest they be destroyed in a false alarm.
We've had those.
The Minutemen have been totally, not only anachronistic and unneeded for the last 40 years and more, but make that almost 50 years, 48 years, since about the mid-60s, dangerous.
Lightning rods for attack.
Lightning rods for a doomsday machine on either side.
It's inexcusable, intolerable, outrageous evil that we have maintained those forces and the Russians too have maintained comparable forces for the last, you could say for the entire period.
But I'm emphasizing, especially the last 50 years, when there has been, even from the Pentagon's point of view, no real rationale for them at all.
That's why a number of us got arrested in Vandenberg Air Force Base a couple of months ago protesting a launch a test launch of a Minutemen missile.
In other words, a rehearsal for doomsday.
A test of a doomsday machine which should not exist.
We're going on trial probably in October.
I just got, and the others of us just got, a banning order from Vandenberg just the other day actually for the next three years.
I'd get arrested if I set foot on Vandenberg outside the designated protest area outside the gates.
Well, protest is needed.
The fact is that, amazingly enough, a former head of strategic command, a general, has actually called for the abandonment of the Minutemen missile.
He was in charge of them earlier, a few years ago.
Now he says, they should be given up.
He's absolutely right.
Will Congress do it in the face of this powerful lobby from North Dakota and Utah and Montana?
All right, I'm sorry.
We have to leave it there, Dan.
Thank you so much for staying, especially if you're staying this whole hour with us.
I really appreciate it.
Okay.
Good to talk about this.
The point you made earlier is very well taken.
Congratulations.
Well, thank you.
Well, good.
Ellsberg.net, everybody.
We'll be right back.