09/08/16 – Todd Gitlin – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing Todd Gitlin.
He is the author of The Whole World Is Watching, about the anti-Vietnam War movement back when, according to Eric Garris at antiwar.com, he's a real hero from back in the days of the Vietnam War.
And now he's got this very important piece at Bill Moyers' website, billmoyers.com.
It's called The Non-Nuclear Option.
Why should anyone's finger be anywhere near a nuclear trigger?
Welcome to the show.
How are you?
My pleasure to be here.
Very happy to have you here.
So you mentioned how nukes have come up in the campaign here because everybody's sort of worried about what Donald Trump might do with them.
But you don't seem to be too reassured that Hillary is more likely to win at this point.
Why is that?
Well, let me back up for a second.
What I've been doing at billmoyers.com for, I guess, three months now has been writing about elements of the coverage.
And, of course, there's been a lot to say.
So I just recently started a series on sort of what are issues in the campaign that ought to have been raised and have not been.
And it struck me that, of course, the overriding issue, I think the great emergency of our time, the unacknowledged emergency of our time, is nuclear weapons.
And the only way the issue came up was obliquely, as you were suggesting, because a number of times Hillary Clinton has said that this is and I think her ads are saying that this is not a guy whose finger should be anywhere near the nuclear button.
But that raises the question of what the nuclear button is and whose finger should ever be near it.
So I thought it would be a timely moment to talk about what actual American policy is with respect to the use of nuclear weapons.
The news is not shining.
In fact, American policy is to hold open the option of the first use of nuclear weapons, either in a case where the United States is attacked with nuclear weapons or in a case where an American ally is attacked with nuclear weapons or a case where another country who's allied with a country that has nuclear weapons strikes first whether nuclear or not.
Now, not to get lost in the weeds of it, what this means is that the United States holds open the option of beginning a nuclear war.
And so I did several things in this piece.
First of all, I reviewed how close we came to a nuclear war in 1962.
Some of your listeners will remember this and some won't.
I remember it vividly because I was a student activist against nuclear weapons.
And it wasn't until a few years ago that I found out through some historical research, Martin Sherwin at George Mason University is the chief researcher scholar on this, that actually we came within a hair's breadth of nuclear war in 1962.
Without going into the whole story, unless you want to hear it.
Yeah, go ahead.
Tell them.
Okay.
Well, yeah, people should understand this.
I mean, it's breathtaking.
So Kennedy had quarantined or blockaded Cuba when the U.S. got evidence that the Soviet missiles had appeared in Cuba.
So that was on October 22nd, 1962.
Five days later, Soviet submarines were in the vicinity of Florida.
They had been rushed there.
Their normal habitat was in the North Atlantic.
There was a group of them and they were located by American surveillance near the Georgia-Florida coast.
And it was sort of underwater.
And the Soviet policy had been, we now know again, and there are Soviet military and political leaders who talked about this subsequently.
There have been international meetings to review what happened during the missile crisis, which was the closest the world has ever come to, you know, a straight on nuclear war.
And except for accidents and so on.
But this time there was sort of really a virtual war situation.
I mean, it all but declared war and it almost went nuclear.
So the situation was that the instructions to the Russian fleet were to check in with headquarters in Moscow before making any moves other than just simply hanging around.
But the submarines were underwater and their communication with Moscow was disrupted.
They were not getting a message.
And they'd been told that if you don't get a message, the way you should read that, you should assume that there is a war and we've been wiped out.
And so you should launch.
Each of these submarines, I believe there were three of them or four, each had 22 torpedoes with a range of, I believe it was 12 miles.
And one of those torpedoes in each submarine was nuclear.
So the captain.
So meantime, they're underwater.
They're being the ship is shaky.
The submarine is shaking because the Americans are dropping depth charges and and and hand grenade.
Upon the surface, try to lure them out.
That's a standard technique you do.
You sort of rattle the sub and try to get them to surface.
And so you're underwater.
The ship is rattled.
And so you have on board the command structure is you have a captain, the commander rather.
You have a chief political officer.
And then by accident, this particular submarines had on it the commander of the entire fleet.
He had to be on one of the submarines.
So it just happened by chance he was on this one.
So this the commander of the sub said, well, we, you know, the instructions say, if we haven't heard, we should launch.
Let's launch.
And the chief political officer said, let's launch.
Now, in the meantime, I should explain that because these submarines have been sent down from the Arctic and Russia was not in the business of patrolling in tropical waters, the submarine had no air conditioning and it was sweltering.
One place in the engine room was a registered 140 degrees Fahrenheit temperature.
They've run out of fresh water.
The rest of the submarine is at 113 degrees.
I think it's safe to say you've got a very rattled and not calm thinking crew.
So the decision is now left to the commander of the entire fleet, a man named Arkhipov, a naval officer in his 30s.
And he said, well, you know, let's wait and see.
Let's wait and see when we get to the surface.
Whenever that is, we'll be able to check in with Moscow.
There's no urgency.
So had Arkhipov not intervened, they would have launched a nuclear submarine at the American fleet nearby.
Now, that American fleet included a number of destroyers and an aircraft carrier.
A head on nuclear attack on the American fleet in that place, very likely, I would say to a near certainty, would have invoked an American nuclear response.
So that's how close we came in 1962.
And, you know, long story here about how policy has changed since then.
The policy of that first use was slightly modified under Bill Clinton when he was president in 1997.
And so far as we know, there have been no modifications to the policy since.
It's not clear whether.
Well, Obama changed it in 2010.
He said we no longer reserve the right to use nukes against non-nuclear weapons states, unless it's Iran, but against nuclear weapons states, we still reserve the right.
I don't think we have the actual text of the order.
In the case of the Clinton thing, you know, it's become public.
But in any case, you're right.
That was a softening of the policy.
Still, I think there's a lot of uncertainty about what the policy is.
And there's a strong push from people, not only, you know, the usual anti-war suspects, but people who come out of military and Pentagon lives who say enough already.
We are really actually despite the the diminution of nuclear weapons in the world.
We are actually closer to nuclear war than ever before.
This was said recently by former Defense Secretary Perry and who is not by any means, you know, a peacenik.
But he's a sober head.
And he recently published a memoir called, I believe, My Life at the Nuclear Brink.
And it was reviewed very urgently.
Actually, the only serious review I saw was in the New York Review of Books by Jerry Brown, the governor of California.
And I recommend that piece to anyone.
So what I wrote in my piece, I think, you know, in terms of, you know, day by day, the greatest danger to the survival of civilization is nuclear weapons.
And it's not been talked about.
It's not been asked about.
If you look at Trump, you know, as Trump said something with his usual kind of sloppy ambiguity, he said, yeah, nuclear weapons are terrible, but I'm not taking any option off the table.
That was his he said that to an NBC reporter a few months ago.
If you look at Hillary Clinton's Web site, there are if you go to the parts about security and foreign policy, there are three mentions of nuclear weapons.
Two of them have to do with Iran, which is not apropos.
And then the third one is a sort of a general statement about about nuclear danger.
But nothing specific about policy.
It's it's all quite vague.
So there you have it.
I mean, it's a nonissue in the campaign.
And I was I was urging that our journalists, such as they are.
Pay attention.
It was not jumped to prominence in the headline, you know, like emails or, you know, a Mexican marauding rapist doesn't mean it shouldn't be aired.
And in fact, it should be aired because one of the functions of the political campaign is to get a gauge of public sentiment, because what you're electing, what you're choosing is not just a president, but something of a mandate for what this president should take into account during the presidency.
And if the if an issue doesn't come up at all during the campaign, that makes it all the harder to actually make policy.
Yeah, well, and, you know, here's my crazy thing is I think Hillary is more likely to get us into a nuclear war than Donald Trump, because Hillary, I think her top priority in life is getting patted on the head by the toughest guy on the room and in the room.
And I think that her entire consensus of the entire consensus of everybody around her is Russian aggression, Russian aggression.
Even though in that Jerry Brown review of William Perry's book that you mentioned there, he talks about how they were warned by even NHTSA and McNamara and all of the most hawkish hawks of all American greybeards in the 1990s to not expand NATO.
You're going to provoke a reaction out of the Russians and then you're going to pretend that the reaction is the reason you have to expand NATO and take all their defensive maneuvers as aggression and and put us right back into danger again.
Don't do it.
And Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton's husband, did it anyway.
And the last thing that she could ever admit is that NATO expansion was wrong.
That when and, you know, Bush Jr., of course, made it much worse, bringing the Baltics and more states in a couple of the Balkan states in as well.
But she, of course, supported all of that the whole time.
And they can never admit it's their fault.
And it's literally her fault and her family's fault.
And, you know, Donald Trump at least has distance from the policy where he hasn't been churning out papers about why this is smart for the Council on Foreign Relations for the last 10 years or or 25 years like the rest of these goons.
And so, you know, and they even accuse him of not wanting to fight with Russia.
And he does nothing but double down and say, that's right.
I don't want to fight with Russia.
So but she's likely to put Michelle Flournoy in there or or worse, you know, Victoria Nuland for secretary of state, something like that.
We can have a real conflict.
OK, so a number of things here.
First of all, I was also opposed to NATO expansion.
I think it was a bad policy and I think it it it helped to precipitate a more dangerous situation in Eastern Europe.
So we're on the same page there.
Secondly, I I think she has.
What should we say?
She has a belligerent streak.
She has.
And there's a reason, therefore.
I mean, it's not incidental that she voted for the ruinous Iraq war.
And it's not incidental that she has the support of a lot of the neocons.
However, here's where I disagree with you.
I don't think that the principal her principal goal is to be patted on the head by the most hawkish.
I think that it has been a what should we say?
It's a subsidiary move.
She's a very intelligent woman.
She's not reckless.
She's done some very stupid things.
And I have serious differences with her about foreign policy.
However, however, and this is where I think we diverge.
She is not a lunatic.
Trump is a lunatic.
I don't care what he says.
Yesterday, he said, yeah, let's nuke him.
Tomorrow, he says, no, nukes are terrible.
He not only is a blowhard, a ignoramus, a misinformed nothing of a man, but he's also obviously unstable.
And, you know, we've seen many signs of that.
So, yeah, I don't approve of you know, I have a wait and see attitude toward Hillary Clinton's foreign policy and her appointments.
And it may be better or worse.
But at the very least, she is a sane person, an intelligent person who is who will be heading a party that's full of quite divergent forces.
It's by no means a wholly owned subsidiary of the neocons.
It includes a lot of people like us who are not itchy finger people.
So so I say with, you know, with Hillary, you have politics.
You have a political situation in which there are forces and counter forces.
I don't I don't think every you know, John Kennedy ran a campaign in 1960 in which he was.
He sounded like by far the more hawkish candidate.
Nixon was actually more sort of status quo guy.
And Kennedy sounded like the more belligerent guy.
It didn't work out that way, partly because Kennedy was actually trying to show that he could be as, you know, more rugged than Nixon.
Well, as you said, he almost got us into a nuclear war.
He almost got us into a nuclear war.
But here's the other thing.
And I mean, I don't you know, I you know, I started my political life as an opponent of John Kennedy.
And but it also has to be said that when they got there, when they got to the brink, Kennedy then devoted himself to beginning a process of ending the Cold War within a few months.
So, yes.
And by the way, if you examine the transcripts of the meetings they were having in the White House or what to do about about Cuba and the missiles, Kennedy was actually the leading dove.
See, I'm with you here, but I think Hillary is LBJ.
If Obama is JFK, Hillary is LBJ.
And all the people surrounding her are saying that Obama's weak because he didn't arm up the Ukrainian government and make the war in Ukraine worse.
And Obama was reluctant and said, well, we'll send him some trucks.
How about that?
And we'll send him some trainers.
You're pointing at one issue.
Well, that's kind of the issue, isn't it?
Well, no, it isn't.
There are so many issues.
You know, you know, Ukraine is an issue.
Sure.
China is an issue.
But everything in Latin America is an issue.
Everything in the Middle East is an issue.
Iran is an issue.
You know, I mean, you know, the world is very tangled and dangerous.
And, yeah, I mean, I'm not trying to white, you know, cover Coder.
Well, you know, universally brilliant.
I disagree with some of her policies.
But again, she's a grown up.
I mean, this is actually let me let me say this.
Let me say this to you real quick, Todd.
I agree with everything you said about Trump.
I'm not pro Trump whatsoever or or even Gary Johnson.
I mean, I'm anti everyone in this thing.
I kind of like Jill Stein, honestly.
She did the show before and she was sound on virtually everything.
I'm not agreeing myself, but I at least I at least respect her.
But this is please don't misunderstand me that I'm defending Trump's position here necessarily on anything or what have you.
But when you talk about how sane and rational and what an adult Hillary is, that's the part that scares me.
That's the very worst thing, because what that means is that she fits perfectly in the Washington consensus.
And the Washington consensus is completely mad.
The Washington consensus is that we should be sending tanks and guns to the Kiev junta in order to fight the secessionists in the east.
And where Obama was very reluctant and had a lot of pressure and never remind the Republicans had a lot of pressure inside his own national security state pushing him to do it.
And he just wouldn't do it.
You may have seen where General Breedlove, the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO's emails were hacked, where he was trying to do an end run around Obama.
What can I do to make this president arm the Ukrainians?
He was even trying to go around and get the Pakistanis to send in some shoulder fired missiles and this kind of thing.
And if you read that article, but put Hillary in the chair instead of Obama, I'm not really an Obama fan.
Like you said, you started out, you know, opposing JFK back then.
It's not like anybody's got to really be for Obama.
But if you compare him to her, he is calm, cool, patient wisdom compared to Hillary, who would have done whatever Breedlove said.
If Breedlove wants weapons, let's give him weapons.
I think this is where we disagree.
You you you are quite confident.
You know that you also had said a few minutes ago that she's the worst thing.
I'm sorry.
I can't see how a rational person can say that you're talking about.
So your choices are.
And these are your choices, man.
You know, this is the world as it is.
Number one, a lunatic, reckless, ignoramus, lying.
Crackpot.
Number two, a woman who is intelligent, who has made some hawkish judgments in the past.
Who is, as I would add, as a woman, I think, felt a special pressure to sound hawkish.
Big things happen to people when they discover they're in the White House.
It happened to Kennedy and that they command, you know, in that present time.
Seventy three hundred, I believe it is nuclear weapons.
Yes.
Is it a sure thing that that Hillary would guide us to a soft landing in which we avert nuclear war?
No, it's not a sure thing.
It's you know, I don't know a lot of sure things in politics.
I do know one sure thing.
I do know one sure thing, which is that Donald Trump is a clear and present danger.
Well, yeah.
Now, of course, I mean, well, it's just a matter of degrees.
They're all clear and present danger to me.
But of course, it's not just a matter of degree.
There are times when history presents you with really ugly choices.
OK, or really, let's say less than ideal choices.
You know, to me as a war baby, maybe this is sort of this is the history I grew up into, whether I didn't understand it too much later in 1941.
The America had two choices for ally.
Number one was Hitler.
Number two was Stalin.
The right choice was Stalin.
Stalin was a monster.
Stalin is was one of the great monsters of the century.
Stalin might have killed more people than Hitler.
It was absolutely necessary to be allied with Stalin.
That was not pretty and it had a lot of ugly consequences, but it was absolutely necessary.
Now, I'm not saying that Hillary Clinton is Stalin.
I'm just saying that's a real put up or shut up.
You know, push comes to shove, you know, historical question when there were no pleasing choices.
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Well, I ain't voting for anybody, so I'm not going to worry about that.
But, you know, honestly, look, I'm just like you said earlier, this is the most important issue.
This the issue of America's relationship with Russia makes every other issue on the planet seem like nothing, seem completely insignificant.
And on this particular issue, as much of a crackpot as he is, I don't think he's any more reckless than her when it comes to the relationship with Russia.
And especially when they're talking openly about having Victoria Nuland be the secretary of state.
Well, look, Putin is playing him.
And, you know, I mean, don't fall for this.
Putin, you know, is is much smarter than Trump.
No, he's much smarter than Hillary, too.
I doubt that.
I seriously doubt it.
Certainly more.
He may be more shrewd, but then again, he's less.
You know, he's an autocrat.
He's a he's a dictator, more or less.
So he doesn't actually have to.
Well, do you think it would be a smart decision to make Victoria Nuland the secretary of state?
But you're jumping, you know, first of all, you know, I suppose that's a possibility.
It's by no means a certainty.
Number two.
As I said, Hillary is a very shrewd person.
The worst thing you've mentioned, the worst scenario you you presented us is the present is the scenario of General Breedlove.
Well, we're not you know, who was stopped by Obama.
We're not we're not choosing Breedlove for president.
We're not choosing somebody who's, you know, itchy for war.
I don't maybe Victoria Nuland is or not.
I don't know that much about her, but I understand there's a case to be made about her provocations.
Fine.
That's you know, that's problematic.
But we're not choosing a general and we're not choosing a secretary of state.
We're choosing the president.
Yeah.
OK.
No, I mean, look, when you choose George Bush, you choose A.I. and Jensa and and Winep, too.
And when you choose Hillary, then you choose CNAS and Brookings Sabin Center and the New America Foundation and, you know, her pet.
So you get Anne Marie Slaughter and you get, you know, the stroke Talbot and Slaughter was not Dick Cheney.
Anne Marie Slaughter had a an important but not all powerful position in the State Department.
She had a policy planning chief, I think it was.
That's not the same thing as putting in place a vice president of the United States who is a right wing hawk.
Again, look, I'm not arguing anything for Trump at all.
I'm just saying on on the issue of Russia, on the issue of Russia, he says, I think we ought to get along with Russia.
And she says he's a Kremlin agent, everybody.
Der, der, der.
I mean, she is qualitatively and quantitatively worse on Russia issues.
In fact, he even had an adviser who had worked for the previous government in Ukraine that America overthrew.
So at least Trump had the was the truth of who overthrew the government and started the crisis in Ukraine in 2014 was at least available to Trump.
Where it was Hillary's predecessor and her protege, Victoria Nuland, and her predecessor, John Kerry, that did the coup d'etat.
She could never admit it.
She has to pretend that the crisis in Ukraine started with the seizure of Crimea a month later after the coup.
Donald Trump, I'm not on this particular issue, at least is all I'm saying is she's worse.
I'm not saying even anything really good about him.
Just she's worse.
And this is, as you said, the most important issue in the world.
You're profoundly wrong, is all I can say.
And I think you are you're cherry picking points.
You're loading the dice to choose maybe the most possibly bad aspect of Hillary Clinton.
I am not an expert on Russian-Ukrainian relations, so I can't engage with you on that.
You know, remember what we started out talking about here are risks of nuclear war.
Right.
And this is the single greatest risk of nuclear war in the world right now is war in Ukraine.
Excuse me.
When it comes to a debate about who is more likely to trigger a nuclear war, to me, it's an open and shut case.
Donald Trump is a clear and present danger.
Hillary Clinton is a politically ambiguous and possibly constructive and possibly in some ways destructive figure.
We don't know.
But it's an open and shut case.
I'm sorry.
I'm repeating myself, but I don't want to go back through the weeds about Ukraine.
You're singling out one question and one line of argument as if it overpowers everything else.
I can't agree.
Well, I agree with you about what a basket case he is and all those other things.
I don't think there's any dispute about that.
But anyway, about that, then it's case closed.
Yeah.
Well, except look, Strobe Talbot and all the guys at the Brookings Institute who put out their big PDF study about what should be done in Ukraine.
We're all very adult and sober former officials and ambassadors and wonky wonk think tankers.
They say we ought to send a bunch of tanks and guns to Ukraine.
So you don't have to be Donald Trump and raving kook to be really dangerous on Russia and Ukraine issues, is my point.
When did that Brookings report come out?
In the middle of the worst part of the war in 2014.
OK, I haven't read it, but let's just stipulate that what you're saying is accurate.
I'm saying, yeah, like it's this is centrist consensus.
Obama was very reluctant.
Thank God this wasn't just the neocon kooks.
This was the center in D.C. says Russian aggression.
All of them.
I believe it was.
I believe, you know, without question, there was Russian aggression.
I mean, that's indisputable whether you know what the what led to it is a different question.
But the fact that this centrist report was rejected by Obama tells you something about the relative significance on the one hand, presidential power and on the other hand, the views of mainstream opinion in Washington.
And the thing is, there's only one president.
So, I mean, I mean, if I don't know why you you can't admit that.
I mean, you're again now you mentioned Breedlove before.
Now it's the Brookings people.
Neither of them will be president.
OK, so let's talk about Obama.
Trump and Hillary's agreed consensus about spending a trillion dollars on a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, as you talk about in this article.
And it's there you go.
There's an issue that certainly should be debated.
It's a terrible you know, it's a very sad thing that Obama, having come to office as somebody who actually does understand nuclear weapons.
And, you know, going back to the time when he was in college, where I wrote his undergraduate thesis about weapons, nuclear weapons policy.
He understands that we need to get down and that we have to stop, quote unquote, improvements to nuclear weapons.
And so he's been he's submitted.
I don't want to remove the responsibility for him.
He has permitted himself to move toward the embrace of the development of new souped up nuclear weapons.
And then I think that's a terrible mistake.
And it's, you know, it's one of it's it's it's one of the bad things that is coming out.
I mean, that's coming out of his administration.
So we completely agree about that.
All right.
And now tell us about the START treaty, because there's a lot of controversy in even the anti nuclear community about it.
When was it start to is the one that she and Hillary and Obama pushed?
You know, I honestly, I can't keep up.
Yeah, me either.
Anyway, the controversy was that they were they were reducing some numbers, but at the same time, they were expanding some other numbers and they were going to, you know, I guess part of this trillion dollar deal is sort of the deal that they made with the nuclear weapons industry that we're going to build all new factories for you.
And we're going to, you know, really, you know, make it up to you the fact that we're going to reduce overall deployed numbers of warheads and that kind of thing.
Right.
So that's my standing.
Yes, they have reduced the total number, but it could be reduced a lot more.
I mean, one very specific issue that, you know, that I mentioned in passing in my piece, it has to do with whether we need the so-called even with even whether a rational person who believes in nuclear deterrence needs the so-called triad.
You need not only nuclear submarines, which are unfindable, but also nuclear carrying bombers and and land based nuclear missiles.
You need all three.
And, you know, I think very clearly the answer is no.
So you could you know, I mean, that's a that's an issue that Hillary Clinton should be questioned about.
And, you know, that I mean, that's a very important issue.
I mean, Trump, when he when the issue came up, somebody asked him early on during the Republican primaries, what he thought about the nuclear triad.
He'd never heard of it.
I mean, that's what you're dealing with here.
In fact, he just went on blustering and going, oh, the nuclear devastation is very important to me.
Here's a really bad answer.
These are really important issues.
And of course, the answer, the obvious answer is, as Ron Paul put it back in 2008 to The Washington Post, you could defend this country with a couple of good submarines.
Never mind the triad.
We don't even need an air force.
We don't even need any of this.
We don't need an army.
Just leave us alone.
But the principle, you know why we have seventy three hundred nuclear weapons.
I mean, you were talking about deterring nuclear war.
Right.
So let's say hypothetically that some of these these old bombs are rusting or eroding or so on.
So.
So let's say, you know, you're, you know, Specter or, you know, you know, Kimmel, whatever his name is, and you're contemplating an attack on the United States and you think, well, I don't know, maybe I can get away with it because they've got seventy three hundred weapons and maybe two thousand of them are kind of rusty.
But so we might luck out.
I mean, come on.
I mean, not even Kimmel on or whatever his name is.
You know, the very possibility that, you know, that more than you know, that more than zero nuclear weapons are, you know, would be would be launched against you.
You know, I think is, you know, there's your game changer right there.
So, I mean, in a sense, the principle that you articulate from Montpelier, maybe it's exaggerated, but the principle is basically right.
I mean, nuclear weapons are not only hideous, but but they're not weapons and they're not necessary.
And really, they can only be virtually only be used in a way that kills indiscriminately.
I mean, I guess if there's a field of nuclear silos way the hell out somewhere in the middle of Siberia or something, you could consider that, you know, an exception.
But mostly they're made for killing cities full of innocents.
Yeah, that's true.
And it's also true that they generate fallout and they, you know, and they have climatic effects.
And, you know, it's not just, you know, it's out there in a pasture with with nothing but cows around it.
It's you know, I mean, you're talking about, you know, immense, immense, immense damage.
You know, just to give you an idea, by the way, I mean, you know, this story I told you before about the submarine in 1962.
Each of the I neglected to mention that each of the Russian tipped torpedoes had the had the power of a Hiroshima bomb.
And that was 50, what, 54 years ago.
Today, the bombs are vastly bigger in scale.
I mean, those were those were 15 kiloton.
Today, the bombs are of the megaton scale.
The mega means, you know, is a thousand times stronger, a thousand times stronger.
A thousand Hiroshima's from one missile.
That's what you're talking.
Yes.
Daniel Ellsberg likes to say the the Nagasaki bomb, the implosion plutonium fission bomb from Nagasaki.
That's now the blasting cap that's used to set off the hydrogen fusion reaction.
I'm not surprised.
Yes, that's a hell of a blasting cap for a hell of a bomb.
I mean, this is really this is insanity.
And and, you know, we're to go back to what you were saying before.
I think it is true that the conventional wisdom in Washington is in this sense and its important sense insane.
That is true.
And, you know, and the consensus in America, in American politics and in among the elites about the survivability of nuclear weapons.
Is is is is a doomsday assumption.
I mean, I got it.
You know, I got a letter when I when my piece in Moyers dot com came in, I got a long letter from a retired rear admiral.
Interesting, I thought that he took the time to write and he made the standard sort of arguments about the value of a nuclear of a nuclear deterrent.
And he said, well, you know, look, you know, we've got what we get out of this.
We got a long piece.
I mean, you hear this from people who believe in nuclear deterrence.
But we've got 70 years of peace.
Now, as I wrote back to him, you know, obviously, you know, you can't tell the Vietnamese.
We got, you know, 70 years of peace or the Cubans or the Guatemalans or, you know, a lot of other people who are out on the, quote, unquote, fringe of the Cold War.
But let's just suppose for the sake of argument, I'll give you I'll give you that point.
But, you know, if you believe in the value of nuclear deterrence, it doesn't have to work for 70 years.
It has to work forever, forever.
You don't get to make a single mistake.
You don't get back to the roulette table a second time.
Right.
That's the craziness.
Well, the other thing is, too, is it's almost impossible to imagine, isn't it, that any country would get nuked and then would say, no, we're not going to respond in kind.
It just wouldn't be right.
Too many innocent people would die.
No way.
Somebody nukes somebody, they're going to get, I mean, assuming they nuke another nuclear power, it's going to escalate and escalate.
In fact, I've been reading about how the Russians and the Americans both have a doctrine where in some circumstances they'll explode one nuke that's supposed to send the message that you better chill out because we're willing to use nukes.
And yet, I mean, what is that going to do other than send the message that so you better shoot everyone you've got right now rather than back down?
This is an ancient problem in nuclear strategy.
And it will remain a problem as long as the nukes are out there, because essentially what all of these strategists are saying is, I'm a gambling man.
Yeah, maybe the odds are only one in a thousand that will blow up the world, but I'm a gambling man.
I'll buy a Powerball ticket even though the odds are much worse than that.
So they want to play chicken.
And that is a collective insanity.
All right.
Now, one more question for you here.
You mentioned William Perry, and he's just one of them.
You got Kissinger and Schultz and all kinds of retired generals and admirals.
And I mean, really, I think the conservatives and the right wingers and the national security state guys are the ones worth mentioning the most because it's contrary to the confirmation bias.
Right.
That here are all the well, William Perry was a Democrat, I guess.
But, you know, there are these are all national security officials, very serious, you know, nuclear warfare technologists and whatever in their day.
And they're saying, hey, we should have global zero.
That's the name of their organization.
And they want I don't know if they're calling for total eradication, but they're talking about, you know, vast reduction immediately in nuclear weapons and new agreements with foreign countries to get rid of their nukes, too, and all that.
And yet for all the gravitas or whatever that these men, these American greybeards of the establishment, etc., the so-called wise men and whatever of our age bring to this, as you were pointing out earlier, nobody cares.
It's just not even an issue at all.
And I'll go ahead and mention I shouldn't.
But I tried to even send to Gary Johnson what was more or less a speech, a first person written speech about let's abolish nukes.
And here's why.
And here's how we could do it.
And in a, you know, a reasonable sounding way, nothing utopian sounding, but a realistic way of reducing nuclear weapons.
Of course, he didn't touch it or use it at all and won't.
But it's just not an issue, even though the Kissingers of the world say it should be.
So what's up with that?
Well, this is really interesting.
I noticed, by the way, that the introduction to Perry's book was written by George Shultz, you know, who's not exactly, you know, a pacifist, but he approves.
I think he's one of the global zero people also.
Look, you're right.
I mean, it's very interesting.
You know, Jonathan Schell, who taught us so much about nuclear weapons, had interviewed quite a number of retired military officers, high officers, the former head, I believe, of the Marines.
And so on.
These other people who said the nuclear policy is insane.
I think here's the only thing I can conclude about about this.
Yeah.
All these people, you know, Kissinger and the rest of them.
I can't I'm sorry.
I can't even speak the name Kissinger without going feeling that my mind wants to go off on.
I understand.
I'll restrain myself.
I'll restrain myself.
But so, yeah, these people say, yeah, we should do that.
But, you know, they're not doing anything about it.
It's sort of a it's a freebie.
You know, we are on the side of the angels.
You know, are they demanding?
Are they, you know, sort of showing up at the U.N. and demanding that the U.N. Security Council endorse this policy?
You know, I mean, what are they really doing?
They do.
It's a letterhead.
It's a you know, it's a letterhead.
Right.
And that, you know, so it's not very significant.
You know, it's sort of a it's a do good gesture.
I'd love to see them actually do something about it.
I'd love to see them announce that the first day that the new president's office, they want a White House meeting to talk about the urgency of eliminating nuclear weapons.
I mean, that would that would get my attention.
Yeah.
Well, at the very least, they make a real good prop for us that look, you know, somebody like William Perry, who worked in nuclear weapons strategy, you know, his whole life and people like, you know, Daniel Ellsberg.
A lot of people don't really understand, you know, what a role he had.
He was a serious nuclear warfare strategist in the D.O.
D. himself.
And and when these people talk, they really know what they're talking about.
Warning against, you know, the the the current policies as it is.
So, you know, I wonder, though, I'm sorry, going to actually in the White House in the 60s was instrumental to designing the American nuclear war plan.
His father actually had helped create the assembly lines, design the assembly lines for the factories that made the A-bombs and had turned down the job of designing the factory to make the H-bombs because he said it was a war crime.
And then Ellsberg said there's a lesson there.
His father should have leaked to the press right then that they're going to make H-bombs because they were denying it.
And his father knew the truth that they had tried to hire him for the contract.
And that should have been the first Ellsberg whistleblower right there.
Another lesson for, you know, people in the civil service about doing the right thing and when it matters the most before the evil takes place or or as soon as you know it.
But anyway, you know, what you said made me think of an idea that maybe there would be a way for people who are grassroots anti-nuclear activists like yourself and some of the guys at the Los Alamos Study Group and places like that, that maybe we could form our own little committee to put pressure on Global Zero to do exactly what you said.
Hey man, how about you guys get off your duff and on one of these Tuesdays you go to D.C. and actually try to push this thing.
That's a worthy idea.
It should be.
You know, as we've certainly established here, it's the most noble cause on the planet is at least reducing the risk of nuclear war if not getting rid of the risk entirely.
Yep.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, listen, I've kept you way over time.
I'm sorry for arguing so much about politics.
That's all right.
But anyway, great to have you on the show.
Thank you very much, Todd.
My pleasure.
Okay.
Be well.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all.
That is Todd Gitlin.
He is professor of journalism at Columbia.
And he wrote this thing, the non-nuclear option for Bill Moyers.
And that's the Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org and sign up for the podcast feed there as well.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
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