All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Daniel Ellsberg.
For you youngsters who may not know, he's the guy who pretty much ended the Vietnam War by leaking the real secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War to the New York Times and other newspapers back then.
Richard Nixon called him the most dangerous man in America, and he damn near got life in prison for his great effort.
And he also, it turns out, is a great expert in nuclear weapons and wrote a book that came out a couple of years ago called The Doomsday Machine about America and Russia's hydrogen bomb arsenals.
And boy, is that book an eye opener.
And we've talked about the book before.
But today we have something a little bit more specific to address along those same lines.
And that is, well, first of all, welcome to the show, Daniel.
How are you doing again, sir?
Glad to be back, Scott.
I follow your show, as I've told you, very regularly.
I'm very happy to hear that.
It's an honor to be heard by you, Dan, of course.
And I really mean that.
Oh, and by the way, I said the most dangerous man in America.
That also happens to be the title of an excellent documentary about Dan Ellsberg that I know all of you will love.
Now, so here's the thing.
Here's this lady, Liz McAllister, and her friends, who are nuclear weapons activists, anti-nuclear weapons activists.
And they recently did an action.
They named their current group the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, and they did a protest at a nuclear weapons facility in Georgia.
And they have now been convicted and I believe are awaiting sentencing.
And I talked with Francis Boyle on the show, the lawyer, last week, and he talked about how unfair the trial was and how the judge had disallowed all of the expert testimony, including yours.
And so I was wondering if you could tell us what it was that you were going to tell the court if you'd been given a chance.
Ah, well, I should have it in front of me.
It occurred to me that an affidavit that I'd prepared for another trial long ago, actually, and then was used in a number of civil disobedience actions since then, I'm not sure whether it was ever successful in getting an acquittal, but at least it was put forward and it was given to the judge in this case.
We shortened it and updated it a bit to make it relevant to the current trial.
But the essence of it was to argue for the justification for a defense that's often called justification defense or a necessity defense, lesser evil, choice of evils defense sometimes, these or public interest defense.
These all amount to saying that in, which is a long established principle in British law, which we took over after the revolution, British common law, that an act which is under other circumstances or most circumstances illegal may be legal, not merely an extenuating factor in sentencing, but actually the action may be legal, not illegal, if it is taken as a necessity to avoid a greater evil, an imminent greater evil.
This is not to be based simply on a subjective belief alone of the defendants, but something to be argued in front of a jury that they had a reasonable basis for believing that the action they took was the only way to avert what otherwise would be an almost certain greater evil.
The very old cases in law have to do with things like trespassing on a building in order to rescue somebody from a burning building.
The point being made, by the way, in the climate action cases very much by Greta Thunberg and others is that we should be acting as though our house were on fire because it is on fire, our house, the earth, and we've got to act to prevent that.
The necessity defense then says, for example, if you take a life belt from a boat in a harbor to throw it to a drowning person right offshore, that's not theft.
It's a necessary action.
In this case, their argument is that the unobstructed, the unchallenged use and deployment, production, threat readiness of Trident submarines at the Georgia base where they infiltrated is a threat to humanity, an imminent threat in the sense that it really, on the basis of a false alarm or of an escalation of a conflict of some kind, at any point is ready to launch Trident missiles, which if launched in mass as at that very base would kill nearly everyone alive.
That would happen because the smoke from burning cities, a couple of hundred burning cities and a major war between the US and Russia would definitely involve burning hundreds of cities along with military targets, many of those cities being held to have military targets like command and control bases, air defense bases, missile sites nearby.
The smoke would be lofted into the stratosphere where it would not be rained out and would go around the globe quickly, shutting out sunlight, 70% of sunlight, for what is now known to be more than over 10 years, which would almost immediately kill all harvests on earth, most vegetation, and would lead to the starvation of nearly everyone on earth within a year.
The very existence of these missiles and comparable ones that are in Russia constitutes a risk of the destruction of civilization, certainly, and of most humans.
Probably not full extinction.
Some would survive on mollusks and fish in New Zealand or Australia in the coast, but 99% or at least 90% of humans would be killed.
These things do constitute, can well be named, a doomsday machine, a system prepared and actually designed and intended under some circumstances to kill off most life.
That should not exist.
It is, in moral terms, I think unquestionably an evil for such systems to exist at all, let alone to be threatened with initiation of nuclear war.
The question then is, is there action, actions like this essential to averting that danger, to reducing the danger, to eliminating such systems from the earth?
Well, it's not hard to argue that nothing less than these actions, nothing less than a program of resistance and protest and political action that includes these attention-getting and catalyzing actions like this will succeed.
A lot of history shows that civil disobedience of this kind showing a conscientious commitment and a willingness for the participants to pay a cost in their own lives, to sacrifice, to risk prison time, as these people are facing, has been essential to, for example, winning women's vote, civil rights progress such has been made, and there has been progress, although a lot remains to be done.
The unionization of the auto industry, for example, in the 30s was essentially based on sit-in strikes that were held to be in the factories, which were held by local courts and by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional in the end, but not until they had led to the organization of industry.
So there's a long record of such actions being effective and being essential.
And I think they are essential.
Any one of them has no great promise except to catalyze others.
And in my own case, I referred to this in the affidavit, I would never have thought of doing something that would expose me to life in prison, 115 year possible sentence I was charged with.
I would not have thought of doing that without the example of people exactly like these defendants who went to prison to demonstrate nonviolently their conviction that the war in Vietnam was wrong, they should not participate in it, and others should not participate in it.
And I heard that, I felt that power of that action on my own life.
It changed my life and it put in my head the question that really would not have gotten there any other way, which was, all right, what can I do now to help shorten the war now that I'm ready to go to prison?
Like these people, like Randy Kehler and Bob Eaton and David Harris and 5,000 other Americans who went to prison to try to wake up and change the minds of people like me.
And the affidavit does make the point that various government officials and lawyers have acknowledged that the Pentagon Papers arguably shortened the war, the revelation of these things had a role in shortening the war, not by itself, certainly, but in combination with the unusual acts of a lot of different people.
It was one link in doing that, in that causal chain.
Now, a weakness in our vulnerability of the necessity defense or the justification defense in front of a court often is, how can one argue a causal chain between this act, let's say, of sitting in a draft board doorway or sitting in front of a train, as I've done in others, and a train carrying nuclear waste?
How will that possibly affect this, anything else in the world?
And I could say, look, I was a link in that chain.
The people who influenced me by actions like this were links in that chain.
And it did lead, in fact, to what we all hoped in the end, a shortened war, although it didn't end the war very quickly.
It went on for years, but it was an essential part of the process of changing that war.
So I was prepared to, I did, that was, as far as I know, presented to the judge, along with other people who offered comparable testimony, and the judge did not accept any of that.
So I was prepared to come and argue that point and answer any questions from the prosecutor, but in front of the jury.
The need for actions like this, but the, and I was standing by because it was conflicting with some other lecture dates I had, but I was standing by ready to take a red eye or whatever I needed to get from Massachusetts down to Georgia Fest, if the judge would permit that testimony.
But before that arose, some days before the trial, the judge ruled out any such testimony on the possible necessity of these actions.
So that left them with very little to say in defense, except their own sincerity, the necessity of what they did, but no way to bring in other witnesses who were prepared to testify to the illegality of what they were protesting.
The Trident Submarines, Francis Boyle, professor of international law, is an expert on the way in which those threats violate international law that has been accepted as supreme law in this country.
Others were going to testify on the religious basis for their testimony.
They were all, I believe they were all Catholics, actually, and were referring, the Pope in fact has signed his treaty for the prevention of nuclear war, which, for the Vatican, which they hope to encourage other people to support by actions like this.
Anyway, in short, you asked what I would have testified to, and that was it.
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All right, well thanks.
So a few things there.
I had had Elizabeth McAlister on before the trial began, and I had Francis Boyle on too, but you're the nuclear weapons expert for real.
And so I did want to have you on, especially to clarify one point about just how dangerous one nuke is, or just how dangerous one Trident submarine worth of nukes is, or the danger of general nuclear war escalating in the event of a war that includes Trident submarines and these kinds of things, because I think it came out a little bit oversimplified, and I didn't want people to think that you were saying that one nuke would kill all of humanity or something.
That wasn't the point.
But it was that...
I'll say it fairly precisely, because I asked for some advice about this from one of the leading environmental scientists, Alan Roebuck, Rutgers University, who has written many peer-reviewed articles on the problem of nuclear war, as to what one Trident submarine would do if it launched its missiles.
And by the way, Trident submarine is unlikely to launch just one or two missiles because that gives away its location to a satellite with one missile coming up from under the sea, so the submarine becomes vulnerable.
They're managed to and able to get their missiles off very quickly in most circumstances.
If they were not fighting Russia, it would be less urgent.
But these things are designed to deter and, if necessary, annihilate Russia or the Soviet Union.
So what would happen if the missiles on a Trident submarine, which have, by the way, as I recall, two different loadings of warheads, one of which I think is about 300 kilotons, one is 450 kilotons of explosive yield.
That's one warhead.
To understand that, that means the equivalent of 450,000 tons, 450,000 tons of high explosive of dynamite or more modern explosives.
The Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons, 15,000 tons, compared to, say, 450,000 tons.
And the Hiroshima bomb that killed about 80,000 people, and by the end of the year, with people dying off of radioactivity, killed about 150,000 people, was a thousand times more powerful than the most powerful bomb of World War II, the blockbuster, so-called, because it would destroy a block of city buildings.
And that was 10 to 15 or 20 tons.
So 15,000 tons, which is the Hiroshima bomber, sometimes figured 13.5 thousand, 14,000, 15,000, we don't have exact measurement on the ground there, was a thousand times more powerful than a blockbuster.
And the 450,000 bombs then is comparably enormously more than that in a thermonuclear weapon.
So the question is, what would launching all of the weapons, perhaps 172 or so weapons from a Trident submarine do to the world, to the climate?
And the answer is it wouldn't cause a full nuclear winter.
It wouldn't reduce sunlight by 70 percent when the smoke from its cities was lofted into the stratosphere.
It might reduce it ...
Actually, they were looking at a very much smaller war between Pakistan and India that used only 100 atom bombs, Hiroshima-type bombs.
And we're talking here now, as I say, about something enormously larger than that.
But 100 Hiroshima-type bombs on cities would reduce sunlight by about 7 percent, which would be enough to starve to death by killing harvests about 2 billion people, out of 7 billion now.
Right.
So one third, about one third of the population.
Now a Trident submarine would do considerably more than that, much, much larger weapons, and then more of them in one submarine.
How many missiles did you say, or how many different warheads can be fired from one submarine?
It's varied over time.
I think it's 24 at this point.
By the way, they don't always go with full loadings, but they pretty much do.
It sounds at least comparable, 100 small bombs to 24 bigger H-bombs.
You know, that sounds ...
They have numerous warheads per missile, and that can change, it can go up to eight.
Or sometimes the British, I think, use four on a comparable submarine, but it can be eight.
So we're talking close to 200 weapons on one submarine.
And as I say, a much smaller amount, half a submarine, let's say, or less than that, could starve 2 billion people.
Some Trident submarine would not starve everyone in the world, but what, three, four billion?
Half the people in the world?
So they call this, if not a doomsday machine, one half doomsday machine, a third doomsday machine.
The point is that you are still prepared, you have built a machine there that is really intended to do nothing much else than kill half or more, and really with more weapons.
I'm not even looking at what the Russian response to this would be.
Most people in the world.
And by the way, these people, when they went in, are accused of depredation of property as well as entering, trespassing and so on.
They went into great detail on what they had in their backpacks and the litter that they left, in effect, including bolt cutters and things.
And one of those things I'm honored to say that they left behind, to be found, was a copy of my book, The Doomsday Machine, which is subtitled Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
And the thought that the prosecutors were presenting to the jury all the crime tape that they used around the monument and so forth.
And I presume held up my book.
And it reminded me, remember, of Arlo Guthrie's famous monologue or song, the, what was it, at restaurant, where, in any case, Alice's Restaurant.
He was prevented from actually being drafted by having been convicted in a trial of littering.
And I guess they could have accused these people of littering by leaving my big sign.
But I do hope that someone in the prosecution staff or even the base read it.
Yeah.
Well, so can you talk to us a little bit about Elizabeth McAllister and her efforts over the years to bring attention to this issue, Dan?
Well, of course, she's been at this for, well, more than half a century, I'm sure.
One of the early acts of the draft resistors that was, got a tremendous amount of attention was their, the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Philip Berrigan brothers, both Catholic priests, burning draft files in a basket that they'd taken that they had liberated from a drafter's office with homemade napalm, which is jellied gasoline, I think they put gasoline, combined it with some kind of naphtha or something, or soap flakes, I think, a crude form of napkin.
I remember Daniel saying, we apologize for using this to burn paper rather than people, as we were dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of this stuff on people, both in World War II, in Korea, and in Vietnam.
Anyway, Elizabeth McAllister was a nun who worked with Phil Berrigan, the priest, and in some of these actions, later actions, they fell in love and actually got married.
As I recall, they were both excommunicated for that.
The church, as I recall, had offered informally, privately, not to do that, not to excommunicate them if they would not get married, if they would just keep their partnership private and not sanctify it by marriage, and they refused to do that.
They got married, they were kicked out of the church, excommunicated, but spent their lives from then on in what they called the plowshares community in Baltimore, which was named for the passage in Isaiah calling on nations to turn their swords into plowshares, which is what these groups call their actions as doing, converting things to humane and peaceful uses, elements of war.
So, they did very many actions like that.
I got arrested with Phil Berrigan more than once, I guess, but in particular in Germany protesting the Pershing II missile and the Russian, the Soviet SS-20 missile, which were the intermediate range missiles, later banned by Gorbachev and Reagan in the international, I'm sorry, the intermediate range missile treaty, ban treaty, which led actually not just to withdrawing those missiles, but actually destroying them under mutual inspection.
These weapons that we were protesting at the time, and I remember at that time we were using heavy water cannon on us to try to get us away without having to arrest us, police dogs, which were quite intimidating, and so forth.
Again, I remember getting arrested with Dan Berrigan, and I think more than once, but in particular at the offices of the chancellor of the University of California and protest against the fact that every nuclear warhead has been designed, American, by a university.
It's a product.
Universities don't produce or design very much in themselves.
They spin that off to beltway firms and whatnot, but actually every nuclear warhead we had has been designed by an American university, and it's the same university, the University of California, which has what they call campuses at Los Alamos and Livermore, which is very hard to get on without a clearance, without arrest.
Anyway, that was the first time that my wife, who participated in that with me, with Dan Berrigan, ever got fingerprinted, which surprised me.
I thought, wow, I've been fingerprinted dozens of times.
It seemed like in the Marines and State Department every time I got a clearance and everything, and how can you be American and not be fingerprinted?
But it turned out she hadn't been, which explained at last why she had not been in the dock with me in the Pentagon Papers trial.
We didn't really understand that, since she had done a lot of copying with me and had her fingerprints all over those papers, but they didn't have her fingerprints on file.
Well, she couldn't be.
Well, anyway, those are just Berrigan stories.
But Elizabeth McAllister, a very active part of that community, and has been.
I've met her at so many protests over the years against NATO, whatever.
So, I was particularly wanting to pay tribute to her and to others, like the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker.
My son had been editor of the Catholic Worker for years and was a secretary of Dorothy Day.
Well, her granddaughter was one of the people on trial here and was able to tell the jury how this had run in the family, in effect.
But that didn't save her from the sentence that's coming up.
Yeah.
Well, and I've talked with her daughter, Frida, numerous times on the show over the years, and in part, you know, about the history of her family, her mother and father, in doing all these actions.
And they have spent, I mean, her father and her uncle are dead now, but they and her mother have spent decades of their lives in prison on these actions.
And that's something that I should ask you to comment on, is, I mean, these are essentially symbolic actions.
I'm not trying to reduce them in any way.
But as you say, they bring your book.
Sometimes they bang on a warhead with a hammer, probably don't even dent it, just trying to make noise.
They cut a chain link fence, something like this.
And yet the federal prosecutors go after them as though they're the most dangerous people in America, and that they must go to prison.
They must pay.
Decades, 20, 30 years, maybe, the prosecutors seek on these cases, what is going on there?
Well, by the way, one thing that they regularly demonstrate is how easy it is to get onto one of these bases where the water is.
One of the jurors set up a question to the judge.
Is it right that there really are nuclear warheads on this space?
Which there are, of course.
And the prosecutors wouldn't answer that.
Said, oh, no, we don't comment.
We don't tell people where nuclear warheads are or that they're anywhere.
They're stored anywhere near the nuclear submarines on which they're.
This ex-nun knows how to find them, though.
Yeah, right, right.
Well, the interesting though, it has often been brought up.
They say, look, you ought to be grateful to these people for showing what how hard or how easy it is to get into those things.
Because generally on these acts, the nuns involved, which was often the case, have, or grandmothers in other cases, have been on the base for hours without being detected.
It is kind of noteworthy, actually, a little worrisome, I would say.
But they don't get credit for that, for penitent, you know, for demonstrating the security problems on this space.
Rather, they are accused for exactly what they are trying to do, which is to alert people to the fact that we have built these multi-genocidal weapons, omnicidal weapons.
I think they got that word omnicide from my book, I think they said, when I talk about the doomsday machine, that omnicide is a word invented by a philosopher, Summerfield, to call about the process, the determination, the intent, or the weaponry or the machinery for destroying most life on Earth, or most human life.
By the way, not only human, the starvation that we're talking about here would probably not lead to the total extinction of humans.
We're so adaptable.
We can eat so many different kinds of foods from snails and mollusks.
Somebody happened to write me today about a lecture that cockroaches are very good for protein, and so forth.
And there was a time when humans kept themselves alive, only about 10,000 of them, after a climate change, about 60,000 years ago, on the coast of Africa, by eating insects and mollusks.
So humans can do that.
Other animals can't.
They depend on certain kinds of food and certain kinds of weather, and they don't wear clothes, and they don't have fire buildings or transport, except birds that can fly enormous differences, distances, but the rest of them will go entirely extinct.
Almost every land animal after a nuclear war, other than humans, will be totally extinct, not partly extinct.
Most of the biomass I've learned of the earth will survive because it's microscopic.
Bugs you can't even see are actually most of the biomass along with ants and other very small things.
And a lot of them will survive.
But the larger things will go as as did the most enormous number of species 65 million years ago, with the asteroid that hit near Yucatan, and put up dust and smoke and caused fires, along with volcanoes at that time, which killed the dinosaurs.
But it didn't just kill the dinosaurs, it killed all the animals larger than about a squirrel or a chipmunk.
And that's what we evolved from, eventually.
You raise an important question there, Dan Ellsberg.
We've done the effect of an asteroid.
A nuclear war would be the effect of an asteroid.
So let me ask you, let me zoom out here and ask you, how in the world did we get into this mess, where it just goes without saying, not just do we have these weapons, as you always emphasize, forget A-bombs, we have H-bombs now that could kill Dallas, all of Dallas in one shot.
Then never mind the nuclear winter and all that.
But we're talking about just unlimited, unimaginable devastation from even just a very few of these things ever being used.
And yet we have thousands of them, the Russians have thousands of them, all of our most powerful NATO allies have at least a few hundred each.
Israel, India, and Pakistan, of course, have them.
And outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty entirely, the three of those.
And of course, China.
But then the idea essentially among, I don't know, everyone, is that this is the way it is, and this is the way it's going to be.
At least in America and in these other major countries that I talk about.
So it's not even that there's not really a movement against them.
It's that the narrative is so ingrained that we have this stockpile of H-bombs because we have to have it.
Otherwise, we wouldn't have it.
And so it just goes without saying.
It's like this from now on until the day they finally are all used and everything's cancelled.
And so, man, that just doesn't sound right.
How do we get into this mess?
And how in the world can we possibly get out of it now?
Well, I spent my life really trying to understand how this arose and how we can get out of it.
Though I started on the other side in a way, not ever in favor of using these in attacking humans, but possessing them in order to deter which we thought was likely to come without deterrent from the Soviet Union.
It was at a time I started working on this in 1958.
I ran a corporation and became a full employee in 59.
And at that time, we thought the Russians were on the way to having hundreds to thousands of nuclear weapons at a time when we had 40 in 1961.
And they would launch a surprise attack.
They would do exactly what Hitler had done if he'd had them.
And the idea was to say that we were still facing an enemy that was not only tyrannical and ruthless as both Hitler and Stalin were, but also that Russia was as expansive, as aggressive, as militarily ambitious as Hitler.
It was easy to imagine that it was wrong.
And really, that myth persisted despite growing evidence that they were not building missiles, which the army and navy did accept and did estimate that they, in fact, did not have a large missile force.
In fact, nothing but a handful.
But the Air Force had an interest in a large Soviet force, because that would justify a large U.S. Air Force to combat it and to deter it and Rand that I worked for, worked on for the Air Force, on Air Force contract.
So we didn't even see the estimates by the army and navy that by 1960, the Russians, the Soviets had a few.
We thought they were treasonous for following their own service and just trying to cut down the budget of the Air Force.
If I can lift the sights here a little bit, looking back on it, the Air Force estimates were not unrelated to the desires of the aircraft industry, the aerospace industry, to be building a lot of missiles.
You don't say.
And that's true till today.
In fact, the ICBMs that are in schedule, first by Obama and then by Trump, to be built have no other rationale in a world in which, by the way, Trident submarines do exist on both sides, the equivalent.
And by others as well, the British, the French, Chinese are building some.
These can't be targeted by ICBMs or by bombers.
They are relatively invulnerable from such weapons.
So these ICBMs that we're building have essentially no other purpose than to keep production lines going in Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, especially for submarines, and so forth.
The Lockheed Martin, in particular, and the equivalents on the Russian side.
The Russian have the same capitalist motives now that Boeing does for their building ICBMs. And before that, they had bureaucratic interest.
The upshot of this was that in 1961, we learned that what the Russians had was not a thousand missiles that I heard at SAC, Strategic Air Command headquarters in August from the Chief of War Plans there, who's told me that General Power believed that they had a thousand ICBMs at that time.
They had four.
Four.
He was wrong by 250 times, not by 250%.
Meaning they didn't have any, essentially.
They were above ground.
Liquid fuel took many hours to fuel.
Could have been destroyed by a single bomb, practically, at one base, Plosetsk, in Russia.
So that was a myth.
And that didn't slow us down at all in building missiles, because the missiles don't really have to have targets, more than cities, let's say.
I mean, they like to have a lot of military targets.
So they were waiting for the day when the Russians would build up missile targets and they could justify more missiles, which did come about, since we made no effort whatever by negotiations to keep the Russians down to what they had, four or 40 as we had, or 100, instead of the thousands that they did proceed to get, imitating us later in that time.
In other words, one of the malignant aspects of equating the Russians, the Soviets, with Hitler was no negotiations are worthwhile.
He'll never keep any negotiation.
They'll never keep any agreement.
They'll hide everything.
The belief was that they had hidden a thousand.
They hadn't.
No effort was made to limit them, because that would involve limiting what Boeing and Lockheed and Raytheon and General Adams could sell to the government, and what the Air Force could fly for promotions and budgeting.
And that's not only American.
But in fact, we were driving that arms race at every step of the way.
I think at every point, we led the way, as Herb York of Livermore Lab pointed out, the exception being the ICBMs themselves.
They put a Sputnik up before we could.
They put an ICBM tested before we could.
That was essentially the only one in which they were ahead of us.
And they proceeded not to build them while we did, and have kept doing it.
So that's affecting, I think, when you ask, how do we get in this situation?
We taught ourselves in the world, in World War II, that what the Nazis had done as a clearly criminal activity in firebombing London in the Blitz, what the Japanese had done to Shanghai and other cities in Japan, what the Nazis had done in Guernica, destroying the city center in the Spanish War, was the right way to do it.
And that we would conduct war ourselves that way.
And for every ton of bombs the Germans dropped on a British city, we dropped 10 times, 10 tons in the end, on Germany, and later on Japan.
And having learned that that was, after all, secretly the way to fight a war, to absolutely jettison the idea that civilians were immune from direct attack, the basis of the laws of war originating back in church doctrine by Augustine and Aquinas, taken into international law, the banning any direct attack on civilians, we proceeded ultimately in Germany to make civilians our main target, and in Japan, essentially our only target.
And the effect of that was to kill about 600,000 German civilians, firebombed, burn them to death, and 900,000 Japanese before the atom bombs.
And with those added, you got about 1.2 million Japanese killed, add 600,000 Germans.
And what you've got is that we we learned, quote, we taught ourselves, we taught the world, that killing civilians was legal, all right, the way to fight a war.
It was not prosecuted by us at Nuremberg.
The Germans' blitz on London, the Japanese on Shanghai, were not prosecuted in their war crimes trials, because we'd done the same.
And basically said, this is the new way of doing it.
So what atom bombs gave us was a way to do with one plane, what it took about 300 planes to do, to kill 100,000 civilians in one night in Tokyo.
But we had 300 planes, more of them.
So after Tokyo, we did that to every other city we could in Japan.
As you see, the total came close to about 2 million civilians, which is about what Auschwitz killed out of the solution, the final solution, the Holocaust.
About 2 million altogether in Auschwitz, beyond Jews, I think it was about about a million Jews and close to a million others.
And that you can do with one warhead, as I said, now a thermonuclear warhead, you could do that.
So every one of those Trident warheads, is in Auschwitz, a portable Auschwitz.
And as my son, my older son observed, when he was getting arrested with me at Rocky Flats, which produced the plutonium triggers for all of these warheads.
Plutonium bomb is what we use on Nagasaki.
And what people have, very few Americans understand the difference between an A-bomb and an H-bomb.
And the difference is, can be expressed, every H-bomb, which is nearly all of our weapons now, thermonuclear weapons, hydrogen weapons, that's why they're called H-bombs, has a Nagasaki type bomb as its trigger, as its detonator.
And so what the Indians and Pakistanis now have are mere Nagasaki type bombs.
But if testing resumes, which the Republicans have been pledging to do, or wanting to do, frequently in their, and may happen, well, may happen.
If testing resumes, the Indians and Pakistanis will move from A-bombs, Nagasaki type bombs, to H-bombs, of which those, their current bombs, would be the detonators.
And then they wouldn't just starve in an India-Pakistan war, 2 billion people, which is obviously multi-genocidal.
The final solution led to the word genocide, killed 6 million Jews, and about 5 million others.
We're talking now 2 billion people.
So that's something beyond genocide.
But if they renew the testing, and get H-bombs, which they would in a couple of years, then the smoke from their targeting would not kill just 2 billion, it would be 7 billion.
They'd have their nuclear winter effect.
And we'd have more doomsday machines in the world.
So that's what, that's what lies ahead, if the current process of, on both sides, of getting rid of the few restraints that we do have, like that intermediate range nuclear missile treaty, which both sides have just rescinded.
Neither side had a justification for doing it.
And both of them have gotten rid of it.
The START treaty, which put a limit, new START treaty, which would expire next year, or in 21, actually, 2021.
But they say, the Russians are saying it's already getting too late to make the modifications and to extend it.
That's hard to believe, because really, it's a very detailed treaty.
And my impression would be, if you just wanted to extend it for years, which they should, putting a ceiling on both sides, you could do that very quickly.
I'm, I'm sure it could be done.
But, and could be done by the next president, even if they let 2000 go by, but 20.
But without those, all bets are off.
New testing by China, by everybody else.
India and Pakistan get H-bombs rather than A-bombs.
North Korea claims it has an H-bomb, one test.
They may have done one, but it takes a lot more than one test to have a real operational weapon.
They are not testing now, I'm glad to say.
I'll give Trump credit for that right now, by the way, that they're, they're not actually testing, which is good.
But if they test two, they will have their H-bombs and doomsday machines will proliferate.
So it is not, what these people have done at Kings Bay is not too much, and it's not too early to be protesting with their lives to the fullest extent they can, to try to wake people up.
We're having this conversation, and we've had others, Scott, I appreciate it on your, on your show.
But we're having this particular conversation in reference to that action.
And actually, that's their hope, to try to get people thinking about this and talking about this and asking themselves, as these defendants did, am I doing enough?
Could I do more?
Am I doing what I should be doing to end this?
And almost nobody, and I don't exclude myself here either, almost nobody can really answer that.
And faced with this, the arms control treaties, which have been inadequate, but have, did lead to destruction of the intermediate range missiles, which will now be open for rebuilding.
Missiles that I, as I say, I got arrested protesting in 1983 in Germany, with Phil Berrigan, the husband of Elizabeth McAllister.
I was on trial here.
Those weapons, more than a thousand of them were dismantled.
Now they'll be on the way to being, being reproduced.
The US claims that Russia has missiles that violate that treaty.
Russia denies it, but the, in terms of the range, but that could be settled.
Russia denies that they have missiles that are, that could be settled by inspection and negotiation, which the US has not shown any interest in doing.
Instead, they wanted to get rid of the treaty.
And that's very, very short-sighted on both sides.
Putin left the treaty also.
He didn't have to do that right away.
Simply imitated the US right away within days in canceling that treaty.
So we're moving on both sides and elsewhere in the world toward a new Cold War, a new arms race, which will actually not make the world that much more dangerous than it is, because it already is more dangerous than people realize, and has been for a long time.
And that is what Liz McAllister and Clare Grady and others in this, the seven in this trial are trying to wake us up to.
And it has led at great cost to themselves of effort.
Many of them, a couple of them have been in jail for a long time since the action.
That has led to some articles and actions.
And it has certainly not enough to make much of a difference, discussions like this.
But you never know who it may have been inspired to in the administration, and in these labs and elsewhere, to do more than they're doing and with more effect.
I know that because I felt the power of such actions on my own life.
So I know they can be effective, and they can be necessary.
And all the Pentagon Papers definitely did not end the Vietnam War by themselves, not anything like that.
The war went on.
Papers came out in 71.
The war ended in 75.
Later, after thousands more had died on both sides, more than thousands.
And that looked like failure.
But the fact is, it was shorter than it would have been otherwise.
And that was by the actions of a lot of other people, like John Dean revealing what the president had done criminally, to me and others actually, but without documents.
And Lifton would have survived, Nixon would have survived that.
Then Alex Butterfield, in the inner circle, literally in the Oval Office, one of the few people who knew that Nixon had taped himself and everybody else, provides the documentations by revealing the tapes.
Without Butterfield doing that, Nixon stays in office.
And the war continues.
I saw Roy Cohn, by the way, Roy Cohn saying to somebody how McCarthy's aide, John McCarthy's aide, saying, and the mafias, okay, just this film, very good film, where's my Roy Cohn, showing how Roy graduated from being the aide to Senator Joe McCarthy, to being the consul, Gary, to Joe Gotti and other mafia dons, basically.
But they said, if you had been Nixon's lawyer, what would you have counseled?
He said, oh, Nixon could have gotten off by burning the tapes.
I believe that's true.
He would have gotten off.
He would have claimed he had the right to do it as president with no legal or constitutional basis for burning evidence like that.
But would he have been impeached for that?
No, I don't think so.
So the tapes came out finally, as a result of Nixon's own appointees to the Supreme Court, demanding that he turn them over.
And other people, Richardson resigning, Ruckelshaus resigning, rather than fire the special prosecutor, getting a public interest.
Three people, the special prosecutor included, being kicked out on one night, that was called the Saturday Night Massacre.
That got the public notice, and a, quote, firestorm or protest resulted.
They had to hire a new special prosecutor.
What I'm saying is, a lot of people had to act out of character in a way that couldn't have been predicted, being able to resign, telling, being ostracized or subject to prosecution by revealing tapes, in addition to the Pentagon papers.
All of that had to happen to end that war when it did, which was much too long.
But it could have gone on much longer.
The American people, I'm afraid, would have put up with indefinite bombing if it didn't involve ground casualties.
Look at Afghanistan, and look at Iraq right now.
Afghanistan is a war that's going on now for 18 years, and it can go on for another 15 years or 18 years, actually, unless we take action, as is exemplified by the Plowshare 7 and others, and by the 5,000 young men who chose to go to prison to protest the war nonviolently, 50,000 who subjected themselves to a possible prison, as I say, 5,000 were convicted.
Or what's going on right now with young people, inspired by Greta Thunberg, who I had the honor and the privilege of meeting in Sweden earlier this year, and in one of her Friday morning strikes from school, not just a demonstration, but subjecting her and the others who joined her to discipline or suspension or expulsion for quitting school in order to call for effective action against climate change.
A couple of months after I saw her in Sweden, 1.2 million people, students, had on a Friday struck around the world, and later in the year, 4 million striking.
Now, it so happens, we're talking here, sorry to say that, actually, we're talking today on November 15th, which is the 50th anniversary of the second moratorium strike in 1969, November 15th, 1969, where there was a march against death, in Washington, with tens of thousands, 100,000 people.
On October 15th, 2 million people marched on a weekday and demonstrated and rallied against the war.
It was a strike.
It was a general strike, and it prevented nuclear war.
Because none of us knew that at the time.
I was copying the Pentagon papers at the time, because I feared that the, I knew that Nixon would extend the war, and I feared that eventually, perhaps within several years, we'd be in a nuclear war, perhaps with China.
That was my fear.
What I didn't know was that Nixon was threatening and readying nuclear strikes against North Vietnam in that month of October 1969, to be launched on November 3rd.
A speech was drafted by friends of mine, actually, in the White House, explaining that tonight, as I speak, you know, and so forth, pursuant to my orders, they joked about that phrase they put in, pursuant to my orders, bombers are attacking North Vietnam, that having been stopped a year earlier by Johnson.
It was the marches on a weekday march, 2 million, that kept him from doing that, because he knew that nuclear attacks at that time would have put tens of millions of people in the streets, not 2 million, and November 15th confirmed that.
It was even larger demonstrations in many cities.
So he felt, I can't keep the war going with nuclear strikes in the face of protests like that.
So he had to give up nuclear war, and that, quote, moratorium, which was a euphemism for, like, no business as usual, bank holiday.
It was a euphemism for a general strike.
Well, a general strike is what Greta Thunberg is conducting right now on climate issue.
And let's get one going for the genocide in Yemen.
That's happening on a daily basis.
You've written about that.
Bernie Sanders has led a protest against, well, not protest, legislation against that, clearly illegal, clearly a crime against the peace, the kind of thing that was tried at Nuremberg and elsewhere, very clearly.
And as you've said, I believe, absolutely impeachable offense, except that, two little problems.
The president vetoed that, and they haven't yet managed, but I hope they'll be back with a veto proof vote on that.
But of course, that is both genocidal and aggressive.
We're doing that just as Obama's attack on Libya was aggressive, was absolutely illegal, and not even pretense of any consultation with Congress, which is the same here, by the way.
Incidentally, I've been mentioning some of these firms that are involved.
The weapons that we've given Saudi Arabia for that attack, I think, can have a large amount of Raytheon contact with the State Department officer who okayed the selling those weapons, which needed a White House approval, was a former lobbyist for Raytheon.
Exactly.
So the interpenetration of the government and these firms, the military industrial complex, which includes the civilians in so many of them in Pentagon and the White House, is alive and well and keeping this whole process going.
The problem on Yemen is, unfortunately, and this applies to both Democrats and Republicans, is that the Congress, it's bilateral in these things.
The contracts are bilateral.
The donations to the committees are for both Republicans and Democrats.
And Bernie Sanders did lead a very strong effort in Congress to stop it, which was stopped by the veto.
But Congress has never shown a willingness to impeach for a foreign policy crime, which do exist.
And, for example, to get Republicans to join in on the impeachment, which they were able to do, of Nixon.
Nothing like that seems possible now.
But they were willing to vote for the impeachment of their own president, but not on Cambodia, not on the criminal invasion of Cambodia.
So they had to drop that portion of the impeachment to make it a bipartisan impeachment.
Well, in fact, actually answer me this, Dan, because there's some people who think that actually, in a way, he was impeached for ending the war in Vietnam, that that was his real transgression that sort of helped to drum up the real establishment support for getting rid of him then.
It wasn't for war crimes.
It was for trying to end the war crimes, making peace with Mao and with whoever it was at that time, I forget, and Khrushchev.
That's not to be dismissed.
That was certainly not explicit.
Can you tell me the references you would give me?
I mean- Oh, you're going to smack the hell out of me once I say this over the Skype here, but I first heard that I'm almost certain from G. Gordon Liddy on his old radio show that Nixon had the wisdom to end Johnson's horrible Vietnam War.
And this is why the establishment ultimately turned on him, was for doing the right thing there and for doing the right thing in making peace with, you know, detente, essentially with Russia and China both.
And that was what really motivated the turn against him.
When you say really- In fact, let me mention one more thing.
Look at what's going on with Trump right now.
He's not in trouble for Yemen.
He's in trouble for pulling troops out in northeast Syria.
He's impeached for, as Andrew Coburn pointed out on my show, they're going to impeach him for holding up an arms deal, right?
It goes to show you- Who did you say pointed that out?
Andrew Coburn from Harper's, the great Patrick Coburn's brother.
No, it's a good point.
And it's a fair point.
Now, going back on Nixon, if I may for a moment here, and I'm going to have to leave- I know, I know.
It's okay.
Go ahead.
But going back on the first scan, that certainly doesn't account for all, or I would argue even most of the resistance to Nixon at that time, because there certainly were, we had a Congress that certainly did want to get out of Vietnam to a large extent.
A lot of them did, and had been doing it for some years without success.
But that's not to dismiss that point entirely, because of course, a lot of the evidence against Nixon leaked out from what's now known as the deep state to a large extent from CIA and FBI people.
The number two man in the FBI, and undoubtedly some people in the CIA were providing information against Nixon.
And his process of detente, actually at that time with Russia and with China, was absolutely opposed by J. Edgar Hoover.
In fact, the secrecy of that, a great secrecy, was in considerable part to keep J. Edgar Hoover from preempting that, opposing detente with China altogether.
And the whole idea, though Russia and China did not make, and again, it's not unanimous, but did not make everybody in CIA or FBI happy.
And that is undoubtedly directly related to some of the significant leaks against him that were at that time.
So that's an esoteric point.
I say that as a very close student of that process.
And it isn't, I say, generally accepted or known, but I am not at all dismissing that idea.
And it is noteworthy that moves toward detente, as by John F. Kennedy, and then even Nixon, and later other presidents you could name.
And I will say right now, yes, undoubtedly, a part, certainly not all, of the opposition to Trump at this time.
But part of that is precisely to what I would say, his most creditable positions, in my position, in my sense, the idea, why can't we be friends with Russia, or negotiating with North Korea, for example, right now, is part of that Cold War mentality, no negotiations with the opponents, no restraints on the arms race, which I do feel is heavily based in the military industrial complex throughout this period.
And the result of which is, even among the Democrats now, you do not find much focus on the question of actually reducing nuclear arms or any arms, arms at all.
Even Bernie Sanders has joined to the point of being happy to get an F-35 base in his state, which has led to some criticism there.
But you've got a military industrial complex, in other words, that needs justification for large budgets, large sales by arms firms to the government.
They're clients, they're one customer.
And that's something that we have to change, of course.
And so that's why we come back at finally to these actions against nuclear weapons.
They're very few.
And certainly, I applaud and I appreciate the people who are willing to give up their liberty and go to jail, even, in an effort to show that this is madness.
It is mad for humans to be, and now to look at the other side of Trump, on the climate.
The Republican Party is, as Noam Chomsky says, the most dangerous organization in the history of the world, since they're dedicated to maximizing the emission of fossil fuels burning.
Boy, I can think of a lot of worse things about them than that.
But anyway, listen, I got to go and you do too, I know.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show, Dan.
I really do appreciate it a lot.
Great.
Okay.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Good show.
Bye.
All right, you guys, that is the great Daniel Ellsberg.
He is the author of the book Secrets, a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, which is just great.
And then the new one out is called The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
