All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And introducing today's guest, it is, again, the great Gareth Porter, independent investigative historian and journalist, now mostly writing for thegrayzone.com and sometimes still for consortiumnews.com.
Of course, we've rerun everything he writes and has written for the past almost 20 years now, 15 at least, no, 17, 19, at antiwar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth Porter.
How are you doing, sir?
Thanks, I'm fine.
Good to be back again, Scott.
Always great to talk to you, my friend.
So listen, there's so much important news going on about the year 1958.
That's surprising, kind of.
Interesting story, yes.
Yes.
So thegrayzone.com, and again, it will be at antiwar.com, we're going to run it on Monday so that, you know, we don't want it to get buried over the weekend here.
Eisenhower, that is President Dwight David Eisenhower, rejected military chiefs' demand for nuclear war on China.
Classified account of 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis reveals.
Again, at thegrayzone.com.
And this is in regards to the heroic Pentagon Papers leaker, and my friend and yours, and all of our friend, the great Daniel Ellsberg.
Please tell us the entire story, Gareth.
Well, you know, this sort of introducing this, one should, I think, point out that this is the one time during the entire Cold War, and indeed since then, that we've been in a situation where the military in the United States have actually actively pushed for nuclear war against a major power, in this case, communist China.
At that point, of course, communist China was not nearly as powerful as it is today or has been for the last 20 or 30 years.
But nevertheless, you know, it was a major actor on the international stage, and capable of doing something to harm American interests in response to a nuclear war against them.
So this is really very, very shocking, you know, from my point of view, and I think virtually everyone who has read this story agrees that this was an extremely dangerous moment in the relatively recent history of the United States and of world politics, because of this proposed use of nuclear weapons against China by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States.
Now, having said that, I mean, I want to just make it clear that, you know, there was, there was a lot of distance between that proposal for using nuclear weapons and the actuality of it, because, you know, it was clear that Eisenhower did not want to use nuclear weapons against China, that he was holding out against the position of the Joint Chiefs from the beginning to the end.
And you know, he, let's face it, he was hoist to his own petard in a way, because Eisenhower had basically changed the fundamental approach of the US military after becoming president to make nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons, not strategic nuclear weapons, the very essence of the US defense strategy.
In other words, it was assumed that any conflict, military conflict with another power would result in the United States using nuclear weapons.
That was the official assumption.
But when it came down to the actuality of a situation, the situation in this case was that, you know, Eisenhower had no intention of going to war over a minor incident over the offshore islands.
I mean, the offshore islands were not part of the US defense commitment to its nationalist Chinese allies.
It was understood that that was not something that was worth fighting for.
And so from the very beginning, there was something really quite artificial about this idea that there was a crisis over the offshore islands, even when there was a belief that the Chinese would do something militarily aimed at those islands.
Of course, the Chinese actually did start an artillery barrage, an artillery offensive, if you will, aimed at trying to blockade the offshore islands, particularly Kamoi Island, the main one, which had been used by the US military or by the nationalist Chinese military with US support for offensive operations against the mainland.
And so in some ways, you know, this whole idea that the United States would fight for those offshore islands was doubly ridiculous.
And you know, I don't think I quote it in the article, but John Foster Dulles, who's pretty widely known as a hawk in the Eisenhower administration, made it clear on more than one occasion in this period of consideration of this of this whole problem that he didn't think the United States had a very good case for going to war against China over the offshore islands.
So without getting into detail, I would just say that there was something pretty artificial about the whole crisis.
It was never about fear of a major Chinese military move against Taiwan.
There was never any serious national security issue here.
It was really all about the US military wanting to take advantage of this situation in the Taiwan Strait or across the Taiwan Strait to do what they wanted to do, which was to drop atomic bombs on China.
And that is just really the most shocking thing that is imaginable about a country, you know, in international politics.
I mean, what what worse could be done?
I mean, of course, it was not a matter of of a strategic bombing campaign against China, which would kill tens of millions or something like that.
We're talking about casualties in the thousands to tens of thousands at most.
But nevertheless, I mean, this is this is pretty shocking stuff.
And now I'm sorry.
Why would the casualties be so limited?
Why would it be limited?
Because they were going to use tactical nuclear weapons.
They were proposing to use tactical nuclear weapons against the targets that they would argue were either either used or potentially could be used, you know, against in an operation against the offshore islands.
That's the way they that's the way they presented it.
The Joint Chiefs did.
So, you know, it was a limited war in that regard.
But look.
And for the record, the Chinese didn't test their first A-bomb to what, 64 under Johnson, right?
Correct.
Correct.
OK.
And and, you know, they were very, very far away from having anything like that.
But since you raised the point, you know, the Joint Chiefs made it very clear that that they were prepared, fully prepared for the Chinese to retaliate with nuclear weapons against targets, both nationalist Chinese targets.
That is Taiwan itself, the offshore islands, Taiwan itself, and possibly an American military target such as Okinawa.
And that that would be the case because they figured that the Russians were must have been involved in any military move that the Chinese would make against the offshore islands, because surely they would understand the United States would respond militarily.
And therefore, they would assume that if the United States used nuclear weapons against the Chinese, that the Russians would give nuclear weapons to China to retaliate against the United States, of course, with directions to be very careful about how they were used.
That's just how crazy this whole scenario was in terms of unfolding on the part of of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And they were they were OK with that.
They didn't mind the idea that we would get hit, that American bases could get hit with nuclear weapons.
Go figure.
I don't understand it.
I mean, it's a mentality which is beyond my ability to understand.
Well, and then so is it right then that that was really Eisenhower's only worry, too, that if we hit the Chinese, that the Russians then will nuke us.
And so but otherwise we would do it.
Is that basically what happened?
I think that would have made it much simpler.
But look, Eisenhower, like Dulles, was reluctant to go to war over the offshore islands.
I mean, that was not an issue that he wanted to go to war over.
To be to be clear here, when you say offshore islands, you mean including Taiwan, the big one Formosa?
No, no, no.
I'm sorry.
Just the smaller ones.
You've given me the opportunity to make that clear distinction between Taiwan, the major island that the Nationalist Chinese captured in 1950, where 1950, I guess it was, they began to occupy it in 49 and then finally gained complete control over the 1950.
And the offshore islands, which are just five, five miles or less than five miles from the mainland of China, whereas Taiwan is 100 miles away.
And and Kimoi and Matsu were the two major islands, again, just offshore of the mainland.
And then there were a bunch of very much smaller islands that were close by.
But we're only talking about those those islands that were so close to the mainland here.
And which, again, the United States never had any idea would be part of the commitment to defend Taiwan.
Well, I got to say here that, you know, this is just one of so many like examples out of Ellsberg's book.
And I don't actually remember this from Ellsberg's book, The Doomsday Machine, but I know there's a million of them.
And then I read in The New York Times from Charlie Russigate, Russia bounties, Savage, the hoaxster.
Apparently, Daniel Ellsberg handed him a really good one here.
And this came out of a document, one of the few documents that he had liberated along with the Pentagon Papers back then, which he planned on leaking in a separate whole leak about nuclear weapons back then, most of which was lost, he says.
But that this one he had and that he wrote in the book in a footnote that, hey, I have this document and you can find it online and it has more in it than the redacted version that's been released so far.
So then a professor at Georgetown University or sorry, George Washington University National Security Archive project was the first person who actually noticed that and made something of that and went and pulled up the document and found and made a deal out of this.
And now Daniel Ellsberg, this is we can change the subject back to nuclear war in a second, but I just this is important.
Ellsberg is now making a big deal out of this and giving it to Charlie Russia Bounties Savage Russia Bounties hoax that is savage in order to one shed light on the mentality of these military men sometimes when it comes to just how easy it is for them to conclude that it's time to break out the A-bombs, even if so-called tactical strength, tactical yield strength ones.
And at the same time, he's also at 90 years old.
The heroic leaker of the Pentagon Papers is deliberately putting himself on the line and using Charlie Savage of The New York Times to directly challenge the United States Department of Justice and dare them to indict him for espionage and prosecute him under Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act.
The way that they have done the way that they're doing to Daniel Hale right now, the way that they've done to John Kiriakou and to Julian Assange and so many great whistleblowers of our era.
And he wants to be indicted and convicted so that he can appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court and win.
And that is some real heroism.
And that's at the core of this story here.
Yes.
But in his book, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Gareth, one more thing.
I don't know if I said it.
The book is called The Doomsday Machine, and it came out in right around the same time as Fool's Errand did in, I guess, 2017 or early 2018.
It's a great idea by Dan.
I wonder if anybody in the Biden administration is really going to be willing to do that.
I kind of doubt it myself.
I don't know about you.
Yeah, I talked with I talked with your writing partner, John Kiriakou, from your recent Iran book earlier today, and he very much doubted that the DOJ would have the courage to indict Dan Yellowsburg now, but he's clearly in violation of Woodrow Wilson's horrible law, or at least the way that they have interpreted and applied it in this era in the last 20 years.
Yes.
But by the way, let me just say something about the Charlie Savage story, as well as the CNN story that was done.
I don't know if you saw that one.
Neither one of them really made it very clear that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were pushing so hard for this, for the use of nuclear weapons.
You know, it was I would say it was at least deemphasized, to say the least.
And of course, their headlines didn't didn't convey that at all.
So I regard it as interesting and revealing that they really missed the core issue behind this story.
Right.
Yeah.
The headline should have been Chiefs wanted to new China in 58.
Daniel Ellsberg also challenging Justice Department on your head should have been pretty clear.
Yeah, that was the headline.
Something to bury.
That's pretty crazy.
And that's just not the way they that's not the way they cover the news.
That's all there is to it.
Yeah.
Sorry.
One other thing I want to say about the Joint Chiefs position here, which is that they constantly tried to underplay or downplay the significance of using nuclear weapons against these targets in China.
They made it look like based on on the document that we're talking about here, the way it was covered in these in these historical papers that are available, is that the Joint Chiefs made it look like, well, these are very small bombs that they don't do much damage, even though they're nuclear weapons or atomic weapons.
They are not like, you know, some horrible, you know, people killing weapon.
Well, the fact is that these are the weapons that were used against Hiroshima.
They were 15 kiloton tactical nuclear weapons, just like the one dropped on Hiroshima.
And they would have the same effect on any population within three miles of the epicenter of the bomb.
They were airbursts just the way the Hiroshima bomb was was dropped, which is which is precisely the way that an atomic bomb has the greatest blast and fire damage and lethality.
So you know, they had no right, no business to try to downplay it the way they did.
And I just I would draw people's attention to that fact that this is one of the things that they did to try to get away with it.
To what extent it made a difference, I have no idea.
It's quite striking to me.
Well, it's very relevant for our time, too, about these so-called usable tactical nukes that when you're talking about 10 or 15 kilotons, yeah, that's what they used on Hiroshima.
And I don't know what's publicly available.
Maybe if you go to the museum or something, you can see something.
But I had a guy just sent to me on the promise that I wouldn't share them extremely high quality scans of his grandfather's panoramic pictures of Hiroshima in just the days or weeks after the blast, Gareth.
And I have them and I got them on the big screen.
And it's absolutely unbelievable what they did to that city.
It is just unbelievable.
And I read a thing recently that said that if you dig down a few feet anywhere, there's bones, there's bones everywhere still.
And by the way, you know, despite the fact that they were they were claiming that they were only going to be hitting military targets.
We know that there were populated areas very close to these to these targets.
They were both in both the gun emplacements, which were, you know, near the near the strait, the Taiwan Strait and the main air base, which would have been clearly a target.
They were saying, we're going to go all the way north.
We have to go all the way north to Shanghai using tactical nukes to hit these targets.
Well, that air base, the main air base near Shanghai is, of course, it's not near Shanghai City, which is a huge metropolis and was even then in the 50s.
But it was near a city of approximately the same size and population as Hiroshima was.
So so this was an operation that should be likened to the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima.
No question about it.
I don't think there's any question.
I mean, I'm not saying that it would have exactly the same results in terms of the number of people killed, but it would certainly be a mass casualty bombing.
Absolutely.
OK, hang on just one second.
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And yeah, and it would also be the Americans nuked another country again.
Another country in Asia again.
Yes, and by the way, you know, that issue was raised by Dulles and by others in the State Department with Joint Chiefs in discussing this issue.
And the Joint Chiefs just, you know, sort of gave the back of their hand and said, well, OK, maybe there would be like the Japanese would be unhappy with this for a while.
But later on, they would realize the Japanese and others in Asia would realize that it's really in their interest.
So they weren't they weren't bothered by that at all.
Amazing.
And then when also, can you talk a little bit about before and after this happened?
And this crisis was not just one, it was one of many along these same lines at the time or near that era, right?
Well, you know, one one of the things that I didn't have time or basically space to cover is that the result of this little crisis over the Taiwan Strait, which was started before the Chinese did anything at all, but was really sort of became regarded as a crisis by the U.S. government when the Chinese started to try to keep the nationalist Chinese navy from basically supplying these offshore islands, particularly Kimoi.
The result of this was that basically the United States and China resumed their talks in Warsaw and began to discuss some kind of modus of Vandy.
It never really amounted to anything, but there was a sense in which it raised the possibility of reducing tensions between the United States and China.
And this was indeed the initial intention of John Foster Dulles, that he wanted to move toward a two China policy on the part of the United States, a clear cut to China policy where we would no longer tolerate the idea of Zhang threatening to take back the mainland, which was absurd and nobody really believed that that could happen, and try to establish a sort of peaceful relationship between the two Chinas.
Now, People's Republic of China was never going to agree to a true China's policy, of course, but that was an interesting development in terms of U.S. policy that they were giving up.
They were ready to completely end the whole notion of supporting Zhang's claim to recapture the mainland.
And so that was the immediate fallout of this so-called crisis.
And by the way, a China specialist, Jonathan Pollock, who is retired now, who I spoke with yesterday told me that he did his doctoral dissertation on this whole Taiwan crisis.
And he said the Chinese government never used the term crisis in Chinese at all.
They didn't regard it as a crisis.
It was always something that was much lower key.
They had no intention of having it become a crisis at all.
Hey, what do you think about if there was a crisis over Taiwan sometime soon, Gareth?
Do you think there might be?
And what do you think would happen?
Well, that, of course, is precisely the issue that this whole episode raises, and rightly so, because once again, I think the joint chiefs are positioning themselves.
They're preparing for war with China.
They have these strategies that they haven't quite figured out exactly how it's going to work yet, but they have one or more strategies that they're working on that would allow them to defeat China militarily.
But the fact is China now has nuclear weapons, and they are threatening to use them if the United States uses nuclear weapons or threatens Chinese territory in some way.
And so, you know, we are in a situation where definitely the possibility of a nuclear war between the United States and China needs to be thought about very hard, and it needs to be thought about by people who are opposed to it, particularly because it's important to start pushing back against this.
Well, I mean, this is the thing.
It's such an easy thought experiment, right?
Everybody knows, who knows anything about it and has thought about this at all, that they have supersonic sea-skimming missiles, and they also have ballistic missiles that could very easily take out our massive and obsolete and sailor-filled aircraft carriers, which our F-18s do not have a longer range than their sea-skimming missiles do.
So you got standoff range, and they've got you stood off.
So you get close enough to do anything about it, and they can sink your battleship, and, you know, figuratively speaking, but literally speaking, much worse.
And so then what does President Biden or Harris or Cruz or God help us, whoever is the president of the United States at the time, do when an aircraft carrier breaks in half and sinks to the bottom of the ocean full of thousands, 10,000 sailors or what, 14,000?
How many guys you fit on one of those again?
A lot.
Yeah, I don't know.
So then it's a question of nukes, right?
And then, okay, well, we're going to nuke you here, and then we're going to lose.
We're willing to lose Okinawa, which doesn't belong to us, and then we'll tit for tat with bigger and bigger A-bombs and then H-bombs until somebody finally knocks it off.
Is that the plan, or how is this supposed to work?
Look, I mean, I'm quite sure, and they have said so explicitly, that they do not plan to use nuclear weapons unless it becomes absolutely necessary.
But that, of course, is a caveat that gives them plenty of room to plan on it under certain circumstances.
And I'm sure that that is happening, that they do have scenarios in which nuclear weapons would be used.
One thing that I've learned about the military leadership is that they have scenarios for everything possible that would allow them to use their weapons.
And that is what the real danger of the situation is.
That plus the fact that the Chinese are, as you've correctly pointed out, perfectly capable of defeating the United States in the conventional weaponry that the United States can bring to bear.
And the United States does not take it lightly when it's defeated on the field of battle if it has ways of retaliating or responding.
And I would not trust the military leadership one bit under these circumstances to forego that option.
And we could find ourselves once again in a situation where the president has to stand up to pressure from the Joint Chiefs, but particularly from the Navy and the Air Force.
And I haven't said it thus far, but I should say this, that in 1958, it was the Air Force and the Navy, but particularly the Air Force, who were the ones pushing for the use of nuclear weapons.
They're the ones who were very enthusiastic about it for their own sort of institutional interests, whereas the Army was much less concerned.
Well, I would say they were much less supportive.
They were going along with it only very reluctantly, if at all.
And that would be the case again in a situation that we're talking about here with regard to a war over Taiwan.
Absolutely.
And doesn't that just say it all, too, that, well, the different military branches disagree about what's the best policy for protecting the American people's national interests and freedoms and liberties and safeties.
And their different plans for what should be done happen to coincide exactly with the structure of their force and what they have to bring in capability to any particular conflict.
That's absolutely correct.
And I would just underline that by making the following point, which is in my piece, but we haven't talked about it.
That is that one of the most interesting, if not the most interesting quote from this entire, I think it's 550 some page long document that we're talking about, is that when the Pacific Air Force commander wrote to the Air Force in Washington to say, well, OK, President has said we're not going to use nuclear weapons in any initial battle and therefore the Air Force is going to have to be ready here to use conventional weapons in defense of the offshore islands.
And guess what?
The Air Force deputy chief of staff wrote back, he said, absolutely not.
As a matter of principle, the Air Force will not participate in conventional defense, only nuclear weapons.
This is because the Strategic Air Command was the dominant part of the Air Force by far in 1958.
And they had completely retooled the Air Force in the Pacific so that basically they were ready for nuclear war, but nothing else.
They could prepare for something else, but they chose not to.
And ironically, in a way, right, isn't it the case that Eisenhower, who came from the army, was determined to reduce the number of army infantry divisions.
And so it was nukes instead.
This is his idea of getting control of the military-industrial complex was by shifting it from one branch to the other or something?
No, he wanted to save money.
He wanted to avoid huge, you know, back up or increase in the military budget.
And the only way he knew to do that was to say, we're not going to prepare for war with conventional forces if the Soviets attack, you know, Central Europe or whatever.
We're going to defend with tactical nuclear weapons.
And so, of course, the army had it their way.
They got tactical nuclear weapons, but they nevertheless sent 200,000 more troops to Europe after Eisenhower was inaugurated.
Yeah, they got to have their nukes and station them too.
All right, listen.
But the point is, the point is, this was really all about the institutional interests of these very powerful military organizations.
Exactly.
I'm sorry, I'm out of time.
I got to go.
There's somebody else supposed to be interviewing me right now, and I'm late for it, Gareth.
But thank you so much for doing the show again, bud.
My pleasure.
Thanks.
All right, you guys, that is Gareth the Great.
Of course, he wrote the CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Problems, what you call it here?
I always get it wrong, God dang it, Bobby.
CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis with John Kiriakou, who is the CIA insider, not Gareth.
But Gareth's the one who knows all the things.
And of course, again, find him at The Gray Zone and also at ConsortiumNews.com.
Thanks.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, AntiWar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
