For KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Tonight's guest on the show is Daniel Ellsberg.
He famously liberated the Pentagon Papers from the Rand Corporation.
He's the star of the documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America.
He's the author of the book, Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
Keeps a website at ellsberg.net.
And he's written these two great pieces for Truth Dig two years ago.
Hiroshima Day, America has been asleep at the wheel for 64 years.
It'll be 66 now.
And 100 Holocausts, an insider's window into US nuclear policy.
Welcome to Anti-War Radio, Dan.
I'm good to be on, thank you.
Well, I'm very happy you could join us this afternoon.
And so tomorrow is Hiroshima Day.
And you, of course, had a career inside the government and are familiar with nuclear weapons planning and strategy from that point of view.
But you also had a window into nuclear weapons policy that most Americans never had a chance to before they were ever used on Japan.
Isn't that right?
Well, that is, yes.
That's an odd story in its way, kind of coincidental.
Because, ironically, despite the abhorrence of nuclear weapons that I started out with, I found myself working on nuclear war plans years later at the Rand Corporation when I was a consultant to the Defense Department.
But what made that so ironic was my introduction to the subject, which was before that of most Americans.
It so happened that I was in a high school, a sophomore high school class in sociology, social relations near Detroit, with a teacher who raised the subject of the fact, what was then a concept known as cultural lag, the notion that our politics and our morality and our ability to work together as a species and in societies lagged behind our technical ability of destruction, and generally, technology in general, that there was a gap or a lag there.
And as a possible illustration of that, he raised the possibility that, and this is now during the war in 1944, that there might come into existence a uranium bomb, a U-235 bomb, if he described it.
Now, this is something that was underway at the Manhattan Project at that time, but that was super secret.
And it really didn't leak out at all.
What happened was that from pre-war scientific papers, some people followed up during the war a couple of times with articles, one in the Saturday Evening Post, that described the possibility of a bomb, which was otherwise a very great secret, and nobody was talking about that or writing about it.
But he'd come across one of these articles, and he said this would be a bomb that would be 1,000 times more powerful than the blockbusters that were, at that time, had been used against Britain and were being used against Germany at that point, some of them 10 tons of high explosive.
It was above the limit of what our bombs were, and they were called blockbusters because they were said to destroy a city block of buildings, not just a house.
This would be 1,000 times that powerful, and the question would be, what would be the implications for humanity, for human society, for civilization, if there should be such a bomb?
And the emphasis wasn't on whether who had it.
It wasn't on the notion of whether the Germans got this first or whatever got it first.
It was just how would humanity relate to a bomb like that?
And I think all of us high school sophomores at that time in the class, we would write a paper on it and we spent some days, and I think we all came to pretty much the same conclusion.
This would be bad news for humanity.
This would be a bad thing.
We weren't really able to deal with that kind of destructive power in a way that would preserve cities and civilization.
So that was our abstract, hypothetical kind of thought about it, but that meant that when the first Hiroshima day came along, August 6th, less than a year later, about nine months later, I looked at the headlines about a city having been destroyed by a single bomb in a different way from nearly everyone outside the Manhattan Project.
Namely, I know what that is.
That's the bomb we studied, and it has come into existence.
We got it, and we used it on a city.
And I didn't have a sense at that time of what the alternatives might have been or whether we needed an invasion or didn't need an invasion.
I was really thinking of the long-run consequences, and I had quite a chill thinking this is an ominous development, and so it was.
Well, Dan, as you write in the article, America's been asleep at the wheel for 64 years.
It's two years old, at truthdig.com.
It really sounds like this could have been written by Joseph Heller and included somewhere in Catch-22, where somewhere is a high school sophomore who's thought very deeply about the profound consequences of this new technology, and here it is deployed by Harry Truman, who could just as easily be a character in Catch-22, saying, hooray, everybody, look what we did.
And as you say in your article, you heard from his first announcement.
You could tell in Truman's voice that he hadn't thought about this nearly as hard.
He didn't have the wisdom as a single one of you guys, of your classmates or yourself in your sophomore high school class.
Well, I think the point of the piece I wrote, and the way I really think about it, is that this did not take any moral giant to see this when you thought about it not in the context that most Americans had then, and really have ever since, of the assertion, the appearance that it had ended a war, that it had saved American lives from dying in an invasion, maybe a million lives, maybe many Japanese lives, that it had been done by us, and I revered Franklin Roosevelt, who developed this bomb, essentially.
Harry Truman dropped it.
So that all of those things gave it an aura of legitimacy, especially the efficacy.
It was a savior.
We should be grateful to it, as well as an amazing American technical achievement.
Whereas, thinking about it beforehand, nine months earlier, which, as you say, strangely enough, almost no one had.
Certainly not Truman.
When I was reading about it, Truman did not know, as Vice President, that this weapon existed.
He wasn't told until he inherited the presidency, when FDR...
He hadn't spent a minute thinking about it.
And the scientists, amazingly enough, didn't really give strong thought to the post-war implications of this and what it should mean for humanity if we tested it and then used it on humans.
Until around April, when the bomb was dropped in August.
Around April and May, scientists, especially in Chicago, who were no longer at the forefront of the technical work, really sat down and began discussing the long-run implications.
And their conclusion then was, and these were people who had all worked on the bomb, including Szilard, who had first proposed it to Einstein and actually drafted a letter from Einstein to FDR, calling for a crash program on it.
Szilard, at this point, and James Franck and others on the committee, said, even if it would save American lives, and they didn't know the strategic situation, which did not, by May and June and July, no longer looked as though an invasion would be necessary at all.
That's another story.
But they didn't know that.
They said, even if it would save American lives, we should not drop this.
They made two forms at this point.
Another petition was, we should at least demonstrate it and make proposals, specifically that the emperor could stay, a proposal that we eventually did agree to.
We should make that in advance, try to get a surrender without using this, because it will make an arms race inevitable, with very grave implications for the human species.
And that was, I think, a consideration that, as far as we know from the record, was hardly in the minds or the discussion of the people in Washington who were dealing with this.
So all I'm saying is, the scientists who knew where this was heading, and knew, by the way, that ultimately and before long, it would lead to a hydrogen bomb, an H-bomb, a thermonuclear fusion bomb, which required an atom bomb, a Nagasaki-type bomb, as its trigger.
So they knew that what they were building was the trigger of another bomb that would be another factor of a thousand, a million times more powerful than the blockbusters of World War II.
So they could see that, whereas the people in Washington were not thinking in those terms.
But, basically, they came to the same conclusion that a bunch of high school sophomores could easily come to nine months earlier.
And, unfortunately, their letter to the president, their report, did not get into his hands.
It was bottled up by General Groves and others.
It didn't even get to the Secretary of War, Stimson, until after the bomb had been dropped.
Well, on the other hand, it looks like MacArthur and Eisenhower and a great many others in a position to know, knew better, and told Truman so beforehand.
It was really just down to Truman and Stimson.
Eisenhower, in particular, says that he told, first, Stimson, the Secretary of War, and then Truman himself, that he said he saw no reason to drop this terrible thing.
We should not be the first to do it.
He said it was not needed.
The Japanese were near surrender.
He knew what the rest of us in the country did not know, that we were intercepting the Japanese communications and were aware that they were looking for surrender terms and were not, by no means, even the military, determined to fight to the death as they had done on Okinawa.
That's not where they were thinking at that point and that no invasion would be necessary.
So Eisenhower said it wasn't necessary and we shouldn't do it, and he felt very sick at the thought, really.
He reported that later in 1960.
Well, you know, I kind of figured this out today talking with Greg Mitchell, author of Hiroshima in America, and his new book is called Atomic Cover-Up, about the footage suppressed.
But I grew up in the 1980s when Reagan was perceived as a hawk and it was the end of detente and the start again of brinksmanship and whatever, and I was in elementary school when the movie The Day After came out.
And so my conception of what a nuclear war might look like was the absolute nightmare, the end of mankind or whatever, as it's portrayed in that movie.
And yet, as Greg Mitchell is explaining on the show today, for the first many decades, first 40 years, I guess, after the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a great amount of truth about those attacks and the effects were covered up, that basically Americans could see a few different kinds of pictures.
There were a few different black and whites of the mushroom cloud from the air and maybe here's a building that barely stands, maybe with the dome on top that we all see that's now a peace monument there, and then maybe a wide shot of, well, here's Hiroshima after the fact, with obviously a lot of it's flattened.
But that's about it.
For decades, the American people were just, there was a massive lie by omission about the destructive power of these weapons and what the suffering of the Japanese people who survived it, first of all the deaths, but also the people that survived it, what they went through.
True, but you know, Scott, let me go one step beyond that.
I would say that to this day, the American public and really the people of the world on the whole absorbed the implications of the next nuclear revolution that came along some nine years later.
That was the H-bomb that was, the first feasible design of it was conceived, and I think it was 1952, might have been 1951, but it was first tested in 1952 with a device, and then a real bomb in 1954, I believe.
And it didn't come into our arsenal until the mid-50s.
That was another factor of 1,000.
The Hiroshima bomb had the explosive power of 13, and now sometimes you see slightly different figures on it, 13 to 14 thousand tons of TNT.
In other words, more than 1,000 times the 10 tons of the blockbuster.
But what I don't think many Americans realize to this day, and I've asked many audiences here how many did appreciate this, and I get the answer, almost none, the difference between an A and an H-bomb, the difference in scale, the first real test of a big bomb in the mid-50s had the explosive power of 15 million tons of TNT.
In other words, 1,000 Hiroshimas in turn.
And I don't think the American public has never really realized that all of the strategic weapons, the hydrogen bomb, the long-range weapons, our missiles, warheads, and bombers, are H-bombs, they're thermonuclear weapons, and each one of them has for its trigger, its detonator, a Nagasaki-type bomb.
So when you look at those pictures that Greg Mitchell is talking about that have now, I think, become available, now in color, in this flat landscape...
People can see that at TheNation.com, by the way.
I don't think many people really would get it in their minds.
You're looking at the effect of dropping the trigger to a modern, large nuclear weapon.
The detonator, the detonating cap, that's what you're looking at.
And an H-bomb is an entirely different order, because you have thousands, thousands on alert, more thousands in reserve and in a stockpile.
And you're saying these are all multi...
You're saying these are all tens of megatons in yield strength.
They're measured in million...
A megaton is a million tons of explosive equivalent.
And these things are half a megaton.
The individual warheads are smaller than they were in the late 50s, in the early 60s, because those were carried by heavy bombers.
And now we carry a number of them on a single missile.
So they're smaller than those early ones.
So they might be a third of a megaton.
That's a half a megaton, 0.6, that sort of thing.
And there are still some very large weapons in both stockpiles.
But the point is that with the numbers that are involved, thousands, we're talking really about, on both the U.S. and Russia, a capability now that was not ever possible in the world before and was not even conceived in 1945, 55, 65, or 75.
And that was the ability to cause nuclear winter, which was first imagined and then calculated and analyzed very much, starting in 1982, 83.
And with more recent research on that, just in this last decade, during the last decade, which confirms the more ominous implications of the earlier, and that is with these fusion weapons with their immense heat that they let off, it's the largest part of the energy that goes off in the way of heat, the burning of the cities, and the military targets are near cities or in cities, and even if cities are not the alleged initial target, as they were in the planning when I came into the picture in the late 50s and early 60s, that cities were explicit targets.
And now we tend to say, no, the target is this base, this command post order, which will also burn the cities.
And when you burn the cities, the smoke, an aspect of that that was not even calculated until the 80s, the smoke rising simultaneously from all these burning cities will coalesce into great clouds that will blot out the sunlight.
And if it's in the summer, it will lower the temperature by 15 to 20 degrees centigrade, freeze lakes, freeze rivers, kill all the crops, cause famine, with the potential of that moving even into the southern hemisphere, covering the earth and ending most complex life on earth.
That's a real possibility.
Not a small possibility, not a small probability, but just the thought that we have on alert systems that if set off by a false alarm or an escalation from a conventional war that becomes a limited nuclear war and then threatens to escalate, and each side preempts the other, one side preempts the other, they both try to do it.
What you have are two doomsday machines on a hair trigger, worse than one, much worse than one, each one fearing the other, interested in preempting the other's strike, not to be caught on the ground, in effect.
Each with the potential, high potential, of ending life on earth.
It's inexcusable, outrageous, it could not be more ominous that this possibility is allowed to exist, but it is, and that's true under President Obama as much as under any of his predecessors.
And, I might mention, either side should make it impossible to cause nuclear winter, neither has even come close to moving toward that direction.
I'm Scott Horton, this is Anti-War Radio.
We're talking with Daniel Ellsberg, the world's greatest whistleblower, in a great many ways, and I wanted to ask you, Dan, about something that I read in Andrew Coburn's book, Rumsfeld.
It was about the war games, the continuity of government program, and so forth, and about how in the 1990s, in the Bill Clinton years, they would run all these drills about, well, what if we did get into a nuclear war with Russia?
This is after the end of the Cold War, and Donald Rumsfeld would play the emergency continuity of government president, and every time that they did the drill, he would always nuke everyone to death and exterminate all of mankind.
Even if they built into the war game a few chances to try to negotiate a settlement, to try to cause some kind of ceasefire, he would always end up escalating it.
And I just wonder, with your inside knowledge of the war plans, at least from a certain date back in the past, is there a possibility, even, of such a thing as a limited nuclear war between the major powers, never mind India and Pakistan for the moment, but, say, America and Russia?
Well, it's never been very likely that a nuclear attack on the homeland, especially, and even the forces of either one of the superpowers by the other one, could stay limited.
Certainly, Eisenhower didn't believe that was possible.
McNamara did not, I know from talking to him, did not believe that was possible, that it would stay limited.
And under Eisenhower, the plan that works, when operational, when I came into the picture in 59, 60, 61, the Eisenhower plans did not allow for the possibility of limited war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, either conventional or nuclear.
He assumed that any such war would go nuclear, and that was plausible, and, therefore, to save money on divisions, and not to allow the army any basis for asking for divisions to match the Soviets, he directed, and the Joint Chiefs, that there should be no plans, whatever, for war, any conflict that grows to the level that could be called war.
There's a little dispute going on now as to whether Libya is a war or not under Obama, right?
But more than a couple of brigades being involved that did not involve all-out attack on the Soviet Union.
Now, that has been changed to some extent, but not with any high probability of escaping an all-out exchange, just with some effort, if our forces came into conflict somewhere in the world, to keep that down.
But, you know, the idea of using nuclear weapons first against Russia could hardly arise except over a dispute over Ukraine and or Georgia.
Now, I mention this because, if I'm not mistaken, the Republican Party platform, or at least their leading people, like Senator McCain and others, have called, and a number of Democrats have called, for Ukraine and Georgia to be admitted into NATO.
Now, if that were the case, that would be currently still a commitment to the first use of nuclear weapons against Russia in the case of defending the Ukraine or Georgia.
That's the nature of the NATO commitment.
It's the heart of it.
And although Germans and others have tried to propose a no-first-use commitment and unhook NATO from the doomsday machine, from this threat to initiate nuclear war, the U.S. has always fought that very much, partly because it's our nuclear weapons, and thus the rationale for a critical role in Europe, too, because we're the guardians of NATO's nuclear weapons, the French not counting on this being counted.
And so we don't want to give up that role.
Therefore, the idea of extending a NATO guarantee to Ukraine and Russia means that if there were a conflict, as did a rise over Georgia, I said Ukraine and Georgia, there was a conflict over Georgia.
In McCain's accounting, well, we would have known what to do there.
We could use nuclear weapons against Russian troops.
A really good idea.
In other words, let's use the weapons that we have that we've spent so much for, and so we're still keeping tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, hundreds of them, for this purpose, and presumably no other clear purpose, in order that would be the detonator to the doomsday machines on both sides.
So he's talking about ending the world.
George W. Bush was the thin line of civilization in this circumstance, holding Dick Cheney back.
That was it.
If he had been able to convince Junior...
You have to change our view of the relationship there, Cheney.
I think it is true that Cheney was not calling the shots by the end of Bush's term on that issue, because by every account, Cheney wanted to attack Iran with nuclear weapons on their underground sites right through the term, and that it was Bush, of all people, that we relied on.
Well, I think that shows the situation that humanity is in.
A survival depends on the prudence and judgment and wisdom of a George W. Bush, wherein the species, and this is not rhetorical, the species is in very deep trouble, and there's no if there.
That's where we are.
And I have to say, President Obama, with all his talk of abolition, I think is as meaningful as his promise to close Guantanamo.
And I don't say that rhetorically.
I mean, I think there's essentially nothing in it.
I haven't seen anything there at all.
And to talk of lowering the number of weapons that each side has operational to some 1,500, which is far more than needed to cause nuclear winter in the world, that's just laughable if it weren't so tragic.
So far from whether you can abolish nuclear weapons any particular time period is a controversial question.
You could unhook and destroy that doomsday machine and make it impossible to cause nuclear winter.
That is terrible.
It leaves you with nuclear weapons, but it's not measured in thousands.
You get down to dozens, perhaps, when you do that.
Or something like what the Chinese have.
As a matter of fact, they've had the least outrageous demonic nuclear power of any of the major nuclear powers so far.
But I'm saying, of course, that is what should be done.
It should have been done.
Right now we should dismantle all our land-based missiles.
That could be done before the end of the year.
There hasn't been a real rationale for the land-based missiles in a world where we had Polaris and Poseidon submarines.
We haven't had a strategic use for those for a good 50 years.
And I say that as somebody who did work on the war plant in that period.
And yet they remain, in large part, in order to...
It would sound too absurd.
I almost hate to say this, but I would say the major political reason for keeping those land-based missiles, which are targets for Russian missiles, targets for a Russian preemptive strike, and have no practical meaning in reducing damage to the United States under any circumstances.
The major reason is that senators and congressmen from the states in which those missiles reside are concerned about the jobs of the barbershops and the support groups and the telecoms and the servicemen in those missiles.
They don't want to lose.
That's our jobs program.
But that kind of sums up the solemnity and wisdom of our nuclear posture for the last 60 years.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time, Dan.
I'm sorry we'll have to leave it there, but I want to thank you very much for your time on the show tonight.
Good to talk to you.
And remember, on Hiroshima Day, the slogan written on a monument at Hiroshima in Japanese is to the people who died there, Rest in Peace.
The error shall not be repeated.
And that translation in English is for the benefit of the Americans.
The other Japanese tell me that a better translation would be The crime shall not be repeated.
But unfortunately, that promise has not been kept.
It hasn't been dropped yet on other people, but the threat has been there continuously, and I don't think we can keep our commitment to those spirits.
But that's what we should work to do.
All right.
Thank you very much, Dan.
Thank you.
Bye.
Everybody, that's Daniel Ellsberg.
He liberated the Pentagon Papers.
He's the author of the book Secrets, A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
He keeps a website at ellsberg.net, and I highly encourage you to read these two articles at truthdig.com from two years ago.
Hiroshima Day.
America has been asleep at the wheel for 64 years.
And a hundred holocausts.
An insider's window into U.S. nuclear policy.
Again, both of those are at truthdig.com.
That's it for Antiwar Radio tonight.
Thank you very much for listening.
We'll be back here on KPFK next week from 630 to 7.
