08/07/13 – Daniel Ellsberg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm your host and your very good friend, Scott Horton.
My website is scotthorton.org.
I keep all my interview archives there, more than 2,900 of them now, going back to 2003.
And also you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at slash scotthortonshow.
Our next guest is the American hero, Daniel Ellsberg, heroic guy, said hero already, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, ender of the Vietnam War, anti-war and anti-nuclear activist, and a lot of other things.
His website is ellsberg.net.
His movie is The Most Dangerous Man in the World.
His book is Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
You can read chapter one online all about the Gulf of Tonkin incident if you want to.
It's Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
Google around a little bit.
And he wrote this great series, what, back four years ago now, geez, for truthdig.com about America's nuclear policy.
The first one is called 100 Holocausts, an insider's window into U.S. nuclear policy.
And then I want to also point to you, point you guys to this article, Daniel Ellsberg among 31 arrested at Livermore Lab during Hiroshima Day protests.
That's from yesterday.
Welcome back to the show, Dan.
How are you?
I'm okay, Scott.
Thanks for that glowing introduction.
Well, you're my favorite, so there you go.
Why would you go and get yourself arrested protesting America's nuclear policy?
They're just trying to keep us all safe.
Well, I'm part of a community of resistance, as Dan Berrigan used to call it.
In a way, getting arrested is a ritual of that community, but it binds us together and reminds us that we're all still at it, because the problem is still there.
They're still at it.
The possibility of human extinction as a result of American or Russian and or together nuclear weapons that are on alert facing each other right now still exists and still reflects American policy under our current president as under his predecessors.
I think most Americans are aware that there are nuclear dangers in the world, but they have the false impression that it has nothing to do with American policy, that it's a matter of terrorists or proliferation, that it doesn't reflect our policy, or simply that the actual possibility of an American-Russian nuclear exchange, which would cause a nuclear winter, nuclear famine, and end most life on Earth, just doesn't exist.
They aren't aware of it, that in fact, despite reductions in our strategic weapons, each side maintains on alert right now the capability to end most life on Earth, based very possibly on a kind of false alarm of the kind electronic or radar or infrared, false alarm of various kinds that has happened a number of times in the past, and that thus our very existence is contingent on the continued working of a system that's failed very frequently in the past.
Isn't it interesting how everyone in the world, certainly everyone in America, knows that our government possesses enough nuclear weapons to at least threaten the future of mankind's very existence, as you said there, and we all know that the Russians do too, and yet this is not a priority.
How can it not be a priority?
Well, in the first instance, I think I'd have to differ a little with you saying everyone knows that.
I found that when we got arrested protesting a Minuteman launch, that's a land-based missile of which we have over 400 on alert right now, that very many people were surprised to hear that we still had land-based missiles.
Indeed, they have been essentially obsolete from a strategic point of view for over half a century, since we had submarine missiles that were essentially invulnerable, and these land-based missiles are definitely vulnerable and put a pressure on a decision-maker faced with indications of attack, or the fear of attack, to use them rather than lose them.
In other words, there's really no excuse for these to continue to exist, and I think a lot of people are really not aware that they do exist, and that they're really still on alert, and they're more conscious of the fact that the numbers have decreased, both the numbers of warheads and the numbers of missiles, and yet what I think very few people are aware is that even the land-based missiles alone could cause a nuclear winter.
In other words, the reductions have had essentially no effect on the danger to the human species and to most other species.
They have the feeling that we're going down, we're going in the right direction.
We have a president who's talked about the goal of a nuclear-free world, even though he puts it beyond his own lifetime, and they think, okay, we're going in the right direction.
We don't have to do anything, and our leaders are doing as much as they could to reduce this danger.
That's not true at all, and I do agree with you that the American people haven't probed very deeply, haven't distracted by a lot of other things into the remaining danger, and that their beliefs are not very creditable, but still, the media and the government has done what they could to promote them.
All right, now, talk to us a little bit about the difference between an A-bomb and an H-bomb.
You've told me before that when you talk about this to students or whatever other groups, you ask for a raise of hands, who can tell me the difference, and nobody even knows.
Right.
Okay.
This is sort of part of day one of a course, an elementary course, in the nuclear era, that when you talk about an atomic bomb, otherwise known as a fission bomb, the kind of bomb that destroyed Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and those were two different types of fission bombs, which depend on the splitting of heavy atoms, uranium and plutonium, and release energy at about 1,000 times the explosive power of the high explosives before them.
Those bombs are the trigger, a bomb like that is now the trigger, the detonating cap or the percussion cap, you might say, of an H-bomb, a hydrogen bomb, a fusion bomb, which relies on the fusion, the bringing together of very light atoms of hydrogen, and which releases explosive power, again, 1,000 times more than that of the A-bomb trigger.
Not all of them are that large, in fact, most these days are much smaller than that because they're carried by much more accurate missile warheads, but the early H-bombs were in fact 1,000 times more than the explosive power of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or a million times the largest blockbusters of World War II.
So when you see the devastation of Hiroshima or Nagasaki in pictures, as most people have done, that symbolizes for them the dangers of the nuclear era, and it's extremely misleading.
What you're seeing is the destruction of a city by the detonating cap or the percussion cap of a modern thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon, an H-bomb, which comprise all of our strategic arsenal.
So when we go from 1,500 weapons, as we still have after many over 10,000 earlier, the 1,500 still represents, that we have now on on alert, still represents the capability of causing nuclear winter, which is the reduction of sunlight due to the burning of cities, the smoke and debris from cities where a thermonuclear weapon has been exploded in its vicinity, and that reduction in sunlight ends harvests worldwide, essentially, in a world where our actual stored food for humanity is in the order of 30 to 60, at most 90 days.
The loss of harvests in a single year is absolutely catastrophic, and the nuclear famine that would result might leave some thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of humans somewhere in the world still able to fish or to survive, we're such an adaptable species.
But most humans would go, by far, the overwhelming majority, and many other species would be totally extinct, those that depend on vegetation, which would be destroyed by this nuclear winter, and by animals that feed on, predators that feed on the animals that rely on vegetation.
In other words, we'd lose most of our larger animal family here, of which we're part, leaving a lot of bacteria and viruses and some insects, life would go on in that sense, but civilization would be gone almost very rapidly, and most humans.
This remains, this was really only discovered as a possibility of our, or the likelihood of our nuclear war plans some 30 years ago, but that was 30 years ago, and people did raise a cloud of dissent around it, just as they did sometimes the same people, as we're arguing that tobacco was not carcinogenic, or that climate change is a myth.
Oddly, some of the same scientists and propagandists are on all three of those cases, but the fact is that of course they're all valid, and distinct, and particularly, nuclear winter is still a real possibility, or likelihood, depending on targeting, of our current arsenals, depleted as they are, and would still be true if we went through, if the Russians agreed to us to cut from 1,500 to 1,000, a reduction of one-third, which President Obama proposed some months ago, hasn't actually gotten started, should be done unilaterally, and far more than that unilaterally, but in any case, even if it were done, it would essentially make no difference to the prospects.
It's a little like what I just read minutes ago, that the judge in the Bradley Manning case has reduced his possible sentence from 136 years to 90 years.
Yeah, right, from a couple of life sentences to one life sentence.
It really, it makes no essential difference, humanly.
Although on that minor point, I did see where Colonel Morris Davis said that for good behavior and whatever, that could amount to only 20 or so, so there's that, hopefully.
20 out of 90 years?
If he got 90 years, things have gotten better.
In my day, I faced 115 that would have gotten down, possibly to 35, but I don't see how you get down to 20, actually.
Anyway, and I think we can assume good behavior by Bradley Manning, but that doesn't mean he would get out at that time.
Anyway, coming down, good behavior will not protect us from nuclear winter.
Right.
Okay, now, so World War II, approximately 60 million people were killed, and most of them civilians, but you reprint this chart here from the Pentagon, formerly top secret, Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the President's eyes only, within the first month of a nuclear war between America and Russia, it's estimated by the Pentagon in this chart, 275 million people would be dead, 325 million would be dead in six months, and how old is this, and what was the population of the Earth at the time that this was made?
Well, that was then about a quarter of the Earth's population, which was something that Edward Teller used to point to, he used to say, only a quarter of humanity would be destroyed if his weapons, he was known as the father of the H-bomb, were used, and that was sort of the glass three quarters full, you might say, in Teller's words, but even that was totally mistaken, because that calculation was made before the effects of smoke from these burning cities was taken into account, it was another 20 years before that happened, so that was a huge underestimate.
The fact is that the plans in those days would not have killed 600 million people as they assumed, but you talked about the first 300 million, but actually there were about 600 million they were expecting when you put in the effects outside the Soviet Union and the Chinese, when you added those in, but the fact was that it was not 600 million that was at stake, it was the entire, it was all of humanity, and it's been so ever since, because of this smoke effect, totally unconsidered at the time, but you know, nobody's perfect, they hadn't noticed that little consequence.
Collateral damage.
The collateral damage of our attack at that time would have been our own population and everybody else, and they didn't know that, but even the acceptance of, as I say, of hundreds of millions, and it's funny to have to say, even the acceptance of 600 million dead, sounds a little like Teller, but even that, I think, was enough to show the nature of the values and the priorities and the concern for humanity.
They weren't aware that Americans would be destroyed by this, but they weren't, and when it came to other people, even our allies, who would be devastated by the fallout, which is what they were looking at, was not a matter that ruled out this as an instrument of policy, and in fact it was used as, it came as a real possible imminent event just a year after those calculations in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, in short, which could, everyone understood, have led to an all-out U.S. attack on Russia.
They didn't have, at that time, much capability to attack us, left, wouldn't, especially after we struck first, but they did have the capability to destroy Europe, and that simply didn't deter us from thinking of either the threat or the possible use of these weapons as an instrument of policy.
So what we were talking about yesterday at Livermore, which has always been one of the two places that designs these weapons, the two campuses of the University of California, named Livermore and Los Alamos, those are actually separated campuses of a single American university which has designed all of our weapons.
Well our protest there was that the continued design, actually, of a redesign of weapons that can destroy life on Earth, and the problem is not just that they're made at a university – ironic, yes that is – but that they are still in business.
And we were saying that that shouldn't be going on without protest, without Americans being aware of it, to the extent we can make them aware.
This program reflects that arrest, so that'll affect more people than were there or would hear about it immediately, but we're doing what we can to make people aware that that shouldn't be happening in this country or any other country without having to arrest people to do it.
Without saying this is without our consent, you have to do this over our bodies.
It has to be done in the course of arresting Americans.
Well now, one thing that just bothers me so bad, I almost can't believe it but then part of me knows it's true too, I interviewed a guy named Darwin Bond Graham from the Los Alamos something or other anti-nuclear group, and he talked about the power and influence of the nuclear weapons lobby in this country, and they're really no different than any other group of government contractors.
Once they get on the dole, they want to stay paid, and they will do anything to make sure that even if there is a new START treaty, that it's bogged down with so many rioters promising them more nuclear weapons production and more money, that they make it worthless.
Well you know there's an even, that's true, and there is, it's a part, a large part of the overall military-industrial-congressional complex, but particularly ironic, but very important part, is what's called the ITBM caucus, that's I think what they call themselves, eight senators only, but then they have very little opposition, so they're very influential.
The eight senators from the three states that house land-based Minuteman missiles, and the one state, Utah, that refurbishes them and maintains them, so those eight senators alone are maintaining this totally obsolete, dangerous, lightning rod for attack in the case of a false alarm or any other motive for the Soviets to attack the Russians, and moreover, the possibility of a U.S. false alarm that sends our missiles off.
The reason for the efforts of these people, who all come from rather sparsely populated states, is the votes and the jobs that are involved in maintaining these missiles and keeping them on what they call hot alert.
These eight senators have actually lobbied, written the president and urged him not to take them off hot, minute-by-minute alert, because that takes more people, more personnel, more real estate jobs locally, more restaurants, more barbershops, whatever, that's involved in places like Montana and Utah, and that's enough.
It's like keeping Auschwitz in running order, not actually gassing people in it, but keeping it ready to use in case it's needed in future years, at full running order for the jobs locally in the community.
It's an obscenity and an extremely dangerous one.
Well, and it's almost unbelievable, I mean, if I was brand new at this and you told me that Lockheed really likes selling fighter planes to the military and they work really hard on making sure that the congressmen are bribed enough to keep buying fighter planes, okay, fine, but H-bombs?
The future of all of humanity?
Is there no morality or national interest at stake here at all?
There's only personal, individualized greed?
Small countries that are threatened by nuclear attack or even large-scale attack or invasion by their neighbors have a rationale for having a handful, let's say, of nuclear weapons to deter that attack.
How many does it take to deter, really, an attack?
How many weapons would Saddam Hussein have needed to deter our invasion of Iraq?
Well, one would go pretty far, he didn't have it, we might figure on getting that one or finding it, five, ten would give him some insurance.
But would he need a hundred?
Two hundred?
Three hundred?
No.
No, that's, by the way, what Israel has.
And Israel can claim a rationale for having, as I say, a handful, but it has hundreds, far more than has ever been estimated, I believe, officially.
So we don't know exactly, but according to Mordecai Venunu, it had several hundred back when he made his revelations back in the 80s, so I don't think they've destroyed a lot since then.
Do they have a rationale for having hundreds?
India and Pakistan, and this ties into what I was saying earlier, by the way, Pakistan is going over a hundred, India is going in that direction.
These are fission bombs, fortunately, still, not fission, but even so, it's been estimated that an attack using only, quote, 50 or so A-bombs, fission bombs, the kind that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on each side, a hundred altogether, would not cause nuclear litter.
It would cause, however, from the smoke, a darkening of sunlight that would reduce worldwide harvest to the extent, and the calculation has been made and scientifically published, it would kill a billion people.
Now, those billion people are all over the world, the people who live marginally already in harvest.
Does Pakistan and India really have a right to threaten in their political rivalry and opposition to each other the possibility of causing the deaths of a billion or half a billion or anything like that people?
The answer is, of course not, and yet we're talking about a hundred triggers of the 1,500 thermonuclear weapons that we maintain on alert, and the Russians a comparable amount.
What I'm saying is that neither Russia nor the U.S., nor really almost any country of the nuclear states, has a justification remotely for the kind of threat they pose to the world.
As a matter of fact, one country that can't probably cause casualties on that order is North Korea, with their handful of weapons, if they have any, and China actually has kept a relatively small arsenal, but the other countries of the nine states that have nuclear weapons maintain arsenals that go incredibly beyond what can be justified from the point of view of a human community or even of their own neighborhood.
Yeah, that goes for Britain and France, too.
Absolutely, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, and definitely Russia.
This is not to say that I'm not dismissing the need for a world free of nuclear weapons, as Obama has proclaimed, as did Reagan and Carter before him, to pretty much the same effect.
What I'm saying is that to maintain the kinds of arsenals we are has nothing to do with a world free of nuclear weapons, and it has nothing to do, really, with freeing us from the danger of human extinction.
It's a mockery.
It's like his closure of Guantanamo.
It's just not part of his policy, basically.
One thing we haven't talked about is that a recent policy paper, rather an implementation of our 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, the implementation paper came out a couple of months ago, and still rejected the idea of disclaiming first use of nuclear weapons, or as they put it, the sole purpose of nuclear weapons being to deter nuclear attack.
By rejecting that into the indefinite future, that means that they insisted on the Pentagon, and endorsed by the President, on continuing the threat to initiate nuclear war, an act which, by the way, almost all the countries in the UN, with obviously the exception then of NATO in the US, and Israel for that matter, had declared the greatest crime imaginable, the first use of nuclear weapons.
And that denunciation had, of course, no effect on our policy then, but we maintain that threat and that capability now, backing up our policy with the possibility that we would initiate nuclear war.
And actually, our politicians vying for the presidency in 2004, 2008, and later, I'm sorry, 2008 it was more, and 2012, all the major politicians essentially backed the threat of nuclear weapons against Iran, very specifically, with the idea being that only penetrating nuclear weapons could destroy the underground nuclear energy sites, which we don't know whether they have any relation or not to nuclear weapons, but the idea, the only way of destroying those totally would be penetrating nuclear weapons, and so the threat of first use against Iran is a very lively instrument of our policy right now.
Well, the idea that you can deter other countries in the world from acquiring some nuclear weapons, a handful or a dozen or so, in order to deter such threats, the idea that you can stop proliferation, in other words, while we're threatening nuclear attack, is an illusion.
It's impossible.
Especially you look at, we made a deal with Libya, and then stabbed Qaddafi in the back after he gave up his nuclear technology, and we continue to beat the Iranians over the head all day with their civilian nuclear program while ignoring the North Koreans who went ahead and made nukes, so if you're a dictator of a rogue state out there, the message is clear, make nukes, quick.
Yes, the countries of the world, I think, have noted very definitely that Iraq suffered invasion, an aggressive war, quite comparable to any aggression in the past, whether by the Soviet Union against Kuwait or going back to the Second World War, the German aggressions.
Our aggression against Iraq was exactly on the legal and moral plane of those other aggressions, and everyone can see, essentially, that it would be very unlikely to have happened if Saddam had, in fact, had the weapons of mass destruction we were claiming or were warning.
So people can say, well, don't be in a position of opposing U.S. policy unless you have nuclear weapons.
And there were certainly some people, well, people in many parts, certainly in North Korea, drew that lesson.
They're not very likely, I think, to give up their nuclear weapons in the face of that little lesson of history that we gave them.
All right, now, I think you told me before that Mordecai Venunu told you personally that the Israelis had 600 nuclear weapons, and I've been quoting you along those lines, so I wanted to double-check and make sure that that's right.
I think that's right.
I think at the time, the usual calculation from then and now by officials has been something like 200.
I don't know what the basis for that can be, because, as I say, Venunu definitely was saying that at the time he first made his revelations, and here I'm just going from memory, I have to say.
I could be wrong.
But my memory is that he was saying some 300 in the early 70s.
By the mid-70s, his revelation was in the early 80s, and that they'd been producing them at a high rate ever since.
And he did make a calculation of something like 600.
Now, how you get that, I think that's probably very accurate as an estimate.
And have they reduced some as they made others?
Well, I don't know.
We don't have inspection.
They don't make announcements.
They have not yet officially really admitted, nor has the U.S., that Israel has nuclear weapons.
We don't have the inspection that we have in countries that belong to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
But they could well have 600 or more.
The point of even 300 would mean that they are essentially the third largest national nuclear arsenal in the world, more than France.
And I think that is very distinctly possible.
The U.K. has gotten down less than France.
And I think that this business of keeping them at 200 is mainly to avoid admitting that they actually have more than France.
All right.
Now, Dan, you've been around a while, but I wonder whether you've ever heard of a dumber plan than Obama's policy of trying to figure out how to put conventional explosives on the tips of intercontinental ballistic missiles so you can kill anybody in the world in half an hour.
But doesn't that risk a nuclear holocaust on one of these false alarms?
Well, of course, it's always been pointed out that an ICBM coming toward other countries and possibly in the direction of Russia can't really be distinguished whether it has a conventional or a nuclear warhead.
So any use of ICBMs in that category is extremely dangerous in the possibility of a false alarm.
And hardly imaginable why it's really even thought of.
The idea that, yes, it would be nice to be able to kill people from our own territory at a moment's notice.
Actually, we have cruise missiles scattered with conventional warheads scattered so much around the world, bases and aircraft carriers, that it seems hard to know why you need an ICBM.
And again, the word need has to be put in quotations here.
Sure, yeah, you've got to accept 100 false premises first before you even get to that.
All right, well, listen, we're over time.
Thank you so much for your time, Dan.
It's great to talk to you again.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Bye.
All right, everybody, that is the American hero Daniel Ellsberg, liberator of the Pentagon Papers, star of The Most Dangerous Man in America, which is such an excellent documentary.
If you've never watched it, get your hands on that thing.
It's great.
The book is Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
His website is DanielEllsberg.net.
You can find all of his stuff there, including, I'm pretty sure, links to this series that he wrote for Truthdig back in 2009 and 2010, beginning with 100 Holocausts.
I think this was the first one.
No, no, no, this is from September 2009.
The first one was about Hiroshima.
Anyway, there's a series at Truthdig including 100 Holocausts, an insider's window into U.S. nuclear policy.
And, man, there's some incredible truths in there that we were not able to cover on the show today at all.
So please do go and read Dan Ellsberg's series on nukes at Truthdig.com.
And now we're over time.
We'll be right back with the great Jason Leopold on some more madness down at Guantanamo Bay right after this.
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