1/13/22 Daniel Ellsberg: Humans Are Not to Be Entrusted With Nuclear Weapons

For Pacifica Radio, January 16th, 2022.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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All right, introducing the great American hero, Daniel Ellsberg, leaker, liberator of the Pentagon Papers and ender of the Vietnam War and heroic champion of free speech and free media and author of the book Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
And his latest is called The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
And he's got this brand new press release out calling for the elimination of ground based strategic intercontinental ballistic missiles out.
Now, welcome back to the show.
Dan, how are you, sir?
Fine.
Thanks a lot, Scott, for that introduction.
Let me say right away, I'm happy to say to urge your readers to read not only Enough Already, but your earlier books on Afghanistan, Iraq and those wars.
They are terrific.
They remain terrific, even after the horribly executed departure from Afghanistan, which I think you and I both wanted to see us out of there.
But I'll speak for myself, not the way he did it, which showed absolutely, I think, no concern for our Afghan allies, Afghans, which I think has always been the case.
Well, I definitely agree with you about that.
But thank you very much for saying that, sir.
And I'm extremely proud to have your name at the top of both of my books there on the war.
Well, very, very enthusiastically given.
And then one other thing.
Obviously, I didn't end the Vietnam War, but I was in a link of events of people who had to act in unusual ways that were unforeseeable.
I was one link in that chain that finally led actually to the resignation of Richard Nixon, which was unforeseen a year earlier, which was essential.
I mean, the Vietnam War and the war ended nine months later.
So we all played a part.
And I'm glad.
But certainly it was no one person.
As you know, of course.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the truth of the matter is, once the Pentagon Papers came out, the headline was they were lying and they knew they were lying all along.
And now we all together resent that and want to see this thing end now.
And so that is the extremely important role in the history of that war that you played there in shifting the entire American population's sentiment toward the regretful take of that war rather than the willingness to just see it through to the end and all these kinds of things, which had been the sentiment that had previously prevailed.
So you do get the credit for that, for sure.
Scott, that's so welcome.
I mean, what you're saying is very true as far as it goes.
And I don't want to start this by arguing with you, but I think it is important in terms of our future and present to understand that even revealing that four presidents in a row had totally deceived us on this, I didn't convince the people that the fifth president was currently in office, Nixon, was deceiving them just as much.
It was a year after the Pentagon Papers came out in 71.
It was in 72 that Richard Nixon won one of the largest landslides in history after the Pentagon Papers and the war went on in 72, a year after the Pentagon Papers, heaviest bombing of the war, including the Christmas bombing.
And it appeared that the public's mood, which had changed about the war and the Pentagon Papers played a role in that, had no effect on Nixon's policy.
He was able to continue that bombing.
You know, the war essentially went on for four more years to 1975.
The idea of Nixon was his secret plan, and he did have one, was to get American troops out of Vietnam, American ground troops out, he hoped, in his first year.
And that fell through.
He made nuclear threats in order to achieve that, a mutual withdrawal of Northern troops in their country, and American troops to go home.
They didn't buy that, and they weren't about to.
So the war went on.
His next goal was to get the troops out by his next election, by 1972.
And he didn't quite make that, but he almost did, but in January and February of 1973.
But his secret plan was to keep the war going by American air support, which was not going to be withdrawn, in support of the army we equipped, paid, you know, did everything, the essentially puppet army of, under Saigon.
And they, we had rebuilt them, we built them up very much, given them their own air force, actually, though not enough against the North Vietnamese.
But our air force was to make the difference here.
So he planned to keep the bombing going indefinitely.
And what stopped after the Paris Accords of 73, there was in effect a moratorium then, as our troops were actually coming out.
And his intention, and Kissinger's intention, was to send the bombers back as soon as the troops were out in February.
And Kissinger actually recommended that.
Nixon finally gave the order for the bombing to recommence in South Vietnam, and if necessary, was ready to go into North Vietnam again.
But on April 15th, he got the word that John Dean had told prosecutors that Richard Nixon had ordered people to burglarize my former psychiatrist's office.
Now, that's hardly in the league of invading Cambodia, for which he was not impeached.
But this was a domestic crime against an American.
And on that one, people sat up, and he lied.
What, burglarize?
And then it came out that people had been brought up on his orders to incapacitate me, totally.
And they had warrantless wiretaps against me.
All these things to keep me from revealing the secret plan, including indefinite air support and nuclear weapons, if necessary.
He was so anxious that I wouldn't put that out, which isn't in the Pentagon papers, which end in 68, before he came in, that he wanted to do everything to shut me up.
And so, including incapacitate me, if necessary, like the drone attacks they talk of now.
Hillary Clinton says of Julian Assange, couldn't we drone him?
And others say, yeah, he should be executed very much.
Okay, well, Nixon actually launched that.
They didn't do it for reasons I won't go into here, but they were in place to incapacitate me on May 3, 1972.
They were caught in the Watergate weeks later.
And since those people could reveal domestic crimes against me and others, others that they'd done, Nixon had to pay them off to keep them quiet, to keep them lying to a grand jury.
And finally, when John Dean and some others, with the help of some others, brought that out, Nixon was facing impeachment, and he couldn't renew the bombing.
As he said, he couldn't have a war with Congress on two fronts of the bombing and his own impeachment.
So there was no more bombing.
And the war became endable two years later, it took.
But had bombing continued, the question was, how long would the American people let a president or several presidents bomb another country, so long as Americans weren't getting killed?
And we have an answer, which you know, better than anyone.
It's got at least 20 years.
Afghanistan has given us that answer.
The American public has allowed us to both planes and drones to bomb Afghanistan, as well as having troops on the ground for over 20 years.
And we're still in Iraq.
After all that time, although their parliament has demanded that we get out.
We ignore that.
We ignore that.
Supposedly, this elected parliament that we fought a war to allow democracy in Iraq against them.
And when the democracy says, we don't want foreign troops still fighting on our soil.
The foreigner says, nothing, just keeps them there, doesn't even have to answer.
So in short, Scott, you and I are in the business of revealing truths to the American public that have been denied them by the executive branch, and also by the media, the mainstream media, and that's what your books do.
And that's what the Pentagon Papers do, and so forth.
But that's unfortunately, that doesn't automatically, even if it does affect the public opinion, it doesn't automatically get an executive to stop a war that they prefer to keep going.
All right.
Well, anti-war radio, talking with Daniel Ellsberg, of course.
And now let's talk about H-bombs, strategic nuclear weapons.
We have what they call, Dan, the triad of America's nuclear deterrent.
And this is meant to be so much power, essentially, that no one will ever try it.
And so therefore, nukes, they've kept the peace among the major powers since the 1940s.
And therefore, that's going to work forever.
And we have our subs, we have our land-based missiles, and of course, we have our Air Force bombers.
And these make up the triad that keep the peace on the planet Earth, according to the American National Security State.
But you're worried.
Okay.
That triad, that number of weapons we have, Navy submarines, but submarines that are invulnerable, can't be found by the other side, can't be targeted.
And that's true, essentially, of Soviet or Russian submarines as well.
Actually, we do have a much bigger anti-submarine warfare than the Russians are able to have for a lot of geographic reasons and others.
Nevertheless, we have no reliable way to get rid of most of the Soviet submarines, I keep saying Soviet, but Russian submarines now.
So from within the framework of deterrence, without going into that question, with accepting the idea that you don't want to leave, we, or the Russians and the Chinese, don't want to leave possible adversaries with a monopoly of nuclear weapons.
So they want to have some ability to retaliate to a nuclear attack in the same means, whether they use it or not, a survivable capability.
The question is, what do you need for that purpose?
And the fact is that the ICBMs in particular, and the huge number of submarine weapons we have, have no relation to that requirement.
York, who was the first director of Livermore Labs making H-bombs, thermonuclear weapons back then, and then director of research and engineering in the Pentagon, later a big arms negotiator, said to his old Livermore Labs, once he raised the question, meaning, how much does it take to deter an opponent rational enough to be deterred at all?
That excludes, let's say, could have excluded Adolf Hitler, but there hasn't been an Adolf Hitler in that sense, ever since.
So if you can, if you can deter them at all, what does it take?
He said, well, most people, if they think about it, will say, one thermonuclear weapon or animal.
He says, well, say 10 to make sure you don't get that one, you have some left over.
Or to take it from another point of view, what's the maximum killing death that one leader should be able to inflict immediately in a week, a month, a year?
Well, he said, no simple answer to that, but he says, suppose we say World War II, 60 million people, that's as many as you want an individual leader to be able to kill quickly.
So well, that takes 100, 100 kiloton weapons, which are the kind of normal for our missiles right now, 100.
So he says, suppose you say then that the need for deterrence is something between one and 10 or 100, but closer, he said, to one in 100.
That would get you down, by the way, to the range of about what the North Koreans have now.
In other words, all the others have more than that.
We have over 1500 thermonuclear weapons ready to go.
The ICBMs on 10 minute notice, actually, I should say, on a couple minutes notice, the president would have if under the missiles were coming at us, about 10 minutes to make the choice whether to use his missiles, get them off the ground, or lose them.
And it's only the ICBMs that put that pressure on a president, not the sub launch missiles, which can't be attacked.
They can be under order there for up to a year or more.
Certainly, no, no issue right now.
So if it's deterrence, do you need 700 weapons that we have on sea at sea at now?
No, but some one submarine to like England or France, one submarine or something at sea would seem to do that.
That function of deterrence was obviously should have been given to the Navy, the submarines exclusively.
More than half a century ago, I was in the pen working for the Pentagon at that time, when the ICBMs became totally vulnerable to attack.
So you had to launch them on warning to keep them from being destroyed on the ground.
They should have been eliminated at that point.
At our point, they added nothing, except, you know, more nuclear winter a little faster, killing most people on earth.
But they are this hair trigger on the doomsday machine.
And what I've been saying here is no country should have a doomsday machine in the sense of an ability to kill even on the actual targeting to kill most people on earth, not everybody, most people on earth that shouldn't exist.
But it does exist.
Certainly in the US and Russia, Soviet Union imitated us after the Cuban Missile Crisis, their military said, oh, we had to back down because we don't have what the US has.
So we want what the US has.
So they acquired a doomsday machine.
Neither should have that.
But they're not going away anytime soon, because it's very profitable in the military industrial complexes of both countries, actually, remember, they're, they're a capitalist country.
Now, they have the same incentives to produce these things for profit and jobs and everything that we do.
But just looking at us, ICBM program has been pork for more than half a century.
We call it jobs, and it is jobs.
But you could have a lot more jobs than almost any other use that would serve human purposes.
Profits, it's campaign donations.
It works in every party.
It works today, right now on Biden.
Yes, there are people in Biden's administration that have been in every one, including George W.
Bush, and others that say, get rid of the ICBMs, the commander of ICBMs, General Cartwright, get rid of the ICBMs. Perry, the Secretary of Defense, get rid of the ICBMs. But no, now it's Northrop Grumman, making the profit.
And with its lobbyists, more than one for every member of Congress, and these people, no, you're not going to get rid of them.
But we should.
And that's what we're saying, at least make people aware that we have maintained a risk of annihilation of civilization, all this time, that should need not have existed, should not exist, should go away.
And maybe some people, you know, that we're talking to can bring some pressure on their representatives to counteract Northrop.
That's pretty hard.
We don't come with bags of money.
But at least point out, at least give some consideration to the survival of humanity.
All right.
Now, it's important to note here, you know, we're listening to Daniel Ellsberg here.
And of course, you have a reputation now of being this left-leaning peace activist type.
And yet you're speaking as a real authority, as your book is subtitled, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
The reason you had access to the Pentagon Papers is because you were at the Rand Corporation.
You had worked in the White House and the Pentagon, had the highest level bureaucratic experience in dealing with these issues, particularly the issue of nuclear war in the 1960s.
And so that is the position that you're speaking from here that people need to understand.
That's true.
It was in 1961.
So that's 60 years ago.
Okay.
61 years ago, that I was drafting for the Secretary of Defense McNamara, the top secret guidance to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the plan for general war, trying to improve the drastically the Eisenhower plan, which we don't have time to go into now.
Let me just say, as I looked at it, then working for the Secretary of Defense, in fact, I think every civilian who ever looked at it and many military who didn't work for the Air Force said the most irresponsible, reckless, evil plan in human history.
And that sounds, you know, necessarily hyperbolic.
How could that be?
It isn't.
But we don't have time.
Go ahead.
We do have a couple of minutes.
Go ahead and explain what you mean by that, because I already know what you mean.
I'll give you the long term.
Eisenhower's plan, he didn't want to spend money on a conventional war with Russia.
He thought we could do it, but it would cause, if the army was allowed to consider matching the Soviets over there, it would cause inflation over here and would destroy our economy and so forth.
His conservative banker friends like George Humphrey, his secretary of trade, told him that no, the way you have to defend against the Soviets is not to plan on a conventional war in any circumstances, even a conflict over West Berlin or Yugoslavia, Iran.
You have to threaten nuclear war.
And moreover, you have to make it at all credible that we would actually do what we say we would do, initiate nuclear war against the Russians, a nuclear armistead from 49 on, as we are today still committed to do in NATO, in Poland, in Lithuania, to initiate nuclear war.
First, you have to have at least some semblance that you believe you could limit the damage to the U.S. in that war by preempting, by going for, by disarming them.
Now, this has been impossible since those days.
You couldn't disarm them to the point that they would annihilate Europe and U.S., society at least.
That was even before we knew a nuclear winner.
So it's been a hoax to think we can.
Most of our weapons are not for deterring nuclear attack, they're for threatening first use of our nuclear weapons, tactical use, if necessary, in the Ukraine or over Taiwan.
Those threats are being raised right now.
And an issue, Trump actually put into the budget small nuclear warheads for submarines that could be used, you know, in a small nuclear war, which is a fantasy.
So the real threat has always been the threat to blow up most of the world.
Or in Eisenhower's day, we didn't know nuclear winners, so the smoke in the stratosphere that would starve everyone by blocking the sunlight.
Didn't know about it for another 20 years.
But what they did know was that our own, the reactivity from our own fallout, from our own attack on Soviet Union and its satellites, and China, come back to that in one minute, would destroy 100 million of our West European allies by us, without the Soviets using any of the many mobile medium range missiles they had and bombers, which we couldn't destroy.
Now, Dan, do I remember it right that you said there was only one plan, and the plan was, in the event of a crisis, we would nuke every single city in the Soviet Union and China.
Is that right?
That's absolutely right.
So to sum up this plan, you asked about my hyperbolic statement, you know, about this plan.
Here was the plan.
In the case of any armed conflict with the Soviet Union, not China, armed conflict like Berlin, which is 200 miles in East Germany.
So we had no chance, had 22 Soviet armored division in East Germany in the vicinity.
We could not get through that if they wanted to walk into West Berlin.
So the plan was to not only initiate tactical nuclear war under Eisenhower, because he always said, pretty reasonably, if there's a tactical war, if there's a limited war with Russia, it will not stay limited.
True, that was good judgment.
It will go all the way.
Therefore, better for us to go first and hit all of their military targets.
And in General LeMay's form, this is what he'd done to Japan, all of their cities.
So the plan was, in the event of any armed conflict, and by the way, they raised the question, what is armed conflict?
Is it a patrol skirmish in the Berlin corridors?
No, no.
Should be, what about a battalion?
No, might be some road or something.
If it's a brigade or a division, 22 divisions there.
If it's a division, it's general war.
We then hit every city in Russia and China, the Sino-Soviet bloc, which didn't exist by that time.
They had broken up already.
And we were reluctant to think that because it didn't justify a bigger defense budget on our part.
So we hit every city in China as well, as well as all the military targets, which included targets in cities, as it still does.
Bottom line, how many people will be killed?
600 million.
That's without the smoke.
600 million people by our own strike without considering anything that Russia does.
And that was in case of any armed conflict, as we're talking about right now, or Ukraine, or the Baltics or something.
I come back to my statement.
I call that the most insane, evil, reckless plan in human history.
And right now, we are maintaining a risk of launch on warning on a false warning of the kind that we have received a number of times.
Fortunately, just not long enough for the false indications of attack not to be discovered.
So we didn't launch our weapons.
We've lived with that real risk for 50 years, 70 years, which could have been eliminated.
70 years goes beyond before the ICBMs. We had those for 60 years, since 61, 62.
So we could have eliminated that risk of a false launch on warning, which is a real risk, which serves no purpose, whatever, except money for Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman.
It's never meant anything more than that.
And that's been enough.
Those profits have been enough to keep congressmen who get their campaign donations from these people, to keep that in the budget, as of right now, on, you know, that kind of risk, totally irresponsibly.
It could be ended at any time, should have been any time in the last 50 years.
But it won't be, because we've proven that that kind of risk is, for the money, for the money, it's worth it.
The public could change that.
Yeah, I mean, it really is crazy.
I mean, the most cynical or sophisticated political or economic type expert might somehow just believe that the nuclear weapons industry is strictly demand-based, and that the Pentagon tells these companies exactly how many nukes they need, and that would be the end of it.
Don't tell me you've got H-bomb salesmen who push relentlessly for this policy, and then, of course, yes, that is how it works, just like with airplane sales, just like with combat boots, or with anything else.
The nuclear weapons lobby, it's, as my friend Adam says, it's the flea wagging the dog, and here the whole world is held hostage by the profits of just a few men who rule these companies connected to the U.S. federal government in this way.
That's absolutely right.
The rationale behind it, it's a madman theory, you know, Nixon's madman theory.
That's what our nuclear and NATO policy has always been.
If you make a move we don't like, it might be a serious and bad move, we'll blow up the world.
That's our policy.
That should not be a human policy.
So I wanted to give you a chance here to talk about this new movement that you're a part of that's pushing to let's start with getting rid of the minutemen.
So how can people participate in that?
Well, by telling, as I suggested just a little bit earlier, by telling congressmen, by the way, Ro Khanna of the Progressive Caucus, by the way, which has voted against the new ICBMs, the only ones who voted against the budget, Ro Khanna in the Progressive just yesterday responded to that news item that there were 60 groups, more than 60, 70 groups calling for eliminating the ICBMs, which puts it on an agenda which that hasn't just, just hasn't been discussed at all.
At the most they've discussed and failed to block the new ICBM, which will cost 100 billion more in the next decade, a quarter of a trillion over the next life of the thing.
We tried to block that and even that, that had serious opponents in congress like Adam Smith, head, very good, head of the House Armed Services Committee.
So that looked like maybe this is something we can really get rid of in the arms control groups and all.
We've been lobbying on that for quite a while and then the Northrop Grumman lobbyists got to work and they managed to vote down even the idea of a study of whether to keep the minutemen going.
Okay, so the new ground base is on the way.
Adam Smith had to change his tune.
I'd like to know who exactly told him that had to be done.
He changed and said, oh, all right, well, we do need the new ground base after all, having opposed them for a couple of years for the right reasons.
So political pressure works on that side very well and as I say, for the, however, some arms control groups I think got on the wrong foot in my opinion because of their urgency of killing the, quote, GBSD, ground base strategic deterrent.
So instead of that, they sort of said, okay, keep the minutemen and get rid of that.
Well, that's a false position.
The minutemen is as dangerous, the current weapons, 400 of them, as dangerous as the new ICBM. So we just wanted to get on the record here.
Now, be clear that the existence of those ICBMs is the major cause of the positive, non-zero, real risk of all-out nuclear war.
So it's a, it's a very long-term, but very profitable delusion.
So keep that in mind and don't worry about the mess.
Your wife will clean it up.
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Real education.
So you mentioned the doomsday machine there, and now it has been two or three years since I read the book, but the way I remember it is that that's really a reference in a more abstract sense to just the danger of the nations of the world holding these H-bombs at each other's head, but it's also a specific kind of a reference to, I believe, a Soviet plan or system that they had set up where it really was like in Dr. Strangelove where if the Americans in a first strike had taken out their military leadership, the computers were set to go ahead and get revenge and finish killing the rest of us off anyway.
Is that really right?
Okay.
Yes and no, Scott.
Not exactly, because I'm sure my memory is worse than yours, but on this book, which I wrote, I think you have an understandable slight mismemory on that.
Okay, good.
Well, set me straight.
First of all, I never thought of it in really an abstract sense, except when it was first proposed by my then colleague Herman Kahn of the book on thermonuclear war at RAND.
He proposed the idea, concept, hypothetical of a doomsday machine that on being triggered by some action we wanted to deter, it would kill everybody on earth.
Now, everybody.
Now, why, he said, would you even consider such a thing?
Because it might be much cheaper than what we had.
You could actually make explosions in our country that would do this, you know, produce enough fallout, enough radioactivity, various things.
Wouldn't even have to lift them over to the Soviet Union, you know, be a lot cheaper.
Well, cheapness is not an objective for the Pentagon, and that's very significant right now.
To say, don't do the new ICBM, ground-based strategic deterrence, so-called, because it's cheaper to just upgrade the Minuteman.
It does the same thing.
Yeah, it has the same risks.
It does do the same thing.
So I said, just do it on cheaper.
Well, that didn't prevail because saving money is not the function of the Pentagon or the U.S. government.
Saving money that is paid to American corporations and American laborers and unions and whatnot and media and everything.
No, saving money is not.
They just threw 25 billion more than Biden had asked for and Truman and the Pentagon had asked for at them without specifying what it's for.
No, here's a, here's a tip.
25 billion extra on top of about a 140 billion, 740 billion.
They want 785.
Okay.
So as he said, however, given the fact that it would be cheaper, nobody will build this because it's too automatic and it kills too many people.
In fact, everybody.
So he said, no one will produce such a machine, such a device.
It existed right then in 1960.
Now that we know about nuclear winter, that the cities we were targeted to attack in Russia and China, Soviet Union, and even satellites.
Correct that.
In satellites, we didn't target cities per se.
We just targeted military targets that were in cities.
Communications, air defense, a lot of air defense.
You would get all our cities anyway, but we weren't targeting them directly.
But in Russia and China, we were directly targeting the cities, not knowing because they hadn't investigated it, not thinking of the possibility that the smoke would take the form of fire.
I'm sorry, there would be firestorms as in Hiroshima from, or as there was in Tokyo with conventional weapons on March 9th, 1945.
A firestorm that lofts the smoke up above the atmosphere into the upper stratosphere and so forth, where it goes around the world, doesn't rain out, and it blocks the sunlight.
So given that, we then had an apparatus that if used as planned and rehearsed and trained and targeted, would not kill everybody.
It wasn't a doomsday machine in that sense, but nearly everybody.
Within a year of starvation, 90%, up to 98% now or 99%.
Now, that's not extinction.
Even 1% is now 78 million people down in New Zealand and Australia living on fish and mollusks and so forth.
A lot of people, but 90% go quick from our own attack.
So we did have a doomsday machine.
Now coming back, there is another ideological event of our Air Force and the military in general, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, very little known to the public actually, even though they've announced it in various ways, of what they call decapitation.
Hit the command and control of the other side, the nervous system of the military, not just Moscow, where, by the way, they targeted at one point something like 158 warheads.
It's insane.
Even Cheney, when he looked into it, thought, my God, how do they have so many?
But he didn't cut them down that much.
But not only Moscow, but every command and control everywhere, political headquarters and everything.
Now, I've always thought that the reason for it is obvious enough.
It might paralyze the other side.
It's the only way you could have a big nuclear war and not be destroyed by it, is if you paralyze them.
So you can't get them off that targeting for the first highest priority targeting.
As each side said, as Putin said, we announced that under Reagan before it had been more secret.
And under Reagan said, yes, decapitation is our goal and so forth.
The Russians, especially at that point, said, OK, we've got to assure that that decapitation won't keep us from destroying the United States and the rest of the world.
So they did devise a system which they called perimeter system, or in vernacular, called it a dead hand system, where if Moscow is destroyed automatic, they did have a variant of it.
What you said, Scott, there was a design for the thing to be totally automated, that a rocket, a number of rockets would go off from way outside Moscow, if they got the word from via various lines that Moscow had been destroyed, various indicators.
It would automatically go up over the missile fields with an execute order.
And that design, allegedly, was never turned on.
And they had the order, the fact that Moscow had been destroyed would go out automatically to a bunch of lieutenant colonels who would decide whether, with war going on and so forth, there was one human element here.
They would send up the rockets that would do this.
Almost surely they would.
That's what the Russian designer said.
There is a slight human element in it.
But that's not different from the US.
As I said, the doomsday aspect, without being automated, is there in the plan and the missiles.
And it is there right now.
The idea of it's going off on some kind of indication or something, automatically, it's never been.
By the way, our military has talked about automating that whole thing, but they never did it.
In fact, again, it was York, who spoke to one of the heads of the air command, Lawrence, I think it was Lawrence Cooter, who said, well, we've got to automate this thing.
And York said, I mentioned earlier, head of Livermore Labs earlier, said, oh, we'll never do that.
We will never, we'll never automate this whole thing.
And Cooter then said very coldly, we might as well surrender right now.
They say, it's the kind of insanity in the high military that's equivalent to taking bleach for COVID-19.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that exists.
It's just an ideology.
It's a cult.
It's always been true on our side, as well as the Soviets.
Yeah.
Earlier, before the Soviets, probably, that there was delegation in case Washington is hit, in case the head of SAC is hit, Air Force Base in Omaha, then others have the authority.
They have their finger on the button and the ability.
They have it even earlier.
But at that point, the ability and the authorization to carry out their war plans.
So it's always been pretty.
Well, in fact, Dan, don't you say in the book that, never even mind in the event of a war having already broken out, but that in fact, sort of the entire idea of the nuclear football and the control of the president is a myth and that there are thousands of people inside the military who could launch nuclear weapons on their own say so, not just sub captains, but people all over the different armed services, right?
Yes.
Just a slight footnote there, Scott.
It's not probably thousands who can do it, but it's far more than dozens and scores who can do it, maybe hundreds.
Nobody knew at that time, very hard to say just how many people could do it.
And in those days, actually, when even a single pilot could have gotten the thing started, I go into that in the book.
Yes, you did have something approach thousands, but that has been cut off.
The pilot level, the missile silo level can't do it now.
There are only how many?
I don't think anybody knows, but maybe a hundred who are certainly far more than one or two or three.
And that's true in both sides.
It's almost inevitable.
You don't want your system to be paralyzed by an attack or a single assassin or a terrorist attack or something.
But neither side has been responsible in limiting the number of people who can do that at all.
So I take India and Pakistan.
I question whether their leader even knows how many people could actually start their weapons and launch them in a crisis.
And that's true in the other.
By the way, England, France with their submarines, they don't have an ability to keep their captains of those submarines from launching those.
We didn't put anything in that till in the 1990s to keep a submarine from being kind of the third largest nuclear power in the world.
Well, so let's talk about George W. Bush for a little while.
He got us out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
And then the idea was, oh yeah, what are they going to do about it or something stupid like that?
And then the answer was, we found out in 2000, I believe 18, in Putin's State of the Union address, whatever they call it, when he debuted their new nuclear arsenal, he said that they had built a nuclear-powered cruise missile with essentially unlimited range to evade our defenses, that they built a new heavy rocket that can go around the South Pole instead of the North Pole and hit Florida or Texas, and that one of these new heavy missiles would carry enough warheads that they could kill every city in Texas, that they could kill Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Houston, San Antonio, and kill all of us with one rocket, Dan, and also then a nuclear torpedo, where they could drive an H-bomb, basically a drone submarine, into San Francisco Bay and shut down the entire Bay Area permanently with a radioactive tidal wave.
How do you like that?
I don't like it.
That shouldn't exist.
But it is, as you say, a explicit, conscious, and effective answer to our anti-ballistic missile program.
I was just reading yesterday in a defense site that the Russians, somebody who's been over there, in fact, this is Lawrence Korb, who was an assistant secretary under Reagan, a very knowledgeable guy.
He said the Russians, and this is in line with everything else I've heard, the Russian military really has and always has been very afraid of our anti-ballistic missiles possibility.
Every scientist over here, everybody who's looked at that says, it can't possibly work.
It's unworkable.
That's kept us from spending trillions on it instead of tens of billions.
That's one thing that the arms control community did kind of put a ceiling on.
It was a total hoax to think that the anti-ballistic missile could deal with decoys from their ICBMs. It didn't deal with it.
Nevertheless, the Russians are so impressed by American technology, they've always worried the U.S. will come up with something that will nullify our ability to retaliate.
And the Chinese now, the same, with a little more reason, that's why they're building a lot more missiles, unfortunately, a little more reason because we have in their vicinity there, we have the possibility both from submarines and our bases there, the ability to send even very accurate conventional cruise missiles against their missile silos.
And they have a very much smaller base, their force to go after.
So they're building up thanks to our anti-ballistic efforts there.
Putin has said that he will not lower the number of missiles so long as we maintain anti-ballistic missile sites in Poland and Romania, which they like having there, the Poles and Romanians, because it's an American commitment.
It's a presence.
It's a commitment to them against anything from Russia.
However, they can easily, as the Russians point out, they can easily be converted into offensive missile launchers, which would get Moscow in a matter of minutes, maybe 15 minutes or something, and bring into play this decapitation thing that has them concerned.
So these threats that we're making, and again, the ABM is nothing but a sales pitch.
As I say, it's a pork, it's a hoax.
Can we go back to that last point for just a second?
The point about the dual use launchers here, it's the MK-41 missile launcher that you would use for these anti-ballistic missile missiles.
And yet they're the same ones that you can shoot a Tomahawk missile with a hydrogen bomb tip from.
And so if you're Vladimir Putin, what are you supposed to think of that?
Well, one way to think about it would be that any initiation of nuclear war by one of these superpowers against the other, it's the end of civilization.
And you can't, you actually can't change that.
The idea of limiting damage is a hoax.
I must say, he can't count on, let me back off, I think I'm giving a wrong impression here, can't count on our being crazy enough to think that we might get away reducing damage by going first.
That is Air Force doctrine.
So he looks at it, and although the ABM won't work, and although the counterforce will not disarm Russia, will not, can't disarm Russia, the US might think it could.
I can't say that's paranoid.
Most of them do think it could.
And crazily, how can they be that crazy?
Well, that's what I learned at 90.
Everyone, anyone can be dumb enough to keep his job.
And to have a good job at Northrop Grumman, board of directors, when you get out.
Our present, Austin, our present chairman of the Joint Chiefs came from the board of Raytheon.
Before him, two of the acting secretaries since came from Boeing, and the etc.
So, you know, that's, that's part of their career plan.
So opposing, you know, not worrying about these missiles, particularly on either side, is not a good career move.
And they don't do it.
That's true on both sides.
You made reference before, Dan, to Cheney's objection to the war plan back in 91, or pardon me, 89, when he first became Secretary of Defense.
And I had lost that footnote.
But to me, it's such an important anecdote there about when the general showed him, I believe, the simulation on the map of this is what it would look like when we start nuke in Russia.
And that Cheney, old iron ass, as H.W. Bush called him, the meanest guy in North America.
The guy tortures people to death so he can get lies, so he can start wars.
That guy looked at the war plan and said, oh, my God, this is insane.
What are we doing?
Can you remind me where I learned that from?
General George Lee Butler's memoirs, Volume Two, which are quite extraordinary memoirs, says, I believe that story, certainly first he discovered, see, this immense number of, as they called it, overkill on one target, you know, redundancy.
And he tried to reduce it pretty much.
And I'm pretty sure that it's in that book, that same book.
I have seen it several places.
But I'm pretty sure that it is in that one.
And that's probably where you got it.
You know, what it says about Cheney, I don't think there's been anybody who first looks at these plans who isn't, in Eisenhower's term, appalled by them.
But they don't change them.
And why don't they change them?
They're obviously insane.
And let me tell about the plan I did.
I didn't make that clear enough.
I blame myself now that I was one of several, it ran a number of people, whose objective was to do better, much better than this insane Eisenhower plan.
But that was the wrong objective.
Taking that as our target, that's so far off, that the plan I came up with could be said to be better, but it would have had pretty much the same effect, the way the Air Force interpreted it.
For example, I gave an option, I drafted, this was a drafted for not herding Moscow, a drafted, I mean, an option is by Director of the Secretary of Defense McNamara, an option not to hit cities.
Well, as General Butler, the last commander of Strategic Air Command, and first commander of what they called Strategic Command, which he has now, which includes the Navy's Polaris and now Triton submarines.
He was the man in charge of this.
And he ended up when he retired, and he used to call this retirement syndrome, with the most outspoken attacks on these plans I've ever seen by anyone.
He called them evil and immoral.
And he said, we have escaped all out war.
And he's a religious man.
He said, by some combination of the grace of God, luck, and I think he said some prudence.
And of that, uh, he said, well, he thought grace of God was the most important.
I would, I would emphasize the luck.
But he says, I agree with him.
It's a miracle, a secular miracle that we got through the last 70 years, without a nuclear war, I wouldn't have predicted it.
So couldn't we do it again?
Yeah, another miracle.
Why not?
But happened once, maybe could happen again.
Except when you look at the record, you see that time and time again, far from being unthinkable, we were on the verge of nuclear war, secretly.
We were always edging toward it.
It was thinkable every day of the year within the executive branch.
So as I say, I definitely do blame myself in the 60s for taking no stand and not seeing that the ICBMs should be rescinded, should be out.
You shouldn't have them.
The Navy started by saying that.
And they were right.
But at Rand, I didn't, we didn't work, we all didn't work for the Navy.
We were on contract to the Air Force.
And that may, quote, have influenced our thinking here.
But I think if we'd worked for the Navy, I actually think, again, being conscientious and not, not consciously corrupt, or just giving them what they wanted, we would have seen the logic that you shouldn't have these launch on warning dangerous hair triggers.
The subs are not on a hair trigger, and they're not hair triggers.
And even if you accept the idea of deterrence, and then we say, I do, to some extent that separates me from some of a lot of my colleagues in the arms control community.
But I do think you don't have, you don't allow another superpower, somebody to have a monopoly of nuclear weapons.
And I think that goes for Russia or China, as well as for the US.
Mutual disarmament with verification.
Yes, that's what we should aim at.
But unilateral, no.
Having said that, to have, as I put it, a near doomsday machine, a near extinction machine, has always been insane, and it is now.
And you know what, though, if you put unilateral disarmament in its proper context, if America was led by exceptionally responsible men, who said we are disarming, and we're insisting that our friends and allies, and pseudo adversaries, including Russia and China, follow our lead too, and then do everything they can to pressure their friends, the British, the French, the Israelis, to begin to disarm, and do everything they can to shake hands with the Russians, and come eye to eye, and figure out how we can do it together, if America would just take the lead on that.
And you know, it's funny, because as we were talking about, I mean, the mutually assured destruction thing, it just seems so permanent.
So many people take it as it works so well, and this is just how it's got to be forever.
But there, you know, for direct comparison, I saw someone make the other day, the world outlawed chemical weapons.
It's not that they don't exist anywhere, but they are essentially banned.
And there's, in fact, a new treaty, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, really obligates us to disarm.
But there's a new nuclear weapons abolition treaty that almost every non-nuclear state in the world has signed in the last year now, that the nuclear weapons states, of course, are resistant to.
But people should really be thinking hard about this.
There's got to be a way to keep Germany, and France, and Russia, and Britain, and America, and Japan from all killing each other, other than holding H-bombs to each other's head, for the indefinite future.
And you know, every time I talk to you, I get the idea that actually these things are going to start going off here at some point in either my lifetime, or the next generation, or two, or three.
We're not going to make it when we have thousands of these machines ready to be detonated on a moment's notice like this.
Well, I have to agree with that dark picture, Scott.
I don't think it's exaggerated at all.
The, yes, you've described what reasonable people should do.
And we've had leaders who could see that, except that when they're in office, a lot of people see it before they're in office, and after they're in office.
I could name names, but I won't go into that.
But that's, that is the case.
Well, you can name, you can name Kissinger, and Schultz, and Perry, and some of the most prominent leaders of the American national security state over the last two generations, who now confess that, oops, it shouldn't be this way.
That's right.
Okay, that's true.
But when they're in office, then they say, oh, wait a minute.
There's enough people influenced by the combined lobbyists, which are thousands, actually, from, I'll name these names, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Lockheed, Boeing, let's see, what have we left out?
And Northrop Grumman, there you go.
General Dynamics, Honeywell.
Yeah, yeah.
So they, you know, we need the votes, and certainly senators are in their pocket, essentially.
And we need their votes for this other legislative program.
We're not getting big pressure from the public to do this.
It's not an election winner.
And moreover, if we move in this direction, we assure that right-wing people, including some Democrats, but certainly Republicans, will say, you are disarming or, you know, endangering us, which is not true for most of these cases, absolutely not true, but a very potent political charge.
And they don't want to do it.
I don't think it will happen.
As you say, we have these 69 groups who say eliminate nuclear weapons.
Very reasonable.
It's the right thing to do.
Unilaterally on that one, we'd be safer.
There's the unilaterals that we could take and make us all safer.
But it's very unlikely to happen, almost unlikely, very unlikely.
And that's true.
Let me make a point that is very important that I realize I haven't been making enough in the last years.
We have reduced the number of weapons on both sides.
He was in Soviet Union, Russia, 80%, very, very impressive.
80% of the weapons.
There was a time when there were 67,000 nuclear weapons in the world between us.
Remember York's point for deterrence, one to 100, closer to one in 100, 67,000.
Okay, we've reduced that by 80%.
And here's a point that people don't know and doesn't get, and I haven't made it now.
It hasn't reduced the risk of all-out nuclear war at all, as long as those ICBMs remain.
And the Russians depend on theirs much more than we do, because their submarine force, while enough to destroy the U.S., they don't rely on it nearly as much, command and control, and against our anti-submarine warfare, and so on.
They will be much more reluctant to get rid of, though they could reduce their ICBMs.
Our submarine force makes, as I say, has made the, even from a Cold War armaments point of view, which I shared in 1961, at that time, before Vietnam, and before the Pentagon Papers, before a lot of reading I've done, including reading like your own books got, really.
That, even from that point of view, you could say, we're safer, we get rid of that.
But without getting rid of it, reducing the weapons now to 3,000 on each side, 1,500 or 1,500 or so, 2,000 reserve on each side.
So, about 3,000 on each side.
Doesn't change the situation at all.
You still have 400, used to have 1,000.
Now, we have 400 missiles that have to be used or lost if there's warning.
And the false warning continues to happen.
And if it happens during a crisis, for example, we did get false warnings during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And the Russians got them during what they thought of as a crisis in 1983.
And if one man had not lied to his superiors, Petrov, and told them, he really thought there was a 50% chance they were under attack.
And he knew that Andropov and the others were in an alert mood, fearing a surprise attack from Reagan, who they thought was crazy, and who was talking about eliminating the Soviet Union all the time.
If he told them there's a 50% chance that they're on the way, they would have launched their weapons.
So, he told them, no, it's a false alarm, which he didn't know.
His subordinates all said, tell him, go, we're under attack, we're under attack.
He wasn't sure.
If he'd acted differently, you and I would not be having this conversation, Scott.
We'd be gone.
So, the point is, that risk is as great now as it has ever been.
And that's very impossible to people.
They think, well, we're going in the right direction.
We've gone down by 80%.
No.
The insane number of weapons in the world, what do you say, by a thousand or so times, ensured that you could get rid of 80% and still have more than enough to blow the world up.
Right.
Hang on just one second.
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Well, and look, just three weeks ago on Christmas Day, it was the 30th anniversary of the Soviet Union's ceasing to exist entirely.
The fact that we're having this conversation in the year 2022, I mean, it's great to see that you are so healthy and doing so well, Dad, but this is insane that it's even possible that this is the discussion.
You know, Eric Margulies, the great journalist, back a few years ago during the height of tensions in 2014 and 15 in Ukraine and in Syria, he said that he had some contacts, old friends, among the very highest levels of the foreign ministry in France, spies and diplomats and so forth that he's known for many years.
And they told him this is as bad as it's been since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
They were terrified that we were going to get into a real war with Russia over things where we shouldn't be messing around at all, supporting terrorists in Syria, supporting Nazis in their coup in Ukraine and this kind of thing, where we're totally picking the fight unnecessarily.
That's right.
And you didn't mention Taiwan, but I know you know that one.
Oh, and that's in my notes.
I'm so sorry.
Thank you for bringing that up, because I wanted to ask you, I didn't get a chance to interview you when the New York Times put this out.
The cursed Charlie Savage wrote up this great piece that you had given him about some documents about war plans for China in, was it 1958?
58.
And when I said there was a time when Eisenhower, on the one hand, restrained his generals, including the one I've been mentioning, Cooter in the Pacific Command, but he restrained them from the immediate attacks they wanted, nuclear attacks, to defend Komoy and Matsu Islands.
One of them is a mile and a half from the Chinese mainland.
Very visible.
To maintain our control of those, they wanted to go to nuclear weapons.
Now, Eisenhower restrained that as the first action.
But he said, if it's necessary, if their artillery attacks are so effective, or if they add air power to them to keep us from resupplying those little islands, then, yes, then we'll go to nuclear war.
And he said that in these documents that I revealed, in a way that was still top secret, this part of it, of Eisenhower making clear that he was authorizing the use of the, he would authorize, I should say, retain the, I could come, there's somebody teaching, okay.
He retained control, I'll say for a moment, for argument here.
He would go to it, but he said, in the expectation that the Russians, the Chinese didn't have nuclear weapons, that the Russians, their ally then, 58, will hit Okinawa and Taiwan.
They'll destroy Taiwan.
They'll hit our bases in Guam and Okinawa.
Well, that, by his definition, would be armed conflict with the Soviet Union, general war, in which, as I say, at that time, they were figuring on killing 600 million people.
Now, this is Eisenhower.
We haven't had a more mature, responsible president since then.
And this was the crazy stuff he was talking then.
And I thought, it's time for us to know that you don't, we haven't had the chance to elect people who put such a high priority on avoiding nuclear war, that they will refute, they will reject craziness like this.
It's been there all along.
And that isn't to say that it couldn't, it doesn't occur on the other side, either.
But Putin talks about, I don't know whether he really believes this or not, but he talks about initiating nuclear war, if necessary, first use, for some reason.
That's crazy talk, but it serves a purpose at the risk of eventually blowing up the world.
And that's what I wanted to reveal in 58.
I haven't seen any effect of that, I must say.
Some of the scholars were very interested in it.
They didn't know some of this stuff that had never been declassified, top secret.
I haven't even been indicted.
That would draw some attention to it.
And I thought would give me a case here that in my old age, I always thought of prison as my retirement plan.
And it would give me the chance in court to argue that information like this, 50, let's see, it actually, we're talking about 58.
But it was from what I put out was a top secret study from 64.
So what is that?
Over half a century, I can't do the arithmetic at 90.
So you figure it out.
From 64 till now, should this have been top secret, as it is to know what what planning we were making about Taiwan?
I think not.
Anyway, I'd be happy to argue that in court, even if I was expected to lose.
Well, and that's such an important point that in that story, and everyone should go look at I'm sorry, I don't have the headline in front of me, but just search Charlie Savage, Daniel Ellsberg, Taiwan nuclear, something like that, it'll come up.
And the challenge in there is one, hey, everybody, look at what the American military is prepared to do to prevent violent reunification here.
Take note of how dangerous that could be.
But secondly, you really did throw down the gauntlet in the newspaper of record and dare and defy the Department of Justice to indict you and prosecute you under the Espionage Act.
That's not fooling around, man.
That wasn't just a PR stunt, Dan.
There is no question that what I did and what I'm doing when I put this stuff out is absolutely as indictable as anything we've done this century.
Any of the eight or nine people that Obama prosecuted, Julian Assange, Snowden, actually Snowden is a higher classification, it so happens.
But fully indictable on this.
Why haven't they paid any attention?
I couldn't have waved a red flag more obviously.
I have to think, uh, I don't think it's just because of me.
I don't think, I think this is not a best case for them to argue this, which is their interpretation.
That's something that is still top secret, but 50 years old is a basis for putting somebody in prison.
That's not their best case, but they don't need a best case.
I talked this morning for the second time to my hero, one of my heroes, Daniel Hale, called me from Marion Prison, Illinois, this morning.
And I'm flattered that he used his week's call.
He gets two calls a week.
Yeah, I called him yesterday and today we talked.
He revealed the criminality of our drone program, our drone assassination program, which puts people for assassinating on a president's decision, including American citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, both born in the United States, assassinated by drones.
Okay, what Daniel Hale revealed and talked about and did everything he could to publicize it, he was waving the red flag in effect.
So he's in Marion Prison.
And what he, one of the things he revealed on the Intercept, I think it was, that for every person targeted by this thing, by drone program, an average of 17 other people get killed.
People who are nearby, they have the wrong location, the wrong name, whatever, mostly just by children, other people, every kind of person.
And by the way, the targets are also innocent in the first place too, but yeah.
Yeah, anyway, and that includes, of course, countries we're not at war with, like Sudan and various other places where we're using drones, you know, the legality of which is ridiculous.
Whether you want an assassination program at all, you know, that's going to be imitated very much so.
You talked about automated war plan.
Well, our whole war plan is fortunately not automated, nor is Russia's.
But automated drones, I think they're on the way.
And they, you know, they will pick the targets, the drones will, and they will fire the missiles.
And we'll get that in domestic systems eventually.
I mean, that sounds as though I'm off the wall here.
No, I'm sorry, I don't think so.
So...
Yeah, that's the virtual wall that the Democrats support at the southern border, Dan, is to have drones going around arresting people, identifying people and arresting people out in the middle of the desert somewhere.
Just saw a new thing about that.
It's been called the virtual fence instead of Donald Trump's wall.
They haven't yet armed them, is that right?
But they could easily.
Yeah, yeah, I don't know if they have weapons on.
Well, actually, no, I think they do.
Well, I'd have to go back and look, but I think the promo that I saw...
No, I'm pretty sure they don't yet.
They don't have automated weapons.
I don't think we use...
Oh, I don't think they pull the triggers themselves, but they're remote controlled by men.
But I think they may have, you know, shotguns on them to say, freeze right there until the humans get there and arrest people and stuff like that.
Look, people at Google revolted against the idea of providing software for automated systems like that.
And they said, no, we shouldn't be doing that.
Remember, their motto used to be at first in Google, though they changed it, don't be evil.
Yeah.
Then they signed right up with the CIA and it's been pure evil ever since.
So a lot of people at Google said, no, we don't want to be part of this.
Well, good.
That was good.
So Google came off the contract, but that didn't mean others didn't pick it up.
It didn't stop the program.
So the program, of course, is just going ahead full blast.
It's part of this 25 billion that they added.
We want more on cyber war.
Well, and of course, you can't think of taking out anything from the budget, which is mostly pork.
I say the ICBM part is toxic pork.
Hey, actually, as long as we're at it, one more thing, Dan, what about hypersonics?
The story is that Russia and China are ahead of us.
We blew all our WAD patrol and posh tunes down in the Helmand province and they got a leg up on us on the hypersonics.
So we got to give Lockheed a whole new trillion here.
Now, I couldn't know less about that, but I have read the book by Andrew Coburn, spelled C-O-C-K-B-U-R-N.
They're called Spoils of War.
Have you read that?
No, I have it here, but I have not had a chance to look at it.
Let me recommend that to you.
Very much so.
And it's articles of his that mostly came out earlier.
Oh, then in that case, I've interviewed him about them all, all along.
Yeah, but they're extremely good chapters.
And one of his chapters is precisely on this.
Well, I mean, one of his chapters, it's very good, is in detail how we got extended to the border of Russia in East Europe, what Kennan called the greatest mistake of the century.
And Perry had opposed this and so forth.
Okay, we got there for one reason, to sell them weapons, to bring them up to standards of NATO standards with American weapons.
Right.
Or in some cases, European weapons.
And by the way, I suspect that that's one of many reasons that Putin couldn't probably stay in office if he lets Ukraine go into NATO.
But it's probably a minor reason.
But the Rieners, we want to sell them weapons, not the U.S. selling them weapons.
They have a lot of other reasons.
Okay, coming back, Coburn has a chapter in hypersonic stuff.
I actually interviewed him about that piece on the show.
And his claim is that it's just, again, a technical hoax like ABM, that for a lot of technical reasons, which he gets into, that it will never amount to anything.
This one isn't even going to work particularly.
But that doesn't matter.
You can, preparing to do it and developing it and looking at it, well, you can spend any number of billions doing that.
So what's bad about it?
So it's one more, it's one more sales pitch for the weapon.
Well, here's the thing, though.
I mean, I think it's within my imagination to figure that a Russian boat in the Atlantic Ocean could fire a straight shot hypersonic missile and hit D.C. with it or hit Newport News, New Jersey or whatever was their target.
You can do that with a cruise missile right now.
I mean, but I guess the idea is that they go so much faster.
The worry, I don't really know what the advantage is compared to that.
So what?
We don't have anything that could stop a cruise missile coming at us from a submarine or a ship?
Well, and I guess, well, I mean, to me, the worry is just reaction time and errors, right?
What is that?
And if we're afraid it's a hypersonic missile, then that gives us two or three minutes to figure it out instead of 12 or whatever it is, you know, that kind of thing.
As far as strategically, I don't see what makes them so much better than a regular cruise missile.
I guess harder to shoot down.
But we can't shoot.
Well, in theory, you can shoot a cruise missile.
But if it's you know, it can follow an irregular path and can go very low, very low.
It's not really practical.
As far as I know, maybe somebody will contradict me on it.
But, you know, when you mention that ship, you can't you can't.
It's not that we're the only unreasonable, insanely unreasonable people in the world.
It reminds me of something we only learned a few years ago, actually far half a century after the event that Khrushchev had a submarine off Hawaii.
I'll bet even you haven't heard this guy.
I don't think I had heard that.
OK.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev insanely against the advice of some of his top advisers, he sent submarines into the Caribbean with nuclear warheads, which could have started World War Three, blown up the world, you know, against the U.S. Navy in the Caribbean.
Not a good idea.
And that almost did blow up the world.
But meanwhile, we didn't learn that for like 30 years after the crisis.
But even later, we learned at the same time he had a submarine with a nuclear torpedo off Hawaii and with the orders that if the war started, you know, hit Hawaii.
He couldn't hit Hawaii otherwise, but from a submarine he could.
This torpedo itself, you know, nuclear could go into the harbor, you know, blow the harbor up.
Was that a good idea?
Was that really good thinking?
Now, Khrushchev is not only not the dumbest, he's one of the smartest people they've had over there.
But he was capable of that kind of thinking.
And that's why humans are not the species to be entrusted with nuclear weapons.
And what you were saying earlier, Scott, about the prospects for humanity are very dark.
It's not certain that any of this will happen.
And you can play the games in Ukraine and Taiwan and Baltics and everywhere else, and it may not blow the world up.
That's a possibility.
And they're ready to gamble on that and play these games for a variety of reasons, diplomatic reasons, staying in office, keeping alliances where we're the leader.
Look, we're putting nuclear, we're outfitting the F-35, which you know, Scott, is the biggest pork program in history.
It's a trillion and a half dollars for a weapon that, for any of its various functions, there are better weapons.
It may or may not ever be used.
But anyway, even Bernie Sanders can't oppose it.
In fact, he supported an F-35 base or F-35s being based in his state.
And, you know, he just doesn't pay to oppose these things.
So now they're putting, they're outfitting them for nuclear weapons for our F-35s that we want to give, put in Germany.
Now, nuclear weapons in Germany.
Hmm.
You know, under what circumstances would they drop those nuclear weapons?
Circumstances in which all Germans die and nearly everybody else in the world dies without the F-35s.
So the F-35s are just, you know, one more trigger, you might say, on these things.
This is our species.
Yeah, that's kind of the same point about the hypersonics, right, is they don't really give you any better strategic advantage, but they do increase all the risks.
And there's money, there's money.
Nobody wants World War III, nobody.
But preparing for World War III, very profitable, very important to our society.
And also, there's certain political advantages in threatening World War III.
And for that, you prepare for it, which is very profitable, etc.
That's what we've been doing for 70 years.
And it's a miracle we've gotten through this far.
We've come very close.
The miracle we need is for the public to become aware, to let this into their awareness, and make it part of the pressure they bring to bear on our representatives and our presidents, which it currently isn't.
It isn't in campaigns.
It's not an issue.
Maybe that's like this.
While we have these 69 or so groups coming right now, conceivably, we could get into the discussion with this kind of thing.
And maybe that can make a difference.
And otherwise, humanity will go on.
One percent, two percent, there's quite a few.
Maybe 10 percent, that would be 700 million.
Well, that's big civilizations with that.
And you can do it all again.
All again.
But I must say, that's where we're hitting.
Omnicide.
Are you the one who coined the term omnicide in your new book there?
No, it's from a philosopher named Somerville, who invented it years ago.
And of course, as I say, omnicide can be, you know, sounds as though it's defined as everybody dying or even all life dying.
Well, that's not in the cards, even with nuclear winter or climate.
The climate, we don't even know what happens on the population.
I've never heard.
You know, civilization is totally disorganized.
But what happens exactly to the population?
I don't know.
But in nuclear winter, we do know pretty well.
Cut off the sunlight, freeze all the harvest for a year and actually for most of a decade.
And we know what that'll do.
So it doesn't kill everybody.
But for purposes of discussion, I've been calling that omnicide, Somerville's terms.
And we shouldn't be.
No alliance like NATO or Japan should be based on a threat of blowing up the world to protect that ally.
That's, I don't know, it sounds, you know, I've been using the word insane.
But how can you say that?
Very sane, reasonable, respected, highly informed, highly educated.
People have been doing this for 70 years.
So is it insane?
Well, is it insane to destroy the species?
To risk it?
To risk it is what they're doing.
Evidently not clinically.
It all comes down to social psychology, right?
It's the diffusion of responsibility.
It's a way of.
Nobody really, nobody really whose fault it is.
And so it's only many people's fault a little bit.
And so it's sort of like a lynching or something where it's rationalized away.
Very late, very late.
I was speaking just the other day, Dan, with Dan McAdams, who's foreign policy advisor for the great Ron Paul all those years in his congressional office.
And he was talking about we were discussing the Ukraine and the Kazakhstan crisis.
And he was talking about he wouldn't name names, but he was saying someone that he knows personally in Washington, D.C., within the halls of power.
Of course, he spent many years living there, working with Ron.
And he wanted to emphasize it was really important to note.
You talk about this a bit in your book, Secrets, and I guess in Doomsday Machine, too.
But he was saying it's so important to note that these people actually are not criminally insane, psychopathic, sociopathic monster, blood-soaked madmen like you might think of them if you live in Austin and just think of D.C. as just Mordor, you know, over there where these people are just maniacs.
And yet he says, no, it's really not like that.
It's just, you know, it's you can call it a simple-mindedness or being, you know, stuck in an echo chamber or a bubble or something where, look, man, everybody knows we're the good guys.
They're the bad guys.
We're the red, white, and blue.
We always do the right thing.
If it wasn't the right thing, we wouldn't be doing it.
And so that's why we're doing it.
And it's just like that.
And how then in all other aspects, these are normal humans.
It's just that's the way they look at it.
And of course, Dan and I, and I'm not sure about your position on Ukraine, sir, but Dan McAdams and I both look at that thing and ask the question first, why is this all W. Bush and Barack Obama's fault?
And see, you know, history didn't begin when Vladimir Putin did something rash.
Let's try to figure out what led to it.
But, of course, in D.C., they don't have any incentive whatsoever, boy, especially in the Biden administration, for example, to say, yeah, we personally screwed this up back when we were the Obama administration in 2014 and 15, when we did the coup and started the war.
So, you know, they don't have any incentive to be honest about their role in it.
So then they see everything that the other side does in reaction to their actions as aggression and horror and terror.
And now they're the heroes who get to dress up in armor and defend Europe from the Russian hordes.
And they can convince themselves this in a way, again, back to the real point, that they're not like, you know, a serial killer or something.
They could kill every last human, or as you said, not every last human, but only nine-tenths of humanity in an afternoon or, you know, over the course of, you know, a year or two after they engage in a general war over some ridiculous so-called interest.
But then, you know, if you sat down with them at lunch, they're fine.
And that's—it's the incentive structure and the social psychology of the system itself that makes it that way.
Again, just the same thing as taking a check from a lobbyist and saying, okay, thank you, I'll make sure to buy more H-bombs this year.
Thanks for helping me get reelected.
And not thinking that that's completely crazy, that that's how you would, you know, base your legislative decisions and your appropriations and things on those kinds of deals.
But it's difficult to understand, for me, being from Austin and never having been part of that machine.
I remember in—I'll get the number wrong and you'll correct me, but I think in Secrets, you say that 40,000 different men and women inside the government knew that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie.
And they all kept this secret until you finally leaked the Pentagon Papers almost 10 years later, or seven years later.
Isn't that right, that you say that?
Well, since you ask, I didn't give a figure in the book for that, the number.
If you said 30,000, that would be like everybody in the Pentagon.
No, everybody in the Pentagon didn't know that.
Hundreds, tens—hundreds, I would say hundreds knew it.
I didn't give a figure that I think.
But a great— You could have swore it was in the thousands or something.
Anyway, I'm old and decrepit here.
Yeah, but— You're 90 years old and a lot sharper than me.
Not like me.
But listen, Scott, I have to unhappily agree with everything you just said.
You made a number of separate points, but I agree with each of them.
When you say, for instance, they don't say, we did this wrong, so let's change it.
And why don't they say it?
Fat chance.
They just don't.
Virtually no one.
It's just unknown.
It doesn't seem to be human.
And then the other point is, not because these people are unusually corrupt or bad or anything like that.
No.
There is—I once said to Gravel, Senator Gravel, when he was in—no, that was after he was in 2006.
I won't go into all that context.
But I said, do you think that this Congress is exceptionally cowardly—the Democrats in 2006—for not, by the way, moving toward impeaching Bush?
He said, no.
Usually cowardly.
You know, usually.
Same way as before, 30 years before.
Well, the exception—there are exceptions.
Extremely small number of people.
So that's why he keeps saying it is a species problem here.
And I think it comes down to—you know, people want to say, by the way, it's capitalist only.
Well, yes.
Capitalist, certainly.
Capitalism of all kinds certainly contributes to this.
It doesn't block it.
It contributes.
But the Soviet Union can be defined various ways in their system.
Some people don't like to call it socialist.
But whatever—it did call itself socialist.
But whatever it was, it wasn't capitalist.
And they built a doomsday machine.
So, you know, you don't—it isn't—the whole problem isn't defined just by capitalism.
I think in our genes, there is a very tremendous impulse to divide other humans into us and them.
Us and others.
And in the small and in the large.
You know, back when we were hunter-gatherers and had to avoid others.
And then with civilization and war and sex and a lot of other things that came with irrigation—irrigated field agriculture and whatnot, the population exploded.
Okay.
So all that time, I think the—it's very easy to get people to regard certain others as a source of fear, distrust, and contempt.
And they're enemies.
And then even the ones who aren't enemies are still others you don't care about.
Something comes up right now on climate.
It just happens in a discussion the other day.
Somebody was saying, don't these rich people, the CEOs of Exxon, who Tom Englehart made the point that there should be a crime of terracide, T-E-R-R-A-C-I-D.
Well, again, it seems a little exaggerated.
They're not destroying the planet.
They're just destroying the ecology of humans or civilization.
Humans will survive for a while.
I just came up with the perfect compromise, Dan.
We'll take all the nuclear weapons and we'll make electricity out of them.
Yeah.
Well, whatever.
But okay.
So they said on the climate, Exxon, which I—look, I expect—I was talking to a couple of friends the other day, twins, who are 21.
And I said, you know—and their father's about nine years younger than I am.
And I said, when you get to be my age, when your father gets to be my age, 2030, supposedly, according to the Paris Accords, we will have cut fossil fuel emissions in half on the way to eliminating them on balance by 2050.
By 2030, they're supposed to be cut in half.
That's not going to happen.
In fact, I said, I'm pretty sure, pretty sure, not certain, they will still be rising as they are every year since Paris.
And they'll be rising in 2030.
So anyway, somebody said, don't these rich people care, like the CEO of Exxon, about their grandchildren?
And here's my speculative answer.
Yes, they do care about their grandchildren.
They don't care about your grandchildren.
Right.
That's why they're building lifeboats and buying property in Argentina.
They think their grandchildren will do fine.
And they're probably right, unless they're at ground zero for a nuclear winter.
But if they're not at ground zeros, they'll be in New Zealand or they'll be somewhere else.
And if it's the climate change, there will still be luxury resorts for the rich.
They just won't be in the same places they are now.
They won't be in the Philippines.
They won't be in Dubai, I think, with all the air conditioning they have.
I don't think Dubai will be a place that can be.
But there'll be other places.
Antarctica, you know, or Siberia or somewhere.
They'll gather in their bubbles, domes, and they'll be all right.
You know what?
I think the rest of us, regardless of the temperature outside, will be a lot better off without them on the outside of the dome.
I'll take it.
Anyway, listen, we better stop here, Dan.
But I love you.
Thank you so much for doing the show again.
I love talking with you so much.
And I recommend so highly your great books to people, both of them.
Are just incredible.
I love it too, Scott.
OK, keep at it.
Bye.
All right.
Take care.
All right, you guys, that's, of course, the heroic Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, author of Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and the incredible book, The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
And that has been Anti-War Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director at Antiwar.com and author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
Find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
And I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.