Alright, so you guys, introducing Daniel Ellsberg.
If it wasn't for him, we'd probably still be fighting the Vietnam War.
But with some help, he leaked the Pentagon Papers that helped undermine support for that war.
And, of course, he's the author of the book Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
And the latest is The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Dan?
Good to be here, Scott.
Thank you.
Very happy to have you on the show.
And I wanted to say thank you.
It's the first time I've had the chance to officially thank you for endorsing my book, Fool's Errand.
So thanks.
It makes me look smart.
It's a good book.
I was glad to have the chance.
Great.
Appreciate that.
People should read it.
Cool.
Alright.
And then, so, yeah, it turns out that you formerly were a complete madman, helping run America's nuclear war policy.
And one of the saner among the madmen, that comes through clearly in the book here, The Doomsday Machine.
And I almost don't know where to begin, but I guess I'll start with asking you to describe the RAND Corporation and your role there, kind of as the background for the story you tell here.
Well, RAND, which was an acronym for Research and Development, R&D, although some people used to say it's research and no development.
It was analysis and research for the Air Force right after World War II, where the Air Force wanted to keep getting advice from people like operations analysts, systems analysts.
I was in the economics department, which was doing a lot of analysis of the problems of deterring, supposedly at that time, deterring a surprise attack from Russia during a period when the intelligence community, to begin with, all of them, were predicting that the Russians would have a very much greater arsenal of ICBMs and continental ballistic missiles than we could.
They did test one before we could, and that made that claim plausible.
And we were, I and my colleagues, were in the belief that the Russians were on a crash program or at any rate were moving toward hundreds of missiles which could disarm the United States of any ability to retaliate toward a nuclear attack by destroying all the strategic air command, SAC bases, that could retaliate.
So what I was working on was in hopes of preventing any nuclear war by deterring it, by having an ability to retaliate that the Soviets could not destroy.
Now, that turned out to be a delusional framework because when we finally got reconnaissance satellites over the Soviet Union to cover all of it, and that was not until the fall of 1961, after I'd been working on war plans to deter such an attack, it was discovered that they had built, had acquired, it sought no capability for a surprise attack at all.
They had very heavy medium-range and intermediate-range missiles and bombers that could reach Europe and could annihilate Europe in any nuclear war.
But as opposed to the estimate that I had heard myself at the Strategic Air Command in August of 1961, that they had a thousand ICBMs.
A month later, the fairly conclusive result of photographs was that they had four.
The SAC commander, Thomas Power, had been off by 250 times.
So they had not, Khrushchev had not, in other words, built on his initial test, had really bypassed first-generation ICBMs waiting for more advanced ones, which means he hadn't really sought an ability to destroy the United States.
That would have been his opportunity if there ever was one.
And that is destroy them in a surprise attack without experiencing total devastation in Russia.
And really, they did build up their ICBMs in mid-'65, mid-'60s rather, mainly as a result of the humiliation in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And they felt having disposed of Khrushchev, who had backed down in that crisis, Brezhnev, who replaced him, told their military, you can have what you want, and what they wanted was what the U.S. had.
What the U.S. had was the ability to annihilate the Soviet Union with effects that they didn't understand then that would have killed nearly everyone on Earth.
And the Russians proceeded to imitate that and acquire their doomsday machine that could kill nearly everyone, and that's what we've lived with ever since.
Yeah.
So, now here's the thing, too.
Well, there's a couple of things.
In the book, you talk about when you were made aware of this new CIA intelligence that said that they really only had four nuclear weapons, that you understood immediately that that meant that they did not mean to get a first-strike capability, but you had a hard time convincing anybody else of that.
Well, I don't say anybody else.
RAND, as a corporation, as a private NGO, non-governmental corporation, I meant to say it is an NGO, you could say, but a non-profit organization in theory.
They got their money from the Air Force and later from the Department of Defense, and now they get more than half of it, I think, from people other than the U.S. national government, state governments, cities, various other things for civilian work, but that's after I left RAND, essentially, in 1970.
At that time, I was a consultant to the Defense Department and to the White House, actually, and the State Department, to some extent, on war planning.
I came back having learned this estimate in Washington, which was not available to RAND, that was the point I was making earlier, because Eisenhower had cut out the private contractors from national intelligence estimates.
So the RAND people had sort of, like, been preserved in amber in their beliefs of 1958, when they were finally cut off from the intelligence estimates, that we were far behind the Soviets.
And they couldn't adjust to this change that I was reporting.
They said, how would they know it, that there were so few?
What's that based on?
That's totally implausible to them.
Nobody at RAND believed it, I would say, except a handful who had special clearances and who did know about the reconnaissance.
So it was very hard for them to realize that what they and I, with them, had been working on night and day for years with a very great sense of urgency, that we were saving the world from the effects of a Russian surprise attack on the U.S., had been a delusion, that we were working at a false problem and making the problem worse, in effect, by our recommendations for how to meet this false problem.
But then, the way you describe it, your knee jerked the wrong way in response to this, and you wrote a speech that was very consequential in basically calling Khrushchev's bluff publicly, and you say that that helped to precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis that you then say precipitated the Soviets obtaining their own doomsday machine.
Not to be grandiose about this, a lot of factors went into the Cuban Missile Crisis, obviously, but the speech that I proposed and that was picked up by Deputy Secretary of Defense, Rosalind Gilpatrick, I had first recommended, proposed that it be done by the president, but the idea was that in the midst of the Berlin Crisis, which was still very hot at that time, that we should inform the Soviets that they had been running a hoax all this time and that we knew it, and that they could stop talking about their ability to destroy Britain and Paris and the U.S. and running out, as Khrushchev had put it, putting out missiles like sausages on a production line, which was perhaps true in retrospect with respect to their missiles against Germany and against Europe, but not against the U.S. There was no production line running against the U.S.
And so I said, let him know in the midst of this crisis that we know he has been bluffing all this time.
And that was, you know, proved at all the highest levels that they do that, and the speech was given.
Actually, as I say, a number of factors went into the Cuban Missile Crisis, in particular Khrushchev's correct estimate that the U.S. intended to overthrow the regime in Cuba after failing at the Bay of Pigs, and that we were running a huge covert—we really began it pretty much at that time— but he believed we would run a huge covert program of assassination and sabotage and spying against Cuba and use that as an excuse, actually, for a chain of events that would lead to our invading.
It was quite realistic on his part, and that was a major aspect.
I knew nothing of that covert program at the time, so that was a major inducement for him to put missiles in Cuba.
But an additional inducement, as he said, was our talking about the fact that we were so much bigger than he was in strategic forces, and I had contributed to that.
Not only me, but more importantly, President John F. Kennedy, Secretary of Defense McNamara, made speeches to that effect quite a bit.
But the Gilpatrick speech, which was the first expression of that, and I have to acknowledge, I definitely played a role in that process of encouraging or provoking Khrushchev to feel that he had to match our missile capability.
And that was the point behind it?
You weren't just beating your chest.
There was a strategy behind writing the speech that way.
It was a question of trying to keep Khrushchev from beating his chest falsely, you know, wahoo Tarzan-like, and say, come off it on Berlin, we're going to maintain our presence there in West Berlin, and your threats of keeping us out are ill-based.
But so did that speech help to contribute to him backing down and building the wall rather than invading Western Berlin?
No, no, the wall, he had already built the wall.
As a matter of fact, that was in August, I believe.
And the crisis wasn't over quite then.
We came very close to, I think it was October, after my speech, actually, the Gilpatrick speech, where tanks were confronting each other at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, Russian tanks and American tanks looking at each other.
And if someone had fired, as at Kent State, for example, if someone had gone ahead or had a supreme trigger finger, we might not be here because the chance of war coming out of that was very great.
And that's the kind of abyss we have been living next to for the last 70 years or 50 years in particular.
All right, well, I want to get back to the full devastation of nuclear war a little bit later.
But on the history stories of the Kennedy years here, I'm interested in then during your tales of your role during the missile crisis in urging a more hawkish line.
But then you say that and particularly on the issue of agreeing to pull.
I didn't hear it.
Say it again.
Yeah.
On your tales of your role during the Cuban missile crisis, you described that you were pushing a pretty hawkish line, particularly in terms of refusing to pull missiles out of Turkey and this kind of thing.
But then you said that after.
No, it wasn't a question of pushing it.
It was a question of my agreeing.
I was very small cog in there, although I was at a staff level just below the executive committee of the National Security Council.
So I was helping put in reports to there.
But my my opinion was that he didn't need to pull missiles out of Turkey in a trade in that we had him so outgunned.
I remember the context of all this is when you say I was a madman.
Well, fair enough.
I was mad in the sense that I was a cold warrior who believed all the premises of the Cold War, some of which were true and others untrue entirely and made the world very dangerous.
So I was a cold warrior, along with virtually every member of the excom, let's say.
And nearly all of them opposed the idea of very strongly against the president, who, in fact, Kennedy was willing to trade at that point.
And I felt for once that I was definitely disagreed with him on that point.
I was wrong, as I say, make it very clear in the in the book.
I was I was 31 years old.
I was four years out of the Marine Corps.
Fortunately, I was not making these decisions.
And on the other hand, these people who were twice my age and very distinguished, famous group of the executive committee were foolish, unwise, actually.
And as Bobby Kennedy later said, if half of them had been making the decision, the world would have blown up.
So, as I say, I don't want to, even in confession here, be grandiose and point to me.
I was I was the bad one, but I was a participant in a policy that was madly reckless.
Yeah, well, I mean, but I didn't get to the point, which was that I think the way you tell it in the book is that you realize your mistake immediately after the crisis was over.
That actually the U.S. and the USSR were much closer to the war than you thought.
I know what you're referring to there, Scott, but that's a little misleading.
What I discovered to my horror was not that the situation had been so dangerous.
I did discover that later.
That's in the book in detail.
But some of that we didn't learn for 30 and 40 years later.
What I discovered was that the ex-comm people, starting with Paul Nitze, for whom I was working, had believed that it was very dangerous, unlike me, and had gone ahead.
And that was shocking to me.
Not that they were right.
And in fact, they were right more than they knew for reasons they didn't know.
It was quite dangerous, but it was shocking.
But I had wrongly, youngly, blame it on my youth, had believed that Khrushchev had to back down, and therefore it wasn't that dangerous.
And that's why I'd been going along with all this.
But if I had thought, as Paul Nitze said he did, that there was a 10 percent chance of nuclear war, I couldn't have possibly participated in it.
I couldn't understand how could these people have been depth-bombing or mock-depth-bombing Russian submarines, putting our nuclear weapons on alert, flying them in the vicinity of the Soviet Union on alert for purposes of intimidation, making these threats, preparing for an invasion, when they thought there was a 10 percent chance of nuclear war.
And I thought to myself, as we say in the book, who are these guys?
Who am I working for?
Are they all crazy?
Now, the irony is that as years went by, and it took quite a while, when we realized, for example, that Khrushchev had put nuclear weapons, had managed to get nuclear weapons into Cuba despite the blockade.
He got them in before the blockade.
And if the nuclear weapons were there, that they didn't have locks on them that could prevent them from firing, that a Soviet colonel in charge of surface-to-air missiles had shot down the U-2 on Saturday, October 27, without orders, and in fact against orders, from Moscow.
The same could have been done with these missiles.
We discovered from not knowing that at the time, that they had the warheads there, that the situation had in fact been extremely dangerous.
And actually a puzzle that I don't go into in the book, particularly just for space, but it intrigues me very much, is how could Khrushchev have failed to tell us that he had those warheads there, which would have virtually ruled out the possibility of invasion?
By the way, it wasn't just the warheads, but he had, for the medium-range ballistic missiles that he had there that could reach Miami or Washington, he also had short-range missiles used against an invasion fleet.
And since they couldn't reach Miami or the U.S., the Politburo had delegated authority, before Kennedy ushered his threats, had delegated authority to use those to local commanders.
Now, A, we didn't dream that Khrushchev would give that much control to lower commanders and take that risk.
We didn't know the short-range missiles were there.
We didn't know it for 30 years, until after, until glasnost, essentially, in the Russian archives began to open.
But had we known that, as I say, the threats of invasion essentially would have been off.
Why didn't Khrushchev tell us that?
That's inscrutable to me.
I have no reason.
He could have won the crisis if he'd told us that.
My only explanation is, in a regime that secretive, even more secretive than ours, which isn't easy, their habit of secrecy was just such that when it was in his interest to tell us something, he didn't do it.
Well, and that's really the story here, is how close we came to complete nuclear devastation, while at the same time so many bad assumptions were being held as such gospel truth by the men in charge, including the people you were directly working for there.
Yes.
What's your question?
That's the situation.
Well, yeah, that's the point.
You know, actually, my dad was at UCLA, and one of his political science professors, I guess it was, was gone during that time, and then came back after three weeks and said he had been on one of these, I guess, subcommittees, or one of these committees, staffing somebody, and said, we've never been closer to nuclear war.
There's no such thing as closer to nuclear war.
That was the absolute brink at that moment.
Well, yes, and we've been, that wasn't the only time people think of that as being the one time we were close to it.
Actually, as I say in the book, there have been a number of times, in particular one that I wish I had space to go into in detail, and we only learned much of that in the last two years, after all this time, and that was 1983, 35 years ago, when the Russians got a false alarm in the midst of what they thought of as a crisis situation.
Andropov, the prime minister there, the president then, believed that an exercise of ours, Able Archer in NATO, which was a nuclear exercise, was actually cover for a first strike by Reagan.
And in the midst of it, and he was preparing himself and getting ready to anticipate it, exactly when it would come, and take the extremely foolish, I mean, that word will appear pretty euphemistic in a moment, move of trying to preempt it, strike first, strike second first, as they say, by hitting our missiles before ours could arrive.
And when I say foolish, that's just what we would have done under the same circumstances.
Neither side has shown anything like wisdom in these preparations and in the threats.
And we have, in fact, been very close, as in 1983 and other occasions, to blowing the world up.
Yeah.
All right.
So I want to rewind a little bit and talk about at the beginning of the book, about your investigations into the current war plan, as it was under the Eisenhower administration, as it was the transition time, and just basically, you know, what you found from in the old war plan, the plan for general nuclear war against the Communist bloc, as you found it, and how you tried to change it for the better.
Well, for the less bad, the idea was, I had asked, I had drafted a question, which ended up being given to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the name of President Kennedy.
The question to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the name of the President was, if your war plans were carried out as planned, which meant, preemptively meant, not suffering a first strike, but getting our weapons off the ground before any warheads arrived there, or in escalation of a conflict in Europe, carrying out the first strike that we have prepared for and promised to our allies we would make in the end.
If the plans were carried out as planned, how many people would be killed in the Soviet Union and China?
And I had anticipated that they didn't really have a ready answer to that.
Strangely enough, my friends in the Air Staff were under the belief that the Joint Chiefs had never actually calculated how many people would be killed, as opposed to how many bases would be hit, how many cities, how many industrial areas, and so forth, but just civilian casualties.
But they were wrong.
The Joint Chiefs came back with an estimate very quickly in a week, which was very quickly for them, and which was shown to me because I had drafted the question and I saw the answer in the White House.
And to sum up, the answer was 325 million people.
And since they therefore had a calculation, it turned out, for all, I sent another question down through the Deputy National Security Assistant.
How many would be killed altogether then in the world by our strikes?
And the answer to that was another 100 million in East Europe, the captive nation, so-called, of the Warsaw Pact.
Another 100 million in West Europe, our allies, without any warheads landing there of us, from ours, because of fallout in East Europe and Russia.
And 100 million in China.
I mentioned that.
I'm sorry, that was in the 325 million already.
Another 100 million in contiguous areas like India, Pakistan, or areas neutral, like Austria, Afghanistan, Finland.
Parts of Japan would be hit, not hit actually, but destroyed by fallout.
Finland, for example, would be annihilated by fallout from our attacks on submarine pens near Leningrad.
So the total would be 600 million.
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You mentioned Korea in the book as well.
Wow, a war with Korea would put a lot of fallout on China, next to each other as they are.
Okay, so 600 million.
That was 100 holocausts.
And my reaction in the first week and the second week when I read the others was, in both cases, just horror.
I thought these were the most evil plans and preparations that had ever been made in the history of humanity, and also insane.
By the way, I knew that this was not simply a bluff, as Khrushchev had made bluffs, actually, in the late 50s, threatening missiles that he actually didn't have.
But we had all these.
This was the operational.
This wasn't war, hypothetically, five years or ten years in the future.
This is what would happen with the weapons we had on alert, many of which I'd seen on research trips in the Pacific.
In particular, I'd touched a nuclear weapon at one point.
It was on the ground, ready for being loaded on a jet.
It was an interesting experience because it was a cold day, and the weapon was warm, I think, from the radioactivity in it, like an animal body, an eerie feeling, actually.
It was metal skin, warm to the touch.
And no, by the way, that was a 1.1 megaton bomb.
That's a million tons, plus 100,000 tons, equivalent of TNT.
We dropped two million tons in all of World War II.
And this was one bomb that could drop half of World War II in one bomb.
And they were carried by single-pilot planes at that time, as well as being loaded on B-52s.
So I knew that we had the capability, and we were threatening it, and we were prepared, and it was on alert, and this could happen.
That's been true to this day.
But something, by the way, that I didn't know then, and nobody knew for another 20 years, a little more than 20 years, until 1983, that same year of the crisis I've described, when scientists, physicists, aerospace people like Carl Sagan, Brian Coon, and others, Turco, a number of other scientists, discovered that the cities we were planning to hit, and by the way, the way you got to 600 million dead, aside from the fallout, was that every city in Russia and China was to be hit with nuclear weapons.
Now, that, of course, brought casualties up, deaths, to the hundreds of millions.
But that turned out to be a small fraction of the people who would actually die from these attacks, aside from the fallout.
Because the smoke from these burning cities, physicists realized in 1983, 40 years into the nuclear era, the smoke would be lofted by firestorms, intense updrafts from widespread fires of a form that had happened only three times in World War II.
We tried to get firestorms of widespread fires that would get to an especially intense temperature almost every time in Germany and Japan, but only three times was the weather right to do that, one in Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo, and in Tokyo the effect of that was to kill 100,000 people in one night, March 9th and 10th.
In 1945, almost no Americans realized that that was the most murderous terrorist attack, the killing of civilians here deliberately for political effect ever done, more than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
But anyway, the point is that every nuclear weapon would cause a firestorm, as happened in Hiroshima, to a lesser extent Nagasaki.
And that meant these firestorms would not only cause intense temperatures, which was what they were aiming at in World War II, but would inadvertently cause updrafts that would loft the smoke, the soot, the toxic smoke of various kinds, up from the burning cities into the stratosphere, where it wouldn't rain.
It would go around the globe very quickly, within days, and would absorb most of the sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface, more than 70% of the sunlight in a war with Hiroshima.
The effect of that would be ice age conditions on the surface of the Earth, with frozen lakes, even in the spring and summer, but in particular would kill all the harvests, and that would last, we now know, in the last 10 years, further calculations, would last more than a decade.
That would kill nearly everyone on Earth.
So the effect of a war, the very question that I was asking in 1961, where they gave the answer without offering to resign, or apologizing, or expressing anguish, they gave the answer that we would be killing 600 million people, was wrong.
There were then 3 billion people that would have starved to death, nearly all of them.
Now there's 7.4 billion people.
It probably wouldn't be, right now, to full extinction.
Some people would live on fish and mollusks in the southern hemisphere, in Australia and New Zealand.
But 98 or 99% of the people would starve, including the attacker, whether it was the U.S. or Russia, whether they went first or second, and everyone else.
So it is probably called a doomsday machine, in Herman Kahn's sense, of a system that could not only threaten, but actually carry out the death of nearly everyone.
Herman Kahn presented that, a colleague of mine at RAND, a physicist, suggested that as a hypothetical device, which he said did not exist, and almost surely never would exist.
No one would build such a system.
But he was wrong.
It existed right then, in 1960 and 1961, in our Strategic Air Command.
And within a few years, the Russians had one too, by the mid-60s.
So now there's two doomsday machines, coupled together by their fear of surprise attack from the other, their warning systems, their readiness to get off their intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs, within minutes, 10 minutes at the most, but actually several minutes on receipt of warning.
It could be false, and has been false, a number of times, seriously, on both sides.
One time in 1995, after the Cold War, where Yeltsin actually was challenged, was posed with his nuclear computer, his so-called football or briefcase computer, that could send off his missiles.
And that was opened for him in the belief that a missile was heading toward Moscow at that time.
It wasn't.
And fortunately, he didn't press the button or say, go ahead, or we wouldn't be here.
But that's what we've been living with ever since.
All right.
So now I want to talk about the improvements that you tried to make to it, because it is important to show, you know, just how much you were able or how little you were able to ratchet the program down.
But so explain how it could have gotten that way in the first place.
I mean, I understand fear of first strike, like you're saying, but kill every single city in all of China and all of Russia.
How could good old Ike Eisenhower have approved a plan like that?
Well, he did approve it with misgivings.
He called it overkill.
His main concern was too many missiles per city.
It seemed inefficient, wasteful to him.
That was his major concern.
There were two military men, including, I'm glad to say, as a former Marine, the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Shoup, who said to kill all the Chinese when it hasn't even been their fight, when we've started a fight with Russia.
He said, this is not the American way.
That is not a good plan.
He said, this is not the American way.
But it was the American plan.
And it didn't change, despite his sole objection to it.
Others didn't object because they thought a Sino-Soviet pact block, which actually didn't exist at that time in 61, they'd been moving apart steadily toward an adversarial relationship from 59 or so, but we hadn't recognized that yet.
In any case, the idea was, in case of a war with the other superpower, we're not going to leave the Chinese aside to collect all the gains, you know, to be in charge of the world.
No, they're going to go too.
And I'm afraid that is very likely the planning to this day, although it's very secret and I don't know the current planning.
What I do know is this.
You asked the question, did I try to, in my staff role here as drafting guidance for war plans in 61, did I try to improve that at all?
Well, yes.
The very simple answer was to have the option of withholding attacks on China in a conflict with the Soviet Union.
So you didn't necessarily combine them irrevocably, as our then existing plans did do.
So you weren't always hitting Russians, the Chinese, in the event of any conflict over Berlin or Yugoslavia or Iran or anywhere else or an uprising in the east or an attack on West Europe that China would withhold against.
That seemed a simple proposal, and that was okayed by, actually all my guidance was sent to the Joint Chiefs as I drafted it, including that withhold.
Another one was to have the option, which I hoped would be followed, of withholding attacks on cities.
I could hardly conceive of why, in what was supposedly a preemptive attack or even a first strike escalating in Europe, why they would want to hit cities.
It sounded, you know, just from all I'd read, it didn't make any sense to me.
What it turned out was that this was just a carryover, basically, which lasted indefinitely from World War II.
From what I described earlier, General LeMay, who was in charge of that attack in World War II against Tokyo that I described, killed 100,000 people in one night.
It concluded from that that that was the way to fight a war and win a war, against civilians, crack their morale, crack their existence, kill enough people.
Actually, LeMay said to a colleague of mine, Sam Cohen Rand, on one occasion, Sam, war is killing people.
When you kill enough of them, the other guy quits.
That's what he had learned.
It was a very misled notion, even of World War II.
But anyway, that's what he put in.
He became the first commander of Strategic Air Command.
And the first targets for our nuclear weapons and atomic weapons, fission weapons, were cities, eight Russian cities, then 12, 20 as we got more bombs.
And the whole arsenal, essentially, was sent basically against cities.
Then, when the Soviets tested a weapon in August of 1949, every airfield in the Soviet bloc became a potential target.
So you had to have weapons for them and planes for them, very good for the Air Force, which was getting the lion's share of the budget.
So those estimates of a threat from Russia were good for the Air Force, and Rand worked for the Air Force.
And I think without thinking of themselves as corrupt in that sense, they didn't really, we didn't appreciate that the estimates we were getting from the Air Force were, in fact, very self-serving, were very biased.
We managed not to notice that or think of that.
And I accept those estimates, too.
But anyway, that was LeMay's way of fighting a war.
He was succeeded as commander of SAC, Strategic Air Command, by General Thomas Power, who had been the actual man in charge of the flight and observing it in Tokyo while LeMay was back at the base.
General Power had been in charge of the greatest massacre in human history, and he became commander of SAC, and he was commander of SAC during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when I think he and LeMay were among the very few people in the world who would have actually liked to see a nuclear war come.
Thought that better now rather than later, before the Russians build up, and we'll get rid of the communist menace and so forth.
Dangerous, dangerous people.
But we lucked out, actually.
That's described in detail in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
By the way, what I'm saying is that our survival through these preparations, which have been very profitable to the American military-industrial complex, I don't think we would have made these choices, these risks, taken these gambles, and been mistaken in the same way, always in favor of building up forces, if it wasn't very profitable to build them.
And not only profitable for Boeing and Lockheed, or for Grumman and General Dynamics, the other members of the aerospace industry and electronics industry, but they have subcontractors in virtually every state in the union.
And that's why we're rebuilding all these things again, for no other reason than I can see, other than the fact that the production lines need to be kept going at those corporations.
And it's not only profits, but it's votes, it's jobs, unions have generally supported it, Congress has supported all this, and there's basically no opposition.
When senators from the states that now have ICBMs, Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota, when they write letters to the president, these have to be kept on hot alert for the benefit of the local jobs, and they don't put that in the letter, but that's understood.
Other senators don't attack them.
It's log rolling.
They need bases in Minot, North Dakota for ICBMs. Okay, I need bridges, I need whatever else in my state.
They don't get after each other, and that's our political economy.
But remember, the Russians now are the same.
They used to have their bureaucratic, their service motives for not being humiliated and not being less than the US.
There was enough to get them to build a doomsday machine, which they never, no one has ever needed, or even planned as such, but a lot of missiles aimed at our cities.
Now they have profit, just like us.
They have their Boeing and their Northrop, which need to be kept in business and make a lot of profit, and both sides are rebuilding their doomsday machines right now.
Well, and you know, in the book, you talk about some stuff that just seems like mindless, bureaucratic sort of inertia, where with the advent of the hydrogen bomb, for example, they just replaced the atom bomb with hydrogen bombs in all the same war plans, even though now one H-bomb is worth however many atom bombs, but they didn't adjust.
They just switched up.
That's right.
As late as I found in working on war plans, that the plans up through the mid-50s were horrific in their way, but they talked about a million dead, 5 million, 10 million, terrible, but that's less than World War II.
We killed almost 2 million civilians by air power.
Let's see, 600,000 Germans, 900,000 Japanese civilians before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which adds another 300,000 or more, so close to 2 million civilians in World War II.
So that, of course, was over a matter of years.
Now they were planning to do it in weeks, but still they were in the level of World War II that had actually happened and that we had done.
And, of course, the Germans had done not so much with bombing, although they set the precedent in the Blitz and in other places, and the Japanese even earlier, but in the end we ended up sending 10 bombs for every bomb that they had dropped on Britain, for example, 10 tons.
And, nevertheless, as I say, it stayed down at that level.
Then all of a sudden, in the mid-60s, late 60s, the estimated casualties came to 100 million, 200 million, 300 million.
As I said, ultimately 600 million when you saw the total death toll, the body count they had in mind.
That was by substituting H-bombs, hydrogen fusion bombs, for thermonuclear weapons, for the fission bombs that were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And most Americans don't, I think to this day, I find from listening audiences, understand really the difference between those two.
They know that one is larger than the other, but which one, probably the H-bomb, but how much?
And what they don't understand is that the first droppable H-bomb in 1954 had an explosive power 1,000 times more than the Nagasaki bomb, which was used as its trigger.
And every thermonuclear weapon has a Nagasaki-type plutonium fission bomb as its detonator, a percussion cap, in effect, and can be 1,000 times more, even though nowadays, for efficiency, we carry smaller weapons on top of missiles, very accurate, and can create much more devastation than we could earlier on with the large droppable bombs from planes.
And so the individual weapons are smaller than that, and still 10, 20, 50 times more than the Nagasaki weapon.
One reason for mentioning this is to say, dangerous as things are, they really can get worse pretty quickly.
India and Pakistan right now have only A-bombs, the kinds that we use as triggers for H-bombs.
They don't have H-bombs, although India claims to have made a test, but if it did, it was kind of a fizzle.
The same is true of North Korea.
They claim they have made a test.
They may or may not have an H-bomb, but in any case, it takes a lot of tests to have a working H-bomb.
So you have these three countries, North Korea, India, and Pakistan, of the nine nuclear weapon countries, that do not have H-bombs.
If testing started, which the Republicans have been in favor of for some time, actually restarting testing, Russian labs are said to want to restart testing.
If that happened, India and Pakistan and North Korea would get H-bombs very quickly, within a couple of years.
The difference that would make is this.
Right now, with just 100 A-bombs between them, and India and Pakistan each have individually more than 100 A-bombs, so if they used 50 each against cities, they would put enough smoke into the stratosphere, in this nuclear winter effect, to reduce sunlight by 7%, not 70, but 70.
It wouldn't be a full nuclear winter.
It wouldn't starve everyone.
It would starve a third of the Earth's population, or a little less, one to two billion people, perhaps two billion people.
With H-bombs, they would have a doomsday machine.
It would be three-thirds, for the difference that makes.
And they have been recurrently at war over Kashmir.
And over that, everybody in the world has a stake in whether that war occurs.
That capability should not exist.
But of course, with the other nuclear weapons, with H-bombs, even though they don't have as much energy as the U.S. and Russia, they can all create more than two billion dead.
The U.S. and Russia can, with a small fraction of their alert forces, starve everyone on Earth.
That's an unconscionable, immoral, evil, dangerous, you know, we don't have words for this possibility, no matter how low the probability is.
It isn't zero.
And the possibility of killing everybody on Earth has simply never existed, except for the last half-century or more, roughly 70 years of the nuclear era.
We don't have words for it, or concepts.
And I think that's related to the fact that it's very hard for the human mind to even comprehend something like that.
But God knows we haven't acted to remove that capability, which could be done, even without giving up deterrence altogether.
If no country has a real justification for having the hundred weapons that India and Pakistan have, or that Britain and France, or that China has 300, let alone the thousands that the U.S. has and that Russia has, we don't have any justification for it.
But they do exist.
Conceivably, we could mobilize an effort to remove those doomsday machines.
You can't un-invent nuclear weapons altogether.
Un-invent, in a sense, they could always be reproduced.
But you can eliminate doomsday machines, and you could do it very quickly, really, dismantling these weapons in matters of months.
Without a lot of cost, you'd be saving a lot of cost.
You'd be saving close to a trillion dollars in the U.S. alone, and likewise in Russia, if you did that.
But remember, that's money we pay to ourselves.
We don't buy our weapons from them.
They don't buy our weapons from us.
Our Boeing, our Lockheed make a lot of money from these.
A lot of people have jobs relating to it, likewise in Russia, and likewise, to a much lesser degree, in the other nuclear weapons states.
That's not irrational from a short-term, very narrow point of view.
People have interests in maintaining the doomsday machine, but they're not interested to justify the risk.
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All right.
Now, so that's the thing of it, right, is if you completely dismiss the corporate interest and the bureaucratic interest and you look at it from just what the average civilian might imagine would be the national interest of the United States, do we need to have these nuclear weapons at all?
Or just how reasonable would it be to just go ahead and get rid of all but, I don't know, ten or two?
Well, you've put two possibilities there.
When you say do we need any nuclear weapons at all, if we looked at the idea, which is, of course, couldn't be more remote from political reality, but if you imagine our disarming entirely, while Russia retained many weapons or some weapons, and leaving Russia with a monopoly of nuclear weapons, most people would not feel that served world peace or world order, and even prevented, in the end, wars that would renew our own position, nuclear weapons and others.
In other words, the idea of leaving another adversary or even rival with a monopoly of nuclear weapons right now, most people would not find national security or reason, and they wouldn't be wrong, in my opinion.
I would probably be among them.
How many does it take to deter nuclear attack?
Dr. Herbert York, who was the first head of Livermore Nuclear Weapons Design Laboratory, one of the two, along with Los Alamos Laboratories for many years, once asked that question, how many weapons does it take to deter from nuclear attack a kind of enemy rational enough to be deterred at all?
And his answer, speculative, was one or ten, or by another point of view, he made a calculation, a hundred.
He got to that, by the way, by asking, what's the largest number of people we would like as a ceiling for one person to be able to kill, annihilate, in a day or a week or a year or whatever, a short period of time with nuclear weapons?
And he just said, supposing we said that ceiling was World War II level, 60 million, we said that could be done by a hundred thermonuclear weapons, medium, moderate size, a hundred kilotons, which is moderate for them, a hundred weapons would give you 60 million dead.
Now that was without counting smoke.
Actually, we now know the death toll from that would be closer to one to two billion from starvation.
But in terms of radiation, blast, heat and so forth, right away, he said a hundred.
So he said, putting those together, he thought that a justifiable level in a world where others had nuclear weapons and you had to fear attack to some extent of the possibility or face the threat of it, that something between one, ten and a hundred was the maximum.
And he said, closer to one than a hundred.
He was the head of research and engineering in the Defense Department for years, by the way, and later a major negotiator and a nuclear physicist, very deeply into the design of nuclear weapons, so extremely authoritative.
Every country but North Korea has more than that now.
North Korea has 10, 20, has enough material for 60, might have as much as that, but probably has as much as 10 or 20.
It's very hard to justify any country having more than that, and they all have more than that.
All the others, the other eight.
Israel is said to have 80, but by other estimates, a couple hundred.
How do you need, how does Israel need as many as 80 nuclear weapons?
But anyway, all the others have more than that.
India and Pakistan each more than a hundred.
China something like 300.
Russia and the U.S. actually have on the shelf, in terms of weapons that are supposed to be dismantled but haven't been, each of them has something like 7,000 weapons.
But in terms of operational weapons, each has about 4,000 weapons, 1,500 on alert, far more than enough to cause nuclear winter if their plans were carried out.
And what that means is that since the Cold War ended 35 years ago, the number of weapons between the U.S. and Russia has gone down enormously by 85%, which sounds very impressive.
Except that the effect of these has gone, has not changed at all.
When you've starred everyone, which you do with a slight fraction of the remaining weapons, it really doesn't add, it doesn't affect the final account if you burn cities one or two or ten times over, which is what we've had.
The stakes have not gone down in 35 years since the end of the Cold War at all.
And of course the probability of war went down with the ending of the Cold War because these fears that lead to preemption were diminished, very much so, and the weapons should have been diminished then, not by 85%, but by 90% of where they are right now, down by 99% at the least.
And to zero eventually, definitely.
But they haven't.
And now, with the new Cold War revving up, and these fears revving up again and now again, the risk of that happening is going up, not down.
All right.
Now, I guess in the last couple of minutes here, I really wanted to ask you about this.
It sounds like science fiction.
Now, we know in hindsight that the fears were not justified.
But you talk about in the book about how the men on the Manhattan Project, when they were setting off the first test bomb in New Mexico, that they had done some calculations and figured that there was a real risk, they thought, that they would literally ignite the entire atmosphere on Earth.
Yes, it turns out that one or two very qualified people, in particular Hans Bethe, thought the risk was zero.
That was his intuition.
Almost none of the others agreed with that.
It was not zero.
And most of them thought it was very small, except the most authoritative experimental physicist in the world, probably at that time, Enrico Fermi, was not at all sure that it was as small as the others thought, because he thought, there could be something here we haven't calculated.
This is an experiment that has never been done, anything close to it.
There could be an interaction of some kind we haven't figured in.
And he thought the risk of that was 10%, is what he said on the day of the test.
And he offered odds.
He made a book, jokingly, supposedly, on the end of the world, on whether New Mexico would burn altogether or the entire world.
Now, the reason I went into that so much was it's kind of a forecast of the gambles we've been making ever since.
Wait, by the way, before you make that point, can you explain real quick how that would supposedly work with the nitrogen?
What they feared was that the heat of the atom bomb that they knew would work, they knew they could make an atom bomb work.
Right at the very beginning, in 1942, as they started on the Manhattan Project, as a big organizational effort, they realized that heat of that degree could be the trigger for a fusion reaction.
In hydrogen isotopes, the H-bomb, they saw that as a possibility.
But the same in it, it turned out to be, of course.
They also saw that that heat might ignite the nitrogen in the atmosphere and the hydrogen in the oceans.
And that in a fraction of a second, a millisecond or something, the entire atmosphere and the oceans would ignite entirely, and the earth would from then on be a barren rock.
It wouldn't destroy the earth, it would just destroy all life on the earth.
And that was a possibility that they saw right from the beginning.
It scared the man in charge of the project enough, Compton, that he first thought, we've got to stop all research on this.
If there's even a possibility that we could end life on earth.
Hitler, by the way, was made aware of this at the same time.
And as Albert Speer reports, he was not enthralled by the idea of, surprisingly, of being the author of all destruction, of all life on earth, even as a capability.
He didn't like that idea.
He held it against scientists that they were doing this sort of thing.
But for other reasons, he decided anyway not to go ahead with the bomb.
We went ahead with the research, hoping that it would turn out to be impossible that this would happen.
But it didn't turn out to be impossible by the time they were facing the test of Trinity in 1940, the Trinity test in 1945.
In fact, they didn't really know it until after new data from that test and the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other tests made it clear that after all, it was not a low possibility.
It was not a possibility after all.
Data had been right at the beginning.
It was not possible.
But they went ahead with the test and the explosions, not knowing that.
And the reason, as I say, I dwell on that piece of history is that there were scientists then taking a gamble in 1945, at a time, by the way, when the war against Germany was over.
And the war against Japan, which could have been very costly still, there was no question of victory.
The question was the cost at that point.
Even at that point, they still were making a gamble, which in Fermi's eyes was a 10% gamble, like Paul Nitze in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but a 10% of losing everything on earth.
It's funny in this context.
Compared to that, you say, not just a billion people or two billion people or not just humanity.
You know, if humanity goes with nuclear winter, most life will survive because most biomass is microscopic, microbial, and most of that will survive.
And perhaps some very small animals have survived when the dinosaurs went 65 million years ago.
But, you know, humans would go and civilization would go.
Well, what they were gambling with, even the microbes would go, if you care.
You know, if you identify as a part of life, if you're concerned that life in some form goes on, they were gambling with that.
And what I'm saying is that shows the human propensity for pursuing short-run benefits, narrow benefits of various kinds, which can include just keeping Boeing's production lines running, keeping the votes in on that, keeping our status as protector of West Europe, even when in the last 35 years, West Europe has not needed protection.
But keeping that first-use threat that we've relied on for over 50 years now, that incentive has been enough to gamble with the possibility of the ending of civilization.
And there have been times when that wasn't just 3 in a million or even 10%, as Fermi said.
In the Cuban Missile Crisis on October 27th, the chance of destroying civilization was a lot higher than 10%, as I describe in the book.
We don't have time to go into that, but we got very, very close to it.
I would say that was also true in 1983, had Colonel Petrov in 1983 not decided to say that it was a false alarm that his satellite warning system was giving him, but had said there was a 50% chance that they were being attacked, which is what he actually believed.
But he chose not to report that.
If he'd reported the 50% chance, they would have preempted it at that time, and we wouldn't be here.
So we've relied on the prudence and wisdom of people like Petrov or a subcommander named Arkhipov in the Cuban Missile Crisis to keep us from launching the doomsday machines we have built.
So the story about what was called atmospheric ignition, igniting the atmosphere that I give in the book, is kind of a parable.
It's a true story, but it's a parable for the human willingness to gamble on total destruction, not only of ourselves, but of killing everybody, of murder.
Willingness to gamble on that for kind of short-term benefits, real benefits of prestige, of staying in office, of being the head of an alliance, of winning a particular confrontation.
India and Pakistan looking over Kashmir, for example.
That turns out to be human.
And it's capitalist, but it's not only capitalist.
The Russians were doing this in the early 60s, as I'm saying.
Ever since, other countries are doing it.
It's like climate.
It's a problem humans have created that humans may or may not be able to solve.
Well, I think that you found the solution right here.
A little bit of nuclear winter to balance everything out.
That will solve the problem of climate change for large animals, including most humans.
But after the 10 years of nuclear winter, the carbon dioxide we've already put into the atmosphere will resume its effect on the rest of life.
All right.
Now, when they made the H-bomb, were they worried about the same effect again?
Yes, they were worried.
They had discussions of it and again decided to go ahead.
I've never been able to find out yet whether at some point they decided that that was not possible either with the H-bomb any more than the A-bomb.
Whether they decided that before they exploded one, which they did not do with the A-bomb, I haven't been able to find out.
I mean, they were testing them in the atmosphere over and over again, so they sure were pretty confident, I guess.
But it still sounds like, I don't know.
It sounds crazy, but possible.
Well, what it means is that being crazy is something very accessible to humans, including people who are very smart and intelligent.
They can also do crazy things.
They can be crazy.
They can have crazy beliefs.
And certainly wrong-headed beliefs, which happens all the time, continuously.
You're wrong about lots of things all the time.
But persisting in that craziness, as the Republican Party is about climate right now, persisting against all the scientific evidence that there's no man-made climate crisis.
That's what has led Noam Chomsky to call the Republican Party the most dangerous organization in history.
Well, to stick with the H-bombs here for a second, we have a situation with Trump where he's under such attack for supposedly being the Manchurian candidate and all this stuff here.
Do you think it's possible that he could have a nuclear deal with Russia?
It seems to me like it'd be good politics for him to just turn the tables and do a giant deal.
No, look.
Trump is an execrable character, I would say, from almost every point of view.
He has one sane policy that I'm aware of, and that is he's been saying during the campaign and elsewhere, why can't we be friends with Russia, or at least have normal negotiations, collaborate, cooperate?
In my opinion, that's more sane and prudent policy than the opposite, which is we can't negotiate with Putin any more than we thought we could negotiate with Stalin or Khrushchev or any of the others.
And that was wrong.
That was wrong.
I would say it's wrong now.
So he's on the right path on that one, I would say, opposed by the establishments of both Democratic and Republican, who seem to want a Cold War, and for no reason that I can see other than maintaining a trillion-dollar defense buildup of our doomsday machines, which is good for the corporations and good for the corporations in Russia and in other countries who have black budgets for their nuclear capabilities, which are very prone to corruption, with slush funds.
So they're all pursuing this.
But on this point, I would say Trump is sane, and he talked about, possibly earlier in his administration, of a grand bargain with Putin that would bring down the weapons very, very much.
Now, two things about that.
First of all, he hasn't pursued that, and I see no evidence, I'm sorry to say, that Putin wants to do that, to disappoint his military-industrial complex any more than any of our candidates have wanted to disappoint our military-industrial complex.
That includes Trump.
But we're talking about a buildup that did start under, was scheduled under Obama, and that Hillary Clinton was proposing, too.
Now, I have to say to you, since you've raised the subject, why is he saying this?
Well, maybe just because he's sane.
That's not the answer that comes first to mind with Donald J. Trump.
Why is he right on this one subject when I think many other people are wrong?
My own guess, I'll tell you personally, it's speculation, is that on this point, they do have blackmail on him of various kinds.
And they will turn out to be, hasn't been proved yet, definitely not.
I think it will turn out to be that there was a lot of money laundering done by the Trump Organization for Russian oligarchs, criminals, various people.
They have something on him.
Even so, the policy, I would say, of negotiation, of reducing weapons, which he's no longer talking about, would be a good one.
And we have to face the fact that politicians, like other humans, are mixed bags, and they can be very wrong on many subjects and right on one or two.
And we have to use our best judgment.
Any judgment that leads toward war with the other nuclear superpower, Russia, is to me a very bad judgment and very unwise judgment.
And we see that in people that I otherwise respect very much or are on the right track.
And if indeed, when Trump went to Korea, or for that matter, Helsinki, a lot of Democrats who didn't want to give him any credit for anything were denouncing that.
That was not my opinion.
I favor these negotiations and hope something comes of them, which is not terribly likely with John Bolton there.
And I think I have to say, anyone who says that a Republican House right now is not worse than a Democratic-controlled House is, in my opinion, in as great a state of denial as climate change deniers.
But listen, so let me ask you about what you think about what's going on at the Rand Corporation now.
I've had no contact with them for 40 years.
Are they with me?
I have no idea what they're doing now.
Do you read their papers or anything?
Not really, no.
I don't respect that process that much.
So, no, I don't read their papers.
I don't have time.
I see.
Well, I mean, I'm kind of curious as, you know, the way you describe your work there at the time and how justified you were convinced your beliefs were about what was going on and what needed to be done about it.
I wondered, you know, how cockamamie their reports come out compared to y'alls from back then when the USSR is gone, when Soviet communism is defeated.
And this is all, as you say, just a make-work program for these arms dealer companies.
And it's so obvious to everyone.
I don't have the impression that Rand is a big player anymore as they used to be when they were almost the first so-called think tank.
So that's why I haven't kept in touch with him.
There's no question at all that there are many think tanks that support the Cold War.
By the way, Rand has done some reasonable reports I see reported in the paper from time to time.
Things like, for example, they strongly said years ago when they were not adopted that from all the research they could do, gays in the military would not be harmful to the national security, contrary to public policy at that time, contrary to General Powell, for example.
And they had various reports on this and that.
When they come up with something good, I don't find them implemented very quickly, if at all.
Well, they're good on the Mujahedini caulk.
I don't know what they're good.
I did notice that they had a couple on gays that seemed quite reasonable.
Hey, listen, thank you, Dan.
And listen, I really appreciated every word of this book.
It's really great.
And I hope everyone will read it, too.
Okay, good.
Thanks.
All right.
Thanks again, Dan.
Appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that's Dan Ellsberg, ellsberg.net.
There's a bunch of web extras and stuff like that, documents and what have you.
The book is The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
And before that, of course, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
