All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And now another former employee of the RAND Corporation from a few years further back.
It's the American hero, Daniel Ellsberg, liberator of the Pentagon Papers, author of Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers and keeper of the website Ellsberg.net.
You can read either there or somewhere.
You can read chapter one of his book, Secrets, about the day of the Gulf of Tonkin non-incident, which is incredibly important and interesting.
Welcome back to the show.
Dan, how are you?
Fine.
Glad to be here, Scott.
Good, good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Now, this is a very important article that you've written with a co-author, David Krieger, at the Christian Science Monitor, csmonitor.com.
For nuclear security beyond Seoul, eradicate land-based doomsday missiles.
And Seoul refers to the meeting that was held a couple of weeks ago there in Seoul, South Korea.
But now the real point is the abolition of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
First of all, can you tell us, please, about your co-author, David Krieger?
Who's he?
Well, he's the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
He's been a leading voice for the abolition of nuclear weapons, keeping that option, trying to put that option on the table, if you like.
He was encouraged, of course, by President Obama's taking that as his goal, his ultimate goal, a world free of nuclear weapons.
And David Krieger has been pressing that point for over a generation.
I must say, I wasn't as encouraged by that as David was.
I'm an associate.
I'm what they call a senior research associate of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
But I wasn't encouraged by that.
After all, Reagan announced the same goal.
So did Carter.
As a matter of fact, people have forgotten that in his inaugural address.
And a number of presidents have talked about the abolition of nuclear weapons and done very little about it.
And as I see President Obama so far, he's done very little about it.
And I will remain to be convinced that he's really committed to that.
Yeah, me too.
In fact, his whole big speech there in the Czech Republic, the first half of it was great.
And then the second half was about how he didn't really mean it.
It was all right there in the speech.
In fact, the crowd in the Czech Republic even kind of grew quiet and was like, what?
Yeah, he said, this won't happen in our lifetimes, but maybe someday, you know, occasion of this one of the occasions of this op ed being written, it was written in the aftermath of our having protested.
David and I both got arrested protesting the law.
Now, hold on a second, Dan, because I was going to ask you about that.
But first, I wanted to recommend to people that they read your series at Truth Dig all about nuclear weapons.
I wanted to ask you about whether or not you're still working on a book about America's doomsday machine.
Yes, I have a contract with Bloomsbury Press on for a book tentatively entitled The American Doomsday Machine Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, which is what I was back in the 60s, early.
And now the series of articles at Truth Dig are just incredible.
I beg everybody to go look at that came out in, I think, what, 2010, right?
Yeah, two years ago.
OK, now, yes, as you mentioned in this article, I was going to say I gave a talk last week at Brave New Books and Cindy, she handed to and she mentioned being arrested with you referring to a test at Vandenberg Air Force Base where you two went to protest and try to shut it down.
It was a test of what, Dan?
Of a Minuteman three missile.
The our land based missiles are called Minuteman three.
They now have single warheads, although they by current arrangements could go back to multiple warheads as they used to have.
We have now 450 of them.
There's schedule years from now to get down to prep 350.
We were one to draw attention to the fact that if those things were ever set off, sent off en masse as they could be on the basis of a false alarm, they would do us as much harm as any Russian retaliation, because the smoke from the burning cities that they would engender would cover the globe, actually, with stratospheric cover of smoke.
This is the old nuclear winter hypothesis, which has been confirmed by by recent computer modeling in the last few years very strongly.
They would cut out most of the Earth's sunlight.
The sunlight we're getting from the sun and kill the harvest, deprive the Earth of harvest for a number of years.
The smoke would last 10 years or more.
It would kill years of harvests around the world and starve everyone to death.
OK, now, could you talk first about, as you do in the article here at CS Monitor dot com, the incentives, the way it's set up with these missiles in their silos, that a false alarm gives of just one errant missile, maybe, would give the incentive to launch everything we've got.
Why is that?
There's two reasons, really, that bear, particularly on these land-based missiles, like the Minuteman III and the Russians also have land-based missiles, which makes for the worst of situations, because it means that each side has two incentives to launch on a warning, an electronic or infrared warning, that they might be under attack, of which there have been numerous false alarms in the past, some of them lasting for many minutes of the few minutes that are available in order to retaliate.
The reason that such a warning presses the leaders of the respective countries to launch their missiles is, in the first instance, that they may be about to lose them.
If the warning is valid, if there really is an enemy attack underway, then these land-based missiles are very vulnerable.
Few of them will survive a large-scale attack by the other side.
So it's use them or lose them.
The second reason is...
With very little time to make that choice, whether you want to use them or lose them.
A handful of minutes, perhaps 12 minutes, out of the 30-minute flight time of the enemy's missiles would be available after lower levels have analyzed the threat, the warning, and eliminated, let's say, a lot of the false warning, the noise that appears every day, but we have decided this is really a serious event, a serious warning.
The second reason to get them off very fast, and these land-based missiles can be launched within minutes, seconds to minutes, is to attack the enemies, the adversaries' land-based missiles and their command and control before all of those missiles can be launched.
Even if the order to launch is given, it's not clear that everything will get off on time.
As we know from space events, they don't all take off right away.
And the sooner you can get yours off and attack the other side's missiles in its silos, the idea is the less damage you'll suffer from their missiles.
You won't have to wait for their missiles to come over.
So both to keep your own from being destroyed and to destroy the other side's fixed land-based vulnerable missiles, there's great incentive not to wait any longer, but to get those missiles off and perhaps come out of the war less destroyed than otherwise.
And ironically, for the last 50 years, that's basically a delusion.
You can't really, that second incentive to destroy the other guy's missiles doesn't really get rid of his submarine-based missiles, which can't be targeted.
And those will be enough on either side, especially us against the Soviets, against the Russians, to destroy their society entirely.
So the idea of limiting damage has been a kind of hoax, a bluff all this time.
And yet it does shape and determine all of our posture, our buying of missiles, our deployment, our training, everything else has been based on this notion that's been a delusion now for half a century, that you could seriously limit your damage by getting in the first strike.
The truth is that the first strike will result in as much damage just from retaliation as a second strike.
But what we're presenting in this piece is the new data that even without retaliation, the effects of your own strike on burning cities on the other side will be suicidal.
Suicidal, and not just to our own country, but to all complex life on Earth.
We've got to hold it right there and go out to this break.
We're talking with Daniel Ellsberg, the heroic liberator of the Pentagon Papers.
He's working on a new book called America's Doomsday Machine about our nuclear weapons stockpiling.
He's got this great piece at the CS Monitor for Nuclear Security Beyond Seoul, Eradicate Land-Based Doomsday Missiles.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're talking with Daniel Ellsberg, liberator of the Pentagon Papers, bringer-downer of Richard Nixon, and author of this piece at the Christian Science Monitor for Nuclear Security Beyond Seoul, Eradicate Land-Based Doomsday Missiles.
And I want to mention by name here, Hiroshima Day, America has been asleep at the wheel for 64 years, and a hundred holocausts, an insider's window into U.S. nuclear policy.
Both of those articles are at Truthdig, part of this project that will culminate in the book Dan is writing, The American Doomsday Machine.
And I also see here at your Truthdig bio page, Dan, it says that you wrote this paper, Risk, Ambiguity, and Decision.
And this reminds me again that, you know, you're not just this peace activist, you're this brilliant war strategist type, you know, you confessed a minute ago into being a former nuclear war planner.
And so you understand all this complex game theory and all of these and those kinds of things, and your article at the Christian Science Monitor, if I understand it right, is basically a nice half-measure, a modest proposal, that let's get rid of the ICBMs.
It's easy to say, let's just get rid of all nukes, but you're trying to come up with a proposal that policy makers could actually maybe get behind here, that, you know, we'll still have plenty of missiles to blow up the whole world with, just if we got rid of these kinds, we could even keep mutually assured destruction as a strategy, I guess, under your plan.
But we would be much less likely to go to war over a mistake, as has almost happened so many times in the past.
Yeah, well said.
The, if these land-based missiles, just on our side alone, the best thing would be for, by all means, to get them off either the Russians and the U.S., the Russians are less likely to do that, they have fewer submarines, they're much less reliable, they don't rely on their submarines, they keep most of them in port most of the time, whereas we keep a number at sea all the time.
But if we got rid of ours, that would deprive the Soviets, I keep saying that, I'm sorry, lifetime is a cold word, the Russians, it would deprive them of targets, essentially, to aim at, to try to reduce their damage in a preemptive strike, it would take away the incentive for them to strike on warning of the kind of false, ambiguous warning that they've had a number of times, and thus protect us from their mistake.
And at the same time, it would take away the incentive for our man in the Oval Office to launch those missiles to keep them from being destroyed.
We would have given them up.
The truth is, those missiles have been anachronistic, obsolete, unnecessary, and dangerous for over half a century since we acquired submarine missiles that could handle any conceivable targets for us, and that were invulnerable for attack.
So we should have gotten rid of these things 50 years ago and more, but they continue in part because they provide a small amount of jobs in Montana and Wyoming and North Dakota for the, I take it, the restaurants that serve the people who sit down in these silos much of the time and get ready to turn the key and launch them.
They shouldn't be there, and we would do well to find other work for the people who are servicing those doomsday weapons.
All right, now, I guess most people would think, just numbers-wise, you could do the math and figure out maybe American nukes are the most likely to go off in the world, just because we have the most, or us and the Russians, but it seems like the most tense nuclear standoff in the world would be Indian-Pakistan.
Another point of this very same article, based on recent scientific studies by atmospheric scientists, is that even a relatively small war of 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons, that is, atomic bombs, the kind of weapons that are now the triggers for our H-bombs, for our thermonuclear weapons, 100 of those, and they have more than 100, would cause not the end of life on Earth, but about a billion deaths from starvation, as the effects on the ozone layer and the smoke, which would be less than the overall attack, but enough over time, and again, these effects would last for a decade or more, to reduce harvest all over the world and cause about a billion marginally fed people now to die from starvation.
So the rest of the world has a great stake in keeping that war from happening, that is perhaps the most likely, actually, deliberate attack to take place in the world, an India-Pakistan event, and the fact remains that their few hundreds of weapons are far more than they have a right to threaten the world with in these effects.
Well, all the more, of course, then, that's true of the other nuclear states, but above all, the US and Russia, which have 95% of the warheads, which can in fact extinguish life on Earth if we carry out our existing war plans.
We have no right to have such a doomsday machine in operation.
Now, if I had asked you the day after Gorbachev resigned whether we would still have this nuclear posture in 2012, what would you have said, do you think?
Well, the day after he resigned would have been a day to worry, to start with, because I believe Gorbachev was the single world leader on any side here who really did understand the apocalyptic aspects of these weapons and was determined to take real action to get rid of them.
I should say that what's come out more recently is that Reagan actually had that vision, but he was so committed to this illusory Star Wars approach, which he could not give up, that he couldn't arrive at a practical move, except in a limited way, which he did do with Gorbachev, to move in that direction.
But the man, I think, really had a very thorough practical grasp of what was Gorbachev, and to lose him was a very serious danger for the human species.
Okay, well, I didn't phrase my question well.
After it was pretty clear that, hey, the Cold War is over and we can be friends with the Russians now.
Once that, we were at that point.
That should have led to a total rethinking of our posture, and unfortunately it just hasn't.
Yeah, it seems like everybody just forgot about it all, if you ask people.
A lot of our weapons, we still have more than enough left, more than enough left on alert to, and subject to false alarm, to destroy life on Earth.
That's inexcusable.
It's outrageous, and it's insane.
These sound like rhetorical overkill here or something, hyperbole.
It's not at all.
I think if there's ever been an insane policy, it's the nuclear policies that both sides have followed for half a century here and more, and in particular today, with the Cold War over, there isn't the slightest element of strategic rationale for these capabilities for massive destruction to exist.
Yeah, maybe they just need to play the Atomic Cafe on TV more often.
We're not ever subjected in popular culture to anti-nuclear propaganda, you know?
It's gone away.
People think the problem has been solved since the end of the Cold War, and of course, the chance of an all-out war between Russia and the U.S. has undoubtedly gone down.
The trouble is, it hasn't gone down close to zero, and it should be zero, and it isn't.
We could easily make it, for example, even without abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, we could easily, in principle here, bring the weapons down in numbers to a level that would not threaten the destruction of civilization, the destruction of life on Earth.
That would mean, though, not getting down to where they're talking about now, a thousand warheads on each side, and other thousands in reserve.
It would mean getting down to dozens, down to the level, let's say, that China actually has.
China has a dozen or two dozen intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Well, and just to try to back you up here, that it's not just hippie, beatnik, peaceniks like you, Daniel Ellsberg, but it was Robert Gates' own staff, just wrote a report in the last couple years, said, eh, all we need is 14, enough to nuke the capitals of every country who could ever conceivably mess with us, and that's all.
I'm not sure I know that study.
I'd be glad to hear it.
Do you have a reference on that?
I could find it and email it to you, for sure, yeah.
Yeah, send it to me.
But that would be interesting.
Google it right now and see what I can find.
A leak occurred about a month ago, that the Pentagon right now is doing an implementation study for the nuclear posture review that was done a couple years ago, in 2010.
So now they're talking about implementing it, and the leak occurred saying that they were considering going down to levels of, on the one hand, 1,100 from the current floor going down to perhaps 1,000 or 1,100, or 700 or 800, or 300.
Now, I really sat up when I saw that 300.
300 is actually still enough on the edge, if we target it on cities, to destroy life on Earth.
So it's still too many for any nation to have.
But nevertheless, that's a serious reduction that would make a difference, in fact.
Whereas going down to 1,000 essentially doesn't make a difference.
That's what we're likely to do.
1,000 is still far more than is needed to cause a nuclear winter.
And to have those on both sides is inexcusable.
And that's where they're likely to come out.
But when the 300 was mentioned, the Republicans just rose as a body and used phrases like reckless lunacy to think of this.
Well, I was kind of glad to see that phrase get into circulation as a part of serious discussion here, because it really is a good characterization of our actual policy this year and every year in the past, for the last 50.
Reckless lunacy is a good way to describe it.
So I'm glad that's in polite usage now.
But they were saying, no, 300 would be reckless lunacy.
We need 1,000, 1,000 or more.
We need far more than is needed to destroy life on Earth.
300 can just marginally do that.
Well, I'm sorry I was not able to pull up the report or an article on this report right offhand.
But I'm positive I did not make this up.
So I'm going to find a footnote and send it on to you.
But I believe it was the Office of the Secretary of Defense, people working directly for Gates, who put out this report saying we only need 14.
Well, let me say that Herb York, who was the first director of Livermore Labs, which was put up to pursue Teller's dream of thermonuclear weapons and to compete with Los Alamos, he was the first director of Livermore Labs and then later director of research and engineering in the Defense Department and a major arms negotiator later.
He wrote a piece for Livermore on what the real requirements for deterrence were.
He said you could go at it from two directions.
On the one hand, how many warheads does it really take to deter another country from attacking you?
He could have said, for example, how many would Saddam have needed to keep us from attacking him in either the Gulf War or if he'd had any, which he didn't, in 2003.
How many would he have needed?
Would he need a thousand?
No.
He suggested one, two, three, four, maybe ten in case they were able to lose, in case he couldn't guarantee that some of them would survive.
So you might want as many as ten to deter.
North Korea has tens, if any.
We're not sure really what they have in the way of weapons, but they might have as many as ten or so.
Even George W. Bush stopped talking about attacking North Korea while he was focused on Iraq.
North Korea went ahead and tested weapons and actually acquired some.
On the other hand, York said, what if you went from another direction and said what is the maximum number of deaths you would want one world leader to be able to cause in a short time?
That's a question rarely asked or never asked.
Supposing you thought that the most they should be able to cause in the way of fatalities would be something like the total deaths of World War II, something between 40 and 60 million.
You didn't want any one human to have more power than that.
He said, well, that would mean about 100 warheads.
He said it's very utmost 200, but really 100.
From this point of view, York said, something that requires a deterring attack would be somewhere from 1 to 10 to 100 and closer to 1 than 100.
Here you would have what you're suggesting is the Gates people were on that line, something 10 or 14 or something like that.
That's not crazy at all.
In fact, that's the way in which China has actually based its deterrent policy.
They were far less insane in that than the U.S. or Russia with the thousands, the tens of thousands that they came to acquire.
The fact remains that anybody should be asked, what would be the target, say, for the 300 weapons that France may have now or a couple hundred.
Israel probably has 200 to 300, if not more.
What are the targets for those, and what would the environmental impact be of sending those off?
Would it be destroying most of life on Earth, or if they weren't all targeted on cities, what exactly would it be, half a billion, a billion people?
How could this be conceivably justified?
And yet this is the state of reckless lunacy that the human species has gotten itself into.
On a not all that minor but somewhat minor point there, since you mentioned it, I wanted to ask you about what you said about Israel there.
I believe, because I've quoted you, this is why I remember it.
I don't actually remember you saying it.
I remember me saying that you said it before.
But did you not tell me before on the show that Mordecai Ben-Nunu himself told you that Israel has as many as 600 nuclear bombs, including H-bombs?
That was his estimate when I last talked to him some years ago in Israel.
I just wanted to make sure I had that right, because you just used a number a bit lower than that.
He had initially, before he spent 18 years in prison, back in the 1980s, that his estimate as a worker at Timona was that they had some 300 then, and that they had been making them steadily ever since.
That's 30 years ago.
I noticed that the recent...
Of course, officially, we have not been willing to challenge Israel's ambiguity on this.
Israel refuses to admit they have any.
And so Americans dutifully follow that ridiculous delusion, hoax, and to refuse to confirm that we know they do have some.
The next question is, how many?
There was no question that Mordecai Ben-Nunu's photographs from Timona showed that they had a much bigger program than even the CIA had estimated.
And yet, we'll now see estimates of theirs, if one estimates are made, that Israel has some 75 or 100, or we often see 200.
Well, I can't help feeling or remembering that Mordecai told me he thought 600 years ago, and that 300 as early as the mid-80s.
So I imagine there is considerable uncertainty there.
My guess is that it's much higher than the official estimates we're seeing now of 200.
If they have as many as 300 or more, that would make them actually the third largest nuclear power in numbers of warheads after the U.S. and Russia, and ahead of France, which is estimated to have about 300.
England is estimated to have about 200.
My guess is that, strongly based on this, is that Israel has at least as many as those, and possibly more.
But possibly not.
Maybe they've simply gotten rid of a number of weapons.
Somebody did mention to me recently, an expert, that conceivably they did not keep up the same pace of production that Ben-Nunu experienced in the early 70s, and that that was a burst that didn't persist as much.
But even that would suggest they had a lot more than we're estimating.
And I come back to the point, how can they justify even that number?
Well, if they can't justify it, and I don't think they can, of course the U.S., which has more than 10 times any of those estimates, can't justify what we have or the Russians have.
And that's the reality.
The fact that we've come down enormously from the levels of total of some 67,000 weapons between the U.S. and Russia.
Yes, we've come down to perhaps 10,000 each when we consider the weapons that are slated for destruction but have not been destroyed.
That's close to 5,000 on each side.
And we have about 5,000, including operational weapons and reserve weapons on each side.
So we're down to about 20,000 or perhaps 10,000 operational, so-called operational weapons, although the other weapons slated for destruction could also blow up the world, too, without much refurbishing.
So we're at a level, in other words, that is just, what can one say?
It's Alice in Wonderland, surreal, insane.
And although people talk about the unlikelihood of a false alarm that would set these things off or a decision to escalate to those, and it is unlikely, but so is it unlikely that Fukushima would be hit by a tsunami or that the current, and that something, by the way, is still of great danger, or New Orleans be hit by Katrina.
How unlikely was that?
Well, actually, over a period of time, it was pretty likely.
It was foreseen.
Right, yeah, that's what I like to always say.
I saw a scientist on TV one time say that, hey, as long as we have these thousands of nuclear weapons, there's a probability greater than zero that they will be used at some point.
I think that's true.
Simple as that.
And that it really, there's no remaining, we were subject to various delusions during the Cold War that encouraged us to, our companies to make a lot of profits and the Air Force to build up to the level of thousands of warheads, the delusions that the Russians were racing us in the 50s and had a crash program, which was scarcely more true than the idea that Saddam had a crash program that he was building up in 2002.
So these various delusions fed this race, and the delusion, for example, that striking first would leave us much significantly better off than if we suffered a first strike by the other side.
That was probably true in the 50s.
It hasn't been true since the mid-60s.
That's almost 50 years ago, and yet we've continued to operate entirely on the assumption that preemption is a rational policy and that getting in the first row will make a big difference.
I guess I thought that nuclear winter and extinction-level events and all these kinds of things, that would be in the case of a full-scale nuclear war between probably not even just America and Russia, but also throw in China and Europe and everybody picking sides and nuking the whole planet.
That kind of absolute worst-case scenario, like when Rumsfeld was in charge of the continuity of government drills, and he always escalated it to an extinction-level event.
But I guess what I was really surprised to learn was about these studies emphasizing that even a limited war, as you said, fought between India and Pakistan, who presumably only have atom bombs, only atom bombs, not H-bombs, that a war with them with a few score nukes used on each side could be enough to kill how many millions of people again?
And where can people read these studies that you're talking about, the new ones?
Good question.
I've noticed this Christian Science Monitor piece has been reproduced in a number of places, including antiwar.com and Common Dreams.
But when they reproduce it, I notice they don't put on the last link, which I felt was very important in the Christian Science Monitor piece.
So if you go to the, on Google, whatever, you go to the Christian Science Monitor account, there is a link at the bottom that says for all the scientific references that are referred to in this piece, hit on this, hit on this button.
So it's important to go to that.
What was the date of this thing?
It was posted March 27th in the Christian Science Monitor.
And that has more than a dozen scientific references, some of which are the most recent ones, 2007, 2008, even 2010.
And what they bring out is that the original nuclear winter studies of 30 years ago actually underestimated the effects of these, the smoke that would be generated into the stratosphere by a nuclear war, nuclear attacks on cities.
For one thing, the computer models of that day were limited to looking at the effects for only months or most a year or so.
It now turns out that this smoke ball will last for over 10 years and will prevent harvests essentially through that time.
Well, a year without global harvests, let alone two or three or four, is enough basically to starve virtually everyone.
Global supplies of food and grain amount to 40 to 50 days for the world.
And even with very careful distribution, which is questionable with the transportation networks having been destroyed and with the kinds of hoarding that is likely to replace international trade in the event of such a breakdown, everybody dies.
You talk about nuclear, it's a nuclear famine, a nuclear darkness and a nuclear famine.
And a smaller form of that that doesn't threaten everyone but does threaten a billion people can come, as I say, from just 50 Hiroshima-sized weapons on each side of an India-Pakistan event.
But the larger scale nuclear winter that causes everyone to die by famine is threatened, they now see, by much less than what Carl Sagan and Turko and Roebuck estimated 30 years ago.
Some hundreds of thermonuclear warheads that's larger than India-Pakistan have, H-bomb warheads, hundreds of them could cause a nuclear winter and certainly the thousand operational warheads that Obama and Medvedev or now Putin are likely to come up with as the next floor is far more than enough on either side to cause this.
So this has been out of people's thinking for many years now, especially since the end of the Cold War, it shouldn't have been because the doomsday machines are still in good working order and still subject to false alarms as before and far more than is needed to end the human experiment.
Yeah, the entire thing.
People can look online for nuclear close calls or whatever and there's at least 20 of them.
I think the worst one is one that you and I have talked about before too is after the Cold War, 1993, right?
A Norwegian satellite was set up and the word just didn't get all the way through the Russian chain of command the way it was supposed to and alarms started blaring and lights flashing and it was just one guy's cool demeanor that saved the planet from human extinction.
Yeah, that was 1995, January 20.
It's referred to, and those references are, as I say, linked at the end of the Christian Science Monitor account.
Oh, and that has the list of close calls there too?
It has a large list, including a list of launch on warning problems and the false alarms.
Well now, is it right that the American policy now is to scrap the mutually assured destruction posture and try to gain, sort of like in that SWAT team sense, that overwhelming first strike force so that you don't dare resist and even try to gain that capability against Russia?
Probably not to the same degree.
There's a lot of complications here.
The Russian forces have so degraded since the end of the Cold War, mainly for economic reasons.
For one thing, they lost a lot of their early warning capability when they lost East Europe, some of which was located there, and then a lot of the other is just run down greatly, so their warning capability is more ambiguous, and in a way that's more dangerous.
It creates more uncertainty in an event such as this weather launch rocket that almost led to an all-out attack.
But also, their submarines, as I say, are mostly in port now for safety reasons, among other things.
And the chance that a U.S. attack could destroy their land-based missiles is perhaps greater than it was sometimes in the past.
But that doesn't mean, though, that it really does have a significant first strike capability.
The fact remains that it doesn't take that much to destroy the U.S. society, far less than they would be likely to respond with if we launched a first strike.
So that remains as delusory as ever.
It's like a Dr. Strangelove argument.
Well, how many cities are we willing to tolerate?
Those are the kind of discussions that Pentagon war planners have, right?
Well, what if we did lose Denver and Minneapolis and Dallas?
We'd still have Houston, and we'd still have, I don't know, Miami.
I'm hoping that if people can really take in the fact that our current war plans threaten the loss of all of our cities and rural areas just by starvation from the smoke-related effects and the ozone effects of our own attacks, that might conceivably make people fit up a bit to the fact that these were suicidal as well as massively homicidal.
Could the result of this implementation study should be to dispense with this totally anachronistic land-based leg of the so-called triad, leaving us essentially with our submarine force.
And that, too, should be reduced greatly in size to prevent it from being the kind of threat to the Russian land-based forces that would cause the Russians to launch their weapons before they were afraid of losing them.
In other words, there should not be a posture on either side that encourages the other to launch on warning and to launch on a possibly mistaken warning of attack.
And for that matter, we should not be, even if there were a valid attack, for us to launch the scale of attack and retaliation that we're now planning is simply to compound the suicidal nature of that.
It's to destroy crops all over the world with our own retaliation.
That isn't to say you could imagine a revenge attack of some kind that would not be thoroughly suicidal, but it wouldn't be the kind of attack we're planning.
It wouldn't be on the scale we're planning.
Even revenge of the kind we're planning and preparing for is literally suicidal.
Well, now, as a student of Joseph Heller, I kind of imagine that the Air Force and the Navy and the Army and everybody has dibs on every nuclear target ten times over and whatever for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with how any one smart war planner would actually plan it, right?
They all just have dibs, and so they just nuke the same city and the same field of silos over and over and over again in their plans, don't they?
Well, I think it's back in 50 years ago when they were looking at this, I think somebody figured there was something like 180 weapons targeted on Moscow because every unit wanted to have at least one suicide flight unrefueled, get one warhead on Moscow from its unit, so they were going to drive that one Moscow down to the center of the Earth, essentially.
Yeah.
Apparently, you know, that's been noticed year after year after year, and they've tried to reduce the numbers on Moscow and Leningrad, and I don't think they've ever gotten them below some extravagant figure.
I can't wait to read your book.
I'll tell you, your articles at Truthdig and these interviews have just been incredible.
The proposal at the Christian Science Monitor, I think, is extremely important, and I think you make the proposal in a way that it ought to be at least taken seriously over there.
I suspect that President Obama has never been confronted with the actual predictable results of his carrying out any of the options that he's being confronted with.
Like other presidents, he's taken part in rehearsals of doomsday, of responding to warning, and I'd be very surprised to learn that any of those rehearsals have acquainted him with the nuclear winter effects, the climatic and environmental effects of what he would be doing.
But, you know, he used to pal around with Dick Lugar in the Senate and was taken under Lugar's wing, and Lugar's always been a big champion of buying up loose nuclear material from Russia and has had a real concern and expertise in that issue, so Obama, you know, he can't just claim ignorance because at least he's had the opportunity to talk with his own Dan Ellsberg, so to speak, about this issue and really become educated about it.
I think these latest results that show the extreme effects of even a relatively small war between India and Pakistan, which has come close to happening several times...
And by the way, I've posted your...
...recent studies, I think 2007, 2008, when he was busy running for president.
I'm serious when I say that, and I'm not downgrading him on this point, when I say that I doubt if the president has really been acquainted with those, because the Defense Department is basically in a state of denial, simply of ignoring those since they so strongly challenge their actual war planning.
I'm not sure that's true.
It may well be true in Russia as well.
He's got a laptop computer.
If we can get this in front of the president, not just our column, but the references that underlie it, the scientific references, I'd do anything to get that.
But when we raised it with some people in the president's science office, what we got back was they're so thoroughly kept out of such considerations by the Pentagon, of interfering with their war planning, that even the science advisors who would be ideal for studying this issue are kept from knowing the actual targeting, meaning what would the actual environmental effects of our current plans be.
That could change, in theory, but it would take overcoming political obstacles to do it.
Well, you know, you mentioned Reykjavik and Reagan's wish to get rid of nuclear weapons, and they say, I forgot who says, but somebody says that it's because he saw the movie the day after, with Steve Guttenberg and all them, that depicted an American newt.
And Reagan saw it, and it really brought home to him the reality of his brinksmanship, and so he decided he was on a mission from God to get rid of them after that.
And so it seems like maybe these politicians actually do have minds that can be changed, huh?
We didn't know at the time how sincere Reagan was in his revulsion against nuclear weapons.
That unfortunately led him to take refuge in a delusion fostered by Edward Teller and others, that he could take care of the problem technically, technologically, with the Star Wars system.
And he clung to that.
It's possible even to regret that Gorbachev didn't play into that illusion somehow and let him have his Star Wars, since it never has come around to being able to work.
And yet it remains, of course, a bone between us and the Russians still with the ballistic missile defense.
And it was the sticking point where they really could have had a deal at Reykjavik except for that.
It could be that Gorbachev should have said, all right, all right, you can have Star Wars since it won't work anyway, and let's get rid of the nuclear weapons.
But I do have to sympathize with Gorbachev at that time clinging on to the one agreement, the most serious agreement we had, which was to ban the Star Wars type of defense and not being willing to let go of it.
A great opportunity was missed there, though, there's no question.
We've kept you away over time here.
I want to thank you very sincerely for your time on the show again, Dan, as always.
Because so few people discuss this question at all these days that I'm happy to have the opportunity to do it.
Well, you know, Cindy said that you guys spent hours handcuffed in the back of a military police truck wondering whether you would be the first examples Obama made with his new NDAA law.
And so I'm very glad to hear that you're home safe and sound and able to use the telephone.
They haven't come for you quite yet, Dan.
OK, thanks a lot.
Not again, anyway.
All right, thanks.
Everybody, that is the heroic Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg.net is his website.
His article at the Christian Science Monitor is, Nuclear security beyond Seoul.
Eradicate land-based doomsday missiles.
And you know what?
Just type Dan Ellsberg, or in fact, forget Dan, just Ellsberg CSM, and it'll come right up in your search engine.
And please also check him out at Truthdig Hiroshima Day.
America's been asleep at the wheel for 64 years and a hundred holocausts.
An insider's window into U.S. nuclear policy.
He's got a book coming out soon that will be called The American Doomsday Machine.
And boy, are we lucky that he's around, if you ask me.
