Alright y'all, that's a little bit of Born Dead Icons for you here on Chaos Radio.
I want to share with you a couple of quotes here real quick before I bring Dan Ellsberg up.
Dwight Eisenhower, in July 1945, Secretary of War Stimson visiting my headquarters in Germany informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan.
I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act.
The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced in my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.
It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.
The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude." In another quote, Dwight Eisenhower said to Newsweek, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing.
Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, quote, it is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.
The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening.
My own feeling was that, in being first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark ages.
I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
Daniel Ellsberg, welcome to the show, sir.
Glad to be here.
Thank you, Scott.
I'm very happy to have you here, and this is a very interesting, really an incredible article you have here at Truthdig, Hiroshima Day, America has been asleep at the wheel for 64 years, and you tell your personal story of, you know, your own experience in finding out that the bomb had been used, etc.
And the reason I wanted to include those quotes at the beginning of this interview here is because here are two men, and it goes on, there's MacArthur, of course, and many others who oppose the dropping of the bomb, but those two particular quotes right there show Ike Eisenhower and General Eisenhower and Admiral Leahy both as being very thoughtful as to what this really means to destroy a city, how many people will be being killed, what this will mean for the future, and these are the same things that you write in your article that you were thinking about at the time as a kid, a junior high school aged kid.
This was, these were the very same kinds of questions that you were asking yourself, and as opposed to the voice of the president on the radio, the little haberdasher, Klansman, Harry Truman, apparently just sounded like George W. Bush up there, yeah, we did it, we dropped the bomb, it was great, and it was more powerful than this, that, and the other thing, and he wasn't thoughtful at all, not as thoughtful as you as a junior high school student about what he had done.
Well, that's true.
Now, as I say in the article, looking back, there was no reason to think that I and my classmates at school, who all had pretty much the same reaction coming from different backgrounds, were moral giants or prodigies of some sort.
The fact is that we were introduced to the bomb in a context that was different from nearly all other Americans that were outside the Manhattan Project, which was producing the bomb.
And that was, we were focused on the question of what it would mean for the future, exclusively, as a matter of fact.
We were talking about it in the fall of 1944, because of a question put to us by our social science teacher, as to what it would mean for the world, for humanity, for a weapon to exist that was a thousand times more powerful than the most powerful bombs of World War II.
Those were called blockbusters, because they destroyed a city block.
They were ten tons of high explosive.
And he posed very prophetically, actually, that a U-235 bomb, which he'd read about in an article, it's a possibility, would have an explosive power a thousand times that, which is just about exactly right.
The Hiroshima bomb was the equivalent of 13, or now they say 15 or 16, thousand tons, thousand tons of high explosive compared to ten tons.
So what would it mean for us?
And I think it wasn't hard at all for even a 13-year-old or a ninth grader, which is what we were, to conclude humanity doesn't need that.
Humanity can't handle that.
That will be dangerous for the future.
And other, there were some scientists on the Manhattan Project who, unlike the others, who were all crashing to get the bomb ready in time first for Germany, and then when that passed, and the bomb wasn't ready, to go to Japan.
And most of them were working day to day on just how to trigger it, how to get it over there, everything.
A handful of people at Chicago, the Metallurgical Laboratory, which was the Chicago part of the Manhattan Project, did sit up their thoughts and spend some time thinking about what it would mean for the future, and focused on that, they reached the same conclusion.
And they knew something that we didn't know, and that was that this bomb was only, as they put it, a first step.
In fact, it would prove to be, and they foresaw this, nothing other than the trigger to a bomb which would itself be a thousand times more powerful than the A-bomb, the H-bomb.
So looking at the future, whether you saw the H-bomb ahead or simply the use of multiple A-bombs, the Nagasaki-type bombs, you could see right away that this is not a species, this is not a species organized into nation-states that will fail to abuse that, that will fail to kill vast numbers of innocent people, and very possibly end life on earth, and therefore something to be...
I'm trying to think what the right word is, is it to be mourned, actually, and to be afraid of?
Absolutely, those are two appropriate reactions, and something to spend one's highest priority and effort in trying to control and to put that genie back into the bottle, and to eliminate, to reduce the likelihood that it will lead to vast massacres and to possibly the destruction of humanity.
That has been, I would say, the number one, should have been the number one priority for this species from the time that it was realized that a chain reaction was possible in uranium, and that was in 1938.
Well, you know, I talked with Greg Mitchell yesterday, from editor and publisher, the editor of Editor and Publisher and author of Hiroshima in America, about this, and he talked about how the cover-up of the pictures and the classification as top secret of the color film footage and all of this stuff that came from Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war was, you know, instrumental, I guess, in helping the state paper over the effects of atomic warfare, to leave the American people with little enough information about it, yeah, it's a big bang, it killed a bunch of people, it saved a bunch of our guys' lives, and that's basically the end of that, because they were in a rush to get into this big cold war with the Soviets and create this much bigger nuclear weapon-based policy, you know, centered around having tens of thousands of nukes on hand, and so they didn't want the American people to know how truly horrible these things were.
The American people could have thrown a monkey wrench in their plans, that's why they covered it up in the first place, Stan.
Well, that is a point that I do make in the article, that cover-up has gone every year, every month, every year, for the last 64 years, it's very deliberate, and very effective.
I think there's very few Americans, I've found, by asking audiences, who believe that they know the difference between an A and an H-bomb.
Your hearers might well ask themselves that, or ask their family, or ask any, it's an informal poll that can be conducted very easily.
Well, wait, wait, wait, let me stop you right there.
An A and an H-bomb.
Pardon me, you say when you give speeches and you ask the audience, what kind of response do you get now exactly?
I can tell you, whether it's 500 people or 1,500 people or more, usually two or three people will raise their hands to that.
Wow, okay, well, go ahead and take this opportunity then to explain the difference to the good people.
I'll tell you that I ask then, I ask the audience usually just to see if they're sleeping on their hands, how many people do not know the difference, and they do all respond, they all raise their hands.
And then of the two or three who said they didn't know, I'll ask, well, what is the difference?
And I'll usually get an answer that one of them is bigger.
Which one is that?
Well, likely the H-bomb.
How much bigger?
That they don't know.
And to convey that, I think the simplest way to do that, first let's just identify these bombs, A and H.
The A is for atom, it's called an atom bomb to start with, and it's a fission bomb which results in splitting or fissioning the atoms of a heavy element, mainly U-235 and isotope of uranium or plutonium 239 and isotope of plutonium.
So it splits the heavy atom.
So it's a fission bomb, an atom bomb, and a bomb.
The hydrogen bomb, or the H-bomb for hydrogen, or appropriately some people call it the hell bomb earlier, is the fusion or the melding together under pressure and heat of atoms of hydrogen or isotopes of hydrogen.
And the H-bomb releases energy on the level of 1,000 times more powerful than the A-bomb.
But the way to contribute that, the way to see that, I found most easily, is to realize that every hydrogen bomb, H-bomb, also called thermonuclear weapon, since it's largely heat and pressure that melds together the atoms, so it's called thermonuclear.
To those requires an atom bomb of the kind that destroyed Nagasaki for its trigger, for its detonating cap.
And thus, when you see a picture of Nagasaki, the destruction of Nagasaki or Hiroshima, I saw quite a few of those yesterday for Hiroshima Day, you're looking at what happens to a city, a popular area, when you drop on it the detonating cap, like the percussion cap of a modern nuclear weapon, which are virtually all thermonuclear weapons.
Wow.
Yeah, that's a hell of a way to put it.
And it really is right in comparative power.
And it is necessary, I guess a way maybe people could help to understand this, if you think of like Back to the Future 2 where he's got Mr. Fusion on the back of his DeLorean.
The joke there is that it's cold fusion, that you can just drop a banana peel in there somehow and get free energy out of it.
But the problem is in the real world, at least so far, in order to accomplish fusion, it has to be really hot, like say, for example, as hot as the sun.
And that's why you use a Nagasaki bomb as the blasting cap, to make it hot enough that then it becomes possible for nuclear fusion to take place, where they fuse again the lightest element, hydrogen, as opposed to splitting the heaviest.
They fuse the lightest element, atoms of that together.
And that's what releases, again, the kind of bomb like we were talking about yesterday on Showdown, the kind of bomb that could kill Houston in one shot, right?
Well, that's right.
You see, an atom bomb, the Nagasaki or Hiroshima bombs, took a piece out of, they didn't destroy the whole moderate-sized cities they were looking at.
They made a large hole in the populated areas of a moderate-sized city, like Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
A large H-bomb, and let me say, the first explosion of an H-bomb was in 1954.
There were experiments earlier, but the first true H-bomb that was exploded in 1954, that Bravo shot and we took, was 15 megatons of explosive.
That's 15 million tons, or a million times the blockbuster of World War II, or a thousand times the Hiroshima bomb.
It irradiated by fallout.
The fishermen on the Lucky Dragon fishing trawler, the Japanese fishing trawler, 85 miles away from the explosion and irradiated their catch as well, and that's what first created the real panic about the nuclear in Japan.
But to go back to that one point about pictures, what we see over and over are pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with, of course, just empty space or devastated buildings.
You don't see bodies, you don't see humans, and you don't see the injured, who outnumbered, of course, the dead.
But even so, you're just looking at the devastation caused by, we put it again, the blasting cap of a nuclear weapon.
We have right now about 2,200 strategic weapons on operational deployment.
That's way down from what we had in the past.
So over 2,000, and we have thousands more on the shelf.
Those are all thermonuclear weapons, and they are not 15 megaton weapons.
They're warheads much smaller made for missiles and missile warheads, and in most cases to be put several on one vehicle.
So they're much smaller, but they're still on the level of about 300 kilotons.
The number of these have several warheads, each of which is 330 kilotons.
Well, that's more than 20 times each of those, the Nagasaki, the Hiroshima bomb.
So we simply, the public is not getting any picture of the devastating power of our arsenal, or the Russian arsenal that threatens us by looking at those pictures.
They don't know the real nature of the nuclear.
Well, and I guess it's funny that at the same time that that's true, also everybody knows, right?
I mean, we've kind of at the same time, we've all seen Atomic Cafe or whatever, the kind of video footage of the atomic test, and we've seen, you know, hey, look at this, it's the picture of a big H-bomb going off.
I mean, pretty much anybody can imagine a bomb that can kill their city, and they know that there's such a thing, right?
Isn't there kind of a weird sort of contradiction there?
I mean, I don't really disagree, but I think the sort of things are true.
I don't know whether they really do imagine.
By the way, we started, I didn't quite finish the point.
One, even a, let's say, a 10-megaton bomb, even a 5-megaton bomb, a 1-megaton will destroy a metropolitan area.
It doesn't just take a piece out of a city.
One bomb can destroy a metropolitan area very easily.
But can I make a point now that is in my article very briefly, and I didn't spend the time on it, but from what we've been saying here, I think it's quite pertinent, and that's this.
The people you were quoting, like Eisenhower and Leahy and the others, were properly horrified at the idea of using the bomb when it wasn't necessary to shorten the war or win the war, and did not do so in actual fact, by best inference.
But especially because they were focused on the future, and they could see where it was leading.
It was leading to multiple A-bombs, but also especially to H-bombs in the end.
And to start that precedent was very dangerous.
But listening to them, you could easily miss what is a hidden irony in what they were saying.
Because when you talk about the immorality of destroying a city, or the dangers of that precedent, you could easily miss the fact that they knew very well that we had been doing exactly that to every city in Japan since the night of March 9th and 10th, 1945, when General LeMay sent over General Power to lead the attack.
Power was later the head of Strategic Air Command after LeMay, to burn alive or suffocate 80,000 to 120,000 human beings, mostly women, children, and elderly.
The men were away in the army in the city of Tokyo.
Well, isn't it true, Dan, that the reason that they really chose Hiroshima and Nagasaki was because they were two of the last cities that hadn't already been destroyed.
They wanted to test the atom bomb on cities that hadn't already burned to the ground.
The reason they had not been destroyed was that they were being saved as sacrificial animals, human sacrifices to science, to wartime, to power, to the atomic age, and so forth.
Those cities had been deliberately spared, and chosen in part because they didn't have significant military objectives in them that needed to be hit earlier, or even industrial.
They had some industry.
But the industry and the military bases were not the aiming points or the target for either Nagasaki or Hiroshima.
As a matter of fact, they tended to be on the suburbs, in the outskirts, and were not strongly damaged.
The aim was to kill people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But they were the only ones left.
As you say, there were two others, Kyoto and Niigata, that were deliberately left to show the effect of the atom bomb.
They didn't want to just bounce the rubble and burn already charred buildings.
They wanted to show what happened to flesh that had not yet been burned, and buildings.
It sounds as though I'm being macabre there, but actually that was the point, to kill living, breathing people, and show the power of this bomb, and buildings that hadn't yet been destroyed.
In Tokyo, which is something I just mentioned in passing, on March 9th and 10th, that was the largest act of terrorism in human history, before then and since then.
In one day, 80,000 to 120,000 people were killed in one day, deliberately.
That was regarded as so successful that it was imitated immediately.
In the next 67 largest Japanese cities.
Of course, that wasn't entirely unprecedented either.
The Tokyo bombing was the largest ever, because they got a firestorm going with temperatures like the sun.
But just weeks earlier, Dresden had been destroyed, and they did their best to destroy Berlin the same way.
They killed in Berlin 25,000 people in one night, which was dwarfed only by Dresden, which was something between 38,000 and 100,000.
There's a great dispute about the total number of people there.
And other firestorms that had been caused earlier in Hamburg, and one or two others.
So we'd been killing people, humans deliberately, civilians is what I mean to say, civilians deliberately, the British in particular, throughout the war.
But in Japan, it was the exclusive effort from March 9th and 10th on.
So from five months before Hiroshima, from March 9th and 10th, we'd been killing as many civilians in Japan as we could.
And that added up to some 900,000.
It would have been more than that, but we were never successful in getting another firestorm started in Japan.
After Tokyo, the weather had to be right, and the winds had to be right, and so forth.
As Freeman Dyson put it, it was like a hole in one.
In golf, everything had to be right to kill that many people in one night.
So Eisenhower, of course, knew that.
And incidentally, Eisenhower was not really a fan of that in Japan.
It wasn't his responsibility, being the Supreme Commander in Europe.
But he had commented on another comment he made earlier on the atom bomb, was what difference would that make?
After all, we'd been killing people as much as we could in Japan, and on the same scale as the atom bomb promised.
Well, now, this is the real thing, too, because still after all this time, 61% of the American people support it.
Tokyo justifies the atom bombing.
And what does the atom bombing justify?
Everything.
Anything.
How could anyone who justifies the bombing at Hiroshima ever say that whatever violence the government is perpetrating on anyone is somehow not worth it?
This is the trap that John Stewart got caught in when he was arguing with some warmonger from AEI or whoever it was on the Daily Show, when he was opposing the torture of individual terrorists, and the guy said, well, what about Harry Truman?
And, well, yes, I guess he is a war criminal, but then he had to take it back, because Harry Truman's a Democrat, and everybody knows that World War II is wonderful, and America is Superman, and it's okay to nuke Japanese to protect America, and whatever, whatever.
So, you know, this is the ultimate Trump, isn't it?
That any means are justified by whatever ends America's government pretends to be aiming for.
Well, that's the working moral code, ethical code, of most people with regard to their own country, but very specifically of Americans here.
The operational code, you could call it, is that whatever a president does, orders in wartime, is justified.
There's no limit to that, no constraint.
And the demonstration of that is if you accept, and most Americans do accept, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but earlier, the destruction of Japanese cities, and civilians in those cities, deliberately, as justified, there really isn't anything you can't justify.
If you can justify that, you say, well, then anything, it all depends on circumstances, and what the president wants, and what he feels he needs to do.
And I didn't focus at all, I deliberately said in this particular piece, I'm not addressing the question of whether it was necessary, whether it did shorten the war.
I have very strong opinions on that, based on a lot of effort, and I will say right here, in my opinion, and I didn't invent this, this is a widespread scholarly opinion, and I'm not a scholar on this, but I'm a reader of scholarship on this, that the atom bombs, in fact, did not shorten the war by a day, or a week, and they were not necessary, they were known not to be necessary, etc.
But that's a very big issue, very controversial, and I deliberately avoided it in this piece.
Well, the real point of the piece, actually, is you begging current government employees to squeal.
It is time to steal government documents, leak them to the press, as though anybody at the New York Times has the courage to print that kind of thing nowadays anyway, I don't know, maybe if we're lucky.
But the articles, really, it's about you, it's about your father, it's about scientists that worked on the Manhattan Project, on the hydrogen bomb project, and how through all these are examples of people who could have ratted the government out, who could have told the American people, this is what is going on, this is what you need to know about it, and this is, as you've expressed on this show before, Dan, this is your big regret that you didn't blow the whistle on the Vietnam War back in 1961 when you knew better, or even 1964 when you had the documents, and now this is your call out to current government bureaucrats to do what you should have done when the time was right back then.
Well, I'm adding one further omission that I made even earlier, and that was I had documents on the extreme dangers of our nuclear planning, and the insanity of it, it's really the only word that can be, the immorality and insanity of our nuclear planning then and now, and I know all the arguments to be made for those plans, I worked on such planning myself, and I'm saying they don't add up to a remotely adequate justification of what we threaten to do, what we're ready to do, and what may well happen.
It is unjustified, it is really evil, is a word unfortunately made, sort of abused by George W. Bush, as if it's almost useless, but I can't avoid using the word.
Our planning has been evil then and now, and what I regret is that I didn't make that clear by releasing it.
In 1959, 60, 61, when I could have, I can look back and see why I didn't, but mainly I didn't think of it, and should have done that to alert people to the real dangers and the immorality of what they are being recruited into.
Why don't you go ahead and share with us, you end the article by saying that over the next year you plan on helping to expose some of this nuclear posture that the American people need to know about and don't know about.
Let's go ahead and wrap up this interview by getting that started.
I will be in the fall doing a series of pieces on the internet.
They'll be on my website and probably on other websites, antiwar.com I hope, and truthdig.com and some others, which will present really as fully as I can at this point what I learned as a war planner and somebody who worked on nuclear command and control and the possibility of accidental war, unit-driven war, but also of deliberate war as a pursuit of first-use threats.
I'm going to be putting out what I know at that point, and if the government wants to prosecute me for that again, I'm ready for that.
All right, good for you everybody.
Again, it's Daniel Ellsberg.
The article is Hiroshima Day.
America has been asleep at the wheel for 64 years.
It's at truthdig.com.
Thanks very much for your time again on the show, Dan.
Thanks for the opportunity, Scott.
