All right everybody, welcome back to the show, Santi War Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
And our guest today on the show is Dan Ellsberg.
As I've worn this one out, but I still like to say, if it wasn't for him, we'd probably still be fighting the Vietnam War, instead of being such great trading partners with that country.
And he's the author of the book Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
And there's a new documentary out about him, playing now in select theaters, called The Most Dangerous Man in America.
I hope that's still true.
Welcome back to the show, Dan, how are you?
Fine, good to be here.
Well, I think you are still the most dangerous man in America.
We'll get to that in a second, but let's talk about this movie real quick.
This is basically the story of your theft of the Pentagon Papers from the U.S. government, and how you, I guess, tried to give them to the Senate, and eventually gave them to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Right.
Well, tell us about it, what's it playing, how can people see it?
Well, it'll be showing in L.A. on the 23rd at the Lumley Theater in Santa Monica, and it's now just opened at the Film Forum Theater in New York.
It'll be available on PBS, actually, a year from now, but in the meantime it'll be distributed throughout the country at some point when the directors get it together.
That's great.
By that you mean the DVD?
No, it'll be playing in theaters.
Oh, okay, great.
We don't have a distributor yet, I don't think.
But it'll probably play at the Adobe Mall or the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, kind of art house theaters, that kind of thing, right?
I don't know, you're talking to the wrong person on that.
I'm just a subject to the film.
I don't know anything about the production or the distribution.
Okay, well, hopefully at least for the people who don't live in the giant cities where this will, or art house type places where they'll be able to find it, it'll be out on DVD eventually.
My one concern, given what I'm doing now and what's happening to the country and what's happening right now, is that it'll show in Washington, D.C. very shortly.
They hadn't planned that, as a matter of fact, but I'm doing what I can to encourage showings on the Hill, Capitol Hill, and for staffers right now and for government officials, I would hope, in Washington.
I think that the film has, and I only saw it on a big screen for the first time a few days ago, for the first time, and in rough cuts only about a month earlier than that.
I think it has the real potential to encourage some more Pentagon Papers, and that's exactly what we need.
We needed them before Iraq, and we didn't get them.
We got them in the form of memoirs after we were well committed to the war by people like Richard Clark and others, and better late than never, but an awfully big difference between learning how we were being lied into a war several years after the war is in progress and learning it before the country was committed to it.
That's what I would like to see happen right now, and by that I mean this week, next week, and the next month or two before Obama commits us to an endless, bloody, escalating stalemate in Afghanistan by sending 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
If he does that, it will definitely not be the last installment.
It will be the second.
He already sent, what is it, 17,000 earlier, but for that he could be excused by just a new man in office just holding the fort, in a very literal sense, after he just arrived.
But, you know, we're eight months into the administration now.
He will have no excuse of that sort for escalating that commitment now as has been predicted, and I think this film could really, I would like him to see it.
I think it would really give him pause, but I don't count on that.
I would much rather hope that people in the administration will give the lie to the kinds of statements that are being made now about the war, and will encourage Congress to show some spine and oppose it.
Well, and that really is your continuing purpose behind all the writing you do and all the activism you do, is that's the note you always make, is don't keep your secrets, don't keep your boss's secrets at the government.
Steal them and leak them.
Well, you know, first of all, leak them for sure.
Stealing is another matter because the fact is that this information belongs to the sovereign public.
That's the theory of our government.
It's the government that wrongly conceals this information from the public, and what's needed is to really take seriously the oath of office that both Congresspersons and officials in the government take, which is the same oath I took as a Marine and in the Defense Department and the State Department, which is an oath to uphold, support, and defend the Constitution of the United States, which is being flaunted whenever a president deceives the Congress, manipulates the Congress into what amounts to a declaration of war, whether they admit it or not, as happened in Iraq, which was an absolute duplicate of what's described in this film as happening with the Donkey Gulf Resolution back in Vietnam.
It was extremely depressing for me to watch that process happen in 2002.
It so happened my book was coming out just then, and I don't know, I would have liked some of the people to have read that in the Senate who voted an undated declaration of war to the president, gave him a blank check.
I don't have any delusion that it would have changed many votes, but if it had changed one or two, I would have felt it was worthwhile.
Well, now, the last time we talked, it was about the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and you talked about how you were going to, over the next year, write a series of articles about American nuclear policy.
Now, you're famous, of course, for Richard Nixon sending a bunch of thugs to break into your psychiatrist's office, and the stealing of, not the stealing, you're right, correct my English there, but the taking of the Pentagon Papers and the giving of them, the story of Vietnam, and the giving of that story to the American people.
But while you were at RAND and while you were at the Defense Department, you had an extremely close-up view to America's nuclear policy, apparently, and you have this new article, 100 Holocausts, an Insider's Window into U.S. Nuclear Policy at Truthdig.com, which I guess is the first of this series, right?
That's right.
It's also on my website.
All the articles will also be on my website, Ellsberg.net.
Okay, great.
And anyone who wants to reproduce these things, people are asking me for them.
I'll give them right now over this program, but I'll have to answer them.
Absolutely.
Both Bob Shears, Truthdig, and I are anxious for this to be distributed as much as possible.
They don't even have to ask.
Yeah, well, I'm anxious for the truth in this article to be distributed as widely as possible, so I guess the article goes with it there.
You describe my worst nightmare here.
If anybody ever just, you know, kind of used their imagination, what would it mean for America to get into a real nuclear war with Russia, whether in the days of the Soviet Union or today, what would that really look like?
If you took your worst imagination that said they would let loose all of them, then you'd be right.
That's the policy, is nuke humanity off the face of the earth.
That wasn't really realized.
It would be the effect in 1961 when I was working on those plans, and 62 and 63.
It would have been the effect, but nobody realized that until 20 years later with the nuclear winter discovery, really, which was that the smoke from the cities they planned to burn with thermonuclear weapons, that the smoke would blot out the sunlight to the extent of lowering temperatures, if it happened in the spring or summer, to below freezing temperatures, freeze the water and destroy the crops, and it would be a lasting darkness, darkness at noon, as they said, and in the spring, a last thing that would essentially lead by itself to the death by famine of a billion people or more, and possibly to the, if it spread globally, which was really possible, to the ending of advanced life on earth.
Now, as I said, that wasn't known in 1961.
It wasn't known until about 83.
I'll tell you something.
I just had lunch with Jonathan Schell, an old friend of mine, and asked him today, and asked him when exactly his book, The Fate of the Earth, which described the ecological effects of a nuclear war, do you remember that book, or were you old enough to know that?
No, no, I don't know that.
Well, I'll tell you, that book sold over a million hardback copies worldwide, and if you don't know it, it came out first in The New Yorker.
It was a very shocking picture of what would happen in a nuclear war, but I asked him, since nuclear winter wasn't really discovered until a year later, did he have advanced knowledge of that?
He said no, he didn't.
He was looking only at the ozone effects, the effects and various other ecological effects.
Well, those have all been confirmed in links in my article in Truthdig, or on my site, Ellsberg.net.
There is recent research that shows that the effects of the smoke and the ozone would be much worse than was known even 20 years ago, and yet the war plans, you can be sure, not only of this country, but probably of all the nuclear states involved in burning cities.
The only difference is that in the case of Russia and the United States, the number of cities burned would be so great as to create a risk of global nuclear winter and an almost certainty of major regional effects that would kill billions of people.
Well, you pointed out last time you were on the show and in your article about Hiroshima, the American people's ignorance of nuclear bombs, probably they picture Hiroshima if they know anything about nuclear weapons at all, but as you said then, the Hiroshima bomb is basically the blasting cap on the thermonuclear hydrogen bombs that are now in America and Russia's arsenals, and these are literally the kind of bombs that could kill all of New York City, all of Dallas or Houston, Texas in one shot.
That's right, the whole metropolitan area, what Hiroshima did was to create a hole, to take out a piece, a hole in a moderate-sized city, and what these bombs would do is destroy all life in a major metropolitan area.
And now, the other thing, and maybe I missed this, Dan, in the article, but it seems like there's no discussion whatsoever of the possibility in the mind of the generals that maybe if things really came worse to worse in a war with Russia, that we would bomb their nuclear sites and things like that.
The plan seems to be that if we're going to launch a single nuke at Russia, we are going to nuke every single city, every single everything.
We are going to kill the Russians.
That's the plan, and without any kind of variations of that plan, it doesn't seem like it.
Well, no, that was the only plan when I was first looking at it that Eisenhower bequeathed us.
And I myself worked on alternatives to that, trying really to encourage that if worse came to worse and we were retaliating to a plan, we would not be targeting cities as a possibility.
There was no possibility of leaving cities out in the planning that was the legacy of the Eisenhower years.
Now they have many alternatives, but as has been shown in recent studies, again, which I link to in the article, the beauty of the Internet, you can put hyperlinks in and people can just click and get the data right away.
And the latest data shows that there really isn't too much difference in a large attack, such as could occur between Russia and the U.S., for which our missiles in both sides are still on air trigger alert 20 years after the end of the Cold War.
If that trigger got pulled by accident or unauthorized action or by a very, I want to say crazed, but it would be a normal kind of madness for leaders of a powerful state.
The kind of people we elect or that get into that kind of power in escalating a local conflict of some sort.
In that case, nowadays, they now know it wouldn't make that much difference whether you aim at the cities or at the missile sites, whatever, and the fallout, the fire that would be created has very much the same effect, which would mean killing by fallout alone hundreds of millions of people in countries of our allies in West Europe or in East Europe or Japan or Afghanistan, amazingly enough, or Finland, where not a single warhead might explode, but the fallout alone would exterminate huge numbers of people.
Now, I believe, do such options exist right now as alternatives, as possible uses of our warheads?
Let me say, I would bet my life on that very easily.
I don't know.
I don't have the access to those warplanes that I had then, of course.
And Congress doesn't either, really, but they've never really tried.
And in principle, Congress should be able to find out that question.
What are the risks of your actual targeting plans right now of nuclear winter?
And short of that, short of that, short of nuclear winter, how many hundreds of millions or billions of people do you plan under some of your options to kill?
And what right, what purpose is served for having such a capability, let alone pulling the trigger?
That's never been examined by Congress.
Well, it's never been examined by the American people either, I think.
It just sort of goes without saying that we're just going to have thousands of nukes forever, and that the Cold War with Russia is going to go on forever.
We're going to keep these nukes pointed at each other forever, even though the USSR is gone.
This is madness.
All these nukes should have been dismantled, at the very least, in 1992.
Well, let's go right up to the present.
And there is actually something hopeful that happened just this morning that I'll mention in a minute.
But before that, on the alleged missile shield in East Europe, which may make a difference here.
But in the meeting between the US and Russia in the spring, actually Obama and Medvedev, the agreement was made to lower our warhead numbers from the current, our operational warhead, not what's on the shelf, but operational, ready to go, air trigger, from a low of 1,700 to 1,675.
Now the current actually allows, we're not as low as 1,700, we're down to 2,200.
And the last agreement made under George W. Bush was an agreement that we would both be between 1,700 and 2,200.
And we're both down to about 2,200.
So they trumpet that as a decrease to 1,675 of about a third.
But that was already negotiated under George W. Bush.
Right, Obama gave his great speech.
He's getting rid of 25 more warheads.
Now that's ludicrous in itself.
But what's not as obviously ludicrous to most people is that the idea of keeping 1,500 to 1,675, that's the lower limit this time, 1,500.
There is no excuse in the world for having 1,500 warheads.
Congress has never really asked, who would you target those on?
What would targets be and what would the effects be on the world, on us and on our allies, of using that number of weapons or anything like them?
1,000 would not be that much better than 1,500.
To anyone who actually knows what these weapons are, which is a very tiny minority of people it would seem, this is an absurd maintenance of what amounts to a doomsday machine on both sides.
Yeah, well it sure seems to.
Now in Obama's speech he said we need to get rid of nuclear weapons.
And then later on in the speech he said, not that I expect this to happen in my lifetime or anything, which, you know, isn't he only like in his early 40s?
Yeah, right.
Anyways, and then the other thing is, in that same speech he said, I'm going to continue Dick Cheney's policy of putting so-called defensive missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic, but now as you brought up there, it looks like they're backing away from that.
That could be good for this reason.
At least the excuse they were giving, for not going lower, was that Putin was saying, if you don't get rid of those, we won't go below 1,500, because we need our deterrence, we need to deter you.
That is a very arguable proposition, but that's their position, that we needed that.
Well, if Obama's going to get rid of this absolutely unnecessary and unworking missile defense field on the borders of Russia, then Putin certainly has indicated that he's willing to talk going much lower.
Actually, Yeltsin, remember him, going way back to Yeltsin, proposed 1,000.
Now, remember what I've been saying here, something you rarely hear in public discussion.
1,000 is still grossly too many for either needs of deterrence of any sort, and I'm not even questioning that point, that's a whole other discussion.
But if you need to deter, you do not need 1,000 warheads, and you don't need 500 warheads, by anything close to that.
So 1,000 is still too low.
It's still too high.
But he'll go down to 1,500 or 1,000.
Will Obama?
Will he feel that he can afford, in his administration, to have a challenge from the blue dogs or the hawks in Congress, or above all, from a military-industrial complex, from his own military, to give up his hoax that a preemptive attack could serve some useful purpose, and we ought to have a capability for it?
Or will he, at last, recognize the reality of the thermonuclear age?
Well, now, two things here.
One thing, and I don't even know if you want to address this, it's just something I kind of want to mention.
In the article here at truthdig.com, and as you said, it's at danelsberg.net, or just elsberg.net as well, you have this picture from this document, top secret, Joint Chiefs of Staff, for the President's eyes only.
And just seeing this little line graph, fatalities in millions over a number of months, and it says 325 million people.
And now, I think you say in the article, you asked for this in the name of President Kennedy, hey, I want to know how many people will die under our current strike plan.
And the Pentagon just goes, okay, yeah, here's our little line graph, 325 million people.
That's like World War II times 10, right?
But wait, that's just in the Soviet Union and China alone.
And as the text goes on, within a couple more days, I have the more complete figures, which were another, an additional 100 million dead in East Europe, another 100 million dead in West Europe, depending which way the wind blew.
Our allies would be wiped out from fallout if the wind blew over them.
Well, let me ask you now about the mind of one of these people.
Dan, I don't understand, because it would be too easy for me to just think, like in a comic book, these men are some kind of weird satanic cult or whatever.
But tell me about the mind of these military men that draw up these charts and just go about their day talking about, you know, 100 holocausts.
Well, that's a very understandable reaction.
I realized that there'll be a lot more in this series.
I realized that the natural reaction would be what I think a mistaken one, which is that these men are somehow aberrant members of humanity that should be clinically separated from the rest of us somehow, you know, or hospitalized at best or imprisoned or whatever, that they're very different.
And if we could get better people in, it would make a big difference.
The first answer to your question is from my own experience, I would say.
I mean, knowledge of these men.
Well, in your own experience, that means working for Bob McNamara.
Well, McNamara thought this, said, and truly so.
He was horrified at this prospect.
McNamara had very many serious shortcomings, and the policies he backed in many respects were terrible.
He was a major figure in getting us into Vietnam.
But on nuclear matters, I knew from private talks, he was privately totally opposed to the idea of nuclear war, of initiating it under any circumstances anywhere, and yet felt compelled as apparently Barack Obama feels compelled publicly.
I don't know whether, yeah, I think Obama probably privately does abhor this notion.
And yet, like McNamara, who put many nuclear weapons in Europe and who presided over the buildup of our nuclear weapons, did so for a variety of political reasons, domestic reasons, bureaucratic reasons, alliance reasons, none of which I would say stand up as justifications when you look at what's going on.
But that's the kind of thing that was enough to get McNamara to do this, to think of McNamara himself, let alone the people who worked under him, and not just me, but the others.
The Republicans, the Democrats, the career bureaucrats, the officials, the military, the civilians.
Yes, we were militarists.
I think that's fair to say.
But that's who has populated the Pentagon all these years, since there's been a Pentagon.
And certainly we were cold warriors at the time.
But the question I want to put to you is, the right question, in my opinion, we can argue by, is how did these ordinary Americans, quite ordinary, who were not sadists, who were not madmen, how did they come to be proposing and making plans of the same sort that are being made right now?
How did a president like Kennedy, who, like McNamara, I think abhorred the idea of nuclear war, build up the Minuteman missile force totally, as I'll be describing later in the series?
Same question as today.
How did Barack Obama get in the position of deciding that we couldn't go lower than 1,600 or 1,500 warheads, which is insane.
It's enough to destroy life on Earth.
It's enough to produce nuclear winter, just in our own side.
And it's, of course, collaborating with the Russians on their having a doomsday.
So that's the question.
And it's not an easy question to answer, but let me give you a couple of clues.
In the Second World War, the United States Air Force, who was in the Army Air Corps, part of the Army, got in the business, by the end of the war, of conducting war by killing as many civilians as they could.
And that was a lot.
It wasn't what we can do now.
But with conventional weapons, that is, non-nuclear weapons, and with firebombs, small firebombs in very large numbers, they managed.
The U.S. Army Air Corps killed 80,000 to 100,000 civilians in one night in Tokyo, burning them alive, boiling them in the boiling canals of Tokyo.
People went into the canals to get away from the firestorm, and the canals were boiling.
So they boiled to death, or suffocating in the shelters from the loss of oxygen in the firestorm.
I repeat, 80,000 to 120,000 people.
That was in my first item that we discussed, the Hiroshima accident.
Well, that left a legacy of the idea that since that received no resistance in the U.S., in the Congress, in anybody else during or after the war, that's the way you fight a war.
You kill civilians, and the other side gives up, basically.
This is long before the atom bomb, in the sense that in the five months before Hiroshima, we burned to death 900,000 Japanese civilians.
Now, a single bomb would do more than that now, today, if you dropped it near 900,000 civilians.
But it took 300 to 500 planes to do that in a night then, but we had them.
So we used them day after day after day in one city after another.
Now we do it with one submarine, could do far more than that in an hour.
So that was the legacy where these madmen in World War II got the orders, and we were fighting the Japanese, we were fighting the Germans, these devils incarnate, who were indeed extreme, brutal, ruthless aggressors.
And the idea was that anything goes with them.
That's the first step.
Anything goes.
And do it by killing civilians, as in Dresden in Germany, and in Berlin, and many other places.
Hamburg, Cologne.
And once that becomes the basis of your war planning, then a new weapon comes along.
It's an atom bomb, the kind of Hiroshima.
And so they just fit that into the war plans.
Now we do it with atom bombs, only one bomb per city.
We don't have to send 300, we can hit 300 cities or 30 cities at a time.
That gets you into figures like 10 million killed in the war, 15 million killed.
You're still in World War II type numbers, maybe 60 million people, civilian and military, and the Holocaust, and the gypsies, and the Poles, and put everybody into that.
Soviet prisoners of war, German prisoners of war.
You get up to about 60 million people.
Well, all right, so they're killing now, they're planning to kill on World War II levels.
Less than that, actually.
Of course, just one side, we're just doing it, and we're doing it very quickly.
But it's still 10 million, 15, 20 million.
Then the thermonuclear weapon comes along.
The public never grasps, from that day to this, what difference that made.
The H-bomb.
The H-bomb, the thermonuclear weapon for which the Nagasaki bomb, as you put it earlier, is the blasting cap, it's the detonating cap, it's the trigger, it's like a percussion.
They're okay.
What I discovered in the Pentagon was, working now at the top secret level on these, for guidance on the war plans, and asking myself, how could these people that I know are ordinary, they're not ordinary bakers, they're ordinary military planners.
But as military men and civilians, they're very ordinary, very patriotic, conscientious, competent.
There's nothing mad about them.
They're doing their best at the job they're given.
How could they get up to planning the deaths of 600 million?
And the answer is, or actually, by the way, about 200 million of those of our allies and others were undesired, that's collateral damage, but unavoidable.
It isn't that they wanted to kill that many.
They only wanted to kill, by their own planning, about 400 million, or 500 million, not 600 million.
So, I'm saying that, obviously, ironically, it's staggering.
How did it happen?
And the answer is, as I looked at the earlier plans, from one year to the next, the projected casualties in, say, 54, or 55, go from 10 million, 20 million, a very large number, but still a number the world had seen and recovered from, at least when inflicted over a period of years.
They go from that to 100 million, 200 million, 300 million.
What's happened?
They have simply fitted the H-bomb into the same targets, the same plans, as the A-bomb, and that was earlier the same as the napalm and the firebombs.
So, without really thinking, all of this very secret, no hearings in Congress, do we need this, is this the right thing to do, no discussion at all, it's all just very, very, very secret.
And unthinking, well, we've got a new weapon, it's bigger, but the same targets, and we want just as many.
And so we go up to the same kind of planners who were earlier planning, let's say, fire raids on Japan, Japanese cities, and killing horrendous numbers of people, measured, as I say, 80,000 was the largest number in Tokyo.
They didn't get that many in other cities because they couldn't get a firestorm.
80,000, incredible, horrible, the largest terrorist act in human history.
The largest one-day massacre by anybody in the history of the human species.
That was on March 9th, 10th, 1945.
I don't think one American in a hundred knows of that event that we committed.
But they've heard of Dresden, but they don't know about Tokyo, they've heard of Hiroshima.
Okay, what I'm saying finally is that the same people who planned that, which, by the way, included McNamara, who was working for General LeMay at the time, are now making, and by the way, he did learn from that, he didn't want to do that anyway, he was against using nuclear weapons.
Others, however, LeMay, who became Chief of Staff under Kennedy, learned, no, that's actually the way you fight a war, that's the way you win it.
And they're now talking not about 80,000, which was regarded by LeMay as a great success when he achieved it in 1945, to 80 million, or 800 million.
In other words, it's a factor of 1,000 or more.
Right, it's just now we're talking about digits on paper, not human lives.
That's the difference, right?
Coming back to the movie, we've moved quite a ways from the movie, the film, that's just come out, The Most Dangerous Man, and so forth, but as I say, I've just been seeing it, and what still makes me, is very powerful in this movie, is some film, some of which, by the way, from the Vietnamese, they got film, of people under the bombs, people, and in South Vietnam, from some of our own footage, of the people being bombed, an experience that we never had in this country, until 9-11, where you had the effect, essentially the same, as a bombing, and that was new for us.
I had hoped that that would give Americans some sense of empathy for the people we were bombing elsewhere.
This is what people look like who were the victims of bombing.
It didn't have that effect, unfortunately.
No, because history began that day.
America had never bombed anybody before that.
Well, we hadn't bombed that either.
We saw American victims.
That was what was new.
American victims of bombing.
We're still not seeing the victims in Afghanistan or Iraq.
A million and a half killed in Iraq.
And many now, not that many, but many, many people in Afghanistan.
And so as I look at this picture of the Vietnamese, I'm seeing Afghanistan as, a few years ago and still, Iraq.
Well, and this is why there was such a controversy over the AP photo of the soldier who died after getting his legs blown off, because they just do not want the American people to see the effects of combat at all.
Well, right, and remember, the effect above all that they're not to see is American casualties, because apparently that's the kind that really count, that really matter, so we're not to see those.
It was forbidden during the first Gulf War, forbidden by censorship, to show pictures of American casualties.
I remember at the time, I remember Rodney King being beaten in Los Angeles.
Do you remember the video of that?
Sure.
That was like a loop, the way 9-11 was a loop.
It was just played over and over and over again.
And I remember saying, on a program, actually it was Ronald Reagan's son who was the moderator on that program, and I remember saying, the American people saw more violence in that video loop of Rodney King being beaten than they have seen in the six weeks of the Gulf War.
Yeah.
They were prevented from seeing either the people we were killing or the relatively few American casualties then.
Well, and at least then it said at the bottom of the screen, cleared by the Pentagon censors.
Now it doesn't have to be, because it's all just embedded nonsense.
Anyway, that's a whole other tangent.
I want to follow up another point that you just briefly mentioned there, and that is the first strike capability.
And I talked to Scott Ritter on the show before about all this missile defense system and so forth, and he says, you know, it's obviously, it's designed for Russia.
It's not about North Korea or Iran.
We all know Iran doesn't have missiles, doesn't have nukes.
It's clearly about Russia, and yet it's part of the policy.
He said it's an impossible goal.
It's not something we can actually accomplish, but that what they're really trying to do is set up a situation where mutually assured destruction becomes moot, Dan, that at this point we will have first strike capability, that we will be able to nuke Russia and their retaliatory capability so badly on our first strike that they wouldn't be able to do a thing about it.
We probably wouldn't even lose a city at all or whatever.
And that if that really, if they really get to first strike capability, which is their doctrine, then as Klaus Ehrich, the commenter at antiwar.com, always points out, that means that the Russians have to change their stance to launch on warning, not launch on are you sure, but launch on oh, might be, because otherwise they get blown off the face of the earth and not even get a chance to kill one city full of Americans.
Well, in one respect it's worse than that.
That would not be a change in the Russian strategy.
They've had a launch on warning policy right along, and they more or less have to with the kind of forces we're facing them with.
And yet that's a price that we pay, the fact that they may have a false alarm, as they have had in the past, that's gone quite far.
Various things can raise that.
Yeltsin was once, his briefcase with the codes was right in front of him to decide whether to respond to what turned out to be a Norwegian weather, a missile they were sending up for checking the weather, might have been an attack.
We encourage and almost compel them to adopt a stance like that with its risk of blowing up the northern hemisphere, if not the world, that is killing people, not actually blowing everything up, but destroying with smoke and ozone destruction and fire and fallout.
We encourage that with the ability, the preemptive strike, first strike capability that we maintain.
But if there's one thing I would modify in what's being warned of there, and I agree with Scott, what you're quoting there, the game is, I don't, from my knowledge of these people in the past, I would like to believe, and I pretty much manage to believe, that they know that an actual first strike would be absolutely suicidal and catastrophic, whatever we did, that we cannot even remotely disarm the Soviet Union, even with the reduced, very reduced submarine force they have, and the not that reduced land-based missile force, that we can't really do it.
What they're really trying to do, I think, is to maintain a credible threat.
Now, why should it even be credible?
It's insane to believe that we can really lower the damage they can inflict on us with their remaining warheads after we struck them.
So it really comes down to, can you make it plausible that we might be crazy enough under some circumstances to believe our own preparations and our own estimates that maybe we could get away with it?
Unfortunately, that is achievable, to make them think we might be that crazy, because we might be that crazy.
That's the way it goes.
And I'm not saying, again, these people are certifiable lunatics.
They are normal lunatics.
They are human beings in those jobs whose incentives move in a certain way, and the time might come when they say, well, we've been making the plans.
We've had the preparations.
Here are the warnings we're getting, which have been from flocks of geese to signals bouncing off the moon or various, many false alarms have occurred, in fact.
The time has come to press this button.
It could happen.
But you can't make it plausible enough unless you've built the weapons and maintained them, and that's what Barack Obama is still doing, to keep that threat alive.
Now, if he were to give up that threat, that would be a change in the situation.
It might also change his relations with the military complex in a way that he's not prepared to see.
Well, and it's also, I think, worth mentioning, as Gordon Prather says, that these weapons are basically useless for military purposes.
See, what they're saying is, you often hear that, they're useful, they're unusable.
That's true the way the words are meant.
I have tried to encourage for the last 30 years to be more in accord with the real dangers here and why we're really buying them.
Actually, the weapons have been used a great deal, so you can't say they're useless or unusable.
They've been used over and over again.
The way you use a gun, when you point it at somebody's head, whether or not you pull the trigger, you're using the gun.
In fact, that's why you buy the gun, so you don't have to pull the trigger.
That's what we're doing to Iran right now.
That's what we're doing to Iran, and every Democrat, major Democrat, and major Republican candidate used our weapons, not as president, only George Bush was in a position to do that, and he did do that when he said, every option is on the table.
And a reporter asked him, Mr. President, does that include nuclear weapons?
And he said, I repeat, every option is on the table.
He was using the weapon to intimidate the Iranians, to affect their negotiation.
And supposedly, and with very little promise that it would have that effect.
But anyway, he was using the weapons, and without the weapons, he couldn't have done it.
So he buys the weapon.
That's a major reason.
The other major reason is jobs, profits, campaign contributions, the power of the military complex in general, which made it an extremely difficult task to get rid of the F-22 if we really are rid of it, if there's a stake through its heart, which is maybe yes, maybe no, but to get additional F-22s, a weapon for which the Republican president had tried to get rid of, the Democrats president, the executive branch doesn't want, the Air Force doesn't want more of, and yet because of the fact that it's jobs in certain districts in a recession, a depression virtually, no, you can't get rid of it.
And so it was a major accomplishment to get a vote against that.
We couldn't have a better illustration of what the power is here.
Let me give you one hypothesis I have as to how Obama would explain why he is being so cautious in moving away from our doomsday machine and talking about, or for that matter, let's move to going into Afghanistan.
Different level here, but same kind of mentality.
It's just as crazy, it's just as lunatic to go into an endless stalemate in Afghanistan, although the scale of the damage isn't nearly as great.
Why is he doing it?
Let me give you a guess from past experience.
For something very similar to the reason that Lyndon Johnson did the very same thing as described in this movie, in The Most Dangerous Man, in 1965, Johnson wanted to protect his great society program, his welfare programs in general.
He wanted to get them funded actually, not to protect them, but to get them initiated.
And for that he wanted southern votes and he wanted moderate votes.
And if he had given up on Vietnam, as he should have, and as some of his advisors strongly urged him to do, his excuse internally was that he wouldn't get the funding on his domestic programs unless he gave the conservatives in Congress the hawks.
Now, could there be an analogy here?
I will bet that in the private councils of the White House, the discussion is going on, we can't get our health program through, which they're not going to get in any very progressive form in any case, but we won't get anything through if we get out of Afghanistan.
Well, Dan, we saw Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in 2007, as soon as they took over the Congress.
They started rubber stamping George Bush's war bills as long as they got to bring home the poor to their districts.
Now, the first hopeful thing that I've seen in quite a while, and it's why I want this film seen right away in Washington, if it's possible, and I think it is possible, is that to my amazement, Nancy Pelosi and in the House and Senator Levin in the Senate really are at least making noises against escalation in Afghanistan and at least urging a postponement of that decision.
Now, that defiance of the President's wishes on this, as far as we've heard so far, is something new, and I don't rely on them to do the job for us of keeping us out.
Much more likely, as you say, from 2006 on is that they'll utter doubts and skepticism as they did under George Bush, and then they'll vote for the funds in the end.
But there is obviously some disagreement here.
The escalation in Afghanistan is so ridiculously against our interests, our longer-term interests there, that there's an establishment ruling class conflict going on here where public opinion could make a difference and public activism.
In a way that I would not have predicted just a couple of months ago, the chance of changing George W. Bush's policy with, let's say, demonstrations, we saw that before the war, going back to 2003.
And later, there was really very little chance of getting through to that administration.
In this case, I would have hoped early on that there'd be a lot of chance, but we haven't seen much evidence of that in the first eight months.
Although, isn't it interesting?
The opinion polls say 58% of the American people are against the war.
It's just they don't seem to be against it very much.
We need everybody outside yelling, is what you're saying.
Well, what I'm saying, and yelling, by the way, at Congress to strengthen them and say, okay, we like your doubts, congratulate the people.
By the way, I don't remember the last time I felt like congratulating Nancy Pelosi, if that ever occurred.
I really don't remember that.
But in this case, I should follow my own advice here.
Get on the phone, run to her office and say, you're on the right track here.
You're doing the right thing.
We're behind you.
This is what we want.
And by the way, if you shift on this, we'll do what we can to fire you.
And the same with Levin and the others.
Support the ones who are dissenting here and tell the others that if they don't get straight on this, they'll be fired.
And the same also with Barack Obama.
But to focus only on the White House would be a mistake.
Congress hears that a lot more clearly.
I know somebody was saying to me just yesterday, well, isn't he too smart to do this?
And my answer has to be, he's not.
He's very smart.
He's not smarter than Lyndon Johnson or Robert McNamara.
He was as smart as you get.
Johnson, too, with all his, he wasn't proud of his educational background, but everybody who knew him, which is not me, said this is a very, very smart guy.
And certainly McNamara, by every standard interpretation, was a very smart guy.
And those were the people who put us into Vietnam, who did escalate.
The intelligence did nothing for us there.
And I would say the same for Barack Obama.
It would be one more demonstration if he went in, as he had been expected to do, into Afghanistan and commits us now to an endless, bloody stalemate there.
It would be one more demonstration that intelligence did nothing for us.
It does not correlate with wise decision-making.
Well, with the economic problems, I guess it could go one way or the other.
On one hand, it could spur the anti-war movement to be more anti-war and say we've got to bring our troops home and save this money and take care of ourselves.
On the other hand, the draft is a great way to bring down the unemployment rate.
Oh, boy.
Well, and by the way, the way, the standard way ever since Germany in the 30s, and then later the U.S., the way you get out of a deep, deep recession is with defense spending.
Well, that's sure the song they sing, no doubt about that.
And now you're saying even the draft.
They can't put the number of troops in to implement the counterinsurgency doctrines they're talking about and that Petraeus talks about and so forth with less than hundreds of thousands of men.
60,000 doesn't do it.
100,000 doesn't do it.
It would be hundreds of thousands of men and women now.
And I would say, from my experience, by the way, it's a delusion to think that will do it either.
It will keep the place quiet maybe if you put enough in, which could be 400,000 or 500,000, as long as they're there.
And when they leave, you will not find you have made any fundamental change in the situation if you eventually leave.
So I don't call that a real success either.
But the idea that you can have anything that even hints of success with another 40,000 or 50,000 or even 100,000 more men is ridiculous.
I don't believe there can be any military men who have any experience of this problem, any real knowledge of it, who can believe that.
So when it's leaked to the Times recently that the alternatives that Obama is considering are between 10,000 and 45,000, that cannot be the limit of the numbers he's actually hearing.
That might be the first installment.
It would be the first installment.
So we need people in the Pentagon to leak papers about the numbers they're really talking about, don't we?
I would like someone in the White House and in the Pentagon or in the Pentagon or CIA to say two things, leak on two things right now and testify before a Democratic Congress if they will hear them.
And by the way, with this much dissent in Congress, public demand could be for hearings, which haven't occurred yet.
We don't just want statements in the afternoon for the press.
We want hearings, investigative hearings that will penetrate below the highest level that's most responsive to the President and get to the people who are actually making the estimates on two questions.
What are the levels of numbers being given to the President right now as the numbers of men and women who would be needed for a genuine change, successful counterinsurgency strategy?
And you would hope to get on oath.
And also leaks to the press directly to press Congress along here of hundreds of thousands.
Second, get the estimates from the CIA and from the State Department, Intelligence, INI, the State Department Intelligence Branch, who were right on Iraq, know what WMDs, right on Vietnam, been more consistently right throughout the years than CIA has been.
And ask them, and if you put more troops in, will the Taliban get weaker or stronger?
The Russians are telling us right now, from their own experience, and ours up until now, put more troops in, the Taliban will get larger, not smaller.
If you want to...
Well, and of course, you know, the Global Post was reporting that the Taliban is getting all their money from protection money, from the American development, reconstruction, and all that.
That's where the Taliban is getting all their money from.
So the more we build a state there, the more powerful they get.
Not all their money.
As Cybill Edmonds and others have been saying for years, the Taliban take their cut from the huge dope trade from our warlords in Afghanistan, which has grown up since the Taliban was ousted.
And the Taliban are taking their cut now from the dope trade that they originally...
A large fraction of their money goes for selling opium, which ends up mostly in Europe and some in the United States.
Yeah.
Alright, well, listen, I know you've got to go, and I do too, but I really appreciate your time on the show today.
And I hope, Dan, that as you continue writing these articles about nuclear weapons policy, that you can keep coming back and we can kind of serialize them on the radio too.
Okay, you're right, I do have to go.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks a lot.
Everybody, that's Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers.
The website is ellsberg.net.
The book is Secrets, a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
And the brand new movie is called The Most Dangerous Man in America.
We'll be right back.
