Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Daniel Ellsberg

  • Honoring David Krieger

    Honoring David Krieger

    Daniel Ellsberg sent this statement to honor NAPF President David Krieger at the 36th Annual Evening for Peace.

    I am intensely sorry that—having recently and, I hope, temporarily, lost my voice– I am unable to be here today in person, with so many of my friends, mentors and heroes who have come to honor David Krieger. But I am glad to have the opportunity to speak from my heart, about David and the work he has so long been pursuing.

    There is no more important work in the world today than abolishing the ever-imminent danger of near-extinction of humanity posed by the existence of nuclear weapons.

    Yes, obviously, beginning belatedly and urgently to avert the global danger of catastrophic climate change is comparably of the highest level of importance. Yet it is misleading to describe that overwhelming problem, as is too-often done lately, as the only “existential” threat to human survival. As everyone here today recognizes, there are at least two existential challenges, for one of which—the need to abolish nuclear weapons—David Krieger has been perhaps the most consistent, most eloquent prophetic voices of the last half century.

    No one has more steadily and tenaciously focused us on that urgent objective than David. His appreciation of the need for a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation devoted single-mindedly to that pursuit was visionary. And the need is, if anything, even greater today.

    That fact in itself is undoubtedly frustrating; to someone less suited than David for what appears at times a Sisyphean effort, it could be discouraging. Fortunately, we have had David Krieger and those he has encouraged and inspired to press on, against the current, to keep that vision alive. Its achievement, I believe, is essential to keeping the human project going.

    David, I wish I were here to tell you and Carolee in person what your energy and dedication to the goal of keeping the human struggle going have meant to me and Patricia. It’s best expressed, it’s seemed to me, in lines by Stephen Spender in a poem entitled: “I think continually of those who were truly great.” The poem is in the past tense, which fortunately is not at all appropriate in this case. But the last verse, in particular, has always made me think of you (and of the many you have brought together today and in the past):

    Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
    See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
    And by the streamers of white cloud
    And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
    The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
    Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
    Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
    And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

  • The Truth-teller: From the Pentagon Papers to the Doomsday Machine

    The Truth-teller: From the Pentagon Papers to the Doomsday Machine

    This interview was originally published by the Great Transition Initiative.

    The growth of the military-industrial complex poses an existential threat to humanity. Daniel Ellsberg, peace activist and Vietnam War whistleblower discusses with Tellus Senior Fellow Allen White  the continuing existential threat posed by the military-industrial complex—and what needs to be done about it.

    *********************

    You became a pivotal figure in the anti-Vietnam War movement when you released the Pentagon Papers, a large batch of classified documents that revealed a quarter century of official deception and aggression. What inspired you to take such a risky action?

    After graduating from Harvard with an economics degree and completing service in the US Marines, I worked as a military analyst at the RAND Corporation. In 1961, in that role, I went to Vietnam as part of a Department of Defense task force and saw that our prospects there were extremely dim. It was clear to me that military intervention was a losing proposition.

    Three years later, I moved from RAND to the Department of Defense. On my first day, I was assigned to a team tasked with devising a response to the alleged attack on the US naval warship USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin by the North Vietnamese. This completely fabricated incident became the excuse for bombing North Vietnam, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had wanted to do for some months.

    That night, I saw President Lyndon Johnson and my boss, Secretary McNamara, knowingly lie to the public that North Vietnam had without provocation attacked the US ship. In fact, the US had covertly attacked North Vietnam the night before and on previous nights. Johnson and McNamara’s claim that the US did not seek to widen the war was the exact opposite of reality. In short, the Gulf of Tonkin crisis was based on lies. I was not yet moved to leave government, though I had come to view US military action as ineffective, illegitimate, and deadly, without rationale or endgame.

    By 1969, as the war progressed under Richard Nixon, I saw such evil in government deceit that I asked myself, “What can I do to shorten a war that I know from an insider’s vantage point is going to continue and expand?” When the Pentagon Papers were released in 1971, the extent of government lies shocked the public. The retaliatory crimes Nixon committed against me out of fear that I would expose his own continuing threats––including nuclear threats—ultimately helped to bring him down and shorten the Vietnam War. This outcome had seemed impossible after his landslide reelection in 1972.

    Today, similar revelations do not occasion equal shock because in the current administration in Washington, lying is routine rather than exceptional. Whether we are headed for a turning point toward bringing liars to justice will become clear when the investigations of President Donald Trump’s administration are concluded.

    Since then, you have been a vocal critic of both US military interventions and the continued embrace of nuclear weapons, an issue with which you had first-hand familiarity through your work at RAND and the Pentagon. How did your experience with nuclear policy contribute to your disillusionment with US foreign policy writ large?

    At RAND, Cold War presuppositions dominated all our work. We were certain that the US was behind in the arms race and that the Soviet Union, in pursuit of world domination, would exploit its lead by achieving a capacity to disarm the United States entirely of its nuclear retaliatory force. We were convinced that we were facing a Hitler with nuclear weapons.

    However, in 1961, I learned about a highly classified new estimate of Soviet weapons: four intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). At the time, the US had forty ICBMs, as well as thousands of intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Italy, Britain, and Turkey (compared to the Soviet Union’s total of zero). General Thomas Power, head of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), believed that the Russians had 1000 ICBMs. He was wrong by a factor of 250. This early mistaken belief signaled to me that something was very wrong with our perception of the world and, more specifically, with how we perceived the threat posed by the nation viewed as our most formidable adversary.

    At the time, I regarded the erroneous “missile gap” as a misunderstanding or cognitive error of some kind. But, in fact, it was very much a motivated error—motivated in particular by the desires of the Air Force and SAC to justify their budget requests for huge increases in the numbers of US bombers and missiles. But why did we at RAND uncritically accept the wildly inflated Air Force Intelligence estimates, rather than the contrary estimates by Army and Navy Intelligence that the Soviets had produced only “a few” ICBMs? Again, a motivated error. Through self-deception, we viewed ourselves as independent thinkers focused exclusively on national security, assuming that our role as contractors on the Air Force payroll had no influence on our analysis.

    In retrospect, it is clear that our focus and our recommendations would have been very different had we been working for the Navy. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” It was very important to us not to understand that our work was above all serving to justify the exaggerated budget demands by the Air Force.

    My distrust of the wisdom of Pentagon planners was also aroused by JCS estimates of the death toll resulting from deployment of our nuclear weapons. I had heard that the JCS avoided calculating this figure because they didn’t want to know how many people they would be killing. To confront them, I drafted a question that appeared in a letter from the White House Deputy for National Security, Robert Komer, transmitted in the name of President Kennedy: “If your war plans were carried out as written and were successful, how many people would be killed in the Soviet Union and China?”

    Within a week, I held in my hand a top secret, eyes-only-for-the-president document with an estimate of 325 million fatalities in the first six months. A week later, a second communication added an estimated 100 million deaths in Eastern Europe and another 100 million in our allied nations of Western Europe, depending upon the wind patterns in the aftermath of the strike. Additional deaths in Japan, India, Afghanistan, and other countries brought the total to 600 million.

    That killings of this magnitude—100 times the toll of Jewish victims of the Holocaust—were willingly contemplated by our military transcended prevailing notions of crimes against humanity. We had no words—indeed, there are no words—for such devastation. These data confronted me with not only the question of whom I was working with and for, but also the fundamental question of how such human depravity was possible.

    Your recent book, The Doomsday Machine, describes “a very expensive system of men, machines, electronics, communications, institutions, plans, training, discipline, practices and doctrine designed to obliterate the Soviet Union under various circumstances, with most of the rest of humanity as collateral damage.” How did this system come about?

    World War II created a highly profitable aerospace sector upon which the US military relied for strategic bombing of cities, thereby setting the stage for the idea of bombers as a delivery mechanism for nuclear weapons. As orders precipitously declined by the end of the war, the industry was in dire financial straits, facing bankruptcy within a year or two. Accustomed to the guaranteed profits of the war years, they found themselves unable to compete with corporations experienced in building non-military products for the market, and demand for civilian aircraft on the part of commercial airlines was insufficient to replace the wartime military business.

    The Air Force grew concerned that the industry would be unable to survive on a scale adequate to deliver military superiority in future conflicts. In the eyes of the government—and industry lobbyists—the only solution was a large peacetime (Cold War) Air Force with wartime-level sales to keep the industry afloat.

    Thus emerged the military-industrial complex. Mobilization to confront a Hitler-like external enemy—a role filled by the Soviet Union—was viewed as indispensable to national security. Government military planning followed, essentially socialism for the whole armaments industry, including but not limited to aircraft production. With the benefit of hindsight, I now see the Cold War as, in part, a marketing campaign for the continual, massive subsidies to the aerospace industry. That’s what it became after the war, and that’s what we are seeing again today. The contemporary analog is the idea of China as an existential enemy, which, I believe, is the dream and expectation of the US Defense Department.

    The threat of nuclear conflict persists as a near-term existential threat yet remains muted in political discourse and largely absent in public consciousness. How do you explain this glaring inconsistency?

    Contemporary US media focuses on contradictions and conflicts between the two major parties. On the issue of nuclear weapons, little difference exists between them. They support the same programs and both receive donations from Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, among others. They both favor more aircraft than the Pentagon requests, itself an amazing situation given the existing level of spending. Right now, the F35, the largest military project in history, may end up costing $1.5 trillion (an incredible sum even by historical standards of lavish Pentagon spending), yet still unable to achieve the promised performance. This kind of massive pork program is used by senators and representatives to secure political advantage—a “jobs” program that often is a euphemism for a “profits” program.

    Nuclear weapons and climate change are two quintessential planetary threats requiring a coordinated global response. Do you see potential for alignment and cooperation between the anti-nuclear movement and the climate justice movement? 

    We, as a society, are conscious of the risk of the devastating impacts that could come from climate disruption. In contrast to the absence of public discourse around nuclear conflict since the end of the Cold War, climate has been a subject of intense public debate. Although the danger of the nuclear threat remains undiminished, the proposed $1.7 trillion nuclear modernization program in the US is not a matter of serious debate.

    It is difficult to compare climate and nuclear threats. The climate catastrophe toward which we are moving, while uncertain in terms of timing and outcomes, is indisputable. We have survived the nuclear danger for seventy years, although we have come close to conflict more frequently than the public realizes. I am not talking about just the Cuban Missile Crisis; in 1983, for example, we were also at the brink of a nuclear exchange, and there have been other instances. The risk of conflagration remains continuous and potentially catastrophic.

    It is true that climate change may totally disrupt civilization as we know it, but how many lives would it cost? Whatever the number, some form of civilization would probably survive. By contrast, a nuclear winter, which has a non-zero possibility of occurring, would occasion near extinction.

    That being said, both climate and nuclear threats are existential in nature, even as the degree and type of destruction differ. And both share another critical feature: the role of corporate interests and influence in sustaining the threat. As we speak, a pristine Arctic snowfield is under threat of oil drilling. Will Exxon and the other corporations be content to leave their known oil reserves in the ground, as needs to be done? I think that’s as unlikely as Boeing eschewing military contracts.

    To the question of alignment of the nuclear and climate movements, in my view, we cannot deal with the climate problem, globally or nationally, without massive government spending to speed up the production and lower the cost of renewables, and thereby accelerate the transition from a fossil-fuel economy to a renewable energy one. This will also require subsidies to the underdeveloped countries to ease their transitions. In short, we need a new super-sized Marshall Plan combined with government regulation to constrain the most damaging impulses of the fossil-based market economy embraced by Reagan, Thatcher, and other market fundamentalists. We need a national mobilization akin to that achieved during World War II. We confronted Hitler then as a civilizational threat. Climate disruption demands an equivalent response.

    And here’s where the climate-nuclear nexus comes into play again. We cannot afford the wasteful and dangerous development of new nuclear weapons that “modernize” the Doomsday Machine at the same time that we need to apply vast sums to reduce the threat of climate disruption. In the face of imminent climate catastrophe, the $700-plus-billion military budget is both untenable and irresponsible. We must convert the military economy to a climate economy. We cannot have both. To do so, we must recognize that the risks posed by the military-industrial complex far exceed those posed by Russia.

     The Great Transition envisions a fundamental shift in societal values and norms. To what extent does eliminating the nuclear threat ultimately depend on such a shift?

    Few would disagree that to activate plans for deployment of nuclear weapons leading to a nuclear winter—and thereby killing nearly everyone on Earth—is immoral to a degree that words cannot convey. It is a crime that transcends any human conception or language. But what about the threat of deployment? For many, propagating the threat of an immoral act is itself immoral. But in the nuclear era, the nuclear states have not accepted that as a norm. Our entire nuclear posture, and that of our NATO allies, is based on deterrence of a nuclear war and, if it occurs, responding with our nuclear arsenal.

    Revisiting this norm is very difficult. It is deeply embedded in the mindset of the US, Russia, and other nuclear-armed states and reinforced by the interests of powerful corporations. When Reagan and Gorbachev agreed that nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought, they did not say that it cannot be threatened or risked. Both nations continued such preparations and do so to this day. We have been taught that nuclear weapons are a necessary evil. Without a shift in norms and values, this situation will not change.

    The Great Transition depicts a hopeful future rooted in solidarity, well-being, and ecological resilience. Given the dystopian scenarios you outline in The Doomsday Machine and your other work, where do you see the basis for hope?

    My intention in addressing the threat of nuclear annihilation is that it will at least open up the possibility of change. While such a shift in values and norms would be almost miraculous, miracles can happen, and have happened in my lifetime. In 1985, the falling of the Berlin wall a mere four years later would have seemed improbable, if not impossible, given decades of nuclear tensions and near conflicts. But then it happened. And Nelson Mandela coming to power in South Africa, without a violent revolution, was impossible. But it happened.

    So, unpredictable changes like these can happen, and their possibility inspires my commitment to continue my peace activities against long odds. My activity is based on the belief that small probabilities can be enlarged and that, however remote success may be, it is worthwhile pursuing because so much is at stake.

    My experience with the Pentagon Papers showed that an act of truth-telling, of exposing the realities about which the public had been misled, can indeed help end an unnecessary, deadly conflict. This example is a lesson applicable to both the nuclear and climate crises we face. When everything is at stake, it is worth risking one’s life or sacrificing one’s freedom in order to help bring about radical change.

  • Daniel Ellsberg’s Doomsday Machine

    The man who so famously cast light onto the truths of the Vietnam War has now revealed a much larger threat to not only the United States but to all the citizens of our world. Mr. Ellsberg’s new work has the initial effect of scaring the rational reader out of their wits. His personal encounters with the nuclear age have yielded a multitude of warnings for those still holding the illusion that deterrence can save us. He skillfully elevates the faults of our nuclear programs, using his narrative of careful research and silenced horror to show the qualifications he has for raising these concerns. From the interviews he conducted as an employee of the RAND corporation to the war plans he read in the Department of Defense, Daniel Ellsberg’s book is filled with the factors that complete his titular Doomsday Machine. He describes a broken system of retaliation, a history of unnecessary risks, and a government whose morals were lost to the concept of a “just war.”

    In the era of barbed insults regarded as precursors to nuclear threat, the warnings yielded by The Doomsday Machine have become required reading. Many of the circumstances of Ellsberg’s early fears (delegation of first-use capabilities, casualty counts that fail to recognize the theory of nuclear winter, and the space left within deployment of the arsenal for human error) haven’t been fixed or addressed since his time at the Pentagon. We live under the threat of a force the danger of which we cannot comprehend. What Doomsday Machine attempts to do is comprehend this danger, so as to start to dismantle it.

    Tracing the nuclear bomb to its early days on a blackboard at UC Berkeley, he speaks to the uncertainty even its creators had as to what the detonation of this weapon would cause. He speaks to the family men and young physicists who, on the eve of the Trinity tests, took bets as to whether or not their first test would be the end of life on Earth. The atomic flash at the outset of this earliest ever detonation was momentarily mistaken for atmospheric ignition, a seconds-long death of all life, where “the earth would blaze for less than a second in the heavens and then forever continue its rounds as a barren rock.” Even Hitler’s administration did not think the risk worth it, choosing not to pursue scientific research on the creation of such a weapon. Yet now the United States, upheld as the world police for all things moral and ethical, has stockpiled thousands of thermonuclear warheads, while the use of a mere three hundred of their number could cause just as devastating a finale to humanity’s time on Earth.

    Ellsberg asks, “Does the United States still need a Doomsday Machine? Does Russia? Did they ever?”

    He tells us, “The mortal predicament did not begin with Donald J. Trump, and it will not end with his departure.”

    Daniel Ellsberg’s title evokes Kubrick’s film on purpose, a metaphor that culminates in his definition of the “Strangelove Paradox.” The United States has thousands of “Doomdsay Machine” weapons and hundreds of “fingers on the button.” The question the reader must ask, now mortified by the necessary horrors of Ellsberg’s masterpiece, is how to save the world.

    You can find Ellsberg’s book at your local bookshop, or click here to purchase on amazon.com.

  • Overcoming Geopolitical Obstacles to Nuclear Zero by Daniel Ellsberg

    This is the transcript of a talk given by Daniel Ellsberg at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s symposium “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse” on October 24, 2016. The audio of this talk is available here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

    ellsberg

    I think each speaker has, understandably, started by saying what a privilege it is to be here. Let me define that privilege as I feel it, very much very specifically. I don’t believe, in my lifetime, I have been in a discussion group for one day or two days with as many knowledgeable people about nuclear war, nuclear policy, nuclear. If others have been more fortunate, fine. But I see this as a group that is unprecedented for me, and I’m 85. Just saying… A question of age here. We were just a little interested. Noam is the senior person here at 87, I have a senior here, six months more than I am, I’m 85. How many people here are over 64? Okay. You were 10 years old at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I’d say is close to being old enough, and if you’re 70, you’d be 16. That was the last time the American people were conscious of being close, possibly close, to nuclear war. If you’re under that… Let’s say if you’re under 25, you were born after the Cold War, the first Cold War. They’re going to see another one. The people who are in college now are going to understand what ‘Cold War’ means. I’m sorry, ’cause we’re on the way, if we’re not in it already.

    But they have no consciousness of what the first one meant, they couldn’t have. My understanding of… I think that the American public’s understanding and elite’s understanding of nuclear war is almost non-existent. When somebody mentioned earlier whether they knew the difference between an A-bomb and an H-bomb, I’ve asked many audiences that over the year. And I expect to get one, two or three people out of 500 or 1,000 who know that difference. In other words, they know almost nothing. So, let me ask, why aren’t the young involved in this? No American government and no other government has ever taken an effort to educate its people, and that includes non-nuclear states, as well. Eisenhower actually went through a brief period, in the very first months of his administration, on an op… What he called Operation Candor. Capital C-A-N-D-O-R, Candor. It was 1953, we had just tested a thermonuclear weapon in the last days of the Truman administration, having decided not to postpone that ’til Nixon. And he was actually tempted to tell people that the group worked on it in the White House, actually. On telling them of what fallout meant and what difference it made to have H-bombs over A-bombs.

    I think Steven pointed out on your picture the difference is a thousand. In 1954, the first droppable H-bomb was tested. It was one thousand times the Hiroshima weapon. Very few people have a sense of what that means, or what it means right now, that India and Pakistan don’t have H-bombs, and will shortly if testing resumes, which many Republicans and others have been favoring for a long time, and what difference that would make. And I’ll go into that in just a moment. So, that’s sort of not knowing the first thing about the situation we’re in today. I was actually, I have to say, physically dizzy and fainting from the last two talks today by Steven and Hans. Not because I was unfamiliar, I am one of those who actually did know probably most, though far from all, of what each of them had to say. But seeing it all together in one place, and as of today, I was fainting. And the reason was this. Here’s something where I differ from the other people here, who are comparably knowledgers to me, but I’m the one who was part of the problem. No one else here, I suspect, has to think about or deal with the fact that they were on the side of the nuclear arms race at any point in their lives.

    But I wasn’t just, say, designing nuclear weapons, which I know nothing about, or looking at weapons effects specifically. I’m not a scientist, I was an economist. I’m not a scientist. My work was on war plans. And what I was hearing was, “It’s back.” The insanities that I was dealing with, insanities that I was dealing with at that time, and was part of, are coming back. And let me make a little distinction there, my job was to try to somehow edge away, or more than edge away, from the insanities of the Eisenhower war plans. And I was to devise new… I was given the job under the Secretary of Defense McNamara to do new guidance for the operational war plans, that would be a major, major revision of the Eisenhower plans. Which I won’t even take time… I’ve sent my manuscript, by the way, to everybody here. I didn’t expect any of you to have time in the couple of weeks to really look at it. I’m going to talk about a couple of things today that actually aren’t yet dealt with that much in the book. But you will get in the chapters the nature of the Eisenhower proposals. And you know, it was mind-boggling.

    And yet I’ve come to realize that the plans that I, and later, the Kennedy administration worked on, were infeasible modifications of the Eisenhower plan. The actual experience of a nuclear war would’ve been virtually unchanged then and now from the Eisenhower plans, mad as they were. And the subtitle to my book might be the title in the end, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, started out in my mind as somewhat ironic, an attention-catcher. But as I worked along, realized no, they’re real confessions. I have more to confess of being on the wrong track and taking too long to learn it and so forth. They really are confessions. Now, I do think that that background, when I say that I see it coming around again, is based on a understanding of what nuclear weapons were and have been for that is shared by most anti-nuclear activists or specialists, few of whom I think have had real exposure to the actual plans. They’ve heard about them, but they haven’t actually held a plan in their mind or been part of it and so forth. For instance, the word “deterrent” was and is deliberately ambiguous and little understood by most people.

    The purpose of US nuclear war plans and preparations has always been primarily, and at first exclusively, to deter conventional attack by communist forces, by US first-use of nuclear weapons. Let’s remember that between ’45 and ’49, late ’49, when there were plans, nuclear war plans. We had a monopoly which we expected to continue. It was not to deter a Soviet nuclear attack, they didn’t have any and they weren’t expected to for quite a while. And actually, they were slower than we expected to build up their stockpile, especially when it came to ICBMs, but even early on. So that as long as a decade into the nuclear era, we had close to a monopoly. Not literally a monopoly after ’49, but something close to a monopoly. That’s where our policies and our planning were based on that period, essentially where we did not have to fear, especially in the US, putting aside Europe later, but for the US we didn’t have to fear a nuclear weapon landing on us, any more than when we firebombed Tokyo we had to worry that we would be firebombed in return. It was not an issue. And by the way, the plans were started in a period when the initial A-bombs did not, of which we had a very limited stock, again we had three by the end of the month, maybe 10 by the end of the year, did not affect the level of destruction we were already inflicting on Japan.

    Oppenheimer and the others did not expect the first A-bomb to kill as many people as Tokyo in March 9th and 10th, and it didn’t come close. So it wasn’t changing the level of destruction, it was simply a more efficient, cheaper way of doing it with one bomb instead of 300 bombers, but we had 300 bombers and we were using them every day, so it wasn’t changing. And really, the level of expected casualties in Europe or Russia or anywhere, did not reach World War II levels in our estimation. And none of you… That really hasn’t come out very much, what the expectations were. But I can tell you that as late as the early 50s, even mid 50s, you were talking about 15 or 20 million, big figure. But compared to 60 million dead in World War II, so you haven’t gone beyond World War II. From one year to the next in the planning, the casualties went from 15-20 million to 150 million and 200 million, up by 10 times. The mega-tonnage went up much more than that, but for a variety of reasons the damage is in proportional. But you’re going up to hundreds of millions instead of tens. Now that’s something different.

    Okay, the purpose, though, what was the purpose of those weapons? The purpose was almost exclusively to deter. We weren’t anxious to fight, except for a very few individuals. Curtis LeMay was probably correctly perceived as having wanted to get rid of the… Final solution to the Soviet problem, to the communist problem. And there were a few others like that, but they could be named mostly in the Air Force on a hand or two hands, something like that. No, it was to deter. To deter by exterminating the Soviet Union, by the ability to do it. Now, Dick mentioned that… Dick Faulkner, just now, that the Soviets perceive us, and most people, maybe we perceive us, as the one country that’s actually used these weapons. I wish that were true. Actually, we’ve used them dozens of times and to some degree continuously ever since 1945, and some other countries have, too. Why do you think Israel or Pakistan have gotten nuclear weapons, so as not to use them? They are using them the same way we’ve used them every year we’ve had them, which is the way you use a gun when you point it at someone’s head in a confrontation, whether or not you pull the trigger.

    You are using the gun and you could not make that threat whether it’s successful or not if you didn’t have it. And we’re not pointing it. It’s been very conspicuously on our holster on our side. Which, as USAF, as Air Force will point out, is a continuous use. And so it is, indeed. So, that use has been not only by the United States. I’ve been recently reading stuff from the Soviet archives now that’s come out in the last 20 years, and realized, for example, that Khrushchev believed that his threats in Suez, which I must say I thought at the time, everybody thought were ridiculous and may have been ridiculous, he believed it got the Suez War ended. So, he used it over Kuwait, a crisis which I’m sure almost none of you are aware of. The so-called Lebanon-Iraq crisis in Kuwait. Khrushchev made nuclear threats then, as he did later after the Bay of Pigs, which looked pretty ridiculous. And it was certainly bluffs, except that the Soviet specialists say now, “But he believed they worked.” And that encouraged him, then, as soon as he got ICBMs, to make threats over Berlin in 1958, which didn’t get him what he wanted.

    Now in short, this is using the weapons, and using them to what? To deter nuclear attack? No. Not in any single case. And I could give you a list. Berlin, South Vietnam in the 50s, Dien Bien Phu, when we offered, and so forth. Let’s come up, because I don’t have much time here, let’s come right up to the present.

    How many of you had ever heard the name Kaliningrad more than a year ago? How many of you heard it before today? Not so many, right? Look it up on Google. I just found, by the way, that it was originally called Königsberg, which rings in my memory a little bit, under Prussia. But it changed that name in 1946. So we’ve heard of Kaliningrad. Hans mentioned that it’s on the Polish border, right? And when I heard you say that, I thought, “There’s a little better way of saying that.” It’s between Poland and Lithuania. Those are both in NATO. It is part of Russia. It has no land access to Russia, to the rest of Russia. It’s an enclave. It has sea, it’s on a seaport, so they take that seriously.

    It’s now surrounded by NATO, like West Berlin, which had 22 Soviet divisions around it, between it and the rest of NATO. First of all, there’s only one way for the Russians then militarily to defend. It can’t defend, protect. Can it protect? Deter an attack on Kaliningrad, in the area of Kaliningrad. It can say, “Well, we’ll attack you elsewhere if you go into Kaliningrad.” There’s only one way, and that’s to threaten nuclear war, first use. That’s what they are doing. And not implicitly, but explicitly. Putin has said publicly, more than once, “Go into Kaliningrad… ” Which has a population of 400,000, it’s 86 square miles, and so forth. “Go into Kaliningrad, it’s nuclear war. It’s the same as invading Russia, okay?”

    Iskander missiles, dual-capable, in Kaliningrad. Now, do they have nuclear weapons? Warheads? We don’t know. They’re dual-capable. But I say again, you know, he has no other way of doing it, and he is doing it. And the NATO exercise we heard about earlier, had us, NATO, us, going into Kaliningrad. Now, maybe he wouldn’t start a nuclear war. He’d be insane to do it, of course, wouldn’t he? And so, should we assume that’s silly, it’s a bluff? It probably is mainly a bluff. Should we assume, then, that no problem, going into Kaliningrad, now why would go into Kaliningrad? Well, because NATO has just accepted the Baltics into the… If you look at the map on the Baltics. We have no more way of defending the Baltics locally with our divisions that we’re putting… Not divisions, brigades, we’ve been putting there in exercises, than they have of defending Kaliningrad. So what is the NATO answer to that? First use, which it’s always been. When I say, are we… It’s all coming back, let me go back to one little bit of history. Possibly the first use of our nuclear weapons, which was a bluff after the World War, Second World War, was sending publicly described nuclear capable bombers, B-29s, over to England for possible use with the Berlin Blockade, when I was 17. The Berlin Blockade.

    And needed why? Well, if they had interfered with our air access, which they could easily have done, very easily, stopped our air access, we had no other plan than going to war or NATO plan, at that point. How, against the overwhelming Soviet armed forces? No, impossible. So, anyway, Truman believed, by the way, rightly or wrongly, as Gregg Herken has brought out in his book, definitely believed we were successful on that. We kept them from interfering with our air, by fighter pilots in the Axis, it made it possible to stay in West Berlin and get committed there. So, it was a success, which encouraged us to base NATO and other, make all the other uses, I’ve talked of here, that as our first, useful success. Even though it was, in the short run a bluff, the bombers weren’t even configured for nuclear weapons, those B-29s. But they could have been, within weeks. We only had, at that point, a relative handful, a dozen, or a couple dozen, of nuclear weapons.

    Russia is today… There was only one way ever to defend West Berlin ’til the end of the Cold War. Granted, it got less acute after Ostpolitik with Willy Brandt, for which he got the Nobel Prize in ’72. Cold War lasted another 14 years, 15 years. But, in principle, from beginning to end, Berlin was defended by the threat of first use of nuclear weapons. And then by the way, the Kennedy administration came in and, contrary to Eisenhower, Eisenhower’s attitude always was, “Don’t talk about limited nuclear war, especially with Russia. Out of the question. It’ll get big, so go big from the beginning. Go first.” That was Eisenhower’s policy.

    The US didn’t think that looked so good. What’s the alternative? Well, Kennedy, I believe, and the others, the civilians I knew inside said, “You don’t want to initiate nuclear war. But how do you deter it? How do you deal with and how do you reassure Adenauer and reassure the rest of Europe and so forth?” Well, by making the commitment and making the threat. And so what do we try to fill NATO on, with some success? Demonstration strikes. Have you heard that? You heard it earlier this morning. Escalate to de-escalate. A demonstration to show that, I’m sure, Noam, you’ve read stuff on this, if I’m not mistaken, those who were in charge of Berlin planning, you don’t want to go all out. So throw one or two nuclear weapons at them to let them know the risks. So they’ll pull back. Right? Crazy, it was crazy. Crazy then, and crazy now.

    Is it possible for anybody to believe in that? Well, a lot of people seemed to believe in it. The Russians are talking as if they believe in it. Do they really? Who knows? Let me extend that just a moment more.

    The Russians are now defending Kaliningrad by the same threat that NATO used for 50 and more years to defend West Berlin. We are now openly and explicitly defending the Baltics the same way we defended West Berlin or the Russians defended Kaliningrad. And I put to you, there is no other military way to do these things. Let me come back to the last time we came really close, in our knowledge, to nuclear war. It wasn’t the last time, but the public doesn’t know that. Noam made some examples, and others, as late as 1995, actually, with Yeltsin, well after the Cold War. 1983, Andropov, false alarms in his countries, serious ones in 1979, 1981. Serious ones.

    Okay. But the public doesn’t know of any of those. The last time was the Cuban Missile Crisis. How did that come about? Very quickly in one word. Khrushchev knew something that I didn’t know, and I worked for the EXCOM, the Executive Committee, NSC, I was on two of the working groups for the EXCOM, or the NSC during that. And then, a year later, no that was ’62. And two years later, with high clearances, higher than top secret, I studied the Cuban Missile Crisis for most of the year inside the government.

    I still didn’t know that Kennedy had, for a year prior to that, been making every preparation for an invasion of Cuba, which the Russians knew. Exercising it, including an exercise against the Caribbean dictator Ortsac, O-R-T-S-A-C, Ortsac, which as Khrushchev recognized was Castro spelled backwards. And that was the public description of this. And we had been making covert operations into Cuba on an enormous scale. The man who burglarized my doctor’s office, Eugenio Martinez, had as a boat captain made 300 visits, covertly, into Cuba, before the Cuban Missile Crisis, as part of Mongoose. 300, okay.

    So Castro was saying, as he said in his memoirs and later, and we now know very well, “How am I going to keep from losing Cuba? The only country that is going communist without Soviet forces there?” They felt very romantically, almost sentimentally, and also, their foothold in the Western hemisphere and so forth. “I’m going to lose Cuba.” And then he had a brainstorm. And almost nobody in the whole literature describes that brainstorm in the following terms, “I’m going to defend Cuba the way the US defends Berlin.” The only way it could be defended from the Soviet Union, by threatening nuclear weapons. But, he only had, in ’62, still going on, 10 or some say 40 ICBMs. He had threatened to use those over the Bay of Pigs, but that was silly. No. Put nuclear weapons in Cuba.

    That was the only way he could do it, and it would have worked. It wasn’t that crazy, if you could get them there without being stopped. So he had to do it secretly, and he succeeded. He did get them there without being stopped, and once they were there, had he revealed them, I would say, nobody says this, had he revealed them, simply said, “They’re there, just the way your weapons are in Turkey. They’re there. Live with it,” there would have been no question of invading Cuba. It would be out of the question. He would have defended Cuba as long as he wanted to, or if he wanted to trade the weapons, he could trade them not just for Turkish weapons, he could make a big trade if we had to get those out of there.

    So what we see now is then we are currently preparing… I’ll sum it up. No one, no civilian that I know of, put aside LeMay and a couple of others, have wanted to see us in a nuclear war. No president has found himself able or willing to back off from threats of initiating nuclear war and preparing to do it. And the only way that threat can be made they thought plausible, even remotely, in the early years, decades, against the Soviet Union was to have some ability to limit the damage to the United States by hitting all of their hard targets, hitting all of their ICBMs, hitting their command and control, everything else. That was your only way supposedly of surviving. That’s why we had 10,000 weapons, 20,000 weapons, and so forth. It was not to deter a Soviet nuclear attack. It was to make credible a US first strike, and it still is. And that is what it’s for today.

    But now, and I have to take… I’m sorry, but here’s the last 60 seconds. Steve Star today, to my surprise… I mean I hadn’t planned on it, gave you the talk that I had planned to give about nuclear winter, because I think it’s of extreme importance. I know most of what he said, though I was still startled by some things. Of how many of you is that true? How many of you felt you knew most of what Steve Star said today? Really, can I see the hands? Well, it’s more than I would have thought, and we’re talking now about not nuclear winter as it was in 1983, but the studies of the last 10 years since 2007. Let me just ask again. How many of you have read studies by Alan Robock or Toon? Okay. Now you’ve published several. Okay. Meaning that no one has drawn from them that I’ve seen in writing. It’s not just that we’re talking that a nuclear war with Russia of the kind we’re threatening and preparing as in the past would lead to the death of not just most humans, but 99% of humans at most, 98%, 99%. Okay. People understand that if they’ve read the studies.

    I see no one draw the following point, which is very simple. Counterforce, striking first, makes no difference compared to striking second. Most of our warheads, our counterforce, are for striking first. They are for preemption, they are for damage limiting, which is if you believe the studies, which I do, is totally infeasible. Everybody dies, whether you go first or second. So all of these weapons we’re now modernizing and building, actually we are preparing nothing other. They still make credible threats. Credible why? Because humans are crazy, and nations are crazy. It’s credible to make a threat of omnicide, I’m sorry to say, but people don’t realize that’s the threat they’re making. It is the threat we are making. We are in the position of threatening to be a suicide bomber? No. A mutual homicide bomber? No. An omnicide bomber is what we’re threatening to do, not because we want to do it. And I think if that were known, it would at least change the discourse, shall I say. And it certainly is not known.

    As I was saying to my wife, finally, last night… Patricia was saying… I said, “Immoral,” and she said, “Immoral. Immoral is what? Masturbation, adultery, gayness, and so forth. It’s not the right word, somehow, for this.” And I said, “Alright. What is the right word?” We were up late discussing this kind of thing. “What is the… ” There’s no language. Humans never faced precisely this until let’s say 2007, except that who’s heard of it? Nobody knows it, and so forth. We’ve never in our lives faced what we are threatening on either side. It’s not a concept in humans. Can humans relate to this? Well, that remains to be seen, but we haven’t tried.

  • Daniel Ellsberg and 14 Nuclear Protestors Are Victorious in Federal Court

    This article was originally published by Reader Supported News.


    Federal Magistrate judge Rita Federman last Wednesday allowed the U.S. government to dismiss all trespassing charges against the “Vandenberg 15,” a group of citizens who in February conducted a civil disobedience action at Vandenberg Air Force Base. The group was attempting to stop a testing of the Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile that later reached a target in the Marshall Islands (without a nuclear warhead). The group was urging the base commander to stop the testing of thermonuclear warhead delivery vehicles and to eliminate land-based missiles in the U.S.


    The Vandenberg 15 included prominent leaders of the anti-nuclear movement – Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon nuclear weapons strategist, (who also released the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971); Father Louis Vitale, a Franciscan monk and co-founder of the Nevada Desert Experience; Cindy Sheehan, founder of the Gold Star Families for Peace, whose son, Casey, was killed in the Iraq war; and David Krieger, president of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF), member of Veterans for Peace, etc.


    Attorney Matthew Umhofer stated, “Ultimately the government did the right thing to dismiss this case, because they had no real trespassing issues. It is the highest form of patriotism for my clients to petition their government, and they were acting within their rights, and did not trespass as charged. Truly, they are the true patriots, because these nuclear weapons can threaten our national security.”


    Daniel Ellsberg commented on the need for both presidential candidates to consider “dismantling the Minuteman III missiles, to secure the safety of the world, but also the safety of this country. President Obama should take the step and dismantle by next month.”


    Currently, the United States has 450 Minuteman III missiles (with thermonuclear warheads) on high-alert in silos in North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Ellsberg has emphasized in the past that the danger of having these land-based missiles in the U.S. because of the fragility of the worldwide first-strike warning systems, which under time of crisis could launch the nuclear missiles under a ‘use them or lose them’ logic, thus causing an accidental nuclear war.


    Father Louis Vitale stated, “We are still calling on the immediate stop to the use of the Minuteman III missiles, as they are terrible weapons.”


    NAPF president David Krieger emphasized, “This is an absolute victory for all people, not just the people who protested, but all people. Nuclear weapons are the enemy of all humanity, as nuclear weapons are the negation of life on this planet. Humans must show we are more intelligent or we could become extinct. The U.S. needs to lead the way, and the true victory will be when all nuclear weapons are abolished.”


    Carolee Krieger, also one of the Vandenberg 15, clarified, “Daniel Ellsberg has said that if only three hundred nuclear weapons were used worldwide it would cause such smoke and debris in the stratosphere, blocking the sun, that the world would experience famine, starvation. We should use our brains and consider the horrible consequences that could befall us all.”


    In a phone interview after the court’s decision, Ellsberg pointed out, “After the presidential elections, and before the inauguration, Congress will be having discussions about military budgets and nuclear weapons. Secretary of Defense Panetta has stated recently that the first on his list to cut in the military budget [in the event of sequestration] will be the 450 Minuteman III missiles in the U.S. That implies to me that they are not necessary to our national security.


    “In addition, General Cartwright, former commander of the Strategic Command (StratCom), who had the Minuteman III missiles under his command, has stated that the U.S. should get rid of these Minuteman III missiles, as their deployment could endanger our country.


    “I think President Obama should immediately take a limited step by taking the Minuteman III missiles off deployment, not just off high-alert. He would have his own secretary of defense, and the former head of StratCom, by his side in this decision.”


    Ellsberg noted that the issue of false arrests, and First Amendment protections, ultimately led the U.S. government to dismiss the case. He emphasized, “Of course, our criticisms of the U.S. government’s dangerous and reckless actions to have a rehearsal for a holocaust (by testing these missiles) was the focus of the case. There is just no ‘strategic purpose’ to have or deploy these land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and I am saying this strongly, as my former job at the Pentagon was to judge ‘strategic worth’ of nuclear weapons. They should have been dismantled 40-60 years ago, for the safety of the U.S. and the world.”


    All of the Vandenberg 15 would have faced hefty fines from the courts for their protest, except Father Louis Vitale, who would have faced jail time because of his previous arrests at other nuclear actions, including at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Before becoming a Franciscan monk, Father Vitale flew planes for the Air Force in the 1950s. There is another missile test scheduled for November 14 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, yet none of the Vandenberg 15 have committed to protest this next testing of the missiles.

  • Why the Pentagon Papers Matter Now

    Daniel Ellsberg


    This article was originally published by Reader Supported News.


    The declassification and online release Monday of the full original version of the Pentagon Papers – the 7,000-page top secret Pentagon study of US decision-making in Vietnam 1945-67 – comes 40 years after I gave it to 19 newspapers and to Senator Mike Gravel (minus volumes on negotiations, which I had given only to the Senate foreign relations committee). Gravel entered what I had given him in the congressional record and later published nearly all of it with Beacon Press. Together with the newspaper coverage and a government printing office (GPO) edition that was heavily redacted but overlapped the Senator Gravel edition, most of the material has been available to the public and scholars since 1971. (The negotiation volumes were declassified some years ago; the Senate, if not the Pentagon, should have released them no later than the end of the war in 1975.)


    In other words, today’s declassification of the whole study comes 36 to 40 years overdue. Yet, unfortunately, it happens to be peculiarly timely that this study gets attention and goes online just now. That’s because we’re mired again in wars – especially in Afghanistan – remarkably similar to the 30-year conflict in Vietnam, and we don’t have comparable documentation and insider analysis to enlighten us on how we got here and where it’s likely to go.


    What we need released this month are the Pentagon Papers of Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen and Libya). We’re not likely to get them; they probably don’t yet exist, at least in the useful form of the earlier ones. But the original studies on Vietnam are a surprisingly not-bad substitute, definitely worth learning from.


    Yes, the languages and ethnicities that we don’t understand are different in the Middle East from those in Vietnam; the climate, terrain and types of ambushes are very different. But as the accounts in the Pentagon Papers explain, we face the same futile effort in Afghanistan to find and destroy nationalist guerrillas or to get them to quit fighting foreign invaders (now us) and the corrupt, ill-motivated, dope-dealing despots we support. As in Vietnam, the more troops we deploy and the more adversaries we kill (along with civilians), the quicker their losses are made good and the more their ranks grow, since it’s our very presence, our operations and our support of a regime without legitimacy that is the prime basis for their recruiting.


    As for Washington, the accounts of recurrent decisions to escalate in the Pentagon Papers read like an extended prequel to Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s War, on the prolonged internal controversies that preceded the president’s decisions to triple the size of our forces in Afghanistan. (Woodward’s book, too, is based on top secret leaks. Unfortunately, these came out after the decisions had been made, and without accompanying documentation: which it is still not too late for Woodward or his sources to give to WikiLeaks.)


    In accounts of wars 40 years and half a world apart, we read of the same irresponsible, self-serving presidential and congressional objectives in prolonging and escalating an unwinnable conflict: namely, the need not to be charged with weakness by political rivals, or with losing a war that a few feckless or ambitious generals foolishly claim can be won. Putting the policy-making and the field realities together, we see the same prospect of endless, bloody stalemate – unless and until, under public pressure, Congress threatens to cut off the money (as in 1972-73), forcing the executive into a negotiated withdrawal.


    To motivate voters and Congress to extricate us from these presidential wars, we need the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East wars right now. Not 40 years in the future. Not after even two or three more years of further commitment to stalemated and unjustifiable wars.


    Yet, we’re not likely to get these ever within the time frame they’re needed. The WikiLeaks’ unauthorised disclosures of the last year are the first in 40 years to approach the scale of the Pentagon Papers (and even surpass them in quantity and timeliness). But unfortunately, the courageous source of these secret, field-level reports – Private Bradley Manning is the one accused, though that remains to be proven in court – did not have access to top secret, high-level recommendations, estimates and decisions.


    Very, very few of those who do have such access are willing to risk their clearances and careers – and the growing possibility (under President Obama) of prosecution – by documenting to Congress and the public even policies that they personally believe are disastrous and wrongly kept secret and lied about. I was one – and far from alone – with such access and such views, as a special assistant to the assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs in the Pentagon in 1964-65. (My immediate boss John T McNaughton, Robert McNamara’s primary assistant on Vietnam, was another; as documented in the recent publication of his personal diary.)


    I’ve long regretted that it didn’t even occur to me, in August 1964, to release the documents in my Pentagon safe giving the lie to claims of an “unequivocal, unprovoked” (unreal) attack on our destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf: precursors of the “evidence beyond any doubt” of nonexistent WMDs in Iraq, which manipulated Congress, once again, to pass the exact counterpart of the Tonkin Gulf resolution.


    Senator Morse – one of the two senators who had voted against that unconstitutional, undated blank cheque for presidential war in 1964 – told me that if I had provided him with that evidence at the time (instead of 1969, when I finally provided it to the senate foreign relations committee, on which he had served): “The Tonkin Gulf resolution would never have gotten out of committee; and if it had been brought to the floor, it would have been voted down.”


    That’s a heavy burden for me to bear: especially when I reflect that, by September, I had a drawer-full of the top secret documents (again, regrettably, not published until 1971) proving the fraudulence of Johnson’s promises of “no wider war” in his election campaign, and his actual determination to escalate a war that he privately and realistically regarded as unwinnable.


    Had I or one of the scores of other officials who had the same high-level information acted then on our oath of office – which was not an oath to obey the president, nor to keep the secret that he was violating his own sworn obligations, but solely an oath “to support and defend the constitution of the United States” – that terrible war might well have been averted altogether. But to hope to have that effect, we would have needed to disclose the documents when they were current, before the escalation – not five or seven, or even two, years after the fateful commitments had been made.


    A lesson to be drawn from reading the Pentagon Papers, knowing all that followed or has come out in the years since, is this. To those in the Pentagon, state department, the White House, CIA (and their counterparts in Britain and other Nato countries) who have similar access to mine then and foreknowledge of disastrous escalations in our wars in the Middle East, I would say:


    Don’t make my mistake. Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait until a new war has started in Iran, until more bombs have fallen in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, Libya, Iraq or Yemen. Don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you go to the press and to Congress to tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. Don’t wait 40 years for it to be declassified, or seven years as I did for you or someone else to leak it.


    The personal risks are great. But a war’s worth of lives might be saved.

  • A Memory of Howard Zinn

    I just learned that my friend Howard Zinn died today. Earlier this morning, I was being interviewed by the Boston Phoenix, in connection with the release in Boston in February of a documentary in which he is featured prominently. The interviewer asked me who my own heroes were, and I had no hesitation in answering, first, “Howard Zinn.”

    Just weeks ago after watching the film on December 7, I woke up the next morning thinking that I had never told him how much he meant to me. For once in my life, I acted on that thought in a timely way. I sent him an e-mail in which I said, among other things, what I had often told others about him: that he was, “in my opinion, the best human being I’ve ever known. The best example of what a human can be, and can do with their life.”

    Our first meeting was at Faneuil Hall in Boston in early 1971, where we both spoke against the indictments of Eqbal Ahmad and Phil Berrigan for “conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger,” from which we marched with the rest of the crowd to make Citizens’ Arrests at the Boston office of the FBI. Later that spring we went with our affinity group (including Noam Chomsky, Cindy Fredericks, Marilyn Young, Mark Ptashne, Zelda Gamson, Fred Branfman and Mitch Goodman), to the Mayday actions blocking traffic in Washington (“If they won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government”). Howard tells that story in the film and I tell it at greater length in my memoir, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (pp.376-81). But for reasons of space, I had to cut out the next section in which Howard–who had been arrested in DC after most of the rest of us had gone elsewhere–came back to Boston for a rally and a blockade of the Federal Building. I’ve never published that story, so here it is, an out-take from my manuscript:

    A day later, Howard Zinn was the last speaker at a large rally in Boston Common. I was at the back of a huge crowd, listening to him over loudspeakers. 27 years later, I can remember some things he said. “On Mayday in Washington thousands of us were arrested for disturbing the peace. But there is no peace. We were really arrested because we were disturbing the war.”

    He said, “If Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had been walking the streets of Georgetown yesterday, they would have been arrested. Arrested for being young.”

    At the end of his comments he said, “I want to speak now to some of the members of this audience, the plainclothes policemen among us, the military intelligence agents who are assigned to do surveillance. You are taking the part of secret police, spying on your fellow Americans. You should not be doing what you are doing. You should rethink it, and stop. You do not have to carry out orders that go against the grain of what it means to be an American.”

    Those last weren’t his exact words, but that was the spirit of them. He was to pay for that comment the next day, when we were sitting side by side in a blockade of the Federal Building in Boston. We had a circle of people all the way around the building, shoulder to shoulder, so no one could get in or out except by stepping over us. Behind us were crowds of people with posters who were supporting us but who hadn’t chosen to risk arrest. In front of us, keeping us from getting any closer to the main entrance to the building, was a line of policemen, with a large formation of police behind them. All the police had large plastic masks tilted back on their heads and they were carrying long black clubs, about four feet long, like large baseball bats. Later the lawyers told us that city police regulations outlawed the use of batons that long.

    But at first the relations with the police were almost friendly. We sat down impudently at the very feet of the policemen who were guarding the entrance, filling in the line that disappeared around the sides until someone came from the rear of the building and announced over a bullhorn, “The blockade is complete. We’ve surrounded the building!” There was a cheer from the crowd behind us, and more people joined us in sitting until the circle was two or three deep.

    We expected them to start arresting us, but for a while the police did nothing. They could have manhandled a passage through the line and kept it open for employees to go in or out, but for some reason they didn’t. We thought maybe they really sympathized with our protest, and this was their way of joining in. As the morning wore on, people took apples and crackers and bottles of water out of their pockets and packs and shared them around, and they always offered some to the police standing in front of us. The police always refused, but they seemed to appreciate the offer.

    Then one of the officers came over to Howard and said, “You’re Professor Zinn, aren’t you?” Howard said yes, and the officer reached down and shook his hand enthusiastically. He said, “I heard you lecture at the Police Academy. A lot of us here did. That was a wonderful lecture.” Howard had been asked to speak to them about the role of dissent and civil disobedience in American history. Several other policemen came over to pay their respects to Howard and thank him for his lecture. The mood seemed quite a bit different from Washington.

    Then a line of employees emerged from the building, wearing coats and ties or dresses. Their arms were raised and they were holding cards in their raised hands. As they circled past us they hold out the cards so we could see what they were: ID cards, showing they were federal employees. They were making the peace-sign with their other hands, they were circling around the building to show solidarity with what we were doing. Their spokesman said over a bullhorn, “We want this war to be over, too! Thank you for what you are doing! Keep it up.” Photographers, including police, were scrambling to take pictures of them, and some of them held up their ID cards so they would get in the picture. It was the high point of the day.

    A little while after the employees had gone back inside the building, there was a sudden shift in the mood of the police. An order had been passed. The bloc of police in the center of the square got into tight formation and lowered their plastic helmets. The police standing right in front of us, over us, straightened up, adjusted their uniforms and lowered their masks. Apparently the time had come to start arrests. The supporters who didn’t want to be arrested fell back.

    But there was no arrest warning. There was a whistle, and the line of police began inching forward, black batons raised upright. They were going to walk through us or over us, push us back. The man in front of us, who had been talking to Howard about his lecture a little earlier, muttered to us under his breath, “Leave! Now! Quick, get up.” He was warning, not menacing us.

    Howard and I looked at each other. We’d come expecting to get arrested. It didn’t seem right to just get up and move because someone told us to, without arresting us. We stayed where we were. No one else left either. Boots were touching our shoes. The voice over our heads whispered intensely, “Move! Please. For God’s sake, move!” Knees in uniform pressed our knees. I saw a club coming down. I put my hands over my head, fists clenched, and a four-foot baton hit my wrist, hard. Another one hit my shoulder.

    I rolled over, keeping my arms over my head, got up and moved back a few yards. Howard was being hauled off by several policemen. One had Howard’s arms pinned behind him, another had jerked his head back by the hair. Someone had ripped his shirt in two, there was blood on his bare chest. A moment before he had been sitting next to me and I waited for someone to do the same to me, but no one did. I didn’t see anyone else getting arrested. But no one was sitting anymore, the line had been broken, disintegrated. Those who had been sitting hadn’t moved very far, they were standing like me a few yards back, looking around, holding themselves where they’d been clubbed. The police had stopped moving. They stood in a line, helmets still down, slapping their batons against their hands. Their adrenaline was still up, but they were standing in place.

    Blood was running down my hand, covering the back of my hand. I was wearing a heavy watch and it had taken the force of the blow. The baton had smashed the crystal and driven pieces of glass into my wrist. Blood was dripping off my fingers. Someone gave me a handkerchief to wrap around my wrist and told me to raise my arm. The handkerchief got soaked quickly and blood was running down my arm while I looked for a first-aid station that was supposed to be at the back of the crowd, in a corner of the square. I finally found it and someone picked the glass out of my arm and put a thick bandage around it.

    I went back to the protest. My shoulder was aching. The police were standing where they had stopped, and the blockade had reformed, people were sitting ten yards back from where they had been before. There seemed to be more people sitting, not fewer. Many of the supporters had joined in. But it was quiet. No one was speaking loudly, no laughing. People were waiting for the police to move forward again. They weren’t expecting any longer to get arrested.

    Only three or four people had been picked out of the line to be arrested before. The police had made a decision (it turned out) to arrest only the “leaders,” not to give us the publicity of arrests and trials. Howard hadn’t been an organizer of this action, he was just participating like the rest of us, but from the way they treated him when they pulled him out of the line, his comments directly to the police in the rally the day before must have rubbed someone the wrong way.

    I found Roz Zinn, Howard’s wife, sitting in the line on the side at right angles to where Howard and I had been before. I sat down between her and their housemate, a woman her age. They had been in support before until they had seen what happened to Howard.

    Looking at the police in formation, with their uniforms and clubs, guns on their hips, I felt naked. I knew that it was an illusion in combat to think you were protected because you were carrying a weapon, but it was an illusion that worked. For the first time, I was very conscious of being unarmed. At last, in my own country, I understood what a Vietnamese villager must have felt at what the Marines called a “county fair,” when the Marines rounded up everyone they could find in a hamlet–all women and children and old people, never draft- or VC-age young men–to be questioned one at a time in a tent, meanwhile passing out candy to the kids and giving vaccinations. Winning hearts and minds, trying to recruit informers. No one among the villagers knowing what the soldiers, in their combat gear, would do next, or which of them might be detained.

    We sat and talked and waited for the police to come again. They lowered their helmets and formed up. The two women I was with were both older than I was. I moved my body in front of them, to take the first blows. I felt a hand on my elbow. “Excuse me, I was sitting there,” the woman who shared the Zinn’s house said to me, with a cold look. She hadn’t come there that day and sat down, she told me later, to be protected by me. I apologized and scrambled back, behind them.

    No one moved. The police didn’t move, either. They stood in formation facing us, plastic masks over their faces, for quite a while. But they didn’t come forward again. They had kept open a passage in front for the employees inside to leave after five, and eventually the police left, and we left..

    There was a happier story to tell, just over one month later. On Saturday night, June 12, 1971, we had a date with Howard and Roz to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Harvard Square. But that morning I learned from someone at the New York Times that—without having alerted me—the Times was about to start publishing the top secret documents I had given them that evening. That meant I might get a visit from the FBI any moment; and for once, I had copies of the Papers in my apartment, because I planned to send them to Senator Mike Gravel for his filibuster against the draft.

    From Secrets (p. 386):

    “I had to get the documents out of our apartment. I called the Zinns, who had been planning to come by our apartment later to join us for the movie, and asked if we could come by their place in Newton instead. I took the papers in a box in the trunk of our car. They weren’t the ideal people to avoid attracting the attention of the FBI. Howard had been in charge of managing antiwar activist Daniel Berrigan’s movements underground while he was eluding the FBI for months (so from that practical point of view he was an ideal person to hide something from them), and it could be assumed that his phone was tapped, even if he wasn’t under regular surveillance. However, I didn’t know whom else to turn to that Saturday afternoon. Anyway, I had given Howard a large section of the study already, to read as a historian; he’d kept it in his office at Boston University. As I expected, they said yes immediately. Howard helped me bring up the box from the car.

    We drove back to Harvard Square for the movie. The Zinns had never seen Butch Cassidy before. It held up for all of us. Afterward we bought ice-cream cones at Brigham’s and went back to our apartment. Finally Howard and Roz went home before it was time for the early edition of the Sunday New York Times to arrive at the subway kiosk below the square. Around midnight Patricia and I went over to the square and bought a couple of copies. We came up the stairs into Harvard Square reading the front page, with the three-column story about the secret archive, feeling very good.”

  • Nuclear Hero’s ‘Crime’ was Making Us Safer

    Mordechai Vanunu — my friend, my hero, my brother — has
    again been arrested in Israel on "suspicion" of the "crime" of "meeting
    with foreigners." I myself have been complicit in this offense,
    traveling twice to Israel for the express purpose of meeting with him,
    openly, and expressing support for the actions for which he was
    imprisoned for over eighteen years. His offense has been to defy, openly
    and repeatedly, conditions put on his freedom of movement and
    associations and speech after he had served his full sentence,
    restrictions on his human rights which were a direct carry-over from
    the British Mandate, colonial regulations in clear violation of the
    Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Such restrictions have no place
    in a nation evincing respect for a rule of law and fundamental human
    rights. His arrest and confinement are outrages and should be ended
    immediately.

    My
    perspective on Mordechai and his behavior was expressed as well as I
    could do it today in the following op-ed published in 2004 on the day
    of his release from prison. I can only say that I would be proud to be
    known as the American Vanunu: though my own possible sentence of 115
    years for revealing state secrets was averted by disclosure of
    government misconduct against me which pales next to the Israeli
    misconduct in assaulting, drugging and kidnapping Vanunu in the process
    of bringing him to trial, let alone the eleven years of solitary
    confinement he was forced to endure.

    From the Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2004:

    Mordechai
    Vanunu is the preeminent hero of the nuclear era. He consciously risked
    all he had in life to warn his own country and the world of the true
    extent of the nuclear danger facing us. And he paid the full price, a
    burden in many ways worse than death, for his heroic act — for doing
    exactly what he should have done and what others should be doing.

    Vanunu's
    "crime" was committed in 1986, when he gave the London Sunday Times a
    series of photos he had taken within the Israeli nuclear weapons
    facility at Dimona, where he had worked as a technician.

    For
    that act — revealing that his country's program and stockpile were much
    larger than the CIA or others had estimated — Vanunu was kidnapped from
    the Rome airport by agents of the Israeli Mossad and secretly
    transported back for a closed trial in which he was sentenced to 18
    years in prison.

    He
    spent the first 11 1/2  years in solitary confinement in a 6-by-9-foot
    cell, an unprecedented term of solitary under conditions that Amnesty
    International called "cruel, inhuman and degrading."

    Now,
    after serving his full term, he is due to be released today. But his
    "unfreedom" is to be continued by restrictions on his movements and his
    contacts: He cannot leave Israel, he will be confined to a single town,
    he cannot communicate with foreigners face to face or by phone, fax or
    e-mail (purely punitive conditions because any classified information
    that he may have possessed is by now nearly two decades old).

    The
    irony of all this is that no country in the world has a stronger stake
    than Israel in preventing nuclear proliferation, above all in the
    Middle East. Yet Israel's secret nuclear policies — to this day it does
    not acknowledge that it possesses such weapons — are shortsighted and
    self-destructive. They promote rather than block proliferation by
    encouraging the country's neighbors to develop their own, comparable
    weapons.

    This
    will not change without public mobilization and democratic pressure,
    which in turn demand public awareness and discussion. It was precisely
    this that Vanunu sought to stimulate.

    Not
    in Israel or in any other case — not that of the U.S., Russia, England,
    France, China, India or Pakistan — has the decision to become a nuclear
    weapons state ever been made democratically or even with the knowledge
    of the full Cabinet. It is likely that in an open discussion not one of
    these states could convince its own people or the rest of the world
    that it had a legitimate reason for possessing as many warheads as the
    several hundred that Israel allegedly has (far beyond any plausible
    requirement for deterrence).

    More
    Vanunus are urgently needed. That is true not only in Israel but in
    every nuclear weapons state, declared and undeclared. Can anyone fail
    to recognize the value to world security of a heroic Pakistani, Indian,
    Iraqi, Iranian or North Korean Vanunu making comparable revelations?

    And
    the world's need for such secret-telling is not limited to citizens of
    what nuclear weapons states presumptuously call rogue nations. Every
    nuclear weapons state has secret policies, aims, programs and plans
    that contradict its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation
    Treaty and the 1995 Declaration of Principles agreed to at the NPT
    Renewal Conference. Every official with knowledge of these violations
    could and should consider doing what Vanunu did.

    That
    is what I should have done in the early '60s based on what I knew about
    the secret nuclear planning and practices of the United States when I
    consulted at the Defense Department, on loan from the Rand Corp., on
    problems of nuclear command and control. I drafted the Secretary of
    Defense Guidance to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the general nuclear
    war plans, and the extreme dangers of our practices and plan were apparent to me.

    I
    now feel derelict for wrongfully keeping secret the documents in my
    safe revealing this catastrophically reckless posture. But I did not
    then have Vanunu's example to guide me.

    When
    I finally did have an example in front of me — that of young Americans
    who were choosing to go to prison rather than participate in what I too
    knew was a hopeless, immoral war — I was inspired in 1971 to turn over
    a top-secret history of presidential lies about the war in Vietnam to
    19 newspapers. I regret only that I didn't do it earlier, before the
    bombs started falling.

    Vanunu
    should long since have been released from solitary and from prison, not
    because he has "suffered enough" but because what he did was the
    correct and courageous thing to do in the face of the foreseeable
    efforts to silence and punish him.

    The
    outrageous and illegal restrictions proposed to be inflicted on him
    when he finally steps out of prison after 18 years should be widely
    protested and rejected, not only because they violate his fundamental
    human rights but because the world needs to hear this man's voice.

    The cult and culture of secrecy in every nuclear weapons state
    have endangered humanity and continues to threaten its survival.
    Vanunu's challenge to that wrongful and dangerous secrecy must be
    joined worldwide.

  • 2005 Annual Dinner Remarks

    Martin Luther King, Jr. said of his time, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of good people.”

    Our voices and efforts can and do make a difference.

    We meet this year, as we have for the past two years, in a time of war, and I think we must all ask ourselves if we are doing enough to further the cause of peace.

    We just passed the 2,000 mark of young Americans dead in Iraq. And over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed.

    Are we doing enough to build a peaceful world?

    Our responsibility, and the reason the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation exists, is to build such a world, and create a future in which our children and grandchildren can look back on war as an artifact of the past.

    One path to creating such a future is to honor those who struggle for peace, and that is what we are engaged in this evening.

    Tonight we are fortunate to honor two exceptional peacemakers.

    I’ve worked closely with Senator Roche for nearly a decade, and I can tell you what a truly extraordinary man he is. You have already heard from Diandra about his achievements. Let me just add that he is a deeply spiritual person, whose persistence and courage is rooted in a solid base of faith and love for humanity. Knowing that humanity is endangered by nuclear arsenals, I doubt that Doug will cease his work until that danger and the weapons themselves no longer exist.

    Now, it is my privilege to introduce you to Daniel Ellsberg.

    The name Daniel Ellsberg has become synonymous with courageous truth telling for the risks he took in releasing the Pentagon Papers. There was an easier route that Dan could have taken. He could have looked at the Pentagon Papers and then looked the other way. He could have said that government secrecy is necessary, even if it deceives the people into supporting an illegal war. He could have kept his high-level job as a RAND Corporation analyst at the Pentagon and lived a comfortable life with all the perks that go with high government position.

    Can you imagine putting everything on the line for truth – your job, your family, your reputation, your freedom? Dan put it all on the line for truth, for democracy and, most of all, for the possibility of ending a war and saving lives – American and Vietnamese – and he did it with the expectation of losing his own freedom.

    Daniel Ellsberg is a Harvard Ph.D. with an exquisite mind. He is one of the brightest people I know. As a young man, he was a cold warrior, who after graduating from Harvard College volunteered for the Marines and served as a Marine Corps platoon leader and company commander. This is the background of the man who chose to reveal the government’s own secret findings about the Vietnam War to the American people.

    In becoming a whistle blower, Dan helped strengthen the roots of democracy and end a terrible war. He also helped bring down a presidency built on deception and misconduct. Dan’s courage and the illegal reaction of the Nixon administration, helped bring about Mr. Nixon’s early retirement, under duress, from the presidency.

    For releasing the Pentagon Papers, Dan was placed on trial on 11 felony counts that could have resulted in more than 100 years in prison.

    The government’s case against him was dismissed when Nixon’s “plumbers” were caught breaking into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. In this way, Dan was spared growing old in prison. Rather, he has stayed young by devoting himself to governmental accountability and continuing to work for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons. His award-winning memoir on Vietnam and the release of the Pentagon Papers, Secrets, is a book that all Americans should read.

    In his early career, Dan Ellsberg focused on nuclear weapons dangers. In addition to his ongoing efforts for government transparency and accountability and his encouragement of potential whistleblowers, he continues to analyze and to speak out on nuclear dangers.

    Daniel Ellsberg is a courageous and dedicated leader for peace. He is a true American hero. It is a privilege to present him with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2005 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award.