Begging the question, Dan.It turns out that Ellsberg also took many thousands of pages of documents pertaining to another subject: nuclear war. Ellsberg, a prominent thinker in the field of decision theory, had worked on the military’s “mutual assured destruction” strategy during the Cold War. Once a believer in deterrence, he now says he was a collaborator in an “insane plan” for “retaliatory genocide.” He wanted to tell the world decades ago; with nuclear threat looming again, he’s put the whole story into a new book, The Doomsday Machine.
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“I’ve had a nice life, but I would rather have gotten this out,” Ellsberg says. “I shouldn’t have waited.”
NY Magazine
Oh.Ellsberg believed that his bureaucratic opponents — mainly the military brass — were not thinking through the consequences of nuclear war. Then, in 1961, he was allowed to see a piece of information previously unknown even to Kennedy, the death count the military projected for theoretical strikes: some 600 million, not including any Americans killed in counterattacks. (That was still an underestimate.) [...] The planners weren’t heedless — they intended to inflict maximal civilian casualties. “The shock was to realize that the Joint Chiefs knew,” Ellsberg tells me. “I was working for people who were crazier than I had thought. I had thought that they had inadvertently constructed a doomsday machine, without knowing it.”
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He writes that the idea that authority to launch a nuclear war rested solely with the president was a myth, and that the nuclear “football” carried by a military attaché to the president is just “theater.” Working for the Defense Department, Ellsberg traveled throughout Asia, where he discovered there were many plausible scenarios in which officers might feel authorized to launch a nuclear attack in the absence of presidential orders. Safeguards were easy to circumvent. (For decades, purportedly, the eight-digit code to launch a Minuteman missile was set at 00000000.)
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One of the documents in his safe [along with the soon to be released so-called Pentagon Papers], as the FBI surely knew, was a classified nuclear study commissioned by Kissinger. “It’s the same old Dr. Strangelove stuff: 90 million dead, 120 million dead,” Ellsberg says. “But I was going to put that out, of course.” Ellsberg stashed that memo, along with all the other nuclear materials, in a box and gave the lot to his brother, Harry, who later wrapped them in plastic and buried them in the compost pile behind his home in Hastings-on-Hudson. Harry, who is now dead, told his brother that the FBI came poking around the compost pile. But he had already moved the box to another hiding spot, beneath a big iron stove in the garbage dump in Tarrytown.
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Ellsberg intended to arrange for the nuclear papers to be leaked after his trial in Los Angeles, where he was sure he would be convicted. But then he was vindicated through a chain of events he calls a “miracle.” [...] Afterward, though, Harry gave him some bad news: A tropical storm had flooded the dump in 1971. The nuclear papers were lost.
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“That was a shadow over the next 40 years, thinking I fucked up, you know?”
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“Trump has made people more worried,” Ellsberg says. But in his view, having an erratic president only highlights the inherent instability of the system of deterrence. “What is real craziness?” he says. “Everything we’re doing here is crazy, but it’s a consensual craziness.”
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For this reason, Ellsberg is happy that Trump has shown a deferential stance toward Russia. “Why is he that way? I don’t know. Probably, I think, because they’ve got blackmail on him,” Ellsberg says. “I don’t care what the reasons are.” On the other hand, facing North Korea, Trump has been willing to make explicit nuclear threats — although Ellsberg says Trump’s predecessors have all used their arsenals much the same way, by inference, like a gun that bulges conspicuously beneath a jacket. “This is my speculation,” he says, “but in Trump’s mind, the fact that they can kill enormous numbers of our allies and even some American troops, it is very, very different from fearing that they can kill Americans in the homeland.” But even if their missiles can’t reach us quite yet, Ellsberg the game theorist believes that Kim Jong-un has probably devised some sort of strategy to assure that he isn’t destroyed alone.
“Just a small boat, that’s all it takes,” Ellsberg says. “You can put a warhead in it and sail it to Long Beach or L.A. Harbor or San Francisco Harbor.”
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