The Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

  What had prevented Nixon’s test261 of the madman theory from being carried out in 1969 was neither any leak of his threats and plans nor any North Vietnamese compliance with them. It was, as Nixon recounted in his memoirs, the fact that two million Americans took part on October 15 in the “Moratorium” (a general strike by another name), a nationwide weekday work- and school-stoppage protesting the war. Another demonstration, focused on Washington, was scheduled for two days in mid-November. As Nixon says, it was clear to him, given the scale of the first demonstration, that his ultimatum would fail. The North Vietnamese would not believe that he could continue such attacks in the face of this unprecedented popular resistance.

  He secretly gave up his plans for attacking the North at that time. But he continued until the end of the month with a secret global alert of SAC—deliberately designed to be visible to Soviet intelligence but not to the American public, with the intent of making his nuclear threats credible to the Soviets and the North Vietnamese while keeping them unknown to the public.

  That alert—which included SAC bombers flying round-the-clock missions with weapons aboard, a renewal of the air alert that McNamara had discontinued in 1968 because of an accident—was meant to convey to the Soviets, in effect: “We really are preparing to hit your ally with nuclear weapons if they don’t meet our terms; don’t think of making any nuclear response if we have to do that. We’re poised to meet that immediately with a preemptive attack.” This was, after all, exemplary of what I now understand to have been the major purpose of U.S. strategic weapons since the early fifties: to deter, with confidence, Soviet second-use retaliation to U.S. first use of tactical weapons against Soviet forces or their allies, by threatening that if the Soviets made a nuclear response in kind with its own tactical weapons SAC might escalate to a full first strike against the Soviet Union.

  I knew none of this in 1969 or for the next five years. Neither did virtually anyone else outside a few in the White House and the Pentagon. Thus, none of the millions of people who participated in the demonstrations in 1969 were aware that they might have helped prolong a “moratorium” on U.S. nuclear attacks (though not on threats and preparations) for close to half a century more.

  Within weeks of reading in 1974 Roger Morris’s revelation of the first-use planning in 1969 and then hearing more about it from Morris, I mentioned what he had told me to my close friend, the Pakistani political scientist and anti-war activist Eqbal Ahmad. Eqbal informed me that he had been in Paris in December 1972, talking with the North Vietnamese negotiating team just before and during the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam that followed Kissinger’s pre-election assurance that “peace is at hand.” The chief negotiator Xuan Thuy, Eqbal said, had told him during that visit that Henry Kissinger had threatened North Vietnam with nuclear attacks on twelve occasions: “douze menaces nucleaires.”

  I said, “They were keeping a list!” He said yes, that became even clearer the next morning when he talked with Xuan Thuy’s superior, Le Duc Tho. When Ahmad told him what he had heard the previous day, repeating it exactly, Le Duc Tho shook his head negatively, and said: “Treize.” Thirteen. “The unlucky number,” he added.

  To find that I had been as ignorant as every other outsider in the previous five years was no surprise to me. After all, I knew better than most how well and how long important secrets can be kept by government insiders, even from other officials. On the other hand, these were two areas—Vietnam, nuclear policy—where I thought of myself as exceptionally privy to secrets, in the know. It was something of a shock to hear as late as 1974 that I had so underestimated the nuclear dimension to Nixon’s Vietnam strategy.

  This news confronted me with a challenging question: If I hadn’t known about this, what else didn’t I know that I would have thought I did? How much had I been missing in my long-term preoccupation with nuclear first-strike planning, false alarms, instability, crises? Specifically, how many first-use nuclear threats by other presidents had I failed to discover or to take seriously? Those “unknown unknowns,” as George W. Bush’s secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld would later call them, had suddenly become for me “known unknowns.” I began an investigation that I’ve pursued for over four decades. Eventually it reoriented my whole understanding of the functions of our first-strike strategic forces and their relation to threats of first use of tactical weapons in support of our allies.

  I began to look back on the history of U.S. first-use threats262—putting together what were “alleged” or rumored threats in unclassified scholarly or journalistic works or memoirs—then reexamining episodes I had previously studied on a classified basis without fully recognizing an underlying pattern. Most histories downplayed or totally ignored these allegations or reports of nuclear threats because of a lack of documentation. Yet time after time, as documents dribbled out through declassification—often several decades after the events—what emerged was that the allegations had been sound, the threats really had occurred and had been meant to be taken seriously.

  As in the case of first-strike planning and its estimated effects, or the delegation of nuclear authority, the earlier long-term paucity of documents available to investigators turned out to reflect not the absence of such threats but instead systematic, prolonged secrecy about them, even within government circles of those with clearances. Secrecy about presidential discussion of nuclear threats has been only somewhat less than that surrounding covert operations or assassination plots. But the effect on serious scholars had been to make them either altogether unaware of such threats or unduly skeptical that they reflected serious consideration at high levels.

  Thus, after Harry Truman had answered263 a question at a press conference on November 30, 1950 (days after Marines were surrounded by Chinese Communist troops at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea), on whether there was active consideration of use of the atomic bomb in Korea by saying, “There has always been active consideration of its use,” nearly all historians for decades concluded that Truman had simply made an offhand, unreflective comment that had no relation to actual decision-making.

  Not so. The press conference comment probably was not a deliberate revelation by the president. (The question, evidently, had not been planted; the White House tried to walk back his statement that afternoon.) But the consideration that was going on within the JCS of the pros and cons of using nuclear attacks in various ways was active, indeed, and there was more than one occasion under Truman when some or all of the JCS actually recommended their use. All this had been concealed by secrecy (except for Truman’s one breach) that was virtually complete for decades.

  I well remember that 1950 press conference, when I was nineteen and expecting to be sent to Korea by the end of my junior year in college, if not sooner. (It was in that expectation that I proposed to my then fiancée that we get married before I left for the war. We did that in the Christmas break between fall and spring terms; but later that spring a new system of college deferments allowed me to graduate and pursue a year of graduate study in England before I volunteered for the Marines.) I had long wondered whether there had been more to Truman’s comment than scholars had recognized. In my new study I found it noteworthy, when voluminous documentation of nuclear analyses and contingency plans finally emerged, to find that the secrecy system had been so effective and to learn both that the Joint Chiefs were ready to consider dropping atomic bombs just five years after Hiroshima and that Harry Truman didn’t rule it out in internal discussion and planning even though he was less inclined than they were to do it again.

  Likewise, it had become public even in 1951 that General MacArthur had advised the use of atomic weapons in Korea. (His recommendation to a member of Congress to do that, as well as expanding the war to China, led to his highly public and controversial firing by Truman.) But had Dwight Eisenhower, succeeding Truman, paid any attention to such notions (as MacArthur was still proposing)? Not only at the time but for long after, most people, including scholars, found it hard to ima
gine that Dwight Eisenhower (who had revealed he had opposed using the atomic bomb on Japan) was any less reluctant than Truman to make Korea a nuclear war.

  Yes, Eisenhower did say in his first volume of memoirs264 in 1963 that he had determined a decade earlier that the war in Korea could not be allowed to “drag on,” and that a conventional ground attack would be too costly: “First, it was obvious that if we were to go over to a major offensive, the war would have to be expanded outside of Korea.… Finally, to keep the attack from being overly costly, it was clear that we would have to use atomic weapons. This necessity was suggested to me by General MacArthur while I, as President-elect, was still living in New York.”

  Still, I was very struck to read, when it was declassified almost twenty years later, this account of an NSC meeting early in the Eisenhower administration265 on February 11, 1953:

  [The President] then expressed the view that we should consider the use of tactical atomic weapons on the Kaesong area [an area of approximately twenty-eight square miles, treated by the Truman administration as a sanctuary as the initial site of the armistice negotiations; according to General Mark Clark, it was “now chock full of troops and materiel”], which provided a good target for this type of weapon. In any case, the President added, we could not go on the way we were indefinitely. General Bradley thought it desirable to begin talking with our allies regarding an end of the sanctuary, but thought it unwise to broach the subject yet of possible use of atomic weapons.

  Secretary Dulles discussed the moral problem and the inhibitions on the use of the A-bomb, and Soviet success to date in setting atomic weapons apart from all other weapons as being in a special category. It was his opinion that we should try to break down this false distinction.

  The President added that we should certainly start on diplomatic negotiations with our allies. To him, it seemed that our self-respect and theirs was involved, and if they objected to the use of atomic weapons we might well ask them to supply three or more divisions needed to drive the Communists back, in lieu of the use of atomic weapons. In conclusion, however, the President ruled against any discussion with our allies266 of military plans or weapons of attack.†

  Vice President Richard Nixon was, as at all NSC meetings, listening and learning. He had been in office as well in 1954–55 and again in 1958 when Eisenhower directed the Joint Chiefs267 to plan to use nuclear weapons, imminently, against China if the Chinese Communists should attempt to invade the island of Quemoy, occupied by Chiang’s troops, a few miles off mainland China. These threats, which his mentors believed to have been successful, were among the lessons Nixon sought to apply in his own presidency, as indicated at the start of this chapter. Nixon, in short, was the not the first president to “think big.” Nor was he the last.

  * * *

  “It has never been true that nuclear war is ‘unthinkable,’ ”268 wrote British historian E. P. Thompson. “It has been thought and the thought has been put into effect.” He was referring to President Harry Truman’s use of atomic bombs to destroy the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. What needs further attention is that the president who ordered these attacks—along with the great majority of the American public—regarded these nuclear attacks as marvelously successful. Such thoughts get thought again, and acted on.

  Among military planners in the U.S. government, thinking about nuclear war has in fact been continuous over the last seventy-two years: and not only, or even mainly, with respect to deterring or responding to a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States or its forces or allies. Preparations and commitments to initiate nuclear war “if necessary” have been the basis of fundamental, longstanding U.S. policies and crisis declarations and actions not only in Europe but in Asia and the Middle East as well.

  The notion common to nearly all Americans that “no nuclear weapons have been used since Nagasaki” is mistaken. It is not the case that U.S. nuclear weapons have simply piled up over the years, unused and unusable, save for the single function of deterring their use against us by the Soviets. Again and again, generally in secret from the American public, U.S. nuclear weapons have been used, for quite different purposes.

  As I noted earlier, they have been used in the precise way that a gun is used when you point it at someone’s head in a direct confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled. For a certain type of gun owner, getting their way in such situations without having to pull the trigger is the best use of the gun. It is why they have it, why they keep it loaded and ready to hand. All American presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have acted on that motive, at times, for owning nuclear weapons: the incentive to be able to threaten to initiate nuclear attacks if certain demands are not met.

  The long-secret history of this period,269 extending throughout the Cold War and beyond, reveals that the assumption of a legitimate and available presidential “option” of first use—American initiation of nuclear attacks as an escalation of conventional armed conflict—is far more than purely symbolic or rhetorical. In reality, every president from Truman to Clinton has felt compelled at some point in his time in office—usually in great secrecy—to threaten and/or discuss with the Joint Chiefs of Staff plans and preparations for possible imminent U.S. initiation of tactical or strategic nuclear warfare, in the midst of an ongoing non-nuclear conflict or crisis.

  This general proposition is, I know, unfamiliar, startling, on its face highly implausible. To make it less so, I list below most of the actual nuclear crises that can now be documented for the last half of the twentieth century; this is followed by a discussion of more recent instances of nuclear threats from George W. Bush to Donald J. Trump.a

  Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 1945 (with the threat and readiness to drop more until the Japanese surrendered).

  Truman’s deployment of B-29s,270 officially described as “atomic-capable,” to bases in Britain and Germany at the outset of the Berlin blockade, June 1948 (critical, in the eyes of the administration, to Soviet failure to challenge the blockade in the air).

  Truman’s press conference warning that atomic weapons were under active consideration (as they actually were), November 30, 1950, for Korea after China entered the war.

  Eisenhower’s secret nuclear threats271 against China to force and maintain a settlement in Korea in 1953.

  Secretary of State Dulles’s secret offers272 to French foreign minister Bidault of two (possibly three) tactical nuclear weapons in 1954 to relieve the French troops besieged by the Indochinese at Dien Bien Phu.

  Internal agreement under Eisenhower and Dulles273 during the first Quemoy crisis of September 1954–April 1955 that nuclear weapons would be necessary as a last resort to defend the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, communicated to the Chinese by numerous statements and moves that led, in Dulles’s opinion, to the negotiated resolution of the crisis.

  “Diplomatic use of the Bomb”274 (Nixon’s description) to deter Soviet unilateral action against the British and French in the Suez crisis of 1956.

  Eisenhower’s secret directive to the Joint Chiefs during the Lebanon crisis in 1958 to prepare to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, to prevent an Iraqi move into the oil fields of Kuwait.275

  Eisenhower’s secret directive to the Joint Chiefs in 1958 to plan to use nuclear weapons against China276 if the Chinese Communists attempted to invade Quemoy.

  The 1958–59 Berlin crisis.277

  The 1961–62 Berlin crisis.278

  The Cuban missile crisis, 1962.279

  Numerous “shows of nuclear force”280 involving demonstrative deployments or alerts—deliberately visible to adversaries and intended as a “nuclear signal”—of forces with a designated role in U.S. plans for strategic nuclear war.

  Much public discussion in newspapers and in the Senate of (correct) reports that President Johnson had been advised by the JCS of the possible necessity of nuclear weapons to defend Marines surrounded at Khe Sanh, Vietnam, 1968.281†

  Secret threats by Nixon officials t
o deter Soviet attack on Chinese nuclear capability,282 1969–70.

  Nixon’s secret threats of massive escalation,283 including the possible use of nuclear weapons, conveyed to the North Vietnamese by Henry Kissinger, 1969–72.

  Threats and nuclear-capable naval deployment in 1971 to deter (according to Nixon) a Soviet response to possible Chinese intervention against India in the Indo-Pakistani war, but possibly also, or mainly, to deter India from further military pressure284 on Pakistan.

  Nixon’s NSC put SAC on high alert in October 1973285 to deter the Soviets from intervening unilaterally with ground forces to separate the combatants in the Arab-Israeli war, by underscoring U.S. threats to oppose them by force and expressing U.S. willingness to risk escalation to all-out nuclear war.

  President Ford placed nuclear weapons on DEFCON 3286 alert on August 19, 1976, in response to the “tree-trimming incident,” a fatal skirmish in the demilitarized zone; with a U.S. show of force threatening possible use of nuclear weapons, including flying B-52 bombers “from Guam ominously north up the Yellow Sea on a vector directly to … Pyongyang.”

  “The Carter Doctrine on the Middle East,”287 January 1980, as explained (below) by Defense Secretary Harold Brown, Assistant Secretary of State William Dyess, and other spokesmen.