Unfortunately, there continues to be little awareness of the recent scientific confirmation of the thirty-year-old nuclear winter “hypothesis” and its implications for our existing strategic nuclear war plans. To be sure, these actual plans remain Top Secret, but a great deal of testimony by officials, former insiders, and well-informed researchers makes clear that they have much the same character and the same opacity to civilian superiors even within the government as during the time when I had direct knowledge of them.
But I can’t expect enough others to find my judgment adequately credible to motivate a broad and urgent movement for change without more authoritative confirmation. It is therefore a priority of mine—and, I hope, of readers of this book—to encourage pressure on Congress (and potential whistleblowers and other witnesses) and on other legislatures both in nuclear and non-nuclear weapons states to investigate the questions and issues I have raised, both in the United States and worldwide.
After all, not one of these legislatures327 (starting with our own) has ever successfully demanded or been told the truth of nuclear targeting or of the prospective consequences of nuclear war, whether relatively limited and small or all-out.†
It is the long-neglected duty of the U.S. Congress—preferably with the expert help and authority of the National Academy of Sciences, in part on a classified basis for details of actual weapons assignments against targets, yields, height of burst, numbers of detonations—to test the now-confirmed scientific findings regarding nuclear winter against the realities of our secret war plans. On that basis, Congress and the NAS can and must investigate the foreseeable human and environmental consequences of implementing the various “options” in those plans.
But past experience makes clear that Congress will not hold real investigative hearings, using committee subpoena powers, to penetrate the curtains of secrecy around these matters without a new level of pressure from American citizens. It is a major purpose of this book to help inspire that pressure, though it’s obvious that will require a major change in public mood and priorities, and, if such pressure is to be effective, a still greater change in the composition of the present Congress.
My own experience of the last half century tells me that such a change in public awareness and resulting pressure on Congress will not occur without revelations by patriotic and courageous whistleblowers. We have long needed and lacked the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers on the subject of nuclear policies and preparations, nuclear threats, and decision-making: above all in the United States and Russia but also in the other nuclear weapons states.
I will always deeply regret that I did not make known to Congress, the American public, and the world the extensive documentation of persistent and still-unknown nuclear dangers that was available to me half a century ago. Those in nuclear weapons states who are now in a position to do more than I did then to alert their countries and the world to fatally reckless secret policies should take warning from the earlier silence by myself and others—and do better.
I would say to them: Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait to tell the truth to the public and legislatures, with documents, until you’ve lost your access or (in my case) the documents themselves. Above all, to paraphrase an infamous statement by a former secretary of state, don’t wait until the “smoking gun” about your own country’s reckless nuclear threats and policies is a mushroom cloud.
Given such revelations and corresponding investigations by legislatures in this country and other nuclear weapons states, it seems to me reasonable to hope that new public awareness of the now-secret realities would make the prevailing establishment consensus on the need and legitimacy of threatening and preparing to bring about total omnicide unsustainable. It should be commonly recognized that no stake whatever, no cause, no principle, no consideration of honor or obligation or prestige or maintaining leadership in current alliances—still less, no concern for remaining in office, or maintaining a particular power structure, or sustaining jobs, profits, votes—can justify maintaining any risk whatever of causing the near extinction of human and other animal life on this planet.
Omnicide—threatened, prepared, or carried out—is flatly illegitimate, unacceptable, as an instrument of national policy; indeed, it cannot be regarded as anything less than criminal, immoral, evil. In the light of recent scientific findings, of which the publics of the world and even their leaders are still almost entirely unaware, that risk is implicit in the nuclear planning, posture, readiness, and threats of the two superpowers. That is intolerable. It must be changed, and that change can’t come too soon.
The steps I have indicated are only a beginning toward the ultimate delegitimation of nuclear weapons and nuclear threats. But none of the necessary changes can occur without an informed public, suitably alarmed by a situation that properly evokes horror, fear, revulsion, and incredulity, accompanied, hopefully, by the determination of the highest order and urgency to eliminate it.
Yet these reactions have been suppressed by a practice, when the reality is revealed and discussed at all, of maintaining a quasi-academic tone, an “objective,” dispassionate, non-evaluative discourse regarding what the planning and practice has been and the bureaucratic or political reasons behind it, without any appropriate evaluation of the nature or consequence of these decisions and actions. That has contributed to the lack of an adequate political response, even when some aspects of past realities are occasionally exposed.
Moreover, the warnings and demands of activists are almost entirely ignored in mainstream media and politics and academic discussion as being non-expert and emotional rather than rational, failing to give appropriate weight to the complexities, the competing moral considerations and priorities that must drive reasonable and responsible policy-making.
What is missing—what is foregone—in the typical discussion and analysis of historical or current nuclear policies is the recognition that what is being discussed is dizzyingly insane and immoral: in its almost-incalculable and inconceivable destructiveness and deliberate murderousness, its disproportionality of risked and planned destructiveness to either declared or unacknowledged objectives, the infeasibility of its secretly pursued aims (damage limitation to the United States and allies, “victory” in two-sided nuclear war), its criminality (to a degree that explodes ordinary visions of law, justice, crime), its lack of wisdom or compassion, its sinfulness and evil.
And yet part of what must be grasped—what makes it both understandable, once grasped, and at the same time mysterious and resistant to our ordinary understanding—is that the creation, maintenance, and political threat-use of these monstrous machines has been directed and accomplished by humans pretty much the way we think of them: more or less ordinary people, neither better nor worse than the rest of us, not monsters in either a clinical or mythic sense.
This particular process, and what it has led to and the dangers it poses to all complex life on earth, shows the human species—when organized hierarchically in large, dense populations, i.e., civilization—at its absolute worst. Is it really possible that ordinary people, ordinary leaders, have created and accepted dangers of the sort I am describing? Every “normal” impulse is to say “No! It can’t be that bad!” (“And if it ever was, it can’t have persisted. It can’t be true now, in our own country.”)
We humans almost universally have a false self-image of our species. We think that monstrous, wicked policies must be, can only be, conceived and directed and carried out by monsters, wicked or evil people, or highly aberrant, clinically “disturbed” people. People not like “us.” That is mistaken. Those who have created a continuing nuclear threat to the existence of humanity have been normal, ordinary politicians, analysts, and military strategists. To them and to their subordinates, Hannah Arendt’s controversial proposition regarding the “banality of evil” I believe applies, though it might better have been stated as the “banality of evildoing, and of most evildoers.”
After all, we Americans have seen i
n recent years human-caused catastrophes reflecting governmental or corporate recklessness far greater and more conscious and deliberate than our public can easily imagine or is allowed to discover in time. Above all, the invasion of Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan, but also the failure to prepare for or respond to Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, and financial disasters affecting millions: the savings-and-loan scandal, Internet and housing bubbles, criminal fraud, and the meltdown of the banking and investment system.
Perhaps reflection on these political, social, and moral failures—preceding though amplified by current premonitions of disastrous decision-making during the tenure of Donald Trump—will lend credibility to my basic theme, otherwise hard to absorb: that the same type of heedless, shortsighted, and reckless decision-making and lying about it has characterized our government’s nuclear planning, threats, and preparations, throughout the nuclear era, risking a catastrophe incomparably greater than all these others together.
I well know that it is entirely unrealistic to hope that the present Congress (not to speak of the present president), dominated by the current Republican Party, or for that matter a Congress returned to the control of Democratic members mainly of the sort we have seen in the last generation, would respond to demands for any one of the measures I have proposed above:
a U.S. no-first-use policy
probing investigative hearings on our war plans in the light of nuclear winter
eliminating our ICBMs
forgoing delusions of preemptive damage-limiting by our first-strike forces
giving up the profits, jobs, and alliance hegemony based on maintaining that pretense
otherwise dismantling the American Doomsday Machine
Both parties as currently constituted oppose every one of these measures. This mortal predicament did not begin with Donald J. Trump, and it will not end with his departure. The obstacles to achieving these necessary changes are posed not so much by the majority of the American public—though many in recent years have shown dismaying manipulability—but by officials and elites in both parties and by major institutions that consciously support militarism, American hegemony, and arms production and sales.
Tragically, the news is equally bad when it comes to the prospects of reversing American energy policy in time and on a scale to avert catastrophic climate change. Much the same institutions and elites tenaciously obstruct solution to this other existential challenge; they are, indeed, inordinately powerful. And yet, as demonstrated by the downfall of the Berlin Wall, the nonviolent dissolution of the Soviet empire, and the shift to majority rule in South Africa, all unimaginable just thirty years ago, such forces for sustaining an unjust and dangerous status quo are not all-powerful.
Is it simply quixotic to hope to preserve human civilization from either the effects of burning fossil fuels or preparing for nuclear war? As Martin Luther King Jr. warned us,328 one year to the day before his death, “There is such a thing as being too late.” In challenging us on April 4, 1967, to recognize “the fierce urgency of now” he was speaking of the “madness of Vietnam,” but he also alluded on that same occasion to nuclear weapons and to the even larger madness that has been the subject of this book: “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”
He went on:
We must move past indecision to action.… If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
… Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.
Glossary
AEC
Atomic Energy Commission
BMEWS
Ballistic Missile Early Warning System
BNSP
Basic National Security Policy (civilian guidance for war planning)
CINCPAC
Commander in Chief, Pacific Command
DAC
Democratic Advisory Council
DARPA
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
ExComm
Executive Committee of the National Security Council (Cuban missile crisis)
FOIA
Freedom of Information Act
GEOP
General Emergency Operations Plan (PACOM general war plan)
ISA
International Security Affairs (OSD)
JCS
Joint Chiefs of Staff
JSCP
Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan
LOW
launch on warning
LST
landing ship, tank
NIE
National Intelligence Estimate
NSC
National Security Council
ONR
Office of Naval Research
OSD
Office of the Secretary of Defense
PACAF
Pacific Air Forces
PACOM
Pacific Command
RAF
Royal Air Force
SAC
Strategic Air Command
SAMs
surface-to-air missiles
SAP
special access programs
SIOP
Single Integrated Operational Plan
Westpac
Western Pacific
Notes
Introduction
Many of these other documents See National Security Study Memorandum 1 (NSSM-1), Vietnam Options paper, and others: ellsberg.net/Vietnam.
the command and control of nuclear weapons See my essay of August 1960, “Strategic Objectives and Command Control Problems,” ellsberg.net/RAND, written as a RAND internal document but widely circulated at the time within the defense establishment as an early, unclassified exposition of “the problems of command and control,” then not widely understood.
including some on nuclear policy National Security Study Memorandum 3 (NSSM-3), 1969, still not declassified despite frequent FOIA requests by the National Security Archive.
I drafted the Top Secret guidance For full text and accompanying notes, see ellsberg.net/BNSP.
at the highest civilian supergrade level GS-18, civilian protocol equivalent between major general and lieutenant general in military rank. When I transferred to the State Department in 1964, it was at the equivalent rank FSR1, Foreign Service Reserve-1.
I told just one person Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Penguin, 2003), chapter 7, “Vietnam: The Lansdale Team,” 102–108.
A separate, secret grand jury James Goodale, Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles (New York: CUNY Journalism Press, 2013), 174–179.
President Nixon had secretly been informed Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets, 426–443.
These crimes against me Daniel Arkin, “Daniel Ellsberg: Nixon White House Wanted to ‘Shut Me Up’ With Assault,” NBC News, June 19, 2017, www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/daniel-ellsberg-nixon-white-house-wanted-shut-me-assault-n774376, with link to Nick Akerman, Watergate Special Prosecutors’s Office, “Investigation into the Assault on Anti-War Demonstrators on the Capitol Steps on May 3, 1972,” June 5, 1975.
During the next thirteen days See Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets, chapter 29, “Going Underground,” 387–410.
National Security Archive National Security Archive, George Washington University, nsarchive.gwu.edu/nsa/the_archive.html. See many references below.
scores of important subjects Among these are my forty years of anti-nuclear activism from the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 to the present, including many of my some eighty-seven arrests for nonviolent civil disobedience (one on the Greenpeace ship Sirius in Leningrad harbor in 1982 protesting Soviet nuclear testing; most recently on August 9, Nagasaki Day 2017, protesting the continued design of nuclear weapons at the Lawrence Livermore National Laborat
ory, Livermore, California); the history of nuclear weapons accidents and false alarms that have greatly contributed to the dangers of the nuclear era; and the alarming relevance of the recently revealed nuclear crisis of 1983 (unperceived at the time on the U.S. side: see references below) to current circumstances of renewed cold war and mutual costly “modernization” of U.S. and Russian strategic forces with preemptive first-strike characteristics, along with new capabilities for cyberwarfare.
recently declassified documents Among the most important of these are a series of electronic briefing books from the National Security Archive: “Newly Declassified Documents on Advance Presidential Authorization of Nuclear Weapons Use,” National Security Archive electronic briefing book, August 30, 1998, nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/predelegation/predel.htm; “First Declassification of Eisenhower’s Instructions to Commanders Predelegating Nuclear Weapons Use, 1959–1960,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 45, May 18, 2001, nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB45/; “The Creation of SIOP-62: More Evidence on the Origins of Overkill,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 130, July 13, 2004, nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB130/index.htm; “New Evidence on the Origins of Overkill First Substantive Release of Early SIOP Histories,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 236, originally posted November 21, 2007, updated October 1, 2009, nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb236/index.htm; “ ‘It Is Certain There Will Be Many Firestorms’: New Evidence on the Origins of Overkill”: National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 108, January 14, 2004, nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB108/index.htm.
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