Lacking that, I have tried in many ways and venues In addition to many lectures, interviews, and articles (for which see ellsberg.net/articles), this includes testimony in some of my trials for civil disobedience protesting nuclear weapons. In particular, in my trial in Golden, Colorado, November 27, 1979, for four arrests for obstructing the railroad tracks at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production Facility, which was then producing components for the neutron bomb, I revealed much of the substance—then Top Secret—of the early chapters of this book, in hopes that making this public under oath in a criminal trial, subject to perjury, would add authority to my revelations. See my testimony in A Year of Disobedience and a Criticality of Conscience by Joseph Daniel, to which I also contributed a preface and afterword (Boulder, CO: Story Arts Media, 2013). Among articles, see in particular “Roots of the Upcoming Nuclear Crisis (or, Dr. Strangelove Lives: How Those Who Do Not Love the Bomb Should Learn to Start Worrying),” David Krieger, ed., The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons (New York: Routledge, 2011), 45–76.
the open literature See in particular the publications of Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, including “US Nuclear War Plan Updated Amidst Policy Review,” April 4, 2013, fas.org/blogs/security/2013/04/oplan8010-12/. Joseph Trevithick, “Here’s America’s Plan for Nuking Its Enemies, Including North Korea,” Warzone, April 7, 2017, www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/9056/heres-americas-plan-for-nuking-its-enemies-including-north-korea.
“If we have them, why can’t we use them?” Harper Neidig, “Scarborough: Trump Asked Adviser, Why US Can’t Use Nuclear Weapons,” The Hill, August 3, 2016, thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/290217-scarborough-trump-asked-about-adviser-about-using-nuclear.
unless, evidently, he were the first See the important and timely essay, bringing up to date many of the issues raised in this book, by Bruce Blair, “What Exactly Would It Mean to Have Trump’s Finger on the Nuclear Button? A Nuclear Launch Expert Lays Out the Various Scenarios,” Politico Magazine, June 11, 2016, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-donald-trump-nuclear-weapons-missiles-nukes-button-launch-foreign-policy-213955.
Meanwhile, frequent leaked reports in the American press William M. Arkin, Cynthia McFadden, Kevin Monohan, and William Windrem, “Trump’s Options for North Korea Include Placing Nukes in South Korea,” NBC News, April 7, 2017, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-s-options-north-korea-include-placing-nukes-south-korea-n743571; William M. Arkin, “North Korea Has at Least One Thing Right About America’s Plans for War,” Vice News, March 15, 2016, news.vice.com/article/united-states-plans-for-war-with-north-korea.
Dead Hand David E. Hoffman, Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (New York: Anchor Books, 2010). For description and further references to the Dead Hand system, see chapter 19, “The Strangelove Paradox.”
Thanks to revelations from the former Soviet Union See especially Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997). Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006); Sergei N. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2000); Sergo Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Missiles of November, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); General Anatoli I. Gribkov and General William Y. Smith, Operation Anadyr: U.S. and Soviet Generals Recount the Cuban Missile Crisis (Chicago: Edition Q, 1994). Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). I’ve benefited from long conversations with Sergei Krushchev, Sergo Mikoyan, and Timothy Naftali.
The strategic nuclear system is more prone to false alarms See the account by a former CIA officer Peter Vincent Pry, War Scare: Russia and America on the Nuclear Brink (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999). Also Schlosser, Command and Control; see references immediately below on 1983.
Later studies have confirmed Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). See also Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York: Penguin Press, 2013), especially on the 1979 and 1980 false alarms. See several important books from Bruce G. Blair, including Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1985); The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1993); Global Zero Alert for Nuclear Forces (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1995).
false alarms in … 1983 On the recently confirmed 1983 Soviet war scare, including especially dangerous false alarms, see the work of former CIA analyst Benjamin B. Fischer, “A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare,” first published in CIA, Studies in Intelligence, 1996. See also Benjamin B. Fischer, “The Soviet-American War Scare of the 1980s,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 19 (2006): 480–518. And in particular, especially relevant to current concerns about cyberwarfare in service of decapitation, which may give rise to mutual fears encouraging preemption: Benjamin B. Fischer, “Canopy Wing: The U.S. War Plan That Gave the East Germans Goose Bumps,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 27 (2014): 431–464.
For the definitive confirmation of the seriousness of this crisis on the Soviet side—a very highly classified study done in 1990 that was finally declassified twenty-five years later, in 2015, see “The 1983 War Scare Declassified and For Real: All Source Intelligence Report Finds US-Soviet Relations on ‘Hair-Trigger’ in 1983,” edited by Nate Jones, Tom Blanton, and Lauren Harper, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 533, October 24, 2015, nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb533-The-Able-Archer-War-Scare-Declassified-PFIAB-Report-Released/. For further documentation and analysis, see Nate Jones, ed., Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise that Almost Triggered Nuclear War (New York: New Press, 2016). The Reagan policies that frightened the Soviets were extensively documented at the time, including through extensive interviews, in Robert Scheer’s With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War, updated edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1983).
the phenomena of nuclear winter For some of the original studies, see R. P. Turco, et al., “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” Science 122 (1983): 1283–1292. Carl Sagan, “Nuclear War and Climactic Catastrophe: Some Policy Implications,” Foreign Affairs 62 no. 2 (1983/84): 257–292; see also expanded version in Lester Grinspoon, ed., The Long Darkness: Psychological and Moral Perspectives on Nuclear Winter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 7–62. Paul R. Ehrlich, et al., The Nuclear Winter: The World After Nuclear War (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985). Carl Sagan and Richard Turco, A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race (New York: Random House, 1990).
the most recent scientific calculations Steven Starr, “The Ban Treaty Must Address the Scientifically Predicted Consequences of Nuclear War,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 19, 2017, thebulletin.org, gives a good list of some of most recent literature on the subject. See Owen B. Toon, et al., “Atmospheric Effects and Societal Consequences of Regional Scale Nuclear Conflicts and Acts of Individual Nuclear Terrorism,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 7 (2007); Alan Robock, et al., “Climatic Consequences of Regional Nuclear Conflicts,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 7 (2007); Michael Mills, et al., “Massive Global Ozone Loss Predicted Following Regional Nuclear Conflict,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 14 (2007): 5307–5312; Michael J. Mills, et al., “Multi-decadal Global Cooling and Unprecedented Ozone Loss Following a Regional Nuclear Conflict,” Earth’s Future 2 (2014), 161–176; Andrea Stenke, et al.,
“Climate and Chemistry Effects of a Regional Scale Nuclear Conflict,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 13 (2013): 9713–9729; Alan Robock, et al., “Nuclear Winter Revisited with a Modern Climate Model and Current Nuclear Arsenals: Still Catastrophic Consequences,” Journal of Geophysical Research 112 (2007).
Gorbachev has reported Alan Robock, “Nuclear Winter,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 1 (May/June 2010): 425, climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/WiresClimateChangeNW.pdf. “Mikhail Gorbachev, then leader of the Soviet Union, described in an interview in 1994 how he felt when he got control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, ‘Perhaps there was an emotional side to it. But it was rectified by my knowledge of the might that had been accumulated. One-thousandth of this might was enough to destroy all living things on earth. And I knew the report on nuclear winter.’ And in 2000 he said, ‘Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on Earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act in that situation.’ ”
Reagan, who made a similar attribution New York Times, February 12, 1985, “Interview with the President on a Range of Issues,” www.nytimes.com/1985/02/12/world/transcript-of-interview-with-president-on-a-range-of-issues.html.
“Or now, as a great many reputable scientists are telling us, that such a war could just end up in no victory for anyone because we would wipe out the earth as we know it. And if you think back to a couple of natural calamities—back in the last century, in the 1800s, just natural phenomena from earthquakes, or, I mean, volcanoes—we saw the weather so changed that there was snow in July in many temperate countries. And they called it the year in which there was no summer. Now if one volcano can do that, what are we talking about with the whole nuclear exchange, the nuclear winter that scientists have been talking about?” In contrast with Gorbachev, Reagan drew from this not only the desirability of eliminating all nuclear weapons but also necessity of conducting space tests of his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, Star Wars), which, in abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviets, prevented an agreement with Gorbachev at the Reykjavik Summit on mutual nuclear abolition.
Kahn had said he was sure Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 144–156. Herman Kahn, “ ‘A Doomsday Machine’—Last Word in the Arms Race?,” US News & World Report (May 1, 1961): 61, 64.
John Somerville later termed “omnicide” John Somerville, “Nuclear ‘War’ is Omnicide,” Peace Research, April 1982.
so was Herman Kahn in 1960 On Thermonuclear War, 523–524, “The Doomsday Machine … will not always be a completely academic notion. While it does not seem technically feasible today, unless R&D is controlled, it most likely will be technically feasible in 10 to 20 years. A central problem of arms control—perhaps the central problem—is to delay the day when Doomsday Machines or near equivalents become practical, and when and if Doomsday Machines or near equivalents are feasible to see to it that none are built.” In 1983 scientists discovered that an American Doomsday Machine capable of producing nuclear winter had existed at the time Kahn published this statement in 1960 and has existed ever since.
Chapter 1: How Could I?
premises of this last justification For the debate on the “decision” to drop the atomic bomb, see Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (New York: Penguin Books, expanded and updated edition, 1985; first published 1965); Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage Books, 1986); Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003; first published 1975); Barton J. Bernstein, ed., The Atomic Bomb: The Critical Issues (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1976); Stewart L. Udall, The Myths of August: A Personal Exploration of Our Tragic Cold War Affair with the Atom (New York: Pantheon, 1994); Leon V. Sigal, Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998); Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds., Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (Stony Creek, CT: The Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998); J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of the Atomic Bombs Against Japan, 3rd revised edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Particularly pathbreaking, along with many of these other studies, is the more recent work of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, ed., The End of the Pacific War: Reappraisals (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). Scott D. Sagan and Benjamin A. Valentino, “Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants,” International Security 42, no. 1, (Summer 2017): 41–70.
“the world was headed for grief” Leo Szilard, Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts, ed. Spencer R. Weart and Gertrud Weiss Szilard (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1980), 55.
“a black day in the history of mankind” Ibid., 146.
war-winning weapon For one of the most illuminating discussions of hopes for the bomb in the post–World War II world, see Greg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981).
I knew what I wanted to work on Daniel Ellsberg, “Decision-making Under Uncertainty: The Contributions of von Neumann and Morgenstern,” (honors thesis, Harvard University, 1952). Daniel Ellsberg, “Classic and Current Notions of ‘Measurable Utility,’ ” Economic Journal 64 (1954): 225–50.
That included situations of conflict Daniel Ellsberg, “Theory of the Reluctant Duelist,” American Economic Review vol. 46 (1956): 909–23. I might note that although I was often described later as a “game theorist,” my initial contribution in my thesis and this article based on it was a critique of the von Neumann and Morgenstern solution to rational strategy in “two-person, zero-sum games,” the foundation of classical game theory. That was possibly the first—and for many years one of the only—critical, skeptical accounts of that theory.
invent better ones Daniel Ellsberg, “Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 75 (1962), 643–69. Much extended in 1962 Ph.D. thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (Garland, NY: 2001; Kindle edition: Routledge, 2015).
“a guided missile to any spot on earth” World Circling Space Ship, www.astronautix.com/w/worldcirclingspaceship.html.
Earlier studies assumed only a minor role Albert Wohlstetter, Fred S. Hoffman, and Henry S. Rowen, “Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s,” staff report, R-290, (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, September 1, 1956). Top Secret, declassified circa mid-1960s. albertwohlstetter.com/writings/19560901-AW-EtAl-R290.pdf.
An article on the new “military intellectuals” “The Military Intellectuals,” London Times Literary Supplement, August 25, 1961.
a study of how the Japanese had achieved a surprise attack Later published, having taken years and intense lobbying to get cleared, as Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962).
“cannot ensure a level of destruction” Wohlstetter, et al., staff report R-290, 100.
Chapter 2: Command and Control
I joined a few others See my “Strategic Objectives and Command Control Problems,” August 12, 1960, ellsberg.net. This was written as a RAND internal document, but it was unclassified and widely circulated outside RAND in command and control circles.
“planning on strategic warning is dangerous” Albert Wohlstetter, Fred S. Hoffman, and Henry S. Rowen, “Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s,” staff report, R-290 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, September 1, 1956). Top Secret, declassified circa mid-1960s. albertwohlstetter.com/writings/19560901-AW-EtAl-R290.pdf.
I conjectured—as was
later borne out See the Mark Machina compilation, “Further Readings on Choice Under Uncertainty, Beliefs and the Ellsberg Paradox,” a selective listing as of 2001 from “450 scholarly articles that reference Ellsberg (1961)” [my 1961 article “Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms”] in my Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (Garland, NY: 2001; Kindle edition: Routledge, 2015), xxxix–xlviii.
“The first BMEWS radar complex” Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York: Penguin Press, 2013), 255.
President Reagan once made a public statement “On the Record; Reagan on Missiles,” New York Times, October 17, 1984.
I had raised this question Daniel Ellsberg to Albert Wohlstetter and Frank Eldridge, “Subject: Strains on the Fail-Safe System,” RAND Memo M-5 039, July 1958, ellsberg.net; copies to Harry Rowen, Alain Enthoven, Ed Oliver, Jay Wakeley, Dick Mills, R. B. Murrow, C. J. Hitch, Bill Jones.
I had come across a SAC manual Ibid. “Strains on the Fail-Safe System.”
“Spark Plug procedures are the only method” Quoted sentences in this paragraph and the next are from my notes on the GEOP (General Emergency Operations Plan, the PACOM general war plan).
operators of the Minuteman missiles had circumvented John H. Rubel, Doomsday Delayed: USAF Strategic Weapons Doctrine and SIOP-62, 1959–1962 (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2008), 14–15.
“the locks had been installed” Bruce Blair’s Nuclear Column, Keeping Presidents in the Nuclear Dark, “Episode #1: The Case of the Missing ‘Permissive Action Links,’ ” February 11, 2004, Center for Defense Information, web.archive.org/web/20120511191600/http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm.
assured the practical inability of the president Noam Chomsky brought to my attention a memoir by a SAC pilot, Major Don Clawson, who during 1961–1962 flew fifteen air alert (CHROME DOME) missions in B-52s carrying two nuclear HOUND DOG missiles and four other nuclear weapons. In several passages, Clawson substantiates that the looseness of control that I found in the Pacific was virtually identical to SAC procedures, even during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In a section titled “Incredible Reliance on Crew Integrity,” Clawson writes “The total reliance on the B-52 combat crew force’s integrity amazes me even today. Obviously if the crew had the ability to deconstruct and verify a simple, in the clear message, they also had the ability to construct a valid message. Each aircraft had the means of transmitting such a message that would only require authentication to execute the entire Airborne Alert Force, with no recall possible … In spite of the contention shown in motion pictures such as Dr. Strangelove and Thirteen Days that there was an electronic interlock on the B-52 inhibiting the crew from arming and dropping the weapons, there was no such system. All the crew needed was a message in the proper format and authenticated with material hanging around each of the primary crew-members’ neck’s … A rogue crew or crew-member could have easily and quickly composed an authentic message and broadcast it on HF radio, which would have required all SAC elements to keep rebroadcasting it. There was a two-man policy in effect requiring two people be in place at a time when the activity involved nuclear weapons, but when flying Airborne Alert, we sometimes did not have a third pilot, which meant that there was frequently only one pilot in the cockpit when the other was sleeping. The crews were fully aware of this situation; in face we discussed it from time to time.” Major Don Clawson, USAF Ret., Is That Something the Crew Should Know? Irreverent Anecdotes of an Air Force Pilot (London: Athena Press, 2003), 105–106. In line with my own earlier concerns, Clawson, in retirement, wrote to the former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, in December 2001 (in a letter included at the end of his book), asking: “Did you as Secretary of Defense realize that any one of the primary crew-members on the airborne alert B-52s could construct a valid, authenticated message? This message could have been broadcast using the high frequency radio, on the aircraft, and execute the entire B-52 airborne alert force with no possibility of a recall of the airborne aircraft. Was this possibility ever discussed?” Clawson received no response.
The Doomsday Machine Page 44
