The Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

  considered as “laboratory weapons” David Alan Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision,” Journal of American History, June 1979, 66.

  “Atomic bombs in numbers” Ibid., 67.

  capability for “killing a nation” Ibid., 67–68. And see Edward Kaplan, To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).

  hit twenty cities with fifty bombs Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy,” 68. See also Rosenberg, “U.S. Nuclear Stockpile,” 26.

  There were fifty bombs in the arsenal Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War 1945–1950 (New York: Knopf, 1981), 271.

  strikes on seventy Soviet urban areas Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy,” 70.

  might kill 2.7 million people Ibid., 73.

  in the stockpile by January 1, 1951 Rosenberg, “U.S. Nuclear Stockpile,” 26.

  Groves had overlooked Herken, The Winning Weapon, 341.

  identified 409 airfields David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” International Security 7, no. 4 (Spring 1983): 35. Rosenberg’s articles, this one in particular, are fundamental to published accounts of early nuclear war planning, based on declassified documents (many of which Rosenberg first revealed). For other important accounts see Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983); Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton: NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Scott D. Sagan, Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Janne E. Nolan, Guardians of the Arsenal: The Politics of Nuclear Strategy (New York: Basic Books, 1989); and Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson, eds., Strategic Nuclear Targeting (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

  He told Gordon Dean … to “keep them confused” Adam Clymer, “A-Test ‘Confusion’ Laid to Eisenhower,” New York Times, April 20, 1979 (citing Gordon Dean’s diary for May 27, 1953).

  Eisenhower had been “appalled” David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” in Steven E. Miller, ed., Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence: An International Security Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 118.

  “And we call ourselves the human race!” William Burr, “Studies by Once Top Secret Government Entity Portrayed Terrible Costs of Nuclear War,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 480, posted July 22, 2014, nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb480/.

  President Nixon in 1969 William Burr, “The Nixon Administration, the ‘Horror Strategy,’ and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969–1972,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 34.

  His national security assistant Ibid., 35.

  In 1973, midway in his abortive search William Burr, “To Have the Only Option That of Killing 80 Million People is the Height of Immorality,” National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 173, November 23, 2005, nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB173/. See also William Burr, “ ‘Is This the Best They Can Do?’: Henry Kissinger and the US Quest for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969–75,” in War Plans and Alliances in the Cold War: Threat Perceptions in the East and West, eds. Vojtech Mastny, Sven G. Holtsmark, and Andreas Wenger (New York: Routledge, 2006), 118–140.

  as General Lee Butler … has revealed George Lee Butler, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention (Denver: Outskirts Press, 2016), 6–17.

  At the same time As I mentioned in the introduction, Edward Teller, the “father of the H-bomb,” was apt to emphasize that the thousands of thermonuclear weapons in both arsenals, no matter how they were used, could kill “at most a quarter of the earth’s population.” He said this once in answer to a question I posed at a 1982 public hearing by a committee of the California legislature in Los Angeles on the pros and cons of a bilateral nuclear weapons freeze. He was dismissing the possibility of “omnicide,” though I had not raised that term in my prior statement. He had insisted that he speak after me, with no rebuttal, but I couldn’t resist questioning his assurance on this point, which he offered. Killing nearly everyone, he repeated, was “impossible.” Teller’s oral emphasis in both cases.

  “only the extermination of our civilization” Edward Thompson, “Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization,” New Left Review I, no. 121 (May–June 1980): 23, 29.

  as something that needed to be resisted Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 10–12:

  “In my opinion this war, even at this late stage, needs not only to be resisted; it remains to be understood.

  “I am speaking of the limitations not only of public awareness but of the best analyses by ‘experts’—former officials, radical critics, journalists, or academic specialists. No one known to me—and that includes myself—seems to possess as yet an adequate comprehension of the forces, institutions, motives, beliefs, and decisions that have led us as a nation to do what we have done to the people of Indochina as long as we have. No one seems to have an understanding fully adequate, that is, either to wage successful opposition against the process or effectively change it; or even adequate to the intellectual challenge of resolving the major puzzles and controversies about the way the process works today and has worked for the past quarter century.…

  “One problem is that few of the analysts personally command experience or data concerning more than a few of the many dimensions of this process. Another is the relative lack of specialized studies in some of these areas, e.g., on the domestic politics of U.S. foreign policy. Above all, crucial data on the bureaucratic decision process have been closely guarded, limited to a few analysts—I was one—and publicly lied about.

  “I repeat the premise: efforts at better understanding cannot be put off till the triumph of resistance, the end of the war (any more than continued resistance can await a perfect understanding).

  “It was in this belief that I undertook, beginning in the fall of 1969, to reveal to the Congress and the American people the documents and analyses that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.”

  All this applies—as I knew at the time—to our nuclear policy as well. As I’ve described in the introduction, it was my intention as I wrote this in 1972 to contribute to public understanding of the nuclear era by releasing the “other Pentagon Papers” on nuclear matters after my first trial.

  Chapter 17: Risking Doomsday I

  July 7, 1942 Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 65–67.

  “Certainty is a state of mind” Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 131–32.

  “I’ll never forget that morning” Arthur H. Compton, Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 127–28. Emphasis added.

  “Actually, Professor Heisenberg” Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 405, citing Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 227.

  “these bombs must never be made” Compton, Atomic Quest, 128. Emphasis added.

  “scientists discussed the dangers of fusion” Pearl S. Buck, “The Bomb—The End of the World?” American Weekly, March 8, 1959, 9–12.

  “Once Bethe’s calculations had relegated atmospheric ignition” Peter Goodchild, Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 66. Emphasis added.

  “The impossibility of igniting the atmosphere” Ibid.

  Accounts agree that when General Groves Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, 235.

  “In the final weeks leading up to the test” Goodchild, Edward Teller, 103–04. Emphasis added.

  “Before the Trinity test” Thomas Powers, “Seeing the Light of Armageddon,” Rolling Stone, April 29, 1982, 62. Emphasis added.

  “Still alive … No atmospheric ignition.” Davis, La
wrence and Oppenheimer, 239.

  “The whole world has gone up in flames.” James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Knopf, 1993), 232, citing a Conant speech of September 25, 1954.

  “They’re going to take this thing over” Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, 241.

  Oppenheimer had estimated that the first bomb Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 648.

  According to Albert Speer Ibid., 405.

  “the nearest thing to Doomsday” William L. Laurence, “Drama of the Atomic Bomb Found Climax in July 16 Test,” New York Times, September 26, 1945.

  Chapter 18: Risking Doomsday II

  “the fission bomb was all well and good” Peter Goodchild, Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 63.

  “Hans Bethe recalled talking to his wife” Goodchild, Edward Teller, 64.

  “the cities of the United States” Leo Szilard, et al., “A Petition to the President of the United States,” U.S. National Archives, Record Group 77, Records of the Chief of Engineers, Manhattan Engineer District, Harrison-Bundy File, folder #76, July 17, 1945, www.dannen.com/decision/45-07-17.html.

  “that by one means or another, the development of these weapons” “The GAC Report of October 30, 1949” in Herbert York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 158.

  “Reprisals by our large stock of atomic bombs” Ibid., 160.

  “The majority feel that this should be” Ibid., 159.

  “We base our recommendation on our belief” Ibid., 159–160.

  “By its very nature it cannot be confined” E. Fermi and I. I. Rabi letter dated October 30, 1949, “An Opinion on the Development of the ‘Super,’ ” in York, The Advisors, 161–162.

  “to continue with its work on all forms of atomic energy weapons” York, The Advisors, 69.

  “that enough be declassified about the super bomb” “The GAC Report of October 30, 1949,” in York, The Advisors, 159.

  The poet Allen Ginsberg and I Joseph Daniel, Keith Pope, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoy Moore, A Year in Disobedience and a Criticality of Conscience (Boulder, CO: Story Arts Media, 2013). See ellsberg.net.

  That was the same factor Oppenheimer … predicted Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2002), 67. Oppenheimer described a bomb—igniting two to three tons of liquid deuterium—with an explosive yield of one hundred million tons of TNT, destroying some 360 square miles.

  There were tears in his eyes His anguish was not misplaced. See Arjun Makhijani, Howard Hu, and Katherine Yi, eds., Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995). See also Mike Davis, “Dead West: Ecocide in Marlboro Country,” New Left Review I/200, (July–August 1993): 49–73. Reprinted in Mike Davis, Dead Cities: And Other Tales (New York: New Press, 2002), 33–64.

  “a weapon of genocide” Fermi and Rabi, “An Opinion on the Development of the ‘Super’,” and “The GAC Report of October 30, 1949” in York, The Advisors, 161–162, 158, 160.

  Chapter 19: The Strangelove Paradox

  “This is probably one of the most closely kept secrets.” Daniel F. Ford, The Button: The Pentagon’s Command and Control System—Does It Work? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 141.

  deploying SS-9 missiles with twenty-megaton warheads Ibid., 122–24.

  frequent leaks and official statements … decapitation “Jimmy Carter’s Controversial Nuclear Targeting Directive PD-59 Declassified,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 390, September 4, 2012, nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb390/.

  The Reagan administration continued “Reagan’s Nuclear War Briefing Declassified: Kremlin Leaders Among Prime Targets in War Plan,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 575, December 22, 2016, nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb575-Reagan-Nuclear

  “increased emphasis in U.S. nuclear [weapons] employment policy” Leon Sloss and Marc Millot, “U.S. Nuclear Strategy in Evolution,” mimeograph, December 12, 1983, 14; cited in Ford, The Button, 28. Emphasis added.

  “the importance of crippling the [Soviet] command” Ford, The Button, 129.

  “I am convinced that in the Soviet system” Letter from Bruce Holloway to Dr. Francis X. Kane, TRW, Inc., March 31, 1980, cited in Ford, The Button, 128.

  they were building two thousand underground bunkers Ibid., 124.

  increasing capability of multiple-target The hard-target-kill capability of SLBMs has in the last eight years—during the Obama administration—been enormously increased by introducing enhanced-accuracy “super-fuzes” for warheads: Hans M. Kristensen, et al., “How U.S. Nuclear Force Modernization is Undermining Strategic Stability,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1, 2017, thebulletin.org/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-undermining-strategic-stability-burst-height-compensating-super10578.

  a major rationale then and now Anthony Capaccio, “U.S. Reviews Nuclear Strike Survival for Russia and China,” Bloomberg, January 29, 2017, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-30/nuclear-strike-survival-for-russia-china-get-new-u-s-review.

  “General Kuter told me that we had to complete the BMEWS” Herbert York, Making Weapons, Talking Peace (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 183–84.

  “the premier loves surprises” Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Los Angeles, CA: Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1964, www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0055.html.

  The designer of the secret Soviet Perimeter system Valery E. Yarynich, C3: Nuclear Command, Control, Cooperation (Washington, D.C.: Center for Defense Information, 2003).

  However, as David Hoffman David Hoffman, “Valery Yarynich, the Man Who Told of the Soviets’ Doomsday Machine,” Washington Post, December 20, 2012.

  “Yes, the ‘Perimeter’ system exists” “Russia’s Secret Shield, aka Perimeter, Dead Hand,” Pravda, February 2, 2017, www.pravdareport.com/russia/politics/02-02-2017/136776-perimeter-0/.

  Ten days after President Trump’s inauguration “Russia Tests Doomsday Weapon, US Tests Russia’s Ability to Survive,” Pravda, January 30, 2017, www.pravdareport.com/hotspots/conflicts/30-01-2017/136733-doomsday_weapon-0/.

  National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 In particular, Section 1647, and c, on STRATCOM.

  the starvation of one to two billion people or more Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon, “Self-Assured Destruction: The Climate Impacts of Nuclear War,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 5 (2012): 666–74; Ira Helfand, “Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk?” International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, November 2013. See Owen B. Toon, et al., “Consequences of Regional-Scale Nuclear Conflicts,” Science 315, no. 5816 (2007): 1224–1225, calculating the possible reduction in sunlight—and its effects on global harvests and growing seasons—of a conflict between India and Pakistan involving only fifty Hiroshima-size fission weapons on each side. See also Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon, “Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering,” Scientific American 302 (January 2010): 74–81, climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockToonSciAmJan2010.pdf. Ira Helfand, M.D., International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, has calculated that these climatic effects on global food supplies could starve to death up to two billion of the world’s most undernourished people: “Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People At Risk? Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War on Agriculture, Food Supplies, and Human Nutrition,” 2nd edition, 2013 www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/two-billion-at-risk.pdf.

  Chapter 20: First-Use Threats

  “Nixon not only wanted to end the Vietnam War” H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (New York: Times Books, 1978), 82–83. Emphasis in original.

  Art of Coercion lectures: See ellsberg.net/Doomsday/ArtofCoercion and Daniel Ellsberg, “The Theory and Practice of Blackmail,” in Oran R. Young, ed., Barg
aining: Formal Theories of Negotiation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 343–363.

  Hitler’s deliberate use of his reputation for madness “The Political Uses of Madness,” ellsberg.net/Doomsday/ArtofCoercion.

  his “madman theory” The first extensive investigation and discussion of Nixon’s threats, plans, and secret nuclear alert in the fall of 1969 and Nixon’s madman strategy appeared in Seymour Hersh’s amazingly revelatory book, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983). Subsequently, see Scott D. Sagan and Jeremi Suri, “The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969,” International Security 27, no. 4 (Spring 2003): 150–183, and William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball, Nixon’s Nuclear Specter: The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), greatly extending earlier articles by Burr and Kimball. See also “Nixon, Kissinger, and the Madman Strategy during Vietnam War,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 587, May 29, 2015, nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb517-Nixon-Kissinger-and-the-Madman-Strategy-during-Vietnam-War/; “Nixon’s Nuclear Ploy: The Vietnam Negotiations and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test, October 1969,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 81, December 23, 2002, nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB81/index.htm; “Nixon White House Considered Nuclear Options Against North Vietnam, Declassified Documents Reveal: Nuclear Weapons, the Vietnam War, and the ‘Nuclear Taboo,’ ” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 195, July 31, 2006, nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB195/index.htm.

  Nixon “believed his hard-line anti-Communist rhetoric” Ibid.

  “That kept them under some control” Sherman Adams, Firsthand Report: The Story of the Eisenhower Administration (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), 48–49.

  “Some say that we were brought to the verge of war” James Shepley, “How Dulles Averted War,” Life, January 16, 1956, 78.