The Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

“the most dangerous man in America” Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983), 385.

  What had prevented Nixon’s test Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1978), 401–03. See also Hersh, The Price of Power, 130.

  I began to look back at the history of U.S. first-use threats For an early important account, see Sidney Lens, The Day Before Doomsday: An Anatomy of the Nuclear Arms Race (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977).

  Thus, after Harry Truman had answered Harry S. Truman, “The President’s News Conference,” November 30, 1950. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=13673. Also Truman’s memoirs, vol. II, 1946–52: Years of Trial and Hope (New York: Signet, 1965), 450–51; and Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969), 472–85.

  Yes, Eisenhower did say in his first volume of memoirs Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years, 1953–1956: Mandate for Change (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 178, 180.

  account of an NSC meeting early in the Eisenhower administration S. Everett Gleason, “Memorandum of Discussion at the 131st meeting of the National Security Council,” February 11, 1953. Top Secret, Eyes Only (declassified). Eisenhower Library, Eisenhower papers, Whitman file, history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1/d46. Emphasis added.

  “the President ruled against any discussion with our allies” The corresponding discussion in Eisenhower’s memoirs does raise the subject of allied attitudes (and perhaps, implicitly, those of the American public as well) in remarks that may well express the attitudes of some later Presidents (e.g., Richard Nixon, then Eisenhower’s vice president) when they contemplated presenting a U.S. nuclear first use to allies and the American public as a fait accompli:

  “If we decided upon a major, new type of offensive, the present policies would have to be changed and the new ones agreed to by our allies. Foremost would be the proposed use of atomic weapons. In this respect American views have always differed somewhat from those of some of our allies. For the British, for example, the use of atomic weapons in war at that time would have been a decision of the gravest kind. My feeling was then, and still remains, that it would be impossible for the United States to maintain the military commitments which it now sustains around the world (without turning into a garrison state) did we not possess atomic weapons and the will to use them when necessary. But an American decision to use them at the time would have created strong disruptive feelings between ourselves and our allies. However, if an all-out offensive should be highly successful, I felt that the rifts so caused could, in time, be repaired.” Emphasis added. Eisenhower, The White House Years, 1953–1956: Mandate for Change, 180.

  when Eisenhower directed the Joint Chiefs Morton Halperin, The 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis: A Documentary History, RAND Corporation Research Memorandum RM-4900-ISA, December 1966 (redacted, formerly Top Secret), www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM4900.pdf. For passages and pages omitted from the RAND publication, and for my own notes on the crisis as a consultant to Halperin’s study, see ellsberg.net/Doomsday/Quemoy.

  “It has never been true that nuclear war is ‘unthinkable’ ” E. P. Thompson and Dan Smith, eds., Protest and Survive (New York: Penguin, 1980), 42.

  The long-secret history of this period In my essay “Call to Mutiny,” introduction to Protest and Survive, E. P Thompson and Dan Smith, eds. (New York: Monthly Review, 1981), I presented a list of eleven cases, plus a reference to nineteen nuclear “shows of force” listed by Barry Blechman and Stephen Kaplan, Force without War: U.S. Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1978). Six presidents and thirty-six years later, many other cases have surfaced, thanks to FOIA and such windfalls as the Nixon tapes. Joseph Gerson’s outstanding analysis, Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World (London: Pluto Press, 2007) adds some examples not listed here: see his Table 1.1, pp. 37–38, which also illustrates that the Soviets, Chinese, Israelis, Pakistanis, and Indians have all used their bombs in the same ways as the U.S., though much less often. See also Konrad Ege and Arjun Makhijani, “U.S. Nuclear Threats: A Documentary History,” Counterspy (July–August 1982) and Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1987).

  Truman’s deployment of B-29s Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York: Knopf, 1980), 256–74.

  Eisenhower’s secret nuclear threats Eisenhower’s memoirs, vol. I, The White House Years, 1953–1956: Mandate for Change, 178–81. See also Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 237–41.

  Secretary of State Dulles’s secret offers Prime Minister Bidault in the film Hearts and Minds, and in Roscoe Drummond and Gaston Coblentz, Duel at the Brink (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 121–22. See also Richard Nixon’s memoirs, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 150–55.

  Internal agreement under Eisenhower and Dulles Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1987), 54–62, Dulles’s quote on page 61. See also Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “U.S. Nuclear Threats: Then and Now,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 62, no. 5 (2006): 70.

  “Diplomatic use of the Bomb” Richard Nixon, “A Nation Coming into Its Own,” Time, July 29, 1985.

  prevent an Iraqi move into the oil fields of Kuwait Blechman and Kaplan, Force without War, 238, 256.

  use nuclear weapons against China Morton Halperin, The 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis: A Documentary History, RAND Corporation Research Memorandum RM-4900-ISA, December 1966 (redacted, formerly Top Secret), www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM4900.pdf. For passages and pages omitted from the RAND publication, and for my own notes on the crisis as a consultant to Halperin’s study, see ellsberg.net/Doomsday/Quemoy.

  1958–59 Berlin crisis Nixon, “A Nation Coming into Its Own.”

  1961–62 Berlin crisis See chapter 10, “Berlin and the Missile Gap.” Also Blechman and Kaplan, Force without War, 343–439.

  The Cuban missile crisis, 1962 See chapter 12, “My Cuban Missile Crisis” and chapter 13, “Cuba: The Real Story.”

  Numerous “shows of nuclear force” Blechman and Kaplan, Force without War, 47–49, with a table listing nineteen such incidents between November 1946 and the worldwide SAC alert of October 1973.

  defend Marines surrounded at Khe Sanh, Vietnam, 1968 Herbert Schandler, The Unmaking of a President (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 89–91. See also General Westmoreland’s memoirs, William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 338. “If Washington officials were so intent on ‘sending a message’ to Hanoi, surely small tactical nuclear weapons would be a way to tell Hanoi something, just as two atomic bombs had spoken convincingly to Japanese officials during World War II, and the threat of atomic bombs induced the North Koreans to accept meaningful negotiations during the Korean War. It could be that use of a few small tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam—or even the threat of them—might have quickly brought the war there to an end.”

  deter Soviet attack on Chinese nuclear capability Nixon, “A Nation Coming into Its Own.”

  Nixon’s secret threats of massive escalation H. R. Haldeman’s memoirs, The Ends of Power (New York: Times Books, 1978), 81–85, 97–98; and Richard Nixon’s memoirs, RN, 393–414. See also Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983); Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 2001); John A. Farrell, Richard Nixon: The Life (New York: Doubleday, 2017).

  deter India from further military pressure Nixon, “A Nation Coming into Its Own.”

  Nixon’s NSC put SAC on high a
lert in October 1973 Nixon, “A Nation Coming into Its Own.”

  President Ford placed nuclear weapons on DEFCON 3 Norris and Kristensen, “U.S. Nuclear Threats,” 70, quoting Major General John K. Singlaub, Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century (New York: Summit Books, 1991) cited in (and see also) Richard A. Mobley, “Revisiting the Korean Tree-Trimming Incident,” Joint Force Quarterly (Summer 2003): 110–111, 113–114. I am indebted to Norris and Kristensen for their references to this incident, the first one known to me involving the brief Ford administration. However, it might be more accurate to regard it as a “show of force,” like those listed by Blechman and Kaplan in Force without War, than as a nuclear threat.

  “The Carter Doctrine on the Middle East” References in text.

  Serious White House and JCS consideration, in August 1980 The August 1980 White House discussion was reported by Richard Halloran in “Washington Talk; How Leaders Think the Unthinkable,” New York Times, September 2, 1986, based on interviews and an account of the secretary of defense and JCS involvement by Benjamin F. Schemmer: “Was the U.S. Ready to Resort to Nuclear Weapons for the Persian Gulf in 1980?” Armed Forces Journal International (September 1986). This latter highly significant and authoritative account, including named sources, has been almost entirely ignored in the literature, except for Halloran’s story, likewise ignored. Schemmer quotes White House officials as describing this virtually unknown 1980 crisis as “the most serious nuclear crisis since the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Administration officials regarded the explicit threats to the Soviets as successful. See also, AP, Rocky Mountain News, August 27, 1986, citing NBC News, August 26: “NBC quoted intelligence sources as saying that that the Soviet Union was thought to be on the verge of attacking the oil-rich Persian Gulf in August 1980, while Iran was holding American hostages. NBC quoted General David Jones, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, as saying ‘there was no way the United States had the conventional capability to stop the Soviets if they had wanted to make a major move into Iran … The case was then, as it is to a large extent now, that if the Soviets decided to move in a major offensive into that region [as the White House feared at that moment, eight months after the Carter doctrine had been announced] then you would probably have to consider the use of nuclear weapons to stop them, Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary at the time, told NBC.’ ” Note that these accounts came out, to little notice, in 1986, six years after a reported nuclear crisis took place during the 1980 presidential campaign. It had been kept totally secret and unreported at the time and—as is typical of presidential memoirs except for Eisenhower’s—is not mentioned in President Carter’s subsequent memoirs.

  The Carter Doctrine reaffirmed in essence References in text.

  Formal threats by the George H. W. Bush administration Norris and Kristensen, “U.S. Nuclear Threats,” 71, and William M. Arkin, “Calculated Ambiguity: Nuclear Weapons and the Gulf War,” Washington Quarterly 19, no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 2–18. Both of these provide many more references.

  Explicit, secret threats by the Clinton administration Norris and Kristensen, “U.S. Nuclear Threats,” 70, citing congressional testimony by General Eugene Habiger, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom), before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, March 13, 1997. “Asked what ‘sort of deterrence’ he thought U.S. nuclear weapons played in preventing WMD from being used by rogue states, Habiger responded, ‘In my view, sir, it plays a very larger role … [The threat of U.S. nuclear use] was passed to the North Koreans back in 1995, when the North Koreans were not coming off their reactor approach they were taking.’ ” Habiger subsequently explained [in conversation with Kristensen, August 12, 2004] that the message passed on to North Korea had been explicit (70).

  Public warning of a nuclear option by Clinton’s secretary of defense Norris and Kristensen, “U.S. Nuclear Threats: Then and Now,” citing Robert Burns, “U.S. Libya,” Associated Press, April 23, 1996, and “Nuclear Weapons Only Option for USA to Hit Buried Targets,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, May 1, 1996, 3. As the latter headline indicates, this episode under Clinton aired the “need” for bunker-buster nuclear weapons against hardened underground sites that might harbor WMDs (or rogue statesmen like Saddam Hussein) that had been publicized in the Gulf War. This purported need arose again in the Iraq War, and has since 2004 led to plans for possible nuclear strikes against underground nuclear energy installations in Iran. That exemplifies the “nuclear option” that the president and most recent Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, with the possible exception of Barack Obama but including Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, insist must be on the table in negotiating with everyone, in particular in 2017 under Trump, with North Korea.

  “atomic diplomacy” The term introduced by Gar Alperovitz in his pathbreaking work, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York: Vintage Books, 1965).

  a “taboo” against nuclear weapons’ use Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 2008).

  “tradition of non-use” T. V. Paul, The Tradition of Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons (Stanford: Stanford Security Studies, 2009).

  “Even [Secretary of State George] Marshall” Herken, The Winning Weapon, 274.

  In his State of the Union address in 1984 George P. Shultz and James E. Goodby, The War That Must Never Be Fought (Hoover Institution, 2015), xii.

  India at its second test See the important study by Achin Vanaik, After the Bomb: Reflections on India’s Nuclear Journey (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2015).

  the Soviet Union from 1982 until 1993 Serge Schemann, “Russia Drops Pledge of No First Use of Atom Arms,” New York Times, November 4, 1993.

  U.N. Resolution 36/100 Declaration on the Prevention of Nuclear Catastrophe, U.N. General Assembly 91st plenary meeting, December 9, 1981, www.un.org/documents/ga/res/36/a36r100.htm.

  “the American forces could not stop a Soviet thrust” Richard Burt, “Loading For Bear; ‘One-and-a-Half War’ Strategy Now Means Just What It Says Money Is a Critical Obstacle,” New York Times, February 2, 1980.

  “delivering tactical nuclear warheads by cruise missiles” Joshua M. Epstein, Strategy and Force Planning: The Case of the Persian Gulf (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1986), 16, citing Kenneth Waltz, “Strategy for the Rapid Deployment Force,” International Security 5 (Spring 1981): 64n20.

  Dyess answered both questions Newsmakers, NBC, February 3, 1980.

  In 2005–2006 there were articles Philip Giraldi, “Deep Background,” American Conservative, August 1, 2005. Seymour Hersh, “Last Stand,” New Yorker, April 10–17, 2006 and “The Iran Plans,” New Yorker, July 10–17, 2006. Giraldi said the tactical nuclear weapons were for “suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites” that were “hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons.” Hersh also reported, along with his accounts of the detailed discussions and planning, high-level military skepticism about the feasibility and consequences of the planned air attack, and very strong opposition to the “nuclear option” by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). As a result, he reported in July 2005, the White House had reluctantly “dropped its insistence that the plan for a bombing campaign include the possible use of a nuclear device to destroy Iran’s uranium-enrichment plan at Natanz,” although a former senior intelligence official told him, “Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning” and “the civilian hierarchy feels extraordinarily betrayed by the brass.”

  But on April 18, 2006 Quoted in Scott Sagan, “The Case for No First-Use,” Survival 5, Number 3 (2009), 174, with my emphasis added, as indicated in original video. See original video of White House Office of the Press Secretary, “President Bush Nominates Rob Portman as OMB Director and Susan Schwab for USTR,” April 18, 2006. When used by politicians about Iran in 2006–2008, the phrase “all options” evidently meant “all except for direct negotia
tions with Iran, regular diplomatic relations, assurances against American attack, or expanded trade.” Obama broke with that tradition with the Iran nuclear deal, and has been heavily criticized for doing so by Trump, who has threatened to rip up the Iran deal, and resumed the earlier restricted meaning of “all options” with regard to North Korea, and perhaps with Iran.

  Others who used it during the 2008 presidential campaign Thus, for example, Edwards at the Herzliya Conference in Israel in January 2007: “To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep ALL options on the table. Let me reiterate—ALL options must remain on the table.” Emphasis his, in his written transcript. Ron Brynaert, “Edwards: ‘Iran Must Know World Won’t Back Down,’ ” Raw Story, January 23, 2007.

  five of the nine Republican candidates taking part in a debate Republican Presidential Debate, CNN, June 5, 2007, transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0706/05/se.01.html.

  “I think it would be a profound mistake” Dennis Conrad, Associated Press, August 2, 2007.

  “presidents never take the nuclear option off the table” Steve Holland, “Obama, Clinton in New Flap, Over Nuclear Weapons,” Reuters, August 2, 2007. Clinton was “extending their feud over whether Obama has enough experience to be elected president in November 2008.”

  “I would never take any of my cards off the table” “Full Transcript: MSNBC Town Hall with Donald Trump Moderated by Chris Matthews,” March 30, 2016, info.msnbc.com/_news/2016/03/30/35330907-full-transcript-msnbc-town-hall-with-donald-trump-moderated-by-chris-matthews.

  Barack Obama being the only president Bruce Blair, “How Obama Could Revolutionize Nuclear Weapons Strategy Before He Goes,” Politico Magazine, June 22, 2016, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/barack-obama-nuclear-weapons-213981. David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “Obama Unlikely to Vow No First Use of Nuclear Weapons,” New York Times, September 5, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/science/obama-unlikely-to-vow-no-first-use-of-nuclear-weapons.html.