Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg sharing latest story in Sonoma County
At the time he was photocopying the 7,000 top secret documents that came to be known as “The Pentagon Papers,” high-level military analyst Daniel Ellsberg was also copying thousands of other potentially damning classified materials.
Many of them were also related to Vietnam. But most are what he calls “The Other Pentagon Papers,” his notes and studies dealing with the command and control of nuclear weapons and nuclear war planning and strategy assembled in the late 1960s when he worked for The RAND Corp., whose federally funded research often drives military policy.
Ellsberg believed then and now, that those documents were even more important than The Pentagon Papers for what they revealed about the nuclear arms build-up, the dangerous weaknesses in the protocol and strategy for using nuclear weapons and the potential for widespread annihilation. Maintaining a massive stockpile of weapons of mass destruction is, he says, “dizzyingly insane and immoral” because of the potential for global casualties on a catastrophic scale measured in the billions. The full climatic consequences were not even considered until the 1980s when scientists identified and began talking about “Nuclear Winter.”
Nearly a half-century later he finally is both revealing the contents of those documents and sounding an alarm, in his latest book, “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.”
When Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and Washington Post he was arrested on charges of espionage, theft and conspiracy that could have sent him to prison for life. Ellsberg was a cause celebre - a courageous whistleblower or a traitor, depending on which side you were on. Henry Kissinger called him “The most dangerous man in America,” a charge that came to be the title of a 2009 documentary about Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.
The leaks didn’t have the hoped-for impact - hastening an end to the Vietnam War. But they were, as Ellsberg said, “a link in a chain of events and actions” that culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Ellsberg’s latest revelations come as a relative whisper compared to the deafening roar of the Pentagon Papers, which also figured into a Supreme Court decision upholding the press’s First Amendment right to publish them. Yet the 87-year-old activist, who lives in the East Bay city of Kensington, is doggedly pursuing every opportunity to discuss his latest book and the perils posed by America’s nuclear armaments.
He will appear in a sold-out event Monday June 4 at Hanna Boys Center as part of The Sonoma Speaker Series. On June 10 he will appear in conversation with actor, author and Sebastopol resident Peter Coyote, at the Petaluma Veterans Memorial Hall. Although much of the book draws on history and policy during the 1960s, it is relevant today, he said in a recent phone interview.
“There has been no nuclear war and people take that as evidence that it’s extremely unlikely and negligibly important, but that’s not true. Their impression of course, is true. That it didn’t actually happen.
“But if they take from that it didn’t come close to happening, they’re mistaken. They’re unaware of what close calls we have had from false alarms, secret threats and accidents, and how unstable the situation is.”
Nuclear trigger
Ellsberg’s revelations include evidence that there are far more people with the authority to pull the nuclear trigger than the president, contrary to what most people think, that the U.S. has come closer to nuclear war than is commonly known, and that an authorized U.S. nuclear strike could be set off by a far wider range of scenarios and events than the public ever imagined.
The number of deaths estimated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff back in the early 1960s at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Berlin wall, would have been many times more the assumed 600,000. An ensuing nuclear winter, he said, would have led to starvation that could have wiped out nearly everyone on the planet.
“The chance of a two-sided nuclear war is very close now. But it’s not a Russian war which would threaten all life on earth,” he said.
Instead, the threat is from smaller states like Iran and North Korea.
“It’s a terrible prospect and people should be much more worried than they are,” he said. “They’re not acting with the urgency this situation demands. About a third of the country, the Trump supporters, are ignorant of the actual danger … to be knowledgeable about the actual danger and yet to be in any way accepting of war with North Korea, is insane.”
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