DANIEL ELLSBERG WARNS OF ‘NO SURVIVORS’ IF U.S. GOES TO WAR WITH ‘CRIMINALLY INSANE’ NUCLEAR WEAPONS
May 3, 2018
DANIEL ELLSBERG WARNS OF ‘NO SURVIVORS’ IF U.S. GOES TO WAR WITH ‘CRIMINALLY INSANE’ NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Nina Burleigh
“Daniel Ellsberg is best known as the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers and exposed Defense Department lies about American involvement in the Vietnam War. But in 1971, when he took those top secret documents out of his office safe at the Rand Corp., he also took a cache of materials related to his job as one architect of America’s mutually assured destruction nuclear strategy, or MAD.
He hid the top-secret nuclear papers in plastic bags on his brother’s farm in upstate New York, intending to reveal them after the furor over the Pentagon Papers died down. But Tropical Storm Doria in 1971 eroded the hiding place, and he never saw his papers again.
Now a hale and vigorous 87, he is stumping the country giving talks about his latest book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. It recounts his participation in what he calls America’s “criminally insane” nuclear program. Newsweek caught up with him in Washington, D.C., where he was addressing a gathering of progressive lobbyists on the day President Donald Trump decided to bomb Syria, a country where five nuclear-armed nations have been involved during its civil war. Ellsberg, who wants the United States to abandon its willingness to use nuclear weapons offensively (the so-called first-use policy), said the weapons system he and his compatriots invented in the Dr. Strangelove years remains as hair-trigger as ever, and that a mere technical glitch or political clash with Russia could end with major American cities reduced to smoking ash with just 30 minutes’ notice…”