Today, Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed the Pentagon Papers, said in a statement to accuracy.org: “I strongly endorse the action of civil resistance by the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 defendants who are now on trial for having ‘nonviolently and symbolically disarmed the Trident nuclear submarine base at Kings Bay, Georgia.’ The sign they displayed during their action on the base — ‘The Ultimate Logic of Trident is Omnicide’ — is exactly right. I believe they are definitely entitled to the legal defense, among others, of ‘Justification’ or ‘Necessity:’ that an action which would under other circumstances be illegal can be justified as legal by a reasonable belief that it is necessary to avert a much greater evil: in this case, omnicide, the collateral murder of nearly every human on earth in a war in which the nuclear missiles aboard Trident submarines were launched.

“I lay out the argument for that defense in this case in an affidavit that has been submitted to the court. It is based on an earlier affidavit, much longer and more detailed, with legal references, that I have entered in similar trials of anti-nuclear resistance. A key point is that without the impact on myself of actions of civil resistance during the Vietnam War like those of the defendants in this case — including those of Father Philip Berrigan, the late husband of the current defendant Elizabeth McAlister, and of Dorothy Day, grandmother of another defendant Martha Hennessy — I would never have considered revealing the top secret Pentagon Papers: which legal scholars have described as having had, ‘arguably at least,’ a causal effect in shortening the Vietnam War.