Doomsday
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a War Planner is more than just a memoir of Ellsberg's time as a RAND thinker during a tumultuous and fatal moment in history, it is a stocktaking of his moral character and lessons learned as an insider -- even call him a Deep Stater. Ellsberg considered publishing the Nuclear Papers before the Pentagon Papers, [see pages 16-17] knowing that they were more important, but after a discussion with a friend (Randy Kehler) he went with PP first. He then gave his brother, Harry, the NP to hide, which he did, in a landfill, after which they got lost. Ellsberg had to reconstruct the documents of revelation through the later-established Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Though Ellsberg is rightly admired as a whistleblower for bring to the public's attention details of reports from Vietnam and planning rooms that the war was losing effort, and lives were likely being lost for nothing, it was the Nuclear Papers that are far more revealing about the madness of the war hawks, some of whom swelled with omnipotence after the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and danger to the world they represent.
It's not always clear what it was exactly that liked in Ellsberg during his tenure at RAND (and after), but what he presents in his Nuclear Papers is often astonishing and even, at times, terrifying. What he reveals to the reader, presented here in no particular order, is;
- Ike, though we like him now for his 1960 Farewell speech warning us about the MIC, was no angel. When Ellsberg tells us Ike practically threatened to nuke China if North Korea didn't sign the still-current truce with the South "immediately." Nixon would threaten the North Vietnamese similarly.
- Ellsberg revealed that under Ike any number of military personnel had been "delegated" and sub-delegated, down to field commanders, to launch nukes. Ellsberg continues, "So did Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. So, almost certainly, has every subsequent president to this day, even though in the past several decades there may have been at least nominal "devolution" to some civilian outside Washington. This delegation has been one of our highest national secrets.
- During testing of the H-bomb, while scientists worried about setting the world on fire by igniting its nitrogen in the atmosphere and oceans, Enrico Fermi offered bets on whether they'd survive the test blast. [Fermi] said, "He said, "I feel I am now in a position to make book [that is, to accept bets at fixed odds] on two contingencies: 1)that the explosion will burn New Mexico; 2) that it will ignite the whole world."
- Ellsberg was astonished to discover that the Pentagon had a policy that required the nuking of China, in the event of a war with Russia, even if they weren't declared belligerents. (One wonders if that policy is still in place.)
- Ellsberg snarked to a RAND colleague, as they came out of a cinema from watching Dr. Strangelove, that essentially they had just watched a documentary. (The film is also where Ellsberg derived the title of his book.)
- "There is no sign that the findings of the latest scientific peer-reviewed studies of climatic consequences of nuclear war over the past decade have penetrated the consciousness of U.S. officials or Russian officials or have influenced in any way their nuclear deployments or arms-control negotiations."
- Ellsberg references a 1980 (Carter) "possible imminent use of tactical nuclear weapons if a secret Soviet buildup on the Iranian border led to a Soviet invasion of Iran," a virtually unpublicized incident that Carter's press secretary later described as "the most serious nuclear crisis since the Cuban missile crisis."
It was the information contained in The Doomsday Machine and its raw documentation that had Nixon and Kissinger worried when the Pentagon Papers came out. Nixon and his abettor, Kissinger, were scheming on how best to nuke North Vietnam. Ellsberg writes,
If I had known then about Nixon's imminent nuclear threats and plans and had any documents on these, I would have revealed them immediately, instead of the history in the Pentagon Papers, which ended in 1968 before Nixon came to office.
It's been assumed many times over the years that when Ellsberg was referred to as "the most dangerous man in America"who must be stopped at all costs" (Sy Hersh, The Price of Power, p. 385), it was because of the release of the Pentagon Papers. In fact, Ellsberg says in Doomsday, the duo were frightened he'd reveal their nuclear threats. Ellsberg was genuinely frightened for his life. (With crazy man G. Gordon Liddy on the prowl, it was probably a legitimate fear.) Ellsberg goes on to write:
What had prevented Nixon's test of the madman theory from being carried out in 1969 was neither any leak of his threats and plans nor any North Vietnamese compliance with them. It was, as Nixon recounted in his memoirs, the fact that two million Americans took part on October 15 in the "Moratorium" (a general strike by another name), a nationwide weekday work -- and school -- stoppage protesting the war.
(An amusing side note anecdote from Larry Sloman's Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Counterculture Revolution in America:
Levitating the Pentagon struck me as a great idea because removing deference from any of these institutions is very important, and this is of course the kind of thing that Abbie understood instinctively. So they have a press conference, and they're talking about their plans, in a very straight and measured and re- served way. And when it gets to be Abbie's turn to speak, he says, "We're gonna raise the building six feet in the air." I think that really changed the terms. In the Pentagon it became, "Can he really do that? Six feet!" [p.98])
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