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In my childhood, we at least acknowledged the ominous existence of nuclear weapons, no matter how weirdly. I'm thinking about those times we kids spent at school "ducking and covering" under our desks, practicing for" yes, the atomic annihilation of New York City by the Soviet Union. Even at 12, I was certainly aware that the rickety wooden desk just over my head wouldn't provide much protection from the most powerful weapon ever invented. Still, we children and our parents lived through that relatively hot period of the Cold War deeply aware that the world could indeed be blown out from under us at any moment.
Walking around New York City at the time, you regularly passed yellow "fallout shelter" signs and, as we grew up, the movies we saw were remarkably populated with nuclear horrors (from the giant irradiated ants of Them! to Godzilla, that monster brought to life by atomic testing at Bikini Atoll). Today, the strange thing is that the world-ending weaponry of my childhood has only grown more horrific as global arsenals have continued to expand. The U.S. now has an estimated 5,200 sea, air, and land-based nuclear weapons that could obviously devastate several Earth-sized planets. And of course, there are now nine nuclear powers, not just the two of my early childhood. Worse yet, future nuclear arsenals, whether in the U.S., China, Russia, North Korea, or Israel, are only likely to grow ever larger and more ominous.
And yet today, perhaps because miracle of all miracles since August 9, 1945, no country has ever used such a weapon again, nukes are barely acknowledged in our daily lives or, for that matter, in our culture. In that sense, Daniel Ellsberg, about whom TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon writes movingly today, was a model for us all.
The man who, in the midst of the Vietnam War, risked life in prison to leak the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times was, in fact, quite a character. I met him once and, at least in my presence, he simply never stopped talking about subjects that should obsess us all. Today, Solomon, author most recently of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, focuses not on what Ellsberg was most famous for but on the degree to which he spent the rest of his life warning us about the nuclear danger we're still facing. He died six months ago, but until then, as much as those interviewing him may have wanted to discuss subjects related to the Pentagon Papers, he was far more interested in warning us about the possibility of nuclear war and how to avert it.
That's the focus of Solomon's article, adapted from the Second Annual Ellsberg Lecture that he gave last month at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where Ellsberg's archives are located and where the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy is based. Tom
Unilateral Sanity Could Save the World
"Nothing Can Be Changed Until It Is Faced"
Top American officials in the "national security" establishment are notably good at smooth rhetoric and convenient silences. Their scant regard for truth or human life has changed remarkably little since 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg risked decades in prison to leak the Pentagon Papers to the world. During the years between then and his death six months ago, he was a tireless writer, speaker, and activist.
Most people remember him, of course, as the whistleblower who exposed voluminous official lies about the Vietnam War by providing 7,000 top-secret pages of classified documents to the New York Times and other newspapers. But throughout his adult life, he was transfixed above all by the imperative of preventing nuclear war.
One day in 1995, I called Dan and suggested he run for president. His reply was instant: "I'd rather be in prison." He explained that, unlike typical candidates, he couldn't stand to offer opinions on subjects he really knew little or nothing about.
However, for more than five decades, Ellsberg didn't hesitate to publicly address what he really did know all too much about the patterns of government secrecy and lies that sustained America's wars in one country after another, along with the chronic deceptions and delusions at the core of the nuclear arms race. He had personally seen such patterns of deceit at work in the upper reaches of the warfare state. As he told me, "That there is deception that the public is evidently misled by it early in the game" in a way that encourages them to accept a war and support a war is the reality."
And how difficult was it to deceive the public? "I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: it's not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you're often telling them what they would like to believe that we're better than other people, we are superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world."
Dan had absorbed a vast array of classified information during his years working near the top of the U.S. war machine. He knew countless key facts about foreign policy and war-making that had been hidden from the public. Most importantly, he understood how mendacity could lead to massive human catastrophes and how routinely the key figures in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Oval Office openly lied.
His release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealing crucial history about the Vietnam War while it was still underway exposed how incessant deception got wars started and kept them going. He had seen up close just how easy it was for officials like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to suppress doubts about American war-making and push ahead with policies that would, in the end, lead to the deaths of several million people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. And Dan was haunted by the possibility that someday such deception might lead to a nuclear holocaust that could extinguish almost all human life on this planet.
In his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, he highlighted this all-too-apt epigraph from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: "Madness in individuals is something rare. But in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule." The ultimate madness of policies preparing for thermonuclear war preoccupied Dan throughout his adult life. As he wrote,
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