Ellsberg on the Existential Threat of Global Conflict

Excerpt from article and interview by Sasha Abramsky in The Nation, 4/22/22

Arguably no human on earth has given more thought over the past 65 years to the possibilities of nuclear war—intentional or accidental—than Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Since Ellsberg joined the RAND Corporation as an analyst in 1958, he has accumulated a vast wealth of knowledge and perspective on how superpowers use their nuclear muscle to impose their will on the world, and on how their political and military elites strategize about conflicts in the nuclear era. …

Last year, I interviewed Ellsberg, who lives in Berkeley, when he turned 90. On Monday, we resumed our conversation. Over the course of one and a half hours we discussed Ellsberg’s understanding of the war in Ukraine, the likelihood of hostilities between China and Taiwan as a spillover effect, the risk of nuclear bombs being unleashed, and the potentially cataclysmic impact the war could have on the ability of the global community to cooperate on anti-climate-change policies.

Read the full article / listen to the interview in The Nation >>

50th Anniversary of the Pentagon Papers Release – 6/13/21

Fifty years ago today, on 6/13/71, the first set of excerpts from the Pentagon Papers was published in the New York Times: Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U. S. Involvement. Leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, the 42-volume top-secret study revealed the history of Vietnam decision-making and the lies that were told by four U.S. presidents to cultivate public support for the war.

Selected Media Coverage

New York Times special report on the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers:

‘We’re Going to Publish’: An Oral History of the Pentagon Papers, New York Times, 6/9/21

The Secrets and Lies of the Vietnam War, Exposed in One Epic Document, by Elizabeth Becker, New York Times, 6/9/21

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Daniel Ellsberg Makes New Unauthorized Disclosure: The Top-Secret 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis Study

In 1958, a crisis over Quemoy and Matsu in the Taiwan Straits brought the world dangerously close to nuclear war. Morton Halperin’s top-secret 1966 study of the Taiwan Straits Crisis revealed the seriousness with which US military and civilian leaders considered using nuclear weapons against China. RAND’s publicly available version of the study has significant redactions that obscure the nature of the threat. Ellsberg has released an unredacted version of the study.

Main Article:
Risk of Nuclear War Over Taiwan in 1958 Said to Be Greater Than Publicly Known, by Charlie Savage, New York Times, 5/22/21

Follow-On Articles:
Daniel Ellsberg Is 90 Years Old and Still Causing Trouble, by Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 5/24/21

US Generals Said Nuclear Bomb Would Tame Mao, by Ben Hoyle, The Times (UK), 5/24/21

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50th Anniversary of the Pentagon Papers: Conference, Course & Podcast at UMass Amherst

Although it is still being processed and is not fully accessible to the public, Daniel Ellsberg’s archive at UMass-Amherst is already in active use. The university’s recent acquisition of the Ellsberg papers, together with the pending Pentagon Papers 50th anniversary, informed the recent Truth and Dissent conference, a yearlong graduate course, a new archive web resource, and a 5-part podcast by GroundTruth.

—The University of Massachusetts-Amherst recently hosted Truth, Dissent & the Legacy of Daniel Ellsberg, a two-day online conference marking the 50th anniversary of the release of the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg’s keynote address plus seven roundtable discussions explored the major issues that have engaged his life: the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, antiwar resistance, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, whistleblowing, and the wars of the 21st century. Videos of all of the sessions can be viewed here.

—In a related project, GroundTruth launched The Whistleblower. This five-part podcast series explores Ellsberg’s life story through exclusive interviews as well as archival materials.

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“Going Underground,” From “Secrets”

From Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg

Chapter 29: Going Underground

[Previous chapter on Daniel’s relations with Neil Sheehan]

On Monday evening, June 14, 1971, we went to a dinner party at the house of Peter Edelman and Marian Wright Edelman. It was jammed with people sitting on the floor and sofas with plates in their laps, and there were two topics of conversation: What the Pentagon Papers were revealing, and who had given them to the New York Times.  Patricia and I listened without contributing much. Jim Vorenberg was eating, on the floor, in one corner of the room. Our eyes didn’t meet.

Tuesday morning the third installment appeared. Attorney General John Mitchell sent a letter to the New York Times  asking it to suspend publication and to hand over its copy of the study. The Times  declined, and that afternoon the Justice Department filed a demand, the first in our country’s history, for an injunction in federal district court in New York. The judge granted a temporary restraining order while he considered the injunction. For the first time since the Revolution, the presses of an American newspaper were Stopped from printing a scheduled story by federal court order. The First Amendment, saying “Congress shall pass no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” had always been held above all to forbid “prior restraint” of newspaper or book publication by federal or state government, including courts and the executive branch. The Nixon Justice Department was making a pioneering experiment, asking federal courts to violate or ignore the Constitution or in effect to abrogate the First Amendment. It was the boldest assertion during the cold war that “national security” overrode the constitutional guarantees of the Bill of Rights.

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Daniel Ellsberg’s Relations with Neil Sheehan, as Told in “Secrets”

From Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
Chapter 26: To the New York Times

[Here’s a link directly to the most relevant section below]

On February 28, 1971, I was in Washington on a Sunday night to take part in a panel the next day at the National War College. I had dinner with Dick Barnet, Mark Raskin, and Ralph Stavins of the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing think tank. They were working on a book analyzing U.S. involvement in Vietnam in relation to war crimes. As background for their research I had actually given them parts of the Pentagon study, including my own draft of the 1961 decisions, and they had followed my efforts to get it out through Congress.

When they pressed me now on how I was doing, I told them about striking out with Fulbright and McGovern. They said that they thought it was very important that I get it out. They wanted their book out by June, and they were counting on being able to refer to the documentation in the study.

They told me I ought to take it to the New York Times,  the same thing Fulbright and McGovern had mentioned. I had always thought of this choice as a backup, though it seemed unlikely that a newspaper would do more than publish some excerpts. But at this point it was looking as though Congress was closed off. Among newspapers, the Times  was the obvious choice. It was the only journal of record, the only paper that printed long accounts, such as speeches and press conferences, in their entirety. No other paper would do that. Only the Times  might publish the entire study, and it had the prestige to carry it through.

They asked me if I knew anybody at the Times. I told them I knew Neil Sheehan from Vietnam. I didn’t mention that I had also given him top secret leaks in 1968. For that very reason I had tended to stay away from him in recent years. But now all the signs seemed to be pointing me in his direction.

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Daniel Ellsberg’s Efforts to Release the Pentagon Papers to Congress, as Told in “Secrets”

From Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, Chapter 25: Congress

In late December 1970 I had what turned out to be my next-to-last talk with Senator Fulbright, in his office, about what to do with the Pentagon Papers. He now had nearly everything I had, including NSSM-r and my notes on the Ponturo study of Tonkin Gulf. Norvil Jones had made it clear that there would be no public hearings on the war of the sort he’d envisioned back in May, during the Cambodian invasion. The public concern just wasn’t there anymore, nor was there support for such hearings on the Foreign Relations Committee itself. The war had scarcely been an issue in the November congressional elections. Fulbright himself didn’t disagree with my own urgent concern, after the failed Son Tay raid to rescue American prisoners of war, and the renewed bombing of North Vietnam, that the war would soon be getting larger, but he didn’t see much possibility of mobilizing opposition in Congress until that happened.

As for the Pentagon Papers, Fulbright seemed sympathetic to my desire to find some way, apart from immediate hearings, to bring them to bear on the continuing war. He mentioned a number of ways in which it would still be possible to get the papers out with relatively little damage to me, though that wasn’t my major concern. He raised the possibility of issuing a subpoena to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird for the papers. He didn’t have to limit himself, he said, to requesting them from Laird, as he had done several times so far. He could demand them.

At this point Norvil revealed what I take it had been his real worry from the beginning. He thought that the committee, even if it got the papers from Laird by request or subpoena, couldn’t put them out to the public on its own, without administration approval. Even more, the chairman couldn’t do it on his own because he and the committee were supposed to safeguard for the Senate as a whole classified material, which they got all the time and for which they had storage facilities. If Fulbright leaked the papers or went ahead and distributed or published them, he could be charged with having jeopardized the ability to get classified material from the executive, not only for the committee or himself but for the entire Senate. Jones also mentioned that the committee members, and in particular its staff members, were often accused of leaking. It was easy for me to guess that Jones himself didn’t want to be accused of this. He had often shown great concern that I not reveal to anyone that I had given the papers to Fulbright.

Fulbright told me that he had asked Laird several times now for the study, but it seemed unlikely that he was going to get it. It was becoming clear to me that Jones was not going to encourage Fulbright to stick his neck out by releasing or using what I’d given him. Fulbright himself said to me, “Isn’t it after all only history?” I said, well, yes, but it seemed to me quite important history. It was also a history that wasn’t over yet. He said, “But does it really matter? Is there much in there that we don’t know?” He asked if I would give him an example of a revelation that would make a big splash.

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Ellsberg’s Archive at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst

Daniel Ellsberg’s papers have been acquired by the University of Massachusetts – Amherst and will be managed by its Special Collections and University Archives at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library. A week of activities at UMass in October 2019 marked the official launch of the archive and brought opportunities to engage the community on subjects of special interest.

In addition to his archive, Ellsberg joins the University of Massachusetts – Amherst community as a Distinguished Researcher at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the university’s Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). Two videos from Ellsberg’s PERI presentations in October 2019:

—A lecture applying economic insights to the psychology of war planning: “The Dollar Auction, Unendable Wars, and Gambling with Catastrophe.”  (10/23/19)

—A panel discussion with Ellsberg, Gar Alperovitz and Janaki Tschanner following a showing of “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” a documentary film about Ellsberg.  (10/28/19)

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Daniel Ellsberg Interviewed by New York Magazine

Andrew Rice interviewed Daniel Ellsberg for a profile in New York Magazine.

Here are some passages:

“Keeping secrets was my career,” Daniel Ellsberg says. “I didn’t lose the aptitude for that when I put out the Pentagon Papers.” This might come as a shock, considering that the former Defense Department analyst is best known for leaking classified information nearly half a century ago, thus bringing about a landmark legal precedent in favor of press freedom and, indirectly, hastening the end of both the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration. But for many years, even as Ellsberg beat prosecution, became a peace activist, and wrote an autobiography titled Secrets, he still had something remarkable left to disclose….

The Doomsday Machine is being published at an alarmingly relevant moment, as North Korea is seeking the capability to target the United States with nuclear missiles, and an unpredictable president, Donald Trump, has countered with threats of “fire and fury.” Experts on North Korea say that the risk of a nuclear exchange is higher than it has been in recent memory. Ellsberg, as one of the few living members of the generation of theorists who devised our nuclear strike doctrines, has been grappling with such possibilities for much of his life. “It is kind of astonishing,” he says, “that people will put up with a non-zero chance of this happening.”….“It’s like living on Vesuvius — that’s what humans do,” Ellsberg said. “That’s why I think we’re likely to go.”…. Continue Reading

The Secret History of the Bomb: Daniel Ellsberg interviewed in Esquire

Rick Perlstein interviewed Daniel Ellsberg in Esquire. Here are some highlights pertaining to Kim Jong Un and nuclear weapons:

Ellsberg: The war games we run against North Korea, which have been leaked, are always described as involving “decapitation.” And there have been news stories about the South Koreans developing a special “decapitation team.” Now, what can we expect? First, we can be virtually certain that Kim Jong Un has made provisions so that it would not paralyze his system just to kill him. That’s true of every nuclear state. But now let me add something that’s much less obvious. I’m pretty convinced—this is speculation, but it’s based on history and experience—that Kim has, in fact, also made provisions for massive retaliation if he is killed. A “dead hand” system….

The American people are being led to believe that they have to fear a surprise attack from Kim, which is crazy. It would be an act of self- annihilation if he did that. What he wants is a deterrent. Trump is threatening to do something crazy. Now, unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that it’s totally incredible. Both sides are cultivating an image of impulsivity and backing it up with a readiness to use massive force. It really does have a chance of blowing up, and that’s the theme of my book. We should not be talking about or threatening or preparing to go to war against Kim Jong Un any more than he should be preparing to go to war against us. What does that leave? Negotiation.