A Thousand Holocausts from Dizzyingly Insane Nuclear War Policies

I never met Daniel Ellsberg. I vaguely remember him from the 1970s when he leaked confidential military documents about the Vietnam War. Those documents chronicled how America planned and fought an entirely useless but deadly war in the forests, rice fields, and cities of Vietnam and other countries of Southeast Asia. In time, some of those secret documents appeared in a book, The Pentagon Papers. 

I read that book during my service at the US Environmental Protection Agency. I learned something about the Pentagon, the industrial-military complex, and that bitter conflict. 

But I also learned something about Ellsberg. I admired his decision to risk everything for a higher purpose: telling Americans the war in Vietnam was immoral and unwinnable. His courage was contagious. I could see his life was blowing the whistle on Pentagon corruption and, especially, Pentagon’s planning for “fighting” nuclear wars.

This touched me profoundly. I, too, was a whistleblower. I, too, risked everything for the same purpose – in my case informing Americans that deleterious pesticides were entering the food they eat and the water they drink. But unlike Ellsberg, I worked with unclassified material. EPA is not the Pentagon. Yet the dangers Ellsberg and I were fighting were terminal. Nuclear bombs could incinerate hundreds of millions of human beings -- in hours. Ignore pesticides in our food, water and the environment long enough, and humans and wildlife are as good as dead.

Ellsberg did not always do the right thing. With the exception of his teenage years when he rejected nuclear weapons, the feverish cold war culture of the 1950s converted him to a cold war warrior. He studied abstract economics at Harvard and joined the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and a US Airforce subsidiary, RAND corporation, in California. 

He believed he had to defend the US from the Sputnik-like “superiority” of the communist Soviet Union. He worked for ten years with the nuclear war planning priesthood of RAND. Like the Jesuits, the RAND “consultants” were convinced they had the truth. They devoted their lives to killing the Soviet Union. And so did Ellsberg. He felt at home among those nuclear war missionaries -- and loved it. Besides, RAND paid him a high salary and gave him access to highly classified information, not merely about the war in Vietnam but, more important than that, planning for nuclear war.

American atomic bomb over Nagasaki, Japan, August 9, 1945. Courtesy Wikipedia.

In fact, Ellsberg became a planner for nuclear war. In the spring of 1961, he drafted plans for nuclear conflicts. Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, sent Ellsberg’s Top Secret guidance to the Joints Chief of Staff. He briefed McGeorge Bundy, assistant for national security to President Kennedy.  

However, in the spring of 1961, something undermined his faith in nuclear war. The deputy national security adviser to President Kennedy, Bob Komer, showed him a top secret graph done by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for “the President’s eyes only.” This graph illustrated the horrifying number of dead in the norther hemisphere, in case America launched a “first strike” against the Soviet Union. 

In the first hours of the conflict, there would be 275 million dead. After six months that number would have risen to 325 million. However, that was not enough. The military alliance of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union would bring American nuclear weapons exploding over Eastern European cities. The result: another hundred million dead. And then there was fallout. The experts of the Joint Chief of Staff said the fallout would kill another hundred million people in Finland, Sweden, Austria, Afghanistan, India and Japan. The proximity of Finland to the Soviet Union guaranteed its extinction. 

So, the potential “collateral damage” of a US “first strike” against the Soviet Union and China would be more than half a billion dead people. Ellsberg said the projected total would be “six hundred million dead. A hundred Holocausts.”

Signs of weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear bombs are weapons of mass destruction. They are affecting the entire planet. Courtesy Wikipedia.

This face to face confrontation with the truth of exploding nuclear bombs convinced Ellsberg he had to do something to expose the secret he had just learned about nuclear war: the time was ripe for leaking nuclear war papers. 

He tells this story in his timely, insightful, and extraordinary new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (New York, Bloomsbury, 2017).

He probably copied 10,000 pages of top secret documents about nuclear war planning and the command and control of nuclear weapons, including studies of nuclear crises. 

He wanted to have those secret documents reach the American people, telling them the bitter truth about the evil of scheduling global slaughter with nuclear bombs.  Those documents would tell Americans the Pentagon’s nuclear war planning was sheer madness and destruction on a gigantic scale: unfathomable and unthinkable for Americans and the people of the world.  

Ellsberg gave the pile of nuclear war planning documents he copied at RAND to his brother for safe keeping. The FBI was after him for leaking the Pentagon Papers. In fact, in 1971, Ellsberg was indicted for crimes against the government. He faced prison for life. 

His brother, Harry, lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Harry hid the documents, first, in a compost heap in his garden and, second, in the city dump. He was terrified the FBI might find the secret papers in his house. A storm, however, swallowed the documents.

This blow cost Ellsberg a forty-five year anguish of trying to recreate the lost trove of nuclear war planning documents – the story of this book. But he had kept notes. Other people also kept using all legal means for the declassification of those papers. Adding the findings he tracked in the open literature, Ellsberg recreated the story of the lost secret documents. 

He is certain that hundreds and hundreds of holocausts are ready to catch fire at any moment. Nothing has changed in planning for “first strike” nuclear war. The US was ready to drop its nuclear bombs over Russia in 2017 as it had been in 1961. 

Ellsberg admits thousands of US nuclear bombs have been “on a hair trigger alert.” These weapons are mainly targeting cities and command and control centers of Russia. The notion that “first strike” policy is for deterring Russia is nonsense, says Ellsberg. The idea is simply to “attempt to limit the damage” to the US from assured Russian retaliation. 

“First strike” has always been at the heart of US nuclear war planning.

There are plenty of fingers, including those of the president, in the nuclear trigger. Repeated false alarms of nuclear attacks against the United States exacerbate the potential for starting a nuclear war. There were false alarms in 1979, 1980, 1983, and 1995. This system, says Ellsberg, “could explode by mistake… taking much of the world with it.” It is “an unconscionable risk,” writes Ellsberg.

In the 1980s, scientific studies showed that nuclear war would trigger nuclear winter and nuclear famine. Smoke and soot from thousands of burning cities will reach the stratosphere where they will bloke the Sun from reaching the Earth. Temperatures on Earth will drop to ice age levels, thus precipitating massive famines and massive death. Smoke and soot are expected to remain in the stratosphere for about ten years.

Fire cloud (pyrocumulonibus). These kind of clouds will move the smoke and soot of nuclear war to the stratosphere and trigger a nuclear winter -- and nuclear famine. Courtesy Wikipedia.

 Nuclear winter and nuclear famine guarantee there would be no winner in a nuclear war. Yet this fact has made no difference to American and Russian nuclear war planners.

“Like discussion of covert operations and assassination plots, nuclear war plans and threats are taboo for public discussion…. This… coupled with systematic official secrecy, lying, and obfuscation has created extremely deficient scholarly and journalistic understanding and almost total public and Congressional ignorance,” Ellsberg writes.

This infuriating reality angered Ellsberg who spent more than fifty years studying nuclear planning. He says an “all-out thermonuclear war – an irreversible, unprecedented, and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization and most life on earth – has been, like the disasters of Chernobyl, Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, Fukushima Daiichi, and before these, World War I, a catastrophe waiting to happen, on a scale infinitely greater than these. And that is still true today.”

“Today” is 2017. He ends his book with suggestions for dismantling the Doomsday Machine. This means primarily dismantling the airplanes, missiles, and submarines delivering nuclear bombs. And, of courses, those bombs must also go. He speaks about zero nuclear bombs on the planet, in other words, for universal nuclear disarmament.

He assures us that criminal insanity has been hovering and pervading all that RAND and the Pentagon have been doing in planning nuclear wars. He was part of that insane asylum. He should know. 

But Ellsberg also knows that neither the Republican nor the Democratic party is likely to take the “dismantling” of US nuclear forces seriously. Only an outraged public might turn the tide against the “monstrous [nuclear bomb] machines” and the “dizzyingly insane and immoral” policies fueling them. 

Read Ellsberg’s Doomsday Machine. He wrote it for your survival. It’s well-written, riveting, startling, passionate and necessary. It rings the bells of danger. Ellsberg has seen nuclear death. He is desperately trying to tell us to act fast and decisively -- to avoid it. 

There’s no higher priority.