Daniel Ellsberg > Quotes

“Yet what seems to me beyond question is that any social system (not only ours) that has created and maintained a Doomsday Machine and has put a trigger to it, including first use of nuclear weapons, in the hands of one human being—anyone, not just this man, still worse in the hands of an unknown number of persons—is in core aspects mad. Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“City burning, in other words, was becoming something of a science.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“Thus, virtually any threat of first use of a nuclear weapon is a terrorist threat. Any nation making such threats is a terrorist nation. That means the United States and all its allies, including Israel, along with Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“Just like the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, any future attack by a single tactical nuclear weapon near a densely populated area would kill tens to hundreds of thousands of noncombatants, as those did. Thus, virtually any threat of first use of a nuclear weapon is a terrorist threat. Any nation making such threats is a terrorist nation. That means the United States and all its allies, including Israel, along with Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“These two systems still risk doomsday: both are still on hair-trigger alert that makes their joint existence unstable. They are susceptible to being triggered on a false alarm, a terrorist action, unauthorized launch, or a desperate decision to escalate. They would kill billions of humans, perhaps ending complex life on earth. This is true even though the Cold War that rationalized their existence and hair-trigger status—and their supposed necessity to national security—ended thirty years ago. Does the United States still need a Doomsday Machine? Does Russia? Did they ever? Does the existence of such a capability serve any national or international interest whatsoever to a degree that would justify its obvious danger to human life? I ask the questions not merely rhetorically. They deserve sober, reflective consideration. The answers do seem obvious, but so far as I know they have never been addressed. There follows another question: Does any nation on earth have a right to possess such a capability?”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“Whether rightly or wrongly, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction, firebombs, and atomic bombs—and believes that it was fully justified in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“The world has yet to absorb the lessons of this history—the story of how the existence of humanity was placed in great, unjustifiable danger by men who had no intention of doing that, men who recoiled from ending human history, or from taking what they saw as a high or even significant risk of doing so.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“Seventy years of public controversy about “the decision to drop the bomb” have been almost entirely misdirected. It has proceeded on the false supposition that there was or had to be any such decision. There was no new decision to be made in the spring of 1945 about burning a city’s worth of humans.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“Matthews’s pursuit of this issue, like that of nearly every other interviewer, seemed to reflect the simple, widespread ignorance of the reality that Trump was taking the same position of every president since Truman, and of every major candidate in that long period, definitely including his rival Hillary Clinton. She would surely have given essentially the same answers to Matthews’s questions as Trump did if she had been in that same forum, consistent with her stand in 2007. No candidate or president has ever come close to adopting and proclaiming a no-first-use policy (with Barack Obama being the only president311 to encourage serious internal consideration of it, especially in his last year, before rejecting it in face of opposition from his secretaries of defense,”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“The fact is that the estimate of fatalities, in terms of what was calculable at that time—even before the discovery of nuclear winter—was a fantastic underestimate. More than forty years later, Dr. Lynn Eden, a scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, revealed in Whole World on Fire71 the bizarre fact that the war planners of SAC and the Joint Chiefs—throughout the nuclear era to the present day—have deliberately omitted entirely from their estimates of the destructive effects of U.S. or Russian nuclear attacks the effects of fire. They have done so on the questionable grounds that these effects are harder to predict than the effects of blast or fallout, on which their estimates of fatalities are exclusively based, even though, as Eden found, experts including Hal Brode have disputed such conclusions for decades. (A better hypothesis for the tenacious lack of interest is that accounting for fire would reduce the number of USAF warheads and vehicles required to achieve the designated damage levels: which were themselves set high enough to preclude coverage by available Navy submarine-launched missiles.) Yet even in the sixties the firestorms caused by thermonuclear weapons were known to be predictably the largest producers of fatalities in a nuclear war. Given that for almost all strategic nuclear weapons, the damage radius of firestorms would be two to five times the radius destroyed by the blast, a more realistic estimate of the fatalities caused directly by the planned U.S. attacks on the Sino-Soviet bloc, even in 1961, would surely have been double the summary in the graph I held in my hand, for a total death toll of a billion or more: a third of the earth’s population, then three billion. Moreover, what no one would recognize for another twenty-two years were the indirect effects of our planned first strike that gravely threatened the other two thirds of humanity. These effects arose from another neglected consequence of our attacks on cities: smoke. In effect, in ignoring fire the Chiefs and their planners ignored that where there’s fire there’s smoke. But what is dangerous to our survival is not the smoke from ordinary fires, even very large ones—smoke that remained in the lower atmosphere and would soon be rained out—but smoke propelled into the upper atmosphere from the firestorms that our nuclear weapons were sure to create in the cities we targeted. (See chapter 16.) Ferocious updrafts from these multiple firestorms would loft millions of tons of smoke and soot into the stratosphere, where it would not be rained out and would quickly encircle the globe, forming a blanket blocking most sunlight around the earth for a decade or more. This would reduce sunlight and lower temperatures72 worldwide to a point that would eliminate all harvests and starve to death—not all but nearly all—humans (and other animals that depend on vegetation for food). The population of the southern hemisphere—spared nearly all direct effects from nuclear explosions, even from fallout—would be nearly annihilated, as would that of Eurasia (which the Joint Chiefs already foresaw, from direct effects), Africa, and North America. In a sense the Chiefs”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“The cliché that “everything leaks; it all comes out in the New York Times eventually” is emphatically not true, above all for sensitive compartmented information. It’s a cover story, designed both to hide and sustain the effectiveness of the overall secrecy system. (Edward Snowden was the first ever to expose a large amount of SCI, including massively unconstitutional and criminal dragnet surveillance of American citizens and others in the world without probable cause for suspicion. Many thousands of NSA employees had known for a decade of that mass surveillance and its criminality. Not one other had disclosed it. Snowden is currently in exile, probably for life.)”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“We have an unusual record of the Cuban missile crisis101 as a result of tapes Kennedy made of meetings of the ExComm. I wasn’t surprised to read, years later when the tapes were transcribed, that McNamara had said at the second ExComm meeting one week earlier much the same as I had: that these missiles didn’t affect our security decisively, or even significantly. “I’ll be quite frank,”102 he told the president. “I don’t think there is a military problem … This is a domestic political problem.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“Contrary to Stimson’s highly influential but totally misleading account in Harper’s in February 1947, “The Decision to Use the Atom Bomb”—written for Stimson by McGeorge Bundy177 while he was in the Society of Fellows, and a successful propaganda counter to the impact of John Hersey’s New Yorker report “Hiroshima” in August 1946—there was no moral agonizing at all among Truman’s civilian or military advisors about the prospect of using the atom bomb on a city.† That moral threshold had been crossed long before. There was, in reality, no debate or even discussion whatever in official circles as to whether the bomb would or should be used, if it were ready in time before the war ended for other reasons.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“What is missing—what is foregone—in the typical discussion and analysis of historical or current nuclear policies is the recognition that what is being discussed is dizzyingly insane and immoral: in its almost-incalculable and inconceivable destructiveness and deliberate murderousness, its disproportionality of risked and planned destructiveness to either declared or unacknowledged objectives, the infeasibility of its secretly pursued aims (damage limitation to the United States and allies, “victory” in two-sided nuclear war), its criminality (to a degree that explodes ordinary visions of law, justice, crime), its lack of wisdom or compassion, its sinfulness and evil.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“It was typical of U.S. strategists, then and later, to leave European, North African, and Asian casualties entirely out of account in weighing the deterrent balance. And I don’t know of any instance of a president or any civilian official raising this point. In retrospect, that’s a startling commentary.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“But there was even more that Khrushchev knew and Kennedy didn’t—secrets that Khrushchev had chosen not to reveal at the time and that remained unknown to any Americans (including me) for twenty-five years or more. First, that the number of Soviet troops116 in Cuba was not seven thousand, as we had at first supposed, or seventeen thousand, as the CIA estimated at the end of the crisis, but forty-two thousand. And second, that along with SAMs and ballistic missiles, they had been secretly equipped with over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons, warheads included.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“That exchange did it. Already oppressed by the briefings up to that point, I shrank within, horrified. I thought of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, when an assemblage of German bureaucrats swiftly agreed on a program to exterminate every last Jew they could find anywhere in Europe, using methods of mass extermination more technologically efficient than the vans filled with exhaust gases, the mass shootings, or incineration in barns and synagogues used until then. I felt as if I were witnessing a comparable descent into the deep heart of darkness, a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one third of the earth’s surface. Those feelings have not entirely abated, even though more than forty years have passed since that dark moment.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“Partly at Rubel’s urging, Secretary of Defense McNamara later compelled the Minuteman developers, against great resistance, to install the equivalent of an electronic lock on the Minuteman, such that it couldn’t be fired without the receipt of a coded message from higher headquarters. Decades later, long after McNamara’s retirement, Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman launch control officer, informed the former secretary that the Air Force had ensured that the codes in the launch control centers were all set continuously at 00000000. According to Blair, McNamara responded, “I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged. Who the hell authorized that?” “What he had just learned from me,” Blair continues, was that the locks had been installed,52 but everyone knew the combination. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at 00000000.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“Here, then, is the actual situation that has prevailed for more than half a century. Each side prepares and actually intends to attack the other’s “military nervous system,” command and control, especially its head and brain, the national command headquarters, in the first wave of a general war, however it originates. This has become the only hope of preempting and paralyzing the other’s retaliatory capability in such a way as to avoid total devastation; it is what must above all be deterred by the opponent. But in fact it, too, is thoroughly suicidal unless the other side has failed to delegate authority well below the highest levels. Because each side does in fact delegate, hopes for decapitation are totally unfounded. But for the duration of the Cold War, for fear of frightening their own publics, their allies, and the world, neither side discouraged these hopes in the other by acknowledging its own delegation.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“Is it simply quixotic to hope to preserve human civilization from either the effects of burning fossil fuels or preparing for nuclear war? As Martin Luther King Jr. warned us,328 one year to the day before his death, “There is such a thing as being too late.” In challenging us on April 4, 1967, to recognize “the fierce urgency of now” he was speaking of the “madness of Vietnam,” but he also alluded on that same occasion to nuclear weapons and to the even larger madness that has been the subject of this book: “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.” He went on: We must move past indecision to action.… If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight. … Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“I asked, “How do you think that would work?” The major said, “If they didn’t get any Execute message? Oh, I think they’d come back.” Pause. “Most of them.” The last three words didn’t register with me right away because before they were out of his mouth, my head was exploding. I kept my face blank but a voice inside was screaming, “Think? You think they’d come back?!”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“Khrushchev told Norman Cousins, a few months after the crisis, his reaction at the time: When I asked the military advisors if they could assure me137 that holding fast would not result in the death of five hundred million human beings, they looked at me as though I was out of my mind, or what was worse, a traitor. The biggest tragedy, as they saw it, was not that our country might be devastated and everything lost, but that the Chinese or the Albanians might accuse us of appeasement or weakness. So I said to myself, “To hell with these maniacs. If I can get the United States to assure me that it will not attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, I will remove the missiles.” That is what happened, and now I am reviled by the Chinese and the Albanians.… They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“We humans almost universally have a false self-image of our species. We think that monstrous, wicked policies must be, can only be, conceived and directed and carried out by monsters, wicked or evil people, or highly aberrant, clinically “disturbed” people. People not like “us.” That is mistaken. Those who have created a continuing nuclear threat to the existence of humanity have been normal, ordinary politicians, analysts, and military strategists. To them and to their subordinates, Hannah Arendt’s controversial proposition regarding the “banality of evil” I believe applies, though it might better have been stated as the “banality of evildoing, and of most evildoers.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“A streetcar rattled by on the tracks as I read the headline: a single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought: “I know exactly what that bomb was.” It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about the previous fall. I thought: We got it first. And we used it. On a city. I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very dangerous for humanity had just happened.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“For several crucial days, I believe, Kennedy and Khrushchev were each privately prepared to back down, “but not yet,” as they sparred with forces armed with thermonuclear weapons. If their bargaining had gone on one more day, then nearly all then-living humans might have died from it, and few if any now alive would ever have existed. Yet—have we had a president since World War II who would have acted in those circumstances more responsibly, more prudently? Do we have such a president now? Does Russia?”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“The atom bomb did not start a new era of targeting or strategy or war making in the world. Annihilation of an urban civilian population by fire had already become the American way of war from the air, as it had been the British way since late 1940.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“What had prevented Nixon’s test261 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. Another demonstration, focused on Washington, was scheduled for two days in mid-November. As Nixon says, it was clear to him, given the scale of the first demonstration, that his ultimatum would fail. The North Vietnamese would not believe that he could continue such attacks in the face of this unprecedented popular resistance.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“The implication—never questioned by anyone at RAND while I was there—was that adequate deterrence for the United States demanded a survivable, assured second-strike capability to kill more than the twenty million Soviet citizens who had died in World War II. That meant we were working to assure the survival under attack of a capability for retaliatory genocide, though none of us ever thought of it in those terms for a moment.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“But nothing has ever expressed the general, gut-felt moral revulsion against city-bombing better than a virtually unknown article, from firsthand experience, by America’s most famous writer at the time, Ernest Hemingway, in July 1938. It’s still little known because he wrote it, by request, for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, which published it in Russian; his manuscript in English didn’t surface143 for forty-four years. It conveys in words the same surreal images that Picasso had rendered on canvas the year before. His lead sentence: “During the last fifteen months I saw murder done in Spain by the Fascist invaders. Murder is different from war.” Hemingway was describing what he had seen of fascist bombing of workers’ housing in Barcelona and shelling of civilian cinemagoers in Madrid. You see the murdered children with their twisted legs, their arms that bend in wrong directions, and their plaster powdered faces. You see the women, sometimes unmarked when they die from concussion, their faces grey, green matter running out of their mouths from bursted gall bladders. You see them sometimes looking like bloodied bundles of rags. You see them sometimes blown capriciously into fragments as an insane butcher might sever a carcass. And you hate the Italian and German murderers who do this as you hate no other people. … When they shell the cinema crowds, concentrating on the squares where the people will be coming out at six o’clock, it is murder. … You see a shell hit a queue of women standing in line to buy soap. There are only four women killed but a part of one woman’s torso is driven against a stone wall so that blood is driven into the stone with such force that sandblasting later fails to clean it. The other dead lie like scattered black bundles and the wounded are moaning or screaming.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“most Americans have never recognized as “terrorist” in precisely the same sense the firestorms caused deliberately by U.S. firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden or Hamburg or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. These deliberate massacres of civilians, though not prosecuted after World War II like the Japanese slaughter in China at Nanking, were by any prior or reasonable criteria war crimes, wartime terrorism, crimes against humanity.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner