THE
TRUTH-TELLER: FROM THE PENTAGON PAPERS TO THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE
The
growth of the military-industrial complex poses an existential threat to
humanity. Daniel Ellsberg, peace activist and Vietnam War whistleblower
discusses with Tellus Senior Fellow Allen White the continuing
existential threat posed by the military-industrial complex—and what needs to
be done about it.
*********************
You
became a pivotal figure in the anti-Vietnam War movement when you released the
Pentagon Papers, a large batch of classified documents that revealed a quarter
century of official deception and aggression. What inspired you to take such a
risky action?
After
graduating from Harvard with an economics degree and completing service in the
US Marines, I worked as a military analyst at the RAND Corporation. In 1961, in
that role, I went to Vietnam as part of a Department of Defense task force and
saw that our prospects there were extremely dim. It was clear to me that
military intervention was a losing proposition.
Three
years later, I moved from RAND to the Department of Defense. On my first day, I
was assigned to a team tasked with devising a response to the alleged attack on
the US naval warship USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin by the
North Vietnamese. This completely fabricated incident became the excuse for
bombing North Vietnam, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara had wanted to do for some months.
That
night, I saw President Lyndon Johnson and my boss, Secretary McNamara,
knowingly lie to the public that North Vietnam had without provocation attacked
the US ship. In fact, the US had covertly attacked North Vietnam the night
before and on previous nights. Johnson and McNamara’s claim that the US did not
seek to widen the war was the exact opposite of reality. In short, the Gulf of
Tonkin crisis was based on lies. I was not yet moved to leave government,
though I had come to view US military action as ineffective, illegitimate, and
deadly, without rationale or endgame.
By
1969, as the war progressed under Richard Nixon, I saw such evil in government
deceit that I asked myself, “What can I do to shorten a war that I know from an
insider’s vantage point is going to continue and expand?” When the Pentagon
Papers were released in 1971, the extent of government lies shocked the public.
The retaliatory crimes Nixon committed against me out of fear that I would
expose his own continuing threats––including nuclear threats—ultimately helped
to bring him down and shorten the Vietnam War. This outcome had seemed
impossible after his landslide reelection in 1972.
Today,
similar revelations do not occasion equal shock because in the current
administration in Washington, lying is routine rather than exceptional. Whether
we are headed for a turning point toward bringing liars to justice will become
clear when the investigations of President Donald Trump’s administration are
concluded.
Since
then, you have been a vocal critic of both US military interventions and the
continued embrace of nuclear weapons, an issue with which you had first-hand
familiarity through your work at RAND and the Pentagon. How did your experience
with nuclear policy contribute to your disillusionment with US foreign policy
writ large?
At
RAND, Cold War presuppositions dominated all our work. We were certain that the
US was behind in the arms race and that the Soviet Union, in pursuit of world
domination, would exploit its lead by achieving a capacity to disarm the United
States entirely of its nuclear retaliatory force. We were convinced that we
were facing a Hitler with nuclear weapons.
However,
in 1961, I learned about a highly classified new estimate of Soviet weapons:
four intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). At the time, the US had forty
ICBMs, as well as thousands of intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Italy,
Britain, and Turkey (compared to the Soviet Union’s total of zero). General
Thomas Power, head of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), believed that the
Russians had 1000 ICBMs. He was wrong by a factor of 250. This early mistaken
belief signaled to me that something was very wrong with our perception of the
world and, more specifically, with how we perceived the threat posed by the
nation viewed as our most formidable adversary.
At
the time, I regarded the erroneous “missile gap” as a misunderstanding or
cognitive error of some kind. But, in fact, it was very much a motivated
error—motivated in particular by the desires of the Air Force and SAC to
justify their budget requests for huge increases in the numbers of US bombers
and missiles. But why did we at RAND uncritically accept the wildly inflated
Air Force Intelligence estimates, rather than the contrary estimates by Army
and Navy Intelligence that the Soviets had produced only “a few” ICBMs? Again,
a motivated error. Through self-deception, we viewed ourselves as independent
thinkers focused exclusively on national security, assuming that our role as
contractors on the Air Force payroll had no influence on our analysis.
In
retrospect, it is clear that our focus and our recommendations would have been
very different had we been working for the Navy. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is
difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his
not understanding it.” It was very important to us not to understand that our
work was above all serving to justify the exaggerated budget demands by the Air
Force.
My
distrust of the wisdom of Pentagon planners was also aroused by JCS estimates
of the death toll resulting from deployment of our nuclear weapons. I had heard
that the JCS avoided calculating this figure because they didn’t want to know
how many people they would be killing. To confront them, I drafted a question
that appeared in a letter from the White House Deputy for National Security,
Robert Komer, transmitted in the name of President Kennedy: “If your war plans
were carried out as written and were successful, how many people would be
killed in the Soviet Union and China?”
Within
a week, I held in my hand a top secret, eyes-only-for-the-president document
with an estimate of 325 million fatalities in the first six months. A week
later, a second communication added an estimated 100 million deaths in Eastern
Europe and another 100 million in our allied nations of Western Europe,
depending upon the wind patterns in the aftermath of the strike. Additional
deaths in Japan, India, Afghanistan, and other countries brought the total to
600 million.
That
killings of this magnitude—100 times the toll of Jewish victims of the
Holocaust—were willingly contemplated by our military transcended prevailing
notions of crimes against humanity. We had no words—indeed, there are no
words—for such devastation. These data confronted me with not only the question
of whom I was working with and for, but also the fundamental question of how
such human depravity was possible.
Your
recent book, The Doomsday Machine, describes “a very
expensive system of men, machines, electronics, communications, institutions,
plans, training, discipline, practices and doctrine designed to obliterate the
Soviet Union under various circumstances, with most of the rest of humanity as
collateral damage.” How did this system come about?
World
War II created a highly profitable aerospace sector upon which the US military
relied for strategic bombing of cities, thereby setting the stage for the idea
of bombers as a delivery mechanism for nuclear weapons. As orders precipitously
declined by the end of the war, the industry was in dire financial straits,
facing bankruptcy within a year or two. Accustomed to the guaranteed profits of
the war years, they found themselves unable to compete with corporations
experienced in building non-military products for the market, and demand for
civilian aircraft on the part of commercial airlines was insufficient to
replace the wartime military business.
The
Air Force grew concerned that the industry would be unable to survive on a
scale adequate to deliver military superiority in future conflicts. In the eyes
of the government—and industry lobbyists—the only solution was a large
peacetime (Cold War) Air Force with wartime-level sales to keep the industry
afloat.
Thus
emerged the military-industrial complex. Mobilization to confront a Hitler-like
external enemy—a role filled by the Soviet Union—was viewed as indispensable to
national security. Government military planning followed, essentially socialism
for the whole armaments industry, including but not limited to aircraft
production. With the benefit of hindsight, I now see the Cold War as, in part,
a marketing campaign for the continual, massive subsidies to the aerospace
industry. That’s what it became after the war, and that’s what we are seeing
again today. The contemporary analog is the idea of China as an existential
enemy, which, I believe, is the dream and expectation of the US Defense
Department.
The
threat of nuclear conflict persists as a near-term existential threat yet
remains muted in political discourse and largely absent in public
consciousness. How do you explain this glaring inconsistency?
Contemporary
US media focuses on contradictions and conflicts between the two major parties.
On the issue of nuclear weapons, little difference exists between them. They
support the same programs and both receive donations from Boeing, General
Dynamics, and Raytheon, among others. They both favor more aircraft than the
Pentagon requests, itself an amazing situation given the existing level of
spending. Right now, the F35, the largest military project in history, may end
up costing $1.5 trillion (an incredible sum even by historical standards of
lavish Pentagon spending), yet still unable to achieve the promised
performance. This kind of massive pork program is used by senators and
representatives to secure political advantage—a “jobs” program that often is a
euphemism for a “profits” program.
Nuclear
weapons and climate change are two quintessential planetary threats requiring a
coordinated global response. Do you see potential for alignment and cooperation
between the anti-nuclear movement and the climate justice movement?
We,
as a society, are conscious of the risk of the devastating impacts that could
come from climate disruption. In contrast to the absence of public discourse
around nuclear conflict since the end of the Cold War, climate has been a
subject of intense public debate. Although the danger of the nuclear threat
remains undiminished, the proposed $1.7 trillion nuclear modernization program
in the US is not a matter of serious debate.
It
is difficult to compare climate and nuclear threats. The climate catastrophe
toward which we are moving, while uncertain in terms of timing and outcomes, is
indisputable. We have survived the nuclear danger for seventy years, although
we have come close to conflict more frequently than the public realizes. I am
not talking about just the Cuban Missile Crisis; in 1983, for example, we were
also at the brink of a nuclear exchange, and there have been other instances. The
risk of conflagration remains continuous and potentially catastrophic.
It
is true that climate change may totally disrupt civilization as we know it, but
how many lives would it cost? Whatever the number, some form of civilization
would probably survive. By contrast, a nuclear winter, which has a non-zero
possibility of occurring, would occasion near extinction.
That
being said, both climate and nuclear threats are existential in nature, even as
the degree and type of destruction differ. And both share another critical
feature: the role of corporate interests and influence in sustaining the
threat. As we speak, a pristine Arctic snowfield is under threat of oil
drilling. Will Exxon and the other corporations be content to leave their known
oil reserves in the ground, as needs to be done? I think that’s as unlikely as
Boeing eschewing military contracts.
To
the question of alignment of the nuclear and climate movements, in my view, we
cannot deal with the climate problem, globally or nationally, without massive
government spending to speed up the production and lower the cost of renewables,
and thereby accelerate the transition from a fossil-fuel economy to a renewable
energy one. This will also require subsidies to the underdeveloped countries to
ease their transitions. In short, we need a new super-sized Marshall Plan
combined with government regulation to constrain the most damaging impulses of
the fossil-based market economy embraced by Reagan, Thatcher, and other market
fundamentalists. We need a national mobilization akin to that achieved during
World War II. We confronted Hitler then as a civilizational threat. Climate
disruption demands an equivalent response.
And
here’s where the climate-nuclear nexus comes into play again. We cannot afford
the wasteful and dangerous development of new nuclear weapons that “modernize”
the Doomsday Machine at the same time that we need to apply vast sums to reduce
the threat of climate disruption. In the face of imminent climate catastrophe,
the $700-plus-billion military budget is both untenable and irresponsible. We
must convert the military economy to a climate economy. We cannot have both. To
do so, we must recognize that the risks posed by the military-industrial
complex far exceed those posed by Russia.
The
Great Transition envisions a fundamental shift in societal values and norms. To
what extent does eliminating the nuclear threat ultimately depend on such a
shift?
Few
would disagree that to activate plans for deployment of nuclear weapons leading
to a nuclear winter—and thereby killing nearly everyone on Earth—is immoral to
a degree that words cannot convey. It is a crime that transcends any human
conception or language. But what about the threat of deployment? For many,
propagating the threat of an immoral act is itself immoral. But in the nuclear
era, the nuclear states have not accepted that as a norm. Our entire nuclear
posture, and that of our NATO allies, is based on deterrence of a nuclear war
and, if it occurs, responding with our nuclear arsenal.
Revisiting
this norm is very difficult. It is deeply embedded in the mindset of the US,
Russia, and other nuclear-armed states and reinforced by the interests of
powerful corporations. When Reagan and Gorbachev agreed that nuclear war cannot
be won and must not be fought, they did not say that it cannot be threatened or
risked. Both nations continued such preparations and do so to this day. We have
been taught that nuclear weapons are a necessary evil. Without a shift in norms
and values, this situation will not change.
The
Great Transition depicts a hopeful future rooted in solidarity, well-being, and
ecological resilience. Given the dystopian scenarios you outline in The
Doomsday Machine and your other work, where do you see the basis for
hope?
My
intention in addressing the threat of nuclear annihilation is that it will at
least open up the possibility of change. While such a shift in values and norms
would be almost miraculous, miracles can happen, and have happened in my
lifetime. In 1985, the falling of the Berlin wall a mere four years later would
have seemed improbable, if not impossible, given decades of nuclear tensions
and near conflicts. But then it happened. And Nelson Mandela coming to power in
South Africa, without a violent revolution, was impossible. But it happened.
So,
unpredictable changes like these can happen, and their possibility inspires my
commitment to continue my peace activities against long odds. My activity is
based on the belief that small probabilities can be enlarged and that, however
remote success may be, it is worthwhile pursuing because so much is at stake.
My
experience with the Pentagon Papers showed that an act of truth-telling, of
exposing the realities about which the public had been misled, can indeed help
end an unnecessary, deadly conflict. This example is a lesson applicable to
both the nuclear and climate crises we face. When everything is at stake, it is
worth risking one’s life or sacrificing one’s freedom in order to help bring
about radical change.
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