The Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

  the last bargaining strategy mentioned above Donald Trump could cite the authority of STRATCOM, Strategic Command, “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence,” the successor to SAC, in 1995: “Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. The fact that some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of control’ can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary’s decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries.” Obtained under FOIA by Hans Kristensen, www.nukestrat.com/us/stratcom/SAGessentials.PDF.

  reminiscent, to many observers, of Nixon’s madman theory James Hohmann, “The Daily 202: Donald Trump embraces the risky ‘Madman Theory’ on foreign policy,” Washington Post, December 20, 2016. See also Nicole Hemmer, “The ‘Madman Theory’ of Nuclear War Has Existed for Decades. Now, Trump Is Playing the Madman,” Vox, January 4, 2017, www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/4/14165670/madman-theory-nuclear-weapons-trump-nixon. Excerpt from Trump interview on Face the Nation, January 3, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVTAaJ1fzfc.

  Speaking personally, I have always shared See my articles, “Ending Nuclear Terrorism: By America and Others,” in Richard Falk and David Krieger, eds., At the Nuclear Precipice: Catastrophe or Transformation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 83–96; “U.S. Nuclear Terrorism,” in Karen Lofthus Carrington and Susan Griffin, eds., Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 19–25.

  Chapter 21: Dismantling the Doomsday Machine

  The results from either a preemptive or a retaliatory U.S. attack Though the framework of “withhold” options for cities and central command in Moscow remained in place for decades on paper, the reality at the operational level and the point of impact remained that of SIOP-62, totally negating these “options.” General George Lee Butler (USAF, Ret.), the last commander of SAC and the first commander of its successor the Strategic Command, makes that clear in his unprecedentedly candid memoirs. For a description of the planning process as it existed in the Eighties, Butler gives space in his memoir to Franklin C. Miller, who eventually served under seven defense secretaries and as the NSC’s senior director for defense policy and arms control. Miller reports that when he became director of strategic forces policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) in 1981, he found a situation unchanged from what I had discovered a generation earlier:

  “The first issue we took on had its origins in Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s 1962 speech to the American Bar Association in Chicago [a Kaufmann-drafted precursor to the Athens and Ann Arbor speeches]. McNamara argued that the President should have the option, in a major counter-military strike, to spare (‘withhold’) attacks on certain Soviet cities in the hope of sending a signal of restraint to the Kremlin. This was incorporated into formal plans. At some point, presumably in the 1970s, the war planners at the JSTPS [the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, which produced the SIOP] (without informing the Joint Staff or OSD, much less the White House staff) had decided to define a ‘city’ in such a manner that had the President ordered a strike that included the cities withhold, all of those cities would nevertheless have been obliterated.”

  Similarly, though Presidential Guidance was “not to rely on launch on warning of attack,” while allowing preplanning of the “option” to do so, “It was disturbing to discover during our involvement in the LUA [launch under attack, an alternative description of launch on warning] debate that, despite Presidential guidance, the JSTPS resented our involvement in what they considered a strictly military issue, in part because no senior officer there could believe a President would not choose to direct a launch on warning/under attack.”

  Finally, when Miller accompanied Secretary of Defense Cheney to a briefing on the SIOP in 1989 (the year the Berlin Wall came down), Cheney “was astonished at the number of weapons directed to the general area of Moscow.”

  So much for my success in 1961–62, nearly thirty years earlier, in trying to modify SAC war plans. Reading Butler’s disillusioned and, for me, disillusioning memoir last year (it came out as an ebook, self-published, in 2016), I reflected that perhaps, even so, I had brought about one single change in the prevailing preparations for general war. McNamara’s had directed, based on my draft, that there should be a “withhold option” on attacking China in the event of armed conflict with the Soviet Union, rather than automatic annihilation of China in any such war. That was my special contribution, from my knowledge of PACOM plans; all the other elements of the strategy were familiar at RAND. Nothing else we had proposed in 1961, so far as I could see, seemed to have survived even a decade bureaucratically.

  Still, that alone could have seemed to me potentially a great achievement—saving a hundred million lives in China in the event of a decapitating attack on Washington!—if not for what I now knew about nuclear winter. However, just months after reading the Butler/Miller revelations last year, I was staggered to read a 1968 document sent to me in October by a former SAC officer, Joel Dobson, who had come across it on the National Security Archive website in a briefing book I hadn’t seen. It recorded notes of a meeting of President Lyndon Johnson with his secretaries of defense and state, Clark Clifford and Dean Rusk, the JCS and their chairman General Earle Wheeler, Walt Rostow, and others, in the Cabinet Room on October 14, 1968.

  The memo was a single page, headed Eyes Only For the President, originally Top Secret, (finally declassified after several appeals, apparently in 2010, some nine years from the time the National Security Archive first requested it), The notes read:

  Secretary Clifford: There have been instructions issued on authority to release nuclear weapons in the event the President has been killed or cannot found. This is to prevent a breakdown in the chain of command.

  The project’s code-name is “Furtherance.”

  We recommend three major changes:

  (1) Under the former orders, a full nuclear response against both the Soviet Union and China was ordered if we were attacked. Under the change, the response could go to either country—not both. There could be a small-scale or accidental attack. We do not recommend full attack at all times. This would permit a limited response.

  (2) Instructions on the response to a conventional attack would be conventional, not nuclear as is now in the plan.

  (3) There was only one document of instructions beforehand. Now there would be two documents.

  (4) We all recommend this.

  Walt Rostow: We think it is an essential change. This was dangerous. We recommend going forward.

  (General Wheeler and all the JCS concurred.)

  October 1968. Ten years after I had first seen the Pacific Command war plans, almost eight years after I had reported on them to McGeorge Bundy and had drafted for McNamara’s signature a directive—which he sent to the JCS—to exclude automatic attack on China in the event of our armed conflict with the Soviet Union. So far as I had ever known, over the last half century, that 1968 “change” had been ordered by the secretary of defense and embodied in war plans a full seven years before this presidential meeting.

  That was what Nixon and Kissinger found William Burr, “The Nixon Administration, the ‘Horror Strategy,’ and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969–1972,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 34. William Burr, “To Have the Only Option That of Killing 80 Million People is the Height of Immorality,” National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 173, November 23, 2005, nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB173/.

  efforts as delusional … defense secretaries and their aides See closing chapters 25 and 26 of Fred Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 356–391.

  “I
t was Senator Kennedy’s intention” Theodore C. Sorensen, editorial note in Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969), 98.

  the programs of Presidents Obama, Trump, and Putin William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, “U.S. Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms,” New York Times, September 21, 2014. Kingston Reif, “Trump Continues Obama Nuclear Funding,” Arms Control Today, July/August 2017, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2017-07/news/trump-continues-obama-nuclear-funding. President Trump is now signing contracts for replacement of the entire nuclear triad, in advance of his end-of-the-year review of strategic policy. David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “U.S. To Overhaul Nuclear Arsenal Despite the Risk,” New York Times, August 28, 2017.

  We must begin now the effort to explore The far-sighted article by Randall Forsberg, “The Freeze and Beyond: Confining the Military to Defense as a Route to Disarmament,” World Policy Journal 1, No. 2 (Winter 1984): 285–318, an early exposition of the important concepts of “non-offensive defense” and “cooperative security,” is still highly relevant, as is John D. Steinbruner, Principles of Global Security (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), and John D. Steinbruner and Nancy Gallagher, “Prospects for Global Security,” Daedalus (Summer 2004): 83–103.

  more than 120 nations that adopted the treaty United Nations General Assembly, Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, July 7, 2017 undocs.org/A/CONF.229/2017/8. See also Aria Bendix, “122 Nations Sign ‘Historic’ Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons: While the Treaty Faces Many Barriers to Implementation, It Signifies a Profound International Statement,” Atlantic, July 8, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/07/122-nations-approve-historic-treaty-to-ban-nuclear-weapons/533046/.

  an accidental detonation Eric Schlosser’s brilliant investigation of the Titan II accident at Damascus, Arkansas, on December 18, 1980, reveals that this incident could have resulted in a nuclear explosion possibly triggering an all-out war. Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York: Penguin, 2013). See also Milton Leitenberg, “Accidents of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Weapon Delivery Systems,” SIPRI Yearbook of World Armaments and Disarmament 1968–69 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1969), 259–270, and Milton Leitenberg, “Accidents of Nuclear Weapons Systems,” World Armaments and Disarmament, SIPRI Yearbook 1977 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 52–82. See also “Every Nuclear Tipped Missile is an ‘Accident Waiting to Happen,’ ” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 442, posted October 7, 2013, edited by William Burr, nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb442/

  dismantle entirely Five years ago David Krieger and I urged just that (not for the first time) and spelled out the reasons for it, after being arrested with thirteen others at Vandenberg Air Force base protesting the imminent test flight of a Minuteman III. David Krieger and Daniel Ellsberg, “For Nuclear Security Beyond Seoul [Nuclear Security Summit], Eradicate Land-Based ‘Doomsday’ Missiles,” Christian Science Monitor, March 27, 2012. See ellsberg.net.

  currently rescheduled for “refurbishment” “The other contracts the Pentagon announced last week are for replacements for the 400 aging Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles housed in underground silos. The winners of $677 million in contracts—Boeing and Northrop Grumman—will develop plans for a replacement force … Mr. Perry, who was defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, has argued that the United States can safely phase out its land-based force, calling the missiles a costly relic of the Cold War. But the Trump administration appears determined to hold on to the ground-based system, and to invest heavily in it. The cost of replacing the Minutemen missiles and remaking the command-and-control system is estimated at roughly 100 billion.” Sanger and Broad, “U.S. To Overhaul Nuclear Arsenal Despite the Risk.”

  Former secretary of defense William Perry has argued William J. Perry (secretary of defense 1994–1997), “Why It’s Safe to Scrap America’s ICBMs,” New York Times, September 30, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/opinion/why-its-safe-to-scrap-americas-icbms.html. Also James E. Cartwright (General, USMC, Ret., commander of U.S. Strategic Command 2004–2007, Vice Chairman of the JCS 2004–2011) and Bruce G. Blair, “End the Policy for First-Use of U.S. Nuclear Weapons, New York Times, August 14, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/opinion/end-the-first-use-policy-for-nuclear-weapons.html. Also Tom Z. Collina, Arms Control Today, May 21, 2012, “Former Stratcom Head Calls for Cuts,” www.armscontrol.org/act/2012_06/Former_STRATCOM_Head_Calls_for_Cuts.

  On the Russian buildup: Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, “Russian Nuclear Forces, 2017” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 73, no. 2 (2017): 115–126.

  as Alan Robock and Brian Toon have put it Alan Robock and Brian Owen Toon, “Self-Assured Destruction: The Climate Impacts of Nuclear War,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 5 (2012): 66–74.

  After all, not one of these legislatures On the inability of Senator Robert Kerrey, then ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to get access to targeting lists of the SIOP, see Brett Lorrie, “A Do-It-Yourself SIOP,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 57, no. 4 (2001): 22–29.

  As Martin Luther King Jr. warned us Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” Riverside Church, April 4, 1967, kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_beyond_vietnam/. Emphasis added.

  Acknowledgments

  that statement (in part) I urge readers to look for the whole statement on ellsberg.net, the ending of my preface to Joseph Daniel’s A Year of Disobedience a Criticality of Conscience (Boulder, CO: Story Arts Media, 2013). 80–81.

  “increasing levels of cancer, leukemia, and genetic mutation” This was neither rhetorical nor exaggeration. Carl Johnson, MD, director of the Jefferson County Health Department where Rocky Flats was located, found that nearness to the Rocky Flats plant correlated both to plutonium contamination and incidence of cancer, a study later published in 1981 in Ambio, the journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His results were confirmed by Karl Morgan of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, known as the “father of health physics,” who along with Alice Stewart, British epidemiologist and renowned expert on the harmful effects of low-dose radiation, testified at our late trial in November 1979. Johnson was forced out of his job by real-estate interests in Jefferson County. (See A Year of Disobedience and a Criticality of Conscience, 55, 57, 112–113, also on ellsberg.net).

  After a surprise FBI raid on Rocky Flats in 1989 to collect evidence of environmental lawbreaking at the plant, and a runaway grand jury whose sealed report calling Rocky Flats “an ongoing criminal enterprise” for its violations and recommending criminal indictment and trial of several high-ranking Rockwell and DOE officials was leaked to the press, production at Rocky Flats was “suspended” and, in fact, permanently ended, the entire facility razed. (See LeRoy Moore, “Local Hazard, Global Threat” in A Year of Disobedience and a Criticality of Conscience, 106–135, on the health findings, the cover-up, and legal disputes—which continue to this day—over inadequate cleanup and protection of the public against development interests in Jefferson County adjacent to Rocky Flats.)

  Acknowledgments

  Without the encouragement, support and guidance of my son Robert Ellsberg, this project could not have been completed. When Robert found me effectively stuck a year and a half ago, he put aside or added to his own work schedule to devote long intervals in which he acted as a combination of coach, motivational trainer, editor, and work manager. (My thanks go as well to his partner, Monica Olson, who lent her enthusiastic support to his doing this.)

  On several final chapters—in particular, those on Cuba and the last one on agenda—where I felt overwhelmed confronting a multiplicity of memos and drafts and couldn’t see how to boil them down, he cut and pasted from my own files to put together drafts that allowed me to move ahead. Toward the end he talked with me almost every day, setting
goals and keeping my spirits up, counseling what to keep in and what to cut or leave out. In short, he applied his professional art as a gifted editor to serve his father in what was literally a labor of love.

  This book has been a very long time in gestation: really, the whole of the nuclear era so far, since I first heard of U-235 in the fall of 1944. During that long period, every person mentioned in this book in whatever connection, including references, has contributed to my present and still-evolving understanding of nuclear danger. I am grateful to every one of them for that. That definitely includes my former RAND and Pentagon mentors, colleagues, and friends, however much our views and concerns diverged in later years.

  It also includes, above all, mentors, colleagues, and friends of the last fifty years who have shared both of my dual commitments to the antiwar and anti-nuclear movements: Gar Alperovitz, Noam Chomsky, Jim and Shelly Douglas, Douglas Dowd, Mort Halperin, David Hartsough, Randy Kehler, Peter Kuznick, Steve Ladd, Robert Lifton, Greg Mitchell, Robert Musil, Cody Shearer, Gary Snyder, Norman Solomon, Janaki Tschannerl, Brian Willson, and Howard Zinn. I treasure what I have learned from each of these, far beyond anything I learned at Harvard.

  I’ve also cherished my contacts, however brief in some cases, with the many thousands of people who have been in jail with me for actions of nonviolent civil disobedience protesting our nuclear policy or wrongful interventions. That applies especially to the members of the Rocky Flats Truth Force (including Frank Cordaro, Jay Dillon, Marion Doub, Evan Freirich, Elena Klaver, Patrick Malone, LeRoy Moore, Chet Tchozewski, and Roy Young). For me this all started under the influence of Janaki Tschannerl, Randy Kehler, and Bob Eaton, who inspired in me (along with the writings of Barbara Deming) the thought of truth-telling as a form of Gandhian nonviolent resistance.

  In that same spirit, I want to pay tribute to fellow whistle-blowers: in particular to Mordechai Vanunu (a prophet of the nuclear age, who suffered the greatest personal price so far, for his revelations of the Israeli nuclear program—including ten and a half years in solitary confinement—and who is still in internal exile in Israel), Frank Serpico (perhaps the first modern whistle-blower, who also paid a heavy physical price), and my more recent heroes, Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden. Likewise, with my admiration and appreciation for their truth-telling: William Binney, Tom Drake, Sibel Edmonds, Melvin Goodman, Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, John Kiriakou, Edward Loomis, Ray McGovern, Jesselyn Radack, Coleen Rowley, Thomas Tamm, Russell Tice, J. Kirk Wiebe, Joseph Wilson, and Ann Wright (and others, less personally known to me).