The Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

  In this context, Morton Halperin deserves special mention as one of the very few friends from my years at RAND and the Pentagon—where all my associates held security clearances—whose friendship survived my release of the Pentagon Papers and who supported my act. (Almost the only others were Bernard Brodie, Tom Schelling, and Melvin Gurtov.) Becoming an absolutely crucial member of my defense team, Mort willingly risked his own future clearance and career. Ever since then, he has been an indefatigable critic of wrongful interventions and defender of whistle-blowers’ legal rights. (He was one of the very first to argue publicly for “no first use” of nuclear weapons, from 1960.)

  I’m deeply grateful for friendship and support for my work that has included but gone well beyond warm hospitality: Markell Brooks, Daidie Donnelly, Judy Ehrlich, Jodie Evans, Verona Fonte, Rick Goldsmith, Hilary and Danny Goldstine, Claire Greensfelder, Susan Griffin, Edie Hartshorne, Martin and Dorothie Hellman, Sy and Liz Hersh, Barbara Koeppel, David and Carolee Krieger, Peter and Simki Kuznick, Joanna Macy, Jeffrey and Leila Masson, Julia Pacetti, Lynda and Stewart Resnick, Peter Dale Scott (my close friend and mentor since the Pentagon Papers trial) and Ronna Kabatznick, Bert Schneider, Lloyd and Marva Shearer, Stanley and Betty Sheinbaum, Jeremy Sherman and his parents Gordon and Kate, Dan Smith and Joan Marler, Lee Swenson and Vijaya Nagarajan. Every year since 1982, the many participants in Robert Lifton’s annual Wellfleet seminar have provided me with a welcome, quasi-academic intellectual community.

  I have benefited from research grants from the W. Alton Jones Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and award money from the Right Livelihood Foundation (2006). Moreover, I was enabled to work on this book at writing retreats at the Mesa Refuge (Pt. Reyes Station, California) and the Carey Institute for Global Good (Renssalaerville, New York). David Krieger’s Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, of which I am a Senior Fellow, has been a conduit for vital financial support for my work (in particular from Markell Brooks). They all have my great thanks.

  Likewise, David Krieger and his colleagues at NAPF—along with long-time stalwarts of nuclear abolition including my friends Helen Caldicott (who revived Physicians for Social Responsibility), Alice Slater (Abolition 2000), Jackie Cabasso, John Burroughs, and Andrew Lichterman (Western States Legal Foundation), Bruce Blair (Global Zero), Jonathan Granoff (Global Security Institute), Aaron Tovish (Mayors for Peace), and Alyn Ware (Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament)—for keeping alive the cause of total elimination of nuclear weapons. All of these organizations deserve the attention and support of readers of this book, as do ICAN (International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons), Federation of American Scientists, Arms Control Association, Greenpeace and International Network of Scientists and Engineers for Global Responsibility, Arjun Makhijani’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I have learned a great deal over the last forty years from all those named above, and particularly from my friend Christopher Paine (National Resources Defense Committee).

  My younger son, Michael, played a crucial part in encouraging and helping me to write the book proposal that I turned over to my outstanding agent, Andy Ross, and that helped sell this book. Andy Ross’s tenacity made sure that—after seventeen rejections, on commercial grounds—this manuscript found the perfect home at Bloomsbury, thanks to editor Peter Ginna (who has, of course, my thanks). At Bloomsbury, my wonderful editor Nancy Miller’s continued enthusiasm, through long delays and extensions, has kept me going, and her careful work has greatly improved the text, as has the meticulous copyediting by Laura Phillips and her crew. My assistant Nomi Yah has been indispensable for thirteen years. Michael Mack, a Macintosh wizard, has surmounted numerous computer crises. Tom Reifer, Allen Pietrobon, and William Burr have supplied uncountable numbers of reference articles.

  Invaluable comments and corrections have been provided by readers of parts or all of this manuscript: David Barash, William Burr, Linda Burstyn, Martin Hellman, Frank von Hippel, Judith Lipton, Benoit Pelopidas, Ted Postol, Alan Robock, Eric Schlosser, Daniel U. Smith, Norman Solomon, Trevor Timm, Brian Toon, and Aaron Tovish. Several of these have gone over the entire manuscript so generously and meticulously that I do not see how in good conscience, if I identified them, they could escape all responsibility for any remaining errors. (I’ve always wanted to write that.) I am grateful to Alan Robock and Brian Toon for sharing all their papers on nuclear winter with me, including some not yet published, and for answering patiently all my questions.

  Since this is my final book—so I hope (my wife assures me I am not alone in that)—I want to take more space than usual to acknowledge my profound debt and gratitude to those who have been with me for the long haul, my family (which has virtually come to include Tom Reifer).

  To start with Tom: In January 1984, when I asked a question in the first session of a course I was teaching on nuclear policy at UC Irvine, exactly one member of the class of four hundred undergraduates raised his hand, and he answered correctly. I was impressed and asked his name. When I found that Tom was also the only student, so far as I could tell, who was reading all the voluminous optional reading I had recommended, I admitted him to the graduate seminar I was conducting on the same subject. The other members were all graduate students or faculty. It soon became clear that he was the outstanding discussant.

  What I didn’t know at the time was that he wasn’t enrolled at Irvine or any other university; he was sixteen years old, a school dropout who never formally graduated from high school. He had been a runaway from an abusive home since he was thirteen, until his sister had recruited him off the streets into the movement started by Randy Kehler and Randall Forsberg for a bilateral nuclear weapons freeze. But after assisting me in that course (and during it, passing a high school equivalency test, and earning a letter of commendation from me) he went on to get a BA and MA at UC Santa Cruz in sociology and a PhD at SUNY Binghamton. Tom is now a full professor of sociology at the University of San Diego. His pathbreaking thesis, drawing on world systems theory, will be published—after a gestation period comparable to that of this book—as “Lawyers, Guns and Money: Wall Street and the American Century.”

  Tom has been a close friend for most of the third of a century since he took my course, but for the first ten years or so he was, in effect, my student; for the last twenty years, more of a mentor. This text reflects at least a thousand hours of intense discussion with him over the last three decades, and not only about nuclear policy (I’m greatly indebted to Kerstin Lanham for her generous readiness and extraordinary facility to transcribe many of those dialogues for me). Imagine what it has meant to me to have had round-the-clock assistance from him in recent months just to complete the references and notes in this book!

  Next, my older children, Robert Boyd and Mary Carroll Ellsberg. I couldn’t tell them why I was away from home so much in Washington in their early youth, because they weren’t cleared. Nor did they know the substance of the Pentagon Papers they spent a night helping me copy: Robert, at thirteen, collating, and Mary, who was ten, cutting Top Secret off the tops and bottoms of the pages with a scissors. (I wanted them to see that I was doing something, calmly and deliberately, that I thought was right, whatever they might hear if I went to prison shortly as I expected.)

  They weren’t scarred by that experience, evidently. They both went on to fulfill a father’s highest hopes for careers of right livelihood. Robert, a born editor and inspiring author, has been for years the editor-in-chief and publisher of Orbis Books, the publishing house of the Maryknoll order. Mary, after working, at considerable risk, in the Sandinista literacy and health campaigns in Nicaragua, earned a PhD in public health from Umeå University in Sweden with an epidemiological study in Nicaragua of violence against women, a subject on which she has become a worldwide authority. She is now Director of the Global Women’s Institute and Professor of Global Health at George Washington University.


  In my first book in 1972 I acknowledged my wife, Patricia, as my partner, lover, and closest friend. That remains true forty-five years later. It’s fifty-two years from our first date on April 16, 1965, when she had made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: to accompany her the next day to the first SDS rally against the Vietnam war. (It was my first Saturday off from the Pentagon in nine months, spent working dutifully six and a half days a week on the escalation of the war.) Two nights after that I was in love with her, as I’ve been ever since.

  Patricia was an unindicted co-conspirator for the final copying and release of the Pentagon Papers. (Unindicted, it turned out, because she had never been fingerprinted, unlike me and my co-defendant Tony Russo; the FBI couldn’t identify her prints on the Papers.) That occupied the first year of our marriage, followed by two years on trial and two more years of antiwar activism.

  She didn’t know in the first years of our marriage what’s revealed in my introduction here, about the “other Pentagon papers” on nuclear matters, with my expectation of another trial and almost certain life imprisonment. Or, absent that outcome (thanks to tropical storm Doria) the prospect after the war of forty more years of preoccupation and activism on what was, to her, a whole new obsession of mine. She surely deserved to know all that when she accepted my proposal in 1970, but I couldn’t tell her without incriminating her further.

  Since 1975 Patricia has had to live with my on-and-off engagement with this book. That’s been true for the entire life of my youngest son, Michael Gabriel (now forty), who like his mother has endured endless monologues on this and other grim subjects. Publication day will be a glorious liberation for both Michael and Patricia (though Michael will be taking on the task of managing my related website). That Patricia has remained my loving partner throughout this interminable pursuit is … a miracle, the kind that gives me hope for this world.

  One of the most challenging days for our marriage was the first birthday of my youngest son Michael, May 12, 1978. Instead of being at home with them in San Francisco to observe the occasion, I was sitting with Robert—by then the editor of the Catholic Worker—who had come out to Colorado to join me on the railroad tracks at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production Facility, awaiting what was to be my fourth arrest there and his first.

  As we traveled in a police van to jail, in handcuffs, Robert looked out at the tracks we were passing and said, “You know, there should have been people sitting on the tracks at Auschwitz.”

  Mary had come out to the tracks while her brother was in jail, and she was shocked to see his appearance in court for sentencing on May 27. He had spent sixteen days on a water fast, most of it in solitary confinement (separated from the rest of us until that morning), and he had to leave the courtroom at one point, dizzy and nauseated, But she then heard him, as we all did, deliver in a strong voice his stunning address to the court, handwritten the night before.

  The last words in this book go to Robert from that statement (in part):329

  By sitting on railroad tracks at Rocky Flats—one dozen, two dozen, even a hundred people—we ourselves may not actually be able to stop the production of plutonium triggers there. But we are trying to show that we as a people, if we wish and if we are determined, have that power—the power to change ourselves and history—we as a people can close Rocky Flats, and in fact that is what we must do. We do not deny that the goal of worldwide disarmament is a complicated one and filled with risks, but it is time that we begin accepting the risks of peacemaking as we have for so long lived under the risks of war …

  For us, the choice is clear.

  Rocky Flats is the Auschwitz of our time. Behind that barbed wire and those locked doors, intelligent, decent family men in their white suits and their security badges are implementing the technological preparations for the Final solution to the Human Problem. In each bomb prepared at Rocky Flats is another Holocaust—perhaps for the children of Moscow, Peking, Hanoi—those who build them don’t know.

  At one of the German concentration camps—I believe it was Dachau—the American troops who liberated it forced the townspeople to tour the camp—to the huddled, emaciated survivors, the piles of corpses, the ovens that had disposed of the dead. And of course they were numbed and shocked and they said, “We didn’t know—we didn’t know what was in those boxcars—we didn’t know what came out of those chimneys.”

  We would like to spare the people of this county, this state, and our country, that kind of experience—so we are shouting, we are trying to warn the people what kind of cargo over those railroad tracks in sealed boxcars is killing and mutilating your unborn children by increasing levels of cancer, leukemia, and genetic mutation330—even if the bombs never go off.

  And we are doing more than that. There are people right now who are blocking those tracks. There is a group of people—someday they will be thanked, now they are jailed—who are saying, “Build your bombs, continue our business as usual in this death camp—but I’m sorry that I must withdraw my consent—you will have to do it over our bodies.”

  They are saying, no longer should nuclear bombs be made in this country without Americans being arrested. And when I heard that in Colorado there were people who were willing to say this and act on it, I had to come here—because I knew these were people I wanted to know and to join and be with.

  As Robert said the last words, he turned around, away from the judge, and thanked the defendants who filled the small courtroom for giving him the chance to be in their company. We all stood up and met that with shouts and applause, and the judge, who had warned us against demonstrations, ordered the marshals to clear the courtroom.

  Index

  A-bombs. See atomic bombs and attacks

  Acheson, Dean, here, here, here, here, here, here

  Adams, Sherman, here

  Adenauer, Konrad, here

  The Advisors (York), here

  AEC. See Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)

  Afghanistan, here, here, here, here, here

  Ahmad, Eqbal, here

  Air Force, U.S. See also Kadena Air Base; Kunsan Air Base; Osan Air Base

  atomic bombings and, here, here

  bases in Japan, here, here

  bombing of cities in Europe, here

  Cuban missile crisis and, here, here

  fire, lack of accounting for, and, here

  General War definition and, here, here

  general war plans and, here

  industrial targets and, here, here, here, here

  Japanese attack on, here

  Kennedy at Vienna Summit and, here

  LeMay and, here

  massacres in the air, here

  missile budgeting, here

  missile gap estimates, here, here, here, here, here, here

  NORAD visit, here

  nuclear war planning for Soviet Union, here

  nuclear weapons in Japanese waters and, here

  precision bombing, here, here, here, here

  Project Retro, here

  war fighting strategy, here, here

  Wohlstetter’s briefings to, here

  airpower doctrine, here

  Alaska, here

  Albania, here, here, here, here

  Allison, Sam, here, here, here

  all options, here, here

  all-source access, here

  alternate command posts, here, here

  ambiguity, here, here, here, here, here, here

  American doctrine, here

  Annex C of JSCP, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. See also Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)

  Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, here

  anti-nuclear activism, here, here

  Aquinas, Thomas, here

  area bombing, here, here, here

  Arendt, Hannah, here

  Arkhipov, Vasili Alexandrovich, here, here

  Arkhipova, Olga, here

  armed conflict, definition of, here

  Army, U.S., here, here, here, here, here
, here, here

  Army Air Force, U.S. (USAAF), here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  Arnold, Hap, here, here, here, here

  Atlas missiles and engines, here, here, here, here, here

  atmospheric ignition, here, here, here

  atomic bombs and attacks

  dangers of, here

  Eisenhower and, here

  Ellsberg’s father and, here, here

  H-bomb replacement of, here, here

  H-bombs compared to, here, here, here, here, here, here

  Hitler and, here

  on Japan, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  LeMay and, here, here

  Nagasaki-type, here

  planned for Soviet Union, here, here

  Spark Plug procedures and, here

  thermonuclear fuel ignition by, here

  Truman and, here, here, here, here, here

  atomic diplomacy, here, here

  Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), here, here, here, here, here, here. See also General Advisory Committee (GAC)

  Augustine, here

  Austria, here, here, here

  B-17s, here, here

  B-24 Liberator bombers, here

  B-29s, here, here, here, here, here, here

  B-47s, here, here

  B-52s, here, here, here, here

  B-58s, here

  B-70 bomber program, here

  Baldwin, Stanley, here

  Ball, Desmond, here, here, here