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daniel ellsberg
What the US Air Force Doesn't Want You to Notice on Election Night
As the warring ruling class seems to be pushing for nuclear brinkmanship, on this election night let us not be distracted.
Nov 05, 2024
Much significance will happen at the end of Election Day, and a countdown will begin at 11:00 p.m. PDT on November 5th. While everyone’s attention will be on who our next president will be, the U.S. The Air Force will test-launch an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with a dummy hydrogen bomb on the tip from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The missile will cross the Pacific Ocean and 22 minutes later crash into the Marshall Islands. The U.S. Air Force does this several times a year. The launches are always at night while Americans are sleeping.
This is what nightmares are made of—between 1946 and 1958 the U.S. detonated 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands, and the result is that the Marshallese people have lost their pristine environment and face serious health problems. Our environment is threatened here as well. Not only did the indigenous Chumash people lose their sacred land to Vandenberg Air Force Base, but also America’s Heartland presently has around 400 ICBMs stored in underground silos equipped with nuclear warheads that are ready to launch at a hair trigger’s notice. Named “MinuteMen III,” after Revolutionary War soldiers who could reload and shoot a gun in less than a minute, ICBMs not only put Americans at risk of accident, but they put all life on earth in danger.
ICBMs are not viable for national defense. They are a relic of a bygone era having been invented by Nazi Germany, and their presence only escalates the risk of nuclear accidents or conflicts. A single launch could lead to a nuclear exchange that would annihilate cities, contaminate the environment, and cause irreversible harm to our planet’s ecosystem. Once an ICBM is launched, it cannot be recalled. I don’t want a nuclear strike or accident to happen. We can change course now, and our first step is to decommission the ICBM program also because it is a staggering financial burden to maintain.
Nuclear weapons only provide the terrifying threat of annihilation, either by command or by accident. Nuclear weapons and ICBMs only make the world less safe and strip us of security.
The U.S. plans to spend over $1.2 trillion on nuclear modernization over the next 30 years, which means new, larger nuclear bombs and new, larger ICBMs called Sentinels that will need to be tested. This massive investment in outdated technology diverts critical funds away from humanitarian needs like healthcare, education, and healing climate change—issues that directly impact our quality of life, and our children’s future.
I teach 4th and 5th graders Creative Writing. I adore children’s imaginations, but when my students were given the assignment to write about something important to them, they wrote lines that broke my heart. This is a wake-up call for us adults to face the reality we have made for our children.
“Such a shame, a perfectly good planet, trashed.” Claire, age 9.
“What would you think about no nature in the world? No trees, no butterflies, no birds or bunnies at all! Most important of all, no people. There would be no technology, no schools, no history, no entertainment; everything we have worked for would be wasted. What would you think about a beautiful world that basically had nothing? I think I would absolutely hate it.,” Brynn, age 9.
Other than destruction caused by industrial global warming and by war, which the children are all-too aware of, this child does not know what actually could turn nature and civilization to nothing in a matter of minutes; she doesn’t know about “nuclear winter” or how vulnerable we are to a nuclear accident. Most people don’t.
The claim is that nuclear weapons are deterrents, but it is diplomacy that creates alliances and peace. Nuclear weapons only provide the terrifying threat of annihilation, either by command or by accident. Nuclear weapons and ICBMs only make the world less safe and strip us of security.
As the warring ruling class seems to be pushing for nuclear brinkmanship, on this election night let us not be distracted. By decommissioning ICBMs, the U.S. could lead the world in reducing the nuclear threat and encourage other nations to do the same. For the sake of our health, environment, and the safety of future generations, it’s time to scrap the ICBM program. We owe it to our children to invest in a future that prioritizes peace and sustainability over destruction.
As it is we the people who possess the right of self-determination, we must confront the material reality of our homeland and face what it will take to protect it. Do we have the courage to change our country for the better and ensure our futures? Yes we do, and now is the time to take action.
“Only we, the public, can force our representatives to reverse their abdication of the war powers that the Constitution gives exclusively to the Congress,” said Daniel Ellsberg, U.S. military analyst, economist, and author of "The Doomsday Machine."
May we cancel this nightmare weapons program for once and for all and give our children the security that they deserve.
Tell Congress: Cancel Sentinel Missile Program—More Than 700 Scientists Agree: https://secure.ucsusa.org/a/2024-cancel-sentinel-letter
Learn more about the dangers of ICBMS and get involved. https://defusenuclearwar.org/eliminate-icbms/
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The Threat of 1,000 Holocausts Puts Everything at Stake
If a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a category of now or never.
Oct 01, 2024
Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.
While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”
That was in 1961.
Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause “nuclear winter.” And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.
No longer 100 Holocausts.
More than 1,000 Holocausts.
If such a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a category of now or never.
What if we did have the opportunity for hindsight? What if we could somehow hover over this planet? And see what had become a global crematorium and an unspeakable ordeal of human agony? Where, in words attributed to both Nikita Khruschev and Winston Churchill, “the living would envy the dead.”
As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno, standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the Pentagon budget.
What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?
In 2023: The nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the U.S. share. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear weapons spending.
The United States is leading the way in the nuclear arms race. And we’re encouraged to see that as a good thing. “Escalation dominance.”
But escalation doesn’t remain unipolar. As time goes on, “Do as we say, not as we do” isn’t convincing to other nations.
China is now expanding its nuclear arsenal. That escalation does not exist in a vacuum. Official Washington pretends that Chinese policies are shifting without regard to the U.S. pursuit of “escalation dominance.” But that’s a disingenuous pretense. What the great critic of Vietnam War escalation during the 1960s, Senator William Fulbright, called “the arrogance of power.”
Of course there’s plenty to deplore about Russia’s approach to nuclear weapons. Irresponsible threats about using “tactical” ones in Ukraine have come from Moscow. There’s now public discussion – by Russian military and political elites – of putting nuclear weapons in space.
We should face the realities of the U.S. government’s role in fueling such ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms-control agreements. Among crucial steps, it’s long past time to restore three treaties that the United States abrogated – ABM, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, and Open Skies.
On the non-proliferation front, opportunities are being spurned by Washington. For instance, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman wrote in September: “Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.”
That deaf ear greatly pleases Israel, the only nuclear-weapons state in the Middle East. On September 22, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said unequivocally that Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon was “a form of terrorism.” The United States keeps arming Israel, but won’t negotiate with Iran.
The U.S. government has a responsibility to follow up on every lead, and respond to every overture. Without communication, we vastly increase the risk of devastation.
We can too easily forget what’s truly at stake.
Despite diametrical differences in ideologies, in values, in ideals and systems – programs for extermination are in place at a magnitude dwarfing what occurred during the first half of the 1940s.
Today, Congress and the White House are in the grip of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” In a toxic mix with the arrogance of power. Propelling a new and more dangerous Cold War.
And so, at the State Department, the leadership talks about a “rules-based order,” which all too often actually means: “We make the rules, we break the rules.”
Meanwhile, the Doomsday Clock set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now just 90 seconds away from apocalyptic midnight.
Six decades ago, the Doomsday Clock was a full 12 minutes away. And President Lyndon Johnson was willing to approach Moscow with the kind of wisdom that is now absent at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Here’s what Johnson said at the end of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin in June 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey: “We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions.”
Two decades later, President Ronald Reagan – formerly a supreme cold warrior -- stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.”
But such attitudes would be heresy today.
As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno, standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the Pentagon budget. Huge new appropriations for nuclear weapons are voted under the euphemism of “modernization.”
And here’s a sad irony: The few members of Congress willing to urgently warn about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger with calls for “victory” in the Ukraine war. Instead, what’s urgently needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.
The United States should not use the Ukraine war as a rationale for pursuing a mutually destructive set of policies toward Russia. It’s an approach that maintains and worsens the daily reality on the knife-edge of nuclear war.
The few members of Congress willing to urgently warn about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger with calls for “victory” in the Ukraine war. Instead, what’s urgently needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.
We don’t know how far negotiations with Russia could get on an array of pivotal issues. But refusing to negotiate is a catastrophic path.
Continuation of the war in Ukraine markedly increases the likelihood of spinning out from a regional to a Europe-wide to a nuclear war. Yet, calls for vigorously pursuing diplomacy to end the Ukraine war are dismissed out of hand as serving Vladimir Putin’s interests.
A zero-sum view of the world.
A one-way ticket to omnicide.
The world has gotten even closer to the precipice of a military clash between the nuclear superpowers, with a push to greenlight NATO-backed Ukrainian attacks heading deeper into Russia.
Consider what President Kennedy had to say, eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, in his historic speech at American University: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the world.”
That crucial insight from Kennedy is currently in the dumpsters at the White House and on Capitol Hill.
And where is this all headed?
Daniel Ellsberg tried to alert members of Congress. Five years ago, in a letter that was hand-delivered to every office of senators and House members, he wrote: “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years.” Those studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”
In the quest for sanity and survival, isn’t it time for reconstruction of the nuclear arms-control infrastructure? Yes, the Russian war against Ukraine violates international law and “norms,” as did U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real diplomacy with Russia is in the interests of global security.
And some great options don’t depend on what happens at the negotiation table.
Many experts say that the most important initial step our country could take to reduce the chances of nuclear war would be a shutdown of all ICBMs.
The word “deterrence” is often heard. But the land-based part of the triad is actually the opposite of deterrence – it’s an invitation to be attacked. That’s the reality of the 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles that are on hair-trigger alert in five western states
Uniquely, ICBMs invite a counterforce attack. And they allow a president just minutes to determine whether what’s incoming is actually a set of missiles – or, as in the past, a flock of geese or a drill message that’s mistaken for the real thing.
The former Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote that ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” and “they could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”
And yet, so far, we can't get anywhere with Congress in order to shut down ICBMs. “Oh no,” we’re told, “that would be unilateral disarmament.”
Imagine that you're standing in a pool of gasoline, with your adversary. You’re lighting matches, and your adversary is lighting matches. If you stop lighting matches, that could be condemned as “unilateral disarmament.” It would also be a sane step to reduce the danger -- whether or not the other side follows suit.
The ongoing refusal to shut down the ICBMs is akin to insisting that our side must keep lighting matches while standing in gasoline.
The chances of ICBMs starting a nuclear conflagration have increased with sky-high tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. Mistaking a false alarm for a nuclear-missile attack becomes more likely amid the stresses, fatigue and paranoia that come with the protracted war in Ukraine and extending war into Russia.
Their unique vulnerability as land-based strategic weapons puts ICBMs in the unique category of “use them or lose them.” So, as Secretary Perry explained, “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.”
The United States should dismantle its entire ICBM force. Former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair and General James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote: “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.”
In July, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a letter signed by more than 700 scientists. They not only called for cancelation of the Sentinel program for a new version of ICBMs – they also called for getting rid of the entire land-based leg of the triad.
Meanwhile, the current dispute in Congress about ICBMs has focused on whether it would be cheaper to build the cost-overrunning Sentinel system or upgrade the existing Minuteman III missiles. But either way, the matches keep being lit for a global holocaust.
During his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Martin Luther King declared: “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.”
I want to close with some words from Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, summing up the preparations for nuclear war. He wrote:
“No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.”
This article is adapted from the keynote speech that Norman Solomon gave at the annual conference of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC on Sept. 24, 2024.
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Blank Checks for War: Congress Has Abdicated Its Power From Tonkin to Gaza
As the 60th anniversary of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution approaches, it’s time to reflect on how Congress solidified its long-standing deference to the presidency on foreign policy and how the people can make their voices heard.
Aug 01, 2024
With the U.S.- backed carnage in Gaza continuing and the threat of growing violence looming throughout the region (in Lebanon, Iran, and who knows where else), we need to think more deeply than ever about how the American people have historically been excluded from foreign policy decision-making. An upcoming anniversary should remind us of what sent us down this undemocratic path.
Sixty years ago, on August 7, 1964, U.S. Congress handed President Lyndon B. Johnson the power to wage a major war in Vietnam, solidifying its long-standing deference to the presidency on foreign policy. Not once since World War II has Congress exercised its constitutional responsibility to vote on declarations to decide if, when, and where the United States goes to war.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 flew through Congress, in part because most members trusted the president’s assurance that he sought “no wider war.” Their trust was misplaced. The Johnson administration kept secret and lied about its plans for future military escalation in Vietnam. It also lied about the incident used to persuade Congress to give LBJ a blank check to use military force however he wanted: the false claim that American ships had been the targets of unprovoked and unequivocal attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats.
We have long had more than enough evidence to demand fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy. We can’t wait for Congress to represent us faithfully.
In fact, the United States had been fighting a secret war against North Vietnam since 1961. The U.S. destroyers that LBJ said were innocently sailing on the “high seas” were there to support South Vietnamese attacks (organized by the U.S. military and CIA) on North Vietnamese coastal villages. On August 2, 1964, these ongoing acts of war finally provoked a few Vietnamese patrol boats to chase after a U.S. destroyer which, firing first, easily disabled the small vessels. The Vietnamese managed to fire a few torpedoes but missed. There were no American casualties. Not exactly Pearl Harbor.
What’s more, the White House also claimed it had “unequivocal” evidence that North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked again on August 4. In fact, the U.S. commander on the scene sent a “flash message” urging civilian authorities to delay any decision—because what first seemed like an attack may have been a false alarm caused by “freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonarmen.” Within days it was all but certain that no second attack had occurred. As President Johnson said to an aide, “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!”
Nonetheless, Johnson went on television near midnight on August 4 to announce that it was his “duty” to launch a “retaliatory” airstrike. As he spoke, 64 U.S. warplanes were on their way to bomb North Vietnam. The next day LBJ asked Congress for a resolution giving him the authority “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States.” We now know that the heart of this resolution had been drafted months earlier. The administration had just been waiting for a pretext to ram it through Congress.
We also know the lies didn’t stop there. That fall, as Johnson campaigned for the presidency, he sounded like a peace candidate, promising that he would not send “our boys to do the fighting for Asian boys.” Running against pro-war Republican Barry Goldwater, LBJ won in a landslide. Americans voted for peace and ended up with a war that killed more than 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans.
Virtually every top U.S. foreign policy official knew the Johnson administration was lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, including 33-year-old Daniel Ellsberg. By chance, Ellsberg’s first full day on the job, as one of Robert McNamara’s Pentagon “whiz kids,” was August 4, 1964. Ellsberg was then a Cold War hawk who supported the U.S. mission in Vietnam. Like all his colleagues, he raised no internal objections to Johnson’s airstrikes or the administration’s effort to sell the Tonkin Gulf Resolution through deceit. And no insider gave a second’s thought to revealing those lies to Congress, the media, or the public.
After a year in the Pentagon, nearly two years in Vietnam, and two more years meeting young anti-war activists and intensely studying the 7,000-page top-secret history of decision-making in Vietnam that became known as the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg underwent a dramatic political and moral conversion. By 1967, he believed the war an unwinnable stalemate from which the U.S. should find a face-saving exit. By 1969, he regarded it as fundamentally immoral and unjust, and thought the U.S. should withdraw unilaterally and immediately.
At that point, Ellsberg decided to photocopy the Pentagon Papers and make them public, hoping that their sordid record of government lying would further ignite anti-war activism. He did so with the knowledge that it might bring him a life sentence in prison. First Ellsberg tried to persuade anti-war senators to put the Pentagon Papers into the public record. When that effort failed, he took the papers to The New York Times and 18 other newspapers. Each of them published substantial portions in June 1971.
Later that year, Ellsberg spoke with former Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, one of only two members of Congress who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. They talked about the documents in the Pentagon Papers that contained detailed evidence of the Johnson administration’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Morse said to Ellsberg, “If you’d given me those documents, at the time, in 1964, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution would never have gotten out of committee. And if they had brought it to the floor, it would have lost.”
You can’t replay history, so we can’t test Morse’s claim, but Ellsberg has many times said that the greatest regret of his life was not exposing the government’s lies about Vietnam much earlier. There were many reasons why he didn’t, and why so few officials ever expose national security wrongdoing. The biggest reason, Ellsberg came to realize, was the intense culture of power, loyalty, and careerism that characterizes foreign policy circles. Almost no one in those positions, even those who have serious objections to ongoing policies, is willing to risk their insider status and their access to power and privileged information. Most fully internalize the arrogant assumption that the foreign policy elite understands far better than Congress or the people how the world works and how the U.S. should exercise its power.
And Congress, for its part, continues to enable an ever more imperial presidency that decides when and where the U.S. goes to war. It almost never uses the power of the purse to reduce U.S. militarism or to cut funding for unpopular wars. The nearly trillion-dollar Pentagon budget is rubber-stamped every year. There is no guarantee that a more engaged Congress would give us a less militarized and interventionist foreign policy. But it would make that policy more accountable to a public which historically has been substantially more anti-war than its representatives. As in the Vietnam era, a majority of Americans opposed the 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan many years before they ended. And since at least March 2024 a majority of Americans have opposed the Israeli government’s war on Gaza, yet Congress continues to bankroll U.S. support for it.
We have seen, in the last 10 months, an unprecedented outpouring of American protest in support of Palestinian rights. For good reason. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, and many of them children, have been killed by the Israeli military’s indiscriminate and disproportionate response to the Hamas killing of some 1,100 Israelis on October 7, 2023. Around 1.7% of the Gazan population (2.3 million) have been killed and at least 90% displaced from their homes (many have had to flee multiple times). A recent study by the medical journal The Lancet, estimates that the death toll in Gaza could reach 186,000 even if there is a cease-fire today.
For most Americans, this level of suffering is unimaginable. Yet we must try to imagine it. If we were Gaza, at least 5.7 million of us would be dead, the vast majority women, children, and other civilians. Many millions more would be among the uncounted dead and dying—buried, lost, sick, starving. More than 300 million of us would be forced from our homes, on the road seeking shelter, food, and water under ongoing military attacks and perils beyond description.
That is the reality in Gaza.
In the end, only a mass democratic movement has the potential to dramatically change U.S. foreign policy. The first challenge is to overthrow the baseless claim that the United States is the greatest force for good in the world, the “indispensable nation” that stands for the rule of law, freedom, and democracy. Our record does not warrant such a delusion. Only when that ideology and naïve faith is broadly undermined can we hope to chip away at the long-standing infrastructure of U.S. militarism—the over 750 military bases on foreign soil, the annual military exercises in two-thirds of the world’s nations, and the “defense” budget that equals the next nine most militarized nations combined.
Ellsberg and Morse were right. The people must know the truth. But we have long had more than enough evidence to demand fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy. We can’t wait for Congress to represent us faithfully. The people’s voice must be heard.
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