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Ellsberg.Net

Ellsberg’s “Desperate Proposal Pattern”

by Thomas Reifer

At the height of global demonstrations against Israel’s radically disproportionate response to the horrific October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel, which killed some 1,200 people with 240 hostages taken, headlines around the world proclaimed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is vowing to go ahead with his long-planned full scale invasion of Rafah, in Gaza — at a time when some 30,000 Palestinians have already been reported killed by Israel.

How to explain Netanyahu’s determination to proceed at all costs, defying massive protests in Israel and across the world calling for a hostage deal and a ceasefire?  It may be useful to revisit Daniel Ellsberg’s concept of the “Desperate Proposal Pattern,” a theme to which Ellsberg returned many times in his lectures, discussions and private writings on contemporary and historical happenings.

Ellsberg described the Desperate Proposal Pattern this way: “To avoid an ‘intolerable’ (infinitely negative) outcome, any measure with some chance of success is justified, no matter how low its probability of success, or how high its costs and risks. Hence there is no need to report or even calculate the latter considerations; it is enough to say that, unlike current policy, the one proposed is not certain to fail.”

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May 18, 2024 by

RECORDING of Daniel Ellsberg’s 10/22/23 Celebration of Life

On 10/22/23, the Ellsberg family held a public online memorial for Daniel Ellsberg via Zoom and livestream. Family, friends, and colleagues from around the world shared their favorite memories and celebrated Dan’s remarkable life. Here is a sound-optimized recording of the memorial, followed by a guide to the video’s contents.

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November 16, 2023 by

Ellsberg Obituaries & Tributes

Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers, Is Dead at 92, by Robert D. McFadden, New York Times, 6/16/23

Daniel Ellsberg, former defense analyst who released top-secret Pentagon Papers, dies at 92, by Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times, 6/16/23

Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers, Dies at 92, by Harrison Smith and Patricia Sullivan, The Washington Post, 6/16/23

Vietnam-era Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked Pentagon Papers, Dies at 92, by Hillel Italie, Associated Press, 6/16/23

Passage: Remembering Daniel Ellsberg (video), CBS Sunday Morning, 6/18/23

Daniel Ellsberg’s Message to Us, and to Future Generations, by Martin E. Hellman, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 6/16/23

A Father’s Legacy to His Son – and His Country, by Robert Ellsberg and Chris Zimmerman, Plough.com, 6/16/23

Reporter’s Notebook: Why the Pentagon Papers Leaker Tried to Get Prosecuted Near His Life’s End, by Charlie Savage, New York Times, 6/18/23

You Knew Daniel Ellsberg, Whistleblower. I Knew Him as a Film Fanatic, by Catherine Ellsberg, Washington Post Opinion, 6/18/23

Celebrating an Extraordinary American Life: Daniel Ellsberg, by Richard Falk, Counterpunch, 6/23/23

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June 23, 2023 by

Ellsberg Interview & Podcast in the New York Times

Photo by Andres Gonzalez for The New York Times

The New York Times recently published a Q&A interview and a podcast with Daniel Ellsberg:

The Man Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers Is Scared, by Alex Kingsbury – a Q & A with Daniel Ellsberg, New York Times, 3/24/23

Nuclear Secrets, a Compost Heap and the Lost Documents Daniel Ellsberg Never Leaked, New York Times podcast with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, 4/20/23

Excerpts follow from the just-released podcast.

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April 21, 2023 by

Amanpour’s Interview with Ellsberg on CNN, 3/23/23

Watch Ellsberg’s conversation with Christiane Amanpour, “Speaking Truth to Power: Ellsberg’s Legacy of Courage and Conscience,” aired on CNN on 3/23/23.

Excerpts from the Interview:

Christiane Amanpour:  The 20th anniversary of the Iraq War this week reminds us all of the critical importance of holding governments to account. Fast forward to today, and autocrats are waging wars around the world, from Russia’s latest year-long invasion of Ukraine to Iran’s battle with its own people.

The brave women and men taking to the streets there remind us of the power and value of speaking truth to power. Whistleblowing plays a crucial role in this pursuit. Without it, unjust wars begin and injustices go unchecked.

Daniel Ellsberg is probably the patron saint of them all. Anyone who knows anything about America’s misguided war in Vietnam knows his name to this day, because of one giant leap of courage and conscience. Leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971, at great personal risk, changed the course of that history by revealing America secretly knew the war was unwinnable.

Fifty years later, Ellsberg is still deeply committed to peace and transparency. But this month, at almost 92, he revealed his latest personal battle after being diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. So when he joined me from Berkeley, California, we talked about his life, this farewell moment, and above all, how to save lives by speaking out. 

Daniel Ellsberg, welcome to the program.

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March 27, 2023 by

Chomsky & Ellsberg – A Joint Interview with Paul Jay

In August 2022, Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg were interviewed together by Paul Jay for his podcast at theAnalysis.news. An excerpt follows from their conversation.

ELLSBERG: I’m sending stuff to my archives at UMass-Amherst, and I came across in my files this terrific paper by Noam Chomsky, U.S. Involvement in Vietnam, written just after the war had ended, finally in 1975. You probably don’t remember this paper, but I can recommend it to you.

Of course, it reminded me we had been in ’75, you and I, on the same side for eight years, since about ’67, when I came back from Vietnam, working together. With the greatest respect, you’d been on the right side much longer than that, all your life, as far as I know. Before those eight years, I had been participating as part of the wrong side. Anyway, we’ve been in for more than half a century working on this. I have not learned more from any person on Earth. From you, Noam. No one has contributed more.

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September 2, 2022 by

Ellsberg on Nuclear War and Ukraine

Editor’s note: Ellsberg’s 6/18/22 interview with TheAnalysis.News can be viewed here. An excerpt follows from the full transcript.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made the world far more dangerous, not only in the short run, but in ways that may be irreversible. It is a tragic and criminal attack. We are seeing humanity at its almost worst, but not quite the worst – so far, since 1945 we haven’t seen nuclear war.

Really, that was unexpected. When I was in my teens, in the 40s, or the 50s, or early 60s, I think almost nobody I knew expected that we would go 70 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki without another explosion on humans. It could well have happened. We have been very close to it, incredibly close to it.

Yet, something happened that was not easily foreseeable: that each of the superpowers, the US and Russia, allowed themselves to be stalemated or defeated without reverting to nuclear weapons. I think almost nobody foresaw that possibility.

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August 16, 2022 by

Doomsday Delusions

On 4/22/22, Daniel Ellsberg joined host Robert Scheer on “Scheer Intelligence” to discuss how close the world is coming to annihilation in the context of the Ukraine conflict. Ellsberg took part in planning a U.S. response to a nuclear attack during the Cold War, an experience that provides him with a unique perspective on this dangerous moment in history. 

Listen to the conversation / read the full transcript >>

Excerpted from the transcript:

Ellsberg: We are approaching an armed conflict between the U.S. and Russia for the first time ever since we put troops in Russia to put down the Bolsheviks in 1918. In all that time, both sides have avoided actually shooting at each other—and for a good reason, which applies right now. We have what we didn’t have 50 years ago: two doomsday machines, as I call them—that is, systems that are designed and readied and rehearsed to destroy most life on Earth.

My colleague Herman Kahn, who invented the term “doomsday machine” as a conceptual idea, was the model for Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film. Kahn felt that the nuclear threat was necessary, and that to make it credible, you had to prepare to survive it by civil defense, antiballistic missiles and so forth—and you had to be prepared to carry the threat out if necessary.

That was his delusion. It has never been possible to be able to survive as a society, even as a population, from nuclear war. Yet neither side has ever rejected the idea that nuclear war can be prepared for and rehearsed and threatened and risked.

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May 12, 2022 by

Ellsberg on the Existential Threat of Global Conflict

Excerpt from article and interview by Sasha Abramsky in The Nation, 4/22/22

Arguably no human on earth has given more thought over the past 65 years to the possibilities of nuclear war—intentional or accidental—than Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Since Ellsberg joined the RAND Corporation as an analyst in 1958, he has accumulated a vast wealth of knowledge and perspective on how superpowers use their nuclear muscle to impose their will on the world, and on how their political and military elites strategize about conflicts in the nuclear era. …

Last year, I interviewed Ellsberg, who lives in Berkeley, when he turned 90. On Monday, we resumed our conversation. Over the course of one and a half hours we discussed Ellsberg’s understanding of the war in Ukraine, the likelihood of hostilities between China and Taiwan as a spillover effect, the risk of nuclear bombs being unleashed, and the potentially cataclysmic impact the war could have on the ability of the global community to cooperate on anti-climate-change policies.

Read the full article / listen to the interview in The Nation >>

April 27, 2022 by

The 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis – Quemoy

[Referenced in Chapter 2 of The Doomsday Machine]

The 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis (Quemoy Study)
by Morton Halperin, 1966 (unredacted version)

Draft Notes on the Taiwan Straits / Offshore Islands Crisis (Quemoy Study)
by Daniel Ellsberg  (Feb. 1963)

PACAF Report on Taiwan Quemoy Operation
by Daniel Ellsberg (1963)

From Daniel Ellsberg:

I consulted with my friend Morton Halperin when he began the research for this study, I believe, in 1963. Having participated myself in the Cuban Missile Crisis a few months earlier, I spent most of 1963 and the first half of 1964 doing research on nuclear crises at the RAND corporation in Santa Monica, California, for which Halperin was a consultant. When I joined the Defense Department as a full time employee in August 1964, as special assistant to the assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs (ISA), my purpose was really to pursue my investigation of this subject, in the hopes of reducing the chance of nuclear war in the future. When Halperin completed his study at the end of 1966, my Draft Notes on the Offshore Islands Crisis of 1963 were a product of my consultation with Halperin in February 1963. In the mid ’60s, the crisis over Quemoy and Matsu, Offshore Islands in the Taiwan Strait—which is variously described as the Offshore Islands (OSI) Crisis, the Quemoy Crisis, or in the title of Halperin’s study “The 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis”—was not generally perceived as having been a nuclear crisis, despite the fears expressed publicly by politicians and commentators that it could possibly have erupted into nuclear war. What Halperin discovered in his classified (Top Secret) study was that the nuclear dimensions of this confrontation were taken very seriously by the Eisenhower administration, and in particular the military advisers and commanders involved. Indeed, Christian Herter, who succeeded John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, was reported to have said later, “The Cuban Missile Crisis is often described as the first serious nuclear crisis; those of us who lived through the Quemoy crisis definitely regarded that as the first serious nuclear crisis.” The reasons for this will be obvious every few pages of this study.

November 23, 2017 by