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.
Of course, it’s a possibility now, and in a new way. Here is the difference. In past situations of stalemate, when a superpower confronted a much smaller power – whether it was Korea, Indochina, Vietnam, Laos, or the Russians going to Afghanistan – we were able to accept defeat without using nuclear weapons, both in Vietnam and in Afghanistan. Essentially, we suffered a defeat in Iraq, politically speaking, as did the Russians in Afghanistan.
On several occasions, false alarms during past crises could have triggered nuclear war, except for the prudence of individuals in the system. The world hung on the somewhat dangerous (in career terms) decisions by people like Arkhipov in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Colonel Petrov in the 1983 crisis, not to alarm their superiors with their own belief that an attack might be imminent.
A similar situation could arise in the current war in various ways. If the Ukrainians were to use the missile systems that we are now giving them, which give them the capability to reply to Russian attacks on Ukrainian soil with Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil, that would be a severe escalation, one possibly out of US control. Again, if a possible defeat in the Donbass of Russian forces caused Putin or his commanders, or conceivably subordinates, to attack supply points in Poland, thus implicating NATO directly, we could find ourselves with the US and NATO directly at war with Russia – a risk which has so far been avoided.
Each leader here – Biden, on the one hand, and Putin on the other – has in the past refrained from acts that would bring our two nations into direct armed conflict. In this they have shown a kind of prudence. Yet it is also the case that they are gambling with clear-cut risks, through the interaction of what they each are doing with what the other side is doing.
This is getting us into totally new territory, something that has not happened in the last 70 years: the imminent possibility of armed conflict between the US, or NATO, and Russia (or, earlier, the Soviet Union.) Amazingly, in these 70 years, each side has taken care – even in a proxy war, even against some asymmetric, weaker power – to avoid direct armed conflict between them. However, something we have not yet seen, something that has not yet been tested, is the willingness of the leader of a superpower to lose or to be stalemated by the other superpower. That would involve a loss of prestige and a loss of influence in the world such as has not occurred in previous wars.
For the US to withdraw from Vietnam or Afghanistan is understood by others as not directly impinging on their ability to be a great power or a superpower in the world. However, to lose directly to Russia, or for Russia to lose to the US, is another matter. That hasn’t happened before, and it could easily come about now.
That is the gamble being taken by both sides at this point, just as both sides were gambling in the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which I was involved at a high staff level. After 50 years of study, and having participated directly in the crisis, I believe that neither Khrushchev nor Kennedy intended to carry out their threats of armed conflict. I believe that they were both bluffing. Yet each of them was making moves, making deployments and threats and commitments, in order to improve the terms of a negotiated settlement – which each of them expected to conclude, in the course of sparring and deploying, with favorable terms. They came within a hair’s breadth of their subordinates’ actions leading directly into armed conflict.
A negotiated outcome as soon as possible, or within the next several months at least, is very important but not likely. As the war in Ukraine goes on, the possibility of escalation continues, and even grows, as policymakers seek to avoid further escalation or costly stalemate.
So we are talking about a long war in which Ukrainian lives are destroyed, hundreds of thousands more casualties on the Ukrainian side, as well as comparably on the Russian side. This is a tragic situation for Ukraine, and for that matter, for the Russian people with the sanctions, and for the rest of the world in terms of food supplies from Ukraine, which confronts people in Africa right now with the threat of famine and starvation as this goes on. The prospects for simply continuing at this level, even without escalation, are high.
It turns out that leaders in power will risk and even sacrifice almost any number of humans in order to avoid almost certain short-run defeat, disaster, or humiliation for them personally and for their country. The history of the last half century, which I have been analyzing (having participated in some of the worst aspects of it earlier in my life), tells me that rather than suffer humiliating defeat, a leader such as Putin is willing to raise the ante, escalate, back up previous failures, and double down in ways that are without consideration of the cost in human lives.
The risk that both sides are taking of triggering nuclear war, even if it remains somewhat limited, is potentially disastrous.
________
Watch the full interview here.