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Doomsday Machine

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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“The Doomsday Machine” Reviewed by Greg Mitchell on BillMoyers.com

Greg Mitchell reviewed The Doomsday Machine  on BillMoyer.com:

“At a time when nuclear dangers grow, along with activism to combat them—elevated just this week by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons receiving the Nobel Peace Prize—Ellsberg’s book is a timely reminder of the nuclear threat and essential reading in the Trump era.”

Read the full review via the link above.

U.S. Nuclear Terrorism

[Daniel’s chapter in Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World, eds. Susan Griffin and Karin Lofthus Carrington]

Long after the ending of the Cold War, the chance that some nuclear weapons will kill masses of innocent humans somewhere, before very long, may well be higher than it was before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

One phase of the Nuclear Age, the period of superpower arms race and confrontation, has indeed come to a close (though the possibility of all-out, omnicidal exchange of alert forces triggered by a false alarm remains, inexcusably, well above zero).  But another dangerous phase now looms, the era of nuclear proliferation and with it, an increased likelihood of regional nuclear wars, accidents, and nuclear terrorism.  And the latter prospect is posed not just by “rogue” states or sub-state terrorists but by the United States, which has both led by example for sixty years of making nuclear first-use threats that amount to terrorism and may well be the first or among the first to carry out such threats. Continue Reading