Browsing Tag

Nuclear Threats

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.

March 27, 2023 by Ellsberg.Net

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.

September 2, 2022 by Ellsberg.Net

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.

August 16, 2022 by Ellsberg.Net

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.

May 12, 2022 by Ellsberg.Net

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

August 30, 2009 by Michael Ellsberg