Yves here. Paul Jay reprises a 90th birthday interview of Daniel Ellsberg as a commemoration of sorts after his death yesterday at the age of 92.
By Paul Jay. Originally published at theAnalysis.news
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Paul Jay
Hi, I’m Paul Jay, and welcome to a very special edition of theAnalysis.newson the occasion of the 90th birthday of Daniel Ellsberg.
Ninety years ago, Daniel Ellsberg was born, and he has lived a life ofmeaning. Many of us strive to change the world, but few have the opportunityand the courage to change the course of history. Dan’s release of the PentagonPapers at great personal risk helped end the Vietnam War. His book, TheDoomsday Machine Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, reveals theinstitutional madness of American nuclear war strategy. Dan continues to fightfor truth and to awaken people to the existential danger of nuclear weapons.
I interviewed Dan’s friend, historian Peter Kuznick, about the importance ofDan’s life’s work. I encourage you to watch that.
But now, in his own words, is my interview with Daniel Ellsberg on theoccasion of his 90th birthday. So at 90 years old, why don’t you take it easy?What keeps you fighting? How do you summon the strength when sometimes it seemsmany are just not listening?
Daniel Ellsberg
Hope. Hope that we can surmount the challenges that are facing us, thechallenge of ceasing a moral catastrophe that we’re already involved in, whichis that we have allowed doomsday machines to exist in our country and elsewherein the world and that we’re on a course toward climate catastrophe as well. Theproblem is to avert the physical catastrophes, not full extinction in eithercase, but catastrophic results for humanity. If we go on the way we are, if ourpolicies continue as they are, my hope is expressed in action.
As a friend of mine, Joanna Macy, says, “Hope isn’t a feeling or anexpectation, it’s a way of acting, and it’s a way of acting as if we had achance.” I think that’s what we do have. We really do have a chance to changethis and to allow a more humane future to evolve.
Paul Jay
To what extent is that hope an act of faith rather than rational analysis? Iknow you’ve told me you’re not all that optimistic when you think about itrationally.
Daniel Ellsberg
I think, by the way, to say one has faith suggests that you’re sure you feelsecure in the belief that something will save us, either human or external. Idon’t have that kind of religious faith as some do, and I don’t have that faithin humanity or in my own country as much as I used to in the case of my owncountry. So I don’t think it’s a question of any guarantee that we’ll getthrough this without an absolute catastrophe that has not been seen in humanhistory or prehistory. I think that’s not only not guaranteed, it’s not evenlikely, but I don’t think it’s impossible.
And given that, I think the way of acting that’s appropriate in thatpossibility that we can eliminate the doomsday machines and change the courseof putting fossil fuels into warming the atmosphere of the Earth, causing it’sa question of either nuclear winter with the doomsday machine ice on our lakesand killing all our harvests or fire in effect with the climatic rise intemperature that will make large parts of the world uninhabitable for humans,even though it doesn’t lead to full extinction. So I think both of those areactually likely, but not certain. And if we act in a way to explore as much aswe should to explore, search and invent, imagine ways of changing this course,it is possible to do it.
Let me go on that. The notion of faith is often always associated withreligious terms, especially with miracles. Well, I’m old enough to have seensome miracles, secular miracles in the world. I was 60 when one of thoseoccurred. Now, I’m 90. In 1981-83, about forty years ago, if anyone had askedwhat is the chance that the Berlin Wall would be down in ’89 (in eight years),or if they dared say in ‘83 or ‘85, the answer would not have been that it wasunlikely; it was impossible. It’s not really thinkable, so the question wasn’tasked, but it did happen.
A few years later, Nelson Mandela, who had been in isolation for 27-29 years,became the president of South Africa without a violent revolution. I remembermy friend Tony Lewis of the New York Times reading a column saying inwords that were very unusual for a columnist, it’s impossible that there willbe political change in South Africa without a violent revolution, and that’swhat was regarded, but it did happen. So that’s the good news. Miracles of thatsort, and I could name others that I’ve experienced in my own life, in the lifeof this country; they are possible. The bad news is it will take a miracle likethat for us to escape the consequences of what we’re actually doing and programmingright now: in nuclear weapons, in the possibility of wars between nuclear states like the U.S. and Russia, for that matter, India and Pakistan, and in reducing to zero by 2050, less than 30 years from now, fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere. That’s the goal, to keep this as habitable a planet as it is now. That’s not happening. The emissions are going up. They show every signof going up now. So, it will be a very great transformation of our country. I’m working on the assumption at 90 that I perhaps wouldn’t have had at 50 that it is possible to see change like that.
Paul Jay
I’ve got an eight-week-old grandson. What can you say to kids that are coming into this world now? What might the world look like when he’s 90?
Daniel Ellsberg
When you ask that question, it makes me feel almost like the wickedstepmother or the fairy godmother—something in the fairy tales who comes andcurses the newborn child in some way. I certainly don’t mean to curse them—quitethe opposite. I think you as a grandparent, and I know you are following theadvice I’m about to give, but I think what I have to say to the grandparents isthat this child will grow up in a world much, much less hospitable to humanlife than exists right now or has existed for millennia.
If humanity exists at all in numbers greater than a hundredth of somethingof the current population, the result of nuclear winter, these are very badprognostications, and I think that you won’t change that future unless you, asyou are, Paul, but not everyone, not every grandparent, unless you are willingand able to face the difficulty of this and which are the forces and theinterests that are invested in keeping things on the course that they are, inother words, toward disaster. Because I don’t think unless we name those forcesto some extent and recognize them and find ways to organize and enlightenpeople and to challenge them, they will have their way and will stay on ourcourse as it is.
Which let me sum up, I’m saying I think your grandchild is born on theTitanic and we haven’t yet hit the iceberg, but we all of us at this time are,of course, on that same ship or what Nikita Khrushchev called our arc duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis, aptly, and we’re heading into ice, andindeed, the captain of the ship has been warned of the ice ahead, as was trueon the Titanic historically and so far has chosen to go full speed ahead on adark night into that warned ice instead of as other ships in the same vicinitydid with the same warning, stopping dead in the water for the night so as tohave daylight when moving or to move ahead very slowly.
So it would be sure to see any obstacle in the way or simply to go south andextend the voyage, which was acceptable for virtually every ship except theTitanic, which wanted to set a speed record and couldn’t afford to go south ifit were to do that or to stop in the water. And so full speed ahead.
What was needed then was a kind of mutiny by the captain against the wishesof the head of the White Star Line, who was on that ship and wanted a speedrecord, or against the captain who wanted to be on the board of White Star andmade these foolish, reckless choice of moving ahead, the first mate did havetheoretically actually a power to say that’s not acceptable we can’t have that.A kind of mutiny, saving the lives of the people, knowing, by the way, thatthey did not have lifeboats enough for even more than a third of thepassengers, because for many reasons, the first-class passengers needed patiosoutside their cabins from which lifeboats had to be removed in the design.
Exxon, Chevron, Aramco are inducing our politicians who they pay withcampaign donations and other ways and their influence on the president in termsof jobs and again, campaign donations and whatever to allow them to continueexploring for oil that should remain in the ground if our current civilizationis to continue and to get it up, and without a mutiny in Congress and pressureon Congress and the president to change that policy, the basis for hope woulddisappear. I’m assuming that there is a possibility of doing that difficult asit is. On the nuclear aspect, Northrop Grumman, which has just won a contractto develop a ground based strategic deterrent, new intercontinental ballisticmissiles, which should not exist and have been a danger to humanity for atleast the last half century, an inexcusable, unconscionable danger of bringingabout the nuclear winter if used.
And it’s not only Northrop Grumman. They beat out Boeing for that contract.They are subcontracting, of course, to Lockheed, and we have General Dynamicsand Raytheon, Big Five, actually, who were pushing the idea of a $1.7 trillionmodernization, revitalization, as they say, of a doomsday machine that can destroynot all life on Earth, not even all human life, probably, almost surely, but 90percent of it, seven billion people, if we exercised our current war plans in awar against Russia.
Now, as I say, it’s a moral catastrophe that this country built such amachine and it was a moral catastrophe for the world and for Russia when theyimitated it about a decade later, two of them poised on hair triggers, the hairtrigger being the ICBMs on both sides that are vulnerable to being attacked bythe other and subject to warning, tactical warning that each side has investedbillions and billions to achieve that has often proved false, that they areabout to be attacked, and therefore, the president [of the United States] andpresident of the Soviet Union, Russia now, has to decide in minutes whether touse them or lose them. Use them to do what? To hit the other side’s ICBM. Thewarning is telling us they are already on the way not to quit. Or to do itearlier. If we had a war in the Ukraine where it’s likely to escalate, nuclearwar is coming. Do we use our ICBMs now before they’re destroyed or later? Thatis a question that is wrong for any human to be asked, you know, to have thecircumstances.
Abraham Lincoln said if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. If theexistence of a doomsday machine, I again, I’m talking about an elaborate systemdeveloped by major corporations that profit from it and politicians that profitfrom it in jobs and a general ideology that endorses this, including media, ifthat’s not wrong, then nothing is wrong. It is wrong. It is wrong for us tomaintain that, and that is what we’re doing, Democrat and Republican alike onthis issue, there’s no major difference between the parties.
It’s a bipartisan policy to be prepared, ready, totally ready to the orderof a president or someone else who has succeeded, a president who’s just beenkilled somewhere or put out of action. Many fingers could launch this. It’simpossible to paralyze by human attack, to paralyze the system, and it’s asystem, as I say, which we’ve known for 30 years now, will have the effect, iflaunched, of destroying about 90 percent, perhaps 99 percent, probably not 100within a year from starvation because the harvests have been killed for years,perhaps a decade, and the river system dies and the lakes and whatever else.
And yet there’s hardly any discussion of this. I’m reminded really with thefire on the one hand which will be the cause of the smoke that will cause thenuclear winter. For up to this time, the amazing fact has been revealed thatthe Joint Chiefs of Staff never calculate the effects of fire from theirattacks, that they’re planned and readied because it’s too hard to calculate.Supposedly not really true, but it depends on wind. It depends on the load ofthe cities that will be set on fire, that particular target.
So, it’s too hard to calculate compared to fallout or blast or prompt radiation, but actually another thing, they then failed to calculate for 40 years into the nuclear era was smoke, the effect on smoke, where there’s fire, there’s smoke, And in the case of nuclear weapons causing fire, they will cause firestorms of of a kind we tried to produce very widely in firebombing by the British and the Americans in Germany and then the Americans in Japan.
We only achieved it three times. Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo, a firestormthat would cause intense temperatures on the surface, and kill everyone within a given area, 100,000 people in one night in Japan, in Tokyo, March 9th and 10th. They tried to create firestorms in 60 other cities after that, but didn’t get it, killing about 900,000 Japanese civilians before Hiroshima, but Hiroshima caused the firestorm that you can do every time.
The firestorm has the unanticipated effect, they didn’t calculate it, ofcausing the smoke to rise into the stratosphere, to launch it upwards into thestratosphere where it won’t rain out. Do it to one city, effect of that, likeTokyo or even Hamburg and Dresden, the effect is not really perceptible on theearth. Do it to 100 cities.
When I started working on war plans fifty years ago, 60 years, 1961, theJoint Chiefs intended to hit every city in Russia and China, over 100,000 andmany less than that, hundreds of cities. The effect of that would be to putenough smoke and soot into the stratosphere where it would go around the globevery quickly. Within days, or a week or so, it would cut out 70 percent of thesunlight and cause Ice Age conditions on the earth.
So fire followed by ice. So Frost. I actually saw Frost recite his poem in1961 at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the wind blew the leaves, theleaves of his speech, away, and I remember this is a little embarrassingbecause he was old, but of course, he had already written the poem Fire andIce. I don’t think that’s the title of it, but it goes.
Some say the earth will end in fire, some in ice, from what I’ve tasted ofdesire. I tend to favor fire, but from what I know of heat, ice is also greatand will suffice. For destruction. Ice is also great and will suffice.
Anyway, that’s what we’re building toward, and that existed in 1961, andreally it’s existed as a U.S. capability for about 10 years before that. So Isay again, there’s no excuse for the continued existence of this. For one manor one nation to have the capability to do that, and the climate issue is verymuch the same. So at 90 and finally the answer to your question, I’ve learned agood deal of disillusion about my country and about my species, as well aslearning how wonderful it is to live here, to be alive, and I’m still neverless conscious of that than I ever have been. Wonderful here with my wife of 50years and our children. My son lives in the house and look at this in California,and yet in a world where most people do not have the privileges and the luxurythat we have.
Or the security, I could think, although actually what I’ve described it’snot a whole lot of security looking toward the future, but from day to day, nocomparison with most people in the world, and yet with all that harm andoppression and inequality going on, I do choose to want to keep it going, tokeep it going, to postpone at least until we evolve in some cultural way in away that will make it possible for us to make the world less insecure, lessinhumane for everyone.
Paul Jay
Denial of the threat of nuclear war is very comforting. Facing up to it.It’s very disturbing. You are the least in denial of anyone I know. Yet youmaintain a sense of joy. You always have a twinkle in your eye. You laugh andyou smile easily. Most people when I start talking about this, they say ah thisis too depressing. How do you keep your sense of joy throughout all of this?
Daniel Elllsberg
Well, here my wife of 50 years here now being married and being with her,lying with her at night is heaven on earth. So, I know what heaven is, and theother side of that is that. Hell, it’s possible on this earth, as a matter offact, all the people doing these things, I think hardly any of them do notconvince themselves that they are making things less bad than they otherwisewould be if other people were running it, that they have good intentions, butthey are the kind of intentions that pave the road to hell.
And that’s the road we’re on. Well, how do you smile on that road? You know,and curse me? One of my favorite books. Very much so. When I was a kid was abook called Scaramouche by Rafael Sabattini.
And I always remember the first line of that about a Frenchman in the 18th.He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. Well,what we’ve been talking about here is he was not wrong.
The epigraph from my book recently chosen from Nietzsche, one of them twoepigraphs. Madness in individuals is something exceptional, but in groups,parties, nations and epochs, it’s the rule, and again, I think that’s whatwe’re seeing, the sort of availability of humans to madness in any way.
It’s capable we’re all capable of it, I think all humans are capable notonly of participating in something mad out of a sense of group teamwork goingon, delusional beliefs generally and being obedient, being loyal, beingpatriotic, being courageous, all things that we generally regard as virtues,but they all have a dark side in that they can be put to work serving very badinterests in general, and that’s where we are. So for many of us, obviously,life is simply, as I said earlier, very privileged.
My life, has always been a life of privilege compared not only to mostpeople in the world, but most people in America, and it’s a privilege and myfamily to have my wife with us together, to have friends who are also joiningme in this effort is joyous, and there’s a lot of things to laugh about. At thesame time, I can’t let go of this feeling, the belief I have, that it’s notimpossible to avert these catastrophes that we’re facing and that it’s possibleeven to challenge the hoax that entraps so many people.
The Ro Khanna and Markey effort to stop the ground based deterrence, thecontinuance of which I think would mean that we were doomed to have a hairtrigger on the Doomsday Machine indefinitely, and I don’t think we wouldsurvive that indefinitely. The programs of the new administration needimproving actually in terms of climate, but they are an immense change andreally offer hope, an actual visible basis for hope that the emissions will godown. My hero Greta Thunberg, who enlarged a vigil at the Swedish parliamentwith Patricia and I actually participated in one very snowy, very cold morningonce in Sweden with about 50 or 60 people had encouraged millions, actually amillion or so in a couple of weeks later, a couple of months later and a yearlater, several million, many million people protesting in a strike on a schoolday, going from school, basically and striking.
But she could not be clearer in saying success is not measured in thesenumbers of people or even in her ability to speak to parliaments and to theU.N. and to Davos and so forth. She said the emissions are going up and that isthat what we’re looking at, and that’s failure so far, a willingness in words.She’s shown this amazing moral courage and willingness to face not only thepossibility of failure, but the existence of failure of very many times and yetto keep at it, as she does with the others.
And that’s what that’s what I’m privileged to be able to do. To keep at it.It’s possible and if it’s possible, it’s worth devoting one’s life to trying tobring that about.
Paul Jay
Thanks for joining us, Dan, and happy 90th birthday and thank you forjoining us on theAnalysis.news.