{"id":1393461,"date":"2023-12-15T06:54:16","date_gmt":"2023-12-15T06:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=307844"},"modified":"2023-12-15T06:54:16","modified_gmt":"2023-12-15T06:54:16","slug":"unilateral-sanity-could-save-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/12\/15\/unilateral-sanity-could-save-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Unilateral Sanity Could Save the World"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p><\/div>\n

Top American officials in the \u201cnational security\u201d establishment are notably good at smooth rhetoric and convenient silences. Their scant regard for truth or human life has changed remarkably little since 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg risked decades in prison to leak the\u00a0Pentagon Papers to the world.\u00a0During the years between then and his death six months ago, he was a tireless writer, speaker, and activist.<\/p>\n

Most people remember him, of course, as the whistleblower who exposed voluminous\u00a0official lies about the Vietnam War<\/a>\u00a0by providing 7,000 top-secret pages of classified documents to the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and other newspapers. But throughout his adult life, he was transfixed above all by the imperative of preventing nuclear war.<\/p>\n

One day in 1995, I called Dan and suggested he run for president. His reply was instant: \u201cI\u2019d rather be in prison.\u201d He explained that, unlike typical candidates, he couldn\u2019t stand to offer opinions on subjects he really knew little or nothing about.<\/p>\n

However, for more than five decades, Ellsberg didn\u2019t hesitate to publicly address what he really\u00a0did\u00a0<\/em>know all too much about \u2014 the patterns of government secrecy and lies that sustained America\u2019s wars in one country after another, along with the chronic deceptions and delusions at the core of the nuclear arms race. He had personally seen such patterns of deceit at work in the upper reaches of the warfare state. As he told me, \u201cThat there is deception \u2014 that the public is evidently misled by it early in the game\u2026 in a way that encourages them to accept a war and support a war \u2014 is the reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

And how difficult was it to deceive the public? \u201cI would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: it\u2019s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you\u2019re often telling them what they would like to believe \u2014 that we\u2019re better than other people, we are superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dan had absorbed a vast array of classified information during his years working near the top of the U.S. war machine. He knew countless key facts about foreign policy and war-making that had been hidden from the public. Most importantly, he understood how mendacity could lead to massive human catastrophes and how routinely the key figures in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Oval Office openly lied.<\/p>\n

His\u00a0release<\/a>\u00a0of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 \u2014 revealing crucial history about the Vietnam War while it was still underway \u2014 exposed how incessant deception got wars started and kept them going. He had seen up close just how easy it was for officials like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to suppress doubts about American war-making and push ahead with policies that would, in the end, lead to the\u00a0deaths of several million people<\/a>\u00a0in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. And Dan was haunted by the possibility that someday such deception might lead to a nuclear holocaust that could extinguish almost all human life on this planet.<\/p>\n

In his 2017 book\u00a0The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner<\/em><\/a>, he highlighted this all-too-apt epigraph from\u00a0philosopher Friedrich\u00a0Nietzsche: \u201cMadness in individuals is something rare. But in groups, parties, nations,\u00a0and\u00a0epochs, it is the rule.\u201d The ultimate madness of policies preparing for thermonuclear war preoccupied Dan throughout his adult life. As he wrote,<\/p>\n

\u201cNo policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians, and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting\u00a0as if<\/em>\u00a0that is still possible.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A Global Firestorm, a Little Ice Age<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know whether Dan liked Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci\u2019s aphorism about \u201cpessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,\u201d but it seems to me an apt summary of his approach to the specter of nuclear annihilation and an unfathomable end to human civilization. Keeping his eyes relentlessly on what few of us want to look at \u2014 the possibility of\u00a0omnicide<\/a>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0he was certainly not a fatalist, yet he was a realist about the probability that a nuclear war might indeed occur.<\/p>\n

Such a probability\u00a0now looms larger<\/a>\u00a0than at any other time since the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, but its most essential lessons seem to have been lost on President Biden and his administration. Eight months after that nearly cataclysmic faceoff six decades ago between the United States and the Soviet Union, President John Kennedy\u00a0spoke<\/a>\u00a0at American University about the crisis. \u201cAbove all,\u201d he said then, \u201cwhile defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Joe Biden has seemed all too intent on\u00a0forcing his adversary<\/a>\u00a0in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, into just such \u201ca humiliating retreat.\u201d The temptation to keep blowing a presidential bugle for victory over Russia in the Ukraine war has evidently been too enticing to resist (though Republicans in Congress have recently taken a\u00a0rather different tack<\/a>). With disdain for genuine diplomacy and with a zealous desire to keep pouring huge quantities of armaments into the conflagration, Washington\u2019s recklessness has masqueraded as fortitude and its disregard for the dangers of nuclear war as a commitment to democracy. Potential confrontation with the world\u2019s other nuclear superpower has been recast as a test of moral virtue.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in U.S. media and politics, such dangers rarely get a mention anymore. It\u2019s as if not talking about the actual risks diminishes them, though the downplaying of such dangers can, in fact, have the effect of heightening them. For instance, in this century, the U.S. government has pulled out of the\u00a0Anti-Ballistic Missile<\/a>,\u00a0Open Skies<\/a>, and\u00a0Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces<\/a>\u00a0arms-control treaties with Russia. Their absence makes nuclear war more likely. For the mainstream media and members of Congress, however, it\u2019s been a non-issue, hardly worth mentioning, much less taking seriously.<\/p>\n

Soon after becoming a \u201cnuclear war planner,\u201d Dan Ellsberg learned what kind of global cataclysm was at stake. While working in the Kennedy administration, as he recalled,<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I discovered, to my horror, I have to say, is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff contemplated causing with our own first [nuclear] strike 600 million deaths, including 100 million in our own allies. Now, that was an underestimate even then, because they weren\u2019t including fire which they felt was too incalculable in its effects. And of course, fire is the greatest casualty-producing effect of thermonuclear weapons. So, the real effect would have been over a billion not 600 million, about a third of the Earth\u2019s population then at that time.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Decades later, in 2017, Dan described research findings on the \u201cnuclear winter\u201d that such weaponry could cause:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat turned out to be the case 20 years later in 1983, confirmed in the last 10 years very thoroughly by climate scientists and environmental scientists, is that that high ceiling of a billion or so was wrong. Firing weapons over the cities, even if you called them military targets, would cause firestorms in those cities, like the one in Tokyo in March of 1945, which would loft into the stratosphere many millions of tons of soot and black smoke from the burning cities. It wouldn\u2019t be rained out in the stratosphere, it would go around the globe very quickly, and reduce sunlight by as much as 70 percent, causing temperatures like that of the Little Ice Age, killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on Earth. It probably wouldn\u2019t cause extinction. We\u2019re so adaptable. Maybe 1 percent of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98 or 99 percent would not.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Facing the Hell of Thermonuclear Destruction<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his book\u00a0The Doomsday Machine<\/em>, Dan also emphasized the importance of focusing attention on one rarely discussed aspect of our nuclear peril: intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. They are\u00a0the most dangerous weapons<\/a>\u00a0in the arsenals of the atomic superpowers when it comes to the risk of setting off a nuclear war. The U.S. has 400 of them, always on hair-trigger alert in underground silos scattered across Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming, while Russia deploys about 300 of its own (and China is\u00a0rushing<\/a>\u00a0to catch up). Former Defense Secretary William Perry has called ICBMs \u201csome of the most dangerous weapons in the world,\u201d\u00a0warning<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cthey could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.\u201d<\/p>\n

As\u00a0Perry explained, \u201cIf our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.\u201d So, any false indication of a Russian attack could lead to global disaster. As former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair and former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright\u00a0wrote<\/a>: \u201cBy scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.\u201d<\/p>\n

During an interview with me in 2021, Dan made a similar case for shutting down ICBMs. It was part of a recording session for a project coordinated by Judith Ehrlich, co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary \u201cThe Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.\u201d She would go on to create an animated six-episode \u201cDefuse Nuclear War Podcast with Daniel Ellsberg<\/a>.\u201d In one of them, \u201cICBMs: Hair-Trigger Annihilation<\/a>,\u201d he began: \u201cWhen I say that there\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0a step that could reduce the risk of nuclear war significantly that has not been taken but could easily be taken, and that that is the elimination of American ICBMs,\u00a0I\u2019m referring to the fact that there is only one weapon\u00a0in our arsenal that confronts a president with the urgent decision of whether to launch nuclear war and that is the decision to launch our ICBMs.\u201d<\/p>\n

He went on to stress that ICBMs are uniquely dangerous because they\u2019re vulnerable to being destroyed in an attack (\u201cuse them or lose them\u201d). In contrast, nuclear weapons on submarines and planes are not vulnerable and<\/p>\n

\u201ccan be called back \u2014 in fact they don\u2019t even have to be called back, they can\u2026 circle until they get a positive order to go ahead\u2026 That\u2019s not true for ICBMs. They are fixed location, known to the Russians\u2026 Should we have mutual elimination of ICBMs? Of course. But we don\u2019t need to wait for Russia to wake up to this reasoning\u2026 to do what we can to reduce the risk of nuclear war.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And he concluded: \u201cTo remove ours is to eliminate not only the chance that we will use our ICBMs wrongly, but it also deprives the Russians of the fear that our ICBMs are on the way toward them.\u201d<\/p>\n

While especially hazardous for human survival, ICBMs are a humongous cash cow for the nuclear weapons industry. Northrop Grumman has already won a\u00a0$13.3 billion contract<\/a>\u00a0to start developing a new version of ICBMs to replace the currently deployed Minuteman III missiles. That system, dubbed\u00a0Sentinel<\/a>, is set to be a major part of the U.S. \u201cnuclear modernization plan<\/a>\u201d now pegged at $1.5 trillion (before the inevitable cost overruns) over the next three decades.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, on Capitol Hill, any proposal that smacks of \u201cunilateral\u201d disarmament is dead on arrival. Yet ICBMs are a striking example of a situation in which such disarmament is by far the sanest option.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say you\u2019re standing in a pool of gasoline with your adversary and you\u2019re both lighting matches. Stop lighting those matches and you\u2019ll be denounced as a unilateral disarmer, no matter that it would be a step toward sanity.<\/p>\n

In his 1964\u00a0Nobel Peace Prize speech<\/a>, Martin Luther King Jr. declared, \u201cI refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to feel overwhelmed and powerless on the subject. The narratives \u2014 and silences \u2014 offered by government officials and most media are perennial invitations to just such feelings. Still, the desperately needed changes to roll back nuclear threats would require an onset of acute realism coupled with methodical activism. As James Baldwin wrote: \u201cNot everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daniel Ellsberg was accustomed to people telling him how much he inspired them. But I sensed in his eyes and in his heart a persistent question: Inspired to do what?<\/p>\n

This piece is distributed by TomDispatch.<\/i><\/p>\n

The post Unilateral Sanity Could Save the World<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Top American officials in the \u201cnational security\u201d establishment are notably good at smooth rhetoric and convenient silences. Their scant regard for truth or human life has changed remarkably little since 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg risked decades in prison to leak the\u00a0Pentagon Papers to the world.\u00a0During the years between then and his death six months ago, More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Unilateral Sanity Could Save the World<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393461"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1393461"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1393462,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393461\/revisions\/1393462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1393461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1393461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1393461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}