[APPLAUSE]
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Is
this mic working?
Can you hear me in the back?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: OK.
I feel overdressed.
[LAUGHTER] Usually I only wear
all this when I get arrested.
I always tell people, if
you're about to get arrested,
if you have a suit
and tie, wear it,
showing that that
doesn't exempt you
from the obligations
of citizenship,
and that people like
you can get and should
get arrested at times.
It's funny.
Being here, you always
hear speakers say,
it's an honor to be here.
It's not actually a formula
I use, particularly.
I don't go into it.
And yet it's
occurring to me here,
people who stand
here, of course,
know they're at the center
of the universe exactly,
and speaking to--
This is, by the way, a
much younger audience
than I'm used to speaking to.
Generally, they're all
gray hair or [INAUDIBLE]..
I see one here.
OK, the scroll overhead
is a long, long time
ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Except that in the "Star Wars"
movie, the galaxy we're in,
the same bullshit is going
on as in far, far away.
It's been going on all along.
I was just talking to
people from the bookstore.
They tell me they
actually have--
I was surprised-- copies of
my earlier book, "Secrets:
A Memoir of Vietnam and
the Pentagon Papers."
Good book.
I encourage you to read it.
It should be coming out now.
It would explain how we
got into Afghanistan, why
we stayed in Afghanistan,
why we're not getting out
of Afghanistan.
The movie, "The Post," which
is coming out shortly--
and I've seen it
a couple times--
is set in 1971.
And that was at a
time when America
thought it had been going on
for a very long time in war,
in Vietnam, six years.
That was longer than any
American war prior to that.
People then, your age and
twice your age and three times
your age, had not
experienced a war
that had gone on 16 years that
was likely to go on another 10
or 16.
That wasn't in our experience.
And yet the question was just as
sharp then, of course, as now.
What's going on?
Why are we here?
What is this?
The movie, a documentary
that was made from "Secrets"
is called "The Most Dangerous
Man in America, Daniel Ellsberg
and the Pentagon Papers."
It got an Academy Award for
the longest title, actually.
But really, the movie, "The
Post", now, in which I figure,
played by somebody who looks
a lot better than I did then,
Matthew Rhys of
"The Americans--"
so it's a good movie,
in other words--
really doesn't give a clue
as to answering the question,
why was Daniel Ellsberg
dangerous to anybody,
to Kissinger, to Nixon?
It was Kissinger who called me
that, the most dangerous man
in America.
Why did I copy the
Pentagon Papers?
Using the then cutting-edge
technology of the time, Xerox,
without which I couldn't
have copied 7,000 pages
and made a number
of copies, which
took a long time, one copy
at a time in those days,
bar goes back and forth.
And to make several
copies took a long time.
I couldn't have done it in the
electric typewriter days that
just preceded that, or manual
before that, just as Ed Snowden
and Chelsea Manning
could not have put out
hundreds of thousands of files.
If I talk a little
softer, could you hear me?
Can you hear this?
I've had a bad
cold for six weeks
and my voice is always
on the edge of going.
So it's better I don't
talk louder than I have to.
If you can't hear me,
please wave your arms.
OK, I'll try not
to talk so loud.
They couldn't put out
hundreds of thousands
of files or millions of
pages except, of course,
in the digital
era, which they now
can with this new technology.
But what made that dangerous
at any time, then or now?
And the answer was that the
government secrets that they
were holding onto were secrets
about criminal activity,
actions that would be extremely
embarrassing to a president,
because they were illegal or
unconstitutional or simply
incredibly reckless, dangerous,
horrible priorities, unlikely
ever to succeed in
any sense or to end.
The public would
not have applauded
if they understood
the actual strategy
and the actual prospects.
And the prospects generally
were pretty well-known
inside the government.
It's wrong to say, as you
often would see on the Pentagon
Papers, that what they showed
was that the presidents were
told the war was unwinnable.
Anybody here ever
heard that expression?
Let me see more hands.
Don't be shy.
There's quite a few.
Right, that's simply false.
It's not what the Pentagon
Papers say any time.
The president is never told on
writing the war is unwinnable.
He's always told
by the Joint Chiefs
in the papers it is winnable.
Just do it the way we say.
It is not winnable
the way you are doing,
the only way you'll do it.
But if you're willing to risk
war with China, if you're
willing to hit every
target in the north,
if you're willing to put
at least 500,000 troops
in Vietnam--
which we eventually did have--
up to a million, which the
president was told in 1965
was also a real possibility,
a million troops in Vietnam,
then we'd win.
Well, why would we win?
Would the other side give up?
Well, if not then, with more.
They've got to give up
eventually, aren't they?
We're the U-S of A. We're
the greatest and so forth.
Everybody's got to
bend eventually.
They've got to have
a breaking point.
Let us find it and we'll
give you your victory.
No one said quickly.
Five years, 10 years, 15
years, that's what they said.
In 1965, the president
asked the Joint Chiefs,
how long will it take
and how many troops?
And he gets the word from the
commandant of the Marine Corps
troop, five years, 500,000 men.
Now, that's not low
balling it exactly, is it?
It wasn't right.
Because three years later,
we had 500,000 troops there
and we weren't near winning it.
And we weren't any nearer than
we were three years earlier.
But still, you can't say
the Joint Chiefs are saying,
oh, this will be a snap.
Don't worry about it.
The president chose that.
Do I have to explain
why the president chose
not to tell the public
that's where we were going?
No.
He was able to do it because he
didn't have to tell the public.
Because he could count on
people to keep secrets.
They'd signed a promise,
often described as an oath.
But actually, it's not an oath.
It's not, so help me God.
It's not a I swear
this and that.
It's an employment promise.
I don't know what you
sign when you come here
in the way of
non-disclosure agreements.
But most organizations
of any kind,
whether it's a PTA or union
or whatever the hell, you sign
something, what I hear here
stays here and so forth,
can't use it outside, or I can
be fired or I can be demoted.
I can be punished
in various ways.
It's not a crime.
Corporation can't
make it a crime.
Google can't make
it a crime for you
to reveal Google's
secrets unless they're
some kind of trade secrets.
There probably are some
narrow, little areas
where they could
get away with it,
but not just general
how decisions
got made and so forth.
Just a second.
I had taken an oath many
times, as had every member
of the armed services.
I'd been a lieutenant in the
Marine Corps, platoon leader
and company commander,
rifle company commander.
I was very proud of the
fact I was the only First
Lieutenant in the
2nd Marine Division
who had a rifle
company, usually.
I succeeded a major, actually.
And other majors wanted
that job away from me
and they couldn't get it.
I took the oath then.
I took the oath in the Pentagon,
in the State Department.
And the oath was to protect
and defend the United States,
support and defend the
Constitution of the United
States against all enemies,
foreign and domestic.
Now, how that might
affect my behavior
I certainly didn't spend
any time thinking about,
nor did anybody else.
Every member of Congress
has taken that oath.
Every member of the
Executive Department
has taken that same oath.
The president's wording
is a little bit different,
protect, preserve and
defend or something.
But support and defend,
everybody else takes it.
And all of us
violated it every day
we heard the president
lying to Congress
and lying to the public
about what he intended,
where the prospects
were, what he was going
to do in Vietnam, elsewhere.
We all heard the president
lying the public into a war,
keeping the war
going, letting him
know the costs would be much
less than internal estimates
all indicated.
And no one broke.
There were no
leaks, including me.
So was I observing that
oath or violating it,
when I knew that Congress, which
has the exclusive authority
to take us to war,
at least that's
the best
interpretation, I think,
controverted by president's men,
was entirely delegating that
secretly to a president who was
determined to enlarge the war.
That's how you get wars that
go on 10 years or 11 years,
whatever.
The truth is the United States,
as I learned from the Pentagon
Papers, when I read
all of them, had
begun the war in 1945 and '46,
supporting a French effort
to reconquer a colony
which had declared
its independence in August
and September of 1945.
And actually Ho Chi
Minh had been recognized
as a head of state,
at least of the north,
in Paris when they were
negotiating in '45, '46.
But when the French,
starting with a shelling that
killed at least 3,000
civilians in Haiphong in 1946,
went into a war to
reconquer that colony,
the United States was
financing that war, eventually
up to the point of view of 80%.
It was perceived
by the Vietnamese,
correctly, as an
American-French war,
perceived by Americans then
and later as a French war.
I don't think there was one
American in 10,000, 100,000
who knew what I've just said.
But the presence in
Vietnam, it turns out,
knew it because the communist
cadres told them, correctly,
that the US was
financing this war.
In short, it had been a war
against Vietnamese independence
from 1945 to 1975, when it
finally ended 30 years later.
The big part, the US
part, 10 years war,
in 1971, it had
four years to go.
If you see the
movie, "The Post,"
which I recommend you seeing--
and I don't say this publicly,
generally, because it
sounds as though I'm
putting down the movie, and I
have no interest in doing that.
But talking about the
history, I will just
say some questions it
just doesn't answer.
It ends with the triumph of
the Supreme Court saying,
the First Amendment
does not allow
us to grant you
injunctive relief
from this information coming
out, its history coming out.
We can't do prior constraint,
prior restraint in this country
as we could in England.
We don't have an Official
Secrets Act the way they do.
Obama, by the way, used the
Espionage Act nine times,
at least, or 10, if
you count Petraeus,
against leakers like me, but
had been used only three times
before that under all
presidents put together.
I was the first under Nixon.
The movie, by the way, doesn't
mention that I'm put on trial.
It's a big triumph
for the press.
And it was a triumph
for the press.
They can go on printing.
And although the
movie is started
with me giving the papers,
copying them and eventually
giving them to The
Post, it doesn't
mention that, although
they are permitted
to read, on the same week, the
president, the Supreme Court,
decides that I'm put
on trial, eventually
facing 12 felony counts,
115 years possible sentence.
And Pete Williamson, who
was bringing me up here,
said he was 11
when this happened.
He thought I was obviously
guilty of putting out secrets
and that I should be on
trial, when he was 11.
And he said he was
amazed when I somehow
was let off two years later.
I said, well, it was amazing.
It was like a miracle.
Essentially, no
trial has ever been
ended the way that was on
the basis of a findings
of government misconduct,
criminal misconduct,
which led to the criminal
proceedings against Ehrlichman,
Haldeman, a number
of others called,
put a dozen or so White
House aides in jail,
and made the president, facing
conviction and impeachment,
resign.
Without Nixon resigning
in 1974, the war
would have continued
until he left office,
at least through 1976.
With him out, it became endable.
With him in, not possible.
Let me give you one hint that
goes right to the present.
It's not in my book,
but to show, as I say,
how similar the galaxies are.
Galaxy Trump here,
who is accused
of having colluded
with a foreign power
to affect his election
as a challenger, right,
not proven yet.
It may never be proven,
strictly speaking,
in terms of documents.
We'll see.
In the case of Nixon, it was
last year that a document--
last year now--
that a document just surfaced
from Haldeman's notes,
his Chief of Staff, saying that
it was Nixon who gave orders
to derail the arrangements of
going to Paris for negotiations
in November and
December of 1969.
Humphrey was on the
verge of winning
with the thought in
the public's mind
that there were about to be
negotiations that would end
this war, which was then,
they thought, four years old,
since '65.
They didn't know about
the earlier period.
Pentagon Papers
hadn't come out yet.
And so he was talking.
Nixon was dealing with Thieu
through intermediaries,
President Thieu,
not to go to Paris,
to abort the negotiations,
the prospect of which
was leading Humphrey
higher, higher every day
and ready to overtake Nixon.
That prospect stopped
immediately flat
when Thieu announced,
I will not go to Paris,
where he had agreed to go
earlier with President Johnson.
And Nixon won.
Thieu said to aides
later, I elected Nixon.
He was right.
Without him, Nixon would
not have come into office.
The war would have
ended in '69, not '75.
I don't think there's
one American in,
what, 100,000 who
would recognize
what I'm just telling you now.
And it's not very easy.
You don't have to believe it.
But look it up on Google.
You'll find stuff about it.
In short, the help of a foreign
puppet, really, in that case--
Putin is no puppet,
needless to say--
in that case, a puppet
who relied entirely
on American financing
ensured that there
would be regime change from the
Democrats to the Republicans.
He brought about
regime change in this
and enabled himself, Thieu,
to stay in office another--
he left in '75--
six years.
And that explains
something that you just
won't get from history books.
Why did Nixon so doggedly
demand in negotiations
that whatever happened,
Thieu must remain in office?
And if you've seen the
Burns and Novick series,
I think you'll gather that the
Vietnamese, North Vietnamese,
always said, we will negotiate
a coalition government,
but not with Thieu in office.
And I think their reason,
which I can only conjecture,
for not wanting him is that they
were sure Nixon would continue
the bombing if Thieu were
still in office and might not
if he weren't, if there
weren't that continuity.
That's conjecture on their side.
What hardly is much less
conjectural on our side
is why Nixon could not
afford a deal in which Thieu
felt betrayed.
Because Thieu could reveal,
probably with tapes,
with tapes, that Nixon and
Kissinger and Richard Allen,
and other intermediaries, had
stolen an election in 1968
by direct collusion.
Whether this happened at all
or not in this recent election,
I don't know.
Did it happen in '68?
It did happen.
I do know that.
And Nixon could not
afford to let that go.
So another 20,000
Americans had to die
and probably a million
or more Vietnamese.
And it would have gone on
except for an extraordinary set
of circumstances that came
together that I really don't
have time to go into here.
A lot of it is in the book,
"Secrets," toward the end
about the Vietnam part.
And as I say, it's
not in the movie.
So, in short, why was
Ellsberg dangerous?
Because I might reveal
his secret plans.
Why was that dangerous?
Because the secret plans were
for nuclear war in Vietnam.
The threats were made
rather explicitly.
For example, as you'll
see in the book,
in 1972, when there
was an offensive,
a year after the
Pentagon Papers came out,
the war was still going
on and getting larger.
And Nixon is saying,
oh, I'd rather
use a nuclear weapon, Henry.
You got that?
Oh, I think that would be
just too much, on the tape,
says Kissinger.
And Nixon says, nuclear bomb?
That's too big for you, Henry?
I just want you to think
big, for Christ's sake.
OK, so they didn't
have to use it.
They used the B52s and so forth.
What this book is about is,
in a way, the back story,
of secrets, of what was
going on there, again,
not hinted at in the
movie, understandably--
they didn't know it--
is that at the same time I was
copying the Pentagon Papers,
a 7,000-page, top secret,
47-volume study of American
decision making
from 1945 to '68--
and the title was
secret, actually,
in part because most
Americans would have said, 45?
What could that mean?
What decisions were we
doing, the US, in '45?
Well, we were deciding
for the French,
to help the French
reconquer their colony.
That's when our decision making
started, which was not exactly
a legitimate goal for the US.
It was not illegal for
the UN, because the UN
did allow the possession of
colonial powers and trusteeship
and didn't really
rule out trying
to reconquer a colony that had
the obstreperousness to declare
its independence, which
is what France was doing.
That was not clearly illegal at
that point, strangely enough.
But in terms of
American traditions,
we thought of ourselves as--
we didn't think-- of
having run the first war
of national liberation.
But it could have been
called that, the first war
of separation for an empire.
And we thought of
ourselves as anti-imperial.
And we still think of
ourselves that way,
as not an empire
like the others.
That's false.
That's very clear from
the Pentagon Papers
where we're deciding who
should run Vietnam this year
or next year or how they should
stay in power, what criminal
acts they're entitled
to take, how much we
need to support them.
And so it's very obviously
the documents of an empire.
In fact, that's what
I said to my wife,
when she said, at one
point, before they came out,
does it really matter
to get this history out?
And I said, well,
among other things,
it's the first real history
of imperial operations
since the Nuremberg
documents were discovered,
covered after the
Second World War.
And before that, it probably
goes back to Punic times,
to the Syrian empire,
to Sumerian empire,
and so probably all
the same, but we
don't have the documents for it.
And here they are.
And yet, even so, I managed to
think of it as an aberration.
We had somehow gotten ourselves
into acting like an empire.
Let me say just
very briefly now--
I could spend the
whole time on this.
But I'll just say,
I've come recently
to see what we are
as a covert empire.
And covert refers to plausibly
denial covert operations.
Covert operations,
I should say, are
defined as operations that are
not just secret, that you're
not just keeping it safe, but
that you lie about plausibly.
And to make it plausible, you
provide in advance evidence,
false evidence,
misleading evidence
as to what's really going
on and who's running it
and why it's happening
and who did it
and so forth, a false flag
in some cases, whatever.
But you provide
several layers of cover
for what's being done to protect
the president from the notion
that he is murdering,
overthrowing
governments, installing coup
governments in democracies
and so forth, as so often in
the third world then and now, up
until now.
Well, you don't want the US
to be associated with that.
It's happening over there.
And if somehow a
US hand surfaces,
he or she wasn't
working for any agency.
And if you find the
agency, it wasn't the CIA.
And if it was the CIA,
it wasn't the president.
So you have layer after layer
of cover stories with documents.
I didn't know this.
It didn't come to my attention.
This so-and-so did
it and so forth.
The Vietnam War was run from
beginning to end like that.
That's how we run our empire.
We deny that we are an empire.
And what is an empire?
A country that determines the
regime of other countries,
decides who the police
chief was, who shall live
and who shall die, what the
basic foreign policies are.
We do that throughout
Central America
and always have, often many
other parts of the world
as far apart as Indonesia,
now the Middle East.
In general, we decide.
Who do we want?
Is this guy OK?
We don't decide every
detail but any more
than you decide every detail
of a military commander's
operations.
But generally, they work.
If they don't do what
we want, we replace them
with somebody else.
We deny that we're an empire.
We're against empire.
When other people do the same
sort of thing, they're empires.
They're acting imperially.
First level of denial
on the American part.
And then second, how
do they get in power?
Who has to be killed?
What paramilitary forces
have to be paid and go in,
as into Nicaragua, for
example, and other places?
So the efforts are
also plausibly denied.
OK, I could spend time.
And I don't know if
people have it in mind.
Why wasn't I convicted?
I was the first person
prosecuted for a leak.
That's because our
first amendment
precludes prior restraint.
And it also actually precludes
an Official Secrets Act
of the kind the British
have, the mother country.
And most other countries
in the world have it.
We don't have an act
that simply criminalizes
any revelation of classified,
protected, stamped information.
We don't have it.
In fact, what was
I just reading?
I don't know.
I was, just yesterday, reading
something that mentioned--
I guess it was on The
Post or something--
why there had been
so few prosecutions.
But the article didn't
mention the fact
that we didn't have a law
that they were breaking.
And the first
person to experiment
with going with the Espionage
Act, which was meant for spies,
was Nixon against me.
And then there were two
others after me, before Obama.
Obama four-- nine, nine instead
of three altogether before.
Trump almost surely will
prosecute more people
than the nine but
probably will also
prosecute journalists, which
is so clearly against the First
Amendment that no administration
has yet tried to do that,
with the exception of
the Pentagon Papers
where Nixon did,
in fact, set out
to indict some of the New York
Times people who put it out.
But that fell apart when
they discovered the crimes
against me, which
is what brought--
and undoubtedly
against them, too--
when it was found out that
I had been wiretapped--
I should say overheard--
warrantlessly,
which was criminal.
It was certainly true
of the other people
they were investigating in
Boston, like Noam Chomsky
and Howard Zinn obviously
had also been wiretapped.
And so they dropped that
indictment for the same way.
So no journalist has
yet been indicted.
That will probably
happen before long.
Now, we get to the
subject of this book.
And I've been
thinking about how--
I was talking to
some of the people
here how young everybody was.
But the following, now, is
not really a matter if you--
it applies to the older
people just as much.
I kind of analogize myself
to the position of a guy--
not to put on airs,
but James Hansen,
who tries to tell people--
what was it, in 1979, I think.
Or was it '89?
'79, I think-- climate change
is on the way, not just
hotter and not just colder.
Both of those dry--
tremendous change from
CO2 in the atmosphere,
man-made climate.
We have a party in power
right now that almost,
to a man and woman,
simply denies
that there is man-made
climate change,
despite the fact
that it is no longer
a scientific
controversy, as it might
have been 30 and 40 years
ago, or even 20 years ago.
It is no more a controversy
now than evolution.
But that, too, is rejected by
about a third of the country,
OK, the third that were core
to the president right now.
Well, I'm not talking
here about a problem
that started with Donald
Trump, by any means.
But it should-- and it's going
to be very hard to even make
a dent in it under
Trump or his successor,
unless they're significantly
different from Hillary
Clinton or his past predecessors
in the Democratic Party.
When I say I feel like
James Hansen saying,
climate change is real
and it really is coming,
and if we put more
CO2 in the atmosphere,
it's going to come
all the closer
and bring civilization
down before long,
how many people hear it
or do anything about it?
Well, actually in this case,
a lot of people have heard it.
They know that
controversy, even though it
didn't figure for a moment
in the presidential debates
of last year, if I recall,
not a moment, climate.
Not even Bernie Sanders raised
it, that I can remember.
So, nevertheless, there it is.
I'm talking about
a doomsday machine.
And let me put that in context.
How many people here have seen--
I imagine most of you--
"Dr. Strangelove?"
OK, very good.
I saw that for professional
reasons in 1964.
In fact, I'll just mention--
it isn't in the book--
but if Sammy Kubrick
had decided to let
the Pentagon view his rushes--
I was asked by the Secretary
of Defense's office
to be the person to
review it for them because
of my expertise, young as
I was, like you, on command
and control at that time.
And he didn't
allow us to see it.
But when it finally came out,
my boss and I in the Pentagon
did go over in the
afternoon to see it.
And we came out saying,
that was a documentary.
[LAUGHTER] There was
nothing in that movie
that could not have occurred
exactly the way it did occur.
Now, let me mention just--
there were a number of details.
We'll see if I have time.
But the key one is this--
or a key one.
The central idea
is one that Kubrick
got from a colleague
of ours, Herman Khan,
at the RAND Corporation,
called a doomsday machine.
It was a conceptual device
to make certain points about
the nature of deterrence that
would, on being triggered--
and you could preset it to be
triggered by whatever you want,
one nuclear explosion,
10 nuclear explosions--
the wrong person getting
elected somewhere, something
would, by computer, be
recognized as triggering this
and it would end life on Earth.
Now, why would you want to
threaten or prepare ending life
on earth?
One reason, it would
be much, much cheaper
than our current
Strategic Air Command that
depends on deterrence by
building thousands of weapons,
training pilots.
But, in a word, carrying
across the globe with missiles
or planes, dumping them
on targets over there
and so forth, very expensive.
Fairly cheaply, you could
assure that the Russians would
die, for a tiny
fraction of that cost,
if they transgressed
in certain forms.
That's the advantage.
The disadvantage,
everybody else dies, also.
We die.
Now, strictly speaking, in
an actual World War III,
then or now, we
would die anyway.
But the southern
hemisphere would not.
We'd get it from the
Russians' retaliation.
So it is a suicide,
mutual suicide, machine.
But we did think, not
a doomsday machine.
Why would we believe that?
Hit the southern hemisphere.
It's better to have half left.
And Edward Teller, the
inventor of the H-bomb,
the father of the H-bomb,
said a number of times,
once in my presence when I asked
a question, it is impossible--
I can't do a Hungarian accent--
it is impossible, I remember,
to destroy more than a quarter
of the Earth's
population with H-bombs.
And strictly speaking,
the Joint Chiefs
had answered a
question I drafted
which President Kennedy
sent to the Joint Chiefs,
a little more than that.
The question was, if your
plans were carried out
as planned, meaning
as first strike,
because the Air Force has never
accepted the idea that it was
acceptable to wait for
other enemy warheads
to hit before you
launched your warheads--
they have always had a launch
on warning predisposition--
or an escalation of
a war in Europe--
that was the basis
of our NATO policy.
So if you carried out this first
strike for a Russian warhead
to come up, how many people
would be killed in the,
I said, first of all,
in the USSR and China?
I won't go into why I
narrowed it like that,
but I wanted to make it as
hard to evade as possible, just
that.
And they immediately came back
with an answer, to my surprise.
I thought they were
going to dither
and wouldn't want to
tell the President.
And, well, what do you
think the answer was?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Let me have it.
What do you think?
AUDIENCE: All of them?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: What?
AUDIENCE: All of them?
All of them?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Say?
No answer, no guess as to
what the joint chiefs-- what?
AUDIENCE: 100%?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: What?
AUDIENCE: 100%.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, no.
No.
Wrong.
OK, 100%, no, you're
thinking big there.
[LAUGHTER] But that
would be very expensive,
with radioactivity
alone and so forth.
Hard to kill everybody.
But the answer was
325 million people.
And then-- I'll just make
a short comment on this--
since they clearly had
a little model here,
a little linear
model, I said, OK,
how many altogether
then after all?
They gave another 100 million
in a week to East Europe,
another 100 million in
West Europe, our allies,
not with a single
warhead falling on them
from us but from the
fallout from our attacks,
and a third 100
million additional
to areas mostly neutral
contiguous to the USSR
and China.
For example, plucky
little Finland--
you won't recognize that
term, or how many people
here do recognize that term?
I see one hand.
But Americans my age and
older grew up with the memory
that Finland alone had paid its
war debts after World War II--
I, after World War I--
and that in the prior
stages of World War II,
they had fought
off the Russians.
We had movies about it.
So Finland was thought of
in very courageous terms
against the Red
Army at that point,
before Russia became our ally.
That was actually, it was
under the Hitler-Stalin pact.
And so Finland was particularly
sentimentally thought of.
As I said, in
Finland at the time,
our plans called for us to
annihilate Finland by fallout
from our attacks,
underground attacks,
on Russian submarine
pens in Leningrad.
So our attacks on those
which could not be airburst
would create fallout
that would unfortunately
make collateral damage of
all Finns, but also Japan
and so forth.
The total was 600 million,
or 100 holocausts,
from our strikes accomplished
in a week or maybe six months
with the fallout.
Now, it's funny, last
night it occurred to me--
I even looked it up--
and I won't go into that now,
but the origins of the company
model here, which has
always intrigued me.
Don't be evil.
And exactly what
was meant by that?
And it was interesting.
I read some commentaries on it.
Well, evil is a
controversial term.
It's used promiscuously.
It's used all the time.
Ask Trump what's
evil and you'll get
a list of things that many of
which would not coordinate.
Ask other people, it
could be masturbation.
It could be any kind of thing.
The word is used.
Is it entirely useless
a term then after all?
Well, let me just suggest
to you that if there
is some meaning to the word
evil that could be agreed on,
destroying 600 million people
would seem to qualify as evil.
That's evil.
This is an evil plan.
It's evil.
Does that mean it's
done by evil people?
Well, I knew the
people it was done by.
They were my colleagues.
I had beer with him in
the evening, colonels
who worked on war plans.
They were my colleagues
at RAND and whatnot.
They were like everybody.
There were like you and
me, I would have to say.
Am I evil?
Well, I was part
of this, you know?
So the question of
whether you are evil
is a more problematic question.
Suppose you cut it
down to doing evil.
Again, a lot of
room for controversy
there and gray
areas and so forth.
But there were some areas
that are not that gray.
And I'll tell you when we get
to where it is, unfortunately,
very gray and may do us in.
Actually doing this would
seem to qualify as evil.
If this isn't evil, what is it?
As Lincoln said of slavery,
if slavery is not wrong,
then nothing is wrong.
That statement which
he made again and again
meant that a third of
our nation could not
live under him as president.
It could not accept a president
who said slavery was wrong.
What he did say was it's
here and I'm not here
to interfere with
it where it exists.
That's what he said.
But it is wrong.
So a third of the country
seceded, Confederacy.
I'll just say-- let me
see the clock here--
something I've learned
about my country at 86 now,
since Charlottesville,
I have learned more
about the Civil War than I knew
in the rest of my 86 years,
about what it was about
and what was going on.
But the new perception
is simply this,
that the Confederacy
never accepted
that slavery had been wrong.
That is my current
belief, very new to me.
It was not that it took a
war, it took a long time.
Lincoln himself, of
course, certainly evolved
in his attitudes, which
started quite racist,
wanted to get the US out, the
Negroes out of the country.
But he evolved and the country
evolved and it was different.
Well, and then we had
Jim Crow and so forth.
What I'm saying is it's
a new perception of mine
open to debate, and it's
not the subject today,
that the South, in their grade
school and their mother's knee
and their high school education
and their college education,
has never accepted that
slavery was not just
the policy of a defeated nation,
which it was, it was wrong
and it deserved
to be eliminated.
Second, more to the point,
legalized segregation,
Jim Crow legalized segregation,
apartheid, was not wrong.
It was right.
And although, when
it was overturned
by force majeure, legally, by
the Supreme Court and so forth,
that wasn't because
it was wrong.
It was because the
South was weaker.
They were poorer.
There were fewer of them.
It was not wrong.
I believe we have an attorney
general right now who,
if he could, would
re-legalize segregation
from one day to the next.
That's our attorney
general, I think, right now.
That's part of our situation.
OK, coming back-- yeah, I'm
getting a signal back there.
But nevertheless, I've
wandered so much here.
I'm going to go on
a little on longer.
600 million, that didn't
include fire, it so happened,
too hard to calculate.
So the Joint Chiefs
were not including
the main casualty-producing
effect of thermonuclear weapons
when they said 600 million.
Fire not included, just
prompt radiation, blast,
immediate heat and so forth.
Put the fire in and put
the Russian retaliation in
and you quickly
get over a billion.
There were three billion then
at that time, two billion
when I was born, by the
way, in 1931, three billion
in 1961 when I was working
on the war plans, OK?
One billion, one third.
So Teller was wrong.
Yes, you can get over a quarter
of the US population, a third.
Let's say a third.
You know, let's not
argue about a sixth here.
But that's all.
And Herman said in his book--
and he was a close friend
of mine--
he said no one would ever
build a doomsday machine.
We don't have one now and
no one would build one
for the following reasons.
And he gave a number of reasons.
You know, it's cheap.
Yes, but, it has some defects.
They were both wrong.
Teller was wrong.
Herman was wrong.
Nobody's perfect.
In fact, we had a
doomsday machine then.
We'd had it for
10 years at least.
And we have it today.
If our current war
plan, the larger ones
for war with Russia,
not with North Korea,
but if plans for
Russia [INAUDIBLE]
are carried out as
planned, then firestorms
will be caused on hundreds
of cities, the smoke, which
was not calculated until
1983, in terms of hundreds
of millions of tons
of smoke-- and all
the references in my book
or easy to get on Google.
Alan Robock, R-O-B-O-C-K,
and Brian Toon, T-O-O-N.
Look up their papers, especially
since 2007, confirming that,
even a war between India
and Pakistan using A-bombs,
Nagasaki-type bombs-- that's
all they have, like North Korea,
not thermonuclear
bombs, not H-bombs--
using a hundred, of which
they have many more than that,
would cause firestorms
that would put enough smoke
in the atmosphere
to blot out about 7%
of the Earth's
sunlight globally,
stop harvest, curtail harvest,
shorten growing seasons
[INAUDIBLE] one, shortening
world food supply
to kill what was first
estimated within a year
to be about a billion
people by starvation
of the most malnourished
people in the world.
A year later, when
they put in the effects
of Chinese soybeans, production
and some others, two billion,
about 1.9 billion people, India
and Pakistan over Kashmir.
But if US and Russia went
to war, the firestorms here,
which I didn't explain, will
loft smoke and toxic soot,
black soot, into
the stratosphere.
It takes the updraft of
a special kind of fire
called a firestorm to cause this
updraft to push the smoke up
into the stratosphere
where it doesn't rain out
and where it would quickly
go around the globe
and reduce sunlight
by about 70%,
causing winter-like conditions,
ice age conditions on the Earth
below, ending all harvest
and starving nearly everyone.
Almost, surely, not extinction
because we're so adaptable.
We humans are so clever with
our clothing and our fire
and our houses, we can
survive this stuff,
some of us, maybe 1%,
maybe less than 1%.
Well, 1% is 70 million
people, a lot of people.
In Australia, eating fish
and mollusks and whatnot,
it goes on.
We do it all over again.
But 99% of the people would
starve if we carried out
our current war plan.
And I was just asking
somebody at lunch,
what is the chance that
we could use little bunker
buster, the bombs, against
a nuclear state like Russia
or North Korea, being
considered this week,
and keep it localized
and limited to that?
Well, the answer
was, not likely.
I asked, if I may, how unlikely?
Quite unlikely.
And I'm right, about
very, very close to zero.
Nothing is zero.
We've seen, enough
things have happened
that I thought were impossible.
Nothing is zero.
But that's very close to zero.
Now, with North Korea, you
don't get nuclear winter.
There's just not enough
cities there to burn.
And they have only maybe
20 to 60 fission weapons.
Fission weapons will
do the job over there,
but it's not enough
for nuclear winter.
It's not even enough to
starve one billion people.
North Korea war is the one war
between two nuclear weapons
states now that doesn't
have the capability
to starve two billion
people or more, OK?
But everyone else does.
War over the Ukraine or
Syria, war with Russia,
if it possibly
escalated to that,
we have a doomsday machine.
And they do, too.
They are on hair
trigger alert, meaning
that both sides believe that
if there is about to be a war
or if our tactical warning,
which has often been wrong,
tells us that an attack
is underway or tells them
that an attack is underway,
we plan to preempt,
to launch on warning.
That's what Kim Jong
Un proposes to do
if he's about to be attacked.
That's been open
in his exercises.
Today's news is that we are
contemplating a bloody nose
for North Korea, an attack
on them which will hopefully
be limited.
We hit their missile
base, we hit their safes.
We show them we are determined.
We show them what the risks are.
And they back off.
That's what is being
considered by H.R. McMaster,
supposedly recommended
by him now.
Now, if I had access
to that document,
I would put it out now
with the expectation
that I would go
to prison for life
or that I might be assassinated.
But to avert that
war seems to be
unquestionably worth my life,
even if my prospective life was
a lot longer than it is now.
It's the decision I made 40
years ago that I thought even
to have a very small chance
of shortening that war,
it was worth getting the
sentence I expected to get,
which was 115 years in prison.
It's always seemed to me,
obviously, that was worth it.
I'm getting a signal here.
I've got to end.
Don't worry. l got you.
I saw you.
If we had a Snowden or a Chelsea
Manning now at a high level,
I assume we'd get the-- we
are getting leaks, though,
more than before.
Why would I want that out?
Because I think that a
lot of people would say,
that's not a good idea.
What would we do about it?
I don't really know.
With this Congress, if it was a
Democratic Congress confronting
from, even a Congress as bad as
the Democratic Congress we've
had over the last
10 years or so,
we'd have a chance
of stopping this.
I would want to see the public
saying, this must not happen.
It will restart testing.
It will mean that
India and Pakistan--
even if North
Korea is wiped out,
we don't have to worry
about them anymore--
India and Pakistan,
maybe they start testing
and have an H-bomb
within a year or two,
which magnifies their explosive
yield by a factor of 1,000,
and not good for the world.
France and China increase
their MIRVs and so forth.
The world, I think the chance of
getting back from the doomsday
machines we have now,
after a war with Korea,
is, I think, again, close to
zero, not going to happen.
Why is there so
little opposition?
Senator Lindsey Graham has
been saying repeatedly now
on "Meet the Press" and others,
I've told the president,
and he has said this
to me face-to-face,
says Lindsey Graham, that,
remember, the casualties will
all be over there, as
if Kim Jong Un did not
have any boats with which to put
a nuclear warhead in and send
them to Los Angeles or San
Francisco harbors as revenge.
Which I'm, from my experience
on command and control,
I am virtually
certain that it is not
possible to paralyze North
Korean nuclear response
by hitting their
command and control.
And if the president
doesn't know that,
I hope that my book
gets on "Fox & Friends"
and just conceivably get
that words through to him.
So we're facing, in other
words, a terrible crisis
right away with North
Korea, though it's not
the end of the world.
It's just the beginning
of the end of the world.
Because what we have here--
I'll just close
with this thought.
It hasn't happened yet.
So people can look
at the last 70 years
and say, well, it
wasn't certain.
That's for sure.
It was even highly likely.
That gets to be hard to say.
I personally think, in fact,
that it was highly likely
that this blow up and that we've
had something like a miracle.
And miracles do happen.
It's a miracle that I'm
not in jail right now.
That's another story.
But it was not likely.
It was extremely unlikely
that I would not be in jail.
It was a miracle that
Nelson Mandela made it
without a violent revolution.
It was a miracle that the
Berlin Wall came down,
all of this before your time.
Almost even hard to imagine
how impossible that was.
I don't think I've
ever met a person in,
let's say, who in 1980, if
asked that the Berlin Wall would
be down in 1989, that would not
have said, that's impossible.
If anybody knows of any
contradiction of that,
it did happen.
So we can change.
Change like that can happen.
I think it has to be as dramatic
as happened in the Soviet
Union.
It has to be a
change of attitudes,
as happened in terms of white
majority rule being allowable
in South Africa.
Is that likely?
No.
It's unlikely.
It's very unlikely.
But it's not impossible.
And I think what we're
talking about now
is the future of
civilization, of humanity.
It's the kind of
subject that I know
people here do, think big
about, rightly so, all the time.
But if you haven't been thinking
about this, which is also
very possible,
I'd say this, too,
has to be added to the list
of existential dangers.
As for climate, somebody
asked me last night
about artificial intelligence,
germ warfare, whatever.
Our current ready
doomsday machines,
which are about
to be refurbished
at the expense of
$1.5 trillion--
strictly $1.2 trillion, but
they say, with inflation,
really $1.6 trillion
over the next 30 years--
and in Russia,
where using it would
be just as insane as here--
and it would have
been and almost came
close to happening
several times in the past.
And you would not be here
and I would not be here.
I participated in the
Cuban Missile Crisis.
I was wrong about nearly
everything involved,
as was everybody
dealing with me.
And if my own
instincts, like those
of JFK's initial instincts
to attack those missiles--
I wasn't precisely on that, but
I was ready to see it happen--
had been followed,
we would not be here.
Doomsday would have
resulted from any time
since about 1950, when
Harry Truman left Eisenhower
with 1,000 fission weapons.
Eisenhower left office and left
Kennedy 23,000 thermonuclear
weapons, which Kennedy and
Johnson raised to 37,000,
at a time when Herb York, the
director of Livermore Labs,
used to say, how
many weapons does it
take to deter a nuclear
attack against an enemy
rational enough to be deterred?
One.
Or if that's not enough, 10,
but closer to 10 or 1 than 100.
37,000.
We've cut that way down
now, to about 4,000 each.
It takes several hundred
to cause nuclear winter.
So we're in a galaxy
now that may not
have a very long history
as far as human habitation
is concerned, except for
a very small remnant.
And that's the
challenge here that I
add to your global ambitions,
to try to dismantle the doomsday
machines on earth and to
move toward what Trump calls
the world coming to its senses.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I've used up the time here.
I know a lot of you
have to go to work.
I can stay longer,
until even 2:20 or so.
And there's a few more
minutes, even formally--
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thank you for your talk.
It was extremely cheery.
Do you see anything
actionable that people
who already have careers and
can't exactly immediately jump
into civil service can
do to impact any of this?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah,
could you hear that?
I have to go up to hear it.
You know, I have to say
that the first thing, you're
talking to people who
already have careers,
have civil service and so forth.
I was asked this question
just the other day
by an Italian journalist,
it so happens.
And my real answer is leak.
It's actually, don't
just tell your bosses
what you know that you think
the public ought to know.
Don't leave it to
your bosses to decide
what the public should know.
Be prepared to
reveal that yourself.
Do it anonymously.
Cover your tracks, if you
can put out enough that way
to make the point.
Chelsea Manning
and Ed Snowden knew
they couldn't put out enough
to make their point without,
in effect, either revealing
themselves or pointing
the finger of
suspicion at others.
So like myself, they determined
they would say who had done it.
That's what I did.
I didn't want others
to be blamed for it.
But I would say that should
not be kept within channels.
We're in a situation
now where sharing
that wrongly-held information
is of the highest importance.
And so I'm talking to an
audience now here, unusually,
which will be or is in a
chance to actually make
that kind of difference,
generally not.
But for many years,
I didn't talk
about whistleblowing at all
when I talked about activism.
For 40 years, I spent my
time not writing this book
but trying to build
an anti-war movement,
an anti-nuclear
movement, that would
be like the anti-war movement
that had helped end the Vietnam
War, with some success during
the Freeze Movement, though it,
in the end, didn't change
this arms race significantly.
It only lowered the
number of weapons
by 80%, which made no difference
at all, no difference.
There would be no difference.
If the war occurred,
you wouldn't
tell whether it had been done
with 8,000 weapons or 40,000
weapons.
If there was somebody alive
to decide and try to tell,
they wouldn't be able
to tell the difference.
So that didn't work.
But I didn't talk about
whistleblowing much,
mainly because people
I was talking to
would not have a
chance to put that out,
but also because it
seemed self-serving.
And then I thought
of a way to say it,
which I have been saying
and I'll say for 10 years.
Don't do what I did.
Don't wait till the bombs are
falling or thousands of people
more have died if you
have information that
could avert these catastrophes.
No matter the cost
to yourself, consider
paying that cost to put it out.
Because a war's worth
of lives is at stake.
AUDIENCE: In 1983--
I think it was 1983-- there was
a movie called "The Day After"
starring John Lithgow, set in--
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: --Manhattan, Kansas
after nuclear war with Russia.
It is said that this movie was
screened by the Joint Chiefs
a day or two before it was
actually shown on broadcast TV
and that, prior to this, the
Joint Chiefs had operated
under the idea that nuclear
war was quote, winnable,
that there is this concept
of minimal acceptable losses
and that this movie
changed their mind.
Do you agree with
this, disagree?
Has the war planning at the
top about acceptable losses
evolved over time?
Or is it still--
DANIEL ELLSBERG: OK.
AUDIENCE: --screwed
up like it was--
DANIEL ELLSBERG:
You can hear that?
I hear it with difficulty.
I've never heard before that
the Joint Chiefs saw it before,
during, or after.
I've never heard the Joint
Chiefs connected with it.
Did the Joint Chiefs
believe it was winnable?
Yes, the way they thought
Vietnam was winnable.
In other words, in a virtually,
literally meaningless way.
They always talked about
prevailing, about winning.
There were years when they
didn't so much and then
other years they did prevail.
What does prevail mean?
I think it was Weinberger
who said at one point,
it's a word that sounds
better than the opposite,
than not doing, not prevailing.
But what does it mean?
If it meant anything, it
meant reducing the damage
that the other side is
capable of doing to you, OK?
So if you get rid of
their land-based missiles,
they still will have enough
submarine-based missiles
to destroy our society, but
they won't have the land base.
So that's worth doing, isn't it?
Well, no, you know, it isn't.
So why are you doing this?
Why are you talking about
renewing our land-based ICBMs,
which are totally
vulnerable to attack,
in order to get their land-based
ICBMs, which are totally
vulnerable to attack?
Because Lockheed
Martin makes them.
There's jobs, profits,
local real estate.
The weapons have to be on
hot alert, not soft alert,
around the clock,
so that we can sell
more restaurant food or
whatever the hell else in North
Dakota and Wyoming and Montana.
There is no strategic
rationale for them, whatever.
But that's enough.
So the Joint Chiefs were not,
I think, as far as I know,
not affected by that at all.
And if you pressed
them as whether they
could win more than what
I've just described,
they would say, no.
But that's something.
We've got to do something,
not just nothing.
And that was, in
effect, silliness.
Of course, it's the
kind of silliness
that may doom our species.
And it's not only
in this country.
However, the movie
"The Day After"
was shown to Ronald Reagan.
And it did have a big effect.
He couldn't go into the
office at all the next day.
He said he stayed in
bed and he felt sick.
And that it very much
affected his mind when he went
into discussions with Gorbachev
of ending all nuclear weapons,
ballistic missiles of all kinds,
which didn't happen because he
had the crazy belief of an
umbrella-like Strategic Defense
Initiative, SDI--
Star Wars-- that would
protect us entirely
and he wasn't
willing to give up.
He wasn't willing
to give that up
and couldn't get that agreement.
That's another one.
So it had an effect on Reagan.
Gorbachev, meanwhile,
had already
been influenced by
nuclear weapons.
And, by the way, "The Day After"
is just a tiny, little sliver
of what the actual
consequences of a nuclear war
would look like.
Movies that have come
closer to that, there's one
called "Threads" in England
that they've never allowed
to be on BBC, to be shown.
And again, it
really just focuses
on the long-term degradation
and disintegration
of everything, like Cormac
McCarthy's "The Road,"
pretty much.
So no nuclear
state has ever been
willing to tell its
own people or to hold
others accountable to the risks
we are posing over their head.
And a movie like that today
would be very worthwhile.
But I don't know what
prospect there is of it.
AUDIENCE: And,
once again, please
say thank you to
Mr. Daniel Ellsberg.
[APPLAUSE]
DANIEL ELLSBERG: That's OK.
Thank you.
