Far
into this book, Ellsberg quotes a commission report which unanimously
recommended against pursuing the H-bomb (1,000 times more destructive
than the A-bomb used on Hiroshima): “Any military advantage would
be completely trumped(!) by the threat to humankind posed by the
proliferation of these terrible weapons. They are necessarily an evil
thing considered in any light.” The commission's recommendation
was, of course, overruled by the usual fear mongerers and profiteers
and “these terrible weapons” were indeed developed, the chief
source of the curse of apocalypse that hangs over our every moment.
Daniel
Ellsberg, Ivy League whiz kid, was hired by the RAND corporation in
the 50s, a mostly Defense Department-funded thinktank. He was given a
“go anywhere, talk to anybody about anything” mandate in a
project to review U.S. nuclear policy. Ellsberg was shocked by much
of what he encountered as he traveled from site to site, missile
silos and far-flung bases across the world: the numbers of predicted
casaulties, in the millions, blithely noted; the communication
problems and trigger points that could start an accidental nuclear
exchange; the fact that China would be targeted and destroyed, with
again, millions dead, even if it had nothing whatever to do with
whatever conflict; that every city over 25,000 in the Soviet Union
(and China) would be annihilated and that Western Europe, including
all of Scandinavia, would become “collateral damage” from
fallout. The realization came later, that Nuclear Winter would
expand the collateral damage to the entire planet, essentially ending
civilization, perhaps life on earth. This information, predictably,
has not slowed the Doomsday Machine in the slightest.
An
astonishing fact stands out in the narrative, that Ellsberg found
very few, almost zero, moral objections to policies that amount to
unprecedented genocide. This across over 7,000 pages of official
documents. Add to this the near zero politicans willing to point out
the actual threat, to candidly discuss the insanity and criminality
of possessing these weapons. Instead candidates for high office strut
and fret their macho hour upon the stage... a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, signifying nothing... as if their
personal ambition, ideology, power and position were more important
than that life continue on this planet. It is the peace activists and
“fringe” politicians like Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders who
are willing to address these issues and who are marginalized by a
mainstream media that seems to place the privilege of wealth above
all other considerations. “Better dead than red” was an actual
slogan in the 50s, part of an establishment effort to dampen a
growing awareness among the population, of the nuclear danger. It is
discouraging also to note that among the whole discussion in those
official documents, of millions horribly vaporized, billions really
since few if any would survive a full nuclear exchange, that among
those documents there was virtually no discussion of disarmament, of
summoning the energy and creativity to find a way around this
terrible monster – of examining the obvious necessity, as MLK and
other “radicals” attempted to point out, that we end war or it
ends us.
Ellsberg
risked his freedom to release The Pentagon Papers, a secret and
unflattering history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Only the
bungling of the Nixon crew saved him from prison. He intended to
release secret papers about the insane nuclear policy but events
conspired against that plan. The integrity and courage he displayed
in the Marine Corps and his early RAND days did not wane as his point
of view shifted from a patriotic commitment to the status quo to a
realization of the threat to life that view entailed. The book
details the careerist bureacratic and ideological obstacles that
stood (and stand) in the way of his effort to sound the alarm, how
the frustration of those obstacles led him to risk all, in the case
of the Pentagon Papers, and with this book, a renewed, urgent effort
to reach the public in a time as, or perhaps more, dangerous than the
cold war. I like to share a phrase I heard in my early activist
education: Those who call for an end to war are dismissed as
hopeless dreamers, but the only dreamers are those who think we can
survive if we don't.
