 Our next speaker is Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the most famous whistleblower in the history of our country. Daniel was in the Marines. He is the former defense and state departments, Saigon official who revealed, depending on papers, a top secret history of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam to 17 newspapers in 1971, for which he faced a possible 115 years in prison. Daniel is the author of The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Welcome, Daniel. We got Daniel. Hello, can you hear me? Yes. I'm not allowed to unmute themselves, okay. All right, we've heard and we will hear very broad analyses of what has been going on in the Cold War and the new Cold Wars that continue. I want to focus on one that was not salient to me as late as writing my most recent book, The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. It was after that, actually, that I think I became aware really of the I and the military industrial complex, the MIC, which I think I've collected for some 60 years or so before that of focus and obsession with our wars, our interventions, our military activities, but above all, with our nuclear threats and our nuclear buildup. Most arms control and disarmament efforts, anti-nuclear efforts and nuclear for that matter focused almost entirely on strategic comments, concepts within the Defense Department, within the military services and within the think tanks, which are, of course, part of this complex. My friend Ray McGovern says it's not just an MIC, you make the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us of in 1960 and by the 61. And by the way, the original drafts of that speech, a remarkable speech actually about the unwarranted influence that might come or it actually did exist from this military industrial complex, but it was originally called the MICC, the Military Industrial Congressional Complex. That certainly deserved part of that, but then someone noticed that he was going to deliver this speech in front of Congress and that they might take offense. So the congressional part of that came up, but as Ray McGovern points out, it could be well called MICI-MAC, MICI-MAC, rather military, industrial, congressional, intelligence, media, academic and think tank. At least I was, of course, in a think tank working for the Air Force, in particular the Rand Corporation. And in those days, I would say you could work year after year and you can read all of these books, which I have behind me here, and look at the index and look for the name Boeing or Lockheed or Northrop Grumman or General Dynamics. They're just not there as though they were just tradesmen who were doing the bidding of the strategists in the White House and the Pentagon and the Rand Corporation. Not their influence at all. It was after my book came out a few years ago, couple years ago, that I came across this book, Harry S. Truman and the War Scorer Scare of 1948. And it put me onto a whole new line of analysis and I'll try to summarize the message that came through to me there, which was actually new to me after all these years. During the Second World War, a handful of firms, quite a number, hello, during the Second World War, a majority of our planes were actually built by Ford and GM. And when the war ended very in August and the orders were abruptly canceled for new war planes, Ford and GM went back to building cars very happily who they pent up wartime demand. But other companies like Lockheed and Douglas and Martin, others that had built up from almost nothing before the war from very small to enormous profits and gross, but also profits on investments that were mainly made by the government and supplied on lease in effect to these countries, to these companies who had made enormous profits on their invested capital, which was relatively small. Suddenly, they found that their market had vanished and to some extent they tried to satisfy a civilian need for civilian aircraft or even go into other businesses like building buses or other vehicles. And they couldn't compete commercially with Ford or GM or any of the others who were used to cost benefit analysis and efficiency. They had been built up on cost plus contracts, which essentially paid almost no attention at all to cost and they were not built up to, they were not built to compete in the commercial market. They were all facing going bankrupt, literally bankrupt. The orders, as I say, went from almost one day to the next in August of 1945 from enormous to nothing. And they were desperate, some of them didn't go bankrupt but others were looking, say we have only three alternatives to keep up this cutthroat competition between us or to emerge and some of us, one could have less mouths to feed or something or go bankrupt. And the answer was that they had as during the war had to have orders from executive branch from the military for large numbers of war planes. Well, it was peacetime in a sense. But that wasn't appropriate. What was needed was preparation for war, readiness for war all the time, essentially a permanent war economy. And with this, and they got it, a starting lobbying in early 46 actually. And before that, long, not long after that, pressing Truman to appoint a air power commission to see what the requirements were under Thomas Finletter. Yes, I knew about the Finletter report. I didn't know as a result of lobbying by the aircraft industry, but it did point out that we absolutely had to have a lot of airplanes. The Air Force itself also with its new independence or striving for independence at that point, which it got wanted to emphasize a strategic bombing campaign that they'd carried on in World War II, but against who? They wanted it in part because they wanted a healthy aircraft industry, which would have a large research and development arm that had to be paid for by government. The commercial aviation simply would support that. They needed that so as to be superior, even with a relatively small Air Force to have the latest planes as we're still striving to do, of course, with some dogs coming along at the F-35, the biggest boondoggle, which is actually the biggest arms project in history, ultimately perhaps a trillion and a half dollars, happens to be almost clearly a terrible project. Its functions are done better by other planes entirely, but the headline in the New York Times recently was Too Big to Fail, like the commercial firms. Lockheed's F-35. Very recently now, just to bring this right up to date, William Hartung, H-A-R-T-U-N-G of the Center for International Policy has put out a very interesting report called Inside the ICBM Lobby. And let me go back for just a moment to the earlier period. You needed a lot of planes for an industry, the Air Force needed them for an industry that would allow you to have the most superior planes later in the big R&D budget and to have a large share of the military budget and to be independent as an Air Force. The aerospace industry needed the Air Force, a large Air Force that they could sell to, and a Navy as it built up its carrier planes and got more extensive on the strategic mission also, in Polaris, in the missile. So we got an aerospace and missile industry, not only aircraft. This book has really suggested to me that a very large part of the Cold War, not all of it, but a very large part that I've certainly neglected, I would say, for most of my life, until quite recently, is the function of a massive annual subsidy to the aerospace industry, to assure it to be healthy, that it doesn't collapse and get bankrupt. And that has continued every year from, let's say, the late 40s before the Berlin blockade, by the way, even, which contributed its part to the Cold War or Korea, all of these were important turning points. But at the key points, every point there is, the role of the aircraft industry has been very, very important and very neglected. And as I say, you can read many books about this without reading the names of the five that I just mentioned, which are in Hartung's accounts. Hartung, by the way, is one of the very biggest experts on the role of the military industrial complex. And I recommend that you look him up on the web and in the Center for International Policy, many op-eds on this. Unfortunately, he's almost alum in this and the people who work with him at the center. But Raytheon right now is the sole contractor of the, for the new ICBM. And it makes me laugh a little because the reason they're sold is they were competed with Boeing and then Northrop bought away from the Boeing team, the maker of solid fuel rockets and incorporated it, acquired it as an asset in Boeing. So we can't compete now regularly. It's not a fair field. And so it's left to Boeing, which of course has many subcontractors including Lockheed and many of the others. There is no real reason for us to be building and follow on to our current ICBMs, the 400 Minute Man 3 that are in three bases in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, except for the needs of the aerospace industry, the profits, the lobbying and its jobs, the upkeep of towns like Minot, North Dakota, which depend on the Minute Man wing near them or other Cheyenne in Wyoming. And Utah, by the way, with a missile service, the ICBM lobby, and I won't go into the details here, is named in the Hartman book. And I think that's very important that we need to focus on that from an arms control point of view, just as in the climate problem, again you can read book after book after book on climate as I have and look in the index for the word exon or Chevron or Ramco or British petroleum. And oddly, you just don't see it there. The media doesn't deal with it, the analysts don't deal with it. In fact, as in the aerospace case, these are the people we are confronting. These are the institutions, the centers of power. It's not just wrong errors in people's minds, it's profits, jobs, donations, revolving door between the aerospace case, especially between the Defense Department, our current Secretary of Defense having come from the board of Raytheon, which he got into having come immediately from the military back and forth. And the Boeing and Raytheon and others lucky to have financed people since then. Another excellent article is by my name Cummings, lock, stock, and two smoking barrels play on the film name, but an extremely good article you can find on the web about Lockheed's efforts to staff the Defense Department with officials from the Lockheed Corporation very effectively and two to get the orders from them. The cost of this for the American people is the preservation of ICBMs that should not exist, which endanger the United States by their existence as vulnerable fixed site missiles that can only survive and attack by getting off the ground before any missiles should arrive. It is that consideration, use them or lose them, that puts the famous 10 minute or so window on the ability of a president to make a decision as to whether or to launch our forces, essentially our ICBMs, which run very quick alert within minutes. They can be flying and if they aren't and an attack is coming, we will lose them. Now a question could be, so what? A war between the US and Russia, if it starts, will lead to a nuclear winter by the firestorms created in cities on both sides and in Europe and in China and elsewhere, which will send hundreds of millions of dollars, 150 million tons perhaps of soot and black smoke into the stratosphere, will not rain out, will go around the world within days and cut out 70% of sunlight for years, to some extent up to 10 years. But human species, most of it doesn't last that long. It means that harvests are all killed all over the world. Much of the world is ice age conditions during the war, people starve, whether you go first or second. So most of the weapons in our submarines as well, highly accurate weapons, for killing Russian ICBMs also again, like our ICBMs, and the ICBMs, which are vulnerable unlike the sub-launch missiles and ICBMs, each of them is capable of causing nuclear winter. And the ICBMs in particular, that is, they constitute a doomsday machine. And the ICBMs are the hair trigger on that doomsday machine, the ones that compel the president to consider launching on tactical warning within minutes. In short, it would be worth $100 billion or more. What would it take to get rid of them? In other words, to hire people, and you may have to do that in a transition period for the workers to retrain them, hire them not to build ICBMs. That would be worth a lot of money. It wouldn't take as much as actually building them actually does, which would be over the life of the new ICBMs, the 249, pretty precise figure they gave, but $246, $49 billion, a third of it, a quarter of a trillion dollar. So, but a hundred million in the procurement stage first that could be put to urgent needs, obviously of other sorts. Why is this happening? I would say for a little other reason than the effective political influence of these concentrated handful of corporations. So that's the problem. Can we deal with it? That remains to be seen, but it can't be proved yet that we can't. We don't have a record that gives us actual hope in commerce, which has been largely bought by the fossil fuel and the aerospace and such other concentrations of power, president as well, the media which reflect these interests. Can we practically speaking change it? We haven't shown that we can. We have reduced the actual number of warheads on both sides one more than 80% that looks impressive. It has not reduced the risk or the effect of a nuclear war between US and Russia at all. No difference. The ICBMs would make a difference. So I've used up my time here on a relatively narrow subject aspect of the Cold War, but I think one that we have to come to grips with. Thank you so much, Mr. Halsberg. Many of us on this call, I know myself were from Los Angeles, one of the seats of the aerospace industry, euphemism. And recently on PBS, there was a history of aerospace. And I remember seeing there that right after the end of World War II, when peace could have broken out, several of the heads of the aerospace industry, the war industry at that time went to Congress and basically begged them. They said, don't shut us down. Where, what will the LA economy do? And instead of having any sense of creativity or morality, they basically kept it running. So in so much of this way that it's a jobs program. I'm a high school teacher again and so many kids are being funneled into these jobs afterwards. Also, I train as an engineer and many engineers around the country all say it's hard to find a job in something that isn't outside of, in some way, the military industrial complex. I want to say that I saw recently a great webinar, Code Pink webinar, Carly Town did on a transition. So when we talk in the LA area about pollution, we need a just transition out of fossil fuels. We also need a just transition out of the war economy into the peace economy. Let's feminize our economy. But that's a great webinar and I would like to point you all towards that.