 Welcome back to episode two. I'm with Daniel Ellsberg who is an economist, a famous whistleblower associated with the Pentagon Papers and the writer of the book that we're discussing, The Doomsday Machine. In this episode we're going to talk about the rise of nuclear proliferation and the notions of mutual assured destruction and the strategies that ensue. You take us through a number of episodes and you take us through what is almost a change of mindset where in earlier times, say prior to World War I, soldiers went and fought soldiers and you articulate how instead of attacking the other army started attacking civilians and justifying that. The second was the move from armies to air power and the, what you might call pressures within an air force structure to control the proportions of a defense budget. And obviously these missiles and these weapons, well those some are fired from submarines, it adds to that political economic pressure to build up and to sustain or maintain these huge stockpiles and as you said, you don't have to eliminate nuclear weapons. The notion of deterrent and mutual assured destruction could still be relevant without a nuclear winner at much lower levels of deployed missiles on both sides. Finally, your textured and beautiful exploration of the flaws in the command and control structures, which you alluded to in your passage just before this, makes it almost impossible to say fortify the control system so the danger goes down. You can't make something that error proof, that renegade proof. So the only answer in my mind is to go reduce the stock of weapons on both sides to well below the threshold of igniting a nuclear winner. But the whole logic that people who watch Dr. Strangelover, people who study game theory of mutual assured destruction is almost, how would I say, a false consciousness. And I want to ask you, where are the people like you who are the experts who can see this, who do now know about the nuclear where, where are the people marching arm in arm with you that used to work at Rand or in the Pentagon or at Harvard and MIT? Why is there not the kind of uproar about this that there is about climate change? And as you just said, you can get a twofer. If you take this political economic juggernaut down and you reduce the weapons, we become safer and we redeploy the money towards climate change, which makes us safer a second time. You get a double whammy. So I also want to guide our viewers and listeners. Your description of what happened inside a Soviet submarine during the Cuban missile crisis off the coast of Cuba when they were dropping the equivalent of little depth charges or grenades on them. And the two men had taken the two locks you need to release the ability to shoot a nuclear weapon, which the Americans didn't even know they had in the submarine. And a third man overrode them. And this story, I guess, was told by his wife after he passed away. But so you're not just talking hypothetical and fiction, you tell stories in this book about real close calls about an error prone system and about a political economy that is hiding what you've revealed still. You've told the story here in effect. And I can just refer people to my book on that, the second chapter on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Actually, there's a new book out by a very good man, Martin Sherwin, just being reviewed. And he describes this particular episode in very great detail. My book is, what is it for? Several years old now. It's just out now on the Cuban Missile Crisis. And again, focus us on this decision by Captain Archipoff, who's described in a The Man Who Saved the World. And actually, there are two videos with that title, each about different Russians at about the same level of command. A colonel, the other one is Petrov, who saved the world, as did Archipoff in 62. And Petrov saved it in 83 by deciding not to claim that the signals coming in indicating a U.S. attack, he decided that they might not be real, and they weren't. But he wasn't sure that. And he was in a situation where he knew that his Russian superiors, if he told them what he believed, that there was about a 50-50 chance that they were under attack, his subordinates believed it was 100 percent, by the way, and were urging him to, you know, in effect, give the ghost signal. He wasn't sure, but he wasn't sure either way. But if he told them that there was a 50 percent chance they would go first. Now, that would be an insane response because it would blow up the world, and in this case, quote, unnecessarily, because in fact, there were no missiles coming in. But what would it mean to do it necessarily? You know, what could possibly justify doing that under any circumstances, whatever. And yet each side is equal, is to this day, equally poised to do this in part because the threat will, in the U.S. case, is the basis of our alliances. We're protecting people by making that threat. And that's very I've now learned, very economically beneficial to some banks and multinational corporations to be the protector of Europe, even though there used to be a huge Soviet army, at least, that existed. Now there's no Soviet Union. And NATO now goes right up to the borders of Russia, which used to be to the borders of Germany. So they don't exactly need to be protected, unless you say the Baltics or Poland, right on the border. But West Germany doesn't need the protection. But for us to be, now Germany, for us to be the protector remains profitable. It also remains a basis for selling them weapons to confront this threat, whether the threat exists or not. It never really did. But we sold them a lot of weapons. And by the way, that is the reason that President Trump, more explicitly than I've ever seen it before, overrode vetoed a congressional cutoff of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia as dictatorial and tyrannical regime as has ever existed in the world, using, by the way, beheading as a regular method of execution in a total monarchy, you know, dynastic tyranny, various kinds. It's our ally, part of the free world, because it sits on this vast reserves of oil. The effective ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, of Saudi Arabia, the man who executed a Washington Post journalist named Mohammed Khashoggi in a Saudi embassy because he was a critic, cut up his body and took it out of the embassy. We all know that. In other words, this murderer bin Salman wanted to have a Saudi-friendly regime in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world. And so he was trying to regime change and take over Yemen. He's now killing civilians at an enormous rate in Yemen with our supplied planes and bombs and our logistics help. Why are we helping this crime against humanity? It is a genocidal crime that's going on right now as bad as any in the 20th or 21st century except in the scale, but it's pretty large. So Congress actually cut off the fund. Amazing. No legislature had done that since at the time of the ending of my trial with which it was connected in the 73, Congress cut off the funds for Vietnam, for Indochina. The first time since then that they did that. Republicans too in the Senate, the Trump feet of that, keep the arms flowing. Why? As he says, it's a hundred million dollar arms sale. We need the profits. We need the jobs. We can't cut off these arms. We're selling arms to people who are using them genocidally, currently, today, not just hypothetically in the future. It seems very open about that. And they didn't override the veto. And it's still going. Maybe the Democrats will change it, but not not certainly. They've certainly done the same kind of things in the past. So how could this be happening with humans, with Americans? Because we're the worst people in the world. Actually, I don't think that's the answer. So I think it's more of a, you know, other countries have done similar things, but they've never been armed like this before. Right. They have two things are going on now. They did not have the capability to wipe out entire continents before. Really, what we were doing and what the Germans tried to do in the Battle of the Blitz over London was to destroy a city or the heart of a city. And actually, the Germans weren't able to do that. But we built up bombers, most advanced bombers in the world in the end, B-29, which killed about 85,000 people in one day in Hiroshima. But we had killed over 100,000 people five months earlier with the B-29s dropping jelly gasoline on the people of Tokyo. So the willingness to do that, the readiness, the actual operation doing this with something we, our leaders had accepted already, the people of Tokyo as the target. And then 64 other cities before they hit Hiroshima. Okay. So this change in the war, as I say, it wasn't new in human experience. Actually, it was not characteristic of World War One, because they didn't have the ability to do that, except with very long distance artillery, which they use the little long pairs, but not very much. But it had often been done in human experience before. Genghis Khan had a very old city, Tamer Lane. And it goes back to the earliest civilization, the Sumer and others, the willingness to massacre. But then, as you say, there was a period when after the 30 years war, with its huge devastation, religious wars, people had begun to agree, let's concentrate on the armed forces of the other country and not so much on the civilians. And we kind of gotten away with that and even away from that, even had laws and treaties that forbade the deliberate destruction of cities. But after Hitler, his example of the Blitz freed the hand of Churchill and others to do the same. We adopted these Nazi Hitlerian tactics and the Japanese against Shanghai and some other cities in China and the Italians and Germans in Guernica in Spain. We did this to a factor of tenfold and more against the Germans of destroying cities and then the nuclear weapons are the perfect weapons for doing this. So that's what we've gotten. Now, how did we get committed with the ending with the Nazis occupied and the Japanese occupied to regarding the Soviets as suitable targets for annihilation? And actually, something I learned late in the game, relatively recently, is that when World War II ended, the biggest producers of aircraft were General Motors and Ford who had been car producers. They went back to producing cars for a pent-up demand that had been suppressed during the war. Their profits were maintained. Other countries in the aerospace like Lockheed and Boeing found that their orders for airplanes went from thousands a month to zero immediately. They couldn't make up that difference by sales to commercial airlines at that time. They were all facing bankruptcy and they needed big sales from the government to the government as they'd had during World War II. They needed a big threat for those airplanes, those war planes, to be needed for and only Russia presented itself for that with enough targets and planes and so forth to be a credible threat to defend against. And thus, the Cold War was a major factor there as was the desire to rebuild, to build up West Germany in our occupation as a driving force for reconstruction in Europe and that again required a Russian threat. So plausible, though not real. And when the Marshall Plan could not be continued because Republican Congress wasn't interested in sending money to rebuild Europe more than four years, the money had to go by building up their armies in West Germany and elsewhere. Congress would appropriate money and give it to, as I say, Lockheed and even NGM, General Electric and the others for military aid that could be rationalized as defense of this country. And so we built up the domestic machines. The corporation I went to, the Rand Corporations and non-profit, mainly funded as it came in to be an independent corporation by the Ford Foundation for service to the nation, not for profit and for general national security. However, most of its money that was for building and whatnot, a grant from Ford, but its operating cost came almost entirely from the Air Force. But we who worked there, and I came there in 58 as a consultant and then an employee in 39. Just thought of the Air Force, this is going to sound crazy in the light of what I've been saying, but I'll tell you actually the phenomenon. We thought of ourselves as very independent researchers. We didn't tell the Air Force just what they wanted to believe. In fact, what the Air Force wanted was support for the B-70, which later became the B-1, a very high-flying bomber that was their number one priority to get money from Congress for. He said, no, it's not necessary. It's not good. In other words, we were willing to tell the Air Force things that made them quite angry. And yet they continued to fund our research in a way that really confirmed for us we were very independent thinkers. We were just doing not who's right, but what's right. And as my colleague, Alamantouf, would like to say. And what's best for the national security? I would say that throughout my time with them, it was 10 years interrupted by my being in Vietnam. We really did think of ourselves as very independent thinkers and never considered the question of what influence on our thinking about national security was dependent on the fact that all of our money was coming from the Air Force, not the Army or the Navy. I was, when you raised your question, I thought, what if someone had asked the question, what would we be saying if our only sponsor was the Navy? The answer is it would have been entirely different. I have no doubt of that. The fact is that the Polaris, the submarine launch forces, were from every form of declared aim of national security were superior to the Air Force bombers and ICBMs. And our sense of independence came from the fact that we didn't rule out having some Polaris submarines. In addition to our intercontinental ballistic missiles, let me just go to a bottom line. The intercontinental ballistic missiles should never have been built, should have been discarded, and we should have had a treaty with Russia not to have them. But no one gave that one moment's thought because that would be anathema to the people who were paying our money. Now, nobody thought of that, I can tell you at the time. Nobody thought of the Air Force's conditioning here. It was just the fact that when somebody wrote his study, that gave a role to the B-1, the B-70, or the ICBMs, that got great interest with people. And our sponsors were very happy that they were paying us this money and they would bring them to Washington and they would give briefings. And if you wrote something about Polaris, no response went into the wastebasket. And people liked to get a little appreciation and I feel they're doing something for, you know, the relationship and so forth. And they just didn't work on the other or conventional weapons or whatever. We were entirely influenced by the fact that we worked for the Air Force into entirely into forms of recommendation and investment to threaten life on earth, actually. Humans do that. You know, once in a while, an exception comes along. And like Ed Snowden, as it was a rower on the National Security Agency and the massive surveillance that they were conducting against our Constitution and our domestic laws, Chelsea Manning, who reveals, who chooses to reveal that we are not infecting lots of civilians with their operations in Iraq, but are turning people over to be tortured, which was in knowing so, meaning that we were doing something that was as illegal and criminal in the eyes both of international law and domestic law as doing the torturing ourselves, which we had been doing earlier. And when Obama stopped doing that, but didn't criminalize it, we turned it over to them over to other people to torture, which was also criminal. And so for revealing that she spent, it was initially a trans person here, transgender, she was initially Bradley Manning, but she spent seven and a half years in prison, largely all artists, significant part in solitary confinement. Ed Snowden, permanent exile for revealing what district court has recently described as unconstitutional behavior. He was exposing criminal behavior, but he's the one who is put out. That's not exceptional treatment. These were exceptional actions by these people. And the treatment was to be expected. Behavior didn't change, actually. So here's our challenge. Here's our challenge. We mentioned that the climate problem is now conscious in a way in the mass. The nuclear weapons are not actually millions of people have marched, millions of school children literally have marched on a weekday, Friday, a strike led by Greta Thunberg, whom I had the great benefit of meeting. She's a hero, my veteran in Sweden. So people say to Greta, thank you, you've had such great success. People are marching here with millions knowing what they're opposing. It's not the extinction of humanity. It's what I've been saying. It's not unlike nuclear winter, except that it goes on over a matter of a decade or two rather than one year or one day. So very similar challenges, threats to humanity. But it's very clear we haven't had any success at this. Millions have marched, but the emissions are increasing. And success is not measured here by awareness, new awareness, teaching, action, activity, but by results. And there's no results. The race that the human species is making toward a two degree increase centigrade, a three degree, a four degree, with every half degree here, every tenth of a degree, meaning a measurable increase in catastrophe. And the richest country in the world is currently under a president who, on the one hand, is trying to accelerate that race and be denies that he is doing so. We have a Republican Party, which is gradually shifting in the last year, but up till now is a party of people who deny that there was man made climate change. Now, that is not unlike denying that the earth goes around the sun. And after all, when you talk about evidence, everybody can see the sun go around the earth every day. What do you believe? Science or your own eyes? The sun is going around you. And for thousands of years, smart people believe that. And what is the evidence against it? Most people couldn't tell you what the evidence is. You know, it's pretty unstruse. You have to believe the scientists. There is a Flat Earth Society, still. There is a theory going around now that there is a cabal of Democrats who are devoted to killing children to drink their blood. A person believing this is going to be elected to Congress. She doesn't have any opposition at this moment. Others believe that according to the New York Times, this is penetrating the Republican party to a great extent. What's the evidence for that? Documents being leaked by someone in the administration. Supposedly, no one knows who, what not. In short, as I heard from you, Robert, what I thought was a profound expression, which you referred to a comedian who goes by the moniker INQ, for inquiry. The expression, anyone can see, can find evidence to confirm what they want to believe. Is that a fair and fair phrase? Yes. That is true, so it can find out. So other propositions that relate to that, anyone can believe anything with evidence, which they can find. Anyone can disbelieve anything like climate change, or for generations, the tobacco-caused cancer. That has been pretty well proved now, but the profits of the tobacco companies have not decreased. Worldwide sales, they now expand to worldwide sales. Why does the Chinese government still monopolizes the sale of tobacco, selling cancer to their people and others? Because it's revenue, it's income. It's clearly not a species to be trusted with nuclear weapons. But they not only exist, they're being perfected, they're being prevented, they're being spread, and so forth. Dangerous, dangerous species. And our problem now is to how to get this under, how to survive. There are so many good things about life on Earth for humans, for each other. How to keep that going? Well, you can't eliminate quickly, if ever, a lot of the terrible things that humans do to each other willingly. So how do you somehow lower that and preserve the joy, the amenities, the wonder of life for those who are not involved in destroying other people? That's our challenge, and we haven't found out how to do it. Daniel, thank you for exploring and showing us, for the human race, how much is at stake. In the next episode, we'll come back and we'll look at where the resistance is in the expert community and in the political economy that stops us from running the risk of a nuclear winner and the extermination of the human race.