 This is Rob Johnson, the president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Daniel Ellsberg, a famous whistleblower associated with the Pentagon Papers, who has spent many years working on the issues related to national security. He had spent time at the Rand Corporation, was an advisor to Kennedy Johnson, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, and many others. He is trained and a superb economist. He has applied his awareness of game theory, and he's applied his awareness of society, political economy, the notions of what you might call the sociology of how experts behave, and he has put forward an absolutely frightening book called The Doomsday Machine. I'm here today to explore with him the history of mutual assured destruction and the nuclear rivalry between the United States and what is now Russia, and was the Soviet Union, and which has been joined by other countries, including India and Pakistan. Dr. Ellsberg has written about issues that economists will find fascinating, like radical uncertainty, the whole question of the difference between risk and uncertainty, bringing Frank Knight and John Maynard Keynes into contrast with the more deterministic game theory that has been used in the arms control and disarmament world. I will promise that we'll come back and we'll do sessions related to his deep understanding of economics and the history of economic thought. But after that promise is made, I want to shift to The Doomsday Machine. Welcome, Daniel. Thank you for joining me. I'm very pleased to be here talking to you, Robert. So I think there's a certain false innocence about expertise. At one level, people always think that the world is wild, willy-nilly, emotional, and not anchored, and that the expert's job is to be somewhat detached, calm down, and put things together. But experts live in a context. As we talk about nuclear arsenal, that context is Washington governance, a military industrial complex, and what you might call the tribal pressures among experts to conform to what you might call the prevailing conventional wisdom. Maybe challenge it a bit at the margin, but not really break it open. What you've put forward in your book, and I want to step through the various parts of your argument, is that the danger now to humankind, to our children's future is enormous because of some of the ways in which we are not facing the challenge of what you might call being an independent expert, like yourself, in the context of this politics and these tribal behaviors. Tell me a little bit about how you got into the world of arms control and disarmament. I know, by the way, I grew up in Detroit, and I know you attended Cranbrook in Detroit, and so we both have a little bit of that Detroit metropolitan area impact on our spirits, and I know we both had spent time at MIT. I want to tell our listeners that I once was a research assistant from a man named William Kaufman, and he came in and said that you're just, you know who used to sit there, Daniel Ellsberg. So I had the good fortune of sitting in your chair, and now I have the good fortune of talking with you. But let's get going. How did this horrid scenario that's in your book come to be? Horrid is a good word for what we're going to be talking about, absolute horrors and horrid behavior. I heard the word with my bad hearing soared, and it immediately made me think of what John F. Kennedy said in his speech to the United Nations in 1961, his first year, a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which I participated. 61 was a year of a Berlin Crisis, in which I participated peripherally as a consultant from the Rand Corporation, and the word came into the speech in the terms of sword of Damocles, a sword hanging above one's head, the head of a ruler, as Kennedy put it, supported by the slenderest of threads, which could break and kill us all. But it was a sword of Damocles, not over the ruler, but over all the people in the world. Strictly speaking, as far as we knew, a nuclear war initiated by us in our plans involved a threat to initiate nuclear war if the Soviets tried to expand into West Europe or even into Berlin, which was inside East Germany, that was the Berlin Crisis. We would have launched this sword of Damocles, not broken the thread by accident, but wielded the sword. And as far as we knew at that time, that would not actually lead to the death of everyone. Actually, by the time Kennedy said that in the fall of 1961, he had learned that our nightmare in the nuclear consulting business and the drunk chief of staff of the previous several years, namely a Soviet surprise attack, was a camera that it was not possible. The Soviets had four ICBMs instead of the one thousand that had been estimated by the head of the Strategic Air Command to me just in one third earlier, but reconnaissance satellites had revealed they didn't have a thousand. They had four. So the only country in the world that could launch a first strike was the United States, which had thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons, strategic bombers, tactical bombers based bombers on aircraft, some missiles, perhaps 40 missiles, less than a thousand, less than the 160 that the intelligence community had estimated. Ten to one more than the four that they had. But we just learned that. So we talked about a sword of Damocles over mankind. But the best estimates of the joint chief of staff that year in answer to a question that it's how happens. I had drafted and the president sent to the joint chiefs. How many would be killed if we, if I'm paraphrased, launched our sword if we conducted a war plan, which was a first strike plan not out of the blue, but in response to Russian Soviet conventional attacks on Berlin or West Europe, how many would be killed? They did not estimate that the results of our own attack would be killing everyone in the world or that the mutual attack with Soviet response, which at that time they did think was much larger than it actually was. That wouldn't kill everybody in the world either. What they'd estimated was by their own information, they used the weapons that had been bought from Boeing and Lockheed and deployed by the Air Force and trained and rehearsed and carried out the plans they had made for war that year. They wouldn't have killed everybody in the world. They would have killed 600 million people. Now, when I saw that, now we get back to the word horrid or a horror. I felt horror. I felt these are plans by Americans to kill. How can we conceive of this in 600 million people? Nearly all of them civilians are a relative minority, including a hundred million in West Europe are NATO allies who would be killed without a single American or warhead landing on their territory by the fallout, the radioactive fallout carried by the wind in the atmosphere from East Europe, which another hundred million were going to be killed in the captive nations and the 300 million that would be killed in the Soviet Union and China. Now, the Chinese strikes would not radiate much fallout to West Europe. But our own attack, for example, on submarine pens in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, would have wiped out Finland from the fallout from a neutral country in Austria, a neutral country. Our attacks in general in East Europe, satellites and Soviet Union would kill a hundred million West Europeans, whom supposedly we were trying to defend. Our own attack would have wiped them out with this fallout. So I've been faced ever since with the effort to try to understand as somebody who'd grown up as a very patriotic American, like volunteered for the Marines during the Korean War, the Korean emergency. I didn't go to Korea, but I had had volunteered to stay in, actually, for the Suez Crisis when my battalion was in war. So I've been around military men and now at the Rand Corporation I was working very heavily with military men in particular from the Air Force and people that I know had worked and had dinner with and had beer with had worked on plans for killing 600 million people. So how could this be? What does it tell me not just about my country, but about our species organized as we are into nation states with huge military apparatuses? As I say, by the end of the year, I learned that only the U.S. could have this effect that year. Although the Russians, for their part, had missiles and planes that would reach Europe, not the U.S., not across the ocean. This is quite a part from the 600 million we kill or the hundred million in this year they would had prepared to annihilate Germany, in particular, with their missiles and all of Europe, where we had bases all over from Spain and North Africa. All that would go from Russian attacks in addition to our attacks, but we were pretty much all dead anyway. So they would do they would do their part. Their their willingness to obliterate Germany is, of course, related to the fact that Germany had invaded them twice in that century and caused 27 million dead. Thank you, you know, and again, almost an inconceivable number, except compared to 600 million. Now, to say that is to say that the danger that the United States was facing was at that point, not so much from our own weapons. That was a danger to the world and enormous to East to Eurasia. Mr. Dane, we were prepared to wipe out Eurasia within a few years, though, that was imitated by the Soviets. When Christoph was put out with the help of the military to Brezhnev, who replaced him, Brezhnev said to their military, you can have what you want. What do you want? And after the Cuban Missile Crisis, what they wanted was what we had. That was not good for them. It was not good for the world. It was in the end it played a role in virtually bankrupting them. But they produced pretty much what we had. And thus now any attack by us, which we continued to threaten and do to this day, even without a Soviet Union, would evoke a response by the Soviet Union that would again kill as we calculated hundreds of millions of people. However, that was wrong because there was an element and effect of those attacks, many of which hundreds and hundreds of which out of thousands would be near or in cities. And there was an effect that no one had calculated for another for 40 years into the nuclear another 20 years after I worked on war plans. The cities would burn in firestorms are particularly intense fire caused by an immediate which every nuclear weapon causes, not just an ordinary fire, but a very intense and concentrated fire, which sends up enormous updrafts into the upper atmosphere and the stratosphere, carrying hundreds of millions of tons of smoke, which totally uncalculated by our Pentagon and for the first 40 years by the Russians. You know, they calculated heat, blast, radioactive fallout, but not smoke. If you were to detonate these things in an ocean or a desert, you wouldn't get the smoke that since hundreds of these were in cities, which would furnish kindling for these fires, the smoke would go into the stratosphere we learned in 1983 35 years ago, more than 37 years now. I've been talking about this for a while. It would blot out 70 percent of the sunlight reaching the earth in the southern hemisphere where no warheads would land. The radioactivity fallout would be pretty much confined by winds to the northern hemisphere because the winds blow away from the equator, keep the fallout in the same hemisphere. But the smoke in the stratosphere goes around the world and it cuts out the sunlight around the world and it will result in killing all of the harvests. In fact, depending on the season, when it comes down to say in the spring or fall, freezes the lakes, freezes the rivers, creates winter like conditions on the surface of the earth all year round for a number of years. Actually, pretty much a major effects of this last about a decade. They've only learned that recently when the computers got powerful enough to extend the models beyond one year to ten years. Yeah, it's still there in ten years. So the food goes. Nearly everyone stars, not everyone, scientists, Alan Roebuck, Brian Toon have told me some people will live on seafood and mollusks in Australia, in New Zealand or in Australia. A significant number will survive, perhaps one percent, perhaps as many as ten percent of the world's population. Now, one percent is 70 million people. So that's not an it's not an insignificant. That's not extinction. Back to prehistoric times, you want to say, ten percent, seven hundred million. But 90 percent go. Six billion and more go fast in a year, not not in one night in a year. Let me just say is that corresponds approximately to what my colleague at Rand Herman Kahn called a doomsday machine in theory that kills everything. This doesn't kill everything. Ninety percent or ninety percent. And we've had that in our side since about nineteen fifty two under Harry Truman. You don't need thermonuclear weapons for that. I'll go into it because the atom bombs like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hiroshima caused the firestone of all of these create enough smoke from the cities to kill nearly everybody. So in fact, what we were preparing to do and threatening to do and are still threatening to do. And now the Russians as well, Putin makes these same threats and has for some time to protect, for example, Kaliningrad. You may few people have heard of Kaliningrad until they in this particular context. But it's a small enclave inside Poland, which actually belongs to Russia now, like West Berlin in East Germany during the Cold War. It can't be defended by conventional means by Russians since it's surrounded by NATO forces. It could only be militarily protected by the threat to initiate nuclear war, which between the U.S. and Russia or NATO and Russia will mean the escalation to these doomsday machines almost certainly. So Putin is protecting Kaliningrad the same way we protected West Berlin, not more foolish or less foolish. Is it insane? Well, it was the heart of NATO strategy for 50 years. And that was to blow up the world if they started to move into West Berlin and it worked. They didn't move into West Berlin, whereas our notion that they were preparing and wanting, desiring to take over West Europe the way they had East Europe. Was a delusion. That was the basis of NATO strategy. They weren't preparing to do that. They wanted East Europe to control the invasion routes from Germany on the basis of history of the last 50 years. But they weren't rusting to go into West Europe. We now know from the studies that have been released, but they really did want Berlin. It was a thorn in their side. It was right inside East Germany and it showed up the relative poverty of East Germany under the communist system there, compared to the highly subsidized Western style of living in West Berlin. And that led to a hemorrhaging of talent into West Berlin and then from then into West Europe. So they really did want to occupy West Berlin. They could easily do it. They surrounded West Berlin with Soviet armed divisions, but they didn't do it. Not because they were sure that we would blow the world up, but we were prepared. We might do it. We said we'd do it. We were committed to doing it. And they couldn't be sure we wouldn't. So they didn't. So it worked at the risk of not working and blowing the world up. And right now, the same thing in Kaliningrad. It's not different from what we did in Berlin. If we moved into Kaliningrad, which NATO could easily do, the Russians would start nuclear war, but almost surely escalate. Why would it escalate? Because each side, knowing that a nuclear war would devastate itself as well as other. And for 35 years, well, take out nuclear matter, they refused to look at nuclear matter. But prior to that, even so, if we started a war, we understand our military, understand the effects on us of a Soviet response or now a Russian son would be calamitous in unprecedented ways. We wouldn't lose 27 million, as the Russians did. We'd lose 40, 50, 60 million, maybe 100 million. But we have 300 million or then we used to have 200 million. So if we went first, the idea was if war was inevitable, going first was better. We might lose 50 million. But instead of the 150 million that we might lose if we went second, so people would say, yes, terrible if we go first, but less terrible than if we go second. If there's going to be a war, the Russians, for their part, are also poised to be sure to go first than second. And that in particular is true of our ICBMs, our intercontinental ballistic missiles on each side, which are vulnerable to the other. So if our warning system tells us, or each side has an electronic warning system infrared, that enemy missiles are on the way, the decision to the leader of each side is does he wait till they arrive, destroying our ICBMs on the ground whose positions are fixed and known, can we destroy? Or does he launch those ICBMs at the other and get the advantages of a first strike, a preemptive first strike, rather than waiting for them to be destroyed. Our whole system on each side is based on the idea of going first under those circumstances, not out of the blue as we described Pearl Harbor, but in the event that we think we're about to be attacked. A problem here is that each side has had frequent, more than one, convincing alerts that were false alarms, that they were being attacked. Each side, I can name a number of cases. The most recent major one was in 1995, well after the Cold War, when Yeltsin was told the missile was coming toward Moscow and he was given the so-called nuclear footballer computer where he could press a button and give out the order to launch the weapons. And he didn't do it because it turned out that the missile was a weather missile that wasn't going for Moscow. But in other cases, the US top advisor to the president, National Security Advisor, had been awakened at three in the morning and told first that 20 Soviet missiles were on their way, then minutes later, no, 220 going on that. And about to tell the president to launch our missiles without learning his wife, this is Brzezinski's wife, who's lying next to him in the bed, why a murderer, we're all about to die, let her die peacefully in her sleep. But to tell the president that he should launch the missiles before our missiles are destroyed, minutes from, well, seconds even from doing that, he gets a third call, no, it's a false alarm or investigating it. Okay, suppose he had told the president, followed his recommendation to launch our missiles. Why would that be better than alerting his wife? Because his wife didn't have power over missiles, just make her last minutes on her well, would give them a chance, this is not a joke, these are the situation, put that aside and say, why tell the president so he could launch his missile? That's all we're prepared to do, but that would destroy life on Earth. Now, actually that happened, we didn't actually know about nuclear winter that year, we did by 1995, so it wouldn't be all people on Earth, it would be about a billion people. For 35 years, we've known actually that it would be everybody within a year, wouldn't make any difference who went into a second and the false alarms are still more than possible. Something that I learned by the way and reported to President Kennedy's assistant, George Bundy, was that it wasn't only the president who could launch those missiles to prevent our being paralyzed by one single weapon on Washington that would kill the president and most of his constitutional successors, Eisenhower had arranged that people in the field who'd under those circumstances, launch their weapons and lead to the 600 million dead to be sure that they couldn't paralyze us. Each nuclear power has provided for that. So if we come right up to the president, something we know is it's not only President Donald Trump who could launch our weapons, it is the case that many, many other people could launch those weapons outside Washington. Some of them not necessarily more stable than the president. He doesn't drink or take drugs. He tells us until his recent coronavirus infection which he was taking the drug dexamethasone that is in the eyes of everybody in the world makes him quite manic, mania. But people are removed from the system that are found to have been high on cocaine or marijuana in their missile silos or there are other, every year, actually thousands of people are removed for having been sleeping or something like that. How many were not found? Or what about the day before they were found? How high is the probability that it's gone? Well, actually it hasn't happened yet. That tells us it isn't as high as it might be. It may even be low year by year, but it is not zero months by month, year by year. We know that it's higher in periods of crisis like the Cuban Missile Crisis and some other times that have happened than other times and supposing it is low. But what is low here is the launching of doomsday machines that have been created on both sides and other sides that are aspiring to it. That can destroy not all life on earth, but most human life. The nuclear winter takes all of the larger animals. Some of us will survive. The other animals can't do that. They'll all go extinct, the larger ones. And that will leave more than half the biomass on earth, which is microbial. And most of that will survive. And out of that evolve, who knows? What else? We are a danger to all the other larger animals on earth, wiping them out simultaneously as the asteroid that hit the earth 65 million years ago destroyed most larger species. And we evolved out of that from very small animals out of that. So life will go on, the world will go on, but we are prepared to make most of us extinct from moment to moment. Those are the machines we've built. They are kept in full operating order and both sides are adding to them and modernizing them and keeping them on a hair trigger, which could be removed, actually. If both sides are moved, there are ICBMs and maintain their sub-launched weapons, which are not susceptible of being destroyed, don't have to be used first. We will still be capable of destroying life on earth for what that's worth, but would not have the hair trigger. But you can't get rid of that hair trigger, the ICBMs, because Raytheon and Boeing and Lockheed and we'll make those systems depend on them for part of their profits. And they in turn control to a very large extent the parts of Congress who control the budget for this by campaign donations, by assuring that each senator has subcontractors in their state, each congressperson almost everyone has defense con directors in their districts, whose jobs depend on it and whose unions demand that these jobs continue, et cetera, et cetera. So it has proved impossible to get rid of these things. Over the last 50 years, when the sub-launch missiles have existed, when the ICBMs are totally anachronistic and add to a first approximation nothing to our military commitments or our security and add tremendously to the danger of the human species or most of it, and you can't get rid of them because as I say, of these vested interests in Congress, in the population, the workers and the profits of these corporations. So we haven't found a way to do it yet. It's, is it quite essential, I would say, for human survival, civil and civilization survival to dismantle these doomsday machines, even if some nuclear weapons were to continue as a deterrent. We don't have to have a doomsday machine for sure, but we do and we're continuing it. So that's a challenge, understand how this is happening and what the risk is and almost no American understands that because it's not a question of conflict between the parties. Both parties compete to provide this money to the services, to the contractors and whatever. There's no basic difference between the two parties. It's not an issue in the campaign that's going on as we speak, zero. There's not been a word mentioned in the campaign by either side nor reducing these incredible military budgets which explicitly are about for the US, are about $700 billion, but actually if you include everything, easily go up to a trillion, a trillion dollars a year. The kind of money that could easily deal with the climate problem, if we were direct to that year by year and isn't and all the other problems we deal. So you can ask, why are we spending to create this threat to humanity instead of spending on anything else, you know, the other things that need it? Well, again, question of political economy, who profits and some people do benefit by this status quo and they have the power. The question is how to confront that. That's very long. That's where we are. Thank you, Daniel. And in the next part, we'll delve into the parts of your book which talk about the change in military tactics from armies fighting against armies to the attacking of civilians and cities in a move from armies and navies to the role of the Air Force and the rise of nuclear proliferation and nuclear weapons and the use of nuclear weapons, particularly in Japan. Then after that, we'll talk about some of the different political and economic structures that today impede experts and influence the political economy and stop us from reducing the size and scale of nuclear weapons that so viciously and frighteningly threaten mankind.