Quotes from Daniel Ellsberg

A streetcar rattled by on the tracks as I read the headline: a single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought: "I know exactly what that bomb was." It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about the previous fall. I thought: We got it first. And we used it. On a city. I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very dangerous for humanity had just happened.

It was typical of U.S. strategists, then and later, to leave European, North African, and Asian casualties entirely out of account in weighing the deterrent balance. And I don't know of any instance of a president or any civilian official raising this point. In retrospect, that's a startling commentary.

The implication—never questioned by anyone at RAND while I was there—was that adequate deterrence for the United States demanded a survivable, assured second-strike capability to kill more than the twenty million Soviet citizens who had died in World War II. That meant we were working to assure the survival under attack of a capability for retaliatory genocide, though none of us ever thought of it in those terms for a moment.

carrying on a war in someone else's country, a country in no way implicated in attacking our own or anyone else's. To continue to do that against the intense wishes of most of the inhabitants of that country began to seem to me morally wrong.

more than ten years since scientific uncertainties about their calculations have been put to rest, our plans have continued to include "options" for detonating hundreds of nuclear explosions near cities, which would loft enough soot and smoke into the upper stratosphere to lead to death by starvation of nearly everyone on earth, including, after all, ourselves.

These had explicitly denied that the demilitarized zone (DMZ) was an international border separating two independent states.

deliberate bombing of urban populations as the principal way of fighting a war by a major industrial power can be said to have started on February 14, 1942, with a specific British directive

First, that the number of Soviet troops116 in Cuba was not seven thousand, as we had at first supposed, or seventeen thousand, as the CIA estimated at the end of the crisis, but forty-two thousand. And second, that along with SAMs and ballistic missiles, they had been secretly equipped with over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons, warheads included. So

you and I disagree…is with regard to the bombing. You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care.

Operations analysts turned to questions of what the mix should be of explosives and different sorts of incendiaries for the most efficient, cost-effective ways to burn German workers and their families alive.

This was one of Kissinger's first visits to Rand, after a long period of coldness that had begun in the late 1950s because of Rand's critique of his advocacy of limited nuclear wars as instruments of U.S. policy in his 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.

Dwight Eisenhower had secretly endorsed the blueprints of this multi-genocide machine. He had furthermore demanded, largely for budgetary reasons, that there be no other plan for fighting the Russians.

A scholar as authoritative as Richard Rhodes97 was still writing in 1995 that the Soviets had over forty ICBMs in 1961, ten times more than they actually had.

files in the McNamara study offices, I had discovered that this assumption was mistaken. Every one of these crucial decisions was secretly associated with realistic internal pessimism, deliberately concealed from the public, just as in 1964–65.

McGeorge Bundy wrote in Foreign Affairs, "In the real world of real political leaders—whether here or in the Soviet Union—a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one's own country would be recognized as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond human history;

At the time, many American air officers regarded what their allies the British were doing as mass murder.

Among the aphorisms in Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties

don't think it occurred to me in 1961 that the White House might be lying about what the president had been told.

remember someone saying that we were

Vietnam to defend democracy, and remembers me responding that the Saigon regime was no democracy.

I was exactly like the various White House officials who testified later during the Watergate hearings that they had believed—in the words of their boss, President Nixon—that "when the president does it, it is not illegal.

Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.

had begun under Roosevelt, Stimson, and Leahy when, as their subordinate General LeMay put it, "we scorched and boiled and baked179 to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9–10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined

In the limit, every flight commander, if not every pilot with a weapon aboard, would feel authorized, under some circumstances, to initiate nuclear war with the Communist bloc.