Quotes from Daniel Ellsberg

What a true history of the Cuban missile crisis reveals is that the existence of masses of nuclear weapons in the hands of leaders of the superpowers, the United States and Russia—even when those leaders are about as responsible, humane, and cautious as any we have seen—posed then, and still do, intolerable dangers to the survival of civilization.

SAC's only mission in that initial period—which included the formation of NATO—was to threaten or carry out a U.S. first strike against the Soviet Union (possibly to protect Middle East oil, as well as Berlin and Western Europe). It was not at all to deter or retaliate for a nuclear attack on the United States or anywhere else, which was not then a physical possibility.

Within the arsenal there were some five hundred bombs with an explosive power of twenty-five megatons. Each of these warheads had more firepower than all the bombs and shells exploded in all the wars of human history.

see note to p. 249), which I can still recommend

What if this isn't China's war?" the voice asked. "What if this is just a war with the Soviets? Can you change the plan?" "Well, yeah," said General Power resignedly, "we can, but I hope nobody thinks of it, because it would really screw up the plan.

Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule. —Friedrich Nietzsche

More problematic, in retrospect—in fact, I would now say, flat wrong, recklessly so—was the presumption that such regimes, like Nazism, had an insatiable appetite for expansion, which they were determined to satisfy by military aggression where necessary and feasible.

From my academic life, I was used to being in the company of very smart people, but it was apparent from the beginning that this was as smart a bunch of men as I had ever encountered. That first impression never changed (though I was to learn, in the years ahead, the severe limitations of sheer intellect

What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?

Neither of us joined the extremely generous retirement plan RAND offered. Neither of us believed, in our late twenties, we had a chance of collecting on it.

His shelter, as it turned out, burned down in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis the next year, leading Leo Szilard to comment that this proved not only that there was a God but that He had a sense of humor.

Yes, but the whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh? —Dr. Strangelove

we were working to assure the survival under attack of a capability for retaliatory genocide

For every ton of bombs dropped on England in the nine months of the Blitz, England and the United States, mainly England, eventually dropped a hundred tons of bombs on German cities.

in the summer of 1964, coincided with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which became the basis for a congressional resolution that gave Lyndon Johnson almost unlimited authority to pursue the Vietnam War. Ellsberg establishes that the incident was not the military attack on an American ship that Congress thought it was, and that the administration was cooking up evidence to justify a course of action it had already decided upon.

without President Kennedy's knowledge, and, brandishing the might of the United States

McNamara had indicated to me in the luncheon in his office that he would never recommend any such thing. And as I've said, much later he revealed that in fact he had advised both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson never, under any circumstances, to initiate the use of nuclear weapons. He said that they had agreed with him.

The planning we were threatening to carry out was best described by a skeptical Pentagon colleague: "We send in a series of increasingly larger probes. If they're all stopped, we fire a [nuclear] warning shot. If that doesn't work, we blow up the world.

In short, the first Trinity test at Alamogordo constituted a conscious gamble by the senior scientists at Los Alamos and their immediate superiors: a gamble with the fate of every sentient being on the face of the planet and in the atmosphere and the depths of the oceans.

In the face of an enemy believed to be Hitlerian in savagery and armed with a nuclear force believed (incorrectly) to be superior to our own, all these concerns and considerations of safety and high-level control gave way.

This is precisely the explanation given to the president in Dr. Strangelove for his lack of ability to send a Stop order to the planes that have been launched by the mad base commander General Jack D. Ripper.

It's going to be hard to stop this process. The generals are itching for a fight.134 They want to go." The message that Khrushchev took from Dobrynin's account was that if this crisis continued to escalate, Kennedy might well face a coup.

We came out into the afternoon sunlight, dazed by the light and the film, both agreeing that what we had just seen was, essentially, a documentary. (We didn't yet know—nor did SAC—that existing strategic operational plans, whether for first strike or retaliation, constituted a literal Doomsday Machine, as in the film.)

I believe that each leader was—contrary to his public declarations, and in Kennedy's case, secretly from almost all his advisors—determined, to the extent that he had control over events, not to go to war, not to permit armed conflict to arise between American and Soviet forces under any circumstances.