Quotes from Daniel Ellsberg

If Khrushchev had not, surprisingly, initiated an abrupt, humiliating withdrawal of his missiles Sunday morning—without even waiting for an official American response to his proposal of Saturday morning, which Kennedy had argued to his advisors was "very reasonable"—there was every likelihood of the fuse to all-out war being lit by that afternoon.

The major in charge of this little collection of Quonset huts and planes in the hills controlled six and a half times World War II's worth of firepower.

In terms of cost and effectiveness, the air force tenets were simply wrong. In any case, only Britain and America had really prepared themselves in the way of designing heavy bombers for long-range heavy bombardment. And this was not a response to Hitler's aggressions; it started well before Hitler came to power.

the phenomenon of nuclear winter wasn't predicted by environmental scientists until decades after the Cuban missile crisis.

Yet what seems to me beyond question is that any social system (not only ours) that has created and maintained a Doomsday Machine and has put a trigger to it, including first use of nuclear weapons, in the hands of one human being—anyone, not just this man, still worse in the hands of an unknown number of persons—is in core aspects mad. Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.

Thus, virtually any threat of first use of a nuclear weapon is a terrorist threat. Any nation making such threats is a terrorist nation. That means the United States and all its allies, including Israel, along with Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.

City burning, in other words, was becoming something of a science.

Just like the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, any future attack by a single tactical nuclear weapon near a densely populated area would kill tens to hundreds of thousands of noncombatants, as those did. Thus, virtually any threat of first use of a nuclear weapon is a terrorist threat. Any nation making such threats is a terrorist nation. That means the United States and all its allies, including Israel, along with Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.

The world has yet to absorb the lessons of this history—the story of how the existence of humanity was placed in great, unjustifiable danger by men who had no intention of doing that, men who recoiled from ending human history, or from taking what they saw as a high or even significant risk of doing so.

Whether rightly or wrongly, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction, firebombs, and atomic bombs—and believes that it was fully justified in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.

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. More than half a million Germans—civilians—were killed.

At the end of his two terms, President Eisenhower bequeathed to the Kennedy administration eighteen thousand nuclear weapons.

Do you ever feel like the Redcoats?

This mortal predicament did not begin with Donald J. Trump, and it will not end with his departure. The obstacles to achieving these necessary changes are posed not so much by the majority of the American public—though many in recent years have shown dismaying manipulability—but by officials and elites in both parties and by major institutions that consciously support militarism, American hegemony, and arms production and sales.

Only we, the public, can force our representatives to reverse their abdication of the war powers that the Constitution gives exclusively to the Congress.

York posed the question, how many nuclear weapons are needed to deter an adversary rational enough to be deterred? Concurring with Bundy's judgment—as who would not?—he answered his question, "somewhere in the range of 1, 10, or 100 … closer to 1 than it is to 100." In 1986, the U.S. had 23,317 nuclear warheads and Russia had 40,159, for a total of 63,836 weapons.76

most Americans have never recognized as "terrorist" in precisely the same sense the firestorms caused deliberately by U.S. firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden or Hamburg or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. These deliberate massacres of civilians, though not prosecuted after World War II like the Japanese slaughter in China at Nanking, were by any prior or reasonable criteria war crimes, wartime terrorism, crimes against humanity.

The atom bomb did not start a new era of targeting or strategy or war making in the world. Annihilation of an urban civilian population by fire had already become the American way of war from the air, as it had been the British way since late 1940.

I asked, "How do you think that would work?" The major said, "If they didn't get any Execute message? Oh, I think they'd come back." Pause. "Most of them." The last three words didn't register with me right away because before they were out of his mouth, my head was exploding. I kept my face blank but a voice inside was screaming, "Think? You think they'd come back?!