The Doomsday Doctrine

John Perry
How can we end the threat of nuclear annihilation?

Ken Taylor
is mutually assured destruction a form of collective insanity?

John Perry
Is there any role for nuclear weapons in a reasonable defense policy?

Ken Taylor
This is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from Cubberly Auditorium on the Stanford campus.

John Perry
Continuing conversations that begin a stone’s throw away at Philosophers Corner, where Ken teaches philosophy and I did for 40 years.

Ken Taylor
Welcome, everyone to Philosophy Talk.

Today, we’re thinking about nuclear doomsday.

John Perry
Yeah, but why worry about nuclear doomsday now? The Cold War is over. We had 30,000 warheads pointed at the Soviets; they had even more pointed us. I think we’re down to a fraction of that. A climate doomsday things is more worth worrying about.

Ken Taylor
John, you gotta realize there are still enough weapons in each country’s arsenal to incinerate the earth, cause a nuclear winter, and extinguished practically not just human life, but all life on this planet.

John Perry
But why not take comfort in the fact that exactly one country has ever seen fit to new use a nuclear weapon? That was over 70 years ago.

Ken Taylor
One country so far, but more countries are getting into this nuclear act all the time. I mean, now there’s India and Pakistan. There’s Israel. There’s North Korea for crimey’s sake. Some terrorist with a dirty bomb may be the next one. Look the more players there are with nukes, the more likely they are to be used again, don’t you think?

John Perry
Well, no, I don’t know. When we dropped a bomb on Japan, we had a nuclear monopoly. Nothing really to deter us from using them. But since we lost that monopoly, and there’s been this mutual deterrence, not a singular nuclear weapon has been unleashed.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. But John, we’ve come close a couple times. I mean, I know you—youremember the Cuban Missile Crisis, I’m sure. And you remember that during the Berlin crisis, President Kennedy went on national TV and in the middle of his speech, urged Americans to start building fallout shelter. You remember that, right?

John Perry
I remember it very well. My folks listen to the broadcast and build a fallout shelter. Then a couple of years later, when the Cuban missile crisis came, Frenchie and I were ready to drive up and get in their bomb shelter when Khrushchev started removing the missiles. So Khrushchev saved the world and saved us from a long weekend in a very small place with my folks.

Ken Taylor
But given that you live through that, how can you possibly be sanguine about nuclear proliferation?

John Perry
Well, I’m not saying what I’m not saying when about anything. I just recognize while in a perfect world, no nation would have any nuclear weapons. We don’t live in a perfect world. As long as US, Russia, and China and others insist on having huge nuclear arsenals, you can’t expect other countries not to have at least smaller ones.

Ken Taylor
But kind of thinking—that right there. That’s a recipe for disaster.

John Perry
Well, or a recipe for a nuclear standoff. I mean, if you got nuclear weapons, and I don’t you push me around, like what happened to poor Gaddafi—well, not poor Gaddafi, the jerk Gaddafi. If you and I both have them, you don’t mess with me and I don’t mess with you, like Kim Jong-what’s his name and America. Disarmament would be great. But a standoff beats both nuclear war and nuclear domination.

Ken Taylor
That’s like the NRA’S bogus argument that oh, we’re all safer with guns everywhere. But look, more weapons in more hands doesn’t make us more safe. It just means more chances for accidents, more chances for strategic miscalculation, more chances for chest thumping brinkmanship, more pressure to get ever more powerful weapons. Look, if we want nuclear safety, we’ve got to break the nuclear wheel, John.

John Perry
But how do you propose to do that? Eou can’t expect nations to unilaterally disarm. You can’t expect the US and Russia to have mutual disarmament with China waiting in the wings waiting to be dominant.

Ken Taylor
Look, think about it this way. Nuclear weapons are mostly useless anyway, so why not just give them up?

John Perry
Useless?

Ken Taylor
Well, come on, ask yourself, did nuclear weapons saved the Soviets from defeat in Afghanistan? Or did they forestall the collapse of the entire Soviet empire? Did they prevent America’s debacles in Iraq or Vietnam? Have they helped Israel? You know, their undeclared nuclear arsenal, everybody knows they have. It hasn’t helped them solve their Palestinian problem. They’re useless.

John Perry
You’re thinking of it the wrong way. Maybe nuclear weapons are meant to be useful in a way that a cocked and loaded gun is useful as an instrument of intimidation.

Ken Taylor
Except if you actually have to fire your cocked and loaded nuclear weapons, well, then you fail, right? And then the next time that somebody does actually does fire, then it will almost certainly be the last time that either they or anyone else gets to use this cocked and loaded gun. That’s a pretty limited form of utility, I’d say.

John Perry
Well, Ken, there’s a lot to think about here that we usually don’t like to think about. So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Liza Veale, to remind us just how fraught the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology more generally has been. She files this report.

Liza Veale
These days, when you think of total existential planetary annihilation, you’re probably thinking about climate change. For good reason.

Barack Obama
If we do nothing to keep glaciers from melting faster, and oceans from rising faster, and forest from burning faster, and storms from growing stronger, we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair.

Liza Veale
But for Kate Brown, who’s a professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, there’s another reason to lose sleep.

John Oliver
America has around 4800 nuclear warheads, which is more than enough not just to destroy Earth, but to provide Fourth of July fireworks for Martians.

Kate Brown
The only thing that clams me down is not thinking about, frankly,

Liza Veale
The threat of nuclear technology. It’s receded from our collective fears. But Brown says not for any rational reason, just from a kind of recency bias. Nothing terrible has happened in a while.

Kate Brown
We are alive today and have not encountered nuclear Armageddon really only just by chance and circumstance.

Liza Veale
Nuclear weapons are becoming easier and cheaper to build. And it’s not unlikely that other countries like Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia might get them in the next 20 years. North Korea keeps adding to its stockpile. And you don’t have to imagine a hypothetical war time conflict, escalating to the point of a nuclear attack. All it takes is a small mistake.

Kate Brown
There’s been so many close calls: nuclear weapon falling out of planes, there’s been very close encounters where American planes violated Soviet airspace and the Soviets thought it was an attack.

Liza Veale
Making matters worse, the latest hypersonic missile delivery systems mean if a country thinks it’s being attacked, it doesn’t have hours to decide how to respond has minutes. If a country misinterprets a signal, it could be too late.

Kate Brown
The more these missiles populate the earth, the more danger we are in.

Liza Veale
When we think of a nuclear attack, we imagine a big blast that flattens a city. But nuclear warfare is a lot like chemical and biological warfare. After the pyrotechnics are over, the long term manifestations of that one millisecond flash of a bomb continue for centuries.

Kate Brown
Radioactive contaminants, damaged DNA, chromosomes, organs, so that people develop cancers later in life, they develop cardiac problems later in life. Birth defects are an outcome so that the repercussions of nuclear warfare continue for generations, and generations and offspring.

Liza Veale
Worldwide, what we’ve had since these technologies were first introduced is rising rates of cancer, rising rates of birth defects, male sperm count has been cut in half since 1945. But we’ve never adequately funded research investigating the causation between those things and the nuclear radiation from atmospheric testing of weapons during the Cold War. From the beginning, nuclear technology wasn’t just about weapons—it was supposed to be the beginning of an era of free energy.

Newsreel
Here, in fact, is the answer to a dream as old as man himself—a giant of limitless power at man’s command. And where was it Science found that giant? in the atom.

Liza Veale
Since its commercialization in the 1970s, nuclear power has prevented the emission of about 64 billion tons of carbon dioxide. It’s because of these virtues that nuclear technology has been allowed to proliferate around the world. But it’s also why we can no longer contain the threat of nuclear weapons. One of our greatest hopes for salvation is also one of our greatest liabilities. The scientists have always known this of course. Robert Oppenheimer from the Manhattan Project, he knew it.

Robert Oppenheimer
We knew the world would not be the same. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another

Liza Veale
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Liza Veale.

John Perry
Thanks, Liza, very interesting piece showing the good things and the bad things that nuclear energy has been fraught with. I’m John Perry, along with my Stanford colleague, Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from Xubberly Auditorium on the Stanford campus.

Ken Taylor
Our guest today is a former nuclear war planner, and a renowned Vietnam era whistleblower and the author of a wonderful book, “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” Please welcome to the Philosophy Talk stage, Daniel Ellsberg.

John Perry
So, most people my age know Daniel Ellsberg is the hero who took a generation of us and showed that our worst fears were true about the Vietnam War, and then showed that fears we hadn’t even had were true. Daniel Ellsberg, by the time he was 27, was already helping people at the RAND Corporation and the Defense Department think about nuclear strategy. So how did a 27 year old end up being in that kind of position?

Daniel Ellsberg
I was invited to the RAND Corporation, because it was interested in a rather abstract theory called decision theory, in the theory of rational decision making under uncertainty, how do you act reasonably when you don’t know the consequences of your actions? And that was looked at at that time, not so much by psychologists or people who really knew much about actual human behavior, but on a very abstract level. But once I got there, I discovered a very practical question for which I threw myself into for the next many years. And that was, how do you deter the Soviet Union, which was supposedly building up the ability to destroy the United States to design this Strategic Air Command sac. They were supposedly ahead of us in a missile gap, with what the head of the Strategic Air Command estimated in 1961, or 1000, intercontinental ballistic missiles, even a few 100, even 30, could have disarmed us pretty much and made it impossible actually to retaliate, they would be masters of the world. That’s what my colleagues believed, I respected the marine much they were very smart. And they were being told this by the intelligence services, who were lying to them. So we were lied into into a delusion, the actual reality in 1961, which the Army Navy was saying, but it didn’t serve them. They were saying there were a few new ICBMs at a time when the Air Force was saying from hundreds to 1000, the answer was they had for the problem that I was working on as a 2728 year old was a allusion actually how to deter them from launching a surprise attack, which they had no ability, and obviously no intention to do.

Ken Taylor
So let me ask you a question, though. Because one of the things you did, you went and you ask people hard questions. And one of the things that really kind of interests me is what the doctrine was under the Eisenhower administration, what would cause us to launch a nuclear war and what we would do, I don’t think people realize how, what we were up to, and then you manage to change that. And I wonder if you think that was progress or not, but tell us about the Eisenhower era.

Daniel Ellsberg
I didn’t manage to change it. And a number of presidents who wanted to change that did not manage to change it. It’s essentially the same now. And it was started actually under Truman, not even under Eisenhower, at a time when we had monopoly of nuclear weapons. So our weapons were not to deter attack. In the first instance, the Russians didn’t have anyone. None of them did. Our weapons under Truman, going up to 1952 was the basis of our NATO strategy. And remember, Eisenhower, at that time, was in charge was the general in charge of our NATO strategy, but he was under Truman at that point. And the strategy was that if the Russians go into West Berlin, or West Germany, or anywhere else he goes Slavia, which had broken away from Korea, where they didn’t go and so forth. We will hit every city in Russia and China because there was a sino Soviet bloc so even ready fighting Russians under any circumstances, we intended to destroy all aspects of the sino Soviet bloc. As many people in that block as we could.

Ken Taylor
Okay, this is Philosophy Talk, coming to you from the Cubberley Auditorium on the Stanford campus. Our guest is writer, activist and renowned whistleblower and former nuclear war planner, Daniel Ellsberg.

John Perry
In our next segment, we’ll get into the logic logic of nuclear war and nuclear deterrence. Is there such a thing as a limited nuclear war? What would it mean to win a nuclear war? What would cause a rational national leader to even contemplate initiating nuclear hostilities?

Ken Taylor
The madness of Mutually Assured Destruction—along with questions from our audience, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Tiffany Austin
It’s the final countdown.

John Perry
Thanks to our musical guests that Tiffany Austin Quartet. This is Philosophy Talk. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Our guest is former nuclear war planner, Daniel Ellsberg. And we’re thinking about nuclear doomsday.

John Perry
What would a limited nuclear war look like? How could you tell the winners from the losers of a nuclear war? How would their dead and shriveled bodies look different?

Ken Taylor
So Dan, I have a hard time I can imagine an evil diabolical leader launching a nuclear war. But I have a really hard time getting my head around the idea that a rational actor could calmly and deliberately non evil person could choose to initiate nuclear hostility. So I want you to put me inside of the head of a moral national leader faced with this choice, and show me how such a leader I mean, put your decision theory had might reason his or her way to actually wanting nuclear hostilities. How would that work?

Daniel Ellsberg
You said could a nuclear war be limited and could it be won. Or yes, we’ve had a limited nuclear war, or world war two ended by dropping nuclear weapons on an enemy we knew did not have nuclear weapons. And we won the war. For that anything like that happened now? Absolutely. Attack with nuclear weapons, a country that doesn’t have any and doesn’t have an ally. That’s no joke. That would include Iran. We have a national security assistant right now, John Bolton, who has been asking us to launch a preemptive war to prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon. And his point, like that of the Israelis is they must not be allowed to have it, we’ve got to attack them first. With could be done with non nuclear weapons. But wait a minute, Cheney called for nuclear plans against actually to wipe out Iran. Those were exposed back in 2006. So that would be that would be one we wouldn’t get any nuclear weapons.

Ken Taylor
Are you telling me that, okay, if you’ve got a monopoly, then a rational actor would say—

Daniel Ellsberg
We do have a monopoly against most countries.

Ken Taylor
So that would be rational? You’re the decision theorist. So I want to figure out I’m acting rationally, what could lead me to do this horrible? I mean, what’s the rational calculus?

Daniel Ellsberg
Well as John Bolton, that’s a hardware actually for Iran. The purpose actually, he has been said for 20 years, which is what the Israeli say pretty much is. We don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. We don’t have what North Korea to have a nuclear weapon, which it now does. Bolton wants to attack both. Now. Iran actually couldn’t retaliate. We’d kill millions of people. Would it be a victory? No, we’d have Iraq and Afghanistan for the next 30 years. But we wouldn’t have lost the war. But let me ask the question, but Russia is a different matter. Yeah. Because they can retaliate. Okay, so what we’re not just retaliate, North Korea can retaliate. North Korea could in fact, by sending a boat into our harbors here, killed hundreds of 1000s of people, but we would eliminate them and many people like Bolton and others would say, we’ve won the war in a certain sense we have the world wouldn’t have blown up. But now let’s get to Russia. Okay. That’s what you were really trying, right? We threatened nuclear war even to initiate it. Both sides to both sides. Houghton and the US and NATO continue to say if we had to if we were being beaten with non nuclear weapons, we We would initiate nuclear war. Could that be limited? No. People have worked with that question for over 50 years, they’ve never come up with a plausible, although sometimes individuals convinced themselves they can believe anything humans can so that nobody looking at that says it can really be limited.

Ken Taylor
So why wouldn’t it follow from what you just said, this is what I was trying to say the John, nuclear weapons, especially against a nuclear engineer are useless. I mean, there’s no rational calculus that could lead you to do that. Or you just told me there’s no rational calculus that would lead, right unless you’re going to just intimidate the armed—

Daniel Ellsberg
Unless, unless there for intimidation is what they’re for. And that’s why they’re valued. Although I think the real impulse here before is, it’s very profitable to make them and have worked in Russia, which is now a capitalist country, in the same way that it does here for Boeing and Lockheed, and their equivalents. But even on a strategic level, I’ll give an example. Okay, Berlin, yet many people will say the threats have never had any effect, there wasn’t any real threat and nobody believed them, etc, etc. Only one thing kept Soviet troops out of walking into West Berlin and making it part of East Germany. It was 250 mile kilometers, inside East Germany, there were 22 Soviet cracked armored divisions in the vicinity of Berlin, there was no way for us to keep open the access for to Berlin as we committed to in front of NATO and everybody else, except the threat of initiating nuclear war and the readiness to do it. And every president made plans for that made preparations for that had no other alternative. And actually, it worked. But yet the risk of blowing up the world’s

Ken Taylor
So you agree with John, that the utility of a nuclear weapon is like the utility of a cocked and loaded like the John that you were like, the utility of a cocked and loaded weapon, I’ve got my cocked and loaded weapon, do what I say.

Daniel Ellsberg
And when you do that, you are using the weapon, but you couldn’t make that threat if you didn’t have the weapon. And if you weren’t prepared to look, as we were prepared to do it, we have used our nuclear weapons in a couple of dozen crises, most of them secret from the American people, using the exact way you describe, pointed at somebody at the head, you’re using the weapon. And I’m saying in West Berlin, that worked. The only problem was, is it had a genuine possibility, at some moments, even a probability of blowing up at least the northern hemisphere, and in reality, killing nearly everyone on it.

John Perry
But I want to get down to cases. Let’s take Eisenhower, my whole family loved Eisenhower, they loved Bob Taft more, but they liked Eisenhower. I thought Eisenhower was great. I thought he was rash. I thought he was courageous. He promises that there was this football and he was in total control of nuclear weapons. You tell us that’s a lie. But for him to say, you know, don’t do that, or we’ll roll up the word blow up the world. I mean, was he fooling himself? Well, yes, them? Are they all involved in some kind of Flim flam on the whole rest of it. So they can remain in power over what the hell’s going on. When people deter people from doing things by saying that they will do things that make no sense whatsoever.

Daniel Ellsberg
Almost no one that I know of, and I studied this a lot, civilian or military has wanted to initiate a nuclear war. They prepared for it, but not because they want to initiate it. And that’s true on both sides. They want to have the ability to threaten it, both in retaliation in kind if we should be struck by a nuclear attack. But as I say, this all started when we had a monopoly, and we had a superiority for a very long time. The main thing was a threat of initiating nuclear war by us and to threaten that credibly against Russia is not so easy, because the retaliation is so great. So we have to build up thout we said we had to build up Lockheed and Boeing said we had to build up in there people who went in and out from the government to have the ability to disarm Russia. In case we got close to a war so we wouldn’t get Vitaly ation. Can we disarm Russia? With what we have? Can the Russians disarm us? No. But we can pretend we can. And we make a lot of profit in the process. And we can tell our allies, we are successfully deterring them. Therefore, we deserve Gemini in the ally.

John Perry
Let me ask you this. There’s United Nations pledge we will not be the first users of a nuclear weapon. Everybody in the world sign that except for a handful of countries including us, and he had all leaders I remember claimed they wouldn’t.

Daniel Ellsberg
That doesn’t have to be true. Russia for a while in 1980 and actually earlier in 1986 mentioned 79 But In 1980, Russia did unilaterally declare no fursuits. We didn’t follow it. And after a number of years, they said, well, the US hasn’t joined us. So they stupidly in inexcusably went back to this threat of insane action. And I want to put to you we’ll come back to this as philosophers seriously. The following point. Everybody can see the to initiate. On the side is the philosopher John Somerville called it the killing nearly everyone, which is what will happen if we miss you. Hardly anybody? I can’t imagine anyone who would say that is a rational, sane, reasonable thing to do commonly or desperately or anything else. But to threaten it? That’s the question. Yeah. Is that moral? Is that acceptable? The fact is, the public, the Congress, the services on both sides have acted for 70 years now, as though it was reasonable, rational, necessary, justifiable to threaten, prepare for build, rehearse, train to initiate war that would result in the death of nearly everyone else, and everyone has accepted rationality, that it’s insane. But that’s our species. I’m sorry,

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about nuclear doomsday with a former nuclear war planner was right there on the frontlines in front of a live audience in the Stanford campus. We’ve got questions from that live audience. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, what’s your comment or question?

Speaker 2
Um, thank you. Could you talk about the role of the Eisenhower era, Atoms for Peace, that lead to proliferation, I think of nuclear weapons. And also, the idea of trying to basically make it seem like nuclear material was good, and a choice of uranium reactors as opposed to thorium reactors.

Daniel Ellsberg
The Atoms for Peace program initiated by Eisenhower 1953, was actually meant as a PR program to make atoms look good, which was saying earlier, the electricity will be too cheap to monitor all over the world, which is never been true, in part because of the accident insurance aspect of those things. But it’s never become really competitive in that sense. But they knew that at the time, the what the effect of it was to spread reactors all over the world later in the 50s. Actually, we didn’t do that right away. But we said these things are so good for medical research for this and for that nuclear weapons can be good for humanity, I should say nuclear energy, thorium, as you say, uranium plutonium in order to make our buildup of nuclear weapons out of the way, that’s just something that’s going on, don’t worry about it. Let me tell you one bit of background that almost nobody knows a great significance even to this day, Oppenheimer, whom you quoted, and David Lilienthal, who was in the Atomic Energy Agency at that point, in 1952, at the end of last of the Truman administration, knew that an h bar was coming was feasible. They knew that for the first time in 1951, and in 52, they knew that was coming. The first test of an H bomb using an egg Kosaki bomb as its trigger, was 1000 times the yield explosive yield of Nagasaki, which was in turn 1000 times in Nagasaki, the yield of the largest blockbusters in World War 210 1520 tons, which recalled blockbusters because they destroyed a block of city buildings. Okay. Hiroshima was 15,000 tons equivalent. And the first classroom down to 54 of our H bomb, which is most of the bombs now they’re they’re smaller than that first one. But the first one was 15 million tons of TNT. In other words, 1 million times Nagasaki. Now, they saw that coming. So they said to Truman First, don’t test the H bomb first. First, let’s go into the possibility of stopping either side from getting this in, in any case, postpone it till the next administration. And let’s tell. So Eisenhower came in and was initially attracted by that idea. So they had a project called Project candor, candor will tell the public about Fallout, about you know what the meaning is of an H bomb world, which is 1000 times more than the Hiroshima. They worked on that for several months for the UN speech that Eisenhower planned in the fall of 53. His first year, but the end of his first year, Eisenhower decided that was a little too grim. For a bad news for the world for humanity. As a matter of fact, a lot of the scientists thought this will be the end for humanity. So they changed the speech thing to Atoms for Peace, and they call it rather than Project Candor, which was now discarded, to Operation Wheaties because that’s what they were eating when they made that decision.

Ken Taylor
That’s a disturbing story.

John Perry
So, a little quip before. At school. We had someone from Atoms for Peace, come and talk to us, because they were going to build a reactor down the street near Creek, Nebraska. It was hard for Nebraska, I forget. Then on Saturday, my grandfather and I went up to the top of the bell tower at Union colleges we did every Saturday, put on our binoculars and watch for Soviet aircraft. Because we were part of the ground observer corps

Daniel Ellsberg
What year was that?

John Perry
Oh, I think it was ’54.

Daniel Ellsberg
There was not a Soviet plane that could reach the United States.

Ken Taylor
Okay. Let’s take some more questions. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Kelly
Hi, I’m Kelly. I was wondering, I think it’s Senator Warren and Representative Smith have introduced legislation to prevent a first strike. And I was wondering on the side of the United States to make it illegal to launch a first strike. And I was wondering if you think that that’s a reasonable action to take? And if that would actually have any impact on reducing the

John Perry
You say, Elizabeth Warren has already introduced that. And who else?

Kelly
And Adam Smith of Washington.

Daniel Ellsberg
Yes. That’s a very good thing. Sure. I got her Elizabeth Warren’s credit very much. And, as a matter of fact, Adam Smith, the the now in the house, the Democratic leader of the Armed Services Committee, has proposed this. For some years. I’ve talked to him about it directly. Very good. He said, By the way, it’ll take some years to move us in this direction. But of course, should we do it right now unilaterally, as Brezhnev did it in 1980? Yes. But Is that likely to happen? No.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re thinking about nuclear doomsday with Daniel Ellsberg, author of “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.”

John Perry
is it possible to break the nuclear wheel by ridding ourselves of nuclear weapons once and for all? Or now that the nuclear genie is out in a bottle, is a permanent nuclear stalemate the best we can ever hope for?

Ken Taylor
We’re coming to you from Coverley Auditorium on the Stanford campus. We’ll take more questions from our audience when Philosophy Talk continues.

Tiffany Austin
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

John Perry
Thanks to our live musical guests, the Tiffany Austin Quartet. The world as I know it is full of crooked politicians, nuclear weapons ,and tax breaks for billionaires. So if you want to end the world as I know it in those respects, I feel fine. I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. We’re thinking about nuclear doomsday.

John Perry
Dan, we’re going to do something that we can do on Philosophy Talk that no one else in the world can do. We’re going to make you the worldwide czar. of nuclear arms control. I wish we could really do it. Your task is to break the nuclear wheel. What So this starts tomorrow morning, what’s the first thing you’re gonna do?

Daniel Ellsberg
All there would be no question my mind right away to make the world very much safer right away is unilaterally Gropp, the American Intercontinental Ballistic missiles, the ICBM, which we still have 400, they are vulnerable to attack, they can survive and do anything, only if they go first on warning. And the warning has often been fallible. There have been false alarms. And it’s by a miracle that we have not sent off our intercontinental ballistics, in the fear missiles in the fear that if we didn’t, they would be destroyed. They do nothing for us if they do go first, because they can’t target the Soviet submarine. So I keep us and save the world from destruction.

Ken Taylor
So wait a minute. So I think that sounds I never thought of that. But it sounds like a decision theoretic highly rational thing that if we have, so we have this triad, but if we have this, the bombers and the and the submarines, that is the point that there’s no incentive for an opponent to attack those because there are in some sense there.

Daniel Ellsberg
There is one if you raise that question earlier, it could there be one incentive. Yeah, but just the follow up what you just said. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry, has called for years including an op eds in the New York Times former Defense Secretary for eliminating the intercontinental ballistic missiles to make us safer and the world safer. He’s joined in that by General Cartwright, who was the head of strategic command that follow Strategic Air Command.

Ken Taylor
Wait, what stops our planning elite? Yeah, let’s stop them from doing it sounds really good.

John Perry
Have you thought about what it would do to the economy of North Dakota? No, seriously.

Daniel Ellsberg
It’s funny. You say that it’s not so much the economy, there is a city which depends entirely on demanding of a Minuteman missile base, their minor field, I was told by somebody in Congress very close to the Appropriations poles, posits we can’t get rid of that Minuteman base with its 150 warheads, which were a great danger to us. Because mine at North Dakota would go bankrupt would would not be there. So I said, can’t you put something else there? Like trains or something like that? It used to be there said it’s very publisher of philosophy books might sound like a joke, but But unfortunately, it’s not a joke. The answer was, it’s very cold up there. The people, the people in their Minuteman silos are nice and warm down there. And the senators from Dakota want this to be not just existing up there, and not just on alert 12 hours a day, hot alert. Three seems to have more people to be in restaurants, real estate.

Ken Taylor
I want to follow this through because this I mean, this is really striking to me. There have been things that we have kind of nuclear powers, at least the Soviet Union, the Russians and us have agreed to forego, like anti ballistic missile systems. We gave up the MX missile, didn’t we? Right? Carter thought about developing the neutron bomb, but didn’t all those things. See, it seems as though the whole world could decide, well, let’s outlaw as a next step, intercontinental ballistic ballistic missiles, and then we’re we could still have our nuclear nuclear arsenals, right? That seems like just a win win win. What’s what keeps the world from doing?

Daniel Ellsberg
Well, it’d be very good. And that’s a very strong question. And the answer is, we should have a political campaign to do that. And do we know it’s very unlikely. There is a competing existential issue, of course, and that climate, which again, threatens not everyone on earth, not near extinction, but the end of civilization, the nuclear winter is the end of nearly everybody, not just civilization. But on the climate issue. This goes directly to your point, how did we beat ABM anti ballistic missiles, the scientific community lined up almost in mass almost in mass to say, This can’t work. It will not limit damage, we can’t keep them from destroying us with the anti ballistic missiles that was helped by the fact that any ballistic missiles would have had to be all over the place. And people said not in my backyard. They didn’t want them there. But the site has managed to beat it. Now we have a very current thing on the climate issue. The President is limiting scientific investigation of climate. Yes, it’s one of the most wicked

John Perry
Yeah okay, so it’s 10 it’s 10 o’clock tomorrow morning, you’ve gotten rid of ICBMs. You’ve told North Dakota, two senators to go get lost. What’s the next step?

Daniel Ellsberg
Okay to have operation candour in the world, led by the US, which has never occurred in any of the nine nuclear weapons states with a study of what the actual environmental and climatic effects will be of any of the options that the President has given. Congress has never had hearings on this. The National Academy of Sciences has not looked at FCC, we have to have a request from Congress. That was impossible under the Republicans. It’s not impossible, but it’s not too likely under the Democrats, because that would totally undercut the function of the Air Force, and Boeing and Lockheed by the way, which have competed to build new ICBMs at the cost of many, many billions of dollars. Very good for them. So getting rid of it is not easy. But with the candour if there was real a study showing that it will make no difference who goes first in nuclear war. It wasn’t until 19 8340 years into the nuclear era, that it was realized that the smoke from burning cities would be in 150 million tons, would go into the stratosphere where it would not rain out, and will cover the earth and lower the sunlight reaching the earth by 70%, causing Ice Age conditions on the earth and killing all harvests. Which means that whoever goes first will cause by its own, killing us. The burning of cities will cause the destruction of itself and everybody else and the shame of it.

John Perry
We got people from North Dakota lined up to ask a question.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, so welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Stu
My name is Stu, back around 1970 your good friends Nixon and Kissinger put out the madman theory as a negotiating ploy. Well, now we have a true madman in the White House. What are the safeguards against the President just saying we’re gonna let her loose?

Daniel Ellsberg
There are no safeguards and there never will be any the president is the commander in chief. Nobody can appeal his decision to some higher authority. Congress has essentially ceded the notion that we have to have fast decision making here. They’re out of the process. Can somebody prevent the president no, they can say no to emanate will get fired and replaced within minutes by someone else.

Ken Taylor
I want to I want to take you to part of your book that you were an inveterate cold warrior. When you signed up for this. You You were a firm believer. And here’s what the cold warriors seem to believe that Russia had global domination ambitions, and they saw the United States as the obstacle. And all of our understanding of them was interpreted through that lens. Right? It turns out they had for ICBM when we were talking about the missile gap and all that sort of stuff. So how did you stop being a cold warrior? How did that happen?

Daniel Ellsberg
Oh, I didn’t stop being a cold warrior. Till I would say after the Vietnam War. I was in Vietnam as a cold warrior, trying to save the people of South Vietnam from domination by a tyrannical communist regime granted, they had a tyrannical South Vietnam regime. I understood that, but we always thought that’s less permanent than a communist regime. But the I thought of Vietnam, which was clearly at first I saw as a loser, that we couldn’t we enter therefore, people were being killed. I thought of this, even as a coder, they were being killed to no purpose to no effect couldn’t be justified, it ought to end. Then I read The Pentagon Papers the early years and discovered that from the very beginning, we had been backing a French attempt to reconquer a former colony and Indochina which had declared its independence and are backing that which we did, from the beginning pay 80% of their costs was unjustifiable from any point. So it had been an unjust war from the beginning. I didn’t learn that till 1969 When I read those top secret documents, and at that point, I decided to have operation candor, in respect to Vietnam, and let other people know that and by the way, that’s a statement I’ve ever made in 40 years. I just thought of it.

Ken Taylor
Well, we got—unfortunately, we’ve got to end this conversation. I’m gonna thank you for joining us. It’s been a fascinating conversation.

Our guest has been writer, activist, and renowned whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, author of “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” So John, are you having doomsday thoughts? I mean, what do you think?

John Perry
Well, I’ve had doomsday thoughts, most of my life. But Ellsberg has facts like facts. I mean, he’s got facts about scientists, when they when they exploded the first a bomb on the sands of New Mexico, a lot of them thought that there was one chance in a million, maybe one chance in 100,000, that this would end everything, and they did it. It’s crazy societies, even societies of scientists are insane in a way that individuals mostly are not.

Ken Taylor
So the thing is, people think of this as over they think of this is the Cold War problem. But the same strategies, the same tensions, not quite as great that nobody believes the Russians are going to roll over the world, but the nuclear strategies are still intact. That’s the thing. And the weapons are still there. And the pressures are still there. So it’s reading this book, and talking to Dan is kind of an eye opener. I mean, we all worry about global warming, but we should worry about this. But anyway, this conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers where our motto is koji toe Ergo Blago. That’s apologies to Descartes, I think, therefore, I blog, and you can become a partner in our community, just by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org.

John Perry
Now quick—before the doomsday clock hits midnight—let’s hear from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… I grew up in North Dakota in the heat of the Cold War. The recent oil fracking boom? That was in my neighborhood, a largely treeless realm, marked by hammerhead oil wells, vast fields of wheat, sunflowers, soybeans, prairie, sulfur mines, and the churning Missouri River. Dotted through the brown prairies, surrounded by sad little circles of greenery, or mud, or snow in the winter, were missile silos. We drove by them all the time, nuclear warheads underground, watched over, in my mind’s eye, by pudgy pale teenage boys in uniform. I’m sure vitamin D deficiencies abounded, also nervous breakdowns by the dozens, as they huddled lonely and fearful under the dirt and ice and fluorescent lights. Also, they were bored, with hemorrhoids, I’m sure, and they did not have smart phones or cable, not even television or radio, I’ll bet. Maybe a greasy dog-eared deck of cards. Paperback novels by Zane Grey. Nothing to eat but baloney and cheese whiz on Wonder Bread, washed down with Shasta Grape. Sugar free? Ha. In your dreams. There were missile silos, and also an air force base, all within fifty miles of my paranoid little town. So if and when World War III finally erupted, we would be the first to be vaporized. No doubt. Our school didn’t even bother with the duck and cover drills. What would be the point? We would be blasted to microscopic bits before we even saw the flash. Anyway, a lot of resentment about the Cold War when I was a tad. When the powers that be tried to be reassuring they failed miserably. Nuclear energy is clean energy, don’t worry, in the future it will power trains and vacuum cleaners. Radioactivity is harmless. You can eat plutonium. Oh yeah? Then why are there giant zombie ants clambering up through the drainage system! As is the American custom, fear and anxiety were filtered through pop culture. Dr. Strangelove. On the Beach. Godzilla, and other mutated monsters created by radiation. More painful even than the low level trickle down dread of mutants and annihilation, was the indifference of America to North Dakota’s probable fate. Teevee was all surfers and cowboys and private eyes and baseball. Fantasies and big city problems. Extortion. Embezzling. Cigarettes and beer. James Bond will save us. Relax. If you can. Then, without warning, I moved away from North Dakota. And the Cold War ended. The missiles of my childhood were bundled up and put into storage. The silos became museums. Fear receded, but did not vanish. Some missiles went away. Others appeared, as if by magic. Instead of drunken doddering old Russian men squinting at the red button, we now had secret hideouts, invisible fingers. Does Israel have the bomb or not? What about Pakistan? Do we go to war with Iran to stop them from getting one? And we have some portly young man in North Korea threatening to unleash missiles on the coast of California. Where I live! I got out of North Dakota to get away from this stuff and live inside a Perry Mason rerun fantasy of blackmail, fraud, and frameups, and nuclear paranoia is a no no, but no. The Cold War and total annihilation once again rear their ugly heads. North Dakota, in its cycle of boom and bust, moved through the cold war and oil booms and fracking booms, then back to its cold oblivion. Cold northern Swedes and Germans who settled there because they could go no further. Calvinists. We’re doomed. We probably deserve it. People in California and New York like to complain that North Dakota gets as many senators as they do. Well, you take the silos next time then. Put the missiles under Hollywood Bowl, or Times Square, which will also be homeless encampments. Because America itself is a sad little town, better days behind us, can’t even have a parade without a corporate sponsor, no animals in the circus, nothing to watch but Avengers and Star Wars. Except if there is a next time there won’t be another next time will there? Oh well, maybe climate change will get us first. See you in the bunker – unless I see you first! I gotta go.

Tiffany Austin
Holding hands at midnight ‘neath the starry sky, nice work if you can get it and you can get it if you try.

John Perry
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Ken Taylor
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John Perry
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Ken Taylor
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John Perry
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Ken Taylor
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John Perry
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Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
And thank you for thinking.