Archival program – Updated from January 2018 broadcast – The international journalist Robert Fisk wrote in the British Independent in August 2019 that we should have paid more attention to the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki since India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran and the US are currently – quote – “Rattling the Nuclear Cage” — and Donald Trump has just pulled out of the Cold War Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia.
When this program was broadcast first in early 2018 Donald Trump’s serial threats of destruction on North Korea had also heightened the risk of nuclear war – and the Seattle anti nuclear movement invited Daniel Ellsberg for an on stage discussion about nuclear winter, staggering death tolls and how terrifyingly easy it is to set off such a war.
Ellsberg had just been able to publish his most recent book: The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. He had been unable to find a publisher.
In 1961 Ellsberg consulted for the Department of Defense and the White House and drafted Secretary Robert McNamara’s plans for nuclear war. He discovered then that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons had been widely delegated. If the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower had been executed, Ellsberg wrote, they would have caused the near-extinction of humanity. He now says that US nuclear strategy has not fundamentally changed since the eras of late Eisenhower and early Kennedy.
Ellsberg says that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization–and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration–threatens our survival. The US is now planning on spending $1-1.6 trillion on nuclear weapons in the next 30 years.
Ellsberg spoke at Town Hall in Seattle on January 9, 2018. He was recorded by Mike McCormick of Talking Stick TV
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
