From Ellsberg’s 2017 book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner”
In 1971, the young defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg had taken on the Nixon administration, risking his career and freedom to leak the Pentagon Papers. He showed the world that the U.S. government had lied repeatedly about beginning and winning the war on Vietnam.
Now, over 40 years later, Ellsberg is sharing the research from his most ambitious project yet, The Doomsday Machine — a stunning insider’s tale of the American nuclear procedures.
Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner during the 1950s and ’60s. In The Doomsday Machine Ellsberg offers an expose about “the nuclear war planners, of which I was one, who have written plans to kill billions of people,” calling it “a conspiracy to commit omnicide, the death of everyone.” Ellsberg asks us, “Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don’t know. I choose to act as if we have a chance.”
For decades he has put himself on the line to oppose those plans: writing, speaking, standing up, and sitting-in against the threat of nuclear annihilation. Ellsberg has been hauled off to jail for civil disobedience against war over 80 times.
On Dec 13, 2017, Daniel Ellsberg was on stage at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. He had an engaging conversation with the Club’s President, Dr. Gloria Duffy. She and Ellsberg share a similar background. She worked as a resident consultant at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, where Ellsberg had been 6 years earlier. She then was Communications Director at the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C..
This broadcast is part of a celebration of the work and life of Daniel Ellsberg. He recently disclosed that he has pancreatic cancer and has only three to six months to live. He remains active in his anti-nuclear work and wrote that his editor knows that he works better under a deadline. And Ellsberg adds Quote: It turns out that I also live better under a deadline!
CREDIT: Commonwealth Club in San Francisco
DATE: 2017/12/13
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:59 — 39.8MB)
