Ellsberg: Cranbrook, Pentagon Papers, book

Deemed "the most dangerous man in America" by former United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger for leaking a top-secret defense study now known as The Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg risked his freedom to reveal government lies that started and escalated the war in Vietnam. Raised in metro Detroit and graduating from Cranbrook Schools in 1948, Ellsberg's later studies led him to work as a consultant on the country's war strategy, including nuclear plans still in use today. His most recent book, set to be released in December 2017, "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner," promises to release new secrets about the country's nuclear war policy. Ellsberg recently spoke to Downtown reporter Kevin Elliott about the book, as well as his life before and after the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

How did you come to Michigan, to Cranbrook Schools? How did that come about and what were your plans at the time?

I didn’t have a lot of plans when I was 12. Actually my mother had very specific plans for me to be a concert pianist, and I had been working on that since I was 5. I had gone to grade school in Highland Park, Michigan, at quite a good public school. I’ve always regretted what I heard about our country and the decline of its public schools in my lifetime.

My mother arranged for me to go to school only half-days, which was the time that I was about 7 or 8. I took an I.Q. test, I don’t know the results of it, but they allowed me to go only in the mornings so I could practice in the afternoons. I spent all of my time, essentially, from basically 5 to 15 when my mother died, and even a couple of years after that, doing nothing but playing the piano, as I recall it.

I had recitals every year. My teacher was an accompanist to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and we had various recitals, but one big one every year that I had to practice for all year. By the time I was 8 or 9, and certainly 10, I was practicing for four hours a day, then I got up to six hours a day. She wanted me to go to a good school, and she heard about Cranbrook somewhere. I took another test for Cranbrook, and was accepted when I was 12, I think, for the 7th grade. I started that year in February in grade school. They started me in the beginning of the year, so I actually went back half a year in the 7th grade at Cranbrook as a full-scholarship student.

My father had been an engineer at Albert Kahn, in the Fisher Building in Detroit. He worked during the year as the chief structural engineer on the Ford Willow Run plant, which built B-24s on an assembly line, hanging from hooks. As a little boy, he took me out to Willow Run when it got into operation, and there were B-24 bodies in a line. Altogether, the line was a mile-and-a-quarter long. It was a very impressive sight, and I was very proud of my father. He went on to be chief structural engineer on the Dodge Chicago plant, which made engines, for I think, for B-29s. When these planes would come off the line, by the way, they would just be lowered to the ground and filled with gas, and fly away. It was an impressive operation – Detroit, the arsenal of democracy.

My mom, she just wanted me to go to a good school, and Cranbrook was a very good school, and as far as I know, still is a very good school, really excellent. When I went to Harvard, I found the classes relatively easy in a way because I had five years of quite strict academic upbringing, and a lot of homework. I was very well prepared for that.

The future that stretched before was that of a pianist, even though I became aware, I didn’t think I was going to have the career of my hero, Vladimir Horowitz – I just wasn’t up to that. My impression then was that it is hard to make a living as a concert pianist unless you were in the very top, and I didn’t expect to be there. In my last years at Cranbrook, my brother, who was 11 years older, my half-brother was quite radical, introduced me to economics. He actually bought me an economic textbook for my Christmas present in my junior year at Cranbrook. I got very interested in economics, especially in labor economics. I read books about the labor movement in Detroit. Walter Reuther was my hero, as a matter of fact. I remember very well being just thunderstruck when he was shot in Detroit during that period by what turned out to be, later, a coalition of manufacturers who hired several gunmen from Canada to come over and shoot him with a shotgun. It didn’t kill him. It wounded his arm, forever.

I actually was regarded as pretty radical, for my interest in the labor movement, at Cranbrook. The non-scholarship students were nearly all children of auto executives from Bloomfield Hills or elsewhere, and were quite Republican or right wing. So, when I was interested in Henry Wallace, for example, my senior year there, they regarded me as very leftist. I also wrote a humor column for “The Crane,” the Cranbrook newspaper, and I wrote a column every week anonymously, and loved watching people read it and laugh, and not know who the author was until our graduation. I was the class valedictorian.

Oddly enough looking back on it, I was voted “most likely to make a contribution to human welfare,” which was interesting.

I think that happened. I think they were right.

Thank you. Anyway, I did what I could.

I took an SAT for a competition run by the Pepsi Cola Corporation, which had a foundation for sending two students from each state on the basis of tests to a college of their choice anywhere with all expenses paid. The Pepsi Cola Scholarship. It was based on two SATs, one for the state or one nationally, or something like that. I did well on both of those and was one of the two from Michigan who could go anywhere they wanted. I chose Harvard.

The summer that I graduated from (Cranbrook), 1948, I did two things. I thought I was going to have a career in the labor movement as a labor economist. Or, a labor organizer, romantically. That summer, between Cranbrook and Harvard, I actually spent all summer at the Dodge Hamtramck plant on the night shift. The day shift was entirely occupied by Polish Americans, and southerners, blacks and acolytes like me, were on the afternoon shifts. It was very, very hot in the summers in Detroit. That was a very interesting summer. It permanently damaged my hearing. I worked in the press shop of a car manufacturer, and if you’ve never been in a press shop, it’s very noisy. You open the door and you go into this huge loft-like building where they have several-story high presses that press out the entire top of the car. Then others press out the fenders and sides and so forth. I think its three or four stories high, and the press would come down: eeeeeyra – crash! Stepping into that building was like diving into a pool of sound. We didn’t, in those days, have something for our ears, that was something the union brought in later. So, my high-pitched frequencies got cut off at that age, and I’ve been wearing hearing aids now the whole time.

It was the next year that I worked on a ranch in Wyoming stacking hay. Very, very hard work. The hardest work I ever did, physically. I haven’t had a life of hard physical work. I’m a very white collar person, but that was very hard.

Your work in economics and the Ellsberg Paradox, did that transition well into your work with Rand?

I was working on labor economics my first few years at Harvard, then my academic advisor said I should write a better thesis in theory. I wrote an honor’s thesis on that subject. I got summa cum laude at Harvard, and people that read it, the Harvard Society of Fellows, which is an alternate to the PhD program, but in between there, I did get a Woodrow Wilson scholarship, which I could take anywhere. I went to Cambridge University in England, following a professor of mine who moved over there. I spent that year with my wife. I had got married in the middle of my junior year, so we went back to England in ‘52-’53. Meanwhile, the Korean War was still on, or the Korean Emergency, and I had been deferred on a student fellowship in 1951. So I had a couple of years of deferment and felt that I would eventually pay that by going into the service. I chose the Marine Corps.

My wife, who I married when I was 19, had a Marine colonel for a father who became a brigadier general when he retired. She’d grown up on Marine bases, and loved the Marines. I thought it would please her to be back on a Marine base. I went in the Marines in ‘53 for two years, then extended for a year because my battalion was going to the Mediterranean and we had indications, including from the Alsop Brothers columnists, that we would be at war with Egypt over the Suez Canal. I couldn’t stand the thought of being back at Harvard for the Society of Fellows while my battalion was fighting possibly in the Middle East.

We were there for six months during the Suez Crisis. We evacuated all of the Americans from Alexandria at one point while the British and French were attacking Egypt. Then I came back to the Society of Fellows.

To answer your question, I had written this thesis on game theory. I wrote several articles based on that, and I remember I was correcting proofs by torchlight, flashlight and moonlight in a foxhole in Vieques during several months of maneuvers in the Marines.

When I was back in the Society of Fellows, I got interested in an off-shoot of game theory. I have been a critic of game theory, almost the first one, and one of the few up to this day to criticize the foundations of game theory. But that spun off into a field called decision theory, which deals with decisionmaking under uncertainty – not only against an advisory, like game theory, but against nature, in effect. Decisions like, do we evacuate Houston in the face of uncertain warning of a hurricane coming along? A hurricane isn’t a conscious adversary, except in the case of about a third of our country who can only understand that in terms of divine will. But just any kind of decision under uncertainty.

I wrote my PhD thesis at Rand (Corporation). I took six months off from my work at Rand and did a PhD theory on decisionmaking under uncertainty.

I concluded in that thesis that the reigning theory at that time, which was that people should act as if they assign precise probabilities to events; like say, it’s 35 percent likely that the hurricane in Houston will make landfall on a certain day, or something like that – I felt that was unrealistic, not only in terms of their expectations, but everybody admits they were more vague than that. They even act as if they assign post-probabilities to events, and I had a different theory of how that worked, which I called ‘situation ambiguity,’ which is where you don’t know enough to assign even close probabilities to events.

When we initially spoke, we thought we would talk about the Pentagon Papers, of course that was before the presidential election and the completion of your book “The Doomsday Machine.” In light of that, we wanted to ask you how from your own life the importance of the Pentagon Papers and your work as a defense analyst at the Rand Corporation led you to write a book about the country’s nuclear war strategy from the 1960s to today, what that strategy involved then and where you believe we are today?

I went to Rand one summer when I was in the Society of Fellows. It was sort of the Vatican of decision theory. So, I was drawn to Rand not because of their defense work for the Air Force, but because their mathematics department, in particular, and their economics department, had done a lot of work in decision theory and game theory. I went as an economist, which was my field at that point. The economics department was working on nuclear strategy a great deal for historical reasons I won’t go into.

I was drawn to the particular problem of a decision, which was the president’s decision whether to go to nuclear war or not on the basis of uncertain warning. We had, and have, an elaborate warning system of radars and eventually satellites – infrared satellites and communication satellites – to give us warning of the Soviet, in those days, attack. Or Russian attack, now. Or, anybody else. Big radars in Alaska and Greenland and elsewhere. The problem was though, that this warning would never be certain. It would never say an attack is on the way – it would say here are the indications, that it may be, and how many missiles and so forth. It turned out that these were subject to a great deal of mistakes and errors; say mistaking a flock of geese for a flock of planes, for example. Or sunlight glinting off clouds as being the infrared plumes of missiles rising. That happened exactly in 1983.

In 1983, the Russians had exactly that experience, and a colonel in the Soviet Union was faced with the question of whether to tell his superiors that an American attack was on the way, which is what his satellite warnings were telling him. He wasn’t sure, and rightly so. It was a false alarm. He chose not to reveal the full degree of evidence to his superiors because he suspected it was not right. Fortunately, he was right, and his decision was right, so we are still here. Soviets at that time were poised, in the same way that we would have been at that time, for a pre-emptive attack based on that, to get their missiles off the ground before ours arrived. This is very close to the subject of my book. Also, to get our remaining missiles before they got launched. The assumption being that there weren’t just empty holes for them to get, but that some missiles were on the way but others hadn’t yet been launched. They would have launched that to limit the damage, supposedly, to their country from the oncoming attack, and to prevent their retaliation from being destroyed on the ground.

That was an exact imitation of our plans from the late ‘50s on, from the time they had nuclear weapons to threaten us with. Our countries have always been fixed on the idea of pre-emption, even though they try to be very foggy about this to the public. It’s what’s called “launch on warning.” You press the button here before the enemy warheads have arrived. That is the basis of our planning, and always has been. That is extremely dangerous because if false alarms continue as they have until not too long ago, that means potentially, the world as we know it can be destroyed by that effect.

Since the Russians imitated our own strategic forces in the mid ‘60s, really after Khruschev under Brezhnev, after the Cuban Missile Crisis had humiliated them, they spent an enormous amount of money buying what amounted to a strategic air command of their own based mainly on missiles, where ours started with bombers. Until that time, they had very little that could hit the United States, just as North Korea doesn’t have that now in its missile capability, and is striving to get it so they will have the retaliatory ability against the US.

When I went to Rand and got top secret clearance, I was working on deterring a Soviet surprise attack that would wipe out our strategic air command and leave them essentially with a monopoly of nuclear weapons. That was an entirely illusory problem, which I was working on night and day. I was working 70 hours a week at Rand to deter or pre-empt a Soviet attack, which could not have happened. The Soviets in 1960 and ‘61 had exactly four ICBMs (Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles) that could hit the United States, which could have been wiped out by a single plane on our part, compared to thousands of warheads on planes and missiles, and submarine missiles within range of the Soviet Union. They essentially had nothing. It was like the Germans in World War II, where the Manhattan Project had worked night and day to deter a German capability of nuclear weapons, which didn’t exist because they had stopped their program in June of ‘42, about the time we started ours. They had nothing. And, North Korea today has nothing against the United States, but will as things go on, unless we launch a catastrophic war against North Korea.

During that period, there were false alarms that could have led us to attack the Soviet Union, in which case they did have a huge capability against Europe. Nothing against the US – but huge against Europe. Had we attacked them, west Europe would have (been) annihilated, and the Soviets would have been annihilated. In the early days, we would have not have been (annihilated), so our calculations showed. Our calculations were wrong.

In 1983, nearly 40 years into the nuclear era, a bunch of environmental scientists discovered that the attacks on cities – which we planned from the very beginning starting with Hiroshima and Nagasaki – they discovered that the smoke from those burning cities would have been lofted by the nuclear attack into the stratosphere. There the smoke would remain and be lofted further over time by sunlight as it warmed. It would girdle the globe and prevent most sunlight – 70 percent, perhaps of sunlight reaching the earth – which would have led to a nuclear winter all year round, killing all harvests and destroying all our food supplies. So, everything depending on vegetation – all the primates, all the vertebrates – would have died. Probably not all humans would die. We are so adaptable, we can live on mollusks in the south seas down near Australia and probably around the tip of Africa. Probably humans, the most adaptable mammals, would survive to some extent. Less than 1 percent of the current population, but that’s a lot, many millions. Maybe 100 million. Everything else goes.

That would have happened, I show in my book, as early as 1950 or ‘52, when we had a thousand fission warheads trained on cities in the Soviet Union. We wouldn’t have gotten off scott free. Like everyone else, we would have starved in about a year. You’d be dead.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, as I go into in the book, had that gone into large scale, US-led surprise attack, in the course of fighting with Russians it would have most certainly escalated, we would have died from it. Although, we didn’t know that at that point. I was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis at a high staff level as a consultant. The idea of preempting on either side, Russia or the US, has been a hoax all this time.

When I look now at the possibility of war arising between Russia and Americans in the Ukraine, as has never happened. Or in a more limited way in Syria, that just leads to a cold war that will eventually end up in a hot war. If fighting starts in the Ukraine and we end up shooting at Russians and they at us, that’s never happened, ever, ever. I mean except, you know, the troops we sent over in 1918 and 1917 against the Russian Revolution for a few months. But other than that, there’s been no fighting between Russians and us. We both have this doomsday machine, as I call it using (Herman) Kahn’s term, my colleague at Rand. But a system that destroys most all life on earth. Actually it won’t destroy the bacteria, the microbes. That’s not a joke. They will survive, mostly. But the larger animals will not, even if some humans do. So it’s fairly called, I think, a “doomsday machine.” It’s doom of the 7 billion humans.

A war between the US and Russia right now would mean starvation within a year or so, with our stocks of food. Starvation of about 7 billion of them – we have about 7.4 billion. That’s the system we are threatening, and building up.

Obama decided to program a trillion dollars worth of new weapons over 30 years in order to get Congress to sign on to his START II Treaty, which in the end has never been ratified. We promised them we would build up these weapons. Hillary promised to do it, and Trump is in the process of doing it. He’s in the process of rebuilding at the cost of a trillion dollars a machine, that if it were set in motion planes, missiles and submarine missiles on the basis of, let’s say, a mistaken electronic warning.

In 1995, after the Cold War, Yeltsin is told a missile may be coming toward Moscow. He’s looking at his briefcase that has the nuclear code, and some of his generals are telling him, ‘go, before this thing wipes out Moscow and our command and control.’ He hesitates. It seems too long for this thing to hit. They finally decide it’s not real. In fact, it was a Norwegian weather rocket. A weather rocket. One. Why would NATO be sending one rocket against them? And some people thought it was an attack. If he would have listened to his generals, what some of his generals had told him to do, we would not be talking. We – you and I – would have starved to death with our children by 1995 or 1996. That’s the system both sides are rebuilding now. Two doomsday machines. It’s the most insane and immoral policy in the history and prehistory of our species.

In your book, do you come to a conclusion on how it can be reversed?

They should not exist, our ICBMs. And they haven’t had any rationale (to keep them) for 50 years, since we have had submarine-launched missiles, which are not vulnerable (to attack). These are vulnerable. We already have the ability, very accurately, to destroy Russian-based land missiles, if we want to get them off the ground fast if there is warning, a false warning for example. Suppose the warning isn’t false. That they really are attacking. Do the ICBMs do anything for us if we send them off? Zero.

A Russian attack would be suicidal for them, and for us. Our response would be suicidal for them and for us, and for everybody else. There’s absolutely nothing to be said for these (missiles), except that they provide jobs and real estate values and votes in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming. The senators from those states formed an ICBM caucus so that they don’t get rid of these ICBMs. Secretary of Defense William Perry under Clinton has written in op-eds that we should get rid of our ICBMs and we should have done it long ago. Heads of staff, like General Cartwright, or General Lee Butler, who was head of Strategic Air Command, said get rid of the ICBMs. But no. As I said, someone has to build them, and that’s jobs.

Should the Russians attack them? No, that’s totally irrational. The same with us. But here we are, ‘decision making under uncertainty,’ which is the mark of a species that should not be trusted with nuclear weapons.

‘Mutually assured destruction’ is still the strategy?

That was just a phrase that McNamara used, but it describes the reality. In view of that reality, he should have recommended, in strategic terms, cutting down our warheads to a level that would be sufficient to deter.

Here’s a question: Herb York, director of Livermore Laboratory, one of the two campuses at the University of California that has designed all of our nuclear weapons. He was the first director of that, then he was the director of research and engineering for the Defense Department. He asked, “How many explosions on our enemy’s territory are needed to do that. How many survivable hits are needed to deter attack?” How many cities do you have to destroy, or have the capability, to deter an attack. What would you say? Think about it. You’re president, what would it take you to deter attack on another country? How many cities are you prepared to lose?

I would say one would be enough.

That’s what he said. Then he said, you might want more than one to assure them you had at least one to go. By the way, how many survivable warheads did Saddam Hussein have to have – he didn’t have any – or Iran, to deter an attack? Well, one would go very far. Ten maybe.

That’s roughly what North Korea has now. Ten, maybe 20, maybe a little more. And they may not have any, by the way. We don’t know if they have weaponized anything to go on a missile, but they probably have, and they certainly do have the warheads. They have enough for maybe 10 or 20 warheads – pretty good deterrence for most people. None yet to get the United States, which is what they are working on, and it would be good to stop them from that. But the only way you’re going to do that is by concessions by negotiations in which you induce them, for instance, by stopping exercises rehearsing invading North Korea, which is what we just did a month ago. And, by not talking about decapitating them in a surprise attack, or otherwise, which was in the news just yesterday about South Korea going into a special decapitation mode, but we have been exercising that for years and announcing it. Sign a peace treaty with them and say ‘we are not going to do regime change in this tyrannous country of North Korea.’ Stop talking about overthrowing them and get them to freeze their warhead program and their missile program, so they don’t get an ICBM and they don’t get an H-bomb. It can only be done by reaching concessions of the form of ceasing to announce to them that we are preparing for regime change and for invading them. That’s where we should go, and where I hoped Trump would go, but it’s not where he’s going. He’s going toward confrontation.

If there is war with North Korea, millions of South Koreans, and probably Japanese, will die, including tens of thousands of American soldiers in South Korea. No civilians in the US will die, probably. Only our allies. But it won’t cause nuclear winter. Even a war between India and Pakistan would not cause nuclear winter, but it would cause a nuclear famine, it’s been shown, that would affect about 2 billion of our people in the world who are most malnourished by the loss of sunlight. It wouldn’t be enough to stop all harvests, just enough to shorten harvests and to kill some, and lower the food supply enough to kill 2 billion people. A war between the US and Russia kills nearly everybody. So, we shouldn’t be talking about preparing for war with Russians, period.

So, no ICMBs, no launch on warning, no first use of nuclear weapons – several states are not going to give up that ship – but we have no rationale for first use of nuclear weapons, and the Russians don’t really. Greatly lower number of SLBMs (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles) because those are accurate and they do threaten any remaining land-based forces you could have, and you want to remove that threat for our own security and world security because it encourages the other side to launch on warning, or false warning, which is a danger. Take away that threat, the way that Gorbachev took away the threat to NATO by removing 5,000 East Line battle tanks from East Germany in 1986 or ‘87. Take away the threat, then negotiate.

Dismantle the doomsday machine, and of course dismantle the Russian’s. They should do that. But, even if they didn’t, it would remove the threat of these two hair-trigger doomsday machines that now are each threatened to go off on the basis of false warning. We can take that away, and we should. Obama was interested in doing that, by the way, but his own defense people opposed it, for reasons that are rather obscure, but in the end, came down to this: There’s a lot of money making these missiles and these weapons, and people’s jobs depend on them, regions depend on them, and votes and campaign donations. That’s enough to keep it going. And that’s why we live on the brink of a kind of final catastrophe.

As I say in the book, “For years, our strategic weapon forces have posed a catastrophe waiting to happen.” Like Katrina, where effects of the hurricane on the levies was foreseen years ahead. Houston, just now, where the total paving over of the entire area has been predicted for years meant that a large hurricane would flood the place. The decisionmaking under that, which is to disregard the catastrophe, the low probability, but not a zero probability of a catastrophe. To just disregard it. That’s the way humans make decisions under uncertainty. And the result is the flooding of New Orleans, the flooding of Houston, the near evacuation of Tokyo by Fukushima. Those are all tiny, tiny warnings of what a nuclear war would be. A large nuclear war.

Have some of your thoughts changed since releasing the Pentagon Papers? At one time you referred to it as civil disobedience.

I have known since ‘64 when the president lied us into the Vietnam War, my president, LBJ, lied us in. I know presidents are more than capable of lying us into catastrophes – a very small catastrophe by comparison, but not so tiny in human terms. A president who lies us in is prepared to make decisions that are very reckless, and dangerous. Unnecessary and unjustifiable. I also know, from nuclear planning, which I had known about to some degree since 1958 or ‘59, 1960, but in particular, 1961, that our nuclear decisionmaking had the seeds of catastrophe in it. But I kept my mouth shut, like everybody else, which I regret. As I say in my book, “I regret very strongly not saying what I’m saying in the book with documents, which I had then, or in ‘61. Just as I regret that I didn’t reveal the lies about the Tonkin Gulf that I talk about in my previous book, ‘Secrets.’”

The first chapter in that is about the Tonkin Gulf, which was my first night in the Pentagon, by coincidence. It was my first day, but it went into night because we launched our first bombing raids against Vietnam that night, August 4. It was just a coincidence that I started that day. So I spent the night in the Pentagon, following those raids because there is a 12-hour time difference between the Pentagon and the Tonkin Gulf. Daytime there when we were bombing was nighttime in Washington. I knew right then that we were being lied to. I knew about the lie.

I then go to Vietnam, I’m there for two years. I got hepatitis, or I would have stayed on. I came back and warned people that we should get out of Vietnam in 1967, a widely held view in the Defense Department, and held by Secretary of Defense (Robert) McNamara when I came and talked to him in the summer of 1967. But, how to do it without losing face politically. McNamara finally recommended we do it. And he was fired for it by LBJ, who wasn’t ready to do that. So, the Tet Offensive occurred, etc., etc., the war goes on after McNamara leaves for seven years, until 1975.

By 1969, I had the example of young Americans who were resisting the draft on Ghandian principles, that they should nonviolently tell the truth and resist. They just had their own lives. Their own freedom to give, and they went to jail by thousands to resist that war. I realized that was something I could do – go to prison – and that I had secrets. This is what I reveal in the book for the first time. You might be the first reporter I’ve talked to about it. I will say that I realized then that I should be telling dangers of nuclear war, the same way I intended to tell the dangers of continuing in Vietnam, which was the Pentagon Papers.

I decided the example of Americans like Randall Kehler, who was going to prison. I go into this in “Secrets” If you want to know how we got into Vietnam and how we got out of Vietnam in 1975, that’s a good book. The point is, I realized that telling the truth could be the right thing to do. It could be the right decision to make, even if the consequences were prison for myself. In comparison of consequences of not telling, the consequences could be millions of deaths, as in Vietnam for the Vietnamese, tens of thousands, 58,000 for the US. But in terms of nuclear wars, we are talking not of hundreds of millions, but of billions. Billions and billions, up to 7 billion. I wasn’t even aware of that in 1969 when I decided to do this. We didn’t know about nuclear winter. But I did know that something like a billion lives were at stake, something like a third of humanity. In reality, nearly everybody, but we thought a third. That’s a lot more than Vietnam.

Was that something that was being considered in Vietnam? When you said there was something else you reveal in the book.

My plans for putting out information on nuclear wars didn’t come about at that time for reasons that come out in the book. I planned at that time to be a truthteller, a whistleblower about nuclear war, and that didn’t happen. I thought that would put me in prison forever. But that didn’t happen for reasons of a natural catastrophe, actually. A hurricane kept me from doing that. We are in hurricane season now, but Hurricane Doria, or Tropical Storm Doria, kept me from doing what I planned to do then.

You were inspired by people willing to go to jail, and you were planning to spend your life in jail. In recent years, you’ve defended Edward Snowden. Does it diminish at all how people view it if they don’t stay and answer for their alleged crime releasing documents? Does it diminish the importance or legitimacy of what he did in terms of releasing documents?

Absolutely. I don’t have any doubt of it. Now, where there risks in what he did? Might it have hurt us? They claim it did, but they claimed that about me, and it wasn’t true. I haven’t seen any evidence that Snowden actually did cause us any real damage to our interests. Nor Chelsea Manning, who was also accused of that. If they come up with evidence, I have an open mind on that, but I do know they lie all the time about the probable effects. I identify totally with Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. These are three very different people, actually different backgrounds and a lot of differences between us, including age. In terms of motives, there’s more important similarities and identities there. I identify with those two people, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, more than with anyone else on earth.

Each of us saw great wrongdoing going on – illegal, but dangerous to democracy and the people. We each thought someone should tell the public about this and warn them. And we each thought ‘nobody else is going to do it, so I’ve got to do it.’ That last part turns out to be a very unusual decision under uncertainty: ‘No one else will do it, it has to be done, it’s got to be done, so I’ll do it.’ It was the example of people going to prison on that basis without expecting they would have any great effect on the war but that it might help – that’s what encouraged me to give the Pentagon Papers. I don’t think I would have without that example.

Snowden has said that my example played a role in his own decision, which I’m very glad to hear. I’m not aware that’s true with Chelsea Manning, she was too young.

I would think that what you’ve done with the Pentagon Papers had to have an enormous effect. I think National Affairs Magazine said in 2010, “no other episode in history has had a greater influence on the conflicted politics of national security/secrecy.”

It so happens that Snowden has said to me, and in public, that he and his partner saw the movie “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” and that had an effect on strengthening his decision to go ahead as he did. I was very happy to year that. I told the directors of the movie about it, and they were happy.

Do you think there are others that followed, including, even Daniel Schorr (former TV reporter) in 1976 when he leaked the Pike Report findings of the Intelligence Committee investigation into questionable CIA activities, leading up to current times and the leaks of classified information by Edward Snowden and Private Manning?

Well, I think we need more such people right now. Not only in this country but in others. But it turns out to be very rare that even one can make a very big difference. I’ll give an example: I suspected that there must be documents in the Exxon Corporation that revealed that they had been lying for years about the effects of fossil fuel burning on the climate. Just as there were documents in the Pentagon that foresaw what a stalemate and disaster Vietnam would be, the Pentagon Papers, I was sure that Exxon had the same. Well, some reporters picked up on that. They investigated and they found some whistleblowers and they actually came up with these studies that I had predicted. I happen to be rather proud of that chain of events, which of course almost nobody knows. The person in charge of the investigative team went out of his way to tell me that he had been influenced by what I said. They found this, and that’s the basis for suits right now against Exxon, which – who knows – may have some effect eventually on climate.

If (Trump) he decides that he is going to attack North Korea, that would be a catastrophe for the people of South Korea and North Korea, and Japan. Possibly, Guam. I think we have a lot — tens of thousands of Americans there who are all at risk. If he decides to do that, I would hope that somebody would reveal that to Congress and to the public beforehand with the utmost resistance and opposition, and try to get that stopped.

Do you think we’ll see more leaks?

We will see more. Will we see enough that we need? Nothing tells us that will happen. We just haven’t had anything like enough. The ones we’ve had, in some cases, have had some good effect.

I’m sure you had a mixed reaction from the public when you released information, and we’ve seen that before.

Yes. It was a mix between “patriot” and “traitor.” I didn’t think I was a traitor and I’m not anymore of a traitor that Edward Snowden is, or Chelsea Manning, but they’re called ‘traitor’ too. There are people who think the president’s secrets should be kept no matter how dangerous or crazy or criminal his actions might be. There are people that say ‘well, if he decides to do it, then that’s the president’s (choice).’ But that’s not a very democratic frame of mind, but frankly, there are a lot of Americans who’ve never felt very strongly about living in a democracy. A third of the country supported staying in the British Empire at the time of the Revolution. Another third, according to John Adams, were indifferent. So that’s two thirds who didn’t feel very strongly about fighting for the republic.

You have a lot of people right now who are willing to live under a king, as we essentially do. We have an elected king, and it’s not a good system. It’s not the system the founders had in mind. And, the ability to go to war without Congress is not what they had in mind. That’s now been done by a number of our presidents, and Trump certainly feels he has that capability.

Talking about the president and other administrations, when Obama came into office, he said he was going to have increased transparency and have a little more enlightened administration.

He went in the opposite direction.

Now with Trump in office saying he wants to crack down on leakers.

I’ve talked to people very high in the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and in the journalistic field who are certain that with (Jeff) Sessions as Attorney General will bring indictments and prosecutions against journalists, which has never happened, and is a clear violation of the First Amendment. I don’t have any basis for feeling certain about this, I thought it was probable for some time. I was very struck to hear some of these very high journalistic authorities say, ‘no, it’s inevitable, he’s going to do it.’ That’s a path that Obama paved by prosecuting more sources – three times more than all previous presidents put together.

I was the first to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act, or any other act, for revealing information to the American public, not to a foreign power. There have been two other cases before Obama. One of them involved several people, and that one was dropped. One person went to prison, Samuel Loring Morison, for a leak, as of course Nixon tried to do to me, but failed. Morison was pardoned, in retrospect by Clinton after he had been in prison. He has been out for quite a while.

Obama came in and holds nine or 10 cases, depending on how you count. Three times as many. Will Trump do that? There’s no doubt. He will surpass that. That will be a great threat to reporting on national security, which will decrease our security significantly. That’s what lies ahead. But, there will be some people who will tell the truth, like Snowden and Chelsea. Unfortunately, all too few, but better than nothing. If my book can encourage people in the field of nuclear planning – which is life with insanity – to come out about that, that is my highest hope. Among my highest hopes, that the example that this can make a difference might encourage someone to say, ‘nobody else is going to do it, so I’ll have to do it.’ Then go to prison for it, and they may save countless lives.

The symbol of Cranbrook is meaningful to you.

They give out a medal to the valedictorian, which I got. It’s a little medal for achievement. The symbol at Cranbrook is an archer who is aiming at the sky. The story of the Greek myth or something is of an archer who the people before him have aimed at the target and hit it right in the middle, so he aims straight up and its high. The motto of Cranbrook is “Aim High.” And that stayed with me. Cranbrook had a good influence on me.