Editorial: A nuclear war planners warning to U.S. and world
Even delayed as it was by some 45 years, Daniel Ellsberg’s new book, “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” benefits from good timing.
We may benefit, too, as Ellsberg raises the once-dormant subject.
Its publication comes during the release of the new Steven Speilberg-directed movie, “The Post,” which details The Washington Post’s struggles in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers, classified documents leaked by Ellsberg — then a RAND Corp., analyst for the Pentagon — that outlined the Defense Department’s and Johnson administration’s involvement in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967, the related bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia, and the split between stated policy and U.S. actions in Southeast Asia.
“Doomsday Machine” also arrives as tensions between the United States and North Korea fluctuate between its leaders trading barbs over the size of their “nuclear buttons” to the current South Korea Olympics detente.
Since the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the demise of the Soviet Union, the threat of nuclear war diminished in our minds, even as concerns that such weapons might fall into the hands of terrorists or detonate in an accident occasionally rose to the surface of our consciousness.
North Korea’s recent successful tests of nuclear devices and missiles has brought those threats front of mind and serve as a reminder that a stockpile of nuclear weapons remains not just in our hands but those of other nations, including the restive nations of India and Pakistan.
For added emphasis, Global Zero’s famous Doomsday Clock, now stands at two and a half minutes to midnight, the closest the clock has been to midnight since 1953.
The book for years was Ellsberg’s unfinished work, for which the Pentagon Papers were to have served as a prequel. Along with those documents, Ellsberg amassed a collection of some 7,000 pages of reports and documents related to U.S. planning for nuclear war and its possible results, planning that he participated in. It was his intention to make a similar release of those classified papers once he was past the furor and his trial over the Pentagon Papers, in order to campaign against nuclear proliferation in the U.S. and worldwide.
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