DANIEL ELLSBERG'S NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE
The dissident had his 'Dr. Strangelove' moment on a 1959 visit to the hottest front of the Cold War
The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, with worldwide fear about how far Vladimir Putin will go as the battlefield turns against him; and the increasing diplomatic importance of Iran’s cache of partially enriched uranium: these live issues are keeping the bomb in anxious focus around the world. It’s hard to assess what’s more astonishing—that the United States has not had an ambassador in Moscow since last June or that there has been so much blood shed over partially enriched uranium buried somewhere underground in Iran that may be impossible to retrieve and to weaponize.
The United States, Russia, and Israel have huge arsenals of nuclear bombs that are ready to be deployed, as does Pakistan, the site of recent talks between Washington and Tehran. So do India, China, France, the United Kingdom, and North Korea. Iran does not have one.
Nonetheless, the world is teetering on the edge of nuclear madness even as the leadership in Washington and Tehran seem to find it impossible to stick to the negotiating table as the two nations struggle to reach an acceptable resolution of hostilities. This week has seen more US bombing in retaliation for Iran’s shelling of its neighbors, which in turn was in response to continued Israeli attacks by ground and air in Lebanon that Iran believes were in violation of the ceasefire agreement it had reached with Washington. Still, the vitally important and possibly fruitful diplomatic talks continue.
All of this has led me to remember that my pal Daniel Ellsberg passed away three years ago this month. And to think again about an amazing early morning talk—Dan never watched the clock—that we had perhaps a decade ago about one of Dan’s obsessions: the successful issuing of an order for a nuclear attack, which should only be made by the president of the United States, emerging from battlefield officers far below in the chain of command.
Dan told me then something that would have been the highest national security secret in 1959, when he was a shining conservative intellectual light out of Harvard, the Marine Corps, and the RAND Corporation, conducting an official study of command-and-control of nuclear strike authorization. He came to grips with the realization that presidential control was a terrifying farce. We were having a smoke and walking my dog on Newark Street in northwest Washington—Dan often stayed with me and my family while in DC in those days—when he started talking about an official visit he made to an Air Force combat base in Kunsan, South Korea, close to the border with North Korea and just a few moments by air from northeast Russia.
