{"id":103235,"date":"2017-12-11T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T12:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=103235"},"modified":"2017-12-10T15:57:25","modified_gmt":"2017-12-10T15:57:25","slug":"the-doomsday-machine-in-donald-trumps-hands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/12\/the-doomsday-machine-in-donald-trumps-hands\/","title":{"rendered":"The Doomsday Machine in Donald Trump\u2019s Hands"},"content":{"rendered":"

7 Dec 2017 – <\/em>In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, thousands of pages of the Pentagon\u2019s secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, exposing the government\u2019s lies and helping to end the war. President Richard Nixon\u2019s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, called Ellsberg \u201cthe most dangerous man in America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now at 86 years old, Ellsberg is revealing for the first time that the Pentagon Papers were not the first classified documents that he removed from his secure workplace. In his new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner<\/em>, he details his early years at the Pentagon, and why he took thousands of pages of U.S. nuclear war plans describing the lunacy of the U.S. nuclear war policy over 55 years ago. What he discovered is frighteningly relevant today.<\/p>\n

Last July 20 at the Pentagon, President Donald Trump reportedly shocked the military staff gathered to brief him on national security issues by suggesting he wanted to increase the nuclear arsenal tenfold. It was after that meeting that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is said to have called Trump a \u201cf-ing moron.\u201d In August, NBC\u2019s Joe Scarborough, citing an unnamed source, said Trump asked a foreign-policy adviser about using nuclear weapons. Scarborough said: \u201cThree times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can\u2019t we use them?\u201d For over 70 years, the president has held the enormous power to launch nuclear weapons, but only one has used it: Harry Truman, ordering the dropping of two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Trump, who seems to relish saber rattling and antagonizing opponents like the supreme leader of nuclear-armed North Korea, Kim Jong Un, may be pushing us to the brink of nuclear war.<\/p>\n

Describing President Dwight Eisenhower\u2019s nuclear war plans, which Ellsberg was tasked with improving in the early months of the Kennedy administration, the whistleblower told us on the Democracy Now!<\/em> news hour: \u201cThey were insane. They called for first-strike, all-out war \u2026 for hitting every city \u2014 actually, every town over 25,000 \u2014 in the USSR and every city in China. \u2026 The captive nations, the East Europe satellites in the Warsaw Pact, were to be hit in their air defenses, which were all near cities, their transport points, their communications of any kind. So they were to be annihilated as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ellsberg recalled how, in 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff matter-of-factly predicted casualties of over 600 million people globally, when the world population was only 3 billion. \u201cSix hundred million, that was a hundred Holocausts. And when I held the piece of paper in my hand that had that figure, that they had sent out proudly, to the president \u2014 ‘Here\u2019s what we will do’ \u2014 I thought, ‘This is the most evil plan that has ever existed. It\u2019s insane.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Ellsberg was summoned to the Pentagon to help manage the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, considered the closest humanity has come to nuclear annihilation. His personal experience there informs his opinion on Trump\u2019s antagonism toward North Korea. The nuclear arsenals of both countries, he says, are \u201cbeing pointed by two people who are giving very good imitations of being crazy. That\u2019s dangerous. I hope they\u2019re pretending. \u2026 But to pretend to be crazy with nuclear weapons is not a safe game. It\u2019s a game of chicken. Nuclear chicken.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite widespread concern with Trump\u2019s mental stability, he remains in control of the world\u2019s most powerful nuclear arsenal. He has promised to rain \u201cfire and fury\u201d on North Korea. U.S. Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, who oversees the entire nuclear arsenal, assured the audience at a public forum in November that \u201cwe\u2019re not stupid,\u201d that he would reject an illegal order from Trump to launch a nuclear attack.<\/p>\n

Not satisfied to leave the check on Trump to the generals, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held a hearing Nov. 14 to consider changing the law to forbid the president, alone, from being able to launch a nuclear attack. Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, who has publicly stated his fear that Trump may start World War III, chaired the hearing. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut summed up the hearing\u2019s intent, saying, \u201cWe are concerned the president of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear weapon strike that is wildly out of step with U.S. national security interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

We are closer to nuclear war than we have been in many decades, which is why Daniel Ellsberg\u2019s example as a whistleblower and his call for people in government to expose current doomsday plans are more important than ever.<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now at 86 years old, Ellsberg is revealing for the first time that the Pentagon Papers were not the first classified documents that he removed from his secure workplace. In his new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, he details his early years at the Pentagon, and why he took thousands of pages of U.S. nuclear war plans describing the lunacy of the U.S. nuclear war policy over 55 years ago. What he discovered is frighteningly relevant today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":66339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}