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The Current Transcript for February 1, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I believe that secrecy about our nuclear plans and nuclear capabilities and their effects has been more dangerous than the secrecy that gave us 10 years of war in Vietnam.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Daniel Ellsberg was willing to risk serious jail time for exposing the secrets of the U.S. government during the Vietnam War. He famously leaked the Pentagon Papers in the early 70s. But there was another cache of secret documents he intended to leak there whatever sent him to prison for life. He had copied thousands of documents outlining secret plans for a nuclear war that included information from remote fully armed U.S. airbases, calculations and expectations on the potency of thermonuclear bombs, and shocking detail on how military officers far removed from the president could actually trigger a nuclear attack. Daniel Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner, increasingly deeply disturbed at a military plan that could destroy the planet. But the documents he copied were lost and only now, decades later, has he finished writing up all he learned because what existed as a threat then, still exists today. In half an hour Daniel Ellsberg joins me to talk about the Doomsday Machine. But before we begin that conversation we're asking about the presumption of innocence.

SOUNDCLIP

These allegations are false, categorically untrue, every one of them. I will defend myself as hard as I can, with all means at my disposal.

AMT: Canadian politicians, the MeToo movement and the lines between justice, law, opinion and fact. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Due process is for the courts, not for #MeToo, argues lawyer

Guests: Michael Spratt, Hena Singh

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: In Canada, no matter how many accuse you of something, you are innocent until proven otherwise by due process in a court of law.

VOICE 2: As strange as this will sound I believe Brown is innocent. How can we not. We believe in the rule of law and due process restrain from the basic tenants of law at our own peril.

VOICE 3: The moment you find yourself accused you will pray you get due process, that it is slipping away is alarming.

VOICE 4: One of the first things to disappear in a failing democracy is due process. Brown was guilty before being proven innocent.

AMT: Well and tweet after tweet and we voiced a few of them there that you just heard this past week, due process was a hot topic. Conspicuous in its absence according to many in the case of Patrick Brown. His ouster as leader of Ontario's Progressive Conservatives came swiftly and unceremoniously, just hours after an emotional press conference vowing to fight off accusations of inappropriate sexual behaviour, he resigned as party leader making him one of several high profile men in Canadian politics to have it all come crashing down in recent days. The MeToo movement has reached as high as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's own cabinet where a former sports minister Kent Hehr is out pending an investigation.

SOUNDCLIP

I don't a rulebook that's been handed down to me from Wilfred Laurier as leader of the Liberal Party on how to handle these situations. This is new for organisations to have to deal with in this way. And we are doing the best that we can on a case by case basis starting from a place of respect, of support, of belief and understanding that we do have to have fair process as we move forward.

AMT: Well as the prime minister says there is no rule book for these situations. But I'm joined by two guests now to talk about what's fair and what is not. Hena Singh is an employment lawyer and workplace investigator. She's with me in our studio in Toronto. Michael Spratt is a criminal defence lawyer and co-host of The Docket a legal and political podcast. And he's in our Ottawa studio. Hello everyone.

HENA SINGH: Good morning.

MICHAEL SPRATT: Good morning.

AMT: Michael Spratt, I will start with you. You heard in those tweets that people are worried that allegations alone are ending political careers. Should we be concerned that due process is being lost

MICHAEL SPRATT: This is something that always concerns me. As a criminal defence lawyer, the tension that existed me in this case is real because I've seen in court that there are people who are innocent, that there are false allegations. At the same time I know that the charter when it's protecting the right, or the presumption of innocence, applies to criminal and penal matters, so when someone is charged with an offence. And so while the presumption of innocence should be protected in the court, it can sometimes - the insistence on a strict adherence to it outside of the court I think can lead to some complicity in what is a very important movement right now.

AMT: Well tell me a little bit more, then, about your concerns about legal concepts such as due process and presumption of innocence being used in the conversation outside of a courtroom.

MICHAEL SPRATT: Well in the court of course we have the protection because it's the course of power of the state seeking to impose sanctions and deprive someone's liberty outside of the court room though that same consideration doesn't apply when looking at private actors. And that's not to say that there shouldn't be fairness but we don’t insist on a standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt with the presumption of innocence in any other decision that we make in our life. If our friend or daughter or sister came to us and disclosed an allegation we wouldn't stand back in our everyday life as a member of the community and say to that person: "Hold on a second. I you know I'm neutral. I am robotically neutral. I don't believe you. I am not going to accept that what you say is true until someone proves that it is". That's not how we approach everyday situations with common sense in the real world.

AMT: So do you see a danger in using those terms outside the courtroom?

MICHAEL SPRATT: I think that there is. I mean there are lots of examples about how the presumption of innocence in the court room actually is sort of fraying that golden thread that holds the system together is under attack. I mean we see police officers releasing their names when there is a charge. Or there's a bill before the Senate right now that would require a defence to disclose information they had to the crown which was in sexual assault cases which is very unprecedented. And my worry is that not only do we sort of lose some common sense in society when we insist on those stricter strictly legal protections outside of the court, but I actually think that it can do damage to that very important principle inside the court.

AMT: Hena Singh, what do you think our politicians who have been accused of sexual misconduct are being treated fairly?

HENA SINGH: I don’t think fairness is being achieved here and I don't necessarily think we need to have a strict adherence to the courtroom standard. I think we need to implement some sort of fairness so were not drawing conclusions without the factual basis to do so.

AMT: So what would you like to see?

HENA SINGH: An investigation. When you have allegations like this, our laws require employers to do an investigation when someone comes forward with these types of allegations. This is no different. I think we can hire an investigator, bring them in to interview all the parties and draw conclusion,s on a balance of probabilities.

AMT: So in the specific case of Patrick Brown, he resigns as leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives after CTV reports details from confidential sources about his behaviour with young women. So was that resignation appropriate?

HENA SINGH: I don’t know if it's appropriate but I feel like I can read between the lines that he felt like he was forced to do so in the circumstances. And it's unfortunate that he felt that he was forced to do so without some sort of due process or fairness. If we had just stopped for a moment, brought in an investigator, we could have had any answer within 48 hours about what actually occurred. Right now we're all left guessing. We have a very limited set of facts and people are drawing conclusions without some factual basis. But there's not a concrete factual basis to draw these conclusions.

AMT: Because there is a report from CTV and although we don't know the names of the women involved, they have talked to them and they're not anonymous to those women. They know who their names are. They say that they have investigated journalistically.

HENA SINGH: Journalistically. You know I feel we need to have an investigator do an impartial investigation to make sure that all holes are filled and we've heard both sides. As someone who does these types of investigations, yes, there is a lot of people come forward with allegations and they're true, and there is a lot of people that come forward with allegations and there's a mix of facts. When you speak to both sides sometimes the facts are somewhere in the middle. And I feel like when we have an anonymous reporting without the ability to fill in the halls I feel like we're really missing fairness here and he hasn`t had an opportunity to respond to the allegations.

AMT: Michael Spratt what do you think?

MICHAEL SPRATT: I think that what's being suggested there is deeply problematic for a couple of reasons. The first is that it discards the common sense that we employ in everyday life. And the difference between sort of anonymous accusations made on a nameless Twitter account vs. accusations that have been investigated where material has been provided and reproduced. It doesn't address the fact that any system that's set up as suggested would compel the women to come in to answer questions, subject them to cross-examination, compel the media not to report on it. I mean suggestions like that I think are untenable and unworkable. And I think that as a society we can employ common sense in these decisions. If the allegation is anonymous, is bereft of any detail, is outrageous, I trust that as a society we can employ the sort of reasonable thinking when evaluating those allegations. I think that the danger here is that we used straw-man to help sort of justify or defend some of these actions. And when you employ examples that are outrageous, that aren't our force with what happened in the Brown case, I think that can be very damaging and no one yet has suggested what would be a tenable workable system that would not cause harm.

HENA SINGH: I never said we were going to compel anyone to do anything. I was saying bring in an investigator. People can report as they wish. But let's employee some fairness here. If people don’t want to participate in the investigation process we need to have an investigator who deals with that. There`is no compelling. It’s like hire someone and see if we can look into this to see if we can actually figure out what happened instead of drawing conclusions.

AMT: In the meantime what happens to the person?

HENA SINGH: We can just wait. We don't need to force resignations. We don't need to have everyone else resign unless they feel the need to do so, no compelling anything. Just let's wait?

MICHAEL SPRATT: As a member of society I am very uncomfortable with that notion. I mean if a teacher is accused of committing a sexual assault against a student there is a professional organization and theres a process but no one would suggest that that teacher should maintain their position until we get to the bottom of the issue. And to suggest that individuals like Patrick Brown don't have a voice or can't tell their side of the story, I think again setting up a bit of a straw-man because nothing could be more further from the truth. I mean these men who have all been accused, let’s face it, are powerful white men in positions of power. And my guess is that if Patrick Brown wanted to tell his side of the story any national news organization would give him that time to speak to the nation.

AMT: Well let me ask you. The National Post columnist Christie Blatchford wrote that Patrick Brown was treated unfairly, that his accusers were quote anonymous because CTV kept their identities confidential and that quote "every man in the world is now vulnerable". That quote Michael Spratt, what would you say to that?

MICHAEL SPRATT: Well again I think that that is insisting on court room standards that we employ in those very serious cases where the states involved. I think saying that you know it's open season on all men isn't the case at all, and I think that can lead to some sort of a complacency or the lack of an opportunity to try to change the status quo here. These are very serious allegations and they were reported in a serious manner, and I think to suggest that you know until we displace some presumption that we can have opinions or are operate in a reasonable manner, I think it actually dilute some of the important protections that we do need to have. Because no one's going to argue that if someone gets charged of a shoplifting or there is an allegation of a minor offence, that they should necessarily be made a popper or thrown out of their job. But in Mr. Brown's case were dealing with a very different scenario and I don't think it's unfair to insist that we have different rules for politics than we do in the courtroom.

AMT: Hena Singh what you make of the argument that all men are vulnerable now?

HENA SINGH: I don't think all men are vulnerable now. I think we need to be very careful. I think as a society there's a magnifying glass on behaviour with respect to sexual harassment, sexual assault. And I think we need to be careful but there's- just act reasonably. I don't think everyone's vulnerable and I don't think everyone needs to be very careful about everything that they do. Just act reasonably. You know I find that to be a stretch. I don't think that- to the extent that women can come forward with false allegations, I think that is vulnerability because we've now empowered women to come forward and we've shown women 'if you come forward actions will be taken without due process'. And I think that the vulnerability is that people can come forward with false allegations. And we as a society draw conclusions without actually looking into things and that is rare. I get it that it is going to be absolutely rare that someone comes forward with false allegations but the consequences, they're big. They're big for people.

AMT: Is the public then getting the facts it needs to make up minds about these cases, Hena?

HENA SINGH: No I don't think the public is getting all of the facts, all of the relevant facts. I look at the facts that were outlined in their CTV article and in all their publications and I don't have enough facts to draw conclusions. I don't have it and I'm an investigator. I'm looking for facts. I'm looking for an ability to draw a conclusion and I don't have enough facts to draw up a conclusion.

AMT: At the same time I do believe that every news organization who does these stories actually goes to the person who is accused and asks them to weigh in and they don't.

AMT: How much time did we give him to weigh in? And did he have the opportunity to think through this before he responded to this? I don't know if- you know for me I feel like you have to outline the allegations and details to a person and give them an opportunity to think through it and respond. Some of these allegations are over a decade ago. And so if you're asking him: "Okay, here are some allegations that can ruin your career. Can you respond in the next 45 minutes?" I think that's unfair. I think we can give him a bit more of an opportunity and maybe in a different forum.

AMT: Michael Spratt.

MICHAEL SPRATT: Well I think that by saying that we don't have enough facts to take any actions or to draw any conclusions again outlines some of the difficulties with the suggested procedure here. Because if we are going to have an investigation and we don't have enough information right now what that essentially means is that people who make complaints will need to subject themselves to interviews so that people can be satisfied that they know other facts. And I think thats unsatisfying. I mean in the case of Kent Hehr we know that the complainant in that case went public with her identity and received death threats. So there is I think an ability here to craft a system that lets us act reasonably but doesn't sort of insist on those court room standards that I think can have long term and damaging consequences both inside and outside the court.

HENA SINGH: I don’t think that the identity of the people who have come forward would be necessary for the public. I think that it would be necessary for the investigator to speak to them. Everyone can agree that the individuals remain anonymous to everyone except for the investigator and the investigator can speak to them, make sure the holes are filled, speak to Patrick Brown, make sure those holes are filled in and come to a conclusion.

AMT: You are essentially saying you want to investigate the way a journalist investigates. So what happens to your investigation does it just go back into the company or the parliamentary party. Like the one thing about the journalistic investigations is that they are there for the public to see. In other investigations when there have been complaints that disappear as we never know. And isn't that part of the MeToo movement was that so many women who have thought that they could go somewhere for whatever the process is outside of a court room find themselves stymied.

HENA SINGH: Well so let's use Jamie Baillie as an example. He was the leader of the PC party in Nova Scotia. They did an investigation and he resigned and it made sense to me. They hired an - similar to me - a workplace investigator to come in who was a lawyer to come in and do an investigation. And they found that he had engaged in the conduct. There is fairness.

AMT: There you go. Michael Spratt, when do you think of that example?

MICHAEL SPRATT: Well I'm not in favour of muzzling the media, while these investigations are happening or keeping things secret.

HENA SINGH: I never said to muzzle the media.

MICHAEL SPRATT: Well then so I mean this is why it's unworkable in real life, to insist on this sort of this sort of process. Because I mean looking at the Patrick Brown case the media shouldn't have been allowed to report on it until investigations happened or the media can report on it and Mr. Brown can remain in that position with that cloud over him. I mean at the end of the day this is a man who resigned after the media story where there as multiple complainants, where there's text messages and pictures showing, where the matter was waived by caucus. I do not think it's unreasonable to let the public have that information and act in a reasonable manner.

AMT: Well Ms. Singh has making the point that in the case of Nova Scotia the word came out that this was even happening after there was an investigation and obviously someone in that organisation said this is how we should do it and they followed through. If other organizations did that, Michael Spratt, do you think people would be satisfied

MICHAEL SPRATT: Well I do think that there is room to make sure that their workers are protected. I think a good example of that is with our police services across Canada that have very robust associations and collective bargaining rights. What we see there is when there's a serious allegation against a police officer of tampering with evidence or using excessive force gratuitously, we don't see as a society let's hold back and let's wait until there's an investigation and that officer can be on the front line. What we say is that officer is suspended. He is removed from his job and that there's rights that officer has to his association and there can be an investigation at that point. So nothing precludes an investigation if the party wants to do that into Brown. But what we have to make sure happens is that we don't deprive the public of information, we don't deprive the ability of people to form opinions, to act reasonably and to draw conclusions that you know may ultimately be in his best interests.

AMT: We are almost out of time. Hena Singh I am going to give you the last word. Ten seconds.

HENA SINGH: I think we can do both. I think we can achieve fairness and make sure that the media can still report that the public can still draw opinions. And I think we can do both.

AMT: We have to leave it there. Thank you both for your thoughts on this.

MICHAEL SPRATT: No prob.

AMT: I've been speaking with Hena Singh, employment lawyer and workplace investigator with me in our Toronto studio. Michael Spratt is a criminal defence lawyer, blogger and the co-host a legal and political podcast The Docket. He joined us from Ottawa. Let us know what you think. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC, find us on Facebook. Go to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Right after the news, coming up:

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Do you have the papers

VOICE 2: Not yet.

VOICE 3: This is a devastating security breach that was leaked out of the Pentagon.

AMT: Daniel Ellsberg: The Real Story, coming up.

Trump is leading us into nuclear war, says Daniel Ellsberg (and he should know, he used to plan them)

Guest: Daniel Ellsberg

AMT: Hello I am Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

I suppose one of the- A big question I had for him was during this time you know I had the largest FBI manhunt after him in decades. I said 'were you scared?' And he said 'no I wasn't because I had such conviction in what I was doing' and that to me was a real key into who he was. Because there wasn't this kind of breathy, panicked, wide eyed, angst ridden person cowering in a motel with thousands of pages. He was very assured of what he did and knew and what he'd also said very early on, he was more than happy to go to prison for his actions.

AMT: Well that is actor Matthew Rhys who plays Daniel Ellsberg in the film The Post. Speaking about the famous whistle blower, the Oscar nominated movie tells the true story of the leaking of a secret history of the Vietnam War that became known as the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, Washington Post and other news outlets. That act of civil disobedience by Daniel Ellsberg would eventually lead to the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. While the Pentagon Papers have become a part of U.S. history what almost no one knew was that Daniel Ellsberg planned on releasing another batch of top secret documents, these ones about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. And he tells that story and many others in his fascinating new book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Daniel Ellsberg joins us from Berkeley, California hello.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Hello thank you for having me.

AMT: Can you tell me about that other batch of secret documents you had planned on releasing?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Oh I had notes from many years, half a dozen years at least, of working on command and control of nuclear weapons and nuclear war planning and various nuclear crises between 1958 and 1964, when I joined the government and worked turn to work almost exclusively on Vietnam. And then the next year I went to Vietnam for two years then I came back and worked on the Pentagon Papers. But when I had started copying the Pentagon Papers with the intention of giving them to the Senate or eventually to the newspapers, a it turned out, I also decided that really what was more important was to inform the public about the dangers of the nuclear area and specifically of our own nuclear policies. I didn't have the actual plans. I had notes. I had estimates and I had studies that have been done on this. And really one adviser - the very person who by going to prison had inspired me to risk prison or choose prison by revealing classified documents myself - He advised me to put out the nuclear material he said we know enough about Vietnam already and more documents won't add to that. He was somewhat mistaken about that point but he said put out the nuclear right away. And I said I agree it's really more important. But the bombs are falling right now in Vietnam and I want to try to shorten that process and I'll see what I can achieve with some nuclear history that may point people to the fact that we're still being lied into continuing the war. And then when they've had their run I'll put out the nuclear documents. And unfortunately having given them to my brother for safekeeping, he had stored them in a trash dump buried under a visible marker and the marker which was a green stove was rolled away by a hurricane - tropical Storm Doria and the papers themselves were lost. He spent about a year and a half trying to find them among boxes and garbage bags and whatnot. Never did find them so I was left with the knowledge which I present pretty much in this book but not the actual documents.

AMT: It's extraordinary. So you had thousands of pages that that exposed nuclear secrets and nuclear strategy and it disappeared in a landfill in a hurricane.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Correct.

AMT: There's a condo on site now. Is there not?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well in the end having even hired a backhoe at one point, a bulldozer to try to uncover these boxes and found lots of green garbage bags such as was in the box but not one with top secret documents in it. He then told me eventually when I said there must be a way to get these somehow he said 'Well they've now used material from that dump. They've moved it to be foundation for a condominium. And in fact there's been concrete poured over it in the basement. So we'd have to use dynamite to get at it. And that didn't seem very promising. That was a joke.

AMT: You say that had you released those documents you would have definitely been in prison for life.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I was sure. First of all I thought I would be charged with prison as I was for life, 115 years possible sentence 12 felony counts for the Pentagon Papers alone. I might or might not get that full sentence. In fact I hoped I wouldn't because I hoped that I would go into a trial for the nuclear papers having one or at least gotten a low sentence in the first trial and would give me a little better odds in the second trial. But I really thought with putting out nuclear documents the chance of conviction was pretty certain. The thing was though that if I'd had the documents Nixon could indeed have said well I had to put him on trial for a lot of nuclear information here. But if the people had been able to read that information I think it would have been very self-evident that it was information they ought to have and should have had 50 years ago now. So when I put out essentially the same information now without documents I think they would have trouble convincing a jury that this hurt the national security.

AMT: Well Daniel Ellsberg I do want to get to the substance of what you knew and what you know. But just one more point about the fact that you took all of those documents and copied them. You involved your two oldest children - your 13 year old son and your 10 year old daughter - in the actual copying of those documents. What did they do for you?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well many people have questioned that over the years, why would do such a thing. It was very deliberate on my part. Not that I needed the help for those two knights but that I wanted them to see clearly first that their father had not visibly gone crazy and I was sure they would hear that and indeed they did, but that I was doing something soberly and deliberately that I thought needed to be done. And second that I wanted to set an example for them that it might come in their lives at a time when the right thing for them to do is to take action that could land them in jail. And in fact both of them did follow that in the course of their lives not just automatically for me but my both of them have been arrested. My son in particular, my daughter is a world expert now on the epidemiological studies of violence against women and spousal abuse around the world, having gotten a Ph.D. in that in Nicaragua from Swedish university. But before that she was the Sandinista government representative in charge of literacy and then health brigadiers is in Bluefields in Nicaragua at the risk of her life really, because of my government using both tax money and money borrowed for or taken as a gift from Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere outside congressional channels to send guerrillas contras covert operators into Bluefields attacking that place more or less of an invasion. In fact that happened the day she was supposed to give birth to her oldest child, my grandson. So they both have lived very admirable lives and I'm very proud of them.

AMT: And so when she was 10 she was actually cutting the top secret stamps off the tops the bottoms of those pages.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes we gave her that task to keep her busy because she didn't like just sitting around when my son was working the Xerox machine and I was cutting those off really at the expectation that eventually I would want more copies to keep the FBI from getting all my copies and stopping them. So I thought I would have to take them to a commercial Xerox place which I did eventually with the help of my wife - first my fiancé and then my wife of the last 47 years - and without top secret stamps on them which would alert people I thought in the Xerox place to call the FBI. So she was doing what, in the movie The Post, my friend Tony Russo is shown as doing cutting these top secret stamps off the top and bottom of the pages.

AMT: So your own journey looking at atomic weapons begins when you were not much older than those kids you were. You were a young teenager when President Truman announced the first use of the atomic bomb. What did you think at the time?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well actually about nine months earlier, in the fall of 1944, I had a social studies class which set us the challenge of writing an essay on what it would mean for the world for U-235 bomb which our teacher had read about in a magazine article that happened to slip by government censors because it was based on pre-war information. And this would be a bomb that was a thousand times more powerful than the 10 and 20 ton blockbusters that were the largest bombs of World War II. So what would it mean to the world, mankind as we call it then, of having such an explosive? And ironically something that just came home to me the other day actually after all this time, was it it was at that very time, the fall of 1944, that British intelligence and some people in the Manhattan Project realized and were confident that there was no German program. In other words, there was no prospect of the Germans having this bomb before the end of the war and then they were about to lose the war. So there would be no German bomb as there still isn't. Nevertheless at that time even without thinking whether it would be a German or an American bomb it seemed almost self-evident that this was not a good possession for humanity as it was and is. In fact the way I've said it for years, this is not a species to trust with nuclear weapons. And that was it not a hard conclusion to reach for 13 year olds which we were then or 14 year olds in the ninth grade. Because it's very obvious that that was a kind of technology of destruction that mankind was just not set up to control adequately. So when nine months later I saw during the summer vacation headlines in Detroit that a single bomb had destroyed a city in Japan, my reaction was very unlike I think virtually anyone else who saw that headline and that was I know what that was. That's the bomb we studied last year and we got it first. And we used it on a city and I had a feeling of dread actually of kind of anxiety which a lot of people shared actually in general terms. But after a second bomb was used and the Japanese did surrender a couple of weeks later any anguish about the bomb was mostly smothered by feelings that gratitude the war was over even gratitude to the bombing the in the belief which was plausible but wrong, that it was the bomb that had shortened the war. That's a long story but I would say that most Americans falsely believe in my opinion that the bomb actually shortened the war. It was other things that led to the ending of the war at that time even if the bomb had not been used. Meanwhile some of the scientists it turns out now who had worked on that bomb from the beginning believed as soon as the German defeat occurred in May 8th that the bomb should not be used on Japan and should not even be tested. Because that would surely result in an arms race with Russia as it did. They believed at that point by the way that there was very little chance that we would avoid a nuclear war soon. They underrated the power of deterrence in other matters I don't think they did foresee another half century before the bomb was used on a city again. But they were right in my opinion that this had the seeds of a near extinction for humanity. So they were right to be very concerned.

AMT: So you ask the question in your book "How did I come in my late 20s to be working on guidance for nuclear war plans, plans I knew if they were ever enacted would kill hundreds of millions of humans and in reality far more than that?" How do you answer your own question?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: As I say in the book. Really the answer is the same as it was for the scientists I've just described, Leo's Allard and James Franck, Eugene Rabinovitch the founder of the Federation of American Scientists at the Bulletin of Atomic sciences and the Doomsday Clock which has just been moved forward by half a minute to two minutes from midnight. He worked on the Manhattan Project and he was one of those who advised that there should be no test even and that we should point every effort to putting this genie back in the bottle, now that it was now clear that we were not racing the Germans. But the way I got into it was the way they got into it some years earlier. They believe rather plausibly that the Germans were ahead of us probably in creating nuclear weapons. The reality was that the Germans had stopped just about the time they started on a crash program in June of 1942. But it was plausible for them to believe that and even looking back on it I can't criticize them I can't blame them for trying to assure that the German Nazis did not have a monopoly of nuclear weapons. Well in my case we knew by my time that both sides had nuclear weapons. I was under the false impression, as were my colleagues at the RAND Corporation and in the United States Air Force, that the Russians were far ahead of us not to nuclear weapons but in ICBMs the ability to send missiles to our homeland. It was a missile gap and that what they had the problem above all for humanity was to deter them by having the capability, even under attack, even after their attack to retaliate forcefully enough that the prospect would deter them. So I was working to assure that there would be no nuclear war assuming then that if such a war were to occur it would be started by the Russians.

AMT: But not everyone agreed to work on nuclear weapons and that includes your father. Tell us what your dad eventually told you.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I learned many years- I knew that my father had left his engineering firm Giffels and Rosetti, Giffels and Valet, a couple of names. He was one of the largest engineering firms in the world and he had been working on for a DuPont contract with his firm as chief structural engineer for the build up after the war of the Hanford nuclear weapons production facility. If I recall rightly they were enriching uranium for more nuclear weapons and have in fact polluted that part of the country very significantly for a long time. Anyway he had felt uneasy. He told me later very much about being part of that process and all. But as he said Einstein had urged the building of the bomb to keep the Germans from having a monopoly, early on. He revered Einstein he thought well it must be a legitimate activity. But then I knew that he had left the firm and I didn't know in detail because I was out at school and college but he had in fact been out of work for two years. And then was called back by this firm as chief structural engineer. Well I didn't know the circumstances of that until decades later when he told me when in his 80s, late 80s, that he had in fact quit the firm when they asked him to be chief structural engineer at Savannah River in a plant that would be making materials for the H bomb the thermonuclear weapon. And he said that would be a thousand times more powerful than the A Bomb. And I said well your memory is good. The early H Bomb in 1954 the first droppable H Bomb was a thousand times more powerful in yield than the fission bomb at Nagasaki. The A Bomb, the fission bomb 1000 times that in turn had been a thousand times more powerful than the largest bomb of World War II. He had by the way been chief structural engineer at two plants that were producing bombers for World War II, but mainly B 24 bombers and then engines for B 29s. But the B 24s I think were not large enough to be carrying these largest bombs, 20 ton bombs, the British Lancaster I think was used for that. Anyway he was now talking with the bomb. It was a million times more powerful than the blockbusters of World War II. So called because a single 10 ton, 15 or 20 ton bomb would destroy a block of urban buildings. Okay so now a million times more powerful than that. So he said he didn't want to be part of that and he turned that down. He said he came back to his office and he said to one of his aides, his subordinates in the engineering office, 'These guys are crazy. They have an A Bomb. Now they want an H Bomb. They're going to go through the alphabet till they have a Z Bomb'. And I interject at that point will have only gotten to end. I was opposing the neutron bomb at that very time and actually that place has this conversation in my mind because that was about 1978. So he had he had turned that down and he was also very upset that Handford he said was going to pollute, make part of his own country uninhabitable, he said for 23 thousand years and funny figure. I said Dad your memory is very good. That's the half-life of plutonium. I guess I just said uranium enrichment. But I guess plutonium was involved too, remembering my comment at the time. So he had done what other scientists had not done at the time. They were very uneasy about what was going on. But they did not choose to resign or to expose it.

AMT: And he never told you because you didn't have clearance, security clearance.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I said 'Dad, how could you not have told me all this at the time?' He said 'I couldn't tell my family. You weren't cleared'.

AMT: And then of course Daniel Ellsberg you were cleared at the highest ranks. Tell us what kind of clearance you had working through the RAND Corporation with the U.S. Air Force.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well at RAND everyone had, including the janitors and the secretaries, had to be cleared for top secret. The janitors because they might see trash. They might see clippings and secretaries, in those days all women, and almost the only women at RAND were secretaries or a handful of exceptions. So everyone had to be cleared unless they oversee something that was top secret. Really most of what we did was at the secret level, lower level. But some of it was top secret. The Pentagon Papers themselves were TS for top secret. And I was one of the very few people when I came back from Vietnam and worked in the Pentagon Papers, I was one of the very few people to have a top secret safe in my own office not to have to go to the top secret control office because actually the Pentagon Papers were accessible only to two people at the beginning, the president of RAND and me and I was working on them for research. But the clearance My father was talking about was actually higher than top secret it was called a Q clearance which meant special clearance that you had to have a either a secret or top secret turns to get it beforehand and ultimately working for the Pentagon. I had about a dozen of such what are now called Sensitive Compartmented Information Clearances TS-SCI, which is higher than top secret.

AMT: And maybe just so explain to our listeners your clearance was so high that some people who knew things that was classified had permission, if you ask them a question they had to tell you. They had to give you the information they had, when you were doing research.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: First of all these extra clearance higher than top secret. In those days their very existence was secret. Two people had only a top secret clearance. So very few people at RAND knew that such clearances existed. I got a dozen of them or so when I worked as special assistant to the assistant secretary of defence. But when you had such a clearance if you were talking, if you were in the next desk, let's say to your best friend who did not have that particular clearance he might have only top secret or - I say he again in those days it was almost all male except for the secretaries - or he might have higher clearances but not this particular one. In that case you couldn't tell me either the content or what you were learning or the fact that such a clearance existed. There was a [unintelligible] mole which was observed at that time to determine whether someone you were talking to had these special clearances or not. And if you didn't know that he or she did you couldn't hint at their existence. And the point really of all is is that the Compartmented Clearance System is so well observed really and elaborate that it is a myth that everything gets out in the New York Times and that secrets can't be held. Actually even top secret or even secret for that matter but especially top secret, but especially the special clearances above, those secrets can be held indefinitely and held by thousands of people. And they really don't get in the New York Times with very rare exceptions. For example Ed Snowden put out a tremendous amount of material that had that higher clearance. No one else that I know of or ever heard of put out anything like that. His purpose was of course that these special clearances were hiding criminal activity, unconstitutional activity, surveilling everyone in the country on virtually every possible form of communication, computers, Twitter, anything, fax, telephone. And they were hearing everybody essentially without suspicion that they might be associated with any ill doing. It was the infrastructure of a police state, of authoritarian state like East Germany for example, though East Germany didn't have this technology they would have lusted to have such technology but it didn't exist then. He put that out to show that it was criminal. What it was concealing was criminal. But the law is such in this country that if he were to come back I believe he'd be in an isolation cell for the rest of his life. And the fact that his intention and effect was to reveal to the Congress and to the public that there was this indiscriminate mass surveillance going on, that would not have been allowed to be a factor in the trial. Merely the fact that he had revealed this classified information and he would be convicted on it. I follow the advice of a number of lawyers who believe that this is unconstitutional in light of the First Amendment, that there should be the ability to argue that what you done was in the public interest and had not harmed the national security but as of now that could not even be brought up in court. It wasn't brought up in my trial or in any of the other trial since. So I think he's absolutely right to stay out of the grass of this quite unjust process.

AMT: I have some very specific questions for you if I may about the nuclear program I need you to take me through some stuff. So if I may I'll go back to that. What did you learn about the general war plan for a nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States when you were at the RAND Corporation working through Rand around the U.S. Air Force?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well actually what I learned was, as a RAND consultant, it wasn't the information I got was not actually available to my colleagues at RAND per se, but as a consultant to the office of secretary of defence I was linked to them in effect although my salary was being paid ultimately by the Air Force through RAND. But for the secretary of defence I was looking at war plans in part to see how they could be executed reliably but also to see how they might be executed without authority. You know when the president had not intended there to be a war but somehow some lower subordinate could get weapons launched even claimed to have authority to do so. So one thing I found by the way, was to my great surprise, a lot of people below the level of president did have authorization to do that by President Eisenhower which was- I was a little unhappy to see which was renewed by President Kennedy and Johnson after him and Nixon and really all the presidents through the war. And the idea was that if communications were out between the command and Washington something that happened part of everyday with the Pacific Command in Hawaii and points west where I was researching this, then the field commander - the Commander in Chief Pacific - and his subordinates to whom he'd further delegated his authority would have the authority on their own judgement if they felt it was necessary to launch nuclear weapons. [Crosstalking] for people to do it without authorization. But the point was that there were a lot of people in [unintelligible] pack who had authorization from the presidents to conduct this. And that's still not generally known even though in recent times there has been declassification of documents on this.

AMT: I'm going to stop you there because that's a really key point. There was always this view that only the president of the United States could order this and that the weapons won't maybe come from one place, but you make the point that depending on the military base the Air Force had their bombers. You go to a base in South Korea, they've got 12 F100s each with a Mark 20 thermonuclear weapon with a yield of one point one megaton sitting there and they've got control if they wanted to take it.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Exactly by the way not only the Air Force but [unintelligible] is actually a Navy [unintelligible] and he had delegated this to the 7th Fleet and so forth. So a number of commands had this authority and that almost surely remains true to some in some ways today here in Russia and I would guess in North Korea. And the point is one of these nuclear states starting with the U.S., but then Russia as well USSR want to be the possibility to occur that their retaliation would be paralysed by a single weapon on their central command or a handful of weapons on their various high level commands. They want to be sure that an enemy realizes that it's the case that there would be authority for a decentralized launching of nuclear weapons. If you knew where the attacker was would not be the case in the case of a terrorist bomb for example. But that that would nevertheless unlock all the weapons. And let me correct what I just said. Lock is a metaphor here. People like to think that our weapons are all locked up, up to a very high level and that only a combination in effect from the president can unlock them. That has never been true and is certainly not true. Now there are locks on low level weapons to keep the actual plane crew or the missile crew from launching them. There didn't used to be those locks at all. When I was working on this, now there are. But the combination to those locks is not held at the very highest levels to assure that there's no way of paralyzing the response. And I'm sure that we know that's true in Russia, now after the USSR collapsed and there was glasnost and some unveiling of what their systems had been we learned that they had what they called a dead hand system, that if the Central Command was destroyed lower level commands could launch those weapons. I'm sure that's true in North Korea as well.

AMT: I want to play you a clip from the 1964 classic movie Dr. Strangelove. Listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: That is the whole idea of this machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack. And so because of the automated and irrevocable decision making process which rose out human meddling that doomsday machine is terrifying, is simple to understand and completely credible and convincing.

VOICE 2: Gee I wish we had one, a Doomsday Machine S[unintelligible].

AMT: Daniel Ellsberg you said that [laughter] after watching Dr. Strangelove you felt that movie was almost a documentary.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes. Well the irony is that, unknown to Stanley Kubrick in 64, or his source Herman Kahn my colleague at RAND in 50 1960, there was a doomsday machine and it was called the Strategic Air Command. And although it was not automatic its ability to destroy really nearly all humans on Earth near extinction existed not only in 1960 but in 1950 under Harry Truman with fission bombs. And that was true for a reason that no one knew in the 60s or in the 70s and that was that the smoke from burning cities caused by our nuclear attacks on military targets in or near the cities, whether they were aimed explicitly at the city or not, that that smoke would be lofted into the stratosphere where it would not rain out and it would persist around the globe. It would move around the globe in Nepal it would reduce sunlight by some 70 percent and kill all the harvests and the effect would be nuclear famine, would be nuclear winter in the sense of ice age temperatures and conditions year round. But it would specifically kill the harvests and the food supply so that within months or a year near extinction would occur except for a small number of people, relatively small number of people eating fish and mollusks in the southern hemisphere perhaps in Australia. So we had a doomsday machine. George C. Scott I think it's his name and that is Buck Churchiston the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and he says I wish we had one of those. He did without knowing it.

AMT: It you make the point a number of times that the calculations on what a nuclear war could do in terms of dead, it was always in the hundreds of millions. More than half a billion. You make the point that these numbers were bandied about as if they were nothing.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes and no, if I may say. The answer came back quickly. You could say to it without apology to the president when he gave them a question that I had drafted which was 'how many people would be killed if your plans were carried out?' I'm not sure if they were ever again or before ask that question. They did give an answer quickly but to say that the answer was bandied about is misleading. It was very highly classified and held. So much so that I had really written the question in the mistaken belief that they didn't have an answer to it. So it was not a familiar notion. Nevertheless it was known to the Joint Chiefs when they gave the answer and the answer added up to 600 million or a hundred Holocaust's, a hundred times the six million of the extermination of 6 million Jews. A hundred Holocaust and this was projected by our own plans and that included a hundred million of our own allies in West Europe who'd be killed not by our warheads directly, because they weren't aimed at West Europe, but by the radioactive fallout from our attacks on East Europe with the so-called captive nations in the Warsaw Pact and in the USSR. So we were prepared to accept in order to limit damage to the US by disarming the Soviets. We were prepared to kill off a hundred million of our closest allies very like Lindsey Graham's comment very recently about a possible North Korea war which he is very prepared to see in conversation with his friend Donald Trump. And he says they agree the casualties would be over there they would be thousands he said but they wouldn't be American casualties. They would be over there and therefore they would be possible to accept for an American president. And over there he's talking about our allies South Korea and Japan. And it's exactly like our war plans which we're prepared to accept the loss of our allies in West Europe even without any rush before without counting any Russian retaliation. And of course without figuring this smoke which they weren't aware was actually would be the key factor. So wouldn't be 600 million. It would then have been nearly 3 billion which was then the population now would be over 7 billion the population of the earth.

AMT: And correct me if I'm wrong, didn't one name one top military man also make the point that they would also try to take out China because if you go and you take out in a communist country you may as well the other one.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes. They were also going to annihilate China. As I say would you take the smoke into account, it doesn't make any difference actually. Our own country would starve China and so forth, within a year anyway. But if I may for just one moment going back to your comment about being bandied about. So closely are these estimates held that to my knowledge no government estimate has ever been made officially of these actual casualties in the form that I actually reproduce on page 2 of my book, where I give from memory a chart that I saw the deaths in the USSR in China alone not counting Europe and other places. That was three hundred twenty five million. That's a chart that is very simple. So I'm quite confident I have it correctly from memory labeled top secret, sensitive. This sensitive by the way doesn't mean a classification. It means even people who have top secret clearance are not necessarily authorized to see this. It should be held very closely because it's potentially embarrassing. You know it's multi genocidal 300 million in the Russia and China. That's not just genocide of an ethnic group. There is no ethnic group that's 100 million or 300 million. Many ethnic groups would be extinguished by this. And that's been true of our plans all along. In short we have and have had a doomsday machine for more than half a century. So does Russia since the mid-60s and a very simple proposition, I would put to you. There is no conceivable justification even in terms of threat and deterrence, damage supposedly which is a hoax. There is no possible justification for having the capability to wipe out most of humanity or for that matter the billion people threatened by even India-Pakistan war in terms of smoke and nuclear famine. It's morally absurd, obscene should cease to exist there is no justification and one country having that capability does not justify another in having it. So if my book hints at one thing it's to alert people to the fact that these doomsday machines do exist. We have one. We should not. We should divest it that even though deterrence of a nuclear attack remains, I believe in the short run, a legitimate objective rather than having some other country have a monopoly of nuclear weapons. That justifies for example, to some degree, North Korea having certainly is threatened with attack and regime change and assassination. And the logic of the last 50 years, well I don't want to accept that logic fully, but there is logic for their having a deterrent capability of the 10 to 20 weapons that they're credited with by the Federation American scientists. I would say that of the nine nuclear states all of which have far more numbers of weapons and far more capability including thermonuclear weapons except for India and Pakistan that the USA [unintelligible] with its thousands of weapons and the Russia with its thousands of weapons. There's no possible justification for having more weapons than North Korea does right now. And that implies a change in our policy and a change in our posture that's quite radical and yet would be very much in the interest of our security and of the survival of the human species.

AMT: Well let me ask you then on Tuesday night Donald Trump gave his State of the Union address and this is what he had to say about American nuclear weapons today.

SOUNDCLIP

As part of our defense we must modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal hopefully never having to use it but making it so strong and so powerful that it will deter any acts of aggression by any other nation or anyone else. [Applaud] Perhaps someday in the future there will be a magical moment when the countries of the world will get together to eliminate their nuclear weapons. Unfortunately we are not there yet, sadly.

AMT: Daniel Ellsberg what do you think when you hear the US President commit to that?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: It's not you know there really is quite a range of policies between the magic moment when everybody agrees to get rid of all nuclear weapons and the actual programs right now of the nuclear states who are all building up their nuclear programs, all of them without any justification whatever. In other words the objective which is widely accepted and with some basis of having deterrence in terms of the capability to respond to a nuclear attack so that your adversary, if such there is, or your neighbors your rivals do not have a monopoly of nuclear weapons, preventing that is hard to refute the importance of having that. That calls for something like 1, 10, 30 nuclear weapons. That has nothing to do with what he's talking about which is reproducing a so-called triad including intercontinental ballistic missile, sub launch missiles, airplanes, drones with the capability of destroying life on Earth. In other words you shouldn't have to wait for a magic moment to divest yourself and to call on others mutually to go down with you of a doomsday machine, and that's what we do have fire. You know I say this over and over you know in one way or another but I'm just saying he doesn't admit the possibility and I have to say that officially speaking no president before him has really done it, saying that the purpose is served by our actual Arsenal have essentially nothing to do with deterring nuclear attack on the U.S. They have to do with debt limiting damage by pre-empting the Soviet surprise attack, an objective that is totally illusory. Since the Russians gotten submarine launched missiles in the mid-60s, the chance of disarming them to the point where they could not destroy American society is illusory. It's a fraud. It's a hoax. But it does serve to sell weapons as it does today. It does serve Boeing and Lockheed to be computing to build new ICBMs which have been anachronistic and a dangerous anachronism because they're virtually lightning rods for attack. They're on our side there temptation in the face of an alarm like the false alarm in Hawaii a few weeks ago. If that had been at national levels that would warn our minuteman our ICBM controllers to launch their weapons before they were destroyed. And the same is true on the Russian side. False alarms have occurred over there. So these weapons do nothing more than endanger world society basically. But they are for Boeing and Lockheed and Raytheon and Grumman and others who work on this, Northrop sources of profit and of jobs for unions for people, for states where Minuteman are deployed like Montana. They serve the local needs for jobs. They get votes and they serve as places for retired generals to go as vice presidents and win a very good outcome. All of this is without much opposition. So the doomsday machines continue. The very idea that we have to have parity that we must have exactly what the other people have which both sides have relied on to support the demands of their military industrial complex. And Russia has one very similar to ours now. Remember for many years they've been a capitalist country where their profits are earned the same way from their missiles as ours are. So in both cases then the call is 'Oh we have to have what they have'. That's like saying 'We have to have an Auschwitz because Germany has an Auschwitz'. And really you know that seems too prejudicial, in analogy we have to recall that every thermonuclear warhead is a portable Auschwitz. About a million people died in Auschwitz maybe one point two million died in Auschwitz. One of our major thermonuclear warheads will kill a million people if it's dropped near a million people, or more if it's dropped more. These are portable Auschwitz's and in theory there will to be used only under certain circumstances. There are no circumstances that would justify their actual employment. Is there threat needed, a thousands of weapons? No not. So in short it did not start with Donald Trump I have to say. It's about continuing the program that President Obama launched one point five trillion dollars, maybe one point two or one point six trillion dollars over the next 30 years of rebuilding a doomsday machine. As I said again, jobs, profits, votes and so forth but otherwise danger and immorality. It's the threat of an insane and immoral action.

AMT: Well I have to tell you, your book gives us such a window into that world of military thinking, strategic thinking, even the ideas that would be - I said bandied about - but the ideas that would be discussed or explored in these things that were very secret. At times it seemed to me it was a bit of a playground for the paranoid.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes yes. You know the paranoia as I said was very profitable, the exaggeration. I don't blame the people in the Manhattan Project for fearing that Germany and Nazi Germany which was as aggressive and ruthless and destructive and expansionist as anyone thought. That was not a fantasy. And the fear of letting them have a monopoly of nuclear weapons was I think inevitable need. However at the point where it became clear that there was to be no German weapon. And let me repeat it's I've only recently absorbed the fact that I've known for quite a while that it was really known by the fall of 1944. Joseph Rotblat, a Polish scientist with UK nationality who was working on the Manhattan Project, learned that from the head of the British nuclear effort in Los Alamos in the Manhattan Project in the fall of '44 and he left the project, then. He was the only person to do so. He'd been a very critical person early on in the project. Joseph Rotblat he by the way, for his work with the Pugwash Conferences between US and Soviet scientists and others and with the Federation of American Scientists and others received the Nobel Peace Prize with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. And I think it was 1995 or around there. Anyway back in 1944 he left the project because his purpose was to deter a German bomb. And if that was not necessary it was not right to continue producing this world destroying weapon that would surely get out of control eventually. Well he was induced by threats of deportation of taking away his right to be in the U.S. and possibly imprisoned, if he told his fellow scientists what he had learned from his British counterparts and his superiors because that might discourage them from working full blast night and day to produce the bomb to use on Japan, which was not why any of them had started this project really to use it in warfare and doing other - for many of them - other than deterring a German bomb or perhaps if necessary to win the war against Nazi Germany a real threat to us. He wasn't allowed to tell any of them and then when the war did end against Germany one of the men was the Manhattan Project later much later had told me on the phone, he was crying and said I'm ashamed that I did not quit the project at that point and that it continued. Well person after person so Rotblat in effect did to what my father did when it came to an h bomb, but he wasn't allowed to tell the others. Why? Because they wanted the deployment of the bomb directly and they wanted to have a monopoly as long as possible. Truman and [unintelligible] wishfully entertained the delusion that we could have a prolonged monopoly for a decade or more. In fact Truman thought indefinitely the Russians will never be able to do it. All the scientists knew better and four years later that monopoly was lost. But meanwhile NATO had formed and in the early 50s NATO came to rely on nuclear weapons at a time when the Russians had them which meant that the NATO first use policy which persists to this day a willingness and a readiness in a deployment to initiate the use of nuclear weapons. We have tactical nuclear weapons in Europe right now in a handful of bases in several countries. If they were launched Europe would be annihilated but not only Europe everyone it turns out. So NATO has the trigger and a policy of initiating nuclear war leading to near extinction. This has been a mad insane reckless unnecessary policy for well over half a century. But that's the human species that we belong to. I say it's not to be trusted with nuclear weapons.

AMT: So you have mentioned the Doomsday Clock and last week the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists put the doomsday clock 30 seconds closer to doomsday, two minutes to midnight closest it's been since 1953. How much of this is related to North Korea? What do you see and what do you fear right now?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well I participated in the Cuban missile crisis at a high staff level and two working groups actually reporting to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council during the Cuban missile crisis, spending some nights on a couch in the Pentagon during the last week of that two week crisis - open crisis - and then I studied it with high clearances, higher than top secret for over a year after that. And then I've continued to keep up with actually much more information than I had then that's come out with declassification over the years especially from the Russian side. What's striking right now is that for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis 55 years ago, an American president is threatening imminent attack on a nuclear weapons state, on a state that can retaliate with nuclear weapons. The last time that happened as I say was half a century, more than half a century ago in the Cuban Missile Crisis which almost came to near extinction, came I would say within a hand's breadth of blowing up not because either leader was as volatile or reckless as Donald Trump appears to be. John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev I believe were determined not to get to armed conflict only to threaten it to bluff. I believe they were both bluffing but they were doing it with deployments of submarines and destroyers, planes, forces, nuclear warheads that because of uncontrolled action at the lower levels came several times very close to exploding into armed conflict that would have led to our causing nuclear winter although we didn't know that at the time. Well right now in North Korea I think there's a very significant chance, I would say better than even, that this president does mean to launch some kind of an attack on North Korea that will lead to a response that will then cause a two sided nuclear war. North Korea is not Russia. As I've said they're the only one of nine states that can't starve a billion people with its nuclear weapons which even India and Pakistan can because it doesn't have enough weapons. It doesn't have more than it needs to deter a nuclear attack, one would say. Although I have to say that deterrence is not looking very reliable right now. So it's a very dangerous situation even though it won't lead to near extinction at least immediately, it would kill millions of people in the first day or week which would be more violence than the human species has ever seen in a day or week. More than it was caused in the greatest raids the most damaging destructive raids of World War II, more than we've ever seen. And that in turn I think will lead to a world of paranoia as you've just described earlier a paranoid thinking in many states. I think it will lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons to India and Pakistan soon within a year to three, or two or three years testing and getting thermonuclear weapons the kind that my father adjured, shrank from. The difference that will make is that a war between India and Pakistan which has come close several times in the last couple of decades that that war would not kill just one third of the Earth's population two billion people which it might do right now. But almost three thirds they too would each have a doomsday machine altogether. So that's a world of even much greater danger even than we have now. I think nothing at this moment is of higher importance than there not be a war with North Korea.

AMT: You've called it all a catastrophe waiting to happen. you say we've avoided this so far but it's just waiting.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well some would say we've avoided it because of our policies and our weapons. I believe that's not true that we've avoided it despite our policies and we've avoided it by great luck as in the Cuban missile crisis and other occasions. For example Reagan's buildup of a trillion dollars worth of weapons in five years. And his rhetoric like Donald Trump's very much and his exercises, his rehearsals of attacks led the Russian premier Andropov to believe that he was about to be attacked and to be on alert for that reason. And at that very time there was a serious false alarm, on September 26, 1983 which was prevented from leading to a total Russian response in which case we would not be here. We would have long ago starved to death with the rest of the world. But Stanislav Petroff chose to say that it was a false alarm which it was but he wasn't sure of that and he didn't tell his superiors what he really believed that there was a 50-50 chance. Because he knew that with those odds in that mood facing Reagan Andropov would have taken the insane move of pre-empting to limit damage and to get the first strike in. So thanks to Petroff we're still here. It was very unsettling to me last night to read that this Hawaiian we just got last night was not somebody just pushing the wrong button. That certainly is frightening enough that thought that there could be arm for that reason, but the latest word seems to be that the person who did that was under the mistaken belief that there was an attack coming. Now we don't have all the word on that. But I must say I find that a more frightening explanation and not at all surprising because that's happened in the past. And if someone other than Stan Petroff had been on duty, in fact if his own subordinates advice had been followed his superiors would have been told that was an attack coming in. That's what their computers are telling them. And humanity would be down to 1 percent of what it is. No.

AMT: Daniel Ellsberg you make the point that we think monstrous and wicked policies are created by evil and disturbed people when in fact the threat comes from the banal, normal ordinary politicians, analysts and strategists.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes, it's a very dangerous fact in the nuclear era that these weapons are in the hands of people who can easily be persuaded that there are enemies; hostile countries that are pursuing our destruction when in fact what we're facing are ordinary people with terrible flaws and expense. Let me be more specific here. There was a Hitler in charge of Nazi Germany. He was a great danger to certainly to Eurasia and ultimately to the world. But it has been profitable and attractive to later generations to see each rival or adversary of any sort as a Hitler, which is almost really has never been true for a major power. Stalin was as ruthless as brutal as Hitler. He killed perhaps more communists than Hitler did, actually. I couldn't exaggerate that. He did have an empire in East Europe. He was not as we believed Hitler with nuclear weapons. His tyranny over East Europe had a defensive motive against rearmed Germany. That may or may not have excuse what he did but certainly explained it made him much less dangerous and more open to the possibility of negotiation than we ever imagined as a possibility. I think you probably can't exaggerate how tyrannous the regime of Kim Jong Un is but the notion that Trump says he cannot be negotiated with, that no compromise or concession would lead him to freeze his weapons program where it is and not have ICBMs and H Bombs. That's a point of view that is very supportive of our arms buildup which as I say again is very profitable and assures our predominance in the world in some ways. But it leads us toward very great danger. People who have negotiated with the North Korean regime, including the South Korean regime right now, including people like former Defense Secretary William Perry and others who have negotiated with the Greens say that's not true at all. They can't be. They're not crazy in that way. Kim Jong Un thinks he would be crazy to give up his current deterrent of fission type A bombs, 10 or 20 of them, against the United States. And that's not the kind of crazy he is. And in fact that's a very widely held kind of belief that he needs that deterrent. Could he be kept by negotiation by a peace treaty with Korea and by stopping exercises aimed at assassinating him or rehearsing invasion and by trade instead of sanctions and so forth to give up his ICBM and his H Bomb program, that would be good. Russia and China who know Korea fire better than we do say that is possible, but we have a president and not the first one who says no no negotiation. By the way negotiation did stop the North Korean plutonium project for some eight years under Clinton and then George W. Bush came along and did those negotiations and the program restarted. And that's the reason we have the A Bombs right now. So what I'm saying is the notion that countries are like Hitler in the sense that they cannot be negotiated with, that they are totally different from ours, that they are totally recklessly expansionist is a very dangerous approach and has brought the world to where it is right now which as you say, or as I say, a catastrophe waiting to happen.

AMT: You have given us so much to think about. Daniel Ellsberg thank you for your courage and for your voice and for all of these years. Thank you.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well thank you for your very good questions and for reading my book so carefully I appreciate it, as an author. Thank you for the chance.

AMT: Daniel Ellsberg is the author of The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. He joined us from Berkeley California. You can listen to an extended version of our conversation on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Daniel Ellsberg gave us lots to think about. If you want to share your thoughts after hearing him about his decision to risk his freedom to be a whistle-blower, his message about the nuclear threat in the world today, tweet us @TheCurrentCBC comment on our Facebook page or send us an e-mail from the website. Again that's cbc.ca/thecurrent.

[Music]

AMT: Well I want to take a moment to tell you about some special programming we have coming up. Over the next few weeks, we will be taking The Current on the road and across the country for a series of town halls. You're invited to join us. We will be in Halifax, Vancouver and Montreal having in-depth conversations called Facing Race with some of the most pressing issues related to race in Canada today. In Halifax I will be looking at the legacy of anti-black racism and its effects on everything from housing to environmental decisions. That's going to be on February 16. Then Piya Chattopadhyay will be in Vancouver to look at how race impacts people's experience with health from barriers to getting the right mental health care, to prejudice on the front lines of health care. In Montreal Duncan McCue will hear revoke competing identities in Quebec and how race and language impact people's livelihoods and sense of belonging in the province. We hope you'll be part of these conversations by joining us in person in the audience or online through Facebook live. We'll be tweeting about the conversations using the hashtag #CBCFacingRace. Tickets are available now will give you the full dates and the details on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. You'll find more information about each of our three town halls.

[Music]

AMT: A little credit where credit is due for this week's editions of The Current. I'm joined by our executive producer Kathleen Goldhar.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: This week the show was produced by: Idella Sturino.

AMT: Lara O'Brien.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Howard Goldenthal.

AMT: Ines Colabrese.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Rosa Kim

AMT: Pacinthe Mattar.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Exan Auyoung.

AMT: Willow Smith.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Samira Mohyeddin

AMT: Kristin Nelson,

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Karin Marley

AMT: John Chipman.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Kori Sidaway

AMT: And Liz Hoath.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The Current's writer is Peter Mitton. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our digital producer is Padraig Moran.

AMT: Transcripts are provided by Rasha Shehata and Nikhil Sharma. Our technical producer is Gary Francis, our documentary editor is Joan Webber. Our presentation producer is Josh Bloch.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Thanks to our network producers across the country: Anne Penman, Michael O'Halloran, Susan McKenzie, Mary-Catherine McIntosh and Suzanne Defresne.

AMT: Our senior producers are Richard Goddard in Toronto and Cathy Simon in Vancouver. The executive producer of The Current is Kathleen Goldhar. And Kathleen for the next three months you are going deep in to podcast territory. What are you doing can you tell us?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I can tell you a little bit. I am going to be working on a serialised podcast where we are going to be looking into a secret organization. This organization has been in the news a little bit lately but were going to be diving really deep into the stories. We're going to be bringing you people that you've never heard from before, the stories that you've never heard before in the way that only podcasts can do.

AMT: Okay well Kathleen Goldhar will resurface with the podcast and working with producer Josh Bloch on that as well.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: That's right. We're very excited but we'll miss you.

AMT: And we'll miss you but we know where to find you and we will tell our listeners where to find you when that podcast serial is ready. That's our program for today. Stay with radio 1 for Q. Vancouver actor Manny Jacinto, one of the actors on the TV show The Good Place joins Tom Power today. Don't forget about the wonders of the CBC Radio app. You can browse through past episodes of The Current. You can start listening in just a few seconds, search for conversations and coverage you mister you want to hear again or listen live to your local CBC station on the app right from your smartphone or tablet, hear the day's top stories, even make your own playlist of your favourite stuff to listen to later. It's all at your fingertips with the CBC Radio app which is free from the App Store or Google Play. Now when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon papers they were taken up by a society that was fed up with the war in Vietnam protesting against the war on the streets and in song. Fittingly there was at least one song written for Daniel Ellsberg. So we're going to leave you with Rulie Garcia with The Ballad of Daniel Ellsberg. I am Anna Maria Tremonti thanks for listening to The Current.

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[Song: The Ballad of Daniel Ellsberg by Rulie Garcia]

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Thursday February 1, 2018 Full Text Transcript

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