My son, Patrick, forwarded this to me.
by Daniel Ellsberg Posted on March 02, 2023
Dear friends and supporters,
I have difficult news to impart. On February 17, without
much warning, I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer on the basis of
a CT scan and an MRI. (As is usual with pancreatic cancer – which has no early
symptoms – it was found while looking for something else, relatively minor).
I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to
live. Of course, they emphasize that everyone’s case is individual; it might be
more, or less.
I have chosen not to do chemotherapy (which offers no
promise) and I have assurance of great hospice care when needed. Please know:
right now, I am not in any physical pain, and in fact, after my hip replacement
surgery in late 2021, I feel better physically than I have in years! Moreover,
my cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last
six years. This has improved my quality of life dramatically: the pleasure of
eating my former favorite foods! And my energy level is high. Since my
diagnosis, I’ve done several interviews and webinars on Ukraine, nuclear
weapons, and first amendment issues, and I have two more scheduled this week.
As I just told my son Robert: he’s long known (as my editor)
that I work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a
deadline!
I feel lucky and grateful that I’ve had a wonderful life far
beyond the proverbial three-score years and ten. (I’ll be ninety-two on April
7th.) I feel the very same way about having a few months more to enjoy life
with my wife and family, and in which to continue to pursue the urgent goal of
working with others to avert nuclear war in Ukraine or Taiwan (or anywhere
else). When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I
would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly
have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as
that seemed (and was). Yet in the end, that action – in ways I could not have
foreseen, due to Nixon’s illegal responses – did have an impact on shortening the
war. In addition, thanks to Nixon’s crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I
expected, and I was able to spend the last fifty years with Patricia and my
family, and with you, my friends.
What’s more, I was able to devote those years to doing
everything I could think of to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war and
wrongful interventions: lobbying, lecturing, writing and joining with others in
acts of protest and nonviolent resistance.
I wish I could report greater success for our efforts. As I
write, "modernization" of nuclear weapons is ongoing in all nine
states that possess them (the US most of all). Russia is making monstrous
threats to initiate nuclear war to maintain its control over Crimea and the
Donbas – like the dozens of equally illegitimate first-use threats that the US
government has made in the past to maintain its military presence in South
Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and (with the complicity of every member state
then in NATO ) West Berlin. The current risk of nuclear war, over Ukraine, is
as great as the world has ever seen.
China and India are alone in declaring no-first-use
policies. Leadership in the US, Russia, other nuclear weapons states, NATO and
other US allies have yet to recognize that such threats of initiating nuclear
war – let alone the plans, deployments and exercises meant to make them
credible and more ready to be carried out – are and always have been immoral
and insane: under any circumstances, for any reasons, by anyone or anywhere.
It is long past time – but not too late! – for the world’s
publics at last to challenge and resist the willed moral blindness of their
past and current leaders. I will continue, as long as I’m able, to help these
efforts. There’s tons more to say about Ukraine and nuclear policy, of course,
and you’ll be hearing from me as long as I’m here.
As I look back on the last sixty years of my life, I think
there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts. For the
last forty years we have known that nuclear war between the US and Russia would
mean nuclear winter: more than a hundred million tons of smoke and soot from
firestorms in cities set ablaze by either side, striking either first or
second, would be lofted into the stratosphere where it would not rain out and
would envelope the globe within days. That pall would block up to 70% of
sunlight for years, destroying all harvests worldwide and causing death by
starvation for most of the humans and other vertebrates on earth.
So far as I can find out, this scientific near-consensus has
had virtually no effect on the Pentagon’s nuclear war plans or US/NATO (or
Russian) nuclear threats. (In a like case of disastrous willful denial by many
officials, corporations and other Americans, scientists have known for over
three decades that the catastrophic climate change now underway – mainly but
not only from burning fossil fuels – is fully comparable to US-Russian nuclear
war as another existential risk.) I’m happy to know that millions of people –
including all those friends and comrades to whom I address this message! – have
the wisdom, the dedication and the moral courage to carry on with these causes,
and to work unceasingly for the survival of our planet and its creatures.
I’m enormously grateful to have had the privilege of knowing
and working with such people, past and present. That’s among the most treasured
aspects of my very privileged and very lucky life. I want to thank you all for
the love and support you have given me in so many ways. Your dedication,
courage, and determination to act have inspired and sustained my own efforts.
My wish for you is that at the end of your days you will feel as much joy and
gratitude as I do now.
Love, Dan
11 comments:
This strikes me in several ways. I’ve always admired Ellsberg for his courage, and he certainly is showing it now. At 85, I sometimes wonder what it is that, in the end, will kill me. So far as I know, I’m reasonably healthy. My major complaints are a bad back and severe hearing loss, but as Ellsberg’s news demonstrates, in old age there’s no end of the possibilities that can strike you down very quickly.
There’s no disputing the scientific consensus that he notes on the effects of nuclear war. But he doesn’t say how we should react to that, other than to (implicitly) deplore what we’re doing now. But what, exactly, should be our policy with regard to nukes in a world in which people like Putin and Xi have them? Where should we draw lines? Or should we draw them at all? Should we have stayed out of Ukraine and let Putin have it? Are we willing to risk nuclear war for Finland or Hungary? For Korea or Japan? Australia?
These may be unfair questions to pose to someone in Ellsberg’s position right now, but they don’t go away, and I don’t see anyone addressing them.
Over the past few months I have been listening to podcasts and YouTube content produced by Aaron Good, who has a doctorate in political science but focuses on the history of the US Deep State, especially since WWII. One of his mentors is Peter Dale Scott, whom he has interviewed several times for the podcasts. It turns out that Scott has been a very close friend of Daniel Ellsberg for many years, and Good has also interviewed Ellsberg several times. The three of them recorded an episode on Watergate and on the JFK assassination last year. (Scott is 95 now, btw. Still writing and researching.)
One of the most horrifying things I have learned from those podcasts is that while Ellsberg was working on US defense policy for the RAND Corporation, he discovered that what he has called the Pentagon's top plan for nuclear war was so secret that even the Secretary of Defense was not permitted to know about it! The Pentagon had explicit instructions that if a document were prepared that would be seen by the Secretary of Defense or the White House and that mentioned the full name of the plan ("Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan"), the document would have to be retyped using an acronym instead so as to avoid raising questions about what the details of the plan entailed.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/01/18/daniel-ellsberg-nuclear-worrier/
I know we would like to think that things have improved on that front since the 1960s, but I don't think an honest appraisal of the current situation allows us to say that's the case.
(contd)
In some ways, I think things are actually worse. We don't even have the kind of sometimes-adversarial corporate media that we had in the '70s when it comes to the military and war.
Seymour Hersh has reported that a Biden admin insider alleges that not only did Biden himself order the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline (an act of terrorism, and according to some an act of war), but he had begun planning the attack months before the Russian invasion. The Biden admin has blamed Russia for the attack. Yet the major US media have largely ignored this report.
(contd)
We saw with Russiagate that the security services were withholding information from the elected president and his appointees. We see that members of Congress who sit on the intelligence committees and who are supposed to be overseeing the actions of the military and intelligence services have shown no inclination to rein in those agencies, and the latter continue to hide their activities from Congress, the courts, and the public by classifying everything as secret. In far too many cases, members of the House and Senate who sit on the intelligence and defense committees seem to prefer not to know what the services are actually doing. Even if we accept their claims that they were kept in the dark about some of the worst actions of the agencies over which they have oversight responsibilities, they cannot be absolved of failure to act to change the laws so that fewer abuses occur and so that perpetrators of crimes are held accountable.
For example, Nancy Pelosi has claimed that when she was the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee early in the Bush Jr admin, she was not informed that US personnel were torturing prisoners as part of the war effort. I think she is lying about some of this, but even if she is not, what has she done in the subsequent years, including during her long tenure as Speaker, to improve the ability of the House and Senate to oversee the intelligence agencies and prevent crimes like these from occurring ever again? How can members of Congress even raise the alarm about dangerous abuses when the policies are hidden under the rules of secrecy?
"Well, how can you ask when you don't know the program exists?" [Senator Susan Collins] says....
[D]uring the last Congress, she was the ranking member on the Homeland Security Committee, and she still never heard about either the email monitoring or phone records collection....
The White House says members of Congress could have asked to review classified reports. But here's how that would work: First, you have to know what to ask for. Then, you walk into a secure room. You can't bring your cellphone in. You can take notes, but you can't keep them with you afterward. So you're relying completely on memory by the time you walk out of that room.... And yet, all of them were asked to vote on the laws that authorize this monitoring.
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/06/11/190742087/what-did-congress-really-know-about-nsa-tracking
(I should clarify: Hersh did not say his source was a Biden admin staffer. It could very well be someone from the Defense or Intel circles—or for that matter, although far less plausibly, even someone affiliated with an allied government?—who is a not civilian member of the WH.)
David Palmeter,
If you read Ellsberg's letter above, you'll see that China has a no first strike policy, so don't worry about Xi. Do you really think that Xi would be crazy enough to invade Australia? South Korea? Japan? There's a reason that someone used two atomic bombs against Japan a few years ago and that reason is that you don't invade Japan: they fight back.
Putin invaded Ukraine because he mistakenly thought it was a push-over. Bush 2 invaded Iraq for the same reason. No one invades someone who they imagine will put up a fight just as high school bullies don't pick on the capitain of the wrestling team.
Xi might possibly invade Taiwan in certain circumstances, but Korea, Japan and Australia no way. How many soldiers would it take to dominate the huge land mass of Australia?
The two big worries are Putin and good old Joe Biden. Ellsberg makes that clear above by the way.
s. wallerstein,
Xi might not be crazy enough to attack Australia, though the Australians are worried that he might. But this is not my point. My point is that we are committed to defending many countries in case of attack, and that in exchange for, they have agreed to forego nuclear weapons. We've told them they don't need nukes because we've got their backs. Do we have their backs? Should we have their backs? Heretofore, what we've gotten for that is a limit on the spread of nuclear weapons. But we've also gotten defense obligations. And as many episodes in history, from the Peloponnesian War to WWI have shown, alliances, even defense alliances, can lead to nasty things.
"How many soldiers would it take to dominate the huge land mass of Australia?"
Not many. Most of Oz is un or lightly populated with most of the population concentrated i a few smallish areas. Decapitation would be relatively easy. As a sole actor. Oz is a sitting duck
Confirming aaal. I belive I remember reading the if you stand successively on the highest buildings in Melbourne and Sydney , you will have had two thirds of Australia's population within your purview.
I believe Dan Ellsberg deserves equal honor in his dissent with our finest war heroes. He follows Eugene Victor Debs, jailed for violation of the Alien and Sedition acts in WWI. Dan would almost certainly have been found guilty if his constitutional fights had not been violated by the paranoid President Nixon. Dan is among the great American heroes of liberty.
Vernon L. Smith. March 6, 2023 at 2:52 PM
I believe Dan Ellsberg deserves equal honor in his dissent with our finest war heroes. He follows Eugene Victor Debs, jailed for violation of the Alien and Sedition acts in WWI. Dan would almost certainly have been found guilty if his constitutional fights had not been violated by the paranoid President Nixon. Dan is among the great American heroes of liberty
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