“To be sure, Americans, and American Air Force planners in particular, were the only people in the world who believed that they had won a war by bombing, and, particularly in Japan, by bombing civilians. There was no new decision to be made in the spring of 1945 about burning a city’s worth of humans.” Daniel Ellsberg. “The world has yet to absorb the lessons of this history—the story of how the existence of humanity was placed in great, unjustifiable danger by men who had no intention of doing that, men who recoiled from ending human history, or from taking what they saw as a high or even significant risk of doing so.” “We humans almost universally have a false self-image of our species. Many thousands of NSA employees had known for a decade of that mass surveillance and its criminality. Did they ever? Decades later, long after McNamara’s retirement, Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman launch control officer, informed the former secretary that the Air Force had ensured that the codes in the launch control centers were all set continuously at 00000000. If I can get the United States to assure me that it will not attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, I will remove the missiles.” That is what happened, and now I am reviled by the Chinese and the Albanians.… They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. “For several crucial days, I believe, Kennedy and Khrushchev were each privately prepared to back down, “but not yet,” as they sparred with forces armed with thermonuclear weapons. “Most of them.” The last three words didn’t register with me right away because before they were out of his mouth, my head was exploding. But what is dangerous to our survival is not the smoke from ordinary fires, even very large ones—smoke that remained in the lower atmosphere and would soon be rained out—but smoke propelled into the upper atmosphere from the firestorms that our nuclear weapons were sure to create in the cities we targeted. “The fact is that the estimate of fatalities, in terms of what was calculable at that time—even before the discovery of nuclear winter—was a fantastic underestimate. “I don’t think there is a military problem … This is a domestic political problem.” That means the United States and all its allies, including Israel, along with Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.” The biggest tragedy, as they saw it, was not that our country might be devastated and everything lost, but that the Chinese or the Albanians might accuse us of appeasement or weakness. “The cliché that “everything leaks; it all comes out in the New York Times eventually” is emphatically not true, above all for sensitive compartmented information. “I’ll be quite frank,”102 he told the president. “For several crucial days, I believe, Kennedy and Khrushchev were each privately prepared to back down, “but not yet,” as they sparred with forces armed with thermonuclear weapons. This would reduce sunlight and lower temperatures72 worldwide to a point that would eliminate all harvests and starve to death—not all but nearly all—humans (and other animals that depend on vegetation for food). You think they’d come back? “one can ask why they didn’t explore more vigorously the possible environmental consequences of this unprecedented ecological experiment—an all-out thermonuclear war—for which they were preparing. My first thought: “I know exactly what that bomb was.” It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about the previous fall. Ferocious updrafts from these multiple firestorms would loft millions of tons of smoke and soot into the stratosphere, where it would not be rained out and would quickly encircle the globe, forming a blanket blocking most sunlight around the earth for a decade or more.
Does Russia? The obstacles to achieving these necessary changes are posed not so much by the majority of the American public—though many in recent years have shown dismaying manipulability—but by officials and elites in both parties and by major institutions that consciously support militarism, American hegemony, and arms production and sales.” Ferocious updrafts from these multiple firestorms would loft millions of tons of smoke and soot into the stratosphere, where it would not be rained out and would quickly encircle the globe, forming a blanket blocking most sunlight around the earth for a decade or more. As Nixon says, it was clear to him, given the scale of the first demonstration, that his ultimatum would fail.