Once Fired, There’s No Calling a Nuke Back - Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (8/12)

Daniel Ellsberg: "Alerts like that have come at the highest level, that we were being attacked. One, in fact a very convincing one, in 1979, where Zbigniew Brzezinski was awoken at 3:00 in the morning and told that 50 missiles were on the way, and then minutes later that 200 were on the way. That happened a few years later, in the Soviet Union where Stanislav Petrov, a colonel in charge of early warning satellites, learned from his satellites that American missiles were on the way, and he had the job of deciding whether this might be a false alarm. Which it was, but his subordinates all felt, no, this is it. Tell them that we’re under attack. Which would almost surely have led to a Russian preemption, as in our case, and we wouldn’t be here at all. He chose to say it was a false alarm, and then spent ten minutes hoping he had been right. And he was right. He was reprimanded for not following the protocol on this and reporting that there was a high chance that there was an alarm coming. 

The point is these alarms do occur. I said in ’79 Brzezinski was on the point of calling the president and telling him that 200 missiles were on the way when he was called by a third call, and said it’s a false alarm. Now, he hadn’t awakened his wife, who was lying next to him in bed when he got this call. He was about to call the president without awakening his wife, because what’s the use? You know, it was all going to go. No one has asked the question on that story, why didn’t he let the president sleep? What use would it do to tell Jimmy Carter that 200 are on the way? Well, we could fire our weapons. To what effect? No effect, in terms of either American culture or most human life on Earth. It would make no effect. We are on both sides basing our deterrence, subject to false alarms such as this one- someone by the way, had put a training tape into the operational warning system which entirely mimicked a complex Russian attack. It wasn’t just a few weapons are on the way by mistake, but submarine missiles are coming in. Planes have launched, other missiles are coming. It was an entire Soviet attack. It couldn’t have been more convincing. And they discovered that just in time. Two years later, or rather one year later, two separate attacks from a faulty computer chip led to similar alarms on this. 

Our existence as a species, and certainly civilization, not just American democracy, have depended for more than half a century on discovering in time the mistakes of our radar systems and our satellites, and of our subordinates, in the course of this. The world has depended, has rested on the good luck that our system failures have not persisted long enough by minutes to result in the hair triggers on our true doomsday machines from destroying most life on Earth."

Here's eight of the now twelve projected segments in this all-important interview. I'm reading the book now; it's horrifying, but either the species sucks it up and does something about this and global warming or we're all fucked. Nature doesn't grant safe spaces.

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