The thing I remember about 1st grade in 1949 is our air raid drill. I was sitting on the floor in the basement basketball court of Gordon Jr High School. Benner Elementary School was next door. I asked the principal or maybe he was the superintendent if we were there because the bomb couldn’t get all the way through the floors above. I can see his smile when he replied, “Yes that’s about it.”
Daniel Ellsberg is known for the “Pentagon Papers” but they were a fraction of the documents in his safe. One of Mr. Ellsberg’s jobs was informing presidents of our nuclear war plans. He planned to release our nuclear plans after the “Pentagon Papers” were completely published but fate intervened. Now most of those war plans are in the public domain. Since Mr. Ellsberg collaborated in creating those nuclear war plans he has intimate knowledge of them.
Nuclear deterrence to survive a 1st. strike by another nation is pure propaganda. The abundance of nuclear weapons is for surviving retaliation after a U.S. 1st strike.
“In 1959, Ellsberg became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, and consultant to the Defense Department and the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making. In 1961 he drafted the guidance from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the operational plans for general nuclear war. He was a member of two of the three working groups reporting to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOM) during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.”
The book is easy to read and hard to put down.
“The human race would not go extinct from a nuclear winter,” he says. “One or two per cent of us would survive, living on mollusks in places like Australia and New Zealand. Civilization would certainly disappear. But we would survive as a species.””
Just my humble opinion, I don’t see a nuclear war with North Korea that doesn’t involve the Russian Pacific Fleet 100 miles away. (Sonbong North Korea to Vladivostok & the Russian Pacific Fleet is under 100 miles)
Russia has that “Dead Hand” signal thing if a Russian base is attacked.
“The Pacific Fleet is slowly but steadily gaining critical mass. The pride of the fleet are two Borei-class submarines – the Alexander Nevsky and the Vladimir Monomakh – which are counted among the deadliest submarines in the world.
An improved version of the Borei will be capable of launching between 72 and 200 hypersonic, independently maneuverable warheads on the sidewinding Bulava missile. In theory, a single Borei volley could render any country in the world unfit for human life.”
FROM:
Russian Pacific Fleet’s resurgence sets off alarm bells in Washington
SCIENCE & TECH
Full scale nuclear war means about 1 billion immediate deaths. Most of the Northern Hemisphere. Russian subs are about 14 minutes away from anywhere in the USA.
“Ellsberg then turns to North Korea. He believes Trump has largely created the crisis by saying North Korea will not become a nuclear weapons state on his watch. “‘I won’t let it happen,’ according to Trump,” says Ellsberg. “But it already did happen before he took office.”
The result is that the US is now, for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, threatening to attack a country equipped with nuclear weapons. “We are talking openly about assassination teams, about full-scale invasion exercises, about the decapitation of North Korea’s leadership. This is insanity. HR McMaster [Trump’s national security adviser] says we’re moving closer to nuclear war every day. It’s crazy.”
The result of Trump’s words is to accelerate Kim Jong Un’s missile programme. Trump has convinced Kim that North Korea’s ability to obliterate South Korea and parts of Japan would not deter the US. Only the capability of hitting the US mainland would suffice. As a result, North Korea has stepped up its intercontinental ballistic missile development. It is only a matter of time — “perhaps weeks” — before Kim tests a hydrogen bomb in the atmosphere, which he needs to do for his ICBMs to be credible. At which point, all bets are off, says Ellsberg. “Trump is at least pretending to be unstable and crazy,” he says. “At the moment he’s fooling me.”
By this point I am drinking an espresso, although profoundly regretting not having ordered a large cognac. Ellsberg is back on the chamomile and honey. Does anything give him cause for optimism? He mentions Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela and others who improved the world, but keeps returning to his abiding theme: humans control nuclear weapons and they are fallible. Leaders in the US and Russia have delegated the authority to use them to underlings. The US alone possesses an arsenal large enough to destroy the world hundreds of times over. Barack Obama could not cut America’s nuclear capacity in spite of wanting to. Instead the Pentagon persuaded him to spend another $1tn modernising America’s arsenal.
“The chances that we can get off the Titanic are vanishing,” says Ellsberg. “But in spite of all this I am an optimist,” he adds. My ears prick up. It sounds like Ellsberg is going to end on an upbeat note.
“The human race would not go extinct from a nuclear winter,” he says. “One or two per cent of us would survive, living on mollusks in places like Australia and New Zealand. Civilization would certainly disappear. But we would survive as a species.””
MORE AT:
The former cold war hawk talks about Snowden, Nixon and the chances of avoiding a nuclear catastrophe
December 8, 2017
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