Conspiracy theories are fascinating and the bread and butter of tabloid magazines and TV. This series explores these theories in a logical and scientific manner.
As you might know there is a movie out called 'The Post.' It's a Stephen Spielberg movie about how journalists at the Washington Post published the leaked 'Pentagon Papers', a document that describes the United States' secret role in the Vietnam War. My essay isn't about this document. There are many books and TV documentaries about the Pentagon Papers. I want to discuss the ideas proposed by Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon papers to the press. He worked at the RAND corporation (A think tank) and was a consultant to the Department of Defense and White House in 1961. He was privy to Secretary Robert McNamara's plans for nuclear war. His latest book about this is 'The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.'
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A summary of the Pentagon Papers includes that the Johnson Administration lied to the public and to Congress about the true goals of the Vietnam War. It clearly states that the real reason for the Vietnam War was to contain China. This was the pentagon's plan ever since the Korean War. In no way was the Vietnam War fought to protect or help South Vietnam. In other words, the only goal was to throttle China from any new ambitions on the Asian front. The papers also revealed that the United States played a key role in the military overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, the then president of South Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin was staged to allow the United States entry into the war. It also discussed air strikes in both North Vietnam and areas around Vietnam, such as Cambodia. These plans were covered up at the time by being classified.
Ellsberg was charged with conspiracy for leaking the papers but the charges were later dropped when it was revealed that Nixon ordered his so-called 'plumbers' to discredit him during the Watergate scandal.
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Do you remember the 1964 movie: Dr. Strangelove. It's about a rogue United States Air Force general, Jack D. Ripper (appropriate name) who orders a first strike against the Soviet Union and how the president and his military advisers were unable to recall the bombers, resulting in an apocalypse because of the existence of a Soviet Union doomsday device that would retaliate with total destruction of life even if only one nuclear weapon detonates on a Soviet City.
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Well, it turns out that this idea of a doomsday device is real!
All I can say is; don't read Ellsberg book if you have a weak stomach. It's a chilling discussion about the realities of nuclear war and how close we could come to complete annihilation of life on this planet. I must add that Ellsberg does present a rational plan on how to avoid all of this.
In his latest book, Ellsberg discusses the idea of nuclear war since the inception of atomic weapons in World War II and then describes the plans by the military on how to deal with the threat of nuclear war from both Russia and China.
The main tenants of his book are:
The Manhattan project was not meant to make a nuclear weapon to attack Japan but rather to stop Hitler from having one and subsequently to prevent them from falling into the hands of communist states. On this they accomplished 1 out of 2.
There have been several very dangerous incidents that could have led to full-scale nuclear war. Only God knows why they didn't happen. The worse of these was the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union had created so-called doomsday machines to punish anyone foolish enough to launch a preemptive nuclear attack. This is where the conspiracy is. The problem is that both countries rely on failsafe systems to prevent total nuclear war. However, these failsafe systems are not reliable.
These doomsday machine systems entail allowing lower commanders to carry out nuclear attacks if their leaders are 'decapitated', a euphemistic term for the fact that first nuclear strikes would take out the presidents and military leaders. This is the most frightening aspect of this book.
These doomsday machine systems still exist to this day. Holy crap!
A full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia would cause a nuclear winter effect that would destroy almost all life on the planet. This apocalypse would result from the very large fires that would burn for long periods of time, sending smoke into the stratosphere that would block out the sun for a decade or more and kill crops. This is in addition to the radioactive fallout. Such a doomsday scenario would only happen form a full-scale exchange of thousands of thermo-nuclear bombs, not from nuclear attacks from lesser nuclear powered states like India, Pakistan or North Korea.
The only way to avoid this doomsday scenario is to dismantle these doomsday machine systems and do away with all nuclear weapons.
This is an excerpt from the book:
"The bottom line is that arrangements made in Russia and the United States have long made it highly likely, if not virtually certain, that a single Hiroshima-type fission weapon exploding on either Washington or Moscow -- whether deliberate or the result of a mistaken attack (as in Fail Safe or Dr. Strangelove) or as a result of an independent terrorist action -- would lead to the end of human civilization (and most other species). That has been, and remains, the inevitable result of maintaining forces on both sides that are capable of causing nuclear winter, and at the same time are poised to attack each other's capital and control system, in response to fallible warnings, in the delusion that such an attack will limit damage to the homeland, compared with the consequences of waiting for actual explosions to occur on more than one target."
All I ask is that you think about that statement and then consider who is in charge of both the United States and the Russian nuclear forces. Who has their finger on the big red button? These are the terrors of nightmares!
