Daniel Ellsberg's Blog

Ellsberg’s “Desperate Proposal Pattern”

by Thomas Reifer

At the height of global demonstrations against Israel’s radically disproportionate response to the horrific October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel, which killed some 1,200 people with 240 hostages taken, headlines around the world proclaimed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is vowing to go ahead with his long-planned full scale invasion of Rafah, in Gaza — at a time when some 30,000 Palestinians have already been reported killed by Israel.

How to explain Netanyahu’s determination to go ahead at all costs, defying massive protests in Israel and across the world calling for a hostage deal and a ceasefire? It may be useful to revisit Daniel Ellsberg’s concept of the “Desperate Proposal Pattern,” a theme to which Ellsberg returned many times in his lectures, discussions and private writings on contemporary and historical happenings.

Ellsberg described the Desperate Proposal Pattern this way: “To avoid an ‘intolerable’ (infinitely negative) outcome, any measure with some chance of success is justified, no matter how low its probability of success, or how high its costs and risks. Hence there is no need to report or even calculate the latter considerations; it is enough to say that, unlike current policy, the one proposed is not certain to fail.”

Ellsberg coined the term after reading the Top-Secret Pentagon Papers. As first formulated and applied by Ellsberg to U.S. decisionmaking in Vietnam, the concept sought to illuminate the willingness of U.S. Presidents, officials and advisers, when facing a certain short-term loss, to take wild, reckless gambles that risk catastrophe — if doing so would potentially avert such outcomes (and possibly lead them to come out even or win, as they defined such terms.)

Such seemingly paradoxical decision-making was later explored in the groundbreaking work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in their famous article, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decisionmaking Under Risk,” in Econometrica. (1) This body of work was influenced by Ellsberg’s dissertation, Risk, Ambiguity, and Decision, as well as his related early articles on decision-making and what became known as the “Ellsberg paradox.”

For Netanyahu, the sure losses that he is trying to avert are intertwined: the break-up of his coalition, the most right-wing in Israeli history, whose extremist members are demanding such an invasion; the related prospect of his having to reckon with his failure to take the intelligence warnings of reports of the October 7th terrorist attacks seriously, alert the public, and respond; and his possible fall from power — not to mention having to face criminal prosecution on other charges which still loom over his political future.

Other Israeli leaders, most notably former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (2006-2009), have argued that Netanyahu’s goal of supposed “total victory” was always unattainable, a chimera — and that the invasion of Rafah is dangerous, reckless, and certain to cause massive casualties among innocent Palestinian civilians as well as members of the Israeli Defense Forces.

This week, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has published “THE PATTERN OF BIBI’S DESPERATE PROPOSALS: What a twenty-five-year-old memo by Daniel Ellsberg says about the past failures of Lyndon Johnson and the current horrors of Benjamin Netanyahu.” In the article, Hersh says that a “former Israeli officer, who suffered a grievous injury in combat and survived, acknowledged the failures of the current war against Hamas. Following the Ellsberg thesis, he told me that Bibi viewed his ‘survival in power’ in the wake of the failures in Gaza as ‘more important than finding an alternative to Hamas in Gaza, getting on the road to ending the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and normalizing Israel’s situation in the region.’”

For more, see “The Desperate Proposal Pattern,” an abridged version of Daniel Ellsberg’s 4/11/99 unpublished memo to which Seymour Hersh’s article refers.

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Thomas Reifer, PhD is Daniel Ellsberg’s longtime research associate, colleague and friend.

(1) Kahneman later won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work with Tversky. Kahneman died in March 2024. For further background, see his obituary published this week in Science Magazine, as well as his New York Times obituary .

RECORDING of Daniel Ellsberg’s 10/22/23 Celebration of Life

On 10/22/23, the Ellsberg family held a public online memorial for Daniel Ellsberg via Zoom and livestream. Family, friends, and colleagues from around the world shared their favorite memories and celebrated Dan’s remarkable life. Here is a sound-optimized recording of the memorial, followed by a guide to the video’s contents.

NAVIGATING THE VIDEO BY SECTION

1.   Dan’s Family:  5:10
2    Early Years:  37:24
3.   Harvard:  43:56
4.   Decision Theory & RAND:  50:30
5.   Vietnam, A Change of Heart, Pentagon Papers:  53:13
6.   Dear Friends of Dan (One):  1:17:23
7.   Song: “North Star” by Adey Bell:  1:30:28
8.   Dear Friends of Dan (Two):  1:37:35
9.   Antinuclear Scholar-Colleagues:  1:51:50
10.  Civil Courage & Nonviolent Resistance:  1:57:46
11.  Whistleblowers:  2:07:57
12.  International Voices:  2:20:32
13.  Dan’s Legacy:  2:29:58
14.  Dear Friends of Dan (Three):  2:40:56
15.  A Life Well Lived:  2:47:55

APPRECIATIONS

Event Co-creators: Patricia Ellsberg, Mary Ellsberg, & Jan Thomas

Tech / Video Team: John Bogley, Rebecca Hamilton-Levi, Joseph Ndayisenga, Denise Todloski, Nicholas Ellsberg, and María José Calderón

“North Star” – musical tribute to Daniel by Adey Bell & Venus Exalted – @Oracle88; www.oracle88.com

Video Clips of Daniel: The Rocky Flats Truth Force, The Right LIvelihood Foundation, and the directors of “The Most Dangerous Man in America”

Music: Chopin and Debussy via www.musopen.org

Opening Slide and Other Photos: Christopher Michel, @ChrisMichel

Poem Read by Dan: “The Truly Great” by Stephen Spender

Most of all, we are deeply grateful for all of the moving and inspiring tributes to Dan offered by his family and friends. 

Invitation to Daniel Ellsberg’s Online Memorial on Oct. 22nd

The Celebration of Daniel Ellsberg’s Life will take place online on Sunday October 22nd from 1:00 to 3:00 pm Pacific, 4:00 to 6:00 pm Eastern time. You are warmly invited to attend via livestream at ellsberg.net/memorial. Feel free to share this livestream link, as well as the invitation below, with others who would like to attend. For those who are not able to view the celebration in real time, a recording will be posted on this website afterwards.

Warmly, Patricia Ellsberg and the Ellsberg family

(Photo: Christopher Michel – @ChrisMichel)

Ellsberg Obituaries & Tributes

Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers, Is Dead at 92, by Robert D. McFadden, New York Times, 6/16/23

Daniel Ellsberg, former defense analyst who released top-secret Pentagon Papers, dies at 92, by Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times, 6/16/23

Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers, Dies at 92, by Harrison Smith and Patricia Sullivan, The Washington Post, 6/16/23

Vietnam-era Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked Pentagon Papers, Dies at 92, by Hillel Italie, Associated Press, 6/16/23

Passage: Remembering Daniel Ellsberg (video), CBS Sunday Morning, 6/18/23

Daniel Ellsberg’s Message to Us, and to Future Generations, by Martin E. Hellman, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 6/16/23

A Father’s Legacy to His Son – and His Country, by Robert Ellsberg and Chris Zimmerman, Plough.com, 6/16/23

Reporter’s Notebook: Why the Pentagon Papers Leaker Tried to Get Prosecuted Near His Life’s End, by Charlie Savage, New York Times, 6/18/23

You Knew Daniel Ellsberg, Whistleblower. I Knew Him as a Film Fanatic, by Catherine Ellsberg, Washington Post Opinion, 6/18/23

Daniel Ellsberg’s Life Beyond the Pentagon Papers, by Ben Bradlee Jr., The New Yorker, 6/16/23

Daniel Ellsberg, American Hero, by Chip Gibbons, Jacobin, 6/16/23

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, 6/20/23, in four parts:

—Watch the full hour of Amy Goodman’s Ellsberg tribute show on Democracy Now!, 6/20/23

—PART ONE: RIP Daniel Ellsberg: “Most Dangerous Man in America” on Leaking Pentagon Papers, Exposing Gov’t Lies

—PART TWO: Months Before Death, Daniel Ellsberg Warned Crisis over Ukraine & Taiwan Could Lead to Nuclear War

—PART THREE: “The Doomsday Machine”: Confessions of Daniel Ellsberg, Former Nuclear War Planner

—PART FOUR: Daniel Ellsberg’s Dying Wish: Free Julian Assange, Encourage Whistleblowers & Reveal the Truth

Against the Unthinkable: Life After Ellsberg, by Richard (RJ) Eskow, Absolute Zero, 6/21/23

Daniel Ellsberg Is Gone — But He Left Us an Important Message, by Norman Solomon, Salon, 6/16/23

Daniel Ellsberg Was One of History’s Most Consequential Figures, by Trevor Timm, The Guardian Opinion, 6/17/23

Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked Pentagon Papers, Was a Prophet of Truth and Disarmament, by Fr. John Dear, National Catholic Reporter, 6/17/23

How Daniel Ellsberg Opened the Door to One of the Most Consequential Climate Stories of Our Time, by David Sassoon, Inside Climate News, 6/20/23

Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers Leaker, Had Roots in Metro Detroit, Cranbrook Schools, by Frank Witsil, Detroit Free Press, 6/18/23  

We’re Told Never to Meet Our Childhood Heroes. Knowing Daniel Ellsberg Proved That Wrong, by Glenn Greenwald, Rolling Stone, 6/16/23

Remembering Daniel Ellsberg, Courageous Truth-Teller, by Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 6/16/23

Daniel Ellsberg (video) – Courage Is Contagious, Washington Post, 6/16/23

Daniel Ellsberg Died Peacefully Today

A Letter from Daniel Ellsberg’s Family, 6/16/23:

Early this morning, Daniel Ellsberg died peacefully in his home in Kensington, CA. His cause of death was pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed February 17th. He was not in pain, and was surrounded by loving family. In the months since his diagnosis, he continued to speak out urgently to the media about nuclear dangers, especially the danger of nuclear war posed by the Ukraine war and Taiwan. (Links to the interviews are here.)

Daniel also shared many moments of love and joy in these months, including celebrating his 92nd birthday (April 7) and Patricia’s 85th birthday (April 26), and many visits and calls with friends and loved ones. He was thrilled to be able to give up the salt-free diet his doctor had him on for five years; hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppyseed bagels, and lox gave him extra pleasure in these final months. He also enjoyed re-watching his favorite movies, including several viewings of his all-time favorite, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Thank you, everyone, for your outpouring of love, appreciation, and well-wishes to Dan in the previous months. It all warmed his heart at the end of his life.

In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, “If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner.” (Patricia replied, “Then I’m glad you didn’t.”)

Daniel was a seeker of truth and a patriotic truth-teller, an antiwar activist, a beloved husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, a dear friend to many, and an inspiration to countless more. He will be dearly missed by all of us.

Thank you, Daniel, for sharing your wisdom, your heart, and your conscience with the world. We will keep your flame alive.

—Patricia, Mary, Robert, and Michael Ellsberg
Kensington, CA, 6/16/23

P.S. We will be arranging a public Zoom memorial in the coming months. This will be announced on Daniel’s Twitter and Facebook when it has been planned.

P.P.S. The Ellsberg family is extremely grateful to family friends Patrice Wynne, Jan Thomas (who began working as Daniel’s assistant in 1982), Tom Reifer, and Michele Reilly for their tireless and dedicated support in Daniel’s final months and weeks. We are also extremely grateful to Hospice East Bay for their phenomenal care.

Daniel’s surviving family:
Wife- Patricia Ellsberg (85)
Son- Robert Ellsberg (67)
Daughter- Mary Ellsberg (64)
Son- Michael Ellsberg (46)
Grandchildren:
(Robert’s children) Nicholas Ellsberg (36), Catherine Ellsberg (30), and Lukey Ellsberg (28)
(Mary’s children) Julio Martinez Ellsberg (38) and Ana Martinez (34)
Nicholas and his wife Sophie Ellsberg have a daughter Eileen, age 3, Daniel’s great-granddaughter

[Photo by Christopher Michel 2020 @ChrisMichel. A note for media: Christopher Michel took photos of Daniel and Patricia in 2020, and he has made them available via a Creative Commons attribution license, towards the bottom of this page and the next page. The photo credit is “Photo by Christopher Michel @ChrisMichel.” The Ellsberg family is grateful to Christopher Michel for these beautiful photos, which captured Daniel and Patricia perfectly.]

Daniel Ellsberg’s Interviews After His Cancer Diagnosis

The Man Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers Is Scared, by Alex Kingsbury – a Q & A with Daniel Ellsberg, New York Times, 3/24/23Nuclear Secrets, a Compost Heap and the Lost Documents Daniel Ellsberg Never Leaked, New York Times podcast,  4/20/23Speaking Truth to Power: Ellsberg’s Legacy of Courage and Conscience, interview with Christiane Amanpour, CNN, 3/27/23Daniel Ellsberg interviewed by Andrea Mitchell, MSNBC, 4/18/23A Dying Daniel Ellsberg Talks About the Power of Leaks, by Devlin Barrett, Washington Post, 4/25/23After Terminal Cancer Diagnosis, Daniel Ellsberg Reflects on Leaking Pentagon Papers & His Legacy, Democracy Now, 5/1/23“‘Courage is Contagious’: Daniel Ellsberg’s Decision to Release the Pentagon Papers Didn’t Happen in a Vacuum, by Christian Appy, The Conversation, 5/11/23Daniel Ellsberg on the Mehdi Hassan Show, MSNBC, 5/7/23American Prophet: Nearing the End of his Life, Daniel Ellsberg Can’t Be Confined to the Past, by Norman Solomon, Salon.com, 4/15/23

The Ellsberg family is thankful to Julia Pacetti of JMP Verdant Communications for coordinating Daniel’s media relations for over a decade.

Ellsberg Interview & Podcast in the New York Times

Photo by Andres Gonzalez for The New York Times

The New York Times recently published a Q&A interview and podcast with Daniel Ellsberg:

The Man Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers Is Scared, by Alex Kingsbury – a Q & A with Daniel Ellsberg, New York Times, 3/24/23

Nuclear Secrets, a Compost Heap and the Lost Documents Daniel Ellsberg Never Leaked, New York Times podcast with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, 4/20/23

Excerpts follow from the just-released podcast.

Intro: At the end of his life, the man behind the Pentagon Papers has a warning for us all.

A few years ago, Ellsberg revealed a secret: the Pentagon Papers were only some of the documents he’d copied, and not even the ones he considered most important. There was another set of documents about American nuclear war planning that he had wanted to be his legacy. But a sequence of events involving his brother, a compost heap, the FBI, and a tropical storm kept Ellsberg from ever bringing those other papers to light.

Now Ellsberg is reflecting on his life. And against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and rising tensions over Taiwan, he worries that we’re closer than ever to nuclear disaster and that the American public won’t start paying attention until it’s too late. Today, Daniel Ellsberg’s final warning.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: So in those early days at RAND, beyond reading reports about the Russians, what was your actual job?

Daniel Ellsberg: Actually, I was working on a branch of economics called decision theory. My work was: how do people reasonably make decisions under conditions of great uncertainty or ambiguity? An enemy attack — this meant a Soviet attack at that time — would inevitably be ambiguous.

Our warning systems have misread flocks of geese and atmospheric disturbances for incoming attacks, sending false alarms. So how would the president decide what to do when he wasn’t sure if there might be an attack? He didn’t want his planes to be caught on the ground. But on the other hand, if he went first, it could be on a false alarm. So this was the most consequential decision under uncertainty that any human had ever faced. That’s what I was working on.

Garcia-Navarro: Clearly it didn’t take long after you started working at RAND for you to start to think that the safeguards in place to prevent nuclear calamity were not as robust as you might have hoped.

Ellsberg: No. That was my specialty, investigating that, and that was the conclusion I came to: this is a very dangerous system.

Garcia-Navarro: Did you ever actually see a nuclear bomb? Did you ever get close to one?

Ellsberg: The only time I recall seeing an actual nuclear weapon was in Kadena (Air Force Base) in Okinawa. There was a weapon on a trolley, the kind of thing that carries heavy things to be loaded on the plane. It was, I would have said, six or seven feet long.

I put my hand on it, and uncannily, it felt warm. It was a cold day, but the weapon was warm because there was radioactivity coming from it. It felt like animal heat. It felt as though it were alive. That was an eerie feeling.

Garcia-Navarro:  I’m thinking of you as a young man discovering how faulty the systems are that keep us safe from nuclear war. Do you think things are any better now, considering what a dangerous situation we’re in with Russia and other places?

Ellsberg: We’re in a more dangerous situation than any time in my lifetime. You could say the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I was involved in, in fact had a comparable risk of all-out nuclear war; that’s true. Nothing since then.

…I’ve long said that to my last breath I will be doing what I can to postpone and avert the risk of nuclear war. And I will. I will do what I can to the last — till my last breath.

Amanpour’s Interview with Ellsberg on CNN, 3/23/23

Watch Ellsberg’s conversation with Christiane Amanpour, “Speaking Truth to Power: Ellsberg’s Legacy of Courage and Conscience,” aired on CNN on 3/23/23.

Excerpts from the Interview:

Christiane Amanpour:  The 20th anniversary of the Iraq War this week reminds us all of the critical importance of holding governments to account. Fast forward to today, and autocrats are waging wars around the world, from Russia’s latest year-long invasion of Ukraine to Iran’s battle with its own people.

The brave women and men taking to the streets there remind us of the power and value of speaking truth to power. Whistleblowing plays a crucial role in this pursuit. Without it, unjust wars begin and injustices go unchecked.

Daniel Ellsberg is probably the patron saint of them all. Anyone who knows anything about America’s misguided war in Vietnam knows his name to this day, because of one giant leap of courage and conscience. Leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971, at great personal risk, changed the course of that history by revealing America secretly knew the war was unwinnable.

Fifty years later, Ellsberg is still deeply committed to peace and transparency. But this month, at almost 92, he revealed his latest personal battle after being diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. So when he joined me from Berkeley, California, we talked about his life, this farewell moment, and above all, how to save lives by speaking out. 

Daniel Ellsberg, welcome to the program.

Daniel Ellsberg:  Glad to be here, Christiane.

CA:  Daniel,can you just tell me how you’re feeling?

DE:  I’m feeling wonderful, as matter of fact. People say to live one day at a time, as though it were your last. I think that’s pretty hard to do. You’ve got appointments to keep, people to say goodbye to. But actually, one month at a time works very well, living as though it were my last. I’m having a very good time here, seeing relatives, seeing all my grandchildren, and eating food that I haven’t been able to eat for years because I had a salt-free diet, which I am now off.

CA:  It is incredible to hear you saying you are having a wonderful time… You seem to be at peace with it.

DE:  I’m not in arush to leave. But it’s been a wonderful party, and it’s time to go home and goto bed.

CA:  Wow. Well, part of the wonderful party is what you did with your life, right? You are the king of whistleblowers. Does that resonate with you?

DE:  I don’tthink we have a king. It’s a rather anarchic group, actually.

CA:  Okay,the lead whistleblower of all time.

DE:  As I.F. Stone, the journalist, used to say, “All governments lie, and nothing they say is to be believed.” That doesn’t mean that everything they say is a lie. It does mean that anything they say could be a lie, and it’s not the last word. You have to look for other sources of information and check it against your common sense. 

By the way, one thing I’ve learned in my long life is: if a policy looks crazy, it probably is.

CA:  Well, let’s talk about the policy that looked crazy to you. But before I get into the leak of the Pentagon Papers, let us just remember that you are not some long-haired anarchic lout. You were a Marine Corps veteran and a Harvard-educated former Defense Department official. You served with the State Department in Vietnam. So for you, what was the “aha moment” back then that made you need to put this out into the public?

DE:  Like nearly all whistleblowers, the wrongdoing I saw inside was known to virtually all of my colleagues. Humans turn out to be very loath to be ostracized from their group, to lose status, to break the rules of their group. That can keep them quiet about virtually any wrongdoing by that group, any harm being done to others – something they wouldn’t do on their own.

But if their leaders call for it, virtues of obedience that we all regard as virtues – courage, patriotism, loyalty – can be harnessed to very bad causes. That’s true of at least one side, usually both sides in any war. You see courage on both sides. And yet, humans can be called on to do things with their group that they know are wrong, but they can tell themselves, “Maybe it isn’t. Maybe there’s some reason that explains all this.”

For me it was reading 7,000 pages of top-secret documents in the Pentagon Papers. I was one of the few who read them all. I’d worked on one of the volumes, the 1961 volume. Reading them all, I realized that people inside had known, year after year, that what we were doing, at the level we were doing it, was doomed to fail, to result in a stalemate — an escalating stalemate.

But incivilian life, it seems rare to see people risking their careers, their access,their jobs, their families. They are not willing to do it, no matter how manypeople are at stake.

So I’mback where I was in ‘62, in a way. The world has not gotten less dangerous. Andyet, you don’t see people telling the truth, on either side, that mightactually save a war’s worth of lives.

CA:  Can Iask you something? Because speaking to you, and obviously reading all about youand the history… Do you feel at 92 now, and with your illness that you’ve gonepublic with, that you’ve accomplished your goals –  thatit’s been a life well lived, and you have done something more than maybe youcould ever have imagined in terms of effectiveness?

DE: Look, I was part of a movement — the anti-Vietnam-war, the anti-intervention movement — that did contribute, thanks to the unforeseeable actions of multitudes of people, to shortening the war. That was a success. The millions who died in Vietnam — and 58,000 in this country — are testimony to unsuccess, year after year. But eventually, it showed that truth-telling, committed action, nonviolent actions actually do succeed (although with no guarantees.)

I was also part of an antinuclear movement that kept things from being worse than they are, that kept the nuclear threats from being (more than) just threats. These were being used; there was no taboo against threats. But the trigger hasn’t been pulled yet. I was part of that movement.

CA:  Daniel Ellsberg, thank you so much for giving us the benefit of so much wisdom, and so much activism. We really appreciate it, and we wish you really all the very best.

Chomsky & Ellsberg – A Joint Interview with Paul Jay

In August 2022, Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg were interviewed together by Paul Jay for his podcast at theAnalysis.news. An excerpt follows from their conversation.

ELLSBERG: I’m sending stuff to my archives at UMass-Amherst, and I came across in my files this terrific paper by Noam Chomsky, U.S. Involvement in Vietnam, written just after the war had ended, finally in 1975. You probably don’t remember this paper, but I can recommend it to you.

Of course, it reminded me we had been in ’75, you and I, on the same side for eight years, since about ’67, when I came back from Vietnam, working together. With the greatest respect, you’d been on the right side much longer than that, all your life, as far as I know. Before those eight years, I had been participating as part of the wrong side. Anyway, we’ve been in for more than half a century working on this. I have not learned more from any person on Earth. From you, Noam. No one has contributed more.

Just going back to ’67 when I read your book on the American Mandarins and whatnot. The sentence in it was actually just indirect. It said the U.S. acted as if it had a right to do these things, to be demolishing Vietnam and threatening the world. I, as somebody who worked for the government for more than a decade, thought to myself, ‘a new idea’. I had never heard it discussed. Never heard the thought. ‘Do you have a right to do this, or not a right to do that?’ That was a very seminal thought as far as I was concerned. It helped change my life. So thank you.

CHOMSKY:  Let me just add that the fact that Dan was right at the heart of it for many years has been an extraordinary value. More than anyone else, he’s been able to bring us an understanding of how things work on the inside: what the planning is like, what the thinking is like, and how to understand what’s happening now because nothing much has changed. It’s an invaluable contribution. Quite apart from his 50 years of direct engagement, courageous, significant engagement with all the material he has brought forth. Now, on the background of nuclear planning, first, on the background of the Vietnam War, it’s been an incomparable contribution to moving forward to try to achieve some measure of peace and justice in the world.

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Visit theAnalysis.news to:

—Watch the interview

—Read the full transcript (scroll down, then click on “Transcript” link)

Ellsberg on Nuclear War and Ukraine

Editor’s note: Ellsberg’s 6/18/22 interview with TheAnalysis.News can be viewed here. An excerpt follows from the full transcript.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made the world far more dangerous, not only in the short run, but in ways that may be irreversible. It is a tragic and criminal attack. We are seeing humanity at its almost worst, but not quite the worst – so far, since 1945 we haven’t seen nuclear war.

Really, that was unexpected. When I was in my teens, in the 40s, or the 50s, or early 60s, I think almost nobody I knew expected that we would go 70 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki without another explosion on humans. It could well have happened. We have been very close to it, incredibly close to it.

Yet, something happened that was not easily foreseeable: that each of the superpowers, the US and Russia, allowed themselves to be stalemated or defeated without reverting to nuclear weapons. I think almost nobody foresaw that possibility.

Of course, it’s a possibility now, and in a new way. Here is the difference. In past situations of stalemate, when a superpower confronted a much smaller power – whether it was Korea, Indochina, Vietnam, Laos, or the Russians going to Afghanistan – we were able to accept defeat without using nuclear weapons, both in Vietnam and in Afghanistan. Essentially, we suffered a defeat in Iraq, politically speaking, as did the Russians in Afghanistan.

On several occasions, false alarms during past crises could have triggered nuclear war, except for the prudence of individuals in the system. The world hung on the somewhat dangerous (in career terms) decisions by people like Arkhipov in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Colonel Petrov in the 1983 crisis, not to alarm their superiors with their own belief that an attack might be imminent.  

A similar situation could arise in the current war in various ways. If the Ukrainians were to use the missile systems that we are now giving them, which give them the capability to reply to Russian attacks on Ukrainian soil with Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil, that would be a severe escalation, one possibly out of US control. Again, if a possible defeat in the Donbass of Russian forces caused Putin or his commanders, or conceivably subordinates, to attack supply points in Poland, thus implicating NATO directly, we could find ourselves with the US and NATO directly at war with Russia – a risk which has so far been avoided.   

Each leader here – Biden, on the one hand, and Putin on the other – has in the past refrained from acts that would bring our two nations into direct armed conflict. In this they have shown a kind of prudence. Yet it is also the case that they are gambling with clear-cut risks, through the interaction of what they each are doing with what the other side is doing. 

This is getting us into totally new territory, something that has not happened in the last 70 years: the imminent possibility of armed conflict between the US, or NATO, and Russia (or, earlier, the Soviet Union.) Amazingly, in these 70 years, each side has taken care – even in a proxy war, even against some asymmetric, weaker power – to avoid direct armed conflict between them. However, something we have not yet seen, something that has not yet been tested, is the willingness of the leader of a superpower to lose or to be stalemated by the other superpower. That would involve a loss of prestige and a loss of influence in the world such as has not occurred in previous wars.

For the US to withdraw from Vietnam or Afghanistan is understood by others as not directly impinging on their ability to be a great power or a superpower in the world. However, to lose directly to Russia, or for Russia to lose to the US, is another matter. That hasn’t happened before, and it could easily come about now.

That is the gamble being taken by both sides at this point, just as both sides were gambling in the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which I was involved at a high staff level. After 50 years of study, and having participated directly in the crisis, I believe that neither Khrushchev nor Kennedy intended to carry out their threats of armed conflict. I believe that they were both bluffing. Yet each of them was making moves, making deployments and threats and commitments, in order to improve the terms of a negotiated settlement – which each of them expected to conclude, in the course of sparring and deploying, with favorable terms. They came within a hair’s breadth of their subordinates’ actions leading directly into armed conflict.

A negotiated outcome as soon as possible, or within the next several months at least, is very important but not likely. As the war in Ukraine goes on, the possibility of escalation continues, and even grows, as policymakers seek to avoid further escalation or costly stalemate.

So we are talking about a long war in which Ukrainian lives are destroyed, hundreds of thousands more casualties on the Ukrainian side, as well as comparably on the Russian side. This is a tragic situation for Ukraine, and for that matter, for the Russian people with the sanctions, and for the rest of the world in terms of food supplies from Ukraine, which confronts people in Africa right now with the threat of famine and starvation as this goes on. The prospects for simply continuing at this level, even without escalation, are high.

It turns out that leaders in power will risk and even sacrifice almost any number of humans in order to avoid almost certain short-run defeat, disaster, or humiliation for them personally and for their country. The history of the last half century, which I have been analyzing (having participated in some of the worst aspects of it earlier in my life), tells me that rather than suffer humiliating defeat, a leader such as Putin is willing to raise the ante, escalate, back up previous failures, and double down in ways that are without consideration of the cost in human lives.

The risk that both sides are taking of triggering nuclear war, even if it remains somewhat limited, is potentially disastrous.

________

Watch the full interview here.