Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light | Hacker News Reader

Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light

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102 pointscollate55 comments

Ellsberg's recent book The Doomsday Machine says the Pentagon Papers were his less-important material. His job at the Pentagon was nuclear policy, and he also had thousands of pages detailing that policy, which at the time was horrific. (The book goes into detail on just how horrific; much of it has been declassified now so he can source his claims.)

He decided to release the Vietnam papers first because he felt that if he released the nuclear papers, nobody would care about the Vietnam stuff.

He gave the nuclear documents to his brother, who first hid them in a compost bin. Then his brother decided that wasn't secure enough, and hid them in black plastic bags on the outskirts of the town dump. That turned out to be smart, since men in suits were seen poking rods into the compost pile the next day, but a freak storm washed that entire portion of the dump down a hill and the nuclear documents were lost. They spent a year sifting through trash looking for them.

Ellsberg's wife called that storm a miracle from God, because in Ellsberg's opinion he certainly would have spent the rest of his life in prison for making the nuclear papers public.

So, is anything from the nuclear documents in the book you mentioned? Or is it really all lost forever?

The documents themselves are lost, but Ellsberg was deeply involved in nuclear strategy and in the past few years has been able to get public declassified sources for much of what he remembered. The previously-classified history of US nuclear strategy is mostly what the book is about. (See my cousin comment for a short outline.)

Thanks a lot!

You can just watch the movie "Dr. Strangelove."

People thought it was SciFi, but it was actually a documentary.

The nuclear silo launch code for decades was "000000" to save time to launch.

Also, Reagan and Russia didn't care about some goofy MAD doctrine - they wanted actual ABM defenses. That's why there's an ABM ring allowed by treaty around Moscow, and why Reagan funded SDI (lasers weren't implemented, but anti-missile missiles were.) Reagan thought MAD was immoral if you could build a real defense, and he was right.

Something most people don't know is that Russia seriously planned to nuke Beijing durng their 1969 border dispute, but the US found out and told them not to. The CCP did their "wolf warrior" b.s. on Russia, and after the Russians had enough they decided to root out the problem once and for all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict

Ironically, the CCP asked Russia to declare a joint war on the US in the 50's and 60's twice for communist ideological reasons, but Russia laughed them off since there was no practical advantage for Russia.

Although Russia's weapons worked just fine, the US over-estimated Russian belligerence and grossly under-estimated the CCP.

The US Democrats are obsessed with the Russians, but it's the CCP that is completely unhinged. Xi wants to be god on earth over all other countries.

That was only one step in many many codes - you couldn't just get a job in a launch silo and press boom

IIRC, during the Korea war there were people at Pentagon proposing to nuke China over their support for the North.

The US nuclear strategy at time was called massive retaliation.

'massive retaliation' was strategy where the US committed itself to response in much greater nuclear strike in the event of an attack, even conventional attack by Soviets. Kennedy abandoned that strategy during Cuban crisis when he saw that it didn't really work and was insane. It was simply not credible that US would commit losing 80-100 million people after single event.

The US and NATO nuclear deterrence moved to what is now known as flexible response. The response to attack will be proportional.

There seems to be a bit of confusion here.

I surmise that what was "lost forever" was only a copy of the documents. I base that on common sense, as well as this from the linked article (about the Pentagon Papers):

> So Mr. Sheehan smuggled the papers out of the apartment in Cambridge, Mass., where Mr. Ellsberg had stashed them; then he copied them illicitly, just as Mr. Ellsberg had done, and took them to The Times.

(Of course, I could be the one that is confused here, misreading this discussion. But I don't think that is the case)

Yes, it was Ellsberg's copies of the nuclear strategy documents that were lost. The original documents were still in a classified safe in the Pentagon. Some were later declassified, long after they were obsolete, and probably some have never seen the light of day.

Nuclear conflict is inherently horrific, but I would hope we were (and are) willing to do appalling things to deter a nuclear attack on the US.

This is assuming the content of the papers is standard MAD. We don’t know what was in them.

The book is mostly about that content, which has been largely declassified now. It goes into quite a bit of detail.

It was not just MAD. It included massive retaliation against every city in both the USSR and China in response to minor conventional battles, which they calculated would also kill most people in Europe from fallout. It gave independent launch authority to regional military commanders. First strike was part of the strategy, and was threatened on multiple occasions.

The US has still not disavowed first strike.

In response to your last statement, I found this Amazon review [1] (of all sources!) of Ellsberg's book fascinating.

It's written by an older gentleman who was apparently involved in Nuclear policy in the late 70s and early 80s.

Here is the relevant snippet:

> To a degree, my time on nuclear weapons was a decade later than Ellsberg, ironically my first day after my PhD was the day Ellsberg's material hit the NY Times. Coming from MIT, and Ellsberg then being at MIT, I was looked at a bit askance. Yet over the next decade as I became involved in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, especially during the Carter period, it was clear that the only way to use a nuclear weapon was not to use a nuclear weapon.

> The RISOP [Red Integrated Strategic Offensive Plan, or the US Government's best counterplan, i.e. how the Soviets would retaliate] scenarios showed the annihilation of life on the planet. There was no way to win, first strike or otherwise. A Russian and US nuclear war was the destruction of all. Ironically in my later discussions with my Russian partners after the fall it was clear that they too understood this, positioning or not.

So, it seems like NPT [2] states understand that first strike (against one another) is a bankrupt strategy, since it results in MAD [3], if not a global extinction event.

A state might not ever externally disavow the first strike strategy for posturing reasons, but it is almost certainly not viewed as an effective winning strategy, internally.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2SL7WCQW1R6KN/re...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio... Notable non-signatories of the NPT include India, Israel, Pakistan, and DPRK.

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

That would certainly be reasonable and I hope it's accurate. I'm a little worried though that we're spending a lot of money to make more accurate warheads, which are more useful for first strikes against silos, and arguably less useful for deterrence since the resulting "use them or lose them" dynamic is destabilizing.

One improvement we definitely have now is a more flexible strategy. Back in the late '50s and for a while after, they had a detailed plan to keep planes from flying too near each other's mushroom clouds, and since they didn't have decent computers it took a huge amount of work to do all the calculations. The thought of doing it more than once filled nuclear planners with horror, so they just kept to a single plan, which was to launch everything against all targets, regardless of the situation.

We need to survive to 'phasers and photon torpedoes' somehow.

Retaining the skills and active devices to use against inbound rocks and balls of ice in intersecting orbits is the silver lining to these military policies.

"Minor" conventional battles that would have constituted effective declarations of war by a major nuclear power?

If two nuclear powers declare war on each other, that's it. Game Over. It feels redundant to be horrified by the possibility that warring nuclear powers would consider a first strike. Of course they would. That's... how war works.

Before going full nuclear it's always possible to deescalate, and when a first strike means the end of civilization, deescalation is the only rational option.

deescalation is the only rational option

Probably true, but you don't need to actually use first strike capability, you just need to convince the other side that you are willing to use it.

“The Three Body Problem” series has some masterful exploration of this concept.

War != total war.

War is an extension of diplomacy. It’s a negotiation. If increasing costs on my adversary increases costs on me, it may make sense not to do so.

This is just disgusting.

And this is why having nukes to defend yourself, are so important.

The goal of not disavowing a first strike was to deter a conventional attack. If your explicit policy is "we will only use nukes if you use nukes" then the implicit policy is: you can invade Europe without fear of nuclear escalation.

Instead of being upset at hypothetical nuclear fallout that never happened, we should look at the policy as a massive success at preventing war from happening.

Or we could look at the internal policy discussions that took place among Soviet leadership back in the day, since now much of that is unclassified. And it turns out there was no serious threat of a large-scale conventional war in Europe initiated by the USSR - at least not since 1960s or so. If anything, the Soviets were scared that NATO would do it.

Well well. That's one way to look at it and it is an interesting way to look at it

Another way to look at is that is equally important IMO is to realize they not only planned to but actually had occupied most of eastern Europe before that time.

Stopping this planning during the 1960ies might be related to

- Stalins death a decade before or

- to realizing NATO was getting too strong or

- to the enthusiasm for global communism waning

- or something else.

I certainly wouldn't subscribe it to some inherent peaceful nature of USSR though. For all the flak that the Americans (often rightfully) get we must not pretend that there was an obvious, readily available better alternative in trying to deescalate in the 60ies.

I didn't claim anything about the "inherent peaceful nature" of the USSR. It was an empire; empires are generally not peaceful.

However, there's a very simple and obvious reason as to why this mode of thinking prevailed after Stalin's death. The leaders who subsequently took power were those who saw the devastation of WW2 very close up, and knew full well of the true economic and social cost (to remind, Soviet losses were 20 million officially, but the real numbers were quite a bit higher).

The result was a firm commitment to "never again!" - that is, regardless of ideology and politics of the day, the axiom was that there shouldn't be another devastating war like that in the Russian heartland. And it was obvious that any major war with NATO carried a significant risk of such devastation - Soviets simply didn't have enough resources to guarantee the upper hand in a conventional engagement against the combined forces of US and Europe.

(Stalin didn't care about any of this - to his mode of thinking, sacrificing 20 million to grow his power was perfectly acceptable. That's why, as you correctly noted, the change didn't happen until some time after his death, once his political legacy waned.)

Note also that this explains some other things, such as the occupation of eastern Europe - its primary purpose was to serve as a buffer zone in any conflict with NATO, so that any territorial losses and devastation accompanied by large-scale warfare would be concentrated in those areas, as opposed to Russia proper.

Standard MAD* was insane already. The governments of nation states were willing to toast the human race to preserve control by the elites of pieces of land and the illusion of a nation. They still are.

Even if you are taken over by a dictatorship, you can struggle against it afterwards. Some dictatorships were even somewhat positive (e.g. Napoleon Bonaparte) even though I would have sided with the pro-republican movement. There's no future if everyone is dead.

* The funny thing about MAD is that even though it's standard terminology today, that was the name coined by its detractors.

> to preserve control by the elites

Stretch Armstrong would be impressed, this one is not easy to frame through the class war lens.

Nukes don't stop a rebellion. They do make other nations think twice about launching nukes at us, though.

> Nukes don't stop a rebellion. They do make other nations think twice about launching nukes at us, though.

MAD works until it doesn't. Even small escalations can rapidly ramp up into a worst case scenario. There is another path though: Disarmament though international treaties with comprehensive monitoring. Unfortunately, that was not the path taken as nation states that managed to accrue small advantages decided to press them instead. Today, the US is modernizing the nuclear arsenal to the tune of over a trillion dollars and is investing in tactical nuclear weapons.

> Stretch Armstrong would be impressed, this one is not easy to frame through the class war lens.

The cold war was about (some form of) capitalism vs (some form of) communism, which was in fact class war... However, in this case you can also see it as the ruling class is defending itself against control by another nation's ruling class. The people at the bottom are forced to deal with whatever the ruling class decides with little input.

> There is another path though: Disarmament though international treaties

I sleep better with a big deterrence arsenal than with a treaty that gets ignored the moment it becomes inconvenient.

> The cold war was about (some form of) capitalism vs (some form of) communism

The soviets didn't buck elite exploitation. Not for long and not by much.

If you think native elites are exploitative, I have news about foreign elites who have conquered you.

Regardless of who exploits whom under which regime, you'd have to have the mindset of a suicide bomber to prefer being dead than red - when you also unilaterally make that choice for hundreds of millions of people, many of whom entirely uninvolved in your conflict.

If they've reached the point where they actually have to use nuclear weapons in a MAD scenario, that political leader in question has failed at doing their job utterly, and completely irredeemably. It's a complete and utter betrayal of both their constituents, and the responsibility the world entrusted in them.

Why preface this with an "if" like it is a hypothetical where we don't know what happened? It is history now and we know how it turned out. MAD worked, there was never a nuclear war or major conflict between superpowers.

Political leaders didn't fail and have been redeemed. Their constituents weren't betrayed, and the world moves on.

That we did not have a world war does not imply that MAD works.

Moreover the world came incredibly close to total destruction a number of times, and in part it is just look that we are still alive. For example, imagine a different president than Kennedy in power during the Cuban missile crisis.

When did foreign elites ever conquer America?

Isn’t the opposite true? That American elites conquered the rest of the world.

The problem from game theoretical prospective is if you disarm and the other side doesn't your screwed. If the other side disarms it and you don't you win. Neither of you disarm and you maintain the status quo. And as you cant compel the other side to disarm there is no way to get to the mutual disarmament mutual win condition. Disarmament is just a prisoner's dilemma with WMD's and thanks to John Nash we all know mathematically the best move is to defect.

MAD works best also when you act as militaristic and insane as possible so the other side is afraid to do anything lest you kick the nuclear football. Hopefully everyone with access to the nukes knows this, but you cant admit you know this lest the enemy spies find out its a bluff thus weakening the bluff so both sides have to keep up the keefab at all time even internally. so while both sides may act like paranoid crackhead with a gun on the edge of starting Nuclear Armageddon for looking at them funny. They know its a suicide to actually fallow through. And it works. Why do you think the whole world puts up with the ongoing shit show in North Korea? They have nukes and can hit Tokyo Seoul Honolulu and Seattle.

Besides we don't even know that doesn't work. We haven't had a World War or major European war since the end of ww2. If we look back historically going 75 years without a major European war is amazing. all of the big wars since have pretty much been with major powers with non industrialized nations or collapsed failed nation states.

As for elites using nukes on the proles, that is ridicules and violates the don't shit where you eat rule. IE radiation poisoning doesn't care about your net-worth.

Well there's a reason there are safeguards agreements and inspections. The idea is a slow mutual drawdown and then eventually a rapid final disarmament once a critical low threshold is reached.

You can maintain the safeguards and inspections indefinitely via the IAEA.

https://www.ctbto.org/verification-regime/

But then it becomes a race to create the technology that can build nuclear weapons the fastest creating a more volatile equilibrium.

That's a good point but I suspect the feasibility of this approach depends on having large facilities and uranium procurement operations. These are things that can be regulated. You can see this in the Iran situation where their "breakout time" is measurable. With nations willing to negotiate, this could be brought under control. However, tbh I think they probably should have a deterrent as they are facing a serious invasion threat by nuclear armed powers. The world needs to scale down in tandem, not weaker parties first and stronger parties later.

not just fast manufacture times but replace many smaller yeild weapons but newer high yield weapons to keep the numbers in the agreed range but not actually reducing your damage potential.

You can make maximum yields part of your agreements. Of note though, the US during the Obama years improved the accuracy of submarine launched missiles which greatly improved the damage potential while staying in the agreed ranges. This was because fewer nukes would be needed per a target so overall damage could be increased.

For an example of this type of thing, see slide 11 (which refers to air dropped munitions rather than SLBMs): https://fas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Brief2017_Italy2....

The problem with that argument is that at some point acting insane to keep up pretenses and actually being insane becomes indistinguishable and you end up with the situation that only a young Russian nuclear officer disobeying orders is saving the world from nuclear Armageddon [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

you only want the leadership to act insane not the people sitting in the silos. You want sober rational if possible anti nuclear war individual in the silos but again you cant advertise that or you break the keefab the whole thing rides on.

think you're missing the point -

the only people to survive a total nuclear war would be the elites sheltered in some bunker somewhere; the point is that decision makers were/are willing to risk destroying the species itself just so that the surviving 5 people could preserve their ideology/territory and 'win', not that nuclear war is a deterrent against local uprisings.

It might be stuff like that he mentioned in his book like projections of the number of deaths from fallout in Western Europe if a first strike attack on the USSR went off perfectly with no effective response.

What a masterstroke, hiding the documents in black plastic bags on the outskirts of the town dump.

The dumps in my country are not static, they have bulldosers and diggers constantly moving things around and burying them deep underground. Interesting cultural difference

No, that's likely true wherever he buried them. Outskirts probably means a fair distance from where the actual dumping happened, so if someone stumbled upon it they'd think it fell out of a truck or something and ignore it.

Wow. In an age of increasing scrutiny of journalists, particularly in regards to the leaking of classified documents, this is a really bad look. Journalists screwing over their sources is unacceptable in every case, we don't have any trouble understanding that when it comes to interviewing terrorists, I don't know why it's a question when it comes to this.

Some stories are bigger than sources. The 'victim', Ellsberg, would seem to agree.

As far as I remember, Ellsberg was a true believer for a long time and originally wanted the information (not all of the papers) out so America would double down on VN. He thought it was still winnable. He moderated at some point in the process. Sheehan wasn't going to wait for his navel gazing and made him a progressive hero.

This is the problem I have about people who leak documents. They have an agenda and so only release the parts favorable to their bias rather than the whole archive. What was held back from the story that there were documents that showed that the US government was actively trying to get out of the war via back channel negotiations.

If Humphrey had been president, I could find fault in Ellsberg's decision not to release the diplomatic volumes. Knowing that Nixon held his own back channel negotiations to prevent peace and help his election chances, showing that Johnson made limited secret peace talks wasn't very relevant. Ellsberg's view that he didn't want to give Nixon an excuse to stall peace was a good call.

Oh, we were actively trying to not drop napalm in Vietnam? If only we could have been a little faster in not dropping napalm. Dratz!

So if someone leaked info about a killbot program, your protest wouldn't be that it's bad, but it's likely there's other work going on that'll hopefully make such killbots irrelevant, and why weren't those documents leaked? That doesn't sound very reassuring at all.

>Some stories are bigger than sources.

Absolutely. However, is it bigger than every story you're ever going to run? Because if I'm a potential source, and I see that you're rag is fine with sending sources to jail for a source, I'm not going to talk to you. Worse, if I'm a guerrilla group with an embedded journalist, I may very logically decide that they are a threat.

> The 'victim', Ellsberg, would seem to agree.

I don't recall the documentary I watched, but the impression I got was that Ellsberg needed or wanted Sheehan to make the call that he couldn't bring himself to make.

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