Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Ellsberg's job, at the time he copied the Pentagon Papers, was nuclear strategy. His recent book The Doomsday Machine is a sobering account of early US strategy, which he can write about now because a lot has been declassified.

It turns out the Pentagon Papers were supposed to be just a sideline. He also copied documents on US nuclear strategy, which was horrific. He released the Vietnam documents first because he figured if he started with the nuclear docs, nobody would care about the Vietnam stuff.

He gave the nuclear papers to his brother to hide. His brother hid them first in his compost pile, then got worried and moved them to a garbage bag on the edge of the town dump. The next day, men in suits were seen poking metal rods in his compost pile.

Unfortunately, a freak storm washed away that section of the dump. Ellsberg and his brother spent a year opening garbage bags in the area where it all ended up, to no avail. Ellsberg said his wife considered the storm a gift from God, because if the nuclear papers had hit the light of day, he surely would have spent the rest of his life in prison.

The recent revelations are not at all surprising.

Truman relieved General MacArthur of his command over coalition forces in Korea in large part because he planned and aggressively advocated the use of nuclear weapons against the Chinese.

If you visit the Princeton stacks, you can unearth many Woodrow Wilson School theses advocating the aggressive use of nuclear weapons during Vietnam. Some of the people who authored these papers went on to craft US trade policy from the 1980s through the present. A truly remarkable change of heart.

MacArthur was the wack job who, along with Patton and Eisenhower, attacked the poor Bonus Army protestors during the Great Depression. It's pretty much analogous to Occupy Wall Street but with a specific goal.

The Bonus Army was seen as a major threat at the time (imagine the Capital Building protests, but large enough to occupy a large part of the capital). FDR's commencement speech, which took place while they were going on, makes anything said by recent US presidents look tame.

I threat to whom? Hoover sent in the troops and the generals rolled tanks through DC and their encampment. It cost Hoover his reelection and his reputation which was otherwise stellar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army

> The recent revelations are not at all surprising.

You have to be careful with sentences like that. It removes all of the urgency and action from a discussion.

It also adds information. Specifically, that it wasn’t the lack of awareness that led to this situation repeating. This, we should focus our efforts not just on whistleblowing, but on figuring out the gap between the whistle and effective action.

> Truman relieved General MacArthur of his command over coalition forces in Korea in large part because he planned and aggressively advocated the use of nuclear weapons against the Chinese.

This is still debated, and MacArthur later denied it in his testimony to the Senate Inquiry. His removal has a clearer and simpler reason: Truman felt MacArther's communication with the Chinese violated his December directive and preempted the President, while the Joint Chiefs' concern was that "if MacArthur were not relieved, a large segment of our people would charge that civil authorities no longer controlled the military." [1]

The simplest explanation for the removal is that MacArthur tacitly disobeyed the Commander-in-Chief (enraging President Truman).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_of_Douglas_MacArthur#Re...

If you want to learn more, just watch the movie Dr. Strangelove. It was marketed as a comedy, but people in the know consider it to be non-fiction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove

General MacArthur was dismissed during the Korean War because the White House weren't sure if he was going to use nukes or not (like the movie.) The policy was that the US was ready (bombers with nukes were positioned in Japan), but President Truman wanted to give final advance approval to commanders, yet MacArthur was issuing his own policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_MacArthur

(It turns out that MacArthur was right about basically everything he ever said, and continued to advise Presidents.)

makes me wonder what Rhee knew. for those of you who don't know, he was trained by americans and later smuggled out of the u.s. by someone high up in the army. he then received dictatorship of southern korea from the u.s. army, then went on to kill several hundred thousand political prisoners.

Dr. Strangelove ends in a total nuclear war with humanity retreating to underground bunkers, so surely some of it must have been fictional.

Eh, so far.

Not exactly, it finish with the guys that started the war (not humanity en masse) retreating to underground bunkers with an harem. Sounds pretty realistic to me.

It was based on a non comedy book, ‘Red alert’. There is another film from the time as well , same premise, ‘fail safe’ that is also a serious take on it.

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