61 Quotes by Daniel Ellsberg

The implication – never questioned by anyone at RAND while I was there – was that adequate deterrence for the United States demanded a survivable, assured second-strike capability to kill more than the twenty million Soviet citizens who had died in World War II. That meant we were working to assure the survival under attack of a capability for retaliatory genocide, though none of us ever thought of it in those terms for a moment.

President Johnson put destroyers in harm’s way in the Tonkin Gulf not only once, but several times, with the, with a lot of his people hoping that it would lead to a confrontation and claiming that it had. And could have resulted in the lost of many lives in the course of it.

The world has yet to absorb the lessons of this history – the story of how the existence of humanity was placed in great, unjustifiable danger by men who had no intention of doing that, men who recoiled from ending human history, or from taking what they saw as a high or even significant risk of doing so.

This mortal predicament did not begin with Donald J. Trump, and it will not end with his departure. The obstacles to achieving these necessary changes are posed not so much by the majority of the American public – though many in recent years have shown dismaying manipulability – but by officials and elites in both parties and by major institutions that consciously support militarism, American hegemony, and arms production and sales.

The fact is that when it comes to judgment as to what should be secret and what should not be secret, Julian Assange’s judgment has been pretty good so far.

To be sure, Americans, and American Air Force planners in particular, were the only people in the world who believed that they had won a war by bombing, and, particularly in Japan, by bombing civilians. But the nuclear era eventually put that demonic temptation – to deter, defeat, or punish an adversary by an operational capability to annihilate most of its civilian population – within the reach of many nations.

City burning, in other words, was becoming something of a science.

You needn’t think there is nothing you can do-you can tell the truth.

Seventy years of public controversy about “the decision to drop the bomb” have been almost entirely misdirected. It has proceeded on the false supposition that there was or had to be any such decision. There was no new decision to be made in the spring of 1945 about burning a city’s worth of humans.