Ultimate Violence: Nuclear Taboo about to Explode

Our ‘Collective Suicidal Tendency’ Will Need Addressing

Daniel Ellsberg was widely remembered upon his death last week, and vociferously applauded for “The Pentagon Papers.”  I fondly recalled attending his talk on his book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner—when he astonishingly recognized me and complimented my book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump!

Ellsberg barely escaped the wrath of a president who claimed criminal burglary to try to stop him, tried to prohibit publication by demanding that “national security” so require it, and then barely failed to imprison and silence “the most dangerous man in America”—as designated by no less a superior imperialist war criminal himself, Henry Kissinger.

What industry-driven discourse has failed to highlight is that Ellsberg’s greatest concern, for which he expected to be imprisoned for life, was his larger goal of revealing America’s secret plans for nuclear war—including an actual plan for “preemptive” first strike attacks against the Soviet Union.  Preventing the ultimate violence of nuclear war was Ellsberg’s greatest inspiration and passion.  His many years of writing about this greatest of his fears are contained in his final opus, The Doomsday Machine.

Indeed, far more consequential and even more “classified” than “The Pentagon Papers” was the information Ellsberg had on the terrifying plans for nuclear war.  More than fifty years ago, expecting government agents to come searching high and low, Ellsberg and his brother secretly buried what I will call “The Nuclear Papers”—papers he hoped to safeguard for future use, by someone else if not himself.  In the end, however, the earth-shaking trove of secret documents was lost, as its burial place unexpectedly gave way to land developers who had no idea what they were destroying.

There were others who came before and after Ellsberg, also in the know and terrified by the prospect of nuclear war, which, now more than ever, threatens the termination of human civilization.  The father of the atomic bomb Robert Oppenheimer himself, very quickly and desperately, tried to warn against using and further developing the very weapon he had masterminded.  But as the Cold War erupted, he was stripped of his security clearance, ostracized, and blackballed as a result.  After all these years, a major—some say “horror”—movie about what happened to Oppenheimer is scheduled for release next month.  

Albert Einstein and other leading atomic scientists also tried immediately to sound the alarm by publishing a book and making a short movie in 1946, entitled One World or None.  They urgently called for the outlawing of atomic, and the newly-emerging nuclear, weapons, ominously creating “the Doomsday Clock.” 

Others since Ellsberg include my friend and inspiration Bernard Lown, who founded the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.  The Reagan administration at the time tried to get the Prize rescinded, worked feverishly to undermine him, and ultimately caused him to be shunned.  Lown’s remarkable story is told in his Prescription for Survival: A Doctor’s Journey to End Nuclear Madness—after which I named my own organization’s “Prescriptions for Survival” in recent years.

There are other notable current organizations that deserve mention.  Domestically, there is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, which last month honored Professor Richard Falk with its Lifetime Achievement Award.  Internationally, there is the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.  However, against the massive power of the military-industrial complex, the imperial state, and the major corporate media, neither these nor other organizations have managed to have much public impact beyond its limited circles.

A recent Harvard University study showed that Russia is being pushed into using nuclear weapons in Ukraine.  We know that Vladimir Putin has not only begun repositioning tactical nuclear weapons for possible use but has publicly proclaimed unprecedented strategic weapons unstoppable and “the world’s most powerful.”  Even Joe Biden has publicly declared recently that Russia’s use of nuclear weapons is a “real” possibility, and tremendous efforts are underway in the U.S. and China as well to develop and deploy ever greater, faster, and unstoppable nuclear—as well as cyber, biological, and artificial intelligence—weapons of mass destruction.

This is why I have expressed my view that, given the industry influence on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Doomsday Clock should be moved even further from its current 90-second position to 50 seconds to midnight, as I have explained in previous writings.

Einstein, Oppenheimer, Ellsberg, Falk, Lown, and a few others have been extremely prescient in their lifelong warnings.  Now, it seems we are closer than ever to the explosion of the taboo against using nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.  Whether that will then translate to a rapid escalation to total Doomsday or a course correction is in question.  But there is no question that our collective drift to that Ultimate Violence and total destruction is upon us—a situation of utmost urgency.

We have literally entered madness, using the best of human brains and gigantic resources to devote ourselves to mindless preparations for ultimate destruction.  I have consistently called this our “collective suicidal tendency.”  Just as there is a time when it is necessary to let go of home remedies and to call a doctor, when a sickness becomes severe, so is the case with our collective mental health.  To avoid mental health professionals at all cost regarding a mental health issue is what the sickest individuals do. The correct expertise needs to be mobilized if we wish to avoid an outcome as has been depicted in “Dr. Strangelove,” “Fail Safe,” “The Day After,” or “By Dawn’s Early Light.”  Einstein foretold, in his last years—hoping to wake us all up to face our unprecedented predicament—that though he was not sure what weapons would be used for World War III, that World War IV would be fought with “sticks and stones.”