Dear friends and supporters,
I have difficult news to impart. On February 17,
without much warning, I was diagnosed with
inoperable pancreatic cancer on the basis of a CT
scan and an MRI. (As is usual with pancreatic
cancer--which has no early symptoms--it was found
while looking for something else, relatively
minor). I'm sorry to report to you that my
doctors have given me three to six months to
live. Of course, they emphasize that everyone's
case is individual; it might be more, or less.
I have chosen not to do chemotherapy (which
offers no promise) and I have assurance of great
hospice care when needed. Please know: right now,
I am not in any physical pain, and in fact, after
my hip replacement surgery in late 2021, I feel
better physically than I have in years! Moreover,
my cardiologist has given me license to abandon
my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has
improved my quality of life dramatically: the
pleasure of eating my former favorite foods! And
my energy level is high. Since my diagnosis, I've
done several interviews and webinars on Ukraine,
nuclear weapons, and first amendment issues, and
I have two more scheduled this week.
As I just told my son Robert: he's long known (as
my editor) that I work better under a deadline.
It turns out that I live better under a deadline!
I feel lucky and grateful that I've had a
wonderful life far beyond the proverbial
three-score years and ten. (I'll be ninety-two
on April 7th.) I feel the very same way about
having a few months more to enjoy life with my
wife and family, and in which to continue to
pursue the urgent goal of working with others to
avert nuclear war in Ukraine or Taiwan (or anywhere else).
When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had
every reason to think I would be spending the
rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I
would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening
the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that
seemed (and was). Yet in the end, that action—in
ways I could not have foreseen, due to Nixon's
illegal responses—did have an impact on
shortening the war. In addition, thanks to
Nixon's crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I
expected, and I was able to spend the last fifty
years with Patricia and my family, and with you, my friends.
What's more, I was able to devote those years to
doing everything I could think of to alert the
world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful
interventions: lobbying, lecturing, writing and
joining with others in acts of protest and non-violent resistance.
I wish I could report greater success for our
efforts. As I write, "modernization" of nuclear
weapons is ongoing in all nine states that
possess them (the US most of all). Russia is
making monstrous threats to initiate nuclear war
to maintain its control over Crimea and the
Donbas--like the dozens of equally illegitimate
first-use threats that the US government has made
in the past to maintain its military presence in
South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and (with the
complicity of every member state then in NATO )
West Berlin. The current risk of nuclear war,
over Ukraine, is as great as the world has ever seen.
China and India are alone in declaring
no-first-use policies. Leadership in the US,
Russia, other nuclear weapons states, NATO and
other US allies have yet to recognize that such
threats of initiating nuclear war--let alone the
plans, deployments and exercises meant to make
them credible and more ready to be carried
out--are and always have been immoral and insane:
under any circumstances, for any reasons, by anyone or anywhere.
It is long past time--but not too late!--for the
world's publics at last to challenge and resist
the willed moral blindness of their past and
current leaders. I will continue, as long as I'm
able, to help these efforts. There's tons more to
say about Ukraine and nuclear policy, of course,
and you'll be hearing from me as long as I'm here.
As I look back on the last sixty years of my
life, I think there is no greater cause to which
I could have dedicated my efforts. For the last
forty years we have known that nuclear war
between the US and Russia would mean nuclear
winter: more than a hundred million tons of smoke
and soot from firestorms in cities set ablaze by
either side, striking either first or second,
would be lofted into the stratosphere where it
would not rain out and would envelope the globe
within days. That pall would block up to 70% of
sunlight for years, destroying all harvests
worldwide and causing death by starvation for
most of the humans and other vertebrates on earth.
So far as I can find out, this scientific
near-consensus has had virtually no effect on the
Pentagon's nuclear war plans or US/NATO (or
Russian) nuclear threats. (In a like case of
disastrous willful denial by many officials,
corporations and other Americans, scientists have
known for over three decades that the
catastrophic climate change now underway--mainly
but not only from burning fossil fuels--is fully
comparable to US-Russian nuclear war as another existential risk.)
I'm happy to know that millions of
people--including all those friends and comrades
to whom I address this message!--have the wisdom,
the dedication and the moral courage to carry on
with these causes, and to work unceasingly for
the survival of our planet and its creatures.
I'm enormously grateful to have had the privilege
of knowing and working with such people, past and
present. That's among the most treasured aspects
of my very privileged and very lucky life. I want
to thank you all for the love and support you
have given me in so many ways. Your dedication,
courage, and determination to act have inspired and sustained my own efforts.
My wish for you is that at the end of your days
you will feel as much joy and gratitude as I do now.
Love, Dan