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daniel ellsberg
Dissent Is Patriotic: Daniel Ellsberg's Legacy Demands Action
Few will find themselves in Ellsberg’s position, but all of us bear responsibility for doing whatever is in our power to confront injustice in all of its forms, at home and abroad.
Jun 18, 2025
Two years ago this week, Daniel Ellsberg died at the age of 92. In the popular imagination, his legacy is often reduced to a singular act of conscience and courage: the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, a classified government study that exposed the systematic deceit and misconduct of successive U.S. administrations in prosecuting the war in Vietnam.
Ellsberg had spent over a decade inside the national security apparatus, directly contributing to the planning and execution of that war. But over time, he came to regard the intervention as a criminal, imperial war of aggression. Reflecting on the U.S. role in Southeast Asia, he concluded: “We were not on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.” He described the bombing campaigns in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—which involved dropping more than three and a half times the tonnage of explosives used by the United States in all of World War II—as “totally useless, unnecessary from any point of view, and thus unjustifiable homicide, murder.”
For telling the truth about a war that killed millions of Vietnamese and conscripted a generation of Americans in service of empire and the preservation of official credibility, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act and faced up to 115 years in prison. Asked why he had risked everything, he replied simply: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?” And of his transformation: “Killing is not something I’m going to do bureaucratically ever again.”
Radical activism is Ellsberg’s true legacy. But it is meaningless if it remains only a matter of remembrance. To honor him requires that we carry his actions forward.
His defiance helped redefine patriotism itself. “Dissent is patriotic,” he insisted. “And to be loyal to this country does not compel us to be disloyal to [humanity].” His example paved the way for a lineage of whistleblowers including Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden.
But to limit his legacy to the Pentagon Papers is to flatten it into a story of individual heroism, severed from the mass movements that made it possible, and that remain vital today. Few will find themselves in Ellsberg’s position, but all of us bear responsibility for doing whatever is in our power to confront injustice in all of its forms, at home and abroad.
Ellsberg understood this. He often credited the antiwar movement with awakening his conscience, and pointed in particular to the courage of draft resisters willing to face prison. Their example, he said, was decisive in his own decision to leak the Papers. “Courage is contagious,” he reflected. What he did was only possible because others had already taken greater risks.
He also believed that it was mass resistance that averted the war’s most catastrophic escalations. A turning point came on October 15, 1969, a coordinated day of nationwide civil disobedience. As many as two million people walked out to protest the unjust war, followed by another massive demonstration the following month.
At the time, the Nixon administration was preparing to intensify the conflict. Henry Kissinger, in private discussions, called for delivering “a savage blow” to North Vietnam, potentially involving nuclear weapons. But the scale of public opposition forced a retreat.
“The American people,” Ellsberg later recalled, “did not in fact, I think, buy onto the notion that it was all right to kill Vietnamese to an unlimited degree, and they stopped the bombing.” Nixon, he concluded, “did not lose the war. The American people ended the war. They took his victory away from him.”
Ellsberg’s story did not end in 1971. He never returned to government or academia. Instead, he spent the rest of his life as a public educator and dissident, arrested as many as 90 times for acts of civil disobedience, most often targeting U.S. nuclear weapons policy.
At RAND in the 1950s and ’60s, Ellsberg helped draft nuclear war plans, including first-strike scenarios that projected the deaths of 600 million people, what he called “a hundred Holocausts.” In the decades that followed, he made it his mission to dismantle The Doomsday Machine.
In 1978, he was arrested at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant alongside his son, Robert. “Not without arrests,” he declared. “Not anymore, invisibly… not without public question, controversy, challenge. Not, anymore, with the presumed consent of all American citizens.” The day before, while riding in handcuffs next to his father, Robert had looked out at the tracks and said, “You know, there should have been some Germans on the tracks at Auschwitz.”
Four years later, Ellsberg was arrested again, alongside 1,300 others, at the gates of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which he described as “the Auschwitz of our time!” The analogy was provocative but warranted. As he explained, a nuclear strike which they were making possible there would amount to “as deliberate and engineered annihilation of non-combatants as Hitler’s Holocaust in the gas chambers… it would be bringing the gas, the death, the radioactivity to the people, instead of herding them to it.”
This radical activism is Ellsberg’s true legacy. But it is meaningless if it remains only a matter of remembrance. To honor him requires that we carry his actions forward. Reflecting on the public’s acquiescence to the “insanity” of nuclear policy and U.S. militarism, Ellsberg warned: “We all live in Guyana. And I say it’s mutiny time.”
His words remain a call to collective defiance.
Today, that defiance is as urgent as ever. It means standing for principle over careerism, a contrast to figures like Matt Miller. It means continuing to disrupt the flow of weapons to Israel, as workers have done in France and beyond. It means joining marches and freedom flotillas to break the siege of Gaza. It means rejecting war for what it is: organized mass slaughter. And it means defending our communities against the violent overreach of an authoritarian regime.
There is little doubt that this is what Daniel Ellsberg would be doing were he alive today. To honor his legacy, we must do the same—today and every day.
Note: Quotes are drawn from the Daniel Ellsberg Papers at the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
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What the US Air Force Doesn't Want You to Notice on Election Night
As the warring ruling class seems to be pushing for nuclear brinkmanship, on this election night let us not be distracted.
Nov 05, 2024
Much significance will happen at the end of Election Day, and a countdown will begin at 11:00 p.m. PDT on November 5th. While everyone’s attention will be on who our next president will be, the U.S. The Air Force will test-launch an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with a dummy hydrogen bomb on the tip from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The missile will cross the Pacific Ocean and 22 minutes later crash into the Marshall Islands. The U.S. Air Force does this several times a year. The launches are always at night while Americans are sleeping.
This is what nightmares are made of—between 1946 and 1958 the U.S. detonated 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands, and the result is that the Marshallese people have lost their pristine environment and face serious health problems. Our environment is threatened here as well. Not only did the indigenous Chumash people lose their sacred land to Vandenberg Air Force Base, but also America’s Heartland presently has around 400 ICBMs stored in underground silos equipped with nuclear warheads that are ready to launch at a hair trigger’s notice. Named “MinuteMen III,” after Revolutionary War soldiers who could reload and shoot a gun in less than a minute, ICBMs not only put Americans at risk of accident, but they put all life on earth in danger.
ICBMs are not viable for national defense. They are a relic of a bygone era having been invented by Nazi Germany, and their presence only escalates the risk of nuclear accidents or conflicts. A single launch could lead to a nuclear exchange that would annihilate cities, contaminate the environment, and cause irreversible harm to our planet’s ecosystem. Once an ICBM is launched, it cannot be recalled. I don’t want a nuclear strike or accident to happen. We can change course now, and our first step is to decommission the ICBM program also because it is a staggering financial burden to maintain.
Nuclear weapons only provide the terrifying threat of annihilation, either by command or by accident. Nuclear weapons and ICBMs only make the world less safe and strip us of security.
The U.S. plans to spend over $1.2 trillion on nuclear modernization over the next 30 years, which means new, larger nuclear bombs and new, larger ICBMs called Sentinels that will need to be tested. This massive investment in outdated technology diverts critical funds away from humanitarian needs like healthcare, education, and healing climate change—issues that directly impact our quality of life, and our children’s future.
I teach 4th and 5th graders Creative Writing. I adore children’s imaginations, but when my students were given the assignment to write about something important to them, they wrote lines that broke my heart. This is a wake-up call for us adults to face the reality we have made for our children.
“Such a shame, a perfectly good planet, trashed.” Claire, age 9.
“What would you think about no nature in the world? No trees, no butterflies, no birds or bunnies at all! Most important of all, no people. There would be no technology, no schools, no history, no entertainment; everything we have worked for would be wasted. What would you think about a beautiful world that basically had nothing? I think I would absolutely hate it.,” Brynn, age 9.
Other than destruction caused by industrial global warming and by war, which the children are all-too aware of, this child does not know what actually could turn nature and civilization to nothing in a matter of minutes; she doesn’t know about “nuclear winter” or how vulnerable we are to a nuclear accident. Most people don’t.
The claim is that nuclear weapons are deterrents, but it is diplomacy that creates alliances and peace. Nuclear weapons only provide the terrifying threat of annihilation, either by command or by accident. Nuclear weapons and ICBMs only make the world less safe and strip us of security.
As the warring ruling class seems to be pushing for nuclear brinkmanship, on this election night let us not be distracted. By decommissioning ICBMs, the U.S. could lead the world in reducing the nuclear threat and encourage other nations to do the same. For the sake of our health, environment, and the safety of future generations, it’s time to scrap the ICBM program. We owe it to our children to invest in a future that prioritizes peace and sustainability over destruction.
As it is we the people who possess the right of self-determination, we must confront the material reality of our homeland and face what it will take to protect it. Do we have the courage to change our country for the better and ensure our futures? Yes we do, and now is the time to take action.
“Only we, the public, can force our representatives to reverse their abdication of the war powers that the Constitution gives exclusively to the Congress,” said Daniel Ellsberg, U.S. military analyst, economist, and author of "The Doomsday Machine."
May we cancel this nightmare weapons program for once and for all and give our children the security that they deserve.
Tell Congress: Cancel Sentinel Missile Program—More Than 700 Scientists Agree: https://secure.ucsusa.org/a/2024-cancel-sentinel-letter
Learn more about the dangers of ICBMS and get involved. https://defusenuclearwar.org/eliminate-icbms/
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The Threat of 1,000 Holocausts Puts Everything at Stake
If a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a category of now or never.
Oct 01, 2024
Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.
While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”
That was in 1961.
Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause “nuclear winter.” And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.
No longer 100 Holocausts.
More than 1,000 Holocausts.
If such a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a category of now or never.
What if we did have the opportunity for hindsight? What if we could somehow hover over this planet? And see what had become a global crematorium and an unspeakable ordeal of human agony? Where, in words attributed to both Nikita Khruschev and Winston Churchill, “the living would envy the dead.”
As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno, standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the Pentagon budget.
What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?
In 2023: The nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the U.S. share. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear weapons spending.
The United States is leading the way in the nuclear arms race. And we’re encouraged to see that as a good thing. “Escalation dominance.”
But escalation doesn’t remain unipolar. As time goes on, “Do as we say, not as we do” isn’t convincing to other nations.
China is now expanding its nuclear arsenal. That escalation does not exist in a vacuum. Official Washington pretends that Chinese policies are shifting without regard to the U.S. pursuit of “escalation dominance.” But that’s a disingenuous pretense. What the great critic of Vietnam War escalation during the 1960s, Senator William Fulbright, called “the arrogance of power.”
Of course there’s plenty to deplore about Russia’s approach to nuclear weapons. Irresponsible threats about using “tactical” ones in Ukraine have come from Moscow. There’s now public discussion – by Russian military and political elites – of putting nuclear weapons in space.
We should face the realities of the U.S. government’s role in fueling such ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms-control agreements. Among crucial steps, it’s long past time to restore three treaties that the United States abrogated – ABM, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, and Open Skies.
On the non-proliferation front, opportunities are being spurned by Washington. For instance, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman wrote in September: “Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.”
That deaf ear greatly pleases Israel, the only nuclear-weapons state in the Middle East. On September 22, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said unequivocally that Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon was “a form of terrorism.” The United States keeps arming Israel, but won’t negotiate with Iran.
The U.S. government has a responsibility to follow up on every lead, and respond to every overture. Without communication, we vastly increase the risk of devastation.
We can too easily forget what’s truly at stake.
Despite diametrical differences in ideologies, in values, in ideals and systems – programs for extermination are in place at a magnitude dwarfing what occurred during the first half of the 1940s.
Today, Congress and the White House are in the grip of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” In a toxic mix with the arrogance of power. Propelling a new and more dangerous Cold War.
And so, at the State Department, the leadership talks about a “rules-based order,” which all too often actually means: “We make the rules, we break the rules.”
Meanwhile, the Doomsday Clock set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now just 90 seconds away from apocalyptic midnight.
Six decades ago, the Doomsday Clock was a full 12 minutes away. And President Lyndon Johnson was willing to approach Moscow with the kind of wisdom that is now absent at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Here’s what Johnson said at the end of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin in June 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey: “We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions.”
Two decades later, President Ronald Reagan – formerly a supreme cold warrior -- stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.”
But such attitudes would be heresy today.
As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno, standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the Pentagon budget. Huge new appropriations for nuclear weapons are voted under the euphemism of “modernization.”
And here’s a sad irony: The few members of Congress willing to urgently warn about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger with calls for “victory” in the Ukraine war. Instead, what’s urgently needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.
The United States should not use the Ukraine war as a rationale for pursuing a mutually destructive set of policies toward Russia. It’s an approach that maintains and worsens the daily reality on the knife-edge of nuclear war.
The few members of Congress willing to urgently warn about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger with calls for “victory” in the Ukraine war. Instead, what’s urgently needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.
We don’t know how far negotiations with Russia could get on an array of pivotal issues. But refusing to negotiate is a catastrophic path.
Continuation of the war in Ukraine markedly increases the likelihood of spinning out from a regional to a Europe-wide to a nuclear war. Yet, calls for vigorously pursuing diplomacy to end the Ukraine war are dismissed out of hand as serving Vladimir Putin’s interests.
A zero-sum view of the world.
A one-way ticket to omnicide.
The world has gotten even closer to the precipice of a military clash between the nuclear superpowers, with a push to greenlight NATO-backed Ukrainian attacks heading deeper into Russia.
Consider what President Kennedy had to say, eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, in his historic speech at American University: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the world.”
That crucial insight from Kennedy is currently in the dumpsters at the White House and on Capitol Hill.
And where is this all headed?
Daniel Ellsberg tried to alert members of Congress. Five years ago, in a letter that was hand-delivered to every office of senators and House members, he wrote: “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years.” Those studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”
In the quest for sanity and survival, isn’t it time for reconstruction of the nuclear arms-control infrastructure? Yes, the Russian war against Ukraine violates international law and “norms,” as did U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real diplomacy with Russia is in the interests of global security.
And some great options don’t depend on what happens at the negotiation table.
Many experts say that the most important initial step our country could take to reduce the chances of nuclear war would be a shutdown of all ICBMs.
The word “deterrence” is often heard. But the land-based part of the triad is actually the opposite of deterrence – it’s an invitation to be attacked. That’s the reality of the 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles that are on hair-trigger alert in five western states
Uniquely, ICBMs invite a counterforce attack. And they allow a president just minutes to determine whether what’s incoming is actually a set of missiles – or, as in the past, a flock of geese or a drill message that’s mistaken for the real thing.
The former Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote that ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” and “they could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”
And yet, so far, we can't get anywhere with Congress in order to shut down ICBMs. “Oh no,” we’re told, “that would be unilateral disarmament.”
Imagine that you're standing in a pool of gasoline, with your adversary. You’re lighting matches, and your adversary is lighting matches. If you stop lighting matches, that could be condemned as “unilateral disarmament.” It would also be a sane step to reduce the danger -- whether or not the other side follows suit.
The ongoing refusal to shut down the ICBMs is akin to insisting that our side must keep lighting matches while standing in gasoline.
The chances of ICBMs starting a nuclear conflagration have increased with sky-high tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. Mistaking a false alarm for a nuclear-missile attack becomes more likely amid the stresses, fatigue and paranoia that come with the protracted war in Ukraine and extending war into Russia.
Their unique vulnerability as land-based strategic weapons puts ICBMs in the unique category of “use them or lose them.” So, as Secretary Perry explained, “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.”
The United States should dismantle its entire ICBM force. Former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair and General James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote: “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.”
In July, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a letter signed by more than 700 scientists. They not only called for cancelation of the Sentinel program for a new version of ICBMs – they also called for getting rid of the entire land-based leg of the triad.
Meanwhile, the current dispute in Congress about ICBMs has focused on whether it would be cheaper to build the cost-overrunning Sentinel system or upgrade the existing Minuteman III missiles. But either way, the matches keep being lit for a global holocaust.
During his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Martin Luther King declared: “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.”
I want to close with some words from Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, summing up the preparations for nuclear war. He wrote:
“No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.”
This article is adapted from the keynote speech that Norman Solomon gave at the annual conference of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC on Sept. 24, 2024.
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