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writing for godot

The Doomsday Machine

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Written by Walter Hecht   
Sunday, 17 December 2017 06:33

The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon papers fame. While serving in the JFK administration in the early 1960s, Ellsberg saw a Department of Defense estimate of total casualties in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union and China: 500 million in a world less densely populated than now.

“I well know that it is entirely unrealistic to hope that the present Congress (not to speak of the present president), dominated by the current Republican Party, or for that matter a Congress returned to the control of Democratic members mainly of the sort we have seen in the last generation, would respond to demands for any one of the measures I have proposed above:

  • a U.S. no first-use policy
  • probing investigative hearings on our war plans in the light of nuclear winter
  • eliminating our ICBMs
  • forgoing delusions of preemptive damage limiting by our first-strike forces
  • giving up the profits, jobs, and alliance hegemony based on maintaining that pretense
  • otherwise dismantling the American Doomsday Machine

“Both parties as currently constituted oppose every one of these measures. 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.”

It is estimated that a nuclear war induced nuclear winter will cause the death of 99+% of humanity and the death of most large animals on land and in the sea.

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