Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon papers which exposed the government’s lies during the Vietnam war is vocalizing a warning. He says the United States is really close to a nuclear Armageddon.
Ellsberg, now 86-years-old, leaked the Pentagon papers back in 1969 and he’s now got a new book out which serves a warning to those who care to listen. According to the Daily Mail, Ellsberg’s 7,000-page report was the WikiLeaks disclosure of its time, a sensational breach of government confidentiality that shook Richard Nixon’s presidency and prompted a Supreme Court fight that was supposed to advance press freedom.
In his new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Ellsberg details how easy nuclear bombs can be triggered and shot off on a false alarm – and that the president isn’t the only who can launch the nukes, as we are often told. Low-level military commanders are capable of launching nuclear weapons too.
“All out-nuclear war — an irreversible, unprecedented and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization and most life on earth — has been, like the disasters of Chernobyl, Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, Fukushima Daiichi, and before these, World War I, a catastrophe waiting to happen, on a scale infinitely greater than any of these,” writes Ellsberg in his new book.
Adding to fears of a nuclear armageddon is North Korea’s insistence on building a nuclear weapon. This has created a mass panic in nations all around the globe. Not to mention, last month, President Donald Trump put North Korea back on a list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation that allows the US to impose more sanctions and risks inflaming tension over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs.
North Korea then denounced Trump’s decision to relist it as a state sponsor of terrorism, calling the move a “serious provocation and violent infringement,” as the rogue nation sentenced the US president to death, saying he “hurt the dignity” of the “supreme leadership.” All of this is alarming, according to Ellsberg, who believes a nuclear war can be started simply by a false alarm.
Nuclear bombs “are susceptible to being triggered on a false alarm, a terrorist action, unauthorized launch or a desperate decision to escalate,” Ellsberg wrote in his book. “They would kill billions of humans, perhaps ending complex life on earth. This is true even though the Cold War that rationalized their existence and hair-trigger status — and their supposed necessity to national security — ended 30 years ago.”
Many US citizens falsely believe that only the US president, in this case, Donald Trump can order the use of nuclear weapons. But Trump isn’t the only military commander authorized to launch nuclear weapons, according to the New York Post. “There has to be a delegation of authority and capability to launch retaliatory strikes, not only to officials outside the Oval Office but outside Washington too,” Ellsberg wrote.
Ellsberg says that the only way to avoid a nuclear holocaust is full disarmament by the United States and Russia. “The risk that one city will be destroyed by a single (perhaps terrorist) weapon in the next year or the next decade cannot, unfortunately, be reduced to zero,” Ellsberg writes. “But the danger of near-extinction of humanity — a continuous possibility for the past 65 years — can be reduced to zero by the dismantlement of most existing weapons in both the United States and Russia.”
