Ellsberg is famous today as a dissident, but much of his new book concerns his life as a young analyst operating inside a government bureaucracy, a classified realm where knowledge is currency and status is determined by your clearances. “There is no one person who even knows what all the clearances are,” Ellsberg says. “Definitely not the president.” In the late 1950s, after graduating from Harvard and serving as an officer in the Marines, Ellsberg went to work for RAND, a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon, where his colleagues included the physicist Herman Kahn, one of Stanley Kubrick’s models for Dr. Strangelove. Ellsberg writes that he and his colleagues thought they were “working to save the world,” though he was so skeptical they would succeed that he didn’t bother paying into RAND’s “extremely generous” retirement plan.
As a self-described “Cold Warrior,” Ellsberg tried to work within the system through the early 1960s, advocating for a strategy that might make a nuclear war survivable by focusing a first strike on military targets, not cities. (His hope was that if each country’s leadership survived, they might decide against total war.) “For several years, one of my highest objectives,” he writes, “was moving a few pieces of paper from one level of authority to a higher one.” Ultimately, he hoped to reach President Kennedy.
Ellsberg believed that his bureaucratic opponents — mainly the military brass — were not thinking through the consequences of nuclear war. Then, in 1961, he was allowed to see a piece of information previously unknown even to Kennedy, the death count the military projected for theoretical strikes: some 600 million, not including any Americans killed in counterattacks. (That was still an underestimate.) Ellsberg writes of being gripped with a feeling of revulsion, realizing that the document “depicted evil beyond any human project ever.” The planners weren’t heedless — they intended to inflict maximal civilian casualties. “The shock was to realize that the Joint Chiefs knew,” Ellsberg tells me. “I was working for people who were crazier than I had thought. I had thought that they had inadvertently constructed a doomsday machine, without knowing it.”
The better Ellsberg came to understand the workings of the nuclear command-and-control system, the more danger he felt. He writes that the idea that authority to launch a nuclear war rested solely with the president was a myth, and that the nuclear “football” carried by a military attaché to the president is just “theater.” Working for the Defense Department, Ellsberg traveled throughout Asia, where he discovered there were many plausible scenarios in which officers might feel authorized to launch a nuclear attack in the absence of presidential orders. Safeguards were easy to circumvent. (For decades, purportedly, the eight-digit code to launch a Minuteman missile was set at 00000000.) Visiting an air base on Okinawa, Ellsberg touched a hydrogen bomb, and noted the “bodylike warmth” of a device capable of killing millions.
“It did give me a feeling — an eerie, an uncanny feeling, a feeling of dread to some extent,” Ellsberg says. “But not the feeling that this should not exist.” That came later.