January 27, 2003

Daniel Ellsberg's comments to the German press on Bush's reasons for first-use nuclear threats against Iraq

To say that Saddam cannot be contained and should be subjected to preventive war is exactly like saying that Stalin could not be contained and should be subjected to preventive war. Many people did say that, but they were mistaken. When I was a cold warrior in the government, I was not in that school. I believed in containment, I believed in deterrence, and actually, I believe in containment and deterrence of Saddam right now, by military means, among other things. I'm not a total pacifist—I never was, and I'm not now. But I'm glad that we did not launch a preventive war against Stalin, or Mao Tse-tung. . . .

How can the German people as a whole perceive this war to be unnecessary, and foolish and dangerous, whereas the majority of Americans cannot? The Americans simply are listening to their leader. In a time of real danger, they're focusing on what their leader is telling them, and their leader, like all leaders, is willing to lie to them. They're being strongly misled as to the implications of this war, in terms of the risks. When Bush tells them that the real danger of terrorism will be reduced by attacking Iraq, they believe it, because their president tells them that, even though the whole rest of the world, without being necessarily more intelligent—but not being under this particular spell of this particular leader—can look at that and say, "That's absurd; the danger of terrorism will be increased by this attack." How can the American people possibly swallow such an obvious absurdity? Because their president tells them.

I don't think any time before in my life, in an ongoing crisis, has a headline like occurred, where the president was saying publicly, "We will use nuclear weapons." We've said it right along, but the public hasn't been too aware of that. We've always had first use threats. What we have not done is draw attention to that in the midst of a hot crisis, where it really was likely that our threat would be called. This president is getting us ready to use nuclear weapons, and my guess would be that polls will show most Americans backing nuclear weapons in response to chemical weapons.

The senior Bush administration has prepared us to the idea of responding to chemical or biological weapons with nuclear weapons. That turns out to have been the function of this new category, which at first puzzled me, of "weapons of mass destruction." I've been in the arms control field for nearly forty years now, and I'd never heard of this "weapons of mass destruction" category, which lumps together biological, chemical, and nuclear. Between chemical and nuclear there's an enormous difference of destructiveness, by a factor of at least a thousand. So what's the purpose of lumping them together in this new category, "WMD"?

It came in about 1990. I now realize that they already had Iraq in mind with that, and the purpose of that is to say that, if we use nuclear weapons in response to chemical weapons, that would not be first use, we would not be intitiating nuclear war. Rather, we would be retaliating to a weapon of mass destruction with a weapon of mass destruction, which happens to be about a thousand times more destructive. We're not threating to use nerve gas—"we wouldn't do that under any circumstances." Why we still have vast stockpiles is a question not easily answered, but we haven't gotten around to getting rid of them. By vast, I mean, ten thousand tons, a hundred thousand tons, I mean really vast, just as the Russians have. But we've signed a chemical warfare agreement which says we will not use it, even second. So the first Bush administration said, "no, we wouldn't do that. But the only appropriate response would be nuclear."

When I first heard that a dozen years ago, I said, "nuclear, what is this?" It doesn't make any kind of sense to respond to a chemical attack, or a biological attack, with nuclear weapons. Chemical weapons are going to kill some sizeable number of people, but nothing out of the ordinary for warfare. There's no need militarily to respond with nuclear weapons. Anyone who uses chemical weapons against us is asking for us to invade them, destroy them, do whatever, but there's no need for us to use nuclear weapons.

If Saddam had used nerve gas against us in the Gulf War, which he could have, he might have gotten a nuclear weapon back, yes, but it turned out that it was sufficient deterrence to say that would have gone on to Baghdad, or we would have destroyed him with conventional weapons. There's absolutely no need to break the precedent of no first-use.

So, when I first heard this, I couldn't figure out why we would keep first use against biological and chemical weapons. Now, I suddenly realize, they have been working for an invasion of Iraq for a dozen years, even since 1990, when Saddam ceased being our monster, and went off on his own. For all of that time, they have wanted to plan, not just for deterrence—because it won't deter him; if we're going to invade him on the ground, he's going to use those weapons—they've been working for dozen years to justify our using nuclear weapons when (not if) he uses chemical weapons against our invading troops.

Why do they want to use nuclear weapons so badly? It doesn't have much to do with Iraq. It won't effect very much the war in Iraq, unless—the horror of horrors—it's our solution to city fighting problem in Baghdad, which is otherwise quite horrific for our troops. But they want to be the global bosses to extent they can, and in order to be the boss—aside from the financial strength we still have, which we might lose, if the Saudis got out of our control and stopped asking for oil to be paid in dollars—they want two other things. They want control of all the oil in the Middle East. They want control, whether we use it or not. We could conserve and not have any imported oil, and we would still want to control other people's oil. We want to sell it to them, we want to take the profit from it, we want to develop it, whether it goes to us or not—it could go to the Japanese, the Germans, whatever. And third, they want the threat of nuclear weapons to not be regarded as a bluff. They think, "We need to run the world, it's a chaotic world, it's going to be very hard, a lot of American cities are going to go, it's a quite messy world, with terrorists and so forth, but in that world, we want people to know that when we say 'lay off'—you can't say that to al Qauda; where would we send the nuclear weapon—but if anyone else gets uppity, and we say, 'Don't mess with us.' We'll send Special Forces, and if Special Forces doesn't do the job, you're looking down the barrell of a nuclear weapon.'"

Well, that has worked from time to time in the past. But not always, especially not during the Cold War, when there was a danger it would blow up the world. But now that there's no danger of blowing up the world, we now want to have that one in their arsenal. A whole lot of strategists of the ilk of Wolfowitz and Perle and so forth, since the Cold War ended, think, "Well, now, the gloves are off. The big stick is going to be nuclear. They've been looking for a chance to show that when we threaten nuclear weapons, believe the threat."

But this is what they cannot conceive. They don't understand Vietnam at all, even just from a military point of view. We couldn't get people to risk their lives to inform us about the Vietcong, but they would risk their lives to inform the Vietcong about us, so they knew every move we were making, and we didn't know any moves they were making. That didn't mean they could beat us from one year to the next, but it meant that we couldn't possibly beat them. We couldn't find them unless they wanted us to find them.

Well, that's going to be the same with al Qaeda. After Iraq, we are not going to be able to get any degree of cooperation from governments with large Muslim populations. Al Qaeda can grow and do what they want—they're safe, essentially. That doesn't mean they're going to beat the U.S., and it doesn't mean they're going to drive us out of the Middle East. But it does mean they're going to be able to kill a huge number of American civilians, much more than if we had the police and intelligence cooperation of Arab and Muslim states, which the Iraq war will destroy.

I grew up, since I was fourteen, wanting never to see that headline that appeared in the New York Post: "WE WILL NUKE YOU." And it's coming from a president that meant it, and who was appealing for support, and was appealing for support and expecting support from the American people, and he'll probably get it. I've dreaded this day, I've done everything I could to help hold it off. Presidents have said that, Nixon said it privately. But how long did it take us to learn that secret, that Nixon said essentially the same thing to the North Vietnam, on April 27, 1972? It took us thirty years to learn that. For thirty years, it was a secret, because it was so dangerous politically. And when it did come out, everyone assumed that he was just sounding off, he was just bluffing. Not true. What held him back was that it was easy to convince him that it would arouse an anti-war protest, in 1972, that would sweep him—it would have been a tidal wave.

So we have this development, over the past thirty years. Well, here's the culmination of it, that headline: "WE WILL NUKE YOU"

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