Daniel Ellsberg Just Made a Stunning Admission About His Role at the Pentagon
(ANTIMEDIA) — Daniel Ellsberg is a whistleblower and activist most famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. His release of those papers exposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam and eventually led to the end of the war, and he just made a stunning admission about his role as a Pentagon consultant in a recent interview with Democracy Now!
According to the interview, and as he detailed in his new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Ellsberg was a high-level defense analyst, as well as a Pentagon and White House consultant who drafted plans for nuclear war.
Ellsberg told Democracy Now! that he briefed President Kennedy’s aide, McGeorge Bundy, in his first month in office on the nature of the plans for nuclear war under President Eisenhower. Ellsberg noted that the problems with these plans included the delegation of authority to theater commanders on various battlefields to use nuclear weapons. According to Ellsberg, Mr. Bundy found this shocking, but Kennedy chose to renew the delegation, anyway, as most presidents have done. Ellsberg also made the terrifying admission that there are most likely numerous fingers ready to press buttons at any given time:
“How many fingers are on buttons? Probably no president has ever really known the details of that. I knew, in ’61, for example, that Admiral Harry D. Felt in CINCPAC, commander-in-chief of Pacific, for whom I worked as a researcher, had delegated that to 7th Fleet, down to various commanders, and they, in turn, had delegated down to people. So when you say, ‘How many altogether feel authorized?’ if their communications are cut off — and that happened part of every day in the Pacific when I was there — communications got better, but the delegations never changed. There’s — we’ve never allowed it to be possible that an enemy could paralyze our retaliation by hitting our president or our command and control.”
Ellsberg said he was given the job of improving the Eisenhower plans, which were in his opinion “the worst plans in the history of warfare.”