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Rebecca Gordon, Cassandra Redux

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Recently, glancing at one of my bookshelves, I noticed an old book I had been involved in creating and, almost 15 years after its publication, had basically forgotten. Back in 2010, at the moment when President Barack Obama was dispatching thousands more American troops to Afghanistan and expanding that war in a myriad of ways, Nick Turse put together a bluntly entitled volume, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan, in part from the work of TomDispatch authors, including me. All these years later, I picked it up and began reading through it again, noting the thoughts of authors and old friends (some no longer here), ranging from Chalmers Johnson and Juan Cole to Ann Jones and Andrew Bacevich. What struck me, of course, was that, more than 10 years before this country’s disastrous departure from Afghanistan, it was already blindingly obvious — to those who cared to look — just how badly things were going there and what should be done. (Of course, to put even that in perspective, by December 2002, just a year after the post-9/11 American invasion of that country, with TomDispatch barely a year old, I was already referring to that war — to use a word I borrowed from the Vietnam War era — as a potentially disastrous “quagmire.”)

As Turse wrote in his introduction to that book:

“To begin to imagine a true military withdrawal — of troops, bases, and the full-scale machinery of war and occupation — from that country has been the one serious option that has never been put on the proverbial ‘table’ on which ‘all options’ are so regularly said to be placed. It remains on no one’s agenda among Washington powerbrokers, and no part of the discussion and debate among its punditocracy or the mainstream media more generally. And yet the situation in Afghanistan calls out for a serious consideration of just that.”

Which is exactly what his book did in a striking fashion, a path that, he added, has “long been on the road to perdition.”

And all too sadly, it would remain so for (disastrous) years to come, while that book, so totally on target, would essentially fall off the face of the earth. Sometimes, on this increasingly strange planet of ours, it simply doesn’t pay to be right. In fact, it’s hell on earth if you’re on target but fall into the category of — to use a term TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon has employed so strikingly in the past and again today — a Cassandra, when being right couldn’t be more wrong in terms of how the world will treat you.  With that in mind, let Gordon once again play the role of an all-American Cassandra at TomDispatch. Tom

What Did We Know

And When Did We Know It?

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A few days ago, my partner and I went in search of packing tape. Our sojourn on an idyllic (if tick-infested) Cape Cod island was ending and it was time to ship some stuff home. We stopped at a little odds-and-ends shop and found ourselves in conversation with the woman behind the counter.

She was born in Panama, where her father had served as chief engineer operating tugboats in the Panama Canal. As a child, she remembered celebrating her birthday with a trip on a tug from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, sailing under an arch of water produced by fireboats on either side.

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Norman Solomon, How Daniel Ellsberg’s Moral Power Remains Alive

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Strange to think that, without Daniel Ellsberg, Watergate might never have happened, Richard Nixon might have remained president, and the war in Vietnam might have taken even longer to end. So many decades later, it’s easy to forget how, in June 1971, when Ellsberg released those secret government documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, and their shocking revelations about that distant war hit the front page of the New York Times, Nixon and crew were determined to move against him — and fast. It mattered not at all that he would be “indicted on 12 felony counts, including theft and violation of the Espionage Act,” and face up to 115 years in prison. That wasn’t enough for them. Nixon wanted to “try him in the press” and turned to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate him.

As it happened, though, Hoover was a buddy of Louis Marx, the father of Ellsberg’s wife and the head of a major toy company that, among other things, made plenty of toy soldiers. (Marx regularly gave Hoover toys that he could turn over to his employees for their kids at Christmas.) So when the FBI chief moved far too slowly on Ellsberg, Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, worrying about those Pentagon Papers revelations (even though they didn’t deal with Nixon’s own nightmarish role in the then-ongoing wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), decided to set up a White House Special Investigations Unit. It came to be known informally as “the Plumbers.”

Its first assignment would be to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in search of damaging information on him. (No luck, as it turned out, but when the judge in Ellsberg’s trial found out about that break-in, he dismissed the case.) Nine months later, that unit’s ultimate assignment would, of course, have nothing to do with Ellsberg. It would be the infamous break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in — yes! — the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C. The result was history that would have been inconceivable without — yes! — Daniel Ellsberg.

As TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon, author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, makes clear today, Ellsberg led quite a life thereafter before dying in June 2023. Let him rest in peace. (If only the rest of this planet could do the same!) Tom  

The Absence — and Presence — of Daniel Ellsberg

A Year After His Death, He’s Still with Us

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On a warm evening almost a decade ago, I sat under the stars with Daniel Ellsberg while he talked about nuclear war with alarming intensity. He was most of the way through writing his last and most important book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Somehow, he had set aside the denial so many people rely on to cope with a world that could suddenly end in unimaginable horror. Listening, I felt more and more frightened. Dan knew what he was talking about.

After working inside this country's doomsday machinery, even drafting nuclear war plans for the Pentagon during President John F. Kennedy's administration, Dan Ellsberg had gained intricate perspectives on what greased the bureaucratic wheels, personal ambitions, and political messaging of the warfare state. Deceptions about arranging for the ultimate violence of thermonuclear omnicide were of a piece with routine falsehoods about American war-making. It was easy enough to get away with lying, he told me: “How difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: it's not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe -- that we’re better than other people, we're superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”

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William Astore, Nuclear Armageddon Is Us

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It was truly another world.

I’m thinking of my childhood years when to “duck and cover” under our school desks, imagining that those modest structures might somehow protect us from an atomic blast, was a normal part of life. And when you walked the streets of New York then, you couldn’t miss the yellow signs for “fallout shelters” or, if you picked up a magazine, disputes over backyard nuclear shelters. (Yes, we were then living in a bunker culture.) And in those years, of course, the U.S. and the Soviet Union practically had it out in a nuclear fashion in the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was at college when, on October 22, 1962, President Kennedy came on the air to tell us that Soviet missile sites were being prepared on the island of Cuba with “a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere,” and I genuinely feared I might be blown away.

Those were the years when I wasn’t faintly atypical in imagining that I might someday become burnt toast. As I wrote once upon a time:

“No one could mistake the looming threat: global nuclear war. Few of us listeners had seen the highly classified 1960 SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) in which the U.S. military had made its preparations for a massive first strike of 3,200 nuclear weapons against the communist world. It was supposed to take out at least 130 cities, with estimated casualties approaching 300 million, but, even without access to that SIOP, we — I — knew well enough what might be coming. After all, I had seen versions of it, perfectly unclassified, in the movies, even if the power to destroy on a planetary scale was transposed to alien worlds, as in that 1955 science fiction blockbuster This Island Earth, or imputed to strange alien rays, or rampaging radioactive monsters.”

Later in life, while working in publishing, I put out a book by Japanese survivors of the Hiroshima blast, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors. I then visited that city (with the Japanese editor of the book) and viewed, in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the scorched lunch box of an atomized child, among other unforgettable horrors.

So many years later, I find it strange that you can wander our world without, when it comes to nuclear weapons, even imagining ducking, no less covering. It matters little that such weaponry has spread beyond the U.S. and Russia to seven other countries or that, as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore makes painfully clear today, the U.S. is once again expanding and (what a horrifying term) “modernizing” its nuclear arsenal in an unnerving fashion.  Only the other day, while walking in my New York neighborhood, thinking about this all-too-strange nuclear world of ours, I wandered (as I sometimes do) past a more than life-sized statue of a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist monk, Shinran Shonin, in front of a local Buddhist church. I suddenly noticed a plaque there that said, in part: “The statue originally stood in Hiroshima, at a site 2.5 kilometers northwest from the center of the first atomic bomb attack. Having survived the full force of the bomb the statue was brought to New York in September of 1955 to be a testimonial to the atomic bomb devastation and a symbol of lasting hope for world peace.”

World peace? If only. And with the devastation that those two atomic bombs brought to Japan in 1945 and knowing that today even the sort of “tactical” or battlefield nuclear weapons Vladimir Putin is now threatening to use in Ukraine can be far more powerful, let Astore take you deep into the genuinely human madness of our nuclear world. Tom

The Triad Is Not the Trinity

Or, Ending My Thermonuclear Odyssey

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As a late-stage baby boomer, a child of the 1960s, I grew up dreaming about America’s nuclear triad. You may remember that it consisted of strategic bombers like the B-52 Stratofortress, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) like the Minuteman, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) like the Poseidon, all delivery systems for what we then called "the Bomb." I took it for granted that we needed all three "legs" -- yes, that was also the term of the time -- of that triad to ward off the Soviet Union (aka the “evil empire”).

It took me some time to realize that the triad was anything but the trinity, that it was instead a product of historical contingency. Certainly, my mind was clouded because two legs of that triad were the prerogative of the U.S. Air Force, my chosen branch of service. When I was a teenager, the Air Force had 1,054 ICBMs (mainly Minutemen missiles) in silos in rural states like Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming, along with hundreds of strategic bombers kept on constant alert against the Soviet menace. They represented enormous power not just in destructive force measured in megatonnage but in budgetary authority for the Air Force. The final leg of that triad, the most “survivable” one in case of a nuclear war, was (and remains) the Navy’s SLBMs on nuclear submarines. (Back in the day, the Army was so jealous that it, too, tried to go atomic, but its nuclear artillery shells and tactical missiles were child’s play compared to the potentially holocaust-producing arsenals of the Air Force and Navy.)

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