[HN Gopher] Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light ___________________________________________________________________ Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light Author : collate Score : 40 points Date : 2021-02-05 19:23 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.propublica.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.propublica.org) | some_random wrote: | Wow. In an age of increasing scrutiny of journalists, | particularly in regards to the leaking of classified documents, | this is a really bad look. Journalists screwing over their | sources is unacceptable in every case, we don't have any trouble | understanding that when it comes to interviewing terrorists, I | don't know why it's a question when it comes to this. | hindsightbias wrote: | Some stories are bigger than sources. The 'victim', Ellsberg, | would seem to agree. | | As far as I remember, Ellsberg was a true believer for a long | time and originally wanted the information (not all of the | papers) out so America would double down on VN. He thought it | was still winnable. He moderated at some point in the process. | Sheehan wasn't going to wait for his navel gazing and made him | a progressive hero. | donarb wrote: | This is the problem I have about people who leak documents. | They have an agenda and so only release the parts favorable | to their bias rather than the whole archive. What was held | back from the story that there were documents that showed | that the US government was actively trying to get out of the | war via back channel negotiations. | redis_mlc wrote: | Don't over think this. | | Militaries never have plans to quit a war. The other side | always wants the upper hand in negotiations, hence both WW1 | and WW2 going to the bitter end. | | Source: I study WW2, and some others. | DennisP wrote: | Ellsberg's recent book _The Doomsday Machine_ says the Pentagon | Papers were his less-important material. His job at the Pentagon | was nuclear policy, and he also had thousands of pages detailing | that policy, which at the time was horrific. (The book goes into | detail on just how horrific; much of it has been declassified now | so he can source his claims.) | | He decided to release the Vietnam papers first because he felt | that if he released the nuclear papers, nobody would care about | the Vietnam stuff. | | He gave the nuclear documents to his brother, who first hid them | in a compost bin. Then his brother decided that wasn't secure | enough, and hid them in black plastic bags on the outskirts of | the town dump. That turned out to be smart, since men in suits | were seen poking rods into the compost pile the next day, but a | freak storm washed that entire portion of the dump down a hill | and the nuclear documents were lost. They spent a year sifting | through trash looking for them. | | Ellsberg's wife called that storm a miracle from God, because in | Ellsberg's opinion he certainly would have spent the rest of his | life in prison for making the nuclear papers public. | simonebrunozzi wrote: | So, is anything from the nuclear documents in the book you | mentioned? Or is it really all lost forever? | DennisP wrote: | The documents themselves are lost, but Ellsberg was deeply | involved in nuclear strategy and in the past few years has | been able to get public declassified sources for much of what | he remembered. The previously-classified history of US | nuclear strategy is mostly what the book is about. (See my | cousin comment for a short outline.) | simonebrunozzi wrote: | Thanks a lot! | jjoonathan wrote: | Nuclear conflict is inherently horrific, but I would _hope_ we | were (and are) willing to do appalling things to deter a | nuclear attack on the US. | willis936 wrote: | This is assuming the content of the papers is standard MAD. | We don't know what was in them. | DennisP wrote: | The book is mostly about that content, which has been | largely declassified now. It goes into quite a bit of | detail. | | It was not just MAD. It included massive retaliation | against every city in both the USSR and China in response | to minor conventional battles, which they calculated would | also kill most people in Europe from fallout. It gave | independent launch authority to regional military | commanders. First strike was part of the strategy, and was | threatened on multiple occasions. | | The US has still not disavowed first strike. | gen220 wrote: | In response to your last statement, I found this Amazon | review [1] (of all sources!) of Ellsberg's book | fascinating. | | It's written by an older gentleman who was apparently | involved in Nuclear policy in the late 70s and early 80s. | | Here is the relevant snippet: | | > To a degree, my time on nuclear weapons was a decade | later than Ellsberg, ironically my first day after my PhD | was the day Ellsberg's material hit the NY Times. Coming | from MIT, and Ellsberg then being at MIT, I was looked at | a bit askance. Yet over the next decade as I became | involved in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, especially | during the Carter period, it was clear that the only way | to use a nuclear weapon was not to use a nuclear weapon. | | > The RISOP [Red Integrated Strategic Offensive Plan, or | the US Government's best counterplan, i.e. how the | Soviets would retaliate] scenarios showed the | annihilation of life on the planet. There was no way to | win, first strike or otherwise. A Russian and US nuclear | war was the destruction of all. Ironically in my later | discussions with my Russian partners after the fall it | was clear that they too understood this, positioning or | not. | | So, it seems like NPT [2] states understand that first | strike (against one another) is a bankrupt strategy, | since it results in MAD [3], if not a global extinction | event. | | A state might not _ever_ externally disavow the first | strike strategy for posturing reasons, but it is almost | certainly not viewed as an effective winning strategy, | internally. | | [1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer- | reviews/R2SL7WCQW1R6KN/re... | | [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non- | Proliferatio... Notable non-signatories of the NPT | include India, Israel, Pakistan, and DPRK. | | [3]: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction | DennisP wrote: | That would certainly be reasonable and I hope it's | accurate. I'm a little worried though that we're spending | a lot of money to make more accurate warheads, which are | more useful for first strikes against silos, and arguably | less useful for deterrence since the resulting "use them | or lose them" dynamic is destabilizing. | | One improvement we definitely have now is a more flexible | strategy. Back in the late '50s and for a while after, | they had a detailed plan to keep planes from flying too | near each other's mushroom clouds, and since they didn't | have decent computers it took a huge amount of work to do | all the calculations. The thought of doing it more than | once filled nuclear planners with horror, so they just | kept to a single plan, which was to launch everything | against all targets, regardless of the situation. | jjoonathan wrote: | "Minor" conventional battles that would have constituted | effective declarations of war by a major nuclear power? | | If two nuclear powers declare war on each other, that's | it. Game Over. It feels redundant to be horrified by the | possibility that warring nuclear powers would consider a | first strike. Of course they would. That's... how war | works. | curiousllama wrote: | War != total war. | | War is an extension of diplomacy. It's a negotiation. If | increasing costs on my adversary increases costs on me, | it may make sense not to do so. | DennisP wrote: | Before going full nuclear it's always possible to | deescalate, and when a first strike means the end of | civilization, deescalation is the only rational option. | tehjoker wrote: | Standard MAD* was insane already. The governments of nation | states were willing to toast the human race to preserve | control by the elites of pieces of land and the illusion of | a nation. They still are. | | Even if you are taken over by a dictatorship, you can | struggle against it afterwards. Some dictatorships were | even somewhat positive (e.g. Napoleon Bonaparte) even | though I would have sided with the pro-republican movement. | There's no future if everyone is dead. | | * The funny thing about MAD is that even though it's | standard terminology today, that was the name coined by its | detractors. | jjoonathan wrote: | > to preserve control by the elites | | Stretch Armstrong would be impressed, this one is not | easy to frame through the class war lens. | | Nukes don't stop a rebellion. They _do_ make other | nations think twice about launching nukes at us, though. | tehjoker wrote: | > Nukes don't stop a rebellion. They do make other | nations think twice about launching nukes at us, though. | | MAD works until it doesn't. Even small escalations can | rapidly ramp up into a worst case scenario. There is | another path though: Disarmament though international | treaties with comprehensive monitoring. Unfortunately, | that was not the path taken as nation states that managed | to accrue small advantages decided to press them instead. | Today, the US is modernizing the nuclear arsenal to the | tune of over a trillion dollars and is investing in | tactical nuclear weapons. | | > Stretch Armstrong would be impressed, this one is not | easy to frame through the class war lens. | | The cold war was about (some form of) capitalism vs (some | form of) communism, which was in fact class war... | However, in this case you can also see it as the ruling | class is defending itself against control by another | nation's ruling class. The people at the bottom are | forced to deal with whatever the ruling class decides | with little input. | jjoonathan wrote: | > There is another path though: Disarmament though | international treaties | | I sleep better with a big deterrence arsenal than with a | treaty that gets ignored the moment it becomes | inconvenient. | | > The cold war was about (some form of) capitalism vs | (some form of) communism | | The soviets didn't buck elite exploitation. Not for long | and not by much. | | If you think native elites are exploitative, I have news | about foreign elites who have conquered you. | Symmetry wrote: | It might be stuff like that he mentioned in his book like | projections of the number of deaths from fallout in Western | Europe if a first strike attack on the USSR went off | perfectly with no effective response. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-02-05 23:00 UTC)