Nuclear security

Daniel Ellsberg Thinks We’re in Denial About Nuclear War

Your book “The Doomsday Machine” is a warning, based on your experience at the highest levels of nuclear planning at RAND in the early 1960s, that an accidental or intentional nuclear holocaust killing nearly every human alive could happen much more easily than most people realize — which is a pretty urgent message. Why did it take you nearly 60 years to write about it? It didn’t. I submitted the first third of the book to a publisher in 1975, as soon as the war ended. Her response was we would only sell 1,400 copies of this book. So I thought, “All right, that’s enough for every member of Congress and a lot of media people and academics.” And she said, “No, that means we wouldn’t publish it.” And that was reiterated a number of times in succeeding years.

You’re warning people that human civilization itself is at risk, and so many people don’t seem to be concerned. Does it ever make you feel as if you’rethe crazy one? No, it makes me feel that I’m living in a country in a very intense state of denial. I was saying to my wife the other day, “You know, if I didn’t know any more than the public knows about the nuclear danger, I wouldn’t be worried about it either.”