[HN Gopher] Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light
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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.
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