Daniel Ellsberg, who died on Friday, of pancreatic cancer, at age ninety-two, became the father of whistle-blowing in America when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the Times, in 1971. In the course of several months in 1969 and 1970, he copied seven thousand pages of top-secret documents that laid out how four successive Presidents, from Truman to Johnson, deceived the public about U.S. policy in Vietnam. But, at the time, Ellsberg was also planning an even more audacious reveal. Another several thousand pages, which were never released to the public, detailed Washington’s plans for an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union and China.
Ellsberg had been hired at RAND Corporation, the Air Force-affiliated think tank headquartered in Los Angeles, in the throes of the Cold War, in 1959, and worked on an élite team that helped formulate U.S. nuclear strategy and the command and control of its nuclear weapons. While interviewing officers at a remote American air base in the Pacific, Ellsberg made the unsettling discovery that commanders there had been empowered by President Eisenhower to launch nuclear missiles themselves if time or circumstances did not permit authorization by the President. His job involved regular consultations with the Pentagon, and, after John F. Kennedy was elected President, in 1960, Ellsberg quickly became a trusted rising star, working under Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense. In the spring of 1961, when he was thirty, Ellsberg drafted the top-secret operational plans for general nuclear war issued by McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Soon after, Kennedy decided to seek out more detail on the effects of a nuclear war. He submitted a question, in writing, to the Joint Chiefs. The question was drafted by Ellsberg: “If your plans for general [nuclear war] are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China?’’ Ellsberg was shown the chiefs’ answer in the form of a graph—two hundred and seventy-five million would be killed initially, and fifty million more within six months, from injuries and fallout. If a U.S. first strike also included Warsaw Pact allies in Eastern Europe, and Moscow retaliated against our Western allies, the death-toll estimate would rise to six hundred million. “From that day on, I have had one overriding life purpose: to prevent the execution of any such plan,’’ Ellsberg would later write.