Nuclear Disaster Averted
The PBS ‘American Experience’ documentary film in 2023 brings into light how the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium peace movement acted to prevent President Richard Nixon’s order to use nuclear weapons.
Watch scenes from the PBS 2023 documentary — The Movement and the ‘Madman’
— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfhHcq-IUQo
Strategic Demands on the issue of “Singular Authority to Launch Nuclear Weapons”
President Nixon was, in 1969, prepared to ‘push the button‘, operational plans were made, targets picked
The film goes back and looks inside the U.S. National Security Council to reveal how a peace movement prevented nuclear war
PBS
The Movement and the ‘Madman’
PBS PREMIERE MARCH 28 ON AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
The documentary film tells of a dramatic showdown between a protest movement and a president …
Citizen action, as is now revealed, prevented the use of nuclear weapons
https://www.movementandthemadman.com/home
https://www.movementandthemadman.com/history
https://www.movementandthemadman.com/preview
https://www.movementandthemadman.com/interviewees
https://www.movementandthemadman.com/filmmakers
Reviews on Release:
https://www.ncronline.org/culture/new-vietnam-war-documentary-affirms-power-activism
* https://wagingnonviolence.org/2019/11/anti-vietnam-war-moratorium-mobilization-nixon/
Strategic Demands:
In the “Movement and the Madman” 2023 documentary, PBS reveals how close the U.S. came to using nuclear weapons during the Vietnam war.
Daniel Ellsberg, a nuclear war planner recalls in his 2017 book “Doomsday Machine“, a confessional memoir, how the Vietnam Moratorium Committee peace demonstrations of October-November 1969 kept President Nixon from ordering a nuclear attack.
Daniel Ellsberg and Nixon-Kissinger National Security Council senior staff have now, with this film, gone on record explaining how the 1969 peace movement acted to prevent U.S. president from commanding the use of nuclear weapons.
A brief comment from your Strategic Demands editor regarding the film and its pre-production.
Before the documentary film was produced, during the development phase of the project, I was asked to assist the producers during a series of interviews.
My initial recommendation was to interview Roger Morris and Dan Ellsberg and to take a closer look at what had happened in the fall of 1969. The producers took this recommendation and others, to do ‘investigative work’, and the result was “The Movement and the ‘Madman'”.
An additional point, ‘Madman’ in the title could have been ‘Madmen’ because at that point in history, Henry Kissinger was deeply entwined in the war policy, the tactics and command decisions in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger together escalated — and together they planned to use nuclear weapons to ‘send a message’. ‘Targets were picked’, operational plans made. Nixon and Kissinger were on a mad-mission…
* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/The_Movement_and_the_Madman_-_PBS_-_March_2023
An Inside Look at “The Movement and the ‘Madman'”
The release of the documentary film with its stark revelations is time to look back and remember days of war — and an escalation that would have changed the modern world with disastrous consequence.
Strategic Demands’ editor added, in 2022-23, to the original film narrative to bring more into focus the revelations of Dan Ellsberg and NSC senior staff member Roger Morris. The input and new freedom on information research brought forward in the development of the documentary film assisted the production company. Roger Morris, a key Strategic Demands associate over the years, became a central person interviewed for the film, as were NSC members of that era, Mort Halperin and Tony Lake.
The Nuclear War close call the film reveals is another warning in a series of critically impactful warnings of the need, the necessity, to control nuclear weapons before the sands of time wear down and the humanity’s time to act expires.
Those who were up close to the commander-in-chief, who had the authority to order ‘first use’ of nuclear weapons experienced how very close we all came to the chasm of Nixon and Kissinger…
Our generation and every future generation should not forget.
It’s time for sane action, not a nuclear arms race 3.0
_____________________________________
Joan Halifax | “Being with Dying“
End of Life Thoughts
Dan Ellsberg Reflects, as we do too…
By Steven Schmidt
Yes, as I am reading last words from Dan I know I need to write more about Dan Ellsberg and the time we shared. The days are long past but still here with reverberations of war and the costs of war. Memories of a student activist in Dan’s house on the beach, saying goodbye, packing what later would be called the “Pentagon Papers”, the moments etched in my mind.
The war and lies about the war were there in writing, a history commissioned by Robert McNamara, source material, ‘cable traffic’, secrets…
When I met Dan Ellsberg he was no longer a gung ho Marine with a 45 strapped to his hip. He was, he told me, a different man before he went to Vietnam. He changed, he was changed and our nation was convulsed by the war. The price was paid in blood and treasure as the nation’s ‘moral authority’ was lost. The costs of the war continues to be paid today even as Vietnam is now a trading partner of the U.S. and vets take tours of old haunts, battlefields in the south and north of Vietnam. The lush countryside, the marshes, the rainforests, the delta… the Agent Orange, the B52s, ‘Rolling Thunder’, the devastation and the millions of deaths in the region are remembered. Memories are everywhere there – and here.
At least we didn’t use a nuclear weapon as years later it was revealed we came close, very close, to using…
Today, in Ukraine, in Russia, it would be a different world of danger and threat, and craziness, if the U.S. had used the Bomb in Asia, as Ellsberg who was a nuclear war planner for the government, later wrote about in detail. After he wrote “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers”, Dan wrote “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner” and it is on my mind just now, before the sun rises here in Florida.
A few mile from my abode is Fort MacDill, the U.S. headquarters of Special Operations Command, worldwide command and control ops. Yesterday the international news reported that Russian Federation president Putin was moving “tactical nuclear weapons” to Belarus and again threatening with his nuclear arsenal continuing a new version, a “3.0 version of the Cold War. The nuclear threat is, as experts write and others report, at it greatest risk since the height of the Cold War. Here one can say MacDill is a ‘rich targets’, as command and control systems and ‘beheading’ are in the vernacular of nuclear war planners.
Again, I look back at when Nixon and Kissinger and the nuclear war planners were ready to launch… and I thank God, today, that the room in the White House where they were huddling and talking about ‘sending a message’ was not a harbinger of nuclear ‘end of times’ going forward. Right now, I open the “Doomsday Machine” book that Dan gave me and I look again at the inscription:
“12-25-17 To Steven Schmidt – Wed need the Moratorium again ! Dan Ellsberg”
I turn away and see a post Dan forwarded. He is saying he still has hope for the future… even now at the end of his life.
All the young activists rising up give me hope as I leave my life. As the movement against the Vietnam War showed,
young people can save lives when they make their care known in action. Keep going.
The world is in your hands.
As Dan’s words muse of his approaching death, I look back at his 2017 “Doomsday” book and hold it, my thumb flipping through pages. I think back to the late 1960s, talks with Dan, new knowledge he was passing to me as a college student, a founder and activist representing the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. His knowledge passed to me and then passed forward in my traveling, speaking, and organizing across America and on to Europe for peace work, an international peace conference, and then moving into environmental protection work.
All along I watched Dan as he dealt with life as a ‘whistleblower’ and attempted to tell the American people the truth, the McNamara-commissioned history of the Vietnam war as it was, without the cover ups, lies, and deceit.
The truth came out. The repercussions continue… Dan Ellsberg risked it all to tell the truth to the people.
* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Dan_Ellsberg_-_the_world_is_in_your_hands.png
Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg | Published 2017
Daniel Ellsberg: Nixon Almost Took Vietnam War Nuclear In November 1969
Revelations: the Vietnam Moratorium prevented use of nuclear weapons
1969 – “Nuclear targets were picked.”
Ellsberg speculated that the plans would have gone ahead in November 1969.
Instead, a huge demonstration on Oct. 15, 1969, the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, combined a general strike with nationwide protests and teach-ins.
* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Moratorium_October_15_1969.jpg
We, of the peace movement, now look back and look forward …
From Dan to Steven (StratDem editor): ‘We need the Moratorium again !’
July 2023
On the Passing of a Brave Man, Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg saw the results of his revealing ‘nuclear war planner’ warning as the film was broadcast and streamed across the nation. But soon after the April 2023 release of the PBS documentary “The Movement and the ‘Madman“, I would write of Dan and his passing away from cancer on June 16, 2023.
The memory shared here now is of an evening with Dan at his house on the beach next to Pacific Coast Highway as boxes of papers are being packed and Dan is about to leave Southern California for Massachusetts and his fate. The papers were very official looking, “cable traffic” was one of Dan’s more frequent phrases and his Rand Corp years a few miles south of his home led to his knowing what no one knew. He had a choice now that he knew and he had started telling the story. I think I was one of the first to hear, as what he was explaining was becoming what I was talking about in by Vietnam Moratorium travels and organizing.
The papers in the boxes would soon come to be called the “Pentagon Papers“.
Dan was talking of his fate that was about to arrive. He knew President Nixon would not tolerate his existence as it was after he revealed to the American people the lies told by presidents about the Vietnam War. He expected to go to prison ‘for life’.
Daniel Ellsberg
In Memory of a Man Named Daniel
June 17, 2023
The moon was bright that night as I visited Daniel Ellsberg at his house on the beach in Southern California. It was mid 1970 and Dan was surrounded by boxes. “Papers,” he called them. He was packing to leave for Cambridge and a new position at MIT and he was worried that night as he showed me the study he had put together at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica.
As we sorted through documents I noticed some had Top Secret stamped on some of them. I learned later that these were part of the 7000 page, forty plus volume report soon to be called the “Pentagon Papers.”
Dan spoke of President Nixon and famed advisor, Henry Kissinger with first-hand knowledge. He mentioned he had met with Kissinger recently at Nixon’s San Clemente estate. I remember his fear, both that Nixon and Kissinger were repeating mistakes of previous administrations as “the Papers” demonstrated, and how the truth needed to go public. He broke off from the packing and said let’s go, “I need to swim”.
Dan was depressed, I knew, and I was not going to convince him not to go into the loudly crashing night surf. I watched as he plunged into the waves. He then reappeared for a moment in the moonlight. He swam straight out, then disappeared. I waited on shore looking out at the dark ocean. Time passed, no sign of Dan. I began worrying. Is this the end of Dan Ellsberg? Did I just witness Dan ending it all? Did a riptide take him? I walked up and down the beach searching. Suddenly, Dan walked out of the surf, nodded then sprinted back toward the house. He quickly shifted back into work mode. Something happened, he had new resolve.
Today as I reflect on the life of Dan Ellsberg and the announcement of his death, I can say he lived life like few others. He pursued the truth and facts in a way that was astounding and committed. He went on to prove in his actions that he was brave to put his life on the line for the sake of the American people. His decision was purposeful. He thought deeply about the consequences. That night under the moon I saw his fear, and I saw his resolve.
A few months later, when Daniel released the Pentagon Papers to a NY Times writer, Neil Sheehan, the truth came out. Dan’s history of the war study subsequently led to the end of the Nixon presidency and, as a consequence, the end of the Vietnam War. Dan would later say the Pentagon Papers themselves didn’t directly end the war, but the American people learned of the “evidence of a quarter-century of aggression, broken treaties, deceptions, stolen elections, lies, and murder”. This, with Nixon’s resignation, brought on the end of the war.
I learned over the course of our relationship that Dan Ellsberg was gifted, literally. I still say he is the smartest man I’ve ever known. His 2002 book “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers” is a must read. “On the evening of October 1, 1969, I walked out past the guards’ desk at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica,” he writes, “carrying a briefcase filled with top secret documents, which I planned to photocopy that night… How I came to do this is the focus of this memoir.” Dan’s memoir is a true American story.
Beyond the Pentagon Papers and resulting demise of the Nixon presidency, Dan Ellsberg’s follow-on 2017 book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner” later explained the inner machinations of the nuclear war complex. He was, as a younger man, a systems man and followed orders. His nuclear war gaming was a Pentagon nuclear plan that he, as an old man, brought into the light with this revelatory book. The extent of humanity’s threat to life on earth is part of Dan Ellsberg’s legacy now.
Daniel Ellsberg’s life is a testament to what generations to come have to deal with — perpetual wars, the realities of nuclear weapons, modern states with awesome powers for good and bad. Dan Ellsberg revealed and pointed us to harsh realities.
Will we listen to Dan Ellsberg’s message that he, risking all, brought to us?
Daniel Ellsberg, after all is said and done, was a man who taught us. He was a man of peace. Dan was a believer in the power each of us has to make a difference and move toward a better world.
— By Steven J Schmidt / Founder/Siterunner of GreenPolicy360
Vietnam Moratorium Committee / Peace Movement
References: via the National Security Archive
Among US documents retrieved in Freedom of Information requests —
A report from September 1969 on prospective military operations against North Vietnam (referred to unofficially within the White House as DUCK HOOK) included two options to use tactical nuclear weapons: one for “the clean nuclear interdiction of three NVN-Laos passes”-the use of small yield, low fall-out weapons to disrupt traffic on the Ho Chi Minh trail. The other was for the “nuclear interdiction of two NVN-CPR [Chinese People’s Republic] railroads”—presumably using nuclear weapons to destroy railroad tracks linking North Vietnam and China.
A Kissinger telephone conversation transcript, in which Nixon worried that with the 1 November deadline approaching and major anti-Vietnam war (Moratorium) demonstrations scheduled for 15 October and 15 November, escalating the war might produce “horrible results” by the buildup of “a massive adverse reaction” among demonstrators.
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In Memory of the Millions of Lost Lives
* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Oct_15,_1969,_Vietnam_Moratorium_Day_in_memory.jpg
For more, Visit Strategic Demands associate, GreenPolicy360:
* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Nuclear_Weapons
* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Surviving_Victory.png
