The Doomsday Machine, then and now

Younger readers may not know Daniel Ellsberg’s name, but for peaceniks of my vintage, he was and he remains a true American hero, the guy who made the Pentagon Papers public, revealing the long pattern of lies told to Americans about Vietnam. Ellsberg is central to the plot of Steven Spielberg’s recent movie, The Post. His courage and patriotism should command the respect of anyone who loves democracy, truth or sanity.

Curtis LeMay is another name younger readers may not know. Even people my age have largely forgotten him, but Air Force Gen. LeMay shouldn’t be forgotten, either, because there are now men in high places as murderous and mad as LeMay seems to have been. He was America’s highest-ranking general during the early years of the Vietnam War, a guy famous for advocating bombing the North Vietnamese “back to the Stone Age.”

LeMay was also champing at the bit to annihilate the Soviet Union. As revealed in Daniel Ellsberg’s new book (The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner), LeMay and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had prepared for a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union that would have killed millions of Russians in the initial bombing. Moscow alone would have been targeted with 80 nukes, each with a destructive force a thousand times greater than what we had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Knowledge of LeMay’s doomsday plan was kept secret from all but a few high-ranking officers in the Strategic Air Command. Even President Kennedy was kept out of the loop.

In 1968, Sen. Richard Russell said, “If we have to start over again with another Adam and Eve, then I want them to be Americans and not Russians, and I want them on this continent and not in Europe.” Such madness is again descending upon the world as Trump trades childish barbs with Kim Jong Un and shadowy men in bunkers hold the future hostage to the whims of the “very stable genius” who holds our fate in his tiny little hands.