Army and Navy estimates of Soviet ICBMs threatening were "a few". But by all estimates, several hundred intermediate and medium-range missiles were aimed at Western Europe, Germany in particular, along with hundreds of medium-range bombers. Even after the most successful U.S. and NATO first strike, Soviet retaliation against Europe could have added a hundred million to the Western European death count from blast, fire, and immediate exposure to radiation even before the fallout from our own attacks had arrived from the east, borne on the wind.

page 148

In early July [1961], Alain Enthoven had arranged for me to have a brief luncheon with McNamara, to discuss my work on the guidance to the JCS on the war plan, which he had already approved and sent to the Chiefs. We ate at his desk, in his office. It was scheduled to last only half an hour, but it went on nearly an hour longer. I told him about the astonishing answers the JCS had given to the questions I had drafted in the name of the president, in particular about the effects they anticipated on our own European allies from their planned attacks on the Sino-Soviet bloc. I'd had no prior intention to bring up my own strongly heretical view on first use, but midway through our talk, he raised the issue himself.

There was no such thing as limited nuclear war in Europe, he said. "It would be total war, total annihilation, for the Europeans!" He said this with great passion, belying his reputation as a cold, computer-like efficiency expert. Moreover, he thought it was absurd to suppose that a supposedly "limited use" would remain limited to Europe, that it would not quickly trigger general nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union, to disastrous effect.

I've never had a stronger sense in another person of a kindred awareness of this situation and intensity of his concern to change it. 30 years later, McNamara revealed in his memoir In Retrospect that he had secretly advised President Kennedy, and after him President Johnson, that under no circumstances whatever should they ever initiate nuclear war. He didn't tell me that, but it was implicit in everything he had said at this lunch. There is no doubt in my mind that he did give that advice, and that it was the right advice. Yet it directly contradicted the mad "assurances" on U.S. readiness for first use he felt compelled to give repeatedly to NATO officials (including speeches I drafted for him) throughout his years in office, as the very basis for our leadership in the alliance.

McNamara's assistant, Adam Yarmolinsky, had joined us for the last part of the lunch, without saying anything. When we left McNamara's office Adam took me into his small, adjoining room and said that he had never seen McNamara prolong a lunch that way. He had talked more frankly with me than Yarmolinsky had ever heard him talk with anyone else. The point of Adam's telling me this, and of my repeating it now, was to give weight to what he said next. "You must tell no one outside of this suite what Secretary McNamara has told you."

page 149

I asked if he was referring to fears of the reaction from Congress and the JCS (I could have added, "NATO"). He said, "Exactly. This could lead to his impeachment." I told him that I understood. But he went on to make that more explicit. "By no one", he said, "I mean, not Harry Rowen, not anybody." Now, that I understood. Evidently he knew that Harry was my closest friend and confidant, a cleared colleague with whom I normally would have shared even such sensitive information -though I'd been told not to tell anyone- unless I was specifically told not to. I never did tell anyone, not even Harry, what McNamara had said, though he would have found it as heartening as I did. But I did ask Adam one question: "As far as you know, is President Kennedy's thinking on these subjects different from the secretary's?"

Adam held up his thumb and forefinger pressed together, no space between them, and said, "Not an iota."

I left the secretary's suite thinking that here, in Robert McNamara, was someone whose judgement was worthy of my greatest trust. He had, as I saw it, the right perspective on the greatest dangers in the world, and the power and determination to reduce them. And he and his assistant had the street-savy to know that if he wanted to achieve that, he had to keep his cards very close to his chest.

... Dwight Eisenhower had secretly endorsed the blueprints of this multi-genocide machine. He had furthermore demanded, largely for budgetary reasons, that there be no other plan for fighting the Russians. He had approved this single strategic operational plan despite reportedly being, for reasons I now understood, privately appalled by its implications. And when the Joint Chiefs responded so promptly to the new president's questions about the human impact of our attacks, they clearly assumed that Kennedy would not, in response, order them to resign or be dishonorably discharged, nor order the machine to be dismantled. (In that, it turned out, they were right.)

Surely neither of these presidents actually desired ever to order the execution of these plans, nor would any likely successor. But they all must have been aware, or should have been, of the dangers of allowing such a system to exist. They should have reflected on, and trembled before, the array of contingencies

• accidents,
• false alarms,
• outage of communications,
• Soviet actions misinterpreted by lower commanders,
• unauthorized action,
• foolish Soviet initiatives or failure to comply with U.S. threats,
• escalation stemming from popular uprisings in East Germany or elsewhere in Eastern Europe

that might release these pent-up forces beyond their control or that, in ways they had not forseen, could lead them personally to escalate or to initiate a preemptive attack.

Eisenhower had chosen to accept these risks, to impose them on humanity and all other forms of life. Kennedy -and later, Johnson and Nixon to my direct knowledge- did likewise. There is much evidence that such catastrophic "major attack options" were among the choices offered to presidents Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, i.e., until the end of the Cold War. There is little known publicly about the range of options since then, although four hundred Minuteman missiles remain on high alert, along with a comparable number of Trident sub-launched missiles, each alert force more than enough to cause nuclear winter.

Moreover, I felt sure in 1961 that the existent potential for moral and physical catastrophe -our government's readiness to commit multi-genocidal extermination on a hemispheric scale by nuclear blast and fallout- was not only a product of aberrant Americans or a peculiarly American phenomenon. I was right. A few years later, after the humiliation of the Cuban missile crisis and the ouster of Khrushchev, the Russians set out to imitate our destructive capacity in every detail and surpass it where possible. By the end of the decade, they had succeeded. Ever since then, there have existed two Doomsday Machines, each on high alert and subject to possible false alarms and the temptation to preemption, a situation much more than twice as dangerous as existed in the early sixties.

... I personally knew many of the American planners, though apparently -from this fatality chart- not quite as well as I had thought. They were not evil, in any ordinary, or extraordinary sense. They were normal Americans, capable and patriotic. I was sure they were not different, surely not worse, than the people in Russia doing the same work, or the people who would sit at similar desks in later U.S. administrations or other nuclear weapons states.

I liked most of the planners and analysts I knew: not only the physicists at RAND who designed bombs and the economists who speculated on strategy (like me), but also the colonels who worked on these very plans, whom I consulted with during the workday and drank beer with in the evening. What I was looking at was not simply an American problem or a superpower problem. With the age of warring nation-states persisting into the thermonuclear era, it was a species problem.

A few years after leaving the White House, McGeorge Bundy wrote in Foreign Affairs, "In the real world of real political leaders -whether here or in the Soviet Union- a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one's own country would be recognized as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond human history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable."

In the last year of the Cold War, Herbert York cited Bundy's statement in a talk at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (of which he had been the first director), where, along with Los Alamos, all U.S. nuclear weapons had been designed. York posed the question, how many nuclear weapons are needed to deter an adversary rational enough to be deterred? Concurring with Bundy's judgment -as who would not?- he answered his question, "somewhere in the range of 1, 10, or 100 ... closer to 1 than it is to 100."

In 1986, the U.S. had 23317 nuclear warheads and Russia had 40519 for a total of 63836 weapons.

Chapter 11

A Tale of Two Speeches

page 169 - 173

In adding, as he [Gilpatric] did, nearly all my points, he totally changed the tone and bearing of his draft. Some of my language didn't get in, but this did:

Our confidence in our ability to deter Communist action, or resist Communist blackmail, is based upon a sober appreciation of the relative military power of the two sides. We doubt that the Soviet leadership has, in fact, any less realistic views, although this may not always be apparent from their extravagant claims. While the Soviets use rigid security as a military weapon, their Iron Curtain is not so impenetrable as to force us to accept at face value the Kremlin's boasts.

The fact is that this nation has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power that an enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of self-destruction on his part.

That was the key point. My intended message was, for informed ears in the Kremlin and NATO, "We've discovered they are bluffing!" And for the American and European public: "We're staying in Berlin. and there's going to be no war." I thought of it as calling Khrushchev's bluff. I even rammed it home.

And with my new confidenvce that the U.S. patrols along the Berlin corridors would not be obstructed, I felt free to underline one committment in the final paragraph.

The United States does not seek to resolve disputes by violence. But if forceful interference with our rights and obligations should lead to violent conflict -as it well might [though i no longer believed this]- the United States does not intend to be defeated.

[Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell] Gilpatric gave the speech (in cache) [before the Business Council in The Homestead, Hot Springs, VA] on October 21, 1961, including these passages and others written by me, which were then quoted by the New York Times report of the speech.

Chapter 15

Burning Cities

page 262 - 263

LeMay himself was convinced that fire bombing had brought the Japanese to the point of surrender and that the atom bomb was in no way necessary. That last opinion was not at all confined to Air Force commanders, though Navy commanders, with reason, put more emphasis on the effects of the submarine blockade. The judgement that the bomb had not been necessary to victory -without invasion- was later expressed by 

1. Generals Eisenhower, 
2. MacArthur, and 
3. Arnold, as well as 
4. Admirals Leahy, 
5. King, 
6. Nimitz, and 
7. Halsey. 

(Eisenhower and Halsey also shared Leahy's view that its use was morally reprehensible.) In other words, 7 of the 8 officers of 5-star rank in the U.S. Armed Forces in 1945 believed the bomb was not necessary to avert invasion (that is, all but General Marshall, chief of staff of the Army, who alone still believed in July that invasion might have been necessary). Likewise, the U.S. Strategic Bombng Survey for the Pacific War concluded in July 1946 (in a report primarily drafted by Paul Nitze):

"Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

Whether that was true or not, the U.S. Army Air Force came out of the war convinced it had won the war in the Pacific by burning masses of civilians to death. Certainly that was the conclusion of Curtis LeMay. In contrast, his civilian superiors, Truman and Stimson, denied to the end of their lives that the commanders and forces under their authority had ever violated the code of jus in bello by deliberately targeting noncombatants. In LeMay's eyes, that was something of a semantic question. In a lengthy interview with historian Michael Sherry, he said, "There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not rrying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn't bother me so much to be killing the innocent bystanders."

Chapter 16

Killing a Nation

page 273

This little-known story [of potential atmospheric ignition, chapter 17] reveals something about actual decision-making under uncertainty at high levels, especially under cover of secrecy, that we humans are understandably resistant to recogizing in our leaders. It reveals the original readiness to gamble with nuclear disaster - a willingness to undertake small and sometimes not-so-small risks of ultimate catastrophy - that leading officials in nuclear superpowers have been exhibiting ever since. It is not good news.

Chapter 19

The Strangelove Paradox

pages 305 - 307

The bottom line is that arrangements made in Russia and the United States have long made it highly likely, if not virtually certain, that a single Hiroshima-type fission weapon exploding on either Washington or Moscow -whether deliberate or the result of a mistaken attack (as in Fail Safe or Dr. Strangelove) or as a result of an independent terrorist action- would lead to the end of human civilization (and most species). That has been, and remains, the inevitable result of maintaining forces on both sides that are capable of causing nuclear winter, and at the same time are poised to attack each other's capital and control system, in response to fallible warnings, in the delusion that such an attack will limit damage to the homeland, compared with the consequences of waiting for actual explosions to occur on more than one target.

Here, then, is the actual situation that has prevailed for more than half a century. Each side prepares and actually intends to attack the other's "military nervous system", command and control, especially its head and brain, the national command headquarters, in the first wave of a general war, however it originates. This has become the only hope of preempting and paralyzing the other's retaliatory capability in such a way as to avoid total devastation; it is what must above all be deterred by the opponent. But in fact it, too, is thoroughly suicidal unless the other side has failed to delegate authority well below the highest levels. Because each side does in fact delegate, hopes for decapitation are totally unfounded. But for the duration of the Cold War, for fear of frightening their own publics, their allies, and the world, neither side discouraged these hopes in the other by ackowledging its own delegation.

The only change in this situation has been that in the first weeks of the Trump administration, Russian news reports have begun ackowledging that the Perimeter system persists. In a February 2, 2017, article, Pravda revealed that the commander of Strategic Missile Forces Lietenant-General Sergey Karakayev said five years ago in an interview in a Russian publication, "Yes, the 'Perimeter' system exists. The system is on alert. If there's a need for a retaliatory strike, the command for an attack may come from the system, not people". The Pravda report explained, "Nuclear-capable missile will thus be launched from silos, mobile launchers, strategic aircraft, submarines to strike pre-entered targets, unless there is no (sic) signal from the command center to cancel the attack. In general, ... one thing is known for sure: The doomsday machine is not a myth at all - it does exist".

Ten days after President Trump's inauguration in 2017, Pravda quoted his statements that "the United States should strengthen and expand the nation's nuclear capacity" and "Let it be an arms race", and then reported that "Not so long ago, the Russian Federation conducted exercises to repel a nuclear attack on Moscow and strike a retaliatory thermonuclear attack on the enemy. In the course of the operations, Russia tested the Perimeter System, known as the 'doomsday weapon' or the 'dead hand'. The system assesses the situation in the country and gives a command to strike a retaliatory blow on the enemy automatically. Thus, the enemy will not be able to attack Russia and stay alive".

[note added by J. Gruber:

W. Putin, Waldai-Forum, Sotschi, 18. Oktober 2018

"Ich erinnere Sie daran, worum es ging. Es ging darum, ob wir bereit sind und ich bereit bin, die uns zur Verfügung sthenden Waffen einschließlich der Massenvernichtungswaffen zu benutzen, um uns und unsere Interessen zu schützen, und ich habe damit geantwortet "Ich erinnere Sie daran, was ich gesagt habe. Ich habe gesagt, dass in unserem Konzept des Einsatzes von Atomwaffen kein Präventivschlag stattfindet, und ich bitte alle hier und alle, die dann jedes Wort, das ich sage, analysieren und in eigenen Aussagen verwenden, folgendes im Hinterkopf zu behalten.

• Wir haben keinen Präventivschlag in unserem Konzept des Einsatzes von Atomwaffen. Unser Konzept ist ein Vergeltungsschlag. Für diejenigen, die das wissen, ist es nicht notwendig zu erläutern, was das bedeutet.
• Wir sind bereit und wir werden nur dann Atomwaffen verwenden, wenn der Aggressor in Russland zuschlägt, auf unserem Territorium.
• Wir haben ein System geschaffen und verbessern es ständig -es muss verbessert werden- GWS, ein Raketen-Frühwarnsystem.
• Dieses System erfasst auf globaler Ebene, welche Arten von Starts von strategischen Raketen aus den Meeren und Ländern durchgeführt werden. Das ist das erste.
• Und zweitens bestimmt es den Flugweg.
• Als drittes bestimmt es die Region, in dem die Atomwaffen zünden werden.
• Wenn wir überzeugt sind, das geschieht innerhalb von ein paar Sekunden, dass der Angriff auf das Territorium von Russland zielt, nur dann schlagen wir zurück auf gegenseitiger Basis.

Warum "gegen"? Weil der Aggressor auf uns zurück fliegt (sic) [vielleicht besser: Weil die Aggression auf ihn, den Aggressor, zurückschlägt.]. Natürlich ist dies eine globale Katastrophe, aber -ich wiederhole- wir können nicht die Initiatoren dieser Katastrophe sein ohne Präventivschlag. Nein, in dieser Situation warten wir auf den Einsatz von Nuklearwaffen gegen uns und tun selbst aber nichts. Aber dann muss der Aggressor wissen, dass Vergeltung unvermeidlich ist und er zerstört wird.

Wir werden das Opfer der Aggression und würden als märtyrer in den Himmel kommen, und sie würden einfach sterben ohne die Zeit, wenigstens Buße zu tun.

(Die Rede wurde übersetzt nach dem Originalmanuskript des Kreml.]

What has not changed is American preoccupation with threatening Russian command and control: as if all the above revelations, including those of Blair and Yarynich, had not occurred or were thoroughly disbelieved. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, passed with bipartisan support and signed by President Obama on December 23, 2016, included a provision which mandated a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Strategic command on "Russian and Chinese Political and Military Leadership Survivability, Command and Control, and Continuity of Governmental Programs and Activities". The provision of the law for the U.S. Strategic Command to "submit to the appropriate congressional committees the views of the Commander on the report ... including a detailed description of how the command, control, and communication systems" for the leadership of Russia and China, respectively, are factored into the U.S. nuclear war plan. The Pravda news stories quoted above, both apperaing in the second week of the Trump administration, were explicitly responding to these provisions of this law signed a few weeks earlier in their explanation of the continuing need for Perimeter.

Such plans and capabilities for decapitation encourage -almost compel- not only the Perimeter system but Russian launch on (possibly false) warning: either by high command (in expectation of being hit themselves imminently, and in hopes of decapitating the enemy commanders before they have launched all their weapons) or by subordinates who are out of communication with high command and have been delegated launch authority.

As General Holloway expressed it in 1980, he had confidence that with such a decapitating strategy, a U.S first strike would come out much better for the United States than a second strike, to the point of surviving and even prevailing. He was right about the hopelessness of the alternative forms of preemption. But in reality, the hope of successfully avoiding mutual annihilation by a decapitating attack has always been as ill-founded as any other. The realistic conclusion would be that a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviets was -and is- virtually certain to be an unmitigated catastrophe, not only for the two parties but for the world. But being unwilling to change the whole framework of our foreign and defense policy by abandoning reliance on the threat of nuclear first use or escalation, policy makers (probably on both sides) have chosen to act as if they believed (and perhaps do believe) that such a threat is not what it is: a readiness to trigger global omnicide.

page 318

"It has never been true that nuclear war is 'unthinkable', wrote British historian E.P. Thompson. "It has been thought and the thought has been put into effect." He was referring to President Harry Truman's use of atomic bombs to destroy the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. What needs further attention is that the president who ordered these attacks -along with the great majority of the American public- regarded these nuclear attacks as marvelously successful. Such thoughts get thought again, and acted on.

Among military planners in the U.S. government, thinking about nuclear war has in fact been continuous over the last seventy-two years and not only, or even mainly, with respect to deterring or responding to a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States or its forces or allies. Preparations and committments to initiate nuclear war "if necessary" have been the basis of fundamental, langstanding U.S. policies and crisis declarations and actions not only in Europe but in Asia and the Middle East as well.

page 319

The notion common to nearly all Americans that "no nuclear weapons have been used since Nagasaki" is mistaken. It is not the case that U.S. nuclear weapons have simply piled up over the years, unused and unusable, save for the single function of deterring their use against us by the Soviets. Again and again, generally in secret from the American public, U.S. nuclear weapons have been used, for quite different purposes.

As I noted earlier, they have been used in the precise way that a gun is used when you point it at someone's head in a direct confrontation, whether or not the rtigger is pulled. For a certain type of gun owner, getting their way in such situations without having to pull the trigger is the best use of the gun. It is why they have it, why they keep it loaded and ready to hand. All American presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have acted on that motive, at times, for owning nuclear weapons: the incentive to be able to threaten to initiate nuclear attacks if certain demands are not met.

The long-secret history of this period, extending throughout the Cold War and beyond, reveals that the assumption of a legitimate and available presidential "option" of first use -American initiation of nuclear attacks as an escalation of conventional armed conflict- is far more than purely symbolic or rhetorical. In reality, every president from Truman to Clinton has felt compelled at some point in his time in office -usually in great secrecy- to threaten and/or discuss with the Joint Chiefs of Staff plans and preparations for possible imminent U.S. initiation of tactical or strategic nuclear warfare, in the midst of an ongoing non-nuclear conflict or crisis.

This general proposition is, I know, unfamiliar, startling, on its face highly implausible. To make it less so, I list below mist of the actual nuclear cirises that can now be documented for the last half of the twentiesth century; this is followed by a discussion of more recent instances of nuclear threats from George W. Bush to Donald Trump.

pages 319 - 322

follows the list of 25 incidents

page 322

It follows from this listing (and more recent threats discussed below) that there has been no seventy-year moratorium on the active consideration and use of nuclear threats to support "atomic diplomacy". Whatever the inhibitions about pulling the trigger -and the record suggests that these have been strong, even in stalemated wars like Korea and Vietnam- there is no basis whatever for speaking of a "taboo" against nuclear weapons' use, whether in threats or actual attacks. Contrary to what has often been said about nuclear weapons, there is no "tradition of non-use". It is fair to say that, to our extreme good fortune, there has been a long tradition of no nuclear attacks.

Chapter 21

Dismantling the Doomsday Machine

pages 335 - 350

One way the RAND Corporation compensated the Air Force for the virtually complete freedom it had granted us to pursue our own self-generated research was for us to respond promptly whenever it occasionally asked us to evaluate some proposal from within the service. In 1960 my RAND secretary delivered a proposal from the Air Force for me to assess. It was, as usual, a photocopy of an original typed memo with, I believe, the title „Project Retro“ from an Air Force officer. It hat already gone through a number of Air Force offices. That was indicated by check marks and initials on a routing chart that was stamped on the first page, recording that it had been seen and in some way acted on by many of the agencies on the chart, Research and Development, Plans, Science and Technology, and so forth.

There was also the usual routing chart within RAND. I seemed to be among the first in the building to see it, though it wasn't obviously in my line – at first glance, it appeared to be more in the province of engineering – but I was known to be among those who were preoccupied with problems of SAC vulnerability to a Soviet surprise attack an the abilitiy of our offensive forces to survive and retaliate.

It was a classified proposal to deal with the possibility that a Soviet attack with ICBMs could eliminate our capability to retaliate with land-based missiles, primarily Minuteman ICBMs. This was in mid-1960, before the exposure of the missile-gap myth. I had been at RAND full-time for about a year, working on problems precisely like this.

This scheme proposed in some detail to assemble a huge rectangular array of one thousand first-stage Atlas engines – our largest rocket propulsion engines, except for Titans, of which we had only a few – to be fastened securely to the earth in a horizontal position, facing in a direction opposite to the rotation of the earth.

The officer originating this proposal envisioned that if our Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radars detected and reported on the huge viewing screens at NORAD a large flight of missile warheads coming across the North Pole from the Soviet-Union – aimed at our missile fields in North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Missouri – the array of Atlas engines would be fired, as near simultaneously as possible, to stop the earth's rotation momentarily.

The Soviet missiles, on their inertial path, would thus bypass of overfly their intended targets. Our land-based retaliatory force would be saved, to carry out – presumably, when things hat settled down and earth was again spinning normally – a retaliatory attack against the cities and soft military targets (their missiles having already left their hardened silos) in the Soviet-Union.

You didn't have to be a geophysicist, which I wasn't, to see some defects with this scheme. An awful lot of stuff would be flying through the air. Everything, in fact, that wasn't nailed down, and most of what was as well, would be gone with the wind, which would itself be flying at super-hurricane force everywhere at one. Cities on the coasts and beyond would be wiped out by giant tsunamis as the oceans redeployed onto the continents.

The Minuteman launch control officers, safe in their capsules deep underground, would have even less reason than in the foreseeable conditions of nuclear war either to launch their missiles or to come above-ground, sind there would be nothing left to destroy on the surface of the Soviet-Union, or the United States, or anywhere else on the planet. All structures would have collapsed, with the rubble along with all the people joining the wind and the water in their horizontal movement across the face of the earth, into space.

All this was obvious enough. My first thought was, „Pretty funny.“ It was the only piece of paper I had seen from the Air Force bureaucracy that showed a sense of humor. Even better, it was done perfectly straight, with no hint that is was anything but an ordinary secret official document. It looked absolutely authentic. I gave whoever had originated it (a RAND jokester?) credit.

Then I looked again at the routing slip from the Air Force. It really did appear to have gone through a number of relevant official agencies and been passed on. Half the boxes were unchecked – it hadn't gone to those divisions – but half acknowledged receipt. The signed initials were all different and looked real. No one had stopped it before it was sent to RAND, and I realized it was not a joke.

I remember sitting at my desk, looking at that document, and asking myself, for the first time: „Could I be in the wrong line of work?“

I did show it to a couple of RAND colleagues to see if they had the same reaction. They both were dismissive of the scheme. One engineer made some rough calculations on the back of an envelope (RAND engineers really did do this literally on occasion, though there was a blackboard in every room) and said after a few minutes, „One thousand Atlas engines wouldn't do it.“

Another, a physicist, said, as I recall, „If you could actually muster enough power to stop the rotation for a second or so, it's more likely that the earth's surface would rupture from its core. The planet might break up.“ Yes, Project Retro could surely be filed under „Crazy“.

But the truth, in retrospect, was that most of the documents I read in my national security work, including many of those I wrote myself, were only marginally, if at all, less unbalanced than Project Retro. „Unbalanced“ here being a euphemism for crazy, criminally insane.

True, only Project Retro would have had the effect of wiping the surface of the earth clean of human structures, humanity, and all other terrestrial species, and dispersing the creatures of the lakes and ocean deeps to dry out, eventually, on what remained of the land.

But, as I would soon discover, the Joint Chiefs' estimates of the effects of carrying out their first strike plans, under a variety of circumstances, foresaw killing more than half a billon humans with our own weapons in a matter of months, with most of them dead in a day or two.

How to describe that, other than insanity? Should the Pentagon officials and their subordinates have been institutionalized? But that was precisely the problem: they already were. Their institutions not only promoted this insanity, they demanded it. And still do. As do comparable institutions in Russia.

RAND analysts, of whom I was one, sought to bring about less insane planning for nuclear war. We failed. That was in part because the civilian officials we were advising found it hard to get the military to adopt our proposals. But, in retrospedt, our proposed strategies were totally unrealistic – as crazy as SIOP-62, SAC's own plan in 1961. Or almost as crazy. Simply improving on current SAC war plans – the secret goal that a generation of RAND analysts, from Bernard Brodie to Kaufmann to me set themselves – was far too low a bar, and still held us prisoners within the realm of madness. If RAND recommendations, including my own, had been implemented by SAC in an actual nuclear war – in the way that SAC proceeded to interpret them and execute them operationally – they would still have resulted in total global catastrophe.

To be quite plain here, I am talking about the madness of the strategy and planning I had personally laid out in the spring of 1961: my draft adopted word for word by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as his official guidance to the JCS for their operational planning for general nuclear war. I didn't question the appropriateness and need for damage-limiting counterforce strikes against military targets. SAC planners never had any problem identifying enough „military“ targets – hundreds, actually – within or in the vicinity of Moscow and all other cities that a presidential decision at the onset of central war to „withhold“ attacks on command and control or on cities – in the interests of „intrawar deterrence“, „bargaining“, terminating the war, or simply limiting civilian casualties – would have been entirely vitiated. The results from either a preemptive or a retaliatory U.S. attack supposedly based on „my“ guidance for „coercive war“ would have been indistinguishable from those of SIOP-62.

That was what Nixon and Kissinger found they had inherited from Johnson and McNamara, when they were introduced in 1969 to estimates of eighty to ninety million deaths from immediate effects of the „smallest“ attacks available to them. Obviously these estimates reflected attacks that burned all the major urban areas, even when population was not targeted „per se“. (No one knew then that these firestorms would cause global nuclear winter, as had actually been true not only in the sixties but ever since large numbers of atomic bombs had become available in the early fifties for use against cities.)

Both were predicted results and the actual, unrecognized climatic effects remained at these same catastrophic levels when Nixon and Kissinger left office, and throughout the Cold War, despite efforts as delusional and abortive as mine and McNamara's, by defense secretaries and their aides unter Ford, Carter, and Reagan to compel SAC to provide operational plans for „limited nuclear options“ in war with the Soviet Union.

Not that I or anyone elde would ever have been blamed for the omnicidal results if our plans were actually carried out, in the way and on the scale that SAC prepared to carry them out. No one would be left to hold anyone accountable, since the result would have been the near extinction of our species.

Here is what we know now: the United States and Russia each have an actual Doomsday Machine. It is not the same relatively cheap system that Herman Kahn envisioned (or Stanley Kubrick portrayed), with their warheads buried deep and set to exploed in their own territories, producing deadly global fallout. But a counterpart nevertheless exists for each country: a very expensive system of men, machines, electronics, communications, institutions, plans, training, discipline, practices, and doctrine – which, under conditions of electronic warning, external conflict, or expectations of attack, would with unknowable but possibly high probability bring about the global destruction of civilization and of nearly all human life on earth.

These two systems still risk doomsday: both are still on hair-trigger alert that makes their joint existence unstable. They are susceptible to being triggered on a false alarm, a terrorist action, unauthorized launch, or a desperate decision to escalate. They would kill billions of humans, perhaps ending complex life on earth. This is true even though the Cold War that rationalized their existence and hair-trigger status – and their supposed necessity to national security – ended thirty years ago.

Does the United States still need a Doomsday Machine? Does Russia? Did they ever?

Does the existence of such a capability serve any national or international interest whatsoever to a degree that could justify its obvious danger to human life?

I ask the questions not merely rhetorically. They deserve sober, reflective consideration. The answers do seem obvious, but so far as I know they have never been addressed. There follows another question: Does any nation on earth have a right to possess such a capability? A right to threaten – by its simple possession of that capability – the continued existence of all other nations and their populations, their cities, and civilization as a whole?

Robert F. Kennedy's „Thirteen Days“ based on his personal diaries and recollection, offered an account ot the Cuban missile crisis that he drafted in the summer and fall of 1967. RFK's murder in 1968 prevented him from rewriting and completing it prior to publication. At the end of the book, Theodore Sorensen, who edited the memoír, added this note:

„It was Senator Kennedy's intention to add a discussion of the basic ethical question involved (in the crisis): what, if any, circumstance or justification gives this government or any government the moral right to bring its people and possibly all people under the shadow of nuclear destruction?“

I know of no other occasion on which a former official, in or out of office, ever raised this particular question of moral right, whether in memos, internal discussions, or memoirs. But once posed in these terms, is it really so hard a question to answer?

Arguments made for the necessity or desirability of continued possession of some nuclear weapons by nuclear weapons states (NWS) do not remotely apply to maintaining doomsday arsenals on the massive scale of the superpowers – thousands of first-strike weapons each. That's true even when these pro-nuclear arguments do seem plausible to many as reasons for maintaining a small deterrent force.

Thus, for example: „You can't uninvent nuclear weapons.“ That has been a widespread and effective argument against a total unilateral abolition over the past seventy years. True, you can't eradicate the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons and delivery systems. But you can dismantle a Doomsday Machine. And that, at minimum, is what we must hasten to do. There is no need or justification for us to wait for the Russians to do it to theirs first or in step with us, though that global imperative applies just as well to them.

This implies moving in the opposite direction from the programs of Presidents Obama, Trump, and Putin to reconstruct their entire machines, with their first-strike characteristics, with „modernized“ replacement components. In reality, such a program seems nothing other, in either country, than a further subsidy to the military-industrial-legislative complexes that each of them have or are: a boon to profits, jobs, votes, campaign donations (kickbacks). Good, solid, tradtional political incentives, but very far from legitimate justifications for maintaining or rebuilding a Doomsday Machine.

No state ever set out intentionally to acquire a doomsday capability. Nor does the existence of one such machine compel or even create a tangible incentive for a rival or enemy to have one. In fact, having two on alert against each is far more dangerous for each and for the world than if only one existed. If the two existing machines were dismantled (in terms of their doomsday potential), there would never be any strategic rationale for anyone to reconstruct that capability, any more than there was a conscious intention in the first place.

The good news is that dismantling the Doomsday Machine in one country or both would be relatively simple in concept and in physical operation (though politically and bureaucratically incredibly difficult). It could be accomplished quickly, easily within a year. But it would mean – and here's where institutional resistance would be strong – giving up certain infeasible aims and illusory capabilities of our nuclear forces: in particular, the notion that it is possible to limit damage to the United States (or Russia) by means of a preemptive first strike, targeted on the adversary's land-based missiles, its command and control centers and communications, its leadership („decapitation“), all other military targets and war-supporting resources, including urban-industrial centers, transportation and energy.

In other words, it would mean totally discarding the present strategy and criteria for covering targets in our strategic nuclear war plans and discarding most of the forces deployed to carry out these aims and plans. This would mean dismantling all the land-based missile forces (Minuteman missiles), most or all strategic nuclear bombers, most of the current fourteen Trident submarines, and most of the warheads on remaining submarine-launched ballistic missiles in remaining Tridents.

Actually, there were sound, almost equally compelling reasons to dismantle all the above items no later than half a century ago, when the feasibility of a „damage-limiting“ strike against a large Soviet force of hardened missile silos and sub-launched missiles became a delusion and hoax. That war true even before there was any awareness of the dire danger of triggering a nuclear winter.

But that potentially widespread awareness today gives every person, institution, and nation in the world an unprecentendly compelling and urgent basis for demanding that such capabilities and planned „options“ be immediately dismantled.

However low the probability might be of the United States or Russia carrying out its current strategic contingency plans agains the other with the effect of causing nuclear winter and near human extincetion, it never will be zero, so long as Doomsday Machines of the present type exist.

Just how high does such a risk have to be to make the prospect of it intolerable? What risk of nuclear winter happening – whether by panicked reaction or unstable leadership or unauthorized action – is „acceptable“ as the price of maintaining our current strategic forces, and of any benefits that can suppossedly be claimed for that? Five percent over the next forty years? One percent? Three in a milion?

Why is anything other then zero remotely acceptable? Fortunately, it can be zero. The major risks could even be eliminated by executive decision alone, in conventional principle: though in practise, politically, there would have to be considerable support for this in Congress and the public, and in the military-industrial complex, reluctant as the latter would be. Although Donald J. Trump seems more willing to use presidential power than his predecessor, even beyond constitutional limits, the likelihood has always been slim that he would use it in this direction, and now even less than before talk of impeachment commenced. The same appears to apply to Putin. Nevertheless, it is true for both superpowers: the current danger of Doomsday could be eliminated without the United States or Russia coming close to total nuclear disarmament, or the abandonment of nuclear deterrence, either unilaterally or mutually (desirable as the latter would be).

Just for contrast, the risk that one city will be destroyed by a single (perhaps terrorist) nuclear weapon in the next year of the next decade cannot, unfortunately, be reduced to zero. But the danger of near-extinction of humanity – a continuous possibility for the past sixty-five years – can be reduced to zero by dismantlement of most existing weapons in both the United States and Russia (and smaller dismantlement in all the other NWS).

This dismantlement of the Doomsday Machine is not intended as an adequate long-term substitute for more ambitious, necessary goals, including total universal abolition of nuclear weapons. We cannot accept the conclusion that abolition must be ruled out „for the foreseeable future“ or put off for generations. There will not bea truly long-run human future without it. In particular, it seems more naive than realistic to believe that large cities can coexist indefinitely with nuclear weapons. If human civilization in the form that emerged four thousand years ago (in Mesopotamia, Iraq) is to persist globally even another century or two, a way must be found to make the required transformations ultimately practical.

Thus, it is urgent for the nuclear weapon states to acknowledge the reality that they have been denying, and the non-nuclear weapon states have been proclaiming, for almost fifty years: that in the long run, and that time has arrived, effective nonproliferation is inescapably linked to nuclear disarmament. Eventually, indeed fairly soon, either all nations forgo the right to possess nuclear weapons indefinitely and to threaten others with them under any circumstances, or every nation will claim that right, and actual possession and use will be very widespread.

Abolition of nuclear weapons must come in stages, but if proliferation in the near future is to be averted, a real commitment to total abolition of nuclear weapons – banning and eliminating their use and possession – as the truly reigning international goal is no longer to be delayed or equivocated. We must begin now the effort to explore and to help bring about conditions that will make a world of zero nuclear weapons feasible. Thus, it is extremely deplorable that the nuclear weapons states and their allies, led by the United States, boycotted the recent negotiations at the United Nations toward a treaty banning nuclear weapons, even if none of them are yet ready to join the more than 120 nations that adopted the treaty on July 7, 2017.

But what I am proposing is an effort to mobilize international suppport for a shorter-run program to avert as quickly as possible an imminent and continuous threat to human survival. The logic of this program is relatively simple to comprehend. What needs to be done to reduce the danger is easily specified in terms of concrete steps.

The threat of full nuclear winter is posed by the possibility of all-out war between the United States and Russia. Since the end of the Cold War, probably the greatest remaining risk of this annihilating outcome is by a preemptive attack by on side or the other triggered by an electronic false alarm (which has repeatedly occurred on both sides) or an accidental detonation (which was a remote but real risk in a number of previous accidents). The risk is not negligible of such an attack being triggered by an apocalyptic terrorist group, with the capability of creating a nuclear explosion in Washington or Moscow.

The danger that either false alarm or a terrorist attack on Washington or Moscow would lead to a preemptive attack derives almost entirely from the existence on both sides of land-based missile forces, each vulnerable to attack by the other: each, therefore, kept on a high state of alert, ready to launch within minutes of warning.

The easiest and fastest way to reduce that risk – and indeed, the overall danger of nuclear war – is to dismantle entirely (not merely „de-alert“) the Minuteman III missile force (currently scheduled for „refurbishment“), the U.S. land-based leg of the nuclear „triad.“ Former secretary of defense William Perry has argued precisely that, as has James E. Cartwright, former commander of the Strategic Command and vice chairman of the JCS. A second stage would be to reduce the Trident submarine-based ballistic missiles (SLBM) force to give up its capability to target and destroy the entire Russian land-based missile force (on which the Russians choose to rely far more than does the United States). Having first deprived the Russians of their high-priority, time-urgent targets for those forces by dismantling the U.S. Minuteman silos and their control centers, the remaining inventive for the Russians to launch their ICBMs on warning – to avert their being destroyed by U.S. SLBMs – would be eliminated. Launch on warning would no longer be susceptible of being rationalized strategically on either side.

All of the above propositions apply with equal force to the current, vulnerable opposing offensive nuclear forces of India and Pakistan, with the potential global catastrophe of their mutual launch roughly half the scale of the full nuclear winter produced by a United States/Russian nuclear war. The world's interest in reducing these forces and avoiding their hair-trigger alert status – likewise for all currently expanding and „modernizing“ nuclear arsenals – is wholly comparable and secondary only to the mutual confrontation of current superpower forces.

To suggest that these are relatively simple steps for the superpowers and others neglects the challenge of fundamentally altering the doctrine and strategy that have shaped the buildup of our strategic forces over the past sixty-five years. Contrary to public understanding, that strategy has not been a matter of deterrence of nuclear attack on the United States, but rather the illusionary one of improving first-strike capability. Specifically, this has involved the goal of „damage-limiting“ to the United States in the event of a U.S. preemptive strike against Soviet/Russian nuclear capability, triggered by a warning of impending attack, possibly in the context of escalation of a conventional or limited nuclear war.

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That strategy remains in force, although, as noted, the objective of limiting damage to the United States in large-scale nuclear war, or of keeping such a war with a nuclear state limited, has been essentially a hoax, infeasible to achieve for about fifty of those years – ever since the Soviets acquired SLBMs and a large force of hardened ICBMs. Even striking first, it has not been feasible to avoid the effective total destruction of U.S. society (even earlier, that was not feasible for Western Europe), by blast, heat, radiation, and fallout alone from Soviet/Russian retaliation.

Now, in light the phenomenon of nuclear winter precipitated from cities burning from our U.S. attacks alone (aside from Soviet retaliation), there can no longer be any fig leaf of pretense that a „damage-limiting“ first strike by either side would be anything less than suicidal – as Alan Robock and Brian Toon have put it, „self-Assured Destruction“ (SAD) – or, in fact, omnicidal. The changes I am describing mean giving up the pretense, and the supposed political and alliance advantages of maintaining the pretense, that is is possible for either superpower to limit damage to anyone or to everyone by attacking the other with nuclear weapons, whether first or second or in any circumstances or manner whatever.

The sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons should be to deter nuclear attack on the United States and its allies. The sole purpose can and should be accomplished with radically lowered numbers of U.S. nuclear weapons, almost entirely SLBMs [Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles], ICBMs [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles] having been dismantled as they should have been generations ago. This shift would not totally eliminate the dangers of nuclear war, but it would abolish the threat of nuclear winter.

Unfortunately, there continues to be little awareness of the recent scientific confirmation of the thirty-year-old nuclear winter „hypothesis“ and its implications for our existing strategic nuclear war plans. To be sure, these actual plans remain Top-Secret, but a great deal of testimony by officials, former insiders, and well-informed researchers makes clear that they have much the same character and the same opacity to civilian superiors even within the government as during the time when I had direct knowlege of them.

But I can't expect enough others to find my judgement adequately credible to motivate a broad and urgent movement for change without more authoritataive confirmation. It is therefore a priority of mine – and, I hope, of readers of this book – to encourage pressure on Congress (and potential whistleblowers and other witnesses) and on other legislatures both in nuclear and non-nuclear weapons states to investigate the questions and issues I have raised, both in the United States and worldwide.

After all, not one of these legislatures (starting with our own) has ever successfully demanded or been told the truth of nuclear targeting or of the prospective consequences of nuclear war, whether relatively limited and small or all-out.

It is the long-neglected duty of the U.S. Congress – preferably with the expert help and authority of the National Academy of Sciences, in part on a classified basis for details of actual weapons assignments against targets, yields, height of burst, numbers of detonations – to test the now-confirmed scientific finding regarding nuclear winter against the realities of our secret war plans. On that basis, Congress and the NAS [National Academy of Sciences] can and must investigate the foreseeable human and environmental consequences of implementing the various „options“ in those plans.

But past experience makes clear that Congress will not hold real investigative hearings, using committee subpoena powers, to penetrate the curtains of secrecy around these matters without a new level of pressure from American citizens. It is a major purpose of this book to help inspire that pressure, though it's obvious that will require a major change in public mood and priorities, and, if such pressure is to be effective, a still greater change in the composition of the present Congress.

My own experience of the last half century tells me that such a change in public awareness and resulting pressure on Congress will not occur without revelations by patriotic and courageous whistleblowers. We have long needed and lacked the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers on the subject of nuclear policies and preparations, nuclear threats, and decision-making: above all in the United States and Russia but also in the other nuclear weapons states.

I will always deeply regret that I did not make known to Congress, the American public, and the world the extensive documentation of persistent and still-unknown nuclear dangers that was available to me half a century ago. Those in nuclear weapons states who are now in a position to do more than I did then to alert their countries and the world to fatally reckless secret policies should take warning from the earlier silence by myself and others – and do better.

I would say to them: Don't do what I did. Don't wait to tell the truth to the public and legislatures, with documents, until you've lost your access or (in my case) the documents themselves. Above all, to paraphrase an infamous statement by a former secretary of state, don't wait until the „smoking gun“ about your own country's reckless nuclear threats and policies is a mushroom cloud.

Given such revelations and corresponding investigations by legislatures in this country and other nuclear weapons states, it seems to me reasonable to hope that new public awareness of the now-secret realities would make the prevailing establishment consensus on the need and legitimacy of threatening and preparing to bring about total omnicide unsustainable. It should be commonly recognized that no stake whatever, no cause, no principle, no consideration of honor or obligation or prestige or maintaining leadership in current alliances – still less, no concern for remaining in office, or maintaining a particular power structure, or sustaining jobs, profits, votes – can justify maintaining any risk whatever of causing the near extinction of human and other animal life on this planet.

Omnicide – threatened, prepared, or carried out – is flatly illegitimate, unacceptable, as an instrument of national policy; indeed, it cannot be regarded as anything less than criminal, immoral, evil. In the light of recent scientific findings, of which the publics of the world and even their leaders are still almost entirely unaware, that risk is implicit in the nuclear planning, posture, readiness, and threats of the two superpowers. That is intolerable. It must be changed, and that change can't come too soon.

The steps I have indicated are only a beginning toward the ultimate delegitimation of nuclear weapons and nuclear threats. But none of the necessary changes can occur without an informed public, suitably alarmed by a situation that properly evokes horror, fear, revulsion, and incredulity, accompanied, hopefully, by the determination of the highest order and urgency to eliminate it.

Yet these reactions have been suppressed by a practice, when the reality is revealed and discussed at all, of maintaining a quasi-academic tone, an „objective“, dispassionate, non-evaluative discourse regarding what the planning and practice has been and the bureaucratic or political reasons behind it, without any appropriate evaluation of the nature or consequence of these decisions and actions. That has contributed to the lack of an adequate political response, even when some aspects of past realities are occasionally exposed.

Moreover, the warnings and demands of activists are almost entirely ignored in mainstream media and politics and academic discussion as being non-expert and emotional rather than rational, failing to give appropriate weight to the complexities, the competing moral considerations and priorities that must drive reasonable and responsible policy-making.

What is missing – what is foregone – in the typical discussion and analysis of historical or current nuclear policies is the recognition that what is being discussed is dizzyingly insane and immoral: in its almost-incalculable and inconceivable destructiveness and deliberate murderousness, its disproportionality of risked and planned destructiveness to either declared or unacknowledged objectives, the infeasibility of its secretely pursued aims (damage limitation to the United States and allies, „victory“ in two-sided nuclear war); its criminality (to a degree that explodes ordinary visions of law, justice, crime), its lack of wisdom or compassion, its sinfulness and evil.

And yet part of what must be grasped – what makes it both understandable, once grasped, and at the same time mysterious and resistant to our ordinary understanding – is that the creation, maintenance, and political threat-use of these monstrous machines has been directed and accomplished by humans pretty much the way we think of them: more or less ordinary people, neither better nor worse than the rest of us, not monsters in either a clinical or mythic sense.

This particular process, and what it has led to and the dangers it poses to all complex life on earth, shows that human species – when organized hierarchially in large, dense populations, i.e., civilization – at its absolute worst. Is it really possible that ordinary people, ordinary leaders, have created and accepted dangers of the sort I am describing? Every „normal“ impulse is to say „No! It can't be that bad!“ („And if it ever was, it can't have persisted. It can't be true now, in our own country.“)

We humans almost universally have a false self-image of our species. We think that monstrous, wicked policies must be, can only be, conceived and directed and carried out by monsters, wicked or evil people, or highly aberrant, clinically „disturbed“ people. People not like „us“. That is mistaken. Those who have created a continuing nuclear threat to the existence of humanity have been normal, ordinary politicians, analysts, and military strategists. To them and to their subordinates. Hannah Ahrendt's controversial proposition regarding the „banality of evil“ I believe applies, though it might better have been stated as the „banality of evildoing“, and of most evildoers.

After all, we Americans have seen in recent years human-caused catastrophes reflecting governmental or corporate recklessness far greater and more conscious and deliberate than our public can easily imagine or is allowed to discover in time. Above all, the invasion of Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan, but also the failure to prepare for or respond to Hurrican Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, and financial disasters affecting millions: the savings-and-loan scandal, Internet and housing bubbles, criminal fraud, and the meltdown of the banking and investment system.

Perhaps reflection on these political, social, and moral failures – preceding though amplified by current premonitions of disastrous decision-making during the tenure of Donald Trump – will lend credibility to my basic theme, otherwise hard to absorb: that the same type of heedless, shortsighted, and reckless decision-making and lying about it has characterized our government's nuclear planning, threats, and preparations, throughout the nuclear era, risking a catastrophe incomparably greater than all these others together.

I well know that it is entirely unrealistic to hope that the present Congress (not to speak of the present president), dominated by the current Republican Party, or for that matter a Congress returned to the control of Democratic members mainly of the sort we have seen in the last generation, would respond to demands for any one of the measures I have proposed above:

• a U.S. no-first-use policy
• probing investigative hearings on our war plans in the light of nuclear winter
• eliminating our ICBMs
• forgoing delusions of preemptive damage-limiting by our first-strike forces
• giving up the profits, jobs, and alliance hegemony based on maintaining that pretense
• otherwise dismantling the American Doomsday Machine

Both parties as currently constituted oppose every one of these measures. This mortal predicament did not begin with Donald J. Trump, and it will not end with his departure. The obstacles to achieving these necessary changes are posed not so much by the majority of the American public – though many in recent years have shown dismaying manipulability – but by officials and elites in both parties and by major institutions that consciously support militarism, American hegemony, and arms production and sales.

Tragically, the news is equally bad when it comes to the prospects of reversing American energy policy in time and on a scale to avert catastropic climate change. Much the same institutions and elites tenaciously obstruct solution to this other existential challenge; they are, indeed, inordinately powerful. And yet, as demonstrated by the downfall of the Berlin Wall, the nonviolent dissolution of the Soviet empire, and the shift to majority rule in South Africa, all unimaginable just thirty years ago, such forces for sustaining an unjust and dangerous status quo are not all-powerful.

Is it simply quixotic to hope to preserve human civilization from either the effects of burning fossil fuels or preparing for nuclear war? As Martin Luther King Jr. warned us, one year to the day before his death, „There is such a thing as being too late.“ In challenging us on April 4, 1967, to recognize „the fierce urgency of now“ he was speaking of the „madness of Vietnam,“ but he also alluded on that same occasion to nuclear weapons and to the even larger madness that has been the subject of this book: „We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coanniliation.“

He went on:

We must move past indecision to action. … If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those, who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight. … Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.

Version: 5.3.2019

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Joachim Gruber