Pentagon Papers leaker fears America is dangerously close to nuclear war

The Pentagon Papers revealed secrets and lies about the Vietnam War that infuriated a public that was already turning against the war at the time. The man who copied the papers, Daniel Ellsberg, spoke to The New York Times just as a fresh leak from the Pentagon was being posted online.

A slate of documents was released on the social platform Discord before the press ultimately picked it up. They reveal the Pentagon's plans for Ukraine after the invasion by Russia. Some of the documents have been "heavily doctored," according to one defense official that spoke to Politico.

Ellsberg's leak activism was due to his ongoing opposition to nuclear proliferation, something that continues to frighten him today. In his interview, he confessed that he was "scared" and that President Joe Biden "is right when he says that this is the most dangerous time with respect to nuclear war, since the Cuban missile crisis."

"I also don’t think the world is going to deal with the climate crisis. We’ve known, since the 2016 Paris Agreement and before, that the U.S. had to cut our emissions in half by 2030. That’s not going to happen," he also said.

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He's often wondered why there aren't more people leaking documents or information, given that so many more people have access to classified information.

"Many of the people whistle-blowers work with know the same things and actually regard the information in the same way — that it’s wrong — but they keep their mouths shut. As Snowden said to me and others, 'Everybody I dealt with said that what we were doing was wrong. It’s unconstitutional. We’re getting information here about Americans that we shouldn’t be collecting,'" revealed Ellsberg. "The same thing was true for many of my colleagues in government who opposed the war. Of course, people are worried about the consequences."

He also agreed with those who've complained there is a considerable overclassification of documents and that the media has never investigated the system as a whole, outside of the national security secrets themselves.

"For example, the best people on declassification outside the media, the National Security Archive, month after month, year after year, put out newly disclosed classified information that they have worked sometimes three or four years, ten years, 20 years to make public," said Ellsberg. "Very little of that was justified to be kept from the public that long, if at all. An expert estimated in Congress in 1971 that 5 percent of classified information met the criteria for secrecy at the time it was classified, and after a few years that decreased to half of one percent."

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Ellsberg spent his life dealing with nuclear secrets and the fear that two global powers blowing up the world was a reality. He remembered an assistant putting labels on his bookshelves and drawers to classify his files. They read "genocide," "torture," "massacre," "terrorism" and other horrifying things. He said his wife saw it, shocked that she was married to someone who had files like that.

"And so this is California, this is Berkeley, so a bunch of her friends came down with burning sage and exorcised my office," Ellsberg revealed. "But that has been my life since I started work at the RAND Corporation in 1958. I think about nuclear war not because I find it fascinating but because I want to prevent it, to make it unthinkable, because I care about the world that it would destroy."

He went on to explain that there are nuclear weapons that are currently being used in Ukraine by both sides. They're used as threats. He described it as a gamble of luck that it works when the U.S. threatens to use its military might. It might not work in the future.

Read the full interview at the New York Times.