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Ellsberg on Nixon's Nukes

When Dan Ellsberg was in the Twin Cities earlier this year -to testify at the trial of two of the Minnesota 8 -a number of us had a chance to rap with him. During that conversation Dan laid out a very candid analysis of the war, the private strategy of Nixon's administration and the prospects for the future.

Here are some excerpts of Dan's comments during that discussion.

... I still have some contact with them (former colleagues in government) and they have complicated my life a great deal in the last year; because if I had not been talking to them I would have been willing to believe what most people In this country believe, and that is that Nixon, whether he likes it or not, is bowing to political realities and getting out of Vietnam.

There's the Stuart Alsop theory in his columns in "Newsweek, that Nixon is carrying out an enormous strategic retreat.

"He's getting out," Alsop hints sometimes, "totally. Those things you may have heard, that thunder in the background, is an occasional parting shot in what is basically a retreat. And don't worry about his threats, about escalation and so forth - that's Just rhetoric."

I've found over the last year that this is what most people in the country want to believe; and although it contradicts what Nixon has been saying more than most people seem to realize, that doesn't make it incredible, because, as we know, who believes in what a president says?

He says he is going to stay in for a just peace; and he will not be humiliated. He will not accept a defeat; he will keep as many troops there as necessary, he says, and if they are endangered he will not hesitate to take strong and effective measures: "See what I did in Cambodia see what I did last week ... He tells us all this, but people don't necessarily have to believe that - "That's just the president talking to the public."

So, unfortunately, I've had the pressure put on me. The people whom I trust, who were working for Henry Kissinger, and other people in (the Departments of) State and Defense, were telling me "Believe the President," and they would say, at that time, 'I can't tell you why, I can't tell you the details, but when he says he's willing to escalate, believe him." And they said this before Cambodia, and they said this before this last (POW) raid.

I'll give you what I am now perfectly convinced - and have a good deal of evidence-is the Nixon strategy right now. I think that Nixon, like the four presidents before him, is determined not to be in office when Saigon falls to communism. And he is also determined, if possible, to stay in office until 1976.

Those two requirements mean to him that he cannot withdraw all troops or anything like all troops from Vietnam. He can reduce troops, because we had far more troops there than we needed to hold onto Vietnam. The extra troops were being used in a vain attempt to do the trick, to kill enough of the other side to cause them to surrender. We've given up on that. Just to hold on to Vietnam, we had several hundred thousand more troops than he needed; so this gave him people to throw to the wolves, in effect, to throw off the sled when the political wolves got on his heels. And he's been dealing these out now as needed.

But his plan is, first, to keep a hundred or two hundred thousand troops in Vietnam, indefinitely. He would like to get it down to fifty thousand. That's concievable, but unlikely.

So it involves the presence in Vietnam of a hundred to two hundred thousand troops, doing logistics work, transportation, intelligence, communications, and above all, support to air operations, and including U.S. helicopter operations, 50 calibre armed helicopter operations, which already cause most of the Vietnam casualties.

To keep those troops in the country, to make that acceptable to the American public, you have to keep casualties down. And to do this he plans not only to get them out of combat areas, vut to threaten the North Vietnamese that if they should cause combat casualties at an excessive rate, or embarrass him politically by attacking hard, whether they succeeded or not, or by taking over too much of the country, he will destroy North Vietnam.

So a deterrent threat of bombing is the second pillar of the strategy, of what he calls "Vietnamization." And in the beginning it was an unspoken promise, which he has more and more made an explicit promise, and now completely explicit.

Third, why did he expect that this threat would deter the other side when past bombing did not? And the answer is, in his mind, first, it's a bigger threat than the Democrats made.

He has criticized the Demoncrats for small indecisive escalation; and what he has in mind, ultimately, is such things as the mining of Haiphong, the destruction of Hanoi and Haiphong, unrestricted bombing, probably including destroying the dikes - Just a very massive bombing of North Vietnam which is what I mean by burning North Vietnam to the ground.

The urban destruction of North Vietnam could be far greater than it ever was before. He thinks that will make it effective...

And the other thing is, he will demonstrate that he is willing to do it. He'll make it credible by occasional large demonstrations, not only that he is willing to do it But that he can get away with it Domestically. He says to himself, "They are counting on domestic unrest, or congressional dissent keeping me from doing this. I will show them that I can do this and manage it in such a way that I don't get major dissent, or that I can ride it out."

That's the major outline for the strategy, carrying him at least to 72.

Looking further ahead he probably does have the positive hope that by blocking the North Vietnamese long enough, threatening them that if they attack - they can't attack, because if they did they'd get burned out - they'd finally tire and make some very sweeping concessions which we could perhaps accept. . .

He has one premise there that may well be right. And that premise is that the American public cares mostly about U.S. casualties, and by reducing those he has the major aspect of dissent. And the American public does not care about bombing and does not care about North Vietnamese casualties or South Vietnamese casualties, or Laotian, or Cambodian casualties or refugees. ..

He and Kissinger believe that his reaction to Cambodia was a reaction first to the Kent State students and second to the troops in Cambodia. Specifically, that students were mainly concerned about Kent State and adults mainly about the troops ... If he could do without shooting white students next time, and if he keeps American troops out of it, he could get away with a lot. The POW raid and the bombing (and the Laos invasion) have probably persuaded him he is right.

The other aspect though is that his bet on the North Vietnamese is almost surely wrong. In fact it's such a stupid mistake that one could hardly imagine how a U.S. President could make that mistake. But all you have to imagine is that he is not better than the four presidents who preceded him, that they all made that mistake. They all made that assumption: everybody has a breaking point, these people too, etc., etc., which is not a good assumption . . .

The people who are expert on North Vietnam and follow what they are saying and are in contact with them believe it overwhelmingly likely that the North Vietnamese will challenge it. Especially when they realize his intent to keep troops there, which they probably already have by now. And when it is clear to them that domestic dissent will not get Nixon out of there . . .

The implication of all this is that the war is not over. And that expansion is likely, very likely. And it will take the form of continued, heavy Indo-Chinese casualties, which have never reduced actually . . . Increased casualties, if anything, and increased bombing, very increased bombing now what to do about this? Most of the people who've been telling me this say the only thing that can be done, basically, is to get rid of Nixon in '72. And that may be true. It certainly is the most likely way, without at all being a guarantee ... On the other hand, the same people believe premises that I just told you, that have the implication that North Vietnam is like ly to be destroyed before November of '72, or before January of '73. And if you're very concerned about chat, which I am, then the election is not an answer. . .

(I was talking) with Harrison Salsbury, who's editing the Op-ed page, the page opposide the Ed page in the New York Times, last week. He said - and I have now one last turn of the screw here - he not only believes I was correct in this prediction of the future, but that he has believed for a long time, on the basis of his personal knowledge of Nixon, that Nixon believes that he wants, and if fact that he believes he must have to get through the next election, a crisis like the Cuban (missile) crisis - to win the way Kennedy won. Not necessarily a nuclear crisis, bur a major power confrontation, so that he could show once and for all (that he has) balls or something... And that he will win the political Influence, and the diplomatic influence ... He feels he needs that before '72. . .

Finally, the possibility of nuclear weapons comes in the following ways . . . Some of you may have seen a column by James Reston that said this president will use nuclear weapons - dash, underline, any weapons - to protect American troops if necessary. The JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) would probably feel that was the best offer they'd heard from a president since Dulles under Eisenhower and Nixon, who was associated with that policy . . . again, it would probably fail to deter, ultimately.

Nixon could feel that having made the threat of that . . . that to protect his credibility he'd have to carry it out. In fact, I could imagine that Nixon, this president - and this makes him, I think, the most dangerous president that we may have had of the last five - has in his mind that his gift to history will be that he will restore to the American arsenal the threat of nuclear weapons, the power of that threat.

And what it will take to restore it is an effective use of nuclear weapons, probably a demonstrative kind of clean air burst, small, tactical nuclear weapon on an unpopulated area or something. But a precedent that would give him back the threat.

If that is so, he is the most dangerous man in the world. He probably is anyway. But In historic terms this would be a great step upward . . .

Question: Hasn't be pledged to non-first use?

Response: No . . . You think so . . . a lot of people think so . . . No. As a matter of fact, it has been put to Henry Kissinger several rimes in this administration: "Are you willing to give a no-first-use pledge for Vietnam?"

And he has said "No, we will not do that."...

Questioner: Couple that with a massive rounding up of radicals in major cities of the country.

Ellsberg: I think he's be prepared - that's by the way the last thing mentioned. The . . . This ought to cheer you up (laughter) . . . The - that is - I think that they would not do such again, any kind of major escalation without preparation of a kind that they did not have with Cambodia, both to keep the thing in hand, and, if anything, to exploit It with a really major Canadian type, if not Greek type capability for keeping things in hand.

And I presume that the planning for this is going on now, as contingency planning.