John Buell

Clear Jared Kushner—and the Rest of Us

Is Jared Kushner’s receiving top-level security clearance another instance of a rich kid gaining preferences he does not deserve? Unfortunately, most of the commentary on Kushner’s security clearance has focused on his fitness for the privilege. Citizens both here and around the world would have been better served by a discussion of the entire classification system itself and the political interests that system serves. Peeling away the layers of secrecy surrounding national security reveals facts that could change the fundamental orientation of that policy.

A good place to start such an inquiry would be Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Among its great virtues is a history lesson that challenges self- righteous American exceptionalism, especially the contention that the US is a responsible nuclear power and has used no nuclear weapon since Nagasaki.

That contention may be literally true, but it is highly misleading. Ellsberg points out that on more than 20 occasions presidents have used nuclear weapons in the same way a robber points a firearm at his victim and says “Your money or your life.” The revolver plays a major role in the transaction even while not fired. Some threats were bluffs, but Ellsberg is convinced, based on newly released documents, that threats under Eisenhower and Nixon were the real thing: “Most histories downplayed or totally ignored these allegations … because of a lack of documentation. Yet time after time, as documents dribbled out through declassification—often several decades after the events — what emerged was the threats had really occurred and were meant to be taken seriously.” In any case even bluffs seldom work for very long without some evidence that there is something behind the threat.

Equally disturbing are other aspects of the way these nuclear threats evolved. Nuclear planners developed plans to decapitate the nerve center of their enemy’s nuclear war machine and then developed and implemented strategies to delegate control of the nuclear machine in the event their own central command was destroyed. Yet both sides failed to make the latter strategy public thus encouraging plans for a rapid first strike in the event of a warning, possibly false, of an opponent’s attack. Ellsberg again: “For the duration of the Cold War, for fear of frightening their own publics, neither side discouraged these hopes in the other by acknowledging its own delegation.”

Not only was the public left in the dark with regard to the dangers of nuclear confrontation, the nuclear planners and bomb makers were willing to play roulette with the future of the whole planet. In the course of the Manhattan project’s development of an atomic (fission) bomb, some scientists concluded that a bomb fusing isotopes of hydrogen could generate a thousand times the explosive potential of the Hiroshima bomb.

Some also expressed concern that the immense heat generated by the fission explosion might cause the incineration of the Earth’s atmosphere. They speculated as to how remote the probability of such an event was, but they did not postpone or cancel the New Mexico test blast. And even realizing that the fusion bomb would transform war in ways even more profound than the Hiroshima bomb, the public was never informed about plans to develop it.

The Hiroshima bomb, awful as it was, did no more damage than the fire bombing of Tokyo with conventional weapons. H bombs dropped in any relatively large number promised casualties in the billions, something the Cold War era scientists recognized before even more damning and credible predictions of nuclear winter.

Today most of our weapons stockpile is thermonuclear weapons. How safe are these, even during peacetime? Here too Ellsberg’s classified work during the Cold War yielded important clues. He found that, during routine test mobilization of the bombing squads, the actual bomb was generally not loaded into the plane. Cost was not the deciding factor. Rather it was concern that accidental dropping of the bomb posed a remote but real threat of detonation. Ellsberg also learned that launch site personnel had Go codes but no Stop code. The rationale expressed to Ellsberg was that a civilian president might have second thoughts about an attack and thus, at best, spoil a chance for a surprise attack or, at worst, leave our forces totally disorganized and vulnerable. More generally, these deficiencies reflected distrust of civilian authorities, especially in a crisis.

Jared Kushner is not to be trusted as a member of a small elite entitled to make decisions over such matters. But neither should any human be given this monopoly privilege. Most of what is classified serves the purpose of protecting an arms ace and/or economic elite. Cold War values, in particular the superiority of market capitalism, helped impel the arms race, but that in turn added flames, literally and metaphorically, to the Cold War. We must work for a different history. Broader access to such facts improves our odds and should be an entitlement of all citizens in a democracy. Until that day comes we need more whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg.

John Buell lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and writes regularly on labor and environmental issues. Email jbuell@acadia.net.

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2019

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