20.500.12592/b15c2s
LETTER FROM DANIEL ELLSBERG
3 March 2023
Summary
(I’ll be ninety-two on April 7th.) I feel the very same way about having a few months more to enjoy life with my wife and family, and in which to continue to pursue the urgent goal of working with others to avert nuclear war in Ukraine or Taiwan (or anywhere else). [...] In addition, thanks to Nixon's crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I expected, and I was able to spend the last fifty years with Patricia and my family, and with you, my friends. [...] What's more, I was able to devote those years to doing everything I could think of to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful interventions: lobbying, lecturing, writing and joining with others in acts of protest and non-violent resistance. [...] Russia is making monstrous threats to initiate nuclear war to maintain its control over Crimea and the Donbas--like the dozens of equally illegitimate first-use threats that the US government has made in the past to maintain its military presence in South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and (with the complicity 1 of every member state then in NATO ) West Berlin. [...] Leadership in the US, Russia, other nuclear weapons states, NATO and other US allies have yet to recognize that such threats of initiating nuclear war--let alone the plans, deployments and exercises meant to make them credible and more ready to be carried out--are and always have been immoral and insane: under any circumstances, for any reasons, by anyone or anywhere.
