AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now!, Pacifica Radio’s national daily grassroots election show. I’m Amy Goodman.

In this last segment, we’re joined by Dan Ellsberg. He came into New York for an event last night at The New School for the 25th anniversary of his leaking of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, The Washington Post and other papers. The actual anniversary is June 13th. And we’ll be bringing you a Pentagon Papers special on that day. Today we’re going to talk about nuclear weapons and terrorism.

Dan Ellsberg is currently director of the Manhattan Project II, trying to undo the legacy of the original Manhattan Project.

Dan, President Clinton is heading to Russia to meet with Russian President Boris Yeltsin in a couple of weeks. He’ll be meeting with Yeltsin and the G7 leaders on securing easily smuggled components from Russia’s dismantled nuclear arsenal. What do you make of this meeting?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, another name for the G7 leaders, or the slightly smaller group, the permanent members of the Security Council of the U.N., are that they are the nuclear terrorist states of the world. They are the nuclear weapon states, so-called, in the terms the Nonproliferation Treaty, which means that they not only possess nuclear weapons, but every single one of them, with the possible exception of China, reserves the right to initiate nuclear war under circumstances their leaders choose, without any, by the way, legislative or democratic consultation in their own public before they do that, in any one case, even those that are democracies, like the U.S. Without any form of appeal, without any process whatever, their leaders have the right to push buttons that will lead to the indiscriminate slaughter of tens to hundreds of thousands to millions of people.

Now, the slaughter of millions of noncombatants, or tens of noncombatants, is terrorism. And every state that possesses nuclear weapons and proclaims an unrestrained right to use those at its own, to threaten them, and to initiate their use, is making threats of terrorism, of indiscriminate slaughter, that the states I’m referring to, that are in that category of massive terrorist states, are the United States, Russia, England, France, China, Pakistan, Israel and India.

They should cease to be terrorist nations. And they can’t do that from one day to the next. That would make an — it does mean an enormous change in their attitudes, in their stockpiles, in their postures, in their policies. And it can’t happen overnight. But that is what must happen, in a world where terrorism by anyone, whether it’s the Unabomber or it’s the U.S. in Dresden and Tokyo and Hiroshima in World War II, or Russians, Germans, whoever, or by some small group, sets an example, a precedent, of the legitimacy and the usability of terrorism by other people. And it’s doing that in a world in which other people are finding it increasingly, and will find it increasingly, easy to get hold of material that’s perfect for terrorism, small amounts, handful sizes, of fissile material that can be made into crude nuclear weapons, that can give us a Oklahoma City explosion on the scale of 1,000. That capability is getting increasingly available around the world, as it leaks from the former Soviet Union, something that’s already started happening and could become a flood. That’s not a world in which the nuclear states can afford continually, arrogantly and proudly to set an example of the usability, the legitimacy of nuclear terrorist threats. So that’s really a stance we’ve got to come off of.

I can tell you, I’m sure, that will not be, as of now, on the agenda of this anti-terrorism summit between Clinton and Yeltsin. But the world has to change. It won’t change unless people in the grassroots who aren’t blinded by this power of being commander-in-chief of nuclear terrorist forces, very heady, heady way to be, a godlike feeling that you have in your hand the life and death of millions of people — if you have ordinary people in all countries who haven’t been blinded by that experience, have got to insist that with the Cold War over, we finally wake up from this nightmare and change that precedent. Then we could begin to get the problem of nuclear terrorism under control.

AMY GOODMAN: How does the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty fit into this?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: It would be only — the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, it would be a first step. It would be one step toward symbolizing, first of all, in a very powerful way, that we are ceasing to rely on the use and the development of nuclear weapons, that that process is over, that the world, led by the superpowers, is moving away from the development and the design of nuclear weapons. In itself, it doesn’t end that process for anybody. You can design Hiroshima-type weapons now without testing, period.

There are things that it would accomplish more substantively than that. India and Pakistan currently now can only threaten tens of thousands of deaths in each other with Hiroshima-type weapons, or Nagasaki. If they started testing — and they will, if we don’t come up with a test ban quickly — they’ll have H-bombs. And I happen to know from experience here — most of the readers or listeners don’t really have in their minds the difference between an A- and an H-bomb. It’s the difference between an Oklahoma City explosion and a Hiroshima explosion. It’s a difference of a factor of 1,000. It’s another thousand over the Hiroshima. That would make a difference, and it is worth keeping H-bombs out of the hands of new countries. But still, it’s just one step on the way.

What’s more significant is that the refusal to end testing after a 30-year worldwide effort to get those tests stopped, a refusal by all the states and a failure to sign that ban would symbolize to the world, very realistically, what is the current reality, that the leaders of these states have no intention ever of giving up nuclear weapons or their reliance on it. And when that message gets out, unmistakeably, other people will be acquiring those weapons at a rapid rate.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, where does the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty stand now?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: We stand closer to it than ever before in the last 30 years of effort to stop it. Every single one of the nuclear weapon states agreed a year ago at the Nonproliferation Treaty conference, made a — what was called a political commitment, which they carefully refrained from making a legally binding commitment. But they made a political commitment to produce a comprehensive test ban this year, 1996. It was a dated promise, relatively specific. There’s a 50% chance we’ll get that. Every one of them still says, “We want it. It’s at the top of our priorities.” That’s a lie. It’s not the top of their priorities. It’s moving slowly. It’s being bogged down by states like France, and now even India, which is — won’t even admit they have nuclear weapons, but they do — are slowing up the process because they do want to test in the future, without even admitting they have the weapons yet.

So, Clinton has so far — is, I think, in certain sense, committed to a test ban. I mean, that’s what people say in the White House. Well, that’s the way he gets committed to anything. What? Marriage? I don’t know what. But it means you have a chance to get this out of him, with enough pressure. And if we put the kind of pressure on Clinton that other interest groups do, let’s say — usually with more success — we really do have a chance of getting this. That would not be true under Dole, by the way. Dole doesn’t pretend to want a test ban, nor does the Republican Party. They’re against it. So —

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: That’s a good question. How can you be against it? It’s mad. It’s crazy. But that’s their position. I actually wouldn’t find that easy to explain. The —

AMY GOODMAN: I suppose they would say —

DANIEL ELLSBERG: — if you can say other people who want testing, yes, there are the people at the labs. They’ve kind of given up now, to a certain extent, but not altogether. So, the people whose lives and prestige and income and careers and influence in the government has entirely depended for 50 years now on the design of nuclear weapons aren’t — at the nuclear weapons labs at Livermore and Los Alamos and various people in the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, and every counterpart in every one of the other countries — there’s a nuclear-weapons-lab complex in every one of these countries — all of them want nuclear weapons to continue forever.

AMY GOODMAN: Is there —

DANIEL ELLSBERG: But, now, if you were asking me, “Why are they as influential as they are?” that’s not easy to answer.

AMY GOODMAN: Is there a powerful nuclear weapons lobby in Washington?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: There is and always has been. And part of its power has been the secrecy surrounding it. They’ve kept the design of nuclear weapons. And I have to admit, that’s a secret that I am not anxious to see spread around necessarily. But they have used the secrecy surrounding that design to develop a mystique. We are the nuclear priesthood. By the way, that’s a phrase they use of themselves, the “brotherhood,” the “priesthood,” to have a mystique, so that when they say, “We know what’s good for the country, and we know this has to keep happening,” it’s very — it’s hard for most people to argue with them. They have the secret data, and, you know — but it has come about, over 30 years, that enough former members of the priesthood and others have broken away to bring a comparable expertise on the other side and see through that and say, “Look, this is nonsense.”

AMY GOODMAN: Since you’re active in this worldwide movement for a nuclear test ban treaty, what do you say to countries that say, “Listen, if the U.S. has it, if Russia has them, if Israel has them, if India has them — although they’re not saying it — you have no right to tell us we shouldn’t have them? In fact, if we have them, it might serve as a better deterrent?”

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, of course, it would be absurd to say that the U.S. government has a right to tell these people that they don’t have a right. The U.S. and the other nuclear states have no moral, ethical, normative, authoritative position on this, in saying to the rest of the world, “You have no need, no right, no legitimacy to get this stuff, whereas we need thousands of weapons forever. We need the right to continue testing, and so forth.” Of course, that’s an absurd position.

Now, I’m not saying it to these people as a member of the U.S. government. I would be ashamed, embarrassed to try to do that. But I do speak as a member of an informed public around the world, which realizes that, following the example, the fatal example, of the U.S. and Russia and Japan and China and the others, there’s a lot of experience to go on to say that that will not improve their national security, that it will indeed simply mainly induce their neighbors to acquire such weapons for the same reasons and on the same basis, and they will not end up with greater security as a result of that. Now, simply refraining from it will not protect them, either. But they can take part in a worldwide movement as nonnuclear states — and a lot of them are doing this — to press the nuclear states to change their policies so that we get everybody stopped, so that we have one set of rules for everybody. Then their security will be better.

AMY GOODMAN: What is your assessment of President Clinton’s Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary? And, you know, of course, the Department of Energy oversees many of the nuclear weapons plants in this country.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, I think she’s terrific. She’s — up until last year, when she began to get this very focused barrage of bad publicity about her trips and so forth, which I can’t judge, frankly — it does look as though she used bad judgment bureaucratically on that, and it may sully her — one’s judgment of her as a head of a department or something. I really don’t know much about it. But prior to that, I would say this is the first person who’s telling the truth about her department, who is being open, who — she was the only person in his Cabinet, the only person at cabinet level, a man or woman, who opposed beginning testing again, as soon as legislation permitted him to do that in June of 1993, three years ago. Without Hazel O’Leary and a strong grass movements and a congressional movement, we would be testing right now. So, she’s been a very good influence.

AMY GOODMAN: Could a GOP Congress turn around the ban on nuclear testing now?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Very much so, definitely. As I said, critical to our — we would be testing now, and would have been, under Clinton, for the last three years, were it not for a Democratic Congress earlier which managed to stop testing even under Bush. They cut off the funding for Bush, and they did it in a quite clever bureaucratic way, which got Bush not to veto it. But he did mean to change it eventually. Then he was taken out of office. Clinton would have changed it then on the advice of his Defense Department, his State Department, his National Security Council, were it not for the, least of all, in a way, the opposition of Hazel O’Leary, who wasn’t very influential at that time, but, above all, from strong senatorial opposition, which in turn reflected grassroots. Now, that middle link has backed out now.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact —

DANIEL ELLSBERG: We don’t have the congressional lobby to back [inaudible] —

AMY GOODMAN: Wasn’t that the only major foreign policy difference between President Bush and candidate Clinton when they were running against each other?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The only foreign policy difference that he really proclaimed, he — remember that it’s hard — it’s necessary to remember this. Clinton did not promise change on foreign policy. And he had no intention of delivering it. And it’s not what he ran on, and it’s not what he believes in. He ran as representing the kind of Democrats who thought the only way we’ll ever get the White House is by being as close to the Republicans as possible on military spending and on intervention and on hawkish things, and he was prepared to deliver that. But he had one change: He said he was for a comprehensive test ban. That was close to a lie, as these things go. What became very clear was that there was no commitment whatever to a test ban. And nevertheless, thanks to having Clinton rather than Bush, the response to our grassroots pressure, in this country and worldwide, has been such, under Bush — under Clinton, that we do have a good chance of getting a test ban, if we keep the pressure up.

AMY GOODMAN: Dan Ellsberg, I want to switch gears for a second, and we just have about two minutes. You leaked the Pentagon Papers, the thousands of pages of papers that revealed what the Pentagon was doing in Vietnam, almost 25 years ago. You worked for the Pentagon. You worked for the RAND Corporation. Now there — we were talking earlier about this possibility of a new Pentagon Papers, something that you’re quite interested in. This doesn’t have to do with nuclear weapons or nuclear power, but something else, that some might say is equally deadly.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, I’m very impressed, inspired, encouraged by the example of the people in the — who were in the tobacco industry, who, finally, after the kind of lifetime that I’d led in the national security work, came to realize that we were wrong to keep promises of secrecy, when what was being concealed, and lied about, were wrongful, criminal policies that were indiscriminately killing. I’ve talked about nuclear weapons as indiscriminately killing civilians. Sending out, you know, tons and tons of cigarettes into the country doesn’t tell the cigarette companies exactly who will be killed, but it does tell them how many will be killed. It is indiscriminate, random slaughter. And they’ve been getting away with it.

And what turns out is, of course, that they’ve known exactly what they were doing, just as the Pentagon Papers revealed that our leaders knew what they were getting into, knew that they were getting into a situation that would do us no good, but would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and that to reveal that knowledge did undermine the policy. Now that the so-called Cigarette Papers — and there’s a book by that title, I think, coming out very shortly.

AMY GOODMAN: Is it “Cigarette Papers” or “Tobacco Papers”?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, the copy I got in advance calls them the “Cigarette Papers.” Others have called them the “Tobacco Papers.” Both call them the Pentagon Papers, and that’s — a counterpart, and that’s absolutely accurate. In fact, it’s the same amount. It’s 4,000 pages they’re putting out of inner documentation about what the tobacco corporations knew and when they knew it. And it’s very guilty knowledge.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’re going to be talking more about the tobacco industry next Tuesday, when we devote our entire show to tobacco interests and their massive power over presidential candidates. Right now I want to thank you, Dan Ellsberg, for joining us, director of the Manhattan Project II, that’s trying to counter the legacy of the Manhattan Project I in World War II. Dan Ellsberg, thanks for being with us.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Thank you for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: If you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can call the Pacifica Archives at 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230. Tomorrow on the show, Robert Sweet. He’s against mandatory minimums and for drug decriminalization, and he’s a federal judge. Also, a debate on third-party politics, leading into this weekend’s third-party conference in Atlanta.

Democracy Now! is produced by Julie Drizin, with help from Pat Greenfield. Our engineer at WBAI in New York is Matthew Finch, with help from Grayson Challenger and Paul Wonder. Our director has been Errol Maitland. Again, if you’d like a copy of today’s show, 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230. If you’d like to write to us by email, you can write to us at democracy@pacifica.org. That’s democracy@pacifica.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Join us tomorrow for another edition of Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!