| ee erie

paces J O THER FEA TURE ) THE OTHER PRESS

 

 

ator Fulbright;

 

 

 

 

 

by Dave Christian

He does not look like ‘‘The most danger-
ous man in America’.

When he mounted the makeshift stage at
the UBC War Memorial Gym, wearing a
neat gray suit hung on his trim 5 foot 10
inch franié; Daniel Ellsburg could have
been a visiting botany professor, come to
lecture on the secrets of plant genetics.
But he was not; he is one of the leading
advocates of the nuclear-freeze movement;
the man sentenced to 115 years in prison
for releasing the Pentagon Papers; the
former RAND corporation. strategic weapons
analyst whom Henry Kissenger first . decri-
bed as a genius, then as the most danger-
ous man in America.

Dr. Ellsburg has travelled a long route
since joining the RAND corporation in 1958.,
He worked for the Pentagon for over a
decade, his last assignment part of a group
involved in a study of American policy in

Southeast Asia. The work he did in that.
study led his to believe that the United
States Government was lying to the people
about its involvement in Vietnam; this rev-
elation led him to leak the report to Sen-
1 this report was eventually
christened the Pentagon Papers. He has
since lectured and worked for disarmament
touring North America and Europe in his,
campaign. ‘“‘I lecture for a_ living’ Ells-
burg says.

Dr. Ellsburgs mood was relaxed and jocu-
lar as he opened up his_ lecture. Reading
from a stack of newspapers laid on the po-
dium, he read from an article in The Van-
couver Sun which said that Canada is con-
cerned that the proposed Anti-Ballistic Mis-
sile System (ABM) would explode nuclear
warheads over Canadian territory. ‘‘Canada
is taking a very provinicial attitude’ he
said, ‘‘co-operation is the Christian thing to
to do’.

_But the humorous glow of Ellsburg’s open-
ing soon faded as he began to detail the

*

 

 

dangers nuclear weapons pose. His fund-
amental premise was that the stated NATO
and United States line of possessing — nuc-
lear arms for detterant purposes only is pat
ently false. ‘‘NATO planning is first-strike
planning’ he said. ‘‘He (United States Pre-
sident Ronald Regan) thinks that the threat
that the US may use that first-strike capa-
city is indispensible.’’

The rationale for detterence is that the US
must maintain a superior nuclear capacity
to retaliate after a first-strike by the So-
viet Union. Ellsburg replies that this means
“designing weapons that have a first-strike
capacity...and deploying them’’. In this he
spoke particularly of the MX missile and
the Pershing 11. Ellsburg discussed the
Cruise Missle very little, because it is only
in the testing stages, and not to be de-
ployed immediately. But this is not to rule
out his concern over the Cruise; ‘‘its com-
pleted testing and deployment would mean
the end of verifiable arms control.”’

The United States now claims that the So-
viet Union is ahead in the Arms Race. Dr.
Ellsburg feels that this assertion is false.
‘‘There is parity now where there used to
be US superiority’? he says. ‘‘In terms of
what the Soviet Union has we have comp-
lete accurate information. Reagan’s claim of
soviet superiority is in his own head.’’

A Third World War between the two su-
perpowers ‘‘is not the most likely use of
nuclear weapons,’’ Ellsburg says. The most
likely scenario is use against a non-nuclear
adversary in a local war, or as a means of
stopping the Soviet Union from entering an
area that the United States defines as crit-
ical to its security, for example, the
Persian Gulf. ‘‘Our whole nuclear strength
is committed to discouraging the Soviets
from entering other countries’’.

As a new means of ending (or winning?)
the arms race, US President Reagan has
proposed space-age Anti-Ballistic Missile
System designed to strike airborne nuclear
weapons out of the sky. Ellsburg decried

this new system, saying ‘it could be seen

APRIL 13, 1983

~ “The Most Dangerous Man

:

as a harmless waste (of money) on an
enormous scale’. But he warned that ‘“‘it
would increase the instability of the situa-
tion’’ because the Soviet Union would also.
attempt to develop a system of this type.
Ellsburg voiced other concerns; ‘‘there is

no indication that he (Reagan) is willing to

 

 

 

 

 

give up offensive capabilities for this new
technology’’, meaning a doubly expensive
burden than that already borne by the US
taxpayer and the creaking American econ-
omy. His final warning was ‘‘there is no
technological solution to the threat posed by.
these weapons’’.

“It (the arms race) invokes an image of
Russian Roulette’, Ellsburg said. It may
become even worse. The Soviet Union has
said that it will automate its Eastern com-
mand posts if the Pershing 11 Missile is
deployed in Germany. It takes this _posi-
tion because the five minute air-travel time
it takes the missile to reach the Soviet Un-
ion is insufficient to affect retaliation. The
automated system would be a_ launch-on-
warning type. Ellsburg expressed the hope
that Soviet technology is more reliable than
American because ‘‘a Senate revealed 178
false alarms (in the past four years)-several
of these went on for several minutes.”
several minutes is all the time these mis-
siles need, Ellsburg pointed out, thereby
reducing even further the time factor.
Ellsburg is a realist, seeing the nuclear
question in terms of stability. This is his
major concern with the Pershing, Cruise,
and MX missiles. ‘‘(They) increase the pos- —

“It (the arms race) invokes an image of R

(But) it doesn’t make