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DANIEL ELLSBERG. Born 1931.

TRANSCRIPT of OH 1137V A-B.

This interview was recorded on April 13, 2003, for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program and the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum. The interviewer is Dorothy Ciarlo. The interview is also available in video format, filmed by Dorothy Ciarlo.

NOTE: The interviewer’s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets.

ABSTRACT: This oral history was recorded while Daniel Ellsberg was in Boulder for the University of Colorado World Affairs Conference of 2003 and for an informal reunion of persons who participated in the 1978 protest and civil disobedience at Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. Mr. Ellsberg discusses his participation in that protest and gives information about the relevance of Rocky Flats in the larger context of the nuclear arms race.

[A].

00:03 I was born in , , on April 7, 1931, so I just turned 72.

(Let me just give a little prelude. I’m talking with Daniel Ellsberg, and he will be talking about his involvement in the 1978 Rocky Flats protest, as well as other things. This is an oral history for the Carnegie Library and for the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum, and the date today is April 13, 2003, and this is Dorothy Ciarlo. Thank you very much!)

00:46 Well, what really brought me to Rocky Flats in 1978 was basically a life-long— almost life-long—concern for avoiding nuclear war. And that had led me to some strange places in the course of my life, including shaping U.S. general war nuclear plans at a time when I thought that we needed deterrence from the Russians, from the Soviets, and that the best way of avoiding an all-out nuclear war was to deter the Soviets from launching a surprise nuclear attack. It was in that spirit that I went to the Rand Corporation from Harvard in 1958 for the summer, and then in particular that I joined them permanently in 1959 at the height of what was known as the “missile gap,” when it was believed that the Soviets were in a crash effort to develop ICBMs—intercontinental ballistic missiles—with H-bomb warheads with which to disarm the United States of its ability to retaliate, and to take over the world; essentially by destroying the United States. So with great urgency, I spent ’59 and ’60—7 days a week, really, at least part of every Sunday, helping, trying to define how to protect our strategic air command from a disarming attack.

In 1961, late ’61, I learned at a level higher than top secret in that the Soviets had exactly 4 ICBMs at a time when we had 40, going on hundreds and thousands. And at that time, we actually had some 200 intermediate range missiles in the range of Russia—they had none within range of us—and they were threatening Europe 2 but not the United States. We had some 2000 strategic bombers, plus about another 1000 tactical bombers in range of Russia; they had 198 bombers in range of the United States. So there was an enormous gap in striking ability, but it was 10 to 1 and more in our favor. I’d been working, in effect, in support of—or desperately to fight off—an illusion, a hoax essentially, to some degree a mistake, but it was a mistake that wasn’t too easy to see through from the perspective, say, of the Army and Navy. But we worked for the Air Force and were fully subject to this illusion.

03:26 (You had been in the Marines yourself, is that right?)

Yes, I had really chosen the Marines as a service after having been deferred, and I felt during the that it was my duty to take…others had gone in my place in Korea. Now the war was essentially over, in ’54, but I did feel that I owed years of service. So I chose the Marines in significant part because they didn’t threaten nuclear weapons. They—I didn’t want to work for the Air Force, though in the end, ironically, I did end up working for the Air Force. But in the service I chose the Marines as people who fought soldiers, not civilians, and did not rely on nuclear weapons. Even though at that time even the Marines had some nuclear weapons for the 10-inch Howitzers and some of their airplanes. But—didn’t, it was just to—be one of the family.

04:24 I heard in early 1978—my trial for having given the having ended in 1973 and the war had ended in 1975, almost immediately then, as soon as the war had ended, I set to work trying to help build a movement against nuclear weapons, comparable to the movement against the ; that might ultimately even cut off the money for the arms race the way that Congress had eventually cut off the money for the Vietnam War, and that was how the war got ended. So I worked from ’76 on—in ’77, a group came to be called the Mobilization for Survival. Before that, a continental walk across the country for peace and social justice, but actually aimed at abolition of nuclear weapons, and initially at ending the nuclear arms race.

In 1978, or perhaps late ’77, I learned that President Carter, Democratic President Carter, had authorized the production and deployment of neutron bombs, small H-bombs that would kill mainly by radiation. I had known of these for a long time because the inventor of the neutron bomb, the so-called “Father” of the neutron bomb, was a man named Sam Cohen, a physicist at Rand. And he had asked my opinion when I was at Rand in the late ‘50s, what the uses of his weapon would be. That was the kind of thing I did, I knew nothing about the physics of it but I was good at analyzing the roles this would take/play, in adversarial relations. I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in part on bargaining theory, for example. And I told Sam, to his dismay, that I thought this bomb was good for nothing but starting nuclear wars, that it was the weapon that had yet been invented because it was the most usable, allegedly usable, bomb, which was just what he liked about it; that’s what he designed it for, against tank formations, even conceivably against cities where it would kill the inhabitants of structures or buildings without actually demolishing the structures.

3

I just heard it said by, I think Ari Fleischer, no, actually, it was, of all people, Tom Brokaw, not an official member of the government, working for NBC, who had said that we did not plan this time as we did a dozen years ago in Baghdad, to destroy water works and electricity and health projects directly because, “We would be owning the city within a few days.” Actually it took a bit longer. But I think they did use rather discriminate targeting on the whole. And nowadays, they would want to use neutron bombs in this situation and not level the age-old city, just rid it of its resistant people and their families, unfortunately, the “collateral” damage.

07:29 (Let me just insert here, we are talking at a time when everyone’s mind is very much on the war in ).

That’s right. I am very happy that Baghdad fell without much of a fight. We don’t know how many people died yet, probably numbered in the hundreds though, rather than the thousands; it could have been very different. Our troops, US troops and UK troops, are now advancing on Tikrit, the second largest city, where Iraqi troops are said to have retreated for perhaps final battle. I hope very, very much that they lay down their arms, that they melt into the civilian population as they apparently did in Baghdad, because— and I hope above all that Saddam or his successors do not have or use poison gas or biological weapons. We have threatened—the US has threatened in their name—I say we, the US, the President and the Vice-President, and Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, have threatened explicitly that they are prepared to use nuclear weapons if poison gas should be used against our troops. I don’t think that’s purely a bluff, and if that happens, bombs, whose triggers were made at Rocky Flats, I believe, may well be used in Iraq and start an era in which nuclear weapons are not just threatened but are exploded on people, and that will be catastrophic for our species to start that process. A further dangerous stage in this epic, this arc of destruction, self-destruction, we’ve been on here for the last 50 years and more.

09:14 Now, this could happen, in other words, any day. And indeed—

(And it would be traceable back to Rocky Flats…)

Definitely. The triggers would have been made at Rocky Flats, since they were all made at Rocky Flats; they’re probably going to find a new place now that Rocky Flats has so contaminated the area that they really can’t work in it anymore. But Livermore, near my home town, or a lot more likely Los Alamos, perhaps Pantex in Texas, will make new triggers for the bombs that this administration wants to test, new bombs, I mean new triggers. But up ‘til now the bombs that would be used would have been triggered by Rocky Flats.

Now when I came in 19—when I heard first that the neutron bomb was going to be deployed then, I felt, this is the bomb that can start nuclear wars because we use them on tanks, we use them on cities, or whatever. The Soviets didn’t have neutron bombs as far as I know, and their reply would not be with neutron bombs, it would be with regular H- bombs and A-bombs, and we would reply then with our H-bombs and A-bombs. So the 4 phase of neutron bomb warfare would, I felt, not be very long. It would just be the match that lights the thermonuclear war, the way the trigger at Rocky Flats is lit by high explosive, and then in turn, by having imploded, lights the fusion fuel installed at Pantex for an explosion up to a thousand times more lethal than the Nagasaki bomb. Now when I arrived—I keep coming to this point and then I have to go back—I heard the neutron bomb was going to be deployed and I decided, even though I had a child, a baby almost one year old, and had promised my wife that I would be with her, her partner and help her during this period of infancy and childhood—I felt I had to break that promise because I had to spend my time, somehow, to do what I could to warn people about this bomb, wherever I could, that it should not, must not, be deployed.

11:24 What helped was a very widespread opinion in Europe that was opposed to this deployment. But the states had agreed with Carter that they would accept the deployment of these neutron bombs in Germany and elsewhere; although, there was large protest in Germany about it. In this country there wasn’t much of an anti-nuclear movement then; I was helping out with what there was, but there wasn’t a lot. And I heard that there had been an educational project here under Sister Pam Solo and Judy Danielson, I think, of AFSC, that had been educating people for a couple of years at this point, to what they called the “Local Hazard, Global Risk,” the name of their brochure. They had been talking to people at the plant and people in Denver, and explaining to them what the risks were of this nuclear arms race and the local risks of contamination or accident. So, I forget whether they invited me first, or I invited myself. I think they called me up and— but I quickly agreed that I would come and do some preliminary publicity for the rally they had scheduled for April 29th, and I agreed that I would be part of the rally.

(They asked you to speak, then).

Yeah, they asked me to speak. But they also asked me to come earlier, I think in March, as I recall, and do some interviews that would prepare people and get people out to the rally. And although they had been working very well and their brochure was terrific, for over a year and a half, I think two years or so at this point, I found that on every program I was on in Denver—and I was on most of the talk shows, the morning shows—not one of these people who had agreed to interview me were aware what Rocky Flats did, which showed a considerable limitation up to that point of the outreach of this program. These people were really good, but nobody knew, and I remember in particular one interviewer saying, “Well, why are you against nuclear power?”

And I said, “Do you know what they do at Rocky Flats?”

And he said, “Well, isn’t it a nuclear power plant?” which was what everybody thought.

And I said, “The only power they produce at Rocky Flats is the power to end life on earth, or, in smaller quantities, millions and millions of deaths.”

And that was news to people. So my little outreach on television did make a difference; in other words, get on the radio and television. 5

And then, I went off—I did neutron bomb rallies in Amsterdam and I lobbied in Norway; I was all over Europe and a lot in England, and even had the feeling that I was, in some cases, was having some effect. I was a well-known figure at that point because my trial had just ended in 1973. And so I probably had, in some ways, in those days—well, you had more of a movement at this point in Europe than you had in this country.

And I came back for the April 29th rally. And I remember that the rally was a very hot day, April 29th, and I was waiting to speak, and it was so hot, listening to the speakers, I didn’t have any hat—I don’t normally wear a hat—so I went across the square to a Stetson store and bought a Stetson, rather expensive, but it was the only kind of sun hat they had, came back, just to keep the sun off. I mention that because, of course, then we walked out to the site for the—I think there had been a day earlier of education on non- violence training and they had explained—which I took part in—and they explained the procedures of consensus and the rules of non-violence, and all this. And at that point, this wasn’t all that familiar to me because, although I’d been on trial, under indictment for two years and five months in court, facing a possible 115 years’ sentence, I hadn’t been—I think I had been arrested once at this point, and that wasn’t until—aside from the first time for 115 years’ possible sentence!—so that was kind of a large first step. But the first actual civil disobedience action was, I think, ’76, three years after my trial, on the steps of the Pentagon. I think that was my first arrest that I remember. So it hadn’t been so long before. And that was in this continental walk action against nuclear weapons action. So I hadn’t had a lot of non-violence training and so forth, and all this was quite interesting to me and the question of arrest procedures…

16:26 (So you were planning going through that—you were planning to participate in the symbolic—)

Yes. Well, they said—they didn’t emphasize that it was symbolic, by the way, that was retrospective mention. In fact, they didn’t say symbolic at all. I’ll tell you, now that I think back to that, the theme of the training was first in the consensus decision-making, which I was not—which is a process that I was not particularly familiar with. And that had been developed a lot by George Lakey and others at the Philadelphia group called…I’ve forgotten; he’s written a number of very good books, “Strategy for a Living World” or something. But people there have a community in Philadelphia, loosely associated with the Quakers, had developed procedures, a lot for group decision-making that were very ultra-democratic and allowed everybody to speak, and tried to get consensus rather than majority vote, so that a minority would not feel ruled down or rejected, and get everyone involved in the final action. And a lot of emphasis was put on the fact that the first step in this process was that we were going to sit on the tracks, spend the night of Saturday night, that was agreed to. The rally was Saturday, we’d walk out to the site—I think, did we walk out? I think, as I recall, and then we would sit on the tracks, blocking the tracks. And so it was a symbolic blockade of the plant, but it was not a symbolic civil disobedience action. We were in fact putting our bodies on these tracks and should they choose to send a train, we would block that, but of course the assumption was, we would be arrested, we would be subject to arrest. But the assumption was we 6 were risking arrest by this, we weren’t pretending to risk arrest, we were risking arrest. And we were prepared to be arrested.

So we went through the procedures of dealing with a lawyer, what to do in jail and so forth, and how to maintain non-violence in the risk of taunts or provocation of any kind, how to remain cool and non-violent and non-provocative. All this was very interesting. And there were a lot of people involved who sat on the tracks that night. And—but then, the point was, though, that we would then have meetings. We were in affinity groups, I believe, and we would have meetings the next morning as to what to do next.

Now there was a—some kind of a teach-in or something scheduled the next day in Denver, and of course a lot of people were in support of the action were not sitting on the tracks, and then many, many others of course were just onlookers in effect, who were against nuclear weapons but they were at the rally and they were not part of this action directly. So there was going to be a teach-in for such people, for anybody who could come, in Denver. But it was definitely not prescribed that we would end the action Sunday morning, but rather that there would be consensus about that. Much emphasis was put on the point, this is being done by consensus, and although this first step has of course been structured by the organizers, before we all got together, but once we were together, decision-making from then on would be done by consensus, which we’d just been trained in. Procedures like, if you really objected to a particular decision, you could say, “I block.” One person could block, like a Senator filibustering in the Senate. So each person had the power of a Senator, in effect, to stop action. So that there would be further discussion until you reached a consensus and the thinking being that if you somewhat disagreed, you would presumably withdraw your block—or you wouldn’t block, that a block was a last-ditch kind of thing. But it was there as a possibility.

20:48 All right. We went out, and as the afternoon wore on out there, in the evening, as I recall, a rain started, which got heavier and heavier, so a lot of people left, naturally. And I think I had a—yes I had, for some reason, a warm coat, which was much warmer than was necessary. I was carrying it, because I had just come from some relatively cold climates in Europe and elsewhere. So I had this fairly warm coat, so I put the warm coat on and then a garbage bag over the coat, I didn’t have a raincoat, and I had this Stetson, very happily! So I was really not too—I was pretty well prepared although I didn’t have boots, I don’t think I did. I may even have had boots, but I don’t think so. The point being, that the rain got very heavy and very, very cold, and I had been out all night in the rain in the Marines quite a bit in my three years, but this was the toughest night as I remembered ever being out in, and I wondered how many people could hold—withstand this night, because it was dark and we couldn’t really see how many were out there very well. And I thought, well, I’m all right here, I’ve got this rather heavy coat, but other people don’t have that, and I wondered if anybody will be here in the morning.

Well the morning came, and there were a lot of people still left there. This rain had winnowed down to a hard core here; I was very impressed that people would stay through the night at this. And the people on the tracks, I think, had now gotten down to about 29, there were a lot more support people still around, but the people right on the tracks… So 7 at that point I thought two things: first, it’s Sunday morning, so the workers still weren’t there, and we hadn’t gotten arrested after all. So I felt, well, why end the action now, I mean if people are strong enough to stay on these tracks here, let’s make it a little longer action. Obviously they are willing to get arrested, and I think we had a meeting, a consensus meeting, and I think I raised the thought that we should talk about whether we didn’t want to stay here longer, at least until Monday. I had a strong feeling, as I recall— it’s a long time ago—that probably since they hadn’t arrested us yet, they wouldn’t arrest us during the day, but they would arrest us Monday morning when the workers started to keep us from—just to get us out of the way. And so maybe it was at that point, that about 29 others said, yes, that was a good idea.

23:42 Some of the organizers of the original protest at this point became quite agitated and very disturbed that it was going this way. And I couldn’t really understand that. I thought, what’s the problem here, you’ll have your teach-in in town, you’ll have a 1000 people there, and 29 of us will be here, what’s the problem? They seemed to feel, well, we’ve had our action. But I really was quite puzzled by this because I thought, well, they made such a point of, ‘we’ll decide,’ and these people here have decided to stay. I hadn’t made them stay, but it seemed like a good idea to me. And I don’t even remember whether—I suppose those people knew who I was because I had spoken at the rally, and I was quite well known at that time. But I…

(You didn’t feel that you were …)

No, I didn’t have—I really was very determined at that point and later, not to be a heavy on this and not to throw my weight around or say—I just said as one of the people there, I think that it would be good to make this a stronger action here and stay a little longer and actually get arrested. And so the thought, the idea began to be communicated in, well, but a lot of these people had sort of understood that as long as we were here over the weekend, we wouldn’t, there wouldn’t be an arrest, but then there will be an arrest on Monday. I said, well, fine, what’s the problem?

And—you know the people staying there, clearly, were happy to be arrested. So they seemed, as I said, surprisingly agitated about it. But I felt firm—I don’t want to name names on this—but I felt firm, you know if the people want to be here—I wouldn’t have done it by myself, to be a lone adventurer here and trying to show up people, I’ll stay on the tracks, I did not want that impression. But if there were five or six people who wanted to stay, or ten or more—well, there were 29. So, fine, that’s a nice number, and we’ll just stay here. So anyway, we stayed. Now this was a nice—I think Sunday now, the rain had stopped, and it was a nice day again.

So Monday came and some of the organizers were actually—one of the women was actually crying with frustration at this. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. And one of the things was, “Well, all the action’s going to be over after today, after Sunday, and we’ve made all the plans for this, and we’re going on vacation, we’ve worked so hard.” And I thought, well, all right, go on vacation, we’re not asking you to stay around and help on the _____ [?]. We’ll make out here some way or other, you’ve earned your 8 vacation, go do it. And I really was perplexed by the controversy that seemed to be arising here.

But anyway, Monday came and no arrest, and in fact, the plant now put out, the Rocky Flats PR person—I haven’t reviewed this stuff in the book, so I’m going just by memory here, 25 years ago—but my memory is that the plant around this time put out the word that they didn’t need these tracks, really, that we were on an unused spur.

(And this is outside …?)

Outside the plant. So we weren’t on the real track that was used. That’s why they weren’t arresting us, these people can sit there if they want. And we asked around, we said, “Gee, is that the case?” We didn’t know, we just arrived here. We went to the tracks—aren’t these the tracks?—and so all the newspapermen believed that, they said, “Why are you sitting on this unused spur?” But by this time, we talked to people around there, and said, “We don’t believe that, we think this is the track, actually,” because people had told us, there is no other track here. And they also said that they—we’d learned, we’d heard that they had to get this train in and out a couple of times a week to—because otherwise the radioactive material would accumulate and it would become too dangerous in there, for storage and everything. They had to get it out to storage somewhere else. So the trains would come in and then go out with the material.

28:35 And we had already heard that there was more danger than the plant admitted from this passage, that the plant itself emitted a certain amount of venting and of radioactive dust, and that there was some danger from being there. But Dr. Mancuso, who had done studies of this at Hanford emissions, had said that he thought that—he’d told my wife and me before this—that he thought that a few days’ exposure on the track would probably not be too dangerous, and that the real problem was ingestion of particles. It wasn’t being exposed to the skin so much, but if we ingested particles, then they would stay in our lungs and eventually would be—could kill us, depending on how much we had. But a matter of a few days, the risk was not too great. However, having mentioned that my wife was still nursing our child who was just not yet a year old, he called back. This is Dr. Thomas Mancuso, who had done major epidemiological studies, the radiation results of workers at the Hanford plant. By amazing coincidence or irony, my father had been the chief structural engineer on the build-up of Hanford from ’46 on, after the war; it had been used during the war, but there was a huge expansion after the war, and he had been in charge of the building of that, but not of the radiation, the cooling beds or whatever they use, the radiation, which had upset him. He had told me that he was very upset to learn that parts of his own country would be made uninhabitable by these tanks forever, basically. In fact, he told me in his ‘80s, he said for 24,000 years, and I remember saying, “Dad, you have a very good memory, that’s the half-life of plutonium.” The figure had stuck in his mind all this time, from about 1948 when he left the project.

30:40 So—here was Hanford, it turned out that, yes, there had been contamination of the river, and there had been radiation risk which was directly proportional to proximity to the plant, which was presumably also true… and of course Carl Johnson, here, the Health 9

Commissioner of Jefferson County, had found that to be true at Rocky Flats, for which news he was fired from his job. He was the enemy of the people, in Ibsen’s term.

(Were you personally worried?)

Well, so—I was. So here’s what happened. I won’t go into all this, but…I decided that I would take that risk, that this was important enough to me to do that. But, as I say, Tom Mancuso called us up afterwards in California and said, “I’ve been thinking about what you said, that your wife is nursing your infant, she MUST NOT go near those tracks.” He said a nursing mother or infant must not be exposed to that radiation, because that would mean—here I was at this point 47, I guess, and—but, an infant getting this radiation through the mother’s milk or directly ingesting it somehow would have that little particle in their growing bones. It would have a much stronger effect, like strontium 90, and would live with it and die from it. So my wife did not go to the tracks, with that warning. So we knew that there was contra—we didn’t believe the assurances that the workers believed. I mean, we weren’t being paid to believe that, our living did not depend on it, our houses had not been mortgaged in that area, and so we knew that it wasn’t safe. But on the other hand, the risk seemed low. We weren’t there as long as the workers, we weren’t living there, and we weren’t infants. So I thought of it as a risk, but not a high risk, and one that I was willing to take.

32:54 So, if I were to die of it—and it’s almost too late for that now—I could certainly not say I was not warned, and I did take that risk. So, the next step was that—they having said, trying to get us off there by telling us a lie that we were on a spur, and that it was not used, that they did not use that track. That was a direct lie. Now when it came out that they had to arrest us—why? Because we were interfering with—this was after about a week—with the normal operation of the plant. How were we interfering? Because that track, that train, had to go in and out. The Rocky Flats management now and [?] had—their credibility had a very sharp decline at that point, because the journalists had believed what they’d been told up to that point, that they did not need to use that track, and that we were just sitting there if we wanted, and they didn’t have to arrest us. And all of a sudden, they did have to arrest us, because they really did have to get that train in. So all of a sudden the journalism on this changed quite a bit.

34:05 But meanwhile, before that happened, a terrific snowstorm had started. So there was not only—there was snow, and one day there was hail—and I was waiting for a plague of locusts to come, eventually. [Laughs.] It seems like we were being tested somehow. But everybody was staying there. And so when people in Denver saw on their television that there were people out in this weather on that track, a caravan of cars came out. People we hadn’t known, each individually, nothing was organized, and as far as you could see, there was a long line, half a mile of cars filled with tents, ponchos, boots, actual expensive boots, that they just left there, and rain boots, food, water. So much food, we each had a separate tent when we weren’t on the tracks, and there was a tent for food, just to store the food. And they had to put out a notice; we put out a press release saying, no more food! And the food stopped. We had a consensus meeting on what to do with our surplus food, what charity should we give it to. [Laughs.] And it was just a 10 wonderful, warm outpouring, an amazing feeling. And we really all did get all we needed. Everybody got boots and ponchos and everything. Because, of course, we had come out in hot summer weather, spring weather, so nobody had brought rain gear or warm gear at all. So it just showered on us, wonderfully.

So the question was, how long should we stay, and I won’t go through all that, but there were a lot of consensus meetings—because they were not in any rush to arrest us, they weren’t arresting us. And days went by. One day it would be rainy and hailing and the next day it would be hot. And the question was, how do we get off this, eventually, do we have an excuse? [Laughs.] We’ve got our lives to go back to, so what should we say about how long we’re staying? And as I recall, we finally thought, is coming out to address Rocky Flats, I believe. The facility, this campus of the University—no wait, that’s Livermore in Los Alamos or actually campuses of the University of California—but he was coming out to Rocky Flats and somewhere else, maybe the University of Colorado.

(That was President Carter?)

Yes, he was President. So, he was coming out and he’d bring all the press with him. So we shouldn’t leave before this great vast press corps comes, we should get our message out as well as we can. And we wanted to invite him, to visit us on the tracks at Rocky Flats, among other things. And I won’t go through all the details. You can get them from anybody who was involved. But we had to explain—how could we explain why we were there since we couldn’t prove that the Rocky Flats was lying, that they didn’t need these tracks. And they were saying they didn’t need them. So how do we explain that we were there, and we had little problem, well, we don’t believe that, but how far can you take that? And we didn’t believe it, actually, we thought that they were lying, but we weren’t sure; we couldn’t prove it. And so I think we had decided internally that we would stay at least through this visit by Carter, which by coincidence was just about to come up.

37:56 So I could go through lots of details, but—what then happened was, that on a, as I recall a Thursday night, but I could be wrong. Let’s see, we started on April 29th, and I was just looking at that book again, and the first arrest was May 8th, so on the night of May 7th, a heavy snow began to fall. But it turned out that the DOE, my old colleague from the Rand Corporation, Jim Schlesinger, who was now head of the Department of Energy, had decided, these people have to go because they had to use the track. They couldn’t wait. They, of course, had hoped we would pack up and leave, and then the train could quietly come, and there would be no photographers there, there would be no news—oh well, they did have to use the track after all, but meanwhile, there’d be nobody there. Well, they finally decided, we got to get that train in. So they did get—in fact, somebody told me later that Jim Schlesinger had said to someone that his most satisfying act as Secretary of Energy had been to sign the order for the arrest of Dan Ellsberg! Remember, I’m the one…he was a Republican. [Laughs.] They hadn’t gotten me, you know, with the Pentagon Papers, so he was going to be the one to finally put me behind bars! 11

So we woke up that morning and our tent had half-collapsed, but all around us the tents had totally collapsed under the weight of the snow, which turned out to be 36 inches. Now the day before, no snow, it was hot, sunny, blazing, so we all had our pictures taken, and here this morning, April in Colorado—36 inches of snow, which was the heaviest snowfall, we heard, in 100 years, for that date, April 29th. [Laughs.] Nowadays, I can’t impress anybody this month, because they just had 5 and a half feet of snow! Three feet of snow is nothing!

40:03 So, but it was impressive to us. And all the tents had collapsed. Of course, you could put them back up again, but it was a very heavy snowfall, and at this point, the police began arriving—to rescue us? No, no, they had made the decision already. As they said later, if they’d known this snow was going to fall, they would never—they would have waited another day, and we might very well have said, all right, enough…..don’t put the tents back up, we’ll go. But no, so instead they put us in the police van with the pictures showing—everyone’s beard was frozen, there were a lot of beards in this group, not me—all these frozen beards and frozen icicles and everything, and we said, this is a rescue basically, in the police van. So, they took us to a gym somewhere and booked us in. And that was May 8th, so that was the first arrest.

41:05 Now just going back—I did hear later that—and I can’t say I could prove this, and I certainly haven’t seen documents, but I believed it at the time, and I believe it now, subject to counter-evidence—if somebody could prove this is not the case, I would happily accept that. But what I was told by insiders of the earlier action was that the organizers had made—of course they had, as is common in such cases—made negotiations with the police as to where we would be, this is a good way to run an action, and no problem there—and negotiated with the plant and all this, so we weren’t surprising them by what we were doing. And after all, if they planned a train at that point, we wouldn’t have wanted them not to know we were there. So I think it was known that they’d been negotiating with everybody on the conditions, that’s almost always, that is done. But in this case, apparently, an agreement had been made with the plant that they would leave on Sunday morning. And under those conditions, the plant had agreed—I’m sorry, the police had agreed—there would be no arrests. So in the minds of the organizers, it was to be a symbolic civil disobedience. And actually, if that had been known, assuming it to be the case, I don’t think anybody would have been shocked by that exactly; they might still have raised the issue, well, maybe—is that a good idea? Now we’re here, maybe we should rethink this or something. But if they’d really made a point, well, we had this understanding and that’s the action. Certainly, I have never sympathized with people who hijack somebody else’s action and say, you planned it this way, but now I’m coming in and I want to do it this way. They do the organizing, and they do the work, and I follow their lead. But they had not made that clear at all, what they’d said was that this is an action and whether it continues will depend on decision-making. And I thought we had made a decision, those of us who stayed. And they did say, “Well, there was consensus that Sunday morning,” but I said, “Well, consensus of who? The people who had gone back to Denver, the people out here, or the people who are on the tracks?” Who makes this consensus? That’s of 12 course not easy to define. That’s a little problem with the process here, you know, because you’ve got—they hadn’t circumscribed—you could have said, all the people who have had the non-violence training. That was a fair—but a lot of them had left already by this time.

So I thought that it should be a principle of those who were still there. And of course, after the rain that morning, there weren’t a lot of people still there. So anyway, it turned out that the people who had originally organized the action did feel that we, who stayed on the tracks, had hijacked their action, and had turned it into something other than what they had planned. And that there was some very bad feeling which I think persists in some people to this day, not in others. Others who were angry at us at the time, very quickly afterward said, “This is a good action on the tracks, we didn’t plan it but its good,” and were supportive. And others who were just very angry—still, which I was sorry to hear, and now—we come back to one other point. I would not have quickly deferred on this particular one because—maybe I would have on the first day, but as I came to sit on those tracks, and maybe pretty early on, I realized this really is a very strategic location for symbolizing the general problem of the nuclear arms race, and the neutron bomb in particular. This is where they make the triggers for the neutron bomb, specifically, for the neutron bomb, and this is where they make all the triggers for thermonuclear weapons.

45:37 Now, hardly anybody at this time would really know what I mean when I say a trigger for a . I found at that time that if you asked an audience, what is the difference between an A- and an H-bomb, usually in a crowd of 1000 or 2000, one or two people would raise their hand, or if you said an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb, fission bomb or a fusion bomb, still it would be one or two, or three or four. So I’d ask them one of those, I did this all the time. What is the difference?

And normally one would say, “Well, one is bigger.”

“Which one?”

Often they’d say, “I don’t know.”

This is the level, by the way, of education at that time, and the nuclear freeze movement changed this level of education, that came later, for a matter of years. I suspect we’re back there now, I think I’d get the same answers as I got then. I suspect the education has gone way down.

So, I’d say, “Ok, which is bigger?”

Someone would say, “The H-bomb.

“How much bigger?”

“I don’t know,” that was the typical answer. 13

I’d say, “Well, maybe this is the easiest way to convey it. Every H-bomb, which is the great majority of bombs in our arsenal”—which at that time was like thirty-thousand— “the great majority of those are hydrogen bombs, fusion bombs, H-bombs, big or small. Every one of them has a Nagasaki-type bomb as its trigger, that’s the trigger.”

Now, we’ve been hearing a lot during this , partly to scare the Iraqis it seems, but partly, really, of a bomb called the—its acronym is MOAB, and they call it the “Mother of All Bombs,” mocking Saddam’s old phrase, “the mother of all whores.” It means something else, I forget, B is for bomb at the end. But it’s a very large bomb, its twenty- two thousand pounds of TNT, or 11 tons of TNT, now that’s equivalent to the Block- buster, the largest bomb of World War II. Five to ten-ton bombs were called Block- busters because they would destroy approximately a city block of buildings with one bomb. So that’s ten tons—eleven tons. The Nagasaki bomb had the equivalent of twenty-thousand tons of TNT, so that one bomb was two thousand times in explosive power, the largest bomb of World War II, or of this war, the conventional bomb. That Mother of all Bombs—that ten-ton—would not trigger an H-bomb, but something like it would trigger a Nagasaki bomb—actually smaller—but high explosives, in other words, would trigger, in effect, the Nagasaki bomb by imploding the plutonium, by squeezing it to a density that makes it greater than critical mass so that it explodes with a force of ten to twenty-thousand tons of TNT. But that Nagasaki bomb is needed to start the fusion process in an H-bomb. And H-bombs, of course, come in lots of sizes, but the early ones are very large.

I knew all this by this time, not as a physicist, but as somebody who had actually shaped war plans. I knew what our arsenal was, I knew what the ranges of our vehicles were, I knew the plans. I had helped write them, and what kind of bombs you put on what kind of targets. And the early H-bombs were very large, in fact, one of the first tested was fifteen megatons, or fifteen million tons of bombs, tons of TNT. We had twenty megaton bombs in our arsenal, that’s one thousand Nagasaki bombs. And although those are the largest, we and the Russians had much larger ones. These did exist in sizeable numbers, and they are the early ones.

When and Pakistan develop H-bombs, if they haven’t yet—there is a belief that India tried to test some H-bombs in their testing and fizzled, none of our tests fizzled, but that they didn’t achieve full fusion explosion. But if they renew testing, which they will if we do, and we will if this Administration stays in office. We will resume testing of nuclear weapons, they virtually assured that, then the Indians and Pakistanis will. They will then achieve an H-bomb. That will make a difference. It’s the difference of moving from the A-bombs they now have, which would take a hole out of a city like Baghdad, as we took a hole out of Hiroshima or a hole out of Nagasaki—much of the city, more than half of it remained, in each case. An H-bomb on Baghdad, an early one, would leave nothing. A city of five million people, a twenty-megaton bomb would kill five million people if exploded. That’s a Holocaust in one bomb.

14

So as I said at that time, Rocky Flats contributes the detonators for H-bombs, which are portable Auschwitzes, or as my son said, who got arrested on the tracks on May 12th, “Rocky Flats is the Auschwitz of our time.” And he said, “Inside that building men in white suits, men with badges, men with business suits, whatever, going about preparing the implementation for the final solution to the human problem.” Not because they want to do it, they want that to happen, they think they are deterring it from happening, but they are misled. He didn’t say this, I am saying this.

The belief that we needed this to deter was and remained a delusion. I shouldn’t say entirely a delusion, because after all, we fought the idea of a test ban for years. The Soviets did build up an arsenal, they did develop the power to destroy all life on earth, including ours. But it was never true that we needed more to deter that—more than what? One? Ten? A hundred warheads? Rocky Flats had produced more than twenty- thousand triggers, that’s what we had. So it had no relation to needs of deterrence, and still doesn’t, of course.

And against Baghdad, we probably won’t use it now against Baghdad, that’s almost out of the question, thank goodness. It’s not at all out of the question that in the next month the U.S. will use a nuclear weapon if Saddam did—whether he’s dead or alive—did, in fact, have a thousand tons of nerve gas as our President claimed, and if his successors use it. Then a Rocky Flats product may get used on people—and as I say, that will be horrible.

53:51 So our protest—what I said was, we are in the right place, that’s what I said to myself, and as I said last night—I was with some of the people from the Truth Force there—I said something—we don’t all remember the details of the consensus meetings in the tents, but I remember one that I took part in where I contributed to the naming of our group, but I didn’t give the final name. We went around the circle—and this was one of the extreme rainy days, or snowy days or something—and we were sitting under plastic tarp on the tracks, and we went around the circle telling our backgrounds and why we were there, and it was the first time I had met people from Church of the Brethren. I had never even heard of it before, a pacifist Christian Church like the Mennonites, who were also there, and then Catholics, well, most Catholics are not pacifists, but people were there from the Catholic Worker. Like my son, who arrived on May 12th from the Catholic Worker, housed in New York. So we went around, and I realized that these were people who were living and believed from different backgrounds what I had come to understand in ’69, nine years—or ’68, ’69, just ten years earlier, when I had started reading Martin Luther King, Gandhi, John Bondurant’s, The Conquest of Violence, Barbara Deming’s, Revolution and Equilibrium, and Thoreau. So from that reading — and then meeting people who were living that life and going to prison rather than go to Canada, or to the National Guard, or to Vietnam, they went to prison to say, “Not with our consent. This is happening over our bodies, you have to put us in jail to pursue this war.” That put the idea into my head that I could do more than I was, then doing, to help end the war. And what I should think of is whatever I could do non-violently and truthfully in the Gandhian principle, assuming I was ready to go to prison. And among the things I thought of was copying the Pentagon Papers. 15

56:22 So that had been, now, ten years earlier for me. Then I realized these people had maybe grown up in Church of the Brethren, or others, and some not from a religious tradition, some Quakers… but all of them, including ones who were not religious, with a deep commitment to non-violence as a way of life and a way for the world. And so, that wasn’t usually talked about, we said, “We’re against the war, we’re against nuclear weapons.”

So I said, “You know, when it came my turn to speak, I realized listening to you that we share something from very different backgrounds, we are non-violent and maybe we should come out of the closet on that.” Instead of—pacifist is a bad word in American culture, you almost have to say—and I can say truthfully, actually, I’m not a total pacifist; I did support World War II, and I still do. The British gunners against German bombers, the Russians who fought even under Stalin against the German invasion, I think they were doing the right thing, not mistaken, they were doing what they should have done. I’m glad they did it, and I still say that, so I’m not a total pacifist. But when it comes to social change, or to saving the world, with anything but self-defense from violent attack, I am deeply committed to non-violence. And this was true of all these people on the tracks, clearly.

So I said, “Maybe we should use a name that comes right out for once—I couldn’t say we’re pacifist—but makes clear that we’re non-violent. Maybe we should use the name that Gandhi gave to his non-violent actions: Satyagraha,” which translates as “soul force” or “truth force,” but Satyagraha, that’s what he called his actions.

And so somebody said, “Well, that’s too foreign-sounding, and nobody will know what it means.”

So somebody said, someone, not me, said, “Well, how about Truth Force, Rocky Flats Truth Force?”

And I think, actually even the people there last night, I think very few people remembered how that arose, or really knew what the name meant, because Truth Force seems—well, truth force, good thing. But why a truth force? After all, we were sitting in against nuclear weapons. What is truth, why is that the essential word? And the essential word was, this is non-violent action to heal the world, to change the way things are, and to speak the truth of our own spirit and our belief in the strongest way we can without threatening anyone, without using violence. And that is with our own bodies, with our own lives.

59:24 (Great. Just one quick question, and then our tape will be over. Did this participation in this have a certain kind of meaning? Can you say anything about the impact it had for you, personally?)

Yes, well, first—my wife, actually, was at the time more resentful than I realized right away, that I was leaving her alone with her little baby during this, and it caused a rift in 16 our relationship, which took a long time to heal—but is very healed long ago, we’ve been married for thirty-three years. But I realized that she didn’t fully understand how deeply I felt about nuclear weapons. She, after all, got married to me in the context of the Vietnam War, and when the Vietnam War ended—which she was even earlier opposed to than I was, and very happy to be my partner in opposing that. She didn’t really know when she married me in 1970 that she had signed on to a life-time of resistance to something else, to nuclear weapons. So that was difficult in my personal life, but I was committed, whatever the costs. I should have—I regret that I hadn’t made clearer to her exactly how deeply I felt about this. She didn’t know my background on nuclear weapons or anything when we got married. She knew me in working in the Pentagon, which was bad enough, and we had our problems with that, [Laughs.] or in Vietnam. But she didn’t know about my feelings about nuclear weapons. So—it was something I had to do.

61:14 But the Truth Force, being with these people, these deeply committed people who just—in many ways, that was the happiest time of my adult life. I look back on that still, at 72 now, and can say, you people were with me, they’re my brothers and sisters. I will always feel absolutely bonded to them because I loved being with them and it was a happy time.

61:44 [End of Tape A]

[B].

[Talks with friends who came in for a few minutes about plans]

00:02 Okay, we start again? Okay, I’ll tell two stories that I told last night. On May 8th we were arrested at Rocky Flats in a great snowstorm, and there was a young woman there, seventeen, Marian Doub—in fact I urge you to interview her parents who are in this area, Bill and…I’ve forgotten her mother’s name at the moment, [Ed.: Nancy.] and Bill had been part of our effort, and so had Marian. So when we were all arrested, I remember being in the gym and she was on the phone to her mother, and she came back to me crying, and we were being booked in. And she said, “My mother says I can’t do anymore of this because our tests are coming up, final exams are coming up,” for high school, and she said, ‘Enough arrests, and so forth, get back to your books and take your exams,’ “So I can’t do any more actions.” And I said, “Well Marian, that’s all right, I have a daughter your age, just about, and she’s right, you’ll have plenty of time the rest of your life, and now is the time to maintain your relation with your parents and do what they want here, so don’t worry about it.” So it continued to snow for awhile, and all through the next day, so we got 36 inches of snow.

01:39 In the middle of the night, Saturday night, I woke up thinking, wait a minute, the tracks are not occupied now. I know they arrested us because they needed to get a train back in there, they wouldn’t have arrested us otherwise. So they must be about to get a train in there, there’s nobody on the tracks. So I got on the phone, it was about 4:00 in 17 the morning, called everybody and said, “Let’s get everybody you can get together very fast here, and let’s get back on those tracks before the train comes, if we can.”

It was Sunday morning now, it was not easy to get people together, but somebody knew somebody who ran a ski shop here. Now there was 36 inches of snow, there was no way to walk back to those tracks. So the ski shop opened on Sunday morning, and not only did they open and give us snow shoes and skis, and other equipment, but they gave them free—rented, you know. That was a little dangerous because if we got arrested, as we did, of course, the police confiscated this stuff for at least awhile; they didn’t let us go into a jail with skis on. So they actually, the ski shop, gave us the skis and we—it was a wonderful operation, we trudged through the snow. I won’t go through that whole story, it is a wonderful story, actually.

And to cut it short, a day or two later, we’d been ordered, we’d been told, we’d be arrested if we stayed on the tracks, and we got a quick consensus meeting and we stayed on the tracks, but they didn’t arrest us after all, right away. So then somebody said, “A train is coming,” we were up on a hill at that point, off the tracks, in a windstorm. It was an amazing night, it blew almost all the tents down, so we spent the night holding onto these things, and at one point, actually, I went out to try to hold the tent down from outside in this tremendous wind, and the snow had now become icy on top—it was not snowing—and I was pulled away from the tent, and I began sailing across, with my heavy coat on, toward the fence, actually. And the policeman in charge had frequently told us that there was no problem, there would be no violence or anything if they had to arrest us on the tracks, but if we got to the fence, or over the fence, they would have to shoot us. And I remember sailing toward this fence, and sort of shouting into the wind, “I can’t stop!” [Laughs.] And I finally, I think, crawled back, frantically, and the tents had been blown down.

04:34 So here was everybody in the morning, and the train is coming. So we rushed down this thing to the tracks, and they had, in fact, cleared off the tracks, some plow had been through. And there was a train chug-chugging along—not chugging, dieseling, I guess. But it was coming along, slowly along these tracks. So we had time to get down the gully and onto the tracks, and a guy named Jay Dillon, who had very long, red hair, I remember, down his back, put his head on one track and his feet on the other. As he said, later, “He wanted to be sure he couldn’t run away.”

And Forrest Williams, the philosophy professor that I mentioned to you, knelt beside him, and a guy named Butch Wade, whom I remember because we were all skiing a couple of days before, across the snow to reach these tracks. We looked over and there was a figure coming across the snow banks, Butch Wade, with an American flag he was carrying. We had left the flag back somewhere, so he brought the flag up to us. So he sat down with his flag. The train is coming at us, at this point, so we all sat down on the tracks. And the train comes, slowly, giving us time to think, each of us, a little bit, “What are we going to do, what’s going to happen here, what’s next?”

18

And of course we assumed that they didn’t want to run us over. But had they practiced stopping? Did they really know how long it took for them to stop? Well, they weren’t going very fast, or might they play chicken with us, you know, just keep going and let us jump off, as happened, after all, with Rachel Corey recently, in Israel, in front of a bulldozer. She wasn’t threatening the bulldozer and probably the bulldozer didn’t mean to run over her, but it kept going, and she slipped backwards, and she was run over by the bulldozer.

06:47 And my friend, Brian Wilson, did have his legs cut off on the tracks, and the train, in that case, was playing chicken. They did mean—at the Concord Naval Station when these people were protesting the contras—they meant to let them jump off and Brian didn’t jump off, and he lost both his legs. So—and my wife and I went on those tracks the next day, and his blood was on the tracks.

I said to Patricia at six in the morning, “I think I’ve got to go on those tracks.”

She said, “I know, I’ve been thinking the same thing,” and she went out there with me too, and that day they didn’t send a train. That was years later.

07:31 So on these tracks, here the train is coming, and then it did stop, and out of the train comes a whole line of police toward us, which had a very reminiscent feel to it. It was like the scene in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” where this train comes along and stops, and then a whole bunch of armed horsemen leap out from the train. A super-posse comes after them, and apparently the troops and the police in the train had seen the same film, of course, they were all saying to each other in the train, “This is just like Butch Cassidy!” And they were in the train so they could get through the snow, they didn’t have to walk through the snow. So they arrested us again.

08:15 And that night—it took a long time to book us all, so we were getting booked late at night. And in the night, I was getting finger-printed and I look up and there were two women being fingerprinted. And one of them is Marian Doub, the seventeen year old. I said, “Marian, what are you doing here?” I knew she wasn’t supposed to be part of this action. She said, well, she had been home from school, and she was watching the television and saw that we had been arrested again, and that there was no one occupying the tracks anymore. So she felt she had to come out and renew the occupation. And she had been walking along the track with this other woman, and they walked along the tracks in the darkness holding hands—this was later testified in court—and singing, “We Shall Overcome,” and “We will not be moved,” and they saw this light coming at them in the distance. And of course—she had been with us in the first arrest but there was no train, this was the first train to come through since we had first occupied. So they see this light, and the light gets bigger and bigger, and it’s a train coming at them. So they knelt down—this was later testified—they knelt on the tracks, and the train stopped and they went limp, and they were arrested.

So my head was spinning—I hadn’t had any food all day—it was a long day. I was trying to take this in, I said, “Marian, you stopped the train, again, by yourself?” 19

She said, “Well, yes.”

I said, “Who’s your friend?”

She said, “My mother.”

So, [Tearing up, continues with difficulty.] as her mother testified, it was an unusual mother-daughter action, but she felt “I shouldn’t let the young people take all the burden.” So—anyway—

10:19 Oh, you were saying—these were the people that I was with, and the reason that I’m here this week is because my friend, Evan Freirich, who got arrested with us and is one of the original Rocky Flats people, first suggested that I come out for the twenty-fifth reunion just about now. Then they decided not to have a reunion, but would I come out and talk in Boulder against the Iraq war, and it would be a chance to meet with other members of the task force, which I will be doing immediately as soon as we turn off the camera here. And so, I leaped at that chance. And the reason being, I say, these weren’t ordinary— [Tearing up, pause.]

None of us talked about it at the time, but I did ask one—and then I asked a couple of other people, “What had you decided to do if the train kept coming?”

And the two people I asked each said, “I decided I wasn’t going to get up.” [Pause.]

And that’s what I decided, I thought, this is the time, this is the place, and if it has to be over our bodies, let it be over our bodies.

So we didn’t discuss that, I think these two people are the only people I mentioned that to, and I don’t know what the others thought. But as I’ve said to Evan, and said to other people here, that month on the tracks was the happiest time of my life, in my adult life, being with those people in that spirit when that decision was made. It was a very, very happy time.

(I think that’s a good place to end. Thank you very much.)

12:19 [End of Tape B. End of interview.]