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GreenPolicy360 Siterunner:

Yes, I need to write more about Dan Ellsberg and time we shared, days past but still here with reverberations of war and the costs of war. Memories of a student activist in Dan's house on the beach, sayings goodbye, packing what later would be called the Pentagon Papers. The war and the lies about the war were there in writing, a history commissioned by Robert McNamara. When I met Dan Ellsberg he was no longer the gung ho Marine with a 45 strapped to his hip. He was, he told me, a different man before he went to Vietnam. He changed, he was changed, our nation was convulsed by the war. The price paid in blood and treasure, and the nation's 'moral authority', continues to be paid today even as Vietnam is now a trading partner of the U.S. and vets take tours of old haunts in the south and north of Vietnam. The lush countryside, the marshes, the rainforests, the delta, the Agent Orange, the B52s, the devastation, the millions of deaths in the region are remembered. Memories are everywhere there - and here. At least we didn't use the Bomb, as later was revealed we came close, very close, to using...

Today, in Ukraine, in Russia, it would be a different world of hurt and threat, and craziness, if the U.S. had used the Bomb, as Ellsberg who was a nuclear war planner for the government, later wrote about in detail after he wrote "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers". "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" is on my mind just now, before the sun rises here in Florida as I write this, a few mile from Fort MacDill, the US headquarters of Special Operations Command. Yesterday the international news reported that Russian Federation president Putin was moving "tactical nuclear weapons" to Belarus and again threatening with his nuclear arsenal continuing from the Cold War into a new 3.0 version of the Cold War. The nuclear threat is, as experts write and others report, at it greatest risk since the height of the Cold War. Here, nearly adjacent to one of the 'rich targets', as command and control systems are in the lingo of nuclear war planners.

Again, I look back at Nixon and Kissinger and the planners who were ready to launch... and I thank God, today, that the room in the White House where they were huddling and talking about 'sending a message' was not the beginning of nuclear end of times going forward. Right now, I open the Doomsday Machine book that Dan gave me and I look again at the inscription: "12-25-17 To Steven Schmidt - Wed need the Moratorium again ! Dan Ellsberg"