It will take a miracle to avoid catastrophic climate change and nuclear war, but it’s still possible we can create such a miracle. Daniel Ellsberg on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay.

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay, and welcome to a very special edition of theAnalysis.news on the occasion of the 90th birthday of Daniel Ellsberg.

Ninety years ago, Daniel Ellsberg was born and he has lived a life of meaning, many of us strive to change the world, but few have the opportunity and the courage to change the course of history. Dan's release of the Pentagon Papers at great personal risk helped end the Vietnam War. His book, The Doomsday Machine Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, reveals the institutional madness of American nuclear war strategy. Dan continues to fight for truth and to awaken people to the existential danger of nuclear weapons.

I interviewed Dan's friend, historian Peter Kuznick, about the importance of Dan's life’s work. And I encourage you to watch that.

But now, in his own words, is my interview with Daniel Ellsberg on the occasion of his 90th birthday. So at 90 years old, why don't you just take it easy? What keeps you fighting? How do you summon the strength when sometimes it seems many are just not listening?

Daniel Ellsberg

Hope, hope that we can surmount the challenges that are facing us, the challenge of ceasing a moral catastrophe that we're already involved in, which is that we have allowed doomsday machines to exist in our country and elsewhere in the world and that we're on a course toward climate catastrophe as well. And the problem is to avert the physical catastrophes, not probably full extinction on either case, but catastrophic results for humanity. If we go on the way we are, if our policies continue as they are, my hope is expressed in action.

As a friend of mine, Joanna Macy says hope isn't a feeling or an expectation, it's a way of acting, and it's a way of acting as if we had a chance. And I think that's what we do have. We really do have a chance to change this and to allow a more humane future to evolve.

Paul Jay 

And to what extent is that hope, an act of faith rather than rational analysis? Because I know you've told me you're not all that optimistic when you think about it rationally.

Daniel Ellsberg

I think, by the way, to say that I don't that one has faith suggests that you're sure you feel secure in the belief that something will save us either human or external. I don't have that kind of religious faith as some do, and I don't have that faith in humanity or in my own country as much as I used to in the case of my own country. So I don't think it's a question of any sort of guarantee that we'll get through this without absolute catastrophe of a kind that has not been seen in human history or prehistory. I think that's not only not guaranteed, it's not even likely, but I don't think it's impossible.

And given that I think the way of acting that's appropriate in that possibility that we can eliminate the doomsday machines and change the course of putting fossil fuels into warming to the atmosphere of the earth, causing it's a question of either nuclear winter with the doomsday machine ice on our lakes and killing all our harvests or fire in effect with the climatic rise in temperature that will make large parts of the world uninhabitable for humans, even though it doesn't lead to extinction. So I think both of those are actually likely, but not certain.

And if we act in a way to explore as much as we should to explore, search and invent, imagine ways of changing this course,