JUDITH EHRLICH, [currently in Australia] ehrlich.judith@
Ehrlich is co-director/producer of the documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America” about Daniel Ellsberg. RootsAction Education Fund has teamed up with the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy to co-sponsor Daniel Ellsberg
Ellsberg famously released the Pentagon Papers which showed a pattern of deceit on the part of the U.S. government regarding its war on Vietnam.
Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner during the 1950s and ’60s. Since then, he has spent his life writing, speaking, standing up and sitting-in against the threat of nuclear annihilation. He offers chilling clarity about “the nuclear war planners, of which I was one, who have written plans to kill billions of people, a conspiracy to commit omnicide, or near omnicide, the death of everyone.” He asks us, “Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don’t know. I choose to act as if we have a chance.”
This quote is from one of several animated podcasts released Monday which Ehrlich directed. You can watch and listen here.
Said Ehrlich: “You’ll hear from Ellsberg a shocking reality check and analysis of the dangers of nuclear annihilation. Yet he offers hope of possible defusing of that threat, sharing his unique perspective as a planner of such unfathomable horror.
“When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Henry Kissinger (then President Nixon’s national security advisor) called him ‘the most dangerous man in America.’ But those closely held secrets of the war in Vietnam were less explosive than the nuclear secrets that Ellsberg held in his safe at the RAND Corporation. Then a top strategist for the Defense Department, he was party to plans for a nuclear holocaust. After being buried for safekeeping, those documents disappeared in a hurricane that literally blew away his secrets, but that didn’t dampen Ellsberg’s desire to share what he knew.
“He has spent the past six decades putting himself on the line to oppose those evil plans.
“At 92, with his mind sharp as ever, Ellsberg remains an undisputed expert on ‘national security.’ In this unusual illustrated podcast, he shares his unvarnished thoughts about the threat of nuclear annihilation and how it might be defused.
“While we seem able to ignore the reality of so many nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert — amid escalation of a new cold war with heightened nuclear dangers — the risk has only increased. Indeed, the U.S. just enacted its biggest military budget in history, with unprecedented investment in weapons of mass destruction and their deployment.”
To watch the Oscar nominated film on Daniel Ellsberg please go to: MostDangerousMan.org. To host a screening of Ehrlich’s most recent film — “The Boys Who Said NO!” — see here. Ellsberg books include The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner from 2017. See more of his writing at ellsberg.net.