President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are playing a deadly game of "nuclear chicken" that is more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, according to whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, which illustrated the extent of the United States military's destruction of Southeast Asia during the Johnson administration. In an interview with Democracy Now! on Wednesday morning, he said the difference between today's nuclear standoff and the Cuban Missile Crisis is the willingness of each side to destroy the other.
"Both President [John F.] Kennedy and [First Secretary] Nikita Khrushchev [of the Soviet Union] were determined not to carry out the threats they were making of armed conflict, compared to the North Korean crisis right now," he said.
Ellsberg argued that Kim "is the same kind of crazy that [Trump] is," as both believe that "striking first is better than striking second, and striking second is better than not striking at all.
"I hope they're pretending," Ellsberg continued. "But to pretend to be crazy is not a safe game—it's a game of nuclear chicken."
The Cuban Missile Crisis is widely agreed to have been the closest the world has ever been to a thermonuclear war. The crisis was the culmination of years' worth of military escalation tactics used by the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
When the Soviets announced their plans to install nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962, the U.S. immediately reacted, encircling the island with U.S. Navy ships to prevent the Soviets from putting any more offensive weaponry in Cuba.
The 13-day standoff between U.S. and Soviet officials ended when Khrushchev agreed to dismantle all Soviet missiles based in Cuba.
If war had broken out, and if that war had gone nuclear, Ellsberg said a third of the world's population was at risk of being killed either by the nuclear missiles themselves or their long-standing effects on the atmosphere and the environment.
"We came within a hair's breadth of blowing the world up," Ellsberg said.
Ellsberg helped strengthen public opposition to the Vietnam War in 1971 by leaking the secret documents known as the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Ellsberg had access to the documents because of his role as a military strategist at the RAND Corporation. The documents contained evidence that the U.S. government had misled the public regarding U.S. involvement in the war.
After releasing the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 along with other charges of theft and conspiracy, carrying a total maximum sentence of 115 years. The charges were dismissed due to illegal evidence gathering by the government.
Since then, Ellsberg has been an active political figure of the left. His most recent book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, was released earlier this year. During his conversation with Democracy Now! Ellsberg said he hoped for a quick end to the nuclear standoff between the U.S. and North Korea.
But Trump's apparent high regard of nuclear weapons and their destructive capability doesn't make him hopeful.
"It's not a question of whether Trump will use them—he's already using them. He's using them the same way you use a gun in a confrontation, whether or not you pull the trigger," he said.
