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Dear Friends,
Most people know Daniel Ellsberg as the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers and risked more than 100 years in prison to expose the truth about the Vietnam War. Fewer know what came before — and what he spent the rest of his life trying to tell us.
Before the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner with access to the most closely held secrets of U.S. nuclear strategy. He saw the machinery up close: the flawed launch protocols, the near-misses, the cold arithmetic of planned casualties. He never stopped trying to warn the rest of us about it.
A new 29-minute documentary, An Ordinary Insanity, captures that warning. Filmed just one year before his death at age 92, Ellsberg speaks with extraordinary clarity and urgency about the danger of nuclear annihilation — and, just as importantly, about how we can dramatically reduce it.
"I've long said that to my last breath I will be doing what I can to postpone and avert the risk of nuclear war." — Daniel Ellsberg
He kept that promise. With nuclear tensions rising and the New START framework lapsing toward a renewed arms race, the film could not be more timely. It was made to be shared and screened — and that is exactly what we're asking you to do.
▶ Watch An Ordinary Insanity (29 min)
If the film moves you, set aside an hour for a conversation on topic. At the conference of the American Bar Association's International Law Section in April 2018, Ellsberg sat down with Jonathan Granoff, President of the Global Security Institute and Senior Advisor to the Sections Committee on National Security, for a substantive, insider's dialogue on whistleblowing, moral courage, and the revelations in his book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
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