A Fabric of Lies: From Cold War Deception to Nuclear Apocalypse | Paul Jay & Christian Appy

Christian Appy
Thank you, Paul. I’m sure people want to hear more about your personal and political motivations to embark on this long-term, important project, and maybe we’ll get to that, but I thought a more pressing question, which we face for those of us who are interested in organizing people in resistance to the ongoing nuclear peril. Why do you think it is that so many people are not more alarmed by the peril of nuclear weapons that is ever present and as dangerous as ever?

Paul Jay
Yeah, that’s kind of the question. I get why most ordinary people are not, because the media almost never talks about it. In the last presidential election campaign, the only person to mention the danger of nuclear weapons was Donald Trump, and the only reason he did it was to promote the Golden Dome. Other than that, it’s a non-issue in the public discourse. Why is it a taboo, is the question, and why do people go along with the taboo?

It’s partly what happened in the ’90s, even to me, as I was saying, that when the Cold War was, quote, unquote, supposedly over, it seemed like the danger of nuclear war was receding. In fact, it wasn’t, but it felt that way. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia, there was a month or two there where it was back on the agenda. People talked about it a little bit, and then from time to time, a missile goes off course and it falls in Poland, it turned out to be a mistake, there’s another three days of conversation about it again, and then it goes away.

The question is why in the elites, the military elites, the political elites, the financial elites, people who have access to the intelligence, who really have more of an overview, and I’m not saying all the elites, but there’s a section of the billionaire class that’s relatively conscious of things, and certainly in the Pentagon and otherwise, and certainly in the arms industry, why aren’t they more concerned? Because they may think they can survive the climate crisis. I think they’re wrong, but I can imagine why they think, at least for their lifetime and maybe their kids’ lifetime, billionaires will find a way to live. Nobody is surviving a nuclear war. So, denial is a powerful force. Inertia is a powerful force. I can start this answer, but it’s part of a much longer answer because you kind of asked the question right off the top.

The Cold War psychology that has been drummed into our heads since 1946, ’47, ’48, but also the whole mythology of America, from slavery and westward expansion on, we have been told a fabric of lies. It’s natural, in a way, that we learn how to live this weird life where the founders of America can write a Constitution and documents about liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all, and own slaves. You can fight for freedom and own slaves. So, how do you get your head around that?

There’s a kind of compartmentalization where you can just say, “Okay, they’re three-fifths human.” It’s not a way to vilify these people. If you’re born into those circumstances, you are taught how not to see systemic racism. You’re taught to see westward expansion as moving civilization westward, taming savages, and teaching them Christianity. Much of this is all wrapped up in religious rhetoric. I mean, if Jesus ever saw what goes on in his name, especially today, he would come back.

So, the underpinnings of it all are economic. I’ve seen research in tobacco companies that were sitting on research about cancer. They knew it caused cancer. They hid it from the public, but the executives of the companies knew. They still smoked, and they let their kids smoke, knowing it had a high chance of causing cancer. Why? Because in the corporate culture, if you don’t, you don’t get ahead. So you start internalizing a rationalization. “If I don’t do it, somebody else will do it.”

Human society throughout history has had this fabric of lies where the elites lie to everyone else. It’s part of how human civilization evolved. It’s part of how the system works, but we’re somewhere new right now. What’s new is that these lies could end human civilization. This was never true before. You can get over World War I, you can get over World War II, but what’s that line? I can’t remember what it was. “They’re going to fight World War III with stones and arrows.” Well, that’s not true. There won’t be a World War III. I should say no. There’ll be a World War III. There’ll be no World War IV because there are no humans after the world, the next one.

It’s very uncomfortable to talk about. It feels overwhelming. Even in Congress, I don’t know, maybe there are 10 or 20 members of Congress that actually know a damn thing about this. They vote for defense budget after defense budget, with over a trillion dollars now of modernization funds for new nukes. This Golden Con thing is going to be at least another trillion, two trillion. Nobody knows how much it’s going to cost. They’re talking about another Manhattan Project, which means, how much is the Golden Dome going to cost? As much as they can scare the Americans into paying. So it’s the Cold War of exaggerating the enemy’s power. I’m sorry, I’m into my rant, but I’ll go.

To get the extent and consciousness of lies, in 1946, the CIA produced a document titled, Is the Soviet Union a Military Threat to Western Europe or the United States? They do the same document with the same title in 1947, ’48, ’49, ’50, and it continues. It’s a presidential briefing. It goes to the very top levels of the political and military leadership. Every single year, and I’ve got the documents, it’s not some big thing. They’re on the CIA website. They’ve been declassified. Every single year, they say, “No, there is no Soviet threat. The Soviet Union is in a defensive position.”

They don’t tell anybody this. They tell everybody the complete opposite, that the whole Cold War structure of telling Americans and the world that they’re on the verge of being invaded and attacked. “The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming. Get into your fallout shelters, hide under your desks.” It was a campaign of psychological terror, and they knew it was based on bullshit. But it helped create the justification for a whole range of what is called military Keynesianism, profit-making, and such. The point is, we’re still living in that world today.

Christian Appy
Which, if I could just add to that a bit, it was a delusion believed by virtually everyone of the hundreds of very brilliant mostly men working at RAND Corporation, where Ellsberg worked, as Paul pointed out, from ’58 to 1970, with a few stints in the Pentagon and the State Department. They honestly believed that the Soviet Union was hell-bent on world domination, that the Soviet Union represented a threat worse than Hitler. It was like Hitler with nukes. They further believed in the missile gap; they believed up until 1960 that the Russians were far ahead in their nuclear arsenal, and that helped convince the American public to this day that deterrence has really worked.

One answer to the initial question is, well, nuclear weapons haven’t been used since 1945. So clearly, the various groups having nuclear weapons have kept the peace, but Ellsberg has argued for decades that deterrence is a hoax, because from the very beginning, American nuclear policy was based on the idea that we should and have the right to use nuclear weapons first, even against a conventional military attack by the Soviet Union. We’ve always prepared to have a big enough arsenal to not simply scare or not, intimidate and deter a first strike by the Soviet Union, but have enough capacity to effectively win a nuclear weapon, another major delusion.

I’m also reminded by your comments, Paul, that one elite who didn’t buy the standard company line was the commander of the Strategic Air Command, when, in retirement, that guy named Lee Butler, who had been in charge of all these nuclear bombers throughout the ’80s, was asked why there had ever been a nuclear war. And he said, “There are three reasons. The good judgment of a few people at key moments, blind luck, and divine intervention.” If you look at all the close calls, just Google nuclear close calls, and you’ll see a shocking list of technological glitches of false alarms where we were this close to actually launching nuclear weapons. It’s horrific. So, the fact that it hasn’t actually happened shouldn’t really be reassuring at all.

Paul Jay
Just to add one thing. The amount of profit made from nuclear weapons is significant, but minor when you look at the entire financial picture. So who owns the companies that make nuclear weapons now? Are the asset management companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street they all… BlackRock alone is up to now, I think it’s $9 to $10 trillion under management, one company. The three of them together have more money under management. This is like pension funds, giving their money to invest, sovereign wealth funds, and rich people. Ordinary people don’t know how to invest. You give it to a Vanguard mutual fund. They just buy everything on the S&P 500, which means they own just about everything.

Even though the nuclear piece of that is a thimble compared to their overall holdings, why do they risk their overall holdings for a thimble? I’m going to ask somebody. Larry Fink, who’s the head of BlackRock, I’m trying to get an interview with him because I want to ask him. I want to say to Larry, “You say your job is to defend the assets of your investors. Shouldn’t that also include defending the ass’s of your investors?” What the hell is the point?

The problem is the Cold War mentality, which is where I’m going to keep harping on how everyone needs to understand the history of the Cold War. It’s a layer of layer of layer of lies, and they’re afraid that if you get honest and do something about the nuclear threat, if you pull that thread, it might pull a thread of trying… People might start to see through, why do we need the whole military-industrial complex? Because it’s all based on the same fabric of “The enemies are out to get us, and we need all this to stop them.”

Try looking at this from the rest of the world’s point of view. I can’t say the only country, but the country that’s done the most aggressive actions since World War II is clearly the United States. Nobody comes close, whether the intervention in Korea, the Vietnam War, or the Iraq War, nothing comes close. But Americans are always taught to feel under siege. “They’re out to get us, and they’re going to take away our stuff.” That’s going to lead us not only to disaster from climate, which can’t be separated from this issue, but if we don’t get over this, what’s the word, numbness that the Cold War mentality gives us, we won’t survive it.

Christian Appy
Paul, I’ll ask you one more question, and then I’ll turn it over to audience questions. Maybe come back later and ask some more of my own. I’m curious about why you decided to have Dan Ellsberg be the spine for the story you’re telling. I ask that because after his papers arrived at UMass, I organized a year-long seminar for 15 undergraduates and a few graduate students called Truth and Descent: The Life and Legacy of Daniel Ellsberg.

I was excited about it, but I wasn’t sure it would really work because I knew in advance that most of my students probably knew nothing about Ellsberg because he was briefly famous for a few years in the early ’70s. They may have heard his name, maybe not, and yet, I think they were deeply engaged by his example and the opportunity. He was still alive then, so he zoomed with the class, I think five times throughout the course of the year, and they were quite taken with him. So that was my experience. I’m wondering how you came to think that Ellsberg, as a person, could be a key storyteller and communicator about these important issues?

Paul Jay
Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, one, because he woke me up. This was not on my radar, as I said, the issue of nuclear weapons. I’m very intrigued in terms of who I interview and get interested in, in people that were on the inside and were true believers and that really believed the Cold War mythology. I think at the heart of the way Americans, and I’m a dual citizen, so for now, I’ll put my American hat on. I have a Canadian hat, too.

Americans truly have been taught, and most believe that America does bad things for good reasons. Everybody else does bad things for bad reasons, but when we do bad, whether it’s Vietnam, Iraq, or you name it, we always have a good objective. We always have good intent. And because why? Because we’re fighting for freedom. So sometimes, what is it? You’ve got to crack eggs to get freedom. You’ve got to kill people. You’ve got to do this and do that. If you’re born into that, and your identity is wrapped up in that, “I’m an American, and we believe in freedom, even if we do bad things. So I believe in freedom, and I’m a good person because of that.” Even though I see my country at war almost all the time, and wars that are clearly based on lies, if you follow it at all, I can still get my head around we’re still a good country because we do bad things for good reasons.

So, people like Dan, who really believed it, he was such a Cold Warrior. You wouldn’t believe. The stuff he wrote, the memos he gave to Kennedy, even Trump, is not that much of a Cold Warrior. I mean, he’s a different character, I guess, but anyway, he was such a true believer. Then over time, he woke up, and to me, it’s a great story because if Ellsberg can not only wake up, but stick his neck out, because it’s not enough to understand. We’ve got to be willing to stick our necks out. He decided he would risk life imprisonment to tell people the truth about the Vietnam War. He was going to do it with the nuclear papers. So to me, he’s not just an important historical character in all this, but he’s a way of understanding what we have to do.

Christian Appy
What most Americans don’t know is that after the Pentagon Papers, he primarily devoted himself to anti-nuclear activism and was arrested some 80 times, carrying out acts of nonviolence, civil disobedience, in most cases around nuclear issues. So, let’s hear something from you. It could be some short comments, but also questions. Maybe Brennan can take a microphone around.

Unknown Speaker
Thank you. Thanks for the preview and for what you’re doing. It’s very important to raise these issues and get that message out there. I wanted to just ask you more about the How to Stop A Nuclear War part, because that’s your title. I’m assuming if you haven’t finished it yet, there’s lots of scope for more than is in the preview.

Paul Jay
Oh yeah. 

Unknown Speaker
But for instance, you had an interview with Susi Snyder from ICAN, and I’m sure you know about the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and what’s going on. Globally, there’s a lot more going on than there is in this country, a lot of these issues, I’m sure you know. There’s also a lot of potential. You mentioned that you have some things there about the companies. You said it’s just a thimbleful for them, for BlackRock or whatever.

But that’s also a huge opportunity in terms of getting rid of these weapons because it is a thimbleful. It’s something that we know has worked in the past on the nuclear issue back in the ’80s. It’s worked on apartheid and many other campaigns to put pressure on these companies and to get some results out. So I just wonder if you can say a bit more about what your vision is for the stopping part in the film. 

Paul Jay
Yeah, sure. Well, the film is going to try to accomplish two big, major things. I’ll start with the second, which is what you’re raising. There are concrete steps that can be taken to reduce the risk of nuclear war. I’ve talked to hundreds of experts now. I’ve talked to some people who are military leaders, political leaders. Nobody can say the risk of accidental war, miscalculation, and error is zero. Everybody thinks it’s far from zero. You can’t put a number on it.

I did a calculation once. I’m living in Toronto now. What are the odds of your house burning down in Toronto in a given year? It’s less than 1%, but we all buy fire insurance for a house. Less than 1% is enough to spend a lot of money on fire insurance. The risk of nuclear war, we don’t know. You want to say it’s 1% but there have been calculations that it’s even higher. If the risk is the end of human civilization, and it could happen in an hour or two, and it could be tonight or tomorrow or next week, who knows? Don’t you do something about it? Doesn’t society have to talk about it?

At the end of this, we have some very concrete policies that would reduce the risk. Like number one in the United States, get rid of ICBMs and get rid of launch on warning. It’s the most dangerous. We’re getting into this era of AI. We’ll dig into those things more. But the question is, why aren’t we doing any of those things? Quite the contrary, we’re modernizing and expanding the nuclear arsenal. So, why is there this cloak of denial that’s very hard to pierce?

That Don’t Bank on the Bomb campaign from ICAN is good, but let’s be honest, it’s barely making a dent because if one bank pulls out, another one moves in. It doesn’t actually reduce the amount of capital that’s available for this stuff. It’s a great beginning of how to think about putting pressure on these institutions, but without a mass movement, without a real awakening of the population on these issues, it won’t have the clout. For some reason, honestly, to some extent, it escapes me why the more conscious, smarter financial elites themselves aren’t already more concerned about this. I can tell you if you want to ask about some speculation about why they aren’t more concerned.

The first thing we’re going to try to do is try to get to why people don’t wake up about this. I think it has to do with not understanding the history of how we got here. It’s tied to another thing, but we have to learn how to talk to people about who we are because our own identities are wrapped up in historical denial, right to our core is who we are as people. I’m not immune. None of us is immune to it. I go through my daily life. I had a nice dinner. I’m here doing this. How many million people are starving in the world right now? Literally starving to death, generally and more particularly in Gaza, but we go on with our lives. I mean, in some ways, it’s hard to do otherwise and still live your life unless you want to be a full-time activist, and some people do, but it’s hard for most people. But how do we break through?

I’m hoping the nuclear issue is actually a way to pierce this that might help on other issues as well. This isn’t something you can be in denial about and hope to survive. Everyone I know who knows the issues all think that if we don’t do something dramatic to reduce the risk leading to abolishment, but at least reduce the risk, nuclear war is inevitable. It’s going to happen. If it isn’t happening in your lifetime, our lifetime, it will be our kids or our kids’ kids. It’s not that far off. It’s getting far worse.

One of the things that we have to connect for people is that the more the climate crisis develops, the greater the risk of nuclear war. Imagine an India, a Pakistan, and a China with more than half their agriculture gone, which could be within 20 years.

Christian Appy
Because of climate change.

Paul Jay
Because of climate change. If you look at American agriculture. When we start getting past north of three degrees, which could be way sooner than people think. I mean, it could be by 2050. We might even talk at the end of the century. It wasn’t that long ago that the end of the century was going to be two degrees. We might be at two degrees now, or we might be there within 10 to 15 years. We might actually already be at a global average increase of two degrees.

We actually have kind of hit it already. The Arctic is there. Imagine a world where most agriculture is already wiped out and water is depleted. Take every geo-political fracture line, whether it’s India-Pakistan, whether it’s India-China, whether it’s what happens to Russia, which is so dependent on fossil fuel, and now you’re at a stage where the world actually starts to get that you’ve got to phase out fossil fuel. Now you have a militarized Russia with no economy anymore.

Christian Appy
And millions of climate refugees, moving across borders. 

Paul Jay
I was going to get to that.

Christian Appy
Yeah.

Paul Jay
What happens to the tens of millions of people who have to head north? Well, they’re already planning. What’s the plan? The wall. The wall isn’t about just some migrant labor coming north. The wall is getting ready to have machine guns all set up on the top of the wall to stop millions of people coming from South America. I mean, we’re heading into, I hate to use the word end times, but it’s not inevitable. We have to find a way to organize, and I think one piece of this, how to find a way to organize, is, one, yes, you have to understand. Two, you’ve got to get the history of the Cold War. You’ve got to try to teach yourself how we got here, but we have to learn how to talk to people who don’t agree with us. 

I’ll just give you one example that kind of worked for me, and I think I learned something from it. I was going to make a film a few years ago. It was going to be called Why Do They Hate Us? I was going to take 9/11 families to India and Pakistan and get them to go around just asking, “Why do you hate us?” I started interviewing 9/11 families, seeing if they’d come on the trip. The ones I said, most of them wanted to because they genuinely wanted an answer.

The one guy I talked to was a fire chief who’d been at 9/11. He was one of the fire chiefs as the buildings were first on fire. His son was a fireman who went up, never came down, and was in the building when it crashed. So this guy had been a Democrat his whole life. This is back during Bush’s presidency, when he founded an organization called Democrats for Bush. He was so furious at Al Qaeda, the terrorists, Arabs, and whatever. They killed his kid. They killed all these people.

I said, I made a film in Afghanistan. I made a film called Return to Kandahar. I was there in the spring of 2002. I said, “Do you want to know a little bit about what I learned about the history of Afghanistan?” And he said, “Yeah.” You probably know this, but I gave him some of the background, including how the CIA brought Bin Laden to Afghanistan because they felt they needed an Arab leader to rally the forces against the Soviet invaders.

Bin Laden was a CIA asset, to begin with. Absolutely verified, no conspiracy. I mean, I hate this idea, conspiracy theory, because history is a history of conspiracies. But anyway, I’m telling the fire chief this, and I gave him more background on how the Afghan thing developed. You people probably know, the whole thing was engineered by the United States, not just about inducing the Soviets to invade, but getting the Shah of Iran to give $40 million to the President of Afghanistan to break with the Soviet Union, and that’s what starts the ball rolling that leads to the arming of the jihadists and so on and so on.

Anyway, the guy’s looking at me. He did not know a word of what I was saying, not a word of that history. Honestly, most Americans don’t know any of that history, but he told me his head exploded. I didn’t try to argue with him about his beliefs. I just told him what I knew about the history. I think we need to learn how to talk to people who don’t agree with us, and particularly people, the 75 million people that voted for Trump, or the people that keep getting fooled by corporate Democrats, by calmly telling them, “Well, here’s the history, and you can check it. It’s verified.” I can tell you stuff about the Cold War. I’m sure your heads will blow up how consciously and deliberately they lied to erect this structure of nuclear weapons, military bases everywhere, knowing they’re gambling with the apocalypse.

So, what I’m getting at and why I’m making a film is to try to make this a tool for people to help talk to others in a really calm, historical way. Let’s get past all the partisan rhetoric and all the inflammatory language, and really calmly try to talk through how the hell we got here because I don’t think enough people are going to be able to take a position on what to do about it now. What Dan said, he finally realized he was living in an illusion. Well, most of us are living in an illusion.

Christian Appy
Thanks. Yeah, he had his hand back there.

Eric Ross
Just me?

Christian Appy
Yeah.

Eric Ross
Should I stand? Oh, I hate the sound [inaudible 00:32:38]. 

Christian Appy
You want to introduce yourself?

Eric Ross
So, my name is Eric Ross. I’m a PhD candidate in the history department, and trying to formulate a question. It’s been a long day. But basically, honestly, I’m hearing two things at once, which is, on the one hand, for example, I’m an organizer. I also study nuclear weapons. Those two things will very rarely meet because I think that the nuclear weapons work is still tainted with the perception that this is largely a white, upper-middle-class kind of single-issue issue.

I know you’re speaking, and I am in full agreement that this needs to reach people with education, but at the same time, in other organizing spaces, we have this issue in which the problem is that this is still an abstraction, even though it’s very real. If you’re not seeing this as part of this broader intersectional solidarity, then you’re not taken seriously.

In this moment, every day, I come back to what Rosa Luxemburg said in World War I: “The choice is clear, socialism or barbarism.” Right in this moment, when long ago, Wall Street captured Washington and all of these issues with the corporate Democrats that you’re talking about, it seems that picking the nuclear weapon issue is kind of like a band-aid on a bullet hole, a much-needed band-aid.

But whether or not we can make this change within the existing political and social structures in this country, or whether when we’re thinking of questions of rising fascism and the fact that even the elites in power in this moment are completely insulated and not receptive to the will of the people, that the change needs to be this broader structural change, and this will enable our move away from nuclear weapons, which were built on the illogic of capitalism and imperialism, especially in this country. I guess this is a really long, and I apologize, way of asking whether we can actually achieve these aims through some sort of single-issue reform agenda or whether this needs to be part of a broader structural overhaul of the system, or somewhere in between, of course? So, yeah, thank you.

Paul Jay
I think the answer is that if we don’t do both, we won’t be around to do the more radical agenda. I think the nuclear issue is different than climate in this way. I don’t think you can really profoundly deal with what’s absolutely needed for the climate crisis without some profound changes to the economy. I don’t know how we get to real climate policy that matters without nationalizing the fossil fuel companies. I just don’t even see it. Everything else seems to be nibbling around the edges, and we’re unfortunately far from that. But the nuclear issue is not the same issue. There are times in history when the interests of the elite systemically actually align with the interests of working people.

I’ll give you an example. In the 1800s in England, child labor, generally, but particularly in places like Wales, where a lot of mining was going on, and female labor in the mines was actually threatening that there be future of workers. The women’s pelvises were getting twisted hauling rocks up to the surface and loading donkeys. The kids were down there putting little tiny crevices, hacking at iron ore on their backs. They actually put sharp rocks down the back of their shirts so they couldn’t fall asleep when they’re hacking rocks. This is not very long ago.

So two things started happening. There was a movement from the working class against child labor, but the elites, some of them, saw systemically that exactly who the hell is going to work in our industry if we’re killing off the workers. So there were some class-conscious sections of the elites that saw an eight-hour working day and banning child labor was in the interests of capitalism, and for a moment, interests aligned.

To some extent, you had that in the ’30s with the New Deal. A section of the elite saw the only way to save capitalism was to mitigate the effects of the crisis. The working class wasn’t ready to do more, really. So there was an alignment. On the nuke issue, there’s an alignment. Objectively, there’s an alignment. Everyone gets killed. It doesn’t matter how rich you are.

So yes, I think the potential of some reform to reduce the risk is achievable because there is a reason for the elites to want to do it that isn’t part of the fundamental differences, capital versus labor, and so on. I don’t think we get to abolishment without a more fundamental structural change. Maybe if a nuke goes off somewhere, I hate to say it. Maybe if somewhere it actually happens, it will freak people out enough, but abolishment, I think it’s a very important aspiration. It’s very important to talk about, but without the structural change you’re talking about, war is very built into the system to deal with that.

The United States probably isn’t the first place this is going to happen. Let’s be honest about where we are in the world. This is the home of the Empire. It is not the first place where there’s probably going to be this kind of breakthrough. It might be in Brazil or India. I don’t know. I’m hoping.

So the answer to your question is, and the film won’t do this, we won’t treat this as if it’s not part of a systemic issue. So, as a teaching mechanism, we’re going to talk about how America got militarized. Everyone talks about the Manhattan Project. All of a sudden, we’re going to have a bomb. Let’s have the Manhattan Project, but where were we as a society? It wasn’t just because Germany was building a bomb that we had the Manhattan Project, because once they knew there was no German bomb, they kept building it.

So, it wasn’t really about the German bomb. It was because they could do it, and they realized, they, being the American political, economic, and military elites, “If we have the bomb, we rule the world.” That didn’t begin in the early 1940s. It begins during plantation culture. It begins with westward expansion. It begins with the rise of finance. It begins with war profiteering. In the Civil War, it is where J. P. Morgan learns, “Oh, my God, war profiteering is really good.”

J. P. Morgan, a company he owned in the Civil War, bought rifles from the Union army that were going to be discarded because they were considered or two beat up for $2.25 a rifle. His company varnished the wood, did some minor oiling of the rifle, and sold them back to the Union Army for $22.50. War profiteering is right in the DNA of the Industrial Revolution. It’s in the DNA of Westward expansion because you cannot control hundreds of thousands of slaves without an extensive military. You cannot steal land from Indigenous peoples without a powerful military.

So the militarization and then financialization, because Wall Street’s in the middle of everything. Wall Street is the middleman for the Southern cotton getting to England, which is the foundation of the Industrial Revolution in England, cheap cotton, and the textile industrialized manufacturing in England. Did you know Wall Street sold insurance on slaves? I didn’t know that until recently. If you were a slave owner and your slave died, it was an asset like your car. Insurance replaces your car. You could buy insurance to buy a new slave. That’s all, Wall Street. Eventually, Wall Street realizes wage labor is far more profitable for industrialization than slave labor. So now they want, “Okay, let’s free the slaves because we want them as wage slaves, not as slave slaves, and we want the West.”

Anyway, we are not going to make it a single issue in the way we put it into context, but there is a practical side to this. There are actually some things that could be done to reduce the risk. So our theory is that if we can wake people up to understand things at a systemic level, we’ll be better at persuading people. When you vote, don’t vote for anyone who doesn’t have reducing nuclear risk as part of their platform. 
Helen Sightler
Hi, I’m Helen Sightler. I have a quick comment and then a question. I want to come back to my question about the economic point that you started with, because I think that is what opens the door to moving on this issue. My comment has to do with the way you’re putting the lying of the government and all the sort of deception that we have grown up with in terms of our history, American history.

I find that it’s a barrier, I guess, that hearing that message is a barrier to what follows. The reason I think it’s a barrier, and I might frame it differently, I don’t have great words right at the moment for doing that, but it’s because it’s not like there were good guys on the other side either. Part of that Cold War mentality was understanding Stalin, what he did, and his intentions for the populations around Russia that became the Soviet Union. People who lived under Russian rule, basically, suffered greatly during this Cold War period. There was some legitimacy in U.S. concern about Russian expansionism.

I’m not trying to defend us and the deeper analysis you’ve produced, but I think that you’ve got to give us a little room for not feeling like we’ve been kicked like a bunch of dead dogs or something by our government.

Paul Jay
Well.

Helen Sightler
Because, as I said, it’s not like there were good guys on the other side, and just internationally, if you look at a lot of conflicts, you have very similar real, genuine divisions where there are problems on both sides that meet criticism. So give us a little optimism, room to stand on, or some reason to be, “Okay, that was the culture, that was the time, and there were reasons that people believed those things.” Again, I’m not denying the chicanery of the government. I just wanted to [crosstalk 00:45:31]- 

Paul Jay
Yeah. No, it’s an important point. Dan answers that point the best.

Helen Sightler
Yes, okay. So my question comes back-

Paul Jay
Can I deal with that first? Because Dan answers that really well.

Helen Sightler
Well, let me get my other point out, and then you can, so I can sit down here. On an economics point, my question really is, are there academic hotspots in the U.S., I’m sure there are internationally, where people can connect on these issues that are seeing the same kind of grip that corporations in their support structure have on the American economy and other economies as well? Our representative, if you live in North Hampton anyway, has put legislation out to Congress about nuclear war. So, that’s one person I know of, Jim McGovern, who’s clear on this issue, and who is he connected to? Is there some way to connect the folks who are already knowledgeable about this and build a communications platform?

Paul Jay
Well, let me do the first one first.

Helen Sightler
Sorry?

Paul Jay
Let me respond to your first one, then the second one. Dan said it very well. He believed the Soviet Union was Hitler with a nuclear bomb, as Chris said. He came to understand that it wasn’t true. The Soviet Union, and Dan said it, and I mean, everybody says it, who knows, has a very repressive state. We can go into why and how that happened, but it was not a military expansionist state after Yalta. More or less, the Yalta Agreement did almost nothing outside of what it was the Yalta Agreement. It’s very exaggerated that this is just the Red Army conquering these countries.

Most of these countries’ partisan, antifascist movements were led by communists. There was a lot of popular support early for becoming part of the Soviet Union. Now, later, they started to realize what a police state the Soviet state had become. Resistance grew, and also, as the years went by, they started milking the various Soviet Republics, this bullshit division of labor, and so on and so on. Dan came to know, and it’s irrefutable based on searches of the Soviet archives, year after year of CIA analysis telling the American leadership, there is no Soviet military threat.

So what was the threat? One of the things we’ve just discovered… How do I tell this quickly? Well, if someone wants a follow-up, I can dig into this. But the Council on Foreign Relations, which is a Rockefeller institution, meaning Standard Oil, actually was planning the post-World War II world all through World War II, working in a secret committee with the State Department, all verified in the archives of the CFR.

The fundamental plan was, how do you stop any other country from joining the Soviet sphere? That was the big objective. How do you develop a financial architecture based on supposedly free markets, the U.S. dollar, and so on? So they were planning the world during World War II. By ’42, ’43, they knew they were going to have the atomic bomb, which was going to be the thing that allowed America to determine what the world would be. They’re planning the financial architecture for markets open to American capital and so on.

So, the critical thing was, don’t allow other countries to join the Soviet sphere. But the great threat wasn’t Soviet expansion or Soviet military expansion, and the proof of that is the Vietnam War. Everybody who knows anything about Vietnam knows the Vietnamese National Liberation Movement was not a puppet of the Soviet Union. Ho Chi Minh was not. They were fighting the French, then they fought the Americans, and they were always an independent National Liberation Movement. Yes, they got arms from the Soviets and the Chinese.

It was never a story of Soviet expansionism. Yet America goes to war and not only kills, what, close to 3 million people, and what is it, 55,000 American soldiers or so on. Why? When it’s not about Soviet expansionism, then what was it about? Keeping Vietnam out of a socialist sphere.

The domino theory that sometimes people scoff at. It was a real theory. They were so afraid that the National Liberation Movement of Vietnam would inspire the same thing all over Africa, all over Asia, all over Latin America. All these National Liberation movements would gravitate towards Socialism. That was the enemy.

So we need to explain this to people, and how do I know the Soviet Union didn’t have a plan to invade Western Europe and militarily expand? Because the CIA said so, and since then, the Soviet Archive says so. Some of the most passionate anti-communist writers who have gone through the Soviet Archives cannot find anything about a plan to invade anywhere. The closest they got was Afghanistan, and by that time, it’s not Stalin anyway.

I can go on more, but the other big piece of this is, this isn’t America as the evil Empire, as opposed to the Soviets as the evil Empire. The whole thing about evil is full of shit. There is no evil. This whole thing about good and evil is bullshit.

It’s funny. Kirk’s wife just did this, where she said, “I forgive my enemies.” I’m glad she did it. I hope she means it. But what does love your enemy mean? To me, I’ll tell you what it means. Because I don’t hate Hitler. I’m Jewish. I don’t hate any of these things. I don’t love them, but I don’t hate him because it’s part of a historical process. If you understand that we are in this moment, just part of a river of history that got us here, and we’re not out of the river. We’re in that river of history. Every moment that brought us here is still actively shaping today.

So we don’t get that, and the problem is, and I’m not talking about Chris because he’s one of the exceptions. The way they teach history in schools is shit. They don’t start from what’s happening today and go backwards and say, “How did we get here?” They teach history like everything’s in a museum. “Oh, let’s learn about the Battle of Hastings.” Why? Who gives a shit? It actually may matter too today, but if you don’t connect it to today, I don’t need to memorize what the Battle of Hastings was, which is why I gave up on high school.

I’m not trying to say Americans are evil. Through historical, random geographical reasons, the U.S. became dominant. I’m Canadian. If Canada could have been the superpower, they would have jumped at it. They wouldn’t have been any different. It’s just that those aren’t the cards Canada got. So this isn’t about anything evil, bad about the United States. There’s a global system at play here, and the way history developed, it’s managed, led, and dominated by the United States. Who knows, in 50 years, maybe it’ll be China. I don’t think they’ll be any better the way things are going. Right now, China is not as aggressive as the United States is, but it doesn’t mean systemically, they may not become that.

Now, what’s going on in Russia is extremely toxic, and there are internal reasons for it and external, the expansion of NATO, but that doesn’t explain everything. Anyway, I’m not trying to vilify. I want people to understand systemically because that’s where the solutions are to be found. In terms of your second question on the money, I forgot what it was.

Christian Appy
Can I do a quick stab at that one? Because I’d like to get to some more questions.

Paul Jay
Yeah, please do.

Christian Appy
Economic hotspots where these issues are coming together. I would do searches under the phrase Just Transition. Last fall, we had a program about that featuring UMass Economist Bob Pollin and some others, and what the phrase means is, how do we make a just transition from an economy based on fossil fuels in a militarized economy to one that is essentially a green economy? That could require the larger structural transformations that Eric was talking about earlier. But that kind of thinking is going on in a lot of places by different kinds of thinkers and activists. So I would just have that phrase in mind and dig in there.

Paul Jay
We’ll deal with this in the film as best we can. It goes back to the earlier question, if I’m remembering this question. You can’t separate the nuclear issue, the question of inequality, and the question of climate. What was the objective of the Cold War? What was the whole point? Well, there’s a domestic objective and a global objective. The global was to assert U.S. power, finances, dollar, and so on and so forth.

What’s the domestic objective? The same Cold War ideology. Get all the progressives out of the unions. Get people on the Left fired. What are they talking about now? Kirk gets assassinated. The next day, Trump says, “We’re going after the entire Left architecture.” They’re going to go after 501(c)(3)s and universities. We’re right back in McCarthyism. Because the Cold War domestic agenda was to weaken workers’ organizing, weaken workers’ fight for higher wages, and weaken unions. Use the Red Scare to purge Hollywood and purge the government. Squash anybody with any shred of class consciousness. That was the domestic agenda.

The global agenda was to expand finance, expand the American Empire, and so on. You can’t separate inequality. You can’t separate why people can’t afford rent. It’s the same. We’re dealing with a systemic thing, and the Cold War ideology, it’s just “Listen to Donald Trump.” It’s word-for-word what we heard in the ’50s.

Vicky Elson
Hi. My name is Vicky Elson. I’m a double below of UMass, proud to say. I want to thank you for raising awareness on this incredibly important issue. I want to congratulate you on getting Emma Thompson on board. This is fantastic. I agree with you that we have to wake up to this danger. I couldn’t agree more. I agree we need to understand the history and the lies. We need to combine climate, nuclear weapons, inequality, and all the other issues. They all share the same cause, which is called greed and corruption. I hardly agree with you about that. I agree there’s no such thing as good or evil. I agree that if we have nuclear weapons, though, it’s game over for everything. So, that is extremely urgent.

What concerns me is the focus on risk reduction as compared to total abolition. The steps that are in the film are listed out there; you’re like, “Yeah, take the president’s finger off the button.” Great. Especially the current president. But anybody in any country that has a button shouldn’t have one person’s finger on the button without any checks and balances. I mean, that makes sense, but that doesn’t get rid of nuclear weapons. Or you can say no first use. Tell the U.S. not to start a nuclear war; that’s great, but that does not solve the problem.

The problem is the existence of even one nuclear weapon, which one nuclear weapon could fill every burn bed on the planet and overwhelm the entire Red Cross, Red Crescent. One bomb is too many, and if we wait for one bomb for people to wake up, I shudder to think. I think it really might be too late.

So I’ve been working on this stuff about as long as you have. When I started, I thought those steps then were really good until I realized that, no, they actually allow the status quo to continue. If we try to make it safer, then it can keep going and going. If we want to stop it completely, we’re going to have to think bigger than risk reduction. We’re going to have to look at nuclear abolition.

Luckily, we have the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which I hope you will address because it seems to be the biggest hope we have. Our country is so blind to the anti-nuclear movement globally, but it’s huge. We’re expecting Kyrgyzstan to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons this week, which means half the world is committed to the total and complete abolition of everything you do with nuclear weapons, including financing them.

So, a thing that I struggle with a lot is how to balance hope and fear because if people just have fear, they’re going to crawl under the bed, and they’re not going to want to do anything. I think that’s a big part of the denial problem, too. I want to crawl under the bed. I get it, but we have to balance that with hope. If you have only hope, then people think you’re just pie in the sky and you’re unrealistic. I think setting the bar at only risk reduction is it might seem easier. It’s probably actually not. None of this is easy, or we would have done it already. But setting the bar any lower than total abolition is I think abolition is what we need to survive. I think we need to demand the very thing we need. If we set the bar lower, then we’re going to get negotiated away. If you start your bidding too low, you’re going to get ripped off.

That’s what I wanted to say. I wanted to acknowledge the people in the room who are part of the Warheads to Windmills Coalition, other organizations that are working in an interdisciplinary way, working with politicians, working with profiteers, and also getting out the vote. Also, crucially, all these things are important. I just really want to thank you for your piece of this. I hope that your film can help to build a mass movement that we would like to have. We’re going to have to solve this problem with or without one, or we won’t be here, but I would love it if your film contributed to a mass movement, mass awareness, hope, and setting the bar high on the solutions and not just hoping that we can continue staggering along as we have been. So thank you again so much.

Paul Jay
Thank you.

Christian Appy
We’re getting down toward the end, so maybe just a brief final.

Paul Jay
Now I remember what you asked me. I’ll jump to the end, and then I’ll deal with the first part of what you said. We’re not just doing a film. We’re going to create a website. First of all, all our interviews with Dan and everyone else, which is over 100 leading experts, activists, and so on, they’re all going to be in full on the website. We’re going to have links to every organization working on the nuclear issue, whether they’re for abolition or for risk reduction. We’re going to have a section of the website that says, What can I do? You can go there, and you can find all the organizations.

We’re going to have a version of the film on the website, which every time we say something like what I’ve been saying here, there’s going to be a QR code or a link, but a QR code that will take you to our research, and you’ll know why we say what we say, because we’re being very careful. Everything we say is going to be verified, but every single thing has a deep rabbit hole to go down, and the website will have the rabbit holes. But most importantly, it will be a hub for all kinds of organizations to share research, share information, and for people to find those organizations if they want to work with them. So we’re not creating a new organization, but we do want to create a hub.

On the question of abolition, I’m an Ellsbergian on this issue. Dan was muted, and I will be to some extent, too. He didn’t critique the Treaty, but he did point out that there’s not a single nuclear country that has signed. Not only that, there’s not a single NATO country that can sign because NATO is nuclear. It is a very good aspiration, but I believe, and so did Dan, that if you get to a world where you can get to that kind of agreement, you’re in a different world, and I would love to get there.

But there’s a problem here, and this is just one piece of the problem. Neither Russia nor China is going to sign an agreement to abolish nuclear weapons as long as the Americans have conventional superiority. So abolition is far more than abolition. You were talking about a massive cut to the American military budget, a complete withdrawal from Europe militarily. You’re talking about closing bases. This isn’t just about, “Oh, let’s abolish.” Because if you’re Russia and you’re going to get crushed through conventional war, how do you give up your nuke? And the same thing with China. I mean, China is developing now such a conventional force, they can maybe, likely win a Taiwan fight without nukes. Okay, maybe.

The problem is that the United States wants what they call all spectrum dominance. It’s their language, not mine. In space, in cyber, on the seas, on land, you name it, including wanting nuclear supremacy. As long as there’s that, but especially conventional, if you want, how does Russia say… “The only way we can stop conventional forces,” the Russians will say, and they’re not wrong, “is because we have nukes.” You can see them threatening it in Ukraine.

So I think, and I’ve said this to leaders of ICAN and other people, let’s agree to disagree, because I think it’s great, calling for the abolishing of nuclear weapons. It educates people about the danger, and I would never suggest that someone shouldn’t do it. But I think we have to advocate a systemic understanding and deal with some of the most urgent issues. We cannot put off getting rid of ICBMs and launch on warning, don’t build the Iron Dome, and get rid of any capacity for a first strike.

People don’t get how destabilizing an anti-ballistic missile system is. It sounds great. “Oh, shit. We’ll be defended.” Well, first of all, it can’t work. I was saying before, my joke about it is, “It’s not about the dome, it’s about the gold.” It’s a big boondoggle. But because of AI, it’s Star Wars with AI. We don’t actually know whether it might work somewhat because of AI?

They’ve been saying an anti-ballistic missile system is like hitting a bullet with a bullet, and they’ve never been able to do it. Every test fails, but maybe AI could hit a bullet with a bullet. Maybe. It starts to tip the balance. Now, the problem is, even if AI can hit a bullet with a bullet, it can’t distinguish between a bullet and the bullshit, because there’s no such thing as an ICBM coming in, and it’s just a missile. What comes in is a missile surrounded by decoys. So the whole thing is nonsense.

There’s only one way it might work. That is, AI says something’s coming, and we may not know what a bullet and the decoy are, but guess what? Why don’t we nuke it in space, and we’ll knock everything out, including all the satellites? In other words, the only way the Golden Dome works is nuclear war in space. That’s where they’re going. So we’ve got to alarm. People have got to know this. So I’m all for abolishing, but right now, between launch on warning and ICBMs, and even more dangerous in some ways, although it’s hard to compare, but this Golden Dome plan is beyond… We’re already insane, so I don’t even know what the words are for it. Anyway, so I encourage you, fight for abolition, but we’re going to do both.

Christian Appy
Thank you, Paul. Thank you all for coming out.

Paul Jay
Can I say something?

Christian Appy
You want to say something?

Paul Jay
All right, so this up here is a way to get on our email list. So you do the QR, it takes you to a website if you want to keep track of what’s happening with the film. If you actually want to do something to help us get the film out, get on the list and in the email, let us know you’d like to help. At some point, I’m hoping we can actually have a chapter here at the university so people who want to help get the film out will stay in the loop. So, if you’re interested, that’s that. Other than that, thanks so much.

Christian Appy
Thanks