A robber decides to do something big to lay a claim to his turf. He goes to two bars owned by a rival with an AR-15 and not only robs the bars, but kills scores of customers. 

Over the years, the gangster goes around to more than 20 other bars carrying his AR-15. He merely has to point his weapon to make people hand over the money. While he hasn’t had to spray the bars with gunfire, he has certainly used both the gun and his “rep” to carry out his crimes. 

As the gangster gets older, new rivals come up to challenge him. The gangster moves to put them in their place. He takes an even more powerful gun with him. But these rivals are desperate as well—and the question arises:

What happens the next time? Will the rivals again give in? Or will there be an all-out fight?

*****

How many times has the U.S. threatened to use nuclear weapons in the time since it actually did drop two atomic bombs on Japan in World War 2? Once? Twice? Five times? The U.S. has kept the actual number—and the threats it has made—a deep state secret. 

In his book, The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg¹ wrote about his work in the 1950s and 1960s inside the U.S. nuclear war planning apparatus. Ellsberg broke with that and devoted the rest of his life to eliminating nuclear weapons and other horrors.² In his decades of study, Ellsberg unearthed evidence that the United States has threatened to use nuclear weapons more than 25 times in the period since WW 2. 

Ellsberg made the point: if you have a gun, which is loaded, and you are in a confrontation with someone and you point the gun at them, you are using the gun—even if you don’t end up shooting it. 

Ellsberg detailed how the U.S. did this over and over again with nuclear weapons—for many decades—starting with actually dropping two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of WW2. 

• In the early 1950s, during the U.S.-led war in Korea in 1950-53, U.S. President Harry Truman threatened nuclear attack against socialist China, which was defeating the U.S. military for a time during the Korean War.³ 
• In 1954-55, there was a secret agreement at the highest level of the U.S. government to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, against revolutionary China in what was known as the Quemoy crisis. This was communicated to China. 
• During the U.S. war in Vietnam, the U.S. repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons against the forces fighting for national liberation in Vietnam. Ellsberg reports on a conversation with a member of the North Vietnamese delegation to peace talks to end the Vietnam war, who reported that the U.S. had threatened to use nuclear weapons against Vietnam 13 times, none of them publicly known at the time. (And Ellsberg counts the 13 threats against Vietnam as only one of the 25 times that the U.S. has threatened the use of these weapons that could destroy humanity.)
• The U.S. threatened the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons many times over decades. One example: the U.S. issued explicit, secret nuclear warnings to the Soviet Union, telling it to stay out of Iran in 1980 (there was a Soviet military buildup on its border with Iran). 
• The George H. W. Bush administration issued formal nuclear threats against Iraq in 1991.⁴

Ellsberg also shows how the U.S. threatened the use of nuclear weapons in many other crises. And we see this right up to the war in Ukraine in the present day. In 2022, Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine were all over the news, repeatedly, and these threats were themselves a crime. But barely covered at all was the fact that in response, the U.S. rushed upgraded nuclear bombs to Europe⁵—a form of threat to use them. 

What Happens When Someone Calls the Bet?

As we noted in our opening parable—the threat to use nuclear weapons, even so-called tactical nuclear weapons,⁶ risks that those being threatened—or their allies—will refuse to back down. Instead, they will themselves choose to “get the jump” and respond with nuclear weapons, which could escalate into all-out nuclear war. 

Yet this is what the U.S. has done, 25 times. Think about that the next time they label someone else “a monster.” 

Ellsberg further pointed out that every U.S. president since Harry Truman, who ordered the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in WW 2, has carried out the policy of being willing to initiate first use of nuclear weapons.⁷ And every U.S. president since Truman has continued to uphold the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed over two hundred thousand people, overwhelmingly civilians.

“All Options Are on the Table”—A Monstrous Phrase Used by Monsters

When the U.S. was threatening to attack Iran when George W. Bush was president, and Bush was asked about using nuclear weapons against Iran, he responded that “all options are on the table”—an explicit threat that the U.S. might strike Iran with nuclear weapons. Ellsberg commented that shortly after, in the 2008 presidential campaign, this same phrase was used by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Rudolph Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and other lesser-known candidates. These repeated statements were in and of themselves a criminal nuclear threat to Iran—and they also reveal that one of the requirements to be a U.S. president is to be willing and able to issue that threat—and to make that threat real.

This is a time when all these monsters—in the U.S., China, Russia, western Europe, etc.—are “modernizing” and expanding their nuclear arsenals, practicing nuclear war games and, in the case of the U.S. and Russia, actually participating in a war carrying the grave threat of “going nuclear.” At such a time, the alarm has to be much more loudly sounded and the only solution to this madness—revolution, here and all over the world—much more powerfully fought for. 

Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, Finally Abolishing War, and Systematically Addressing the Environmental Crisis