Now it can be told

Deployed in vastly exaggerated numbers, nuclear weapons were maintained in place not just by secrecy, but by banalities and lies. The atomic bomb has been, from the very beginning, both extraordinarily public and secret. Everyone knew about what was regarded as a momentous development in human history. It kept many clichés in circulation for decades — humanity as scientific giants and ethical infants; the desire for international control; the idea of moral scientists who did, or should, reject the sweet blandishments of the bomb. At the same time, insiders knew and did things which were the deepest and most troubling secrets of the deep state. For those few in the know, and assiduous critics, there was a huge mismatch between rhetoric and reality.

Sir Rodric Braithwaite and Daniel Ellsberg, both in their late eighties, were once insiders. Both were the products of first-class education (Ellsberg was a member of the super-elite — the Harvard Society of Fellows), and both served as military officers in the 1950s before taking up elite careers — Braithwaite in the British diplomatic service, ending up as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee; Ellsberg among the economic theorists in the RAND corporation, as one of the ‘wizards of Armageddon’.

Ellsberg became famous in the early 1970s as the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, a huge internal report on the failing war in Vietnam. He did not go to prison because the US government acted illegally to discredit him, actions which were of a piece with the Watergate break-in. Both men have now written compelling books which are deeply critical of their peers and the system they worked for, one with British understatement, the other with ruthless limpidity.

Ellsberg’s main work from the late 1950s onwards concerned nuclear strategy.