An Ordinary Insanity

Last week, I was invited to watch the Zoom premiere of An Ordinary Insanity, a documentary featuring Pentagon Papers whistleblower and nuclear activist Daniel Ellsberg. He remains just as compelling in this short film as he was when I met and was arrested with him and more than 130 veterans at a White House antiwar protest in 2010.

In this 29-minute documentary, former RAND Corporation nuclear planner and The Doomsday Machine author Daniel Ellsberg delivers a stark warning about the global threat of nuclear weapons and argues that humanity must reduce the immediate risk of nuclear winter and total annihilation.

Ellsberg’s opening commentary alone should be enough to shake us awake.

You can’t have a large nuclear war of the kind we’ve prepared for and spent trillions of dollars preparing for where the victims in that war would be limited to the adversaries or to any particular group of adversaries.

Words do not exist in human language to describe that sort of decision or that sort of machinery. There is no possibility to limit damage any more than there is a possibility to win nuclear war.

A threat and a readiness and a preparation and a rehearsal of causing nuclear winter and destroying most large life on Earth. That is insane and you have to call it a kind of ordinary insanity because it’s so widely shared.

What can we do now, what must change? How should we respond to today’s largely self-inflicted polycrisis?

In 2023, NY City Emergency Management released a public service announcement to inform New Yorkers of steps to survive a nuclear attack: get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned. While this 90-sec spot is funnier than recent SNL skits, it is no more useful than the 1951 Drop and Cover’s Bert the Turtle cartoon. Then as now, most Americans didn’t realize both campaigns were meant to sanitize the use of nuclear weapons and foster complacency for a new or ongoing status quo by shaping and controlling public perceptions of US war-making.

Many of us are waking each day - if we sleep at all - to potential nuclear flashpoints, conflicts within a thousand miles of each other, with consequences largely ignored by corporate media. For everyone else, the status quo remains contained and easy to ignore. National media narratives and disinformation often leave little room to confront or even acknowledge the existential danger of nuclear war.

Author Annie Jacobson’s narrative non-fiction, Nuclear War: A Scenario, details the time-line and rapid descent of humanity within minutes of a first strike by an unknown adversary - in UN Secretary-General Guterres’s words “one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation." Jacobson recently described the aftermath online.

In 1985, Stanford professor Martin Hellman wrote On the Inevitability and Prevention of Nuclear War,

Few people understand the full magnitude of the threat. Even fewer understand that new technology, new politicians, or new laws, by themselves, will not remove the threat. Those who do understand are desperately needed to speak out clearly, forcefully, and in a spirit of goodwill. Only then will an environment be created in which the required societal change can begin. And only then will we ensure a meaningful future for the generations to come.

In 2023, shortly before his death, Daniel Ellsberg spoke with Hellman, his friend of more than 40 years. During this Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists interview, Ellsberg spoke of his father and a remark he made to him about a nation with a nuclear arsenal and the capability of ending life on Earth. At that time, oddly enough, Ellsberg insisted nuclear-deterrent capable arsenals would make it more likely to avoid such a cataclysm.

“Yes, but there is a moral cost to having this capability at all. It’s not just a matter of a risk and a cost of blowing the world up. There is a moral cost in telling yourself and teaching your children that there are circumstances that would justify killing everything and therefore that would justify having this capability.”

In his harrowing 2017 memoir, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Daniel Ellsberg echoed his father’s sentiment. Summing up the preparations for nuclear war. Daniel wrote:

No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.

As fighting intensifies in Russia and Ukraine and civilian casualties mount, and as explosions hit Tehran during renewed Israeli attacks on Iran, I’m finding it increasingly more challenging to share Daniel Ellsberg’s underlying optimism. Still, I choose to act as if a global normalcy can be restored and near-term extinction avoided. With the time we may have left, do I have a choice?

Nearly half of Americans expect a nuclear war within a decade. Can anyone blame them?

The documentary premier panel members, which included director Judith Ehrlich and Patricia Ellsberg, shared valuable insight following the documentary screening. View the Q & A here.

June 10, 2026

According to new research released today by ICAN, in 2025, the nine nuclear-armed states spent $16.8 billion (19%) more on their nuclear arsenals than the year before, a total of $119 billion, or $3,768 per second on nuclear weapons.