Daniel Ellsberg’s List of 25 Nuclear Crises from George W. Bush to Donald Trump

1. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 1945 (with the threat and readiness
to drop more until the Japanese surrendered).
2. Truman’s deployment of B-29s,270 officially described as “atomic capable,” to bases in Britain and Germany at the outset of the Berlin
blockade, June 1948 (critical, in the eyes of the administration, to
Soviet failure to challenge the blockade in the air).
3. Truman’s press conference warning that atomic weapons were under
active consideration (as they actually were), November 30, 1950, for
Korea after China entered the war.
4. Eisenhower’s secret nuclear threats271 against China to force and
maintain a settlement in Korea in 1953.
5. Secretary of State Dulles’s secret offers272 to French foreign minister
Bidault of two (possibly three) tactical nuclear weapons in 1954 to
relieve the French troops besieged by the Indochinese at Dien Bien
Phu.
6. Internal agreement under Eisenhower and Dulles273 during the first
Quemoy crisis of September 1954–April 1955 that nuclear weapons
would be necessary as a last resort to defend the offshore islands of
Quemoy and Matsu, communicated to the Chinese by numerous
statements and moves that led, in Dulles’s opinion, to the negotiated
resolution of the crisis.
7. “Diplomatic use of the Bomb”274 (Nixon’s description) to deter
Soviet unilateral action against the British and French in the Suez
crisis of 1956.
8. Eisenhower’s secret directive to the Joint Chiefs during the Lebanon
crisis in 1958 to prepare to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, to
prevent an Iraqi move into the oil fields of Kuwait.275
9. Eisenhower’s secret directive to the Joint Chiefs in 1958 to plan to
use nuclear weapons against China276 if the Chinese Communists
attempted to invade Quemoy.
10. The 1958–59 Berlin crisis.277
11. The 1961–62 Berlin crisis.278
12. The Cuban missile crisis, 1962.279
13. Numerous “shows of nuclear force”280 involving demonstrative
deployments or alerts—deliberately visible to adversaries and
intended as a “nuclear signal”—of forces with a designated role in
U.S. plans for strategic nuclear war.
14. Much public discussion in newspapers and in the Senate of (correct)
reports that President Johnson had been advised by the JCS of the
possible necessity of nuclear weapons to defend Marines surrounded
at Khe Sanh, Vietnam, 1968.281†
15. Secret threats by Nixon officials to deter Soviet attack on Chinese
nuclear capability,282 1969–70.
16. Nixon’s secret threats of massive escalation,283 including the possible
use of nuclear weapons, conveyed to the North Vietnamese by Henry
Kissinger, 1969–72.
17. Threats and nuclear-capable naval deployment in 1971 to deter
(according to Nixon) a Soviet response to possible Chinese
intervention against India in the Indo-Pakistani war, but possibly
also, or mainly, to deter India from further military pressure284 on
Pakistan.
18. Nixon’s NSC put SAC on high alert in October 1973285 to deter the
Soviets from intervening unilaterally with ground forces to separate
the combatants in the Arab-Israeli war, by underscoring U.S. threats
to oppose them by force and expressing U.S. willingness to risk
escalation to all-out nuclear war.
19. President Ford placed nuclear weapons on DEFCON 3286 alert on
August 19, 1976, in response to the “tree-trimming incident,” a fatal
skirmish in the demilitarized zone; with a U.S. show of force
threatening possible use of nuclear weapons, including flying B-52
bombers “from Guam ominously north up the Yellow Sea on a
vector directly to … Pyongyang.”
20. “The Carter Doctrine on the Middle East,”287 January 1980, as
explained (below) by Defense Secretary Harold Brown, Assistant
Secretary of State William Dyess, and other spokesmen.
21. Serious White House and JCS consideration, in August 1980,288 of
the possible imminent use of tactical nuclear weapons if a secret
Soviet buildup on the Iranian border led to a Soviet invasion of Iran,
followed by the expression of explicit, secret nuclear warnings to the
Soviet Union (a hidden episode, spelled out in a professional
military journal and by articles in the New York Times, that remains
virtually unknown to the U.S. public and even scholars, though
presidential press secretary Jody Powell was quoted as describing it
as “the most serious nuclear crisis since the Cuban missile crisis”).†
22. The Carter Doctrine reaffirmed in essence,289 including its nuclear
component, by President Reagan in January 1981.
23. Formal threats by the George H. W. Bush administration290 of
possible U.S. nuclear response to various possible “unconscionable
actions” by Iraq in Operation Desert Storm in January 1991.
24. Explicit, secret threats by the Clinton administration291 of nuclear use
against North Korea in 1995 on its nuclear reactor program
(following the near-launch of an American conventional attack in
1994).†
25. Public warning of a nuclear option by Clinton’s secretary of
defense292 William Perry against Libya’s Tarhuna underground
chemical weapons facility in 1996.†