We Could Lose Two Hundred Million People [in a Nuclear War]

Written on February 18th, 2017 in politics Comments Off

… and still have more than we had at the Time of the Civil War, the Air Force chief of staff told the Joint Chiefs at a September 1971 meeting. – Published on The National Security Archive NSA, Electronic Briefing Book No. 580, by William Burr, Feb 15, 2017.

  • Declassified Diary Excerpt and Other Records of Ex-JCS Chairman Moorer Detail Highest-Level Military Deliberations, Including with White House;
  • JCS Minutes, Once Thought Entirely Destroyed, Partially Preserved in Moorer Records at U.S. National Archives

… The record of the JCS meeting can be found in recently declassified diaries of Admiral Thomas Moorer, who served as JCS chairman during 1970 through 1974. During the late 1970s, the Chiefs destroyed their entire collection of minutes going back to 1947; apparently the only surviving JCS meeting records were those kept by Moorer.

The Moorer diaries capture the policy issues of the day as well as the sometimes difficult relations among senior officials. In September 1971, with bad weather threatening a bombing operation in North Vietnam ordered by President Nixon, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird told Moorer about a recent telephone conversation with a nearly apoplectic National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who “damn near went through the roof” saying that “you people over there don’t you have an Air Force … Can’t you even send a message in the name of the President?”

Another issue that surfaced was a flap over the Shah of Iran’s efforts to recruit Lt. General Hamilton A. Twitchell, who was leaving his role as chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Iran, to work for the Iranian military as a consultant on military purchases. Laird, Moorer, and others thought that Twitchell taking that role would be “bad.” Laird saw it as an “unconstitutional conflict of interest” while Warren Nutter, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, said that it would set a “terrible precedent” with all the “Shahs, Sheiks and Kings around … hiring the MAAG chiefs as they leave or retire … //

… The stated reasons for destroying the minutes, the subjectivity of the records, was plainly specious. Perhaps the JCS didn’t want disconcerting comments, such as General Ryan’s, exposed to the light of day. Congress was then in the processing of strengthening the Freedom of Information Act, which it accomplished in October 1974 when it overrode President Ford’s veto of FOIA reform legislation. Perhaps the Chiefs got wind of the FOIA developments and wanted the minutes destroyed as a precautionary move. Whatever the motives were, the decision meant the loss of nearly 40 years of historical records, which would have covered significant developments from the Berlin blockade and the Korean War to the Taiwan Strait crises of the 1950s and the escalation of the Vietnam War. All that was left were excerpts from minutes on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

That the JCS minutes are interspersed among the Moorer diaries may have spared them from vandalism. As the Moorer collection is large and will take some years to process fully, only when that is complete will it be clear whether the diaries include minutes for all meetings during his time in office.

(full long text, documents 1 – 12, Acronyms and Abbreviations, notes, photos).

Links:

Pakistan under threat from Islamic State – Envoy to US, on The Asian Age, India, Feb 17, 2017: ISIS cannot establish a base in Pakistan as the nation is united when it comes to opposing terrorism, said Aizaz Chaudhry;

Economic Update: Real Economic Journalism, 54.10 min, uploaded by Democracy At Work, with Richard D. Wolff on Feb 16, 2017 … stock market bounce, Swiss voters stop corporate tax giveaway, why public are better than private schools, billionaires party;

The Indiana Democratic Party is Dead, on Z Commentaries, by Vincent Emanuele, Feb 16, 2017;

Brexit: an unorthodox view - Yanis Varoufakis, Srecko Horvat, Elif Shafak FULL, 89.21 min, uploaded by DiEM25.official, Feb 14, 2017 … Srecko Horvat, a Croat philosopher, Elif Shafak, renowned Turkish novelist, and Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, bring to this conversation an intriguing perspective. As intellectuals who know Britain well, they understand first hand the perils of nationalism, disintegration, isolationism and marginalisation. They place post-Brexit Britain in a context informed by a view of Europe and Britain from the continent’s opposite ‘corner’, sharing insights from Greece’s tensions with Brussels and Berlin, Yugoslavia’s disintegration, and Turkey’s fraught relationship with a Europe that both courts and marginalises it;

related – Money as Dept: different videos as documents explaining the matter AND the Film on YouTube-search;

Capitalism and Crisis: the Irish water insurgency, no more blood from these stones, on ROARmag, by Andrea Muehlenbach, Feb 6, 2017;

Off-Grid tiny house truck made from recycled materials, 11.58 min, uploaded by Happen Films, Aug 21, 2016;

… and this:

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