The Lawyers Guild Show – Paul Jay

Jim Lafferty
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Maria Hall
Well, good afternoon, friends. This is Maria Hall, welcoming you to this week's edition of The Lawyers' Guild Show. My friend and co-host, Jim Lafferty, is out today, but he will be back with us next week. In the meantime, we've got a great show lined up for you today. In our first half hour, we'll speak with award-winning journalist and filmmaker, Paul Jay, about his upcoming film, How to Stop a Nuclear War, based on extensive interviews with Daniel Ellsberg and narrated by Emma Thompson.

Last week, you may have seen the news: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock forward to 85 seconds to midnight, predicting the closest humanity has ever come to global catastrophe. In 1947, the Bulletin created the clock as a metaphor to warn of our human potential to destroy life on Earth. Just two years earlier, in 1945, the world saw what nuclear annihilation looked like firsthand when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As World War II ended, a new conflict was born, the Cold War. For the next 40 years or so, the U.S. competed with the Soviet Union for nuclear dominance, not just through military strategy, but also through propaganda and retaliating against critics on the home front. Now, people of conscience, like Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, sounded the alarm. He and others warned that there is no way to win a nuclear war. If one side launches, the other side would inevitably respond, leading to mutual destruction.

Now, many people believe the Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but others, like our next guest, argue the Cold War continues to this day. After all, the U.S. and eight other nations continue to stockpile nuclear weapons, including Russia, China, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, France, the United Kingdom, and North Korea. So the real question is, do we have a path to avoid global destruction? And if so, is there the political will to do so?

To help us explore these questions, our guest for this segment is Paul Jay, award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and founder of theAnalysis.news. Jay has spent decades investigating the inner workings of government, corporate power, and military policy, combining investigative rigor with the storyteller's clarity, which you're about to hear. He's currently working on a new documentary to be released in the fall of 2027 called How to Stop a Nuclear War. It's based on extensive interviews with Daniel Ellsberg and narrated by Emma Thompson. The film examines how close humanity has come to nuclear catastrophe in the past and why Ellsberg's warnings remain urgently relevant today. Paul Jay, welcome to The Lawyers' Guild Show.

Paul Jay
Thanks very much. It's particularly welcome to be here on this show because Michael Ratner, one of the founders, I believe, was a very good friend and helped me a lot in my earlier work.

Maria Hall
Amazing. Yeah, he is an amazing human being. Well, let's get started with current events. Since listeners may not be familiar with Donald Trump's nuclear policy, since there's so much other news out there, can you just break it down for us? What is the administration's approach to nuclear weapons? And talk about both offensively and defensively.

Paul Jay
Well, I guess you could say Trump's basic approach, which is somewhat his approach with other things, can be reduced to one word: more. Because most of everything to do with nuclear weapons is a boondoggle. It's a cash cow, and as with everything to do with Trump, if it's about cash, then it's about more. So Biden increased the nuclear weapons budget by about 20%. Trump has now increased the nuclear budget by around another 25%. So it's not like Trump is unique in buying into this boondoggle, but like I say, more.

What Trump is contributing, you could say, is new, because a lot of this was already baked in. The modernization of American nuclear weapons actually began under Obama. That program was more or less planned to be about a trillion dollars over something like 20 years or so. Now it's down to something like a trillion dollars over 10 years. That's just for the nuke part. But what Trump is contributing is the Golden Dome, which is the latest version of an anti-ballistic missile system boondoggle. I don't know if people have heard me before. I always say it's not about the dome, it's about the gold.

But this is not the first time. This is just the latest variation on the fantasy of anti-ballistic missile systems. It goes back as far as the mid '50s, a program called SAGE, S-A-G-E, which is a radar system with BOMARC missiles that were supposed to knock down Soviet bombers. This was under the whole big lie of the bomber gap, which claimed that the Soviets had way more, like a 10 to one or even 20 to one advantage in bombers. It turned out there was a bomber gap, but it was the other way around. The Americans had far more bombers.

SAGE, almost no one has heard of. SAGE actually costs three times more than the Manhattan Project, which, up until that time, was the biggest industrial program in American history, and SAGE was three times that. Now, why has nobody heard of SAGE? Almost none, unless you're in [inaudible 00:07:20]. I mean, I've interviewed over 100 experts in the nuclear field, and I don't think I've run into more than three that ever heard of SAGE. Richard Rhodes was one of the people, the nuclear historian head.

But it was a massive boondoggle, and you've never heard of it because it didn't work. They never solved the problem of radar jamming, and even though they knew they hadn't solved that problem, they kept pouring money into it. Then you have another program after that called BMEWS, B-M-E-W-S, which partly relied on SAGE and was the first anti-ballistic missile system to deal with what was supposed to be incoming Soviet ICBMs.

That was all done under the big lie of the missile gap. Kennedy ran on this in 1960, saying that the Soviet Union had a thousand ICBMs to America's 40. It turned out the Americans only had 40, but the Soviets only had four. This is something Ellsberg learned, and in fact, it's a long story, but this helped contribute to why Khrushchev put nuclear weapons in Cuba. So this has been a boondoggle series of lies.

If you look at today's military budget, which Trump's now increased to about a trillion and a half dollars, if you strip out the salaries of soldiers and the cost of military bases, so in other words, you focus on hardware, R&D, all the things that the arms manufacturers and the new AI people like Palantir's and others, the things they cash in on, if you strip out the salaries of soldiers and military bases, at least a third of the whole budget is going to the nuclear complex. If you add the Golden Dome projections to that number, you might be talking as much as half of the military budget will actually be going to nukes. So you're talking over 10 years, at the very least, a trillion dollars, and adding the Golden Dome projections, which on its own are probably a trillion, you could be looking at two trillion over 10 years.

For what? For an ABM system that can't possibly work. People have described these things as trying to hit a bullet with a bullet. They couldn't do it in the '50s with SAGE, and they knew it. Even though they were selling SAGE to Americans as a shield, like the Golden Dome, BMEWS was sold as a shield. They were both, at best, early warning systems. So they were lying to Americans then. They didn't work, but if you jump to today, you're talking something like perhaps two trillion bucks, for not just is it about the money, but you're talking about a risk of accidental and miscalculation caused nuclear war, integrating AI into command and control, which is part of this massive increase in money. So the threat is up exponentially, and nobody's talking about it.

Maria Hall
I have a little follow-up question on that. I'm of the generation that grew up hearing about Star Wars, not just the movie, but about Ronald Reagan's Star Wars. So is Golden Dome, maybe for people, even those who are after my generation, who don't even know what Star Wars was, what exactly is this Golden Dome?

Paul Jay
Well, Star Wars or SDI was essentially the weaponization of space. So they would have this system of radar, sensors, satellites, and laser weapons. This was all Reagan's dream. It's a very interesting story because in 1983, Reagan met with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, and Gorbachev actually proposed getting rid of nuclear weapons, abolishing them. Reagan had been freaked out by two things before he got to the meeting. One was the television movie The Day After, which showed what it looks like. Reagan wrote in his memoir that this absolutely freaked him out.

Two, something that people have probably never heard of, there was a war game called Proud Prophet, which was run in the lead-up to that war, where they played out various scenarios in Europe between the U.S. and Russia that would go nuclear. It's a unique war game because the Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs both directly participated in it. Every scenario led to all-out nuclear war and more or less the end of humanity. So it freaked out the whole Reagan administration.

Reagan goes and meets with Gorbachev. Gorbachev proposes getting rid of them. Reagan says, "Well, maybe we can." Then he goes back, and he talks to his advisors. The most prominent is Richard Perle, who goes on to be one of the founders and signers of the Project for the New American Century and one of the designers of the war in Iraq. Perle talks him out of it. Perle says, "If you get rid of nuclear weapons, how do you justify Star Wars, SDI? If there are no nuclear weapons, you don't need it."

Reagan understood the implications of that, because even though everyone was telling him that SDI would cause a new nuclear arms race and that it would be destabilizing. Perle kind of reminded Reagan, but that's actually the point. Because you can't spend money on all this stuff- I guess I was about to swear. I'm not allowed to swear on live radio, is that correct?

Maria Hall
Oh, thank you for catching that. Yeah.

Paul Jay
My assistant told me, be careful, because I normally would swear at that moment.

Maria Hall
Oh, okay.

Paul Jay
Anyway, it torpedoed the negotiations because the Americans wouldn't give up on SDI, but SDI really couldn't work. So what the Golden Dome is, is SDI plus AI. So what they're saying now is that you can have these sensors, satellites, and this whole array in space, but now it's going to work because we have AI, and now you can hit a bullet with a bullet.

Well, let's say it's true, and there's not a single piece of proof or evidence that it is true. But even if... Because there's no such thing as some missile or missiles coming in nice and clean, and now AI can find them, and now we can shoot them down. A missile will come in surrounded by hundreds or even thousands of decoys. See, there's a basic law of physics here. Once the missile gets into space and the capsule detaches, it floats. It doesn't need more propulsion because there's no resistance in space. Once you've reached the speed of getting into space, you don't need any more rocket propulsion. It just goes in the direction it's being sent to. Maybe it has a little bit of rocketry for final targeting.

So if you attach to that capsule, balloon, there's no way. I'm sorry. That was bullshit as the accurate way to describe it. That isn't cursing. That's a scientific word from the Annals of Nuclear Technology. If you surround it with BS, you can't detect it because they're flying at the same speed as the missiles. There's no way AI is going to figure that out.

So, is that some secret that the people proposing the Golden Dome don't know? Of course not, because the point of the Golden Dome is it's not about the Dome, it's about the gold. It's not... The objective isn't to work. The objective is to make money and to find an excuse for another bloody boondoggle.

But the only thing worse than the Golden Dome being a system that doesn't work is that maybe it does work a little bit. That's even worse, because then the Russians and Chinese have to worry about, "Hang on here. If this works even a little. Does that mean the Americans can launch a first strike without worrying about a second strike coming back at them?"

That's the destabilizing piece, which is why in 1972, Nixon and Brezhnev actually signed a treaty to limit anti-ballistic missile systems, because they both realized how destabilizing it was. But because it's such a massive boondoggle, the neocons, the military-industrial complex, the hawks, and the Republican and Democratic parties hated that treaty, and so what do you get? You get to the late '90s, and you have something called the Project for the New American Century, which is this gang of neocons, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Cheney's involved, and all these guys. These are the people who brought you the Iraq war.

Well, in the year 2000, they issued a document, which is something called Rearming America or something like that. It's all about how to modernize the American armed forces. One of their most important demands is to abrogate the '72 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. But it actually says in the document, "But Americans will never go for all this expenditure without a new Pearl Harbor." It says it in the document in exactly those words. So, of course, a year later, what do they get? They get 9/11, they get their Pearl Harbor. Three months after 9/11, they abrogated the ABM Treaty.

Maria Hall
Well, going back to the 1970s, because I do want you to talk about the film you're working on. It was 1971, I believe, that Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers. So, can you tell us about what kind of information you got from Mr. Ellsberg and what inspired you to make the film?

Paul Jay
Well, Dan wrote this book called Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. It scared the hell out of me. I was going to swear again, but I remember the FCC and blah, blah, blah. I was kind of as much in nuclear war denial as most people. After the '90s, Russia wasn't seen as the enemy. And it seemed like there was some reduction in nuclear weapons at that time. There was some, but it felt like this was receding in the background as the issue. Certainly, by 9/11, it became all about terrorism and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the whole issue of nuclear weapons kind of receded.

Anyway, when I read Dan's book, which would have been around 2018, I guess, it just blew me away. So in 2019, I did a series of interviews with him, and then I asked him, "Could we make a film based on these interviews and books?" So between 2019 and 2022, when he died in the spring, I interviewed him for about 45 to 50 hours over those years. Dan was very important, not only because he had studied this all, practically, his whole life after the Pentagon Papers, but he was with the RAND Corporation prior to Vietnam as a nuclear war planner. So really, nuclear weapons were the thing that took up almost his whole life.

Maria Hall
Wow.

Paul Jay
It was the arc of Dan's life. He grew up believing in all of the Cold War mythology. He believed, to begin with, in the missile gap, the bomber gap. He believed the Soviet Union was planning to militarily control the world. He believed that Stalin and the Soviet Union were just another form of Hitler's fascism. Just as Hitler wanted to rule the world, the Soviet Union wanted to use military means to rule the world. He believed all of that. He was a full, thoroughgoing Hawk. I mean, hawk beyond hawkishness, some of the things he did.

I mean, I don't have time to get into it now, but then he started to realize that it was all lies. We have documentation that actually, Dan died before we got this, but we have now found declassified CIA documents that were telling the Truman administration in '46, '47, '48, '49, '50, all through. The title of the documents are, Is the Soviet Union a Military Threat to Western Europe and the United States? And every year, the CIA is telling the Truman administration, "The answer is no. There is no threat."

Maria Hall
Woah.

Paul Jay
Dan read this book before he died, which he turned me on to. It's called Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948 by Frank Kofsky. It's a brilliant book, which lays out how consciously the design for the Cold War was created because the aerospace industry had reached such a scale in World War II, that after World War II, without guaranteed government contracts, Lockheed, Bell Aircraft, all would have gone down the toilet. I think I can say toilet on the FCC. They all would have gone down the toilet.

So, to save the aerospace industry, but more than that, even, they understood systemically that they were going to get back into the crisis of the 1930s if there wasn't a kind of stimulus that World War II spending created. But how are you going to justify stimulus at those levels without an existential enemy? So they just made one up, and the enemy is "The Soviet Union is coming to get us." They knew it was BS, and we have the documentation to prove it.

This isn't to say Stalin wasn't a vicious, political repression and so on, but what Dan realized is that it was not the external military threat. So in our film, we carry on with this because the next big beat of this is the Korean War, which people call the Forgotten War, and it's forgotten for good reason. But it's the template for everything that followed, including Vietnam, creating dictators, maybe 200 of them between '45 and 1990. So the film looks at these things at the systemic economic level and by the players that acted these forces out. I know what your last question is, and you'd better ask it.

Maria Hall
Yes. If you're just tuning in, I'm Maria Hall. I'm speaking with Paul Jay, who is working on and will release next year a movie called How to Stop a Nuclear War, which I can't wait to see. Yes, and I do want to ask you about for listeners, because sometimes I do get feedback that our show can be a little bit... It's reality, but it does get overwhelming, so what are the steps that listeners can take to have a positive impact and help avert a nuclear war?

Paul Jay
Well, I think part of the problem with why people get overwhelmed by this topic is that it always seems like it's all or nothing. People think it seems impossible to get rid of nuclear weapons, and so if you can't get rid of them, you're left with, "Well, what can we do but nothing?" While I think we should get rid of and abolish nuclear weapons. There are some steps that can be taken to reduce the risk, especially of miscalculation and accidents. I think this is what people need to focus on. Yes, let's demand, get rid of nuclear weapons, but let's also focus on what we can do to reduce the risk.

There are some very concrete steps, and so I'm going to list them, and if there's time, we can dig into some of them a bit. But first of all, wherever you are, educate yourself, and we're hoping the film helps with that. On the lies that led us here, the lies of the Cold War, which really are fundamentally about how a nuclear arms race somehow deters things. No, deterrence isn't what it's about. It's about the arms race. It's the arms race that creates the boondoggle, the money. The arms race is the objective of the policy.

If you really just want deterrence, you'd have a few nuclear subs, and that'd be the end of it. You could get rid of everything else and save, I don't know, several hundred billion a year. You get rid of ICBMs, you get rid of the whole nuclear bomber force. Really, it's about deterrence. A few subs can wipe out every city in Russia and China, the current 14 nuclear subs. You don't need new ones either. There's a whole other new generation of nuclear subs being created. Also a boondoggle.

So educate yourself about what this is. Wherever you are, talk about it, and here are some specific things we need to demand. You can pass these as a resolution in your school, in your city, but people running for office, especially federally, but also at the state level.

Okay, here it goes. No golden dome, not a penny. Stop it. If the Congress is really going to be switched, assuming there are midterms, then absolutely demand whoever's in Congress, and Republicans, too. I mean, even Rand Paul types might sign on to this. No Golden Dome. It's a boondoggle for billionaires like Peter Thiel and Karp at Palantir. It's the Silicon Valley Gang and Lockheed driving this Golden Dome. One, two trillion dollars for something that isn't going to work and threaten us.

Number two, this is the one Dan focused on: get rid of ICBMs, the new Sentinel program, and get rid of launch on warning. What is the point of launch on warning? You see something coming in. "Oh, we have to launch. They're going to take out our ICBMs." Well, what are you going to do about it? You can't stop them. There is no missile defense. So why don't you wait and find out whether it's geese, radar bouncing off the moon, or some AI hallucination? Because you can't stop them.

So if you launch on warning, and that's what ICBMs are, the Sentinel, the new ICBMs, that's what they're for, then all you've done is guarantee coming back at you will be some ICBMs and maybe nuclear sub missiles, which evade anything anyway. There's no anti-ballistic missile system that can stop a sub 100 miles off the Coast.

It's all BS. No first strike, and not just declare it. Take some concrete steps, and no first strike means no threatening a first strike. Truman threatened it in Korea, and so did Eisenhower. Nixon threatened it in Vietnam. We have already threatened it against North Korea. Remember, Trump's fury and fire. We've threatened it against Iran. No first-strike, and no first-strike threats.

Here's a very important one. No testing. I know there's a test ban treaty. The Russians and Americans are talking about getting rid of it because if you want to modernize and have all kinds of fancy new nuclear weapons, then you want to test them. If you can't test, you don't know if they're going to work. In fact, a lot of what they already have, they actually don't even know if it's going to work. There's a lot of pressure building up in Congress to get rid of the test ban treaty.

So no testing, concrete demand. Don't vote for anybody who doesn't support this program, and most of the candidates running don't have a clue, including the progressive ones. They need to get educated. Freeze the development of new nuclear weapons. Just stop it right in its tracks.

And here's a very important one. No AI in nuclear command and control. Stop it. There needs to be a unilateral stopping of it. There needs to be treaties, and this is another big deal. No matter what else is going on in the world, and at the time of that '72 Treaty, it was the height of the Vietnam War. The Cold War was raging, and the Russians and Americans still negotiated one of the most rational treaties there ever was in the nuclear age to limit anti-ballistic missile systems. So if it can be done at that time, then why not now?

But here's the thing, and I interviewed Sam Nunn, the senator who was a big insider on this stuff. He says, "One of the problems is there's not even any negotiations going on." So the Russians, Chinese, and Americans are not even talking to each other about these things. At the very least, the point he made, it humanizes the conversation because the military-industrial complex people, like lawyers, love to have worst-case scenarios. Everything's based on a worst-case. So they don't even talk to each other. It exaggerates worst-case mentality. So there needs to be ongoing negotiations.

And just one final thing, no sole presidential authority. Of course, it's particularly nuts, given who the president is now, but hardly anyone has ever made this point, except Garry Wills, the historian. Sole presidential authority to launch nuclear war is fundamentally unconstitutional. Only Congress has the right to launch war. Well, if that's true, how can a president launch a nuclear war? So the whole issue of sole authority is fundamentally unconstitutional, and if there's a Congress with any guts or backbone, this should be a serious issue, especially given what the presidency looks like at the moment.

Maria Hall
Yes. Well, thank you so much for that, Paul Jay. We are out of time, unfortunately. So please tell listeners how to get on the list so they can be the first to know about your movie.

Paul Jay
Yeah. Go to the website, stop-nuclear-war.org, and you can get on the mailing list there. We will be posting updates as we get closer to the film. But also, if you want to help in some way, there are things people can do to help us. So if you want to get on the list, you can also email pauljay@stop-nuclear-war.org, and let us know, because there's research and other things that people can help with.

Maria Hall
Wow, that's great to know. Thank you so much. We would love to have you on again because I know we only scratched the surface, and I have a feeling these issues are going to go on. So thank you. Thank you again for joining us on The Lawyers' Guild Show today.

Paul Jay
Great. Thanks. Thanks again.

• Maria Hill - Law and Disorder
• Paul Jay - Director of How to Stop a Nuclear War