Filmed from an interview a year before his death at age 92, An Ordinary Insanity is Daniel Ellsberg’s parting plea to humanity to stand up against the threat of nuclear weapons. The film is re-edited with new graphics and clips from a previous documentary titled A Common Insanity.
Ellsberg is best known as the whistleblower who released the top secret Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, which revealed that the government lied to the public and Congress about the scope and aim of the war. Prior to that act, Ellsberg worked on orchestrating the nation’s nuclear strategy in the 1960s.
The documentary opens with a blunt description of what nuclear war could mean for the Earth’s inhabitants. In 1961, Ellsberg oversaw the planning of an American nuclear arsenal with an estimated death toll of 600 million people. This estimate included U.S. targets in the Soviet Union and China, along with collateral damage from fallout to neighboring countries. Ellsburg shares that although this was a startling number (he calls it “100 holocausts”), it was a gross underestimate at the time. The initial calculations did not account for the effect of soot and smoke which would unleash a “nuclear winter”- a cooling and darkness that would decimate the world’s ability to grow food crops and lead to the death of 98% of the Earth’s human population.
This unimaginable consequence is made even more disturbing as Ellsberg outlines how a single president has the power to unleash these doomsday weapons. There have been false alarms of incoming nuclear threats in the past, and just one individual would have mere minutes to make the decision to release the U.S. arsenal.
The film emphasizes the insanity of these weapons, but also the perverse lobbying by the military-industrial complex to secure massive amounts of government funding for their development and advancement. When it goes without saying that all people everywhere agree that we would prefer to avoid complete annihilation, the fact that these weapons programs continue to be funded and profitable is an insanity. Unfortunately, this insanity has become “ordinary” in that it is part of the capitalist structure we are living in every day.
It is up to us to stand up and speak out against the nuclear threat, and against the system that continues to profit off of these doomsday weapons. An Ordinary Insanity reminds us that we do not have to accept this insanity as ordinary, and that we must organize to fight against these threats to humanity.
The film is available to stream for free online.
