My wish for you, my friends, is that at the end of your days you will feel as much joy and gratitude as I do now.
Posted on March 02, 2023
Dear friends and supporters,
I have difficult
news to impart. On February 17, without much warning, I was diagnosed with
inoperable pancreatic cancer on the basis of a CT scan and an MRI. (As is usual
with pancreatic cancer – which has no early symptoms – it was found while
looking for something else, relatively minor). I’m sorry to report to you that
my doctors have given me three to six months to live. Of course, they emphasize
that everyone’s case is individual; it might be more, or less.
I have chosen
not to do chemotherapy (which offers no promise) and I have assurance of great
hospice care when needed. Please know: right now, I am not in any physical
pain, and in fact, after my hip replacement surgery in late 2021, I feel better
physically than I have in years! Moreover, my cardiologist has given me license
to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my
quality of life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my former favorite foods!
And my energy level is high. Since my diagnosis, I’ve done several interviews
and webinars on Ukraine, nuclear weapons, and first amendment issues, and I
have two more scheduled this week.
As I just told
my son Robert: he’s long known (as my editor) that I work better under a
deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline!
I feel lucky and
grateful that I’ve had a wonderful life far beyond the proverbial three-score
years and ten. (I’ll be ninety-two on April 7th.) I feel the very same way
about having a few months more to enjoy life with my wife and family, and in
which to continue to pursue the urgent goal of working with others to avert
nuclear war in Ukraine or Taiwan (or anywhere else). When I copied the Pentagon
Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my
life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant
hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was). Yet in
the end, that action – in ways I could not have foreseen, due to Nixon’s
illegal responses – did have an impact on shortening the war. In addition,
thanks to Nixon’s crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I expected, and I was
able to spend the last fifty years with Patricia and my family, and with you,
my friends.
What’s more, I
was able to devote those years to doing everything I could think of to alert
the world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful interventions: lobbying,
lecturing, writing and joining with others in acts of protest and nonviolent
resistance.
I wish I could
report greater success for our efforts. As I write, "modernization"
of nuclear weapons is ongoing in all nine states that possess them (the US most
of all). Russia is making monstrous threats to initiate nuclear war to maintain
its control over Crimea and the Donbas – like the dozens of equally
illegitimate first-use threats that the US government has made in the past to
maintain its military presence in South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and (with
the complicity of every member state then in NATO ) West Berlin. The current
risk of nuclear war, over Ukraine, is as great as the world has ever seen.
China and India
are alone in declaring no-first-use policies. Leadership in the US, Russia,
other nuclear weapons states, NATO and other US allies have yet to recognize
that such threats of initiating nuclear war – let alone the plans, deployments
and exercises meant to make them credible and more ready to be carried out –
are and always have been immoral and insane: under any circumstances, for any
reasons, by anyone or anywhere.
It is long past
time – but not too late! – for the world’s publics at last to challenge and resist
the willed moral blindness of their past and current leaders. I will continue,
as long as I’m able, to help these efforts. There’s tons more to say about
Ukraine and nuclear policy, of course, and you’ll be hearing from me as long as
I’m here.
As I look back
on the last sixty years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which
I could have dedicated my efforts. For the last forty years we have known that
nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean nuclear winter: more than a
hundred million tons of smoke and soot from firestorms in cities set ablaze by
either side, striking either first or second, would be lofted into the
stratosphere where it would not rain out and would envelope the globe within
days. That pall would block up to 70% of sunlight for years, destroying all
harvests worldwide and causing death by starvation for most of the humans and
other vertebrates on earth.
So far as I can
find out, this scientific near-consensus has had virtually no effect on the
Pentagon’s nuclear war plans or US/NATO (or Russian) nuclear threats. (In a
like case of disastrous willful denial by many officials, corporations and
other Americans, scientists have known for over three decades that the
catastrophic climate change now underway – mainly but not only from burning
fossil fuels – is fully comparable to US-Russian nuclear war as another
existential risk.) I’m happy to know that millions of people – including all
those friends and comrades to whom I address this message! – have the wisdom,
the dedication and the moral courage to carry on with these causes, and to work
unceasingly for the survival of our planet and its creatures.
I’m enormously
grateful to have had the privilege of knowing and working with such people,
past and present. That’s among the most treasured aspects of my very privileged
and very lucky life. I want to thank you all for the love and support you have
given me in so many ways. Your dedication, courage, and determination to act
have inspired and sustained my own efforts. My wish for you is that at the end
of your days you will feel as much joy and gratitude as I do now.
Love, Dan
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