DATE/TIME: Friday, October 2, 2026, 2:30 pm PLACE: ENR building, room 223
Daniel Ellsberg
Formerly U.S. Marines, RAND Corporation
Daniel Ellsberg - showing and discussion of his 30-minute film, An Ordinary Insanity
On March 4, 2012, while hiking on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, I received a cellphone call from Daniel Ellsberg. At first, I thought it was a recording asking me to donate to a political cause, but it was actually him. He had discovered my work on nuclear winter and wanted to talk to me about it. Fortunately, I was on sabbatical and living in Sausalito, so on March 21 I spent an exciting afternoon with him at his house in Kensington, north of Berkeley, discussing politics, nuclear weapons, and the climatic impacts of their use. I took Brian Toon, my nuclear winter research colleague from the University of Colorado, to meet Dan that December. This led to Dan including our work in his 2017 book, The Doomsday Machine. And Dan attended the kickoff meeting for Brian’s and my Open Philanthropy Project nuclear winter research program in Boulder in July 2017. We kept in touch and Dan told me to let him know next time I was in town and we could get together. I spent three months at Berkeley in 2023 and was able to spend more time with him just before he succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of 92. But just before that he was able to record a half-hour presentation on what is needed to end the threat of nuclear weapons. I will show that talk and lead a discussion of it afterwards.
Seminar Host:
Alan Robock
Department of Environmental Sciences, SEBS, Rutgers University