Daniel Ellsberg:

Killing everyone. He said, no one would. No one had done it. And no one, he felt, would ever do it.

Well, he was mistaken. There was a doomsday machine at that time. We didn't know actually until another 20 years about the phenomenon of nuclear winter, that the military targets we were going to hit in cities — and, actually, in those days, they planned to hit every city over 25,000 in the Soviet Union and in China. If we were in war with the Soviet Union, we would also hit China.

Those cities burning would have lofted in firestorms, not ordinary fires, but as in Hiroshima or Tokyo or Dresden, that would loft the smoke and soot by tens of millions of tons into the stratosphere, where it wouldn't rain out.

It would be for over a decade, and it would lower the sun's temperatures on the Earth, the sunshine, by about 70 percent.