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Despite terrorization, patriotic pressure and the complete capitulation of their own leaders, the workers were compelled to fight back against unendurable conditions. Starting with 1916, a tremendous strike wave swept the country. In 1917, there were 4,450 strikes, more than in any year except 1937.

ELLSBERG: RAND, which stands for R and D, research and development, was really essence on research for the Air Force, set up as a nonprofit corporation to do long range research for the Air Force in the national interest. And in particular, when I came there in 1958 for the summer and then later permanently in 1959, our obsession, really, was trying to plan our strategic forces in such a way that they couldn't be destroyed in a first strike by the Soviet Union. Those were the years that we all believed in RAND and in the Air Force that there was a missile gap in favor of the Russians and that a Russian surprise attack was a real possibility. And the idea was to assure retaliation for that so as to deter it so that no war would occur.

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ELLSBERG: Well, many things. It was a very strange plan. I'm not the only one who has called it the worst plan in human history. This was the plan for general war. It was an all-out attack on every city in the Soviet Union and China and attacks, in effect, in most of the Eastern Bloc because of air defenses and command and control. That kept for - no reserves, created fallout that would kill perhaps a hundred million people in West Europe for our own weapons if the wind were in the right direction for that and many - and a hundred million in other contiguous areas of the Soviet Union, like neutrals like Austria and Finland and Afghanistan, actually. But also several hundred million in the USSR and China, several hundred million killed - that added up to an intention in a U.S. first strike if we preempted or if we escalated a war in Europe to 600 million dead that they were calculating - a hundred holocausts.

ELLSBERG: Yes. What I discovered, to my horror, I have to say, is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff contemplated causing with our own first strike 600 million deaths, including a hundred million in our own allies. Now, that was an underestimate even then because they weren't including fire, which they felt was too incalculable in its effects. And, of course, fire is the greatest casualty-producing effect of thermonuclear weapons. So the real effect would have been over a billion, not 600 million - about a third of the Earth's population then at that time. What turned out to be the case 20 years later, in 1983, and confirmed in the last 10 years very thoroughly by climate scientists and environmental scientists is that that high ceiling of a billion or so was wrong.

And what it was about was about the 1958 Straits of Taiwan crisis in which mainland China started bombing some islands controlled by Taiwan, and the United States was preparing to defend Taiwan. And the report was similar to the Pentagon Papers study. It was based on internal government classified documents. But it was a study of this crisis, and it showed that the world had come much closer to nuclear war then than the public had ever been allowed to know, that senior generals were really pushing to use a first-strike nuclear attack on mainland China, even though they accepted the risk that that would cause the Soviet Union to retaliate in kind and millions would die because the alternative of losing Taiwan was seen as too great a risk. And instead China broke off the attack. So this nuclear strike never happened.

DAVIES: So in 1958, this document tells us, we came closer to nuclear war than anybody realized because American military commanders were prepared to deal with these Chinese bombings by - with nuclear strikes. He's had this information in a long time. Why was it of more relevance today now?

And against the backdrop of that, Daniel Ellsberg decided that it would be worthy to put this information about what happened in 1958 out because his intuition was that the Pentagon war planners must at that moment be developing war plans for what happens - contingency plans - if China does indeed invade Taiwan and conventional weapons are not enough to prevent them from winning the war. If nuclear weapon strikes were going to be on the table again as they were in 1958, he thought people should see how it went last time and the sort of rationales that people used to justify it last time in order for there to be a public debate this time before any such dire step would be considered.

SAVAGE: Well, so one of the pages that the government had blacked out in the official release of the study quoted the top Air Force commander for the Pacific at the time. He was one of the ones pushing for authorization for a first-use nuclear attack on mainland China. And he praised a plan that would start by dropping atomic bombs on Chinese airfields but not other targets. His argument, as described in this censored version of the report or - was that the relative restraint of only hitting airfields and not I guess just civilian population centers would make it harder for skeptics of nuclear war in the American government to block his plan. And the quotation was something like, there would be merit in a proposal from the military to limit the war geographically to the air bases if that proposal would forestall some misguided humanitarians' intention to limit a war to obsolete iron bombs and hot lead - just really vivid, striking language, a misguided humanitarian who doesn't want nuclear war.

By Diego Ore CARACAS (Reuters) - An imprisoned former Caracas police commissioner at the center of stalled political talks between Venezuela's government and opposition went on a hunger strike on Tuesday, demanding he be released due to frail health. Ivan Simonovis, 54, was sentenced to 30 years behind bars after being convicted of participating in the assassination of four protesters during a march that triggered a brief coup against the late President Hugo Chavez in 2002. Freedom for Simonovis has become a rallying cry for the opposition, which has expressed outrage at his imprisonment in a small cell and says his osteoporosis requires urgent medical attention. The issue was a factor in this month's collapse of negotiations between the opposition and President Nicolas Maduro's government. The talks had been aimed at ending street protests that had been raging since February. Protesters staged near-daily marches over three months to decry crime, inflation and food shortages. It was the worst unrest since a tumultuous two-year period around the time of the coup. The demonstrations have ebbed in recent weeks but Simonovis' announcement may rekindle passions in deeply polarized Venezuela. "All the legal and political efforts to receive a response to the (release) demands I made 10 months ago have been exhausted," Simonovis said in a letter read by his lawyer in front of the Supreme Court. "I'm tired of acting in accordance to the law, yet no one listens to me. Despite my health condition and against the will of my family, I've decided to start a hunger strike in my cell as of today," the letter said. Simonovis is one of the highest-profile cases among several dozen opposition-linked figures who ended up in prison during Chavez's 14-year rule from 1999. For government supporters, Simonovis is a dangerous and violent saboteur who played a role in illegally unseating a democratically elected president. He was sentenced in 2009 after lengthy proceedings. Several other officers were convicted. Later on Tuesday, Maduro slammed mainstream media for seeking to "convert a murderer into a victim." "I won't waver in ensuring justice is done," he said during an hours-long radio program called "In Contact with Maduro." "One sees that there's not even a minimum of reflection, of regret here. To the contrary, (opponents) continue to seek the same thing, to use violence to impose a capitalist, retrograde and repressive regime in Venezuela." In recent months, the government has arrested more than 3,200 people during protests, of whom 224 remain behind bars, according to government figures. The best known is Leopoldo Lopez, a hardline opposition leader. Senior Socialist Party official Jorge Rodriguez infuriated Simonovis's supporters earlier this month, saying the man's case was not on the agenda of the now-suspended talks despite opposition assertions his release was being negotiated. "Those were vivid fantasies," Rodriguez said. Simonovis's family say his health is so weak he runs the risk of breaking bones from simple acts such as lacing up his shoes. The case may evoke memories of farmer Franklin Brito, who died in 2010 after a hunger strike to protest against Chavez's land takeovers. (Writing and additional reporting by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne, Jonathan Oatis and Paul Tait) be457b7860