Nixon did have a secret plan, and I knew that it involved making threats of nuclear war to North Vietnam.

It is a tribute to the American people that our leaders perceived that they had to lie to us, it is not a tribute to us that we were so easily misled.

This wholesale invasion of Americans’ and foreign citizens’ privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we’re trying to protect.

My activities, for which I gratefully accept this Award, are today what they have been for over thirty-five years and will be for the rest of my life: to counter governmental secrecy about the nuclear arms race that threatens the survival of life on earth; and to help build a world movement that will prevent a first use since Nagasaki of nuclear explosions, prevent or end interventions that could lead to such an event, and bring about a world free of nuclear weapons.

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.

The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting.

Nixon did have a secret plan, and I knew that it involved making threats of nuclear war to North Vietnam.