The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

by Daniel Ellsberg

Hardcover, 2017

Publication

Bloomsbury USA (2017), 432 pages

Description

"Here, for the first time, former high level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking first-hand account of America's nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization--and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration--threatens our very survival. No other insider with high level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era. Framed as a memoir--a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating--this gripping expose reads like a thriller and offers feasible steps we can take to dismantle the existing "doomsday machine" and avoid nuclear catastrophe, returning Ellsberg to his role as whistleblower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately hopeful--and powerfully important--book about not just our country, but the future of the world."--Provided by publisher.… (more)

Collection

Waking Up To Our Responsibility

Genres

User reviews

LibraryThing member nmele

This book is a compelling but truly terrifying account of U.S. nuclear plans and policies from the Manhattan Project to the present. Why terrifying? Because it is a thoroughly-documented history of deceit, military obstinacy and insubordination, miscommunication and brinkmanship. According to

Ellsberg, that history continues today. He also confesses his role in the nuclear stalemate which has continued from the 1950s to today and issues a call for a popular movement aimed eventually at abolition but initially at dismantling what Ellsberg, after Herman Kahn, calls the Doomsday Machine, the mechanisms for automatic launch and the system of values, assumptions and policies that hold the entire world at risk of nuclear annihilation. For those who are not policy wonks or nuclear weapons nerds, the going can be slow at times, but Ellsberg is often arresting, especially in his accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the evolution of U.S. values from abhorrence at the bombing of civilians to dismissing civilian deaths as a necessary component of strategy.

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LibraryThing member rivkat

Well, this is a terrifying book. Ellsberg began as a committed Cold Warrior, before his disillusionment led him to leak the Pentagon Papers and become an antiwar activist. What I didn’t know was that he had a larger cache of secret documents about US nuclear policy, though they apparently got

lost when he tried to conceal them from the feds. Still, he worked for RAND and had a lot of access, so his accounts of how, in practice, individual base commanders and even individual pilots could have launched their nuclear missiles—despite what we’ve told the world about the “nuclear football”—were credible. We know a few stories about how individual Soviets averted nuclear war, but not nearly as much about similar decisions by Americans. Luck is not a great strategy, but it’s what we’ve been using and will continue to use as long as America retains a first-strike capability. Ellsberg also writes persuasively about how Presidents, and especially their representatives in private negotiations, have used the threat of nuclear war in political confrontations, and ended up thinking that it worked, to the continued risk of the world.

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