Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the awful dangers of America’s hidden, fifty-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day.

When former presidential advisor Daniel Ellsberg famously took the top-secret Pentagon Papers, he also took with him a chilling cache of top secret documents related to America’s nuclear program in the 1960s. Here for the first time he reveals the contents of those documents, and makes clear their shocking relevance for today.

The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg’s hair-raising insider’s account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization, whose legacy—and proposed renewal under the Trump administration—threatens the very survival of humanity. It is scarcely possible to estimate the true dangers of our present nuclear policies without penetrating the secret realities of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, when Ellsberg had high-level access to them. No other insider has written so candidly of that long-classified history, though the policies remain fundamentally, and frighteningly, unchanged

Ellsberg, in the end, offers steps we can take under the current administration to avoid nuclear catastrophe. Framed as a memoir, this gripping exposé reads like a thriller with cloak-and-dagger intrigue, placing Ellsberg back in his natural role as whistle-blower. It is a real-life Dr. Strangelove story, but an ultimately hopeful—and powerfully important—book.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, War, Military Fiction, Memoir, Biography

432 pages, Paperback

First published December 5, 2017

About the author

Daniel Ellsberg was an American political activist and United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, he precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.

In January 1973, he was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 along with other charges of theft and conspiracy, carrying a maximum sentence of 115 years. Because of governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering, and his defense all charges were dismissed against Ellsberg in May 1973.

Reviews

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucky escapes do not resolve crises; nuclear disarmament needs to be revived.

(2022 Update):
--I was recently reminded of how I first started exploring global issues by hosting documentary nights (which quickly became lecture/interview nights), and what a treasure journalist Paul Jay (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS...) has been with his interviews of pretty much all my favorites (Vijay Prashad, Michael Hudson, Gerald Horne, Chris Hedges, Medea Benjamin, etc.).
...Note: my favorite interviewer these days is Rania Kalek's “Dispatches” on BreakThrough News: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw...
--Revisiting Paul Jay's latest content on his outlet “The Analysis”, I'm reminded of his focus on 2 existential crises: #1 Climate/ecological collapse and #2 Nuclear war. These couple have been on my radar since I started with Chomsky (Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe), but like everyone I am also guilty of neglecting nuclear war. So, I'm relieved to see Paul Jay working on a documentary of this book with the author, whistleblower legend Daniel Ellsberg (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS...).

The Brilliant The Dire:
--Western history/media will have you believe the nuclear crisis is a Cold War-era issue, only to be dusted off as a threat (to countries that already have nukes) from “rogue states” as the empire sets off for their next invasion. Indeed, as Vijay reminds us, US intervention is the key driver of nuclear proliferation; North Korea just has to look at what happened to Iraq and Libya after they gave up their nuclear weapons programs: https://youtu.be/6jKcsHv3c74
--“Pentagon Papers” whistleblower Ellsberg details US's constant aggression with nukes rather than “deterrence”/“defensive” measures, as declassified documents reveal awareness of German/Japanese/Soviet/Chinese capacities and admissions that nuclear escalation for deterrence was not needed/not the actual aims; thus, the book's title “Nuclear War Planner” (rather than nuclear deterrence planner), where US fanatics planned various first-strike scenarios and Rapture-fantasies of post-nuclear-war victories (see Paul Jay on US religious extremism + nuclear annihilation: https://youtu.be/YIFiIMhwiQs). It should be no surprise that more attention was placed on fantasizing first-strikes than preventing accidents (including numerous false alarms)!
--It's difficult to imagine this crisis becoming more acute, but this sprawling Doomsday Machine has only expanded since the Cold War, given US capitalist profits are built on military spending (US military industrial complex) rather than social spending (see below). Thus, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock (estimate of likelihood of human-made annihilation) is at all-time extremes today(!), even compared to the height of Cold War's Cuban Missile Crisis!
--Further lowlights of this “institutionalized madness”: origins of aerial bombardment targeting cities (civilian targets), firestorms, risking “atmospheric ignition”, the Cuban Missile Crisis (or, how-to-bluff-our-way-to-oblivion, with nukes), Nixon’s Madman Theory (with nukes), US/NATO vs. the world (in terms of nuclear first-use policy), “nuclear winters”, and a whole bunch of we-learned-50-years-later-how-much-worse-it-really-was-and-things-have-gotten-worse-all-without-public-attention... As usual, the real world is more unbelievable than fiction (despite the best efforts of the cult classic “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” film).

The Missing:
--Ellsberg decides not to sacrifice rigorous details for the sake of accessibility. So, while this topic is crucial for general readers, certain parts have plenty of names and acronyms; a nice intro is Chomsky’s Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe, and I'm looking forward to Paul Jay's documentary.
--In a recent interview with Paul Jay, Ellsberg says he has been researching more on the political economy of the military industrial complex, citing Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation on how the Cold War arms race bailed out the US aircraft industry. I've been looking into this topic with Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945-1980.
...This is the irrationality of capitalism, where the bottom line is profit. The Roaring '20s (1920's) profit boom crashed into the endless Great Depression where factories were kept idle and crops stockpiled/wasted while the workers (without means of production by definition) starved, since there were no optimistic expectations for capitalist profits (the sole reason for investment/production under capitalism).
...This was only resolved with the rise of Fascism (brute force to revive capitalism) and the greatest war in human history. WWII was the “creative destruction” to wipe away stagnant capital and innovate new markets (war, and everything that supplies wars: War is a Racket).
--However, the US were terrified of the return of another depression once WWII ended (along with its war markets and its social mobilization of private capital). Capitalist profits require a compound annual growth rate (exponential rather than linear growth!) in perpetuity (never mind our finite planet) in order to not crash, so turning the colossal US war productivity of tanks and bombs into mass consumer automobiles and refrigerators and expecting compound growth clearly is not enough. Thus, the Cold War's “Military Keynesianism” (State spending to keep rising demand to absorb capitalism's production), risking nuclear annihilation to (in part) keep capitalism from spiraling into depression. For more:
-The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
-Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
-Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
--We desperately need to bring back the nuclear disarmament movement that peaked in the 1970s-80s, as this has been forgotten with the end of the Cold War (the remaining movements now focus on anti-nuclear power). The Global South's decolonization period offers innovations in organizing for nuclear disarmament (i.e. Non-Aligned Movement, NAM):
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
-The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

————————THE BASICS————————

Ellsberg was a member of the RAND Corporation, and who worked for the White House. He was the main whistleblower and leaker of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed things the US had done/was doing during the Vietnam War (not what they told America they were doing).

He also had another batch of classified papers on nuclear war policy that he planned to release after the Pentagon Papers had a chance to reach the American public through the media. However, he never had a chance to, as the papers were stored at his brother’s house, and were accidentally destroyed.

This book are his memories of what the nuclear war papers contained, and his memories, in general, of working around nuclear weapons in the White House.

——————A BIT ON NUKES——————

The bombs we dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were atomic bombs, or A-bombs (aka plutonium bombs, which work by nuclear fission or cutting apart).

Later on we would arrive at hydrogen bombs, or H-bombs (aka thermonuclear bombs, which work by nuclear fusion, or the combining of atoms) which were far more sinister than the A-bombs. Each H-bomb requires an A-bomb at its core to act as a detonator.

Let that sink in. The images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The horrors of those nuclear bombs?

Remember that the bomb that caused that (the A-bomb) is nothing more than the detonating cap for a modern nuclear weapon.

——————THE NUCLEAR PLAN IN 1961——————

In 1961, the plan—should there be any armed conflict with the Soviet Union (NOTE: not nuclear conflict. Any old armed conflict, as long as it involved more than one US battalion of soldiers, will do)—was as follows:

1) nuke the Soviet Union to the extent that 100 million (out of 175 million total population) would be dead within weeks from the nuclear fallout alone (so this doesn’t even include deaths from the initial blast deaths or from radiation).

2) nuke China to the extent that 300 million (of their 600 million) would likewise be dead from the fallout. (even if China is completely not involved in the armed conflict and is an innocent party, simply because they’re an ally of the Soviet Union).

When someone inquired, “What if this isn’t China’s war? What if this is just a war with the Soviets? Can you change the plan?” Answer: “Well, yeah,” [the general] said resignedly, “we can, but I hope nobody thinks of it, because it would really screw up the plan.”

I hope nobody thinks of the fact that China isn’t part of the war, because it messes up with the plan to kill an extra 300 million innocent people.

This is the kind of person who held our nuclear weapons in 1961 (there’s probably someone similar with them now).

As the Marine Corps commandant rightly notes when he is informed of the plan: “Any plan that murders three hundred million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That is not the American way.” It was, however, the American plan.

In total, the creators of this plan themselves admitted that, if all went as planned (i.e. not even including any retaliation by the Soviet Union whatsoever) over 600 million people would be dead between the Soviet Union, China, and neighboring countries (Finland, for instance, would quite simply no longer exist).

What’s worse: when you add to this number those killed by firestorms (which we now know are some of the most deadly effects of nuclear weapon attacks), the number creeps to 1 billion people. That was a third of the world in 1961.

And when you factor in nuclear winter, a concept we didn’t know existed in 1961 but which we now know does exist… the resulting famine would probably have destroyed virtually the entire human race.

“The graph seemed to me the depiction of pure evil. It should not exist; there should be nothing real on earth that it referred to.”

————————THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS————————

One major focus of this book concerns the Cuban Missile Crisis. As he tells it, what the public knew/knows about it wasn’t anywhere near the truth.

First of all, when Khrushchev accepted Kennedy’s unfavourable deal offer (disarm the missiles, and we promise not to invade Cuba) the real deal went more like this: disarm the missiles, we promise not to invade Cuba, and we’ll disarm the missiles we have in Turkey over the next few months, but only if you promise to keep that part on the DL.

Second, both Khrushchev and Kennedy were incredibly reluctant to attack— there was never any real concern that either would make the first strike (either Khrushchev by ordering the Cubans to fire a missile at the US, or Kennedy by ordering the Turks to fire a missile at Russia and/or by invading Cuba).

For example, a few months after the crisis, Khrushchev said, regarding his decision to agree to Kennedy’s offer,

“When I asked the military advisors if they could assure me that holding fast would not result in the death of five hundred million human beings, they looked at me as though I was out of my mind, or what was worse, a traitor . . . So I said to myself, ‘To hell with these maniacs.’ . . . [My critics] say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?’”

No, the real concern here was their underlings. Military commanders and the like who were always soooo close to making that call for themselves. And of course, once they did, the other side would be obligated to respond, and so forth.

For example: the Cuban commander who shot down the US U-2 plane flying over Cuba, on their own initiative, against direct orders from Khrushchev.

For another (terrifying) example: On the same day the U-2 plane was shot down, an American destroyer in the Caribbean, the USS Beale, detected several Soviet submarines and peppered them with “practice depth charges” (i.e. just baiting them by chucking hand grenades at them, which wouldn’t do any damage to the sub).

The day before, a message had supposedly been sent to Moscow that sending practice depth charges was going to be a signal to submarines that they should come up to identify themselves and surrender. (Naturally, this message was never received, so the subs had no idea this was a thing).

So, unbeknownst to the USS Beale, these subs had no idea they were being signaled. They 100% thought they were under attack.

And little did the USS Beale (or even the submarines’ crews!!!) know, these subs each carried a nuclear warhead with the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Whoops.

Two of the three sub’s captains ordered the warheads readied for release, but ultimately none actually gave the order to strike (obviously, as we’d all probably be dead by now if they had).

Three people needed to agree to use the nuclear warhead: the captain, his second in command, and the Communist Party officer on board. On one of the subs, two of the three people to make the call to release the nuke agreed to do it— and the third was so close to agreeing with them. But he stood firm. They, and the other subs, decided to surface and surrender.

Even more wild: when they got back to Russia, the captains were all scolded for surfacing… rather than violating their written orders not to fire the nuclear weapons without a command from higher ups.

They were scolded for opting not to use nukes against direct orders. For saving all our lives basically.

Small wonder the guy who opposed his two fellow officers on that last sub is referred to as “The Man Who Saved the World.”

————————REACTIONS————————

First, it’s obvious how inefficient the higher echelons of the US government are, even when dealing with things as sensitive as nuclear weapons.

And it’s terrifying to learn how many people have the theoretical and practical ability to start a nuclear war on a whim.

The book itself reads okay, but not great. With some unfamiliar concepts and an extreme amount of alphabet soup acronyming, it sometimes makes for dense and necessarily attentive reading. Also, Ellsberg often refers to people by either their first or their last name or their nickname, changing it up even within the same paragraph, which got very confusing. But it’s not an incredibly difficult read either.

————————THE AUTHOR————————

Ellsberg is not an objective author by any means.

One wonders how it is he always seems to be right. I couldn’t possibly count how many times he recounts a story as follows: a situation arises. Ellsberg, a humble nobody, gives his opinion to a higher-up. Nobody believes or agrees with him. [Sometimes, Ellsberg, humble as he is, goes along with it and does things their way because they’re more important and must be right]. Later, everyone realizes he was right.

Awfully funny how Ellsberg is virtually never wrong. I mean, come on. He can’t have been right about EVERYTHING that ever happened. I’m sorry, it’s just too easy to claim that “I thought that all along! Seriously I tried to tell people but what can ya do” after the fact, when you know perfectly well that nobody on earth can contradict you.

Really, the only time Ellsberg ever really says “I was wrong” is in the context of “I was wrong not to stick to my guns, I was wrong to cave in, because I was right.” Which… isn’t the same thing as being wrong.

Although, perhaps, not always humble, Ellsberg does admit to surprising things that lend him credibility (i.e. he admits to a xenophobic comment about Turks that he’s “not proud of”), in that they cast him in a bad light.

And you can’t doubt the man’s commitment to nuclear non-proliferation. For instance, he’s been arrested numerous times for physically blocking the railroad tracks at nuclear weapons facilities, and pretty much dedicated his life to the cause.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the closing scene of the classic 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Major T. J. "King" Kong straddles a nuclear bomb as it soars down onto the Soviet Union while the World War II hit song We'll Meet Again blares in the background. Major Kong is the commander of a B-52 bomber sent to attack the USSR by the deranged general Jack D. Ripper—and the protocol will not permit the President of the United States to recall the plane. When the bomb explodes, it will trigger a Doomsday Machine installed by the Soviet military, dispersing a radioactive cloud of deadly Cobalt-Thorium G all across the earth and wiping out all human and animal life.

The "nuclear football" is a sham
Daniel Ellsberg, then a high-level consultant to the US military on nuclear war, viewed the film when it was newly released. He was profoundly shocked. He and a friend who worked with him thought Dr. Strangelove was "essentially a documentary." Somehow, the film's creator, Stanley Kubrick, had guessed one of the US government's most closely-held secrets. Despite all the media attention to the "nuclear football" containing the codes to unleash a nuclear war, and the government's insistence that only the President had access to those codes, it was indeed possible for a local commander to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. Beginning with President Eisenhower, an unknown number of military officers—certainly, more than a dozen; perhaps several dozen—have had their fingers on the nuclear button as well. Eisenhower had delegated that ability to his theater commanders, and they in turn had passed it down the line. Ellsberg even met an Air Force major commanding a small US airbase in Korea who could have started a nuclear war simply because he assumed the USSR had attacked American bases when atmospheric disturbance cut off communications.

The Doomsday Machine is alive and well
In fact, Ellsberg reveals, that level of delegation of control to military officers in the field has been the case throughout the sixty-year history of the nuclear standoff between the US and Russia. The potential still exists for a devastating nuclear exchange to be set off through miscommunication, miscalculation, or an unstable military commander. And Ellsberg makes the case in his shocking new memoir, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, that such an exchange would inevitably result in nuclear winter. This phenomenon, repeatedly confirmed by scientists, would extinguish virtually all complex life on Planet Earth by shutting off sunlight, causing harvests to fail, and subjecting billions of human beings and animals to "near-universal starvation within a year or two"—if they survive the fires and the fallout. Effectively, then, both nuclear superpowers had—and still have—the capability to end the human project with what amounts to a Doomsday Machine.

Dan Ellsberg's dramatic second act
Ellsberg has been studying nuclear war since the late 1950s, when he began a long career as a high-level government consultant to the military. Of course, he is far better known for his courage in releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, after several years of work on the Vietnam War. However, in The Doomsday Machine, he explains that he had collected a huge stockpile of official documents about nuclear war that he fully intended to release in the same manner once the reception for the Pentagon Papers had run its course.

"From the fall of 1969 to leaving the RAND Corporation in August 1970," Ellsberg writes, "I copied everything in the Top Secret safe in my office—of which the seven thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers were only a fraction . . . perhaps fifteen thousand pages in all." (For many years, Ellsberg had "classified access several levels above Top Secret.") Sadly, all but the Pentagon Papers were lost in an abortive effort to hide them. But much of that lost material has since been declassified. Now, based on his own extensive notes, research on the issue over six decades, and declassified files from the 1950s and 60s, Ellsberg is belatedly fulfilling his promise to bring the enduring nuclear threat to the forefront.

Startling revelations in The Doomsday Machine
The Doomsday Machine is full of deeply disturbing revelations. The book sometimes reads like a thriller, as Ellsberg describes his mounting horror and revulsion over the discoveries he made over the years. Here are just a few of the most shocking:

The United States is poised to deliver a preemptive nuclear first strike. "Deterring a surprise Soviet nuclear attack—or responding to such an attack—has never been the only or even the primary purpose of our nuclear plans and preparations . . . Though officially denied, preemptive 'launch on warning' (LOW) . . . has always been at the heart of our strategic alert."
The United States is far from alone in delegating nuclear war-making capability to field officers. "How many fingers are on Pakistani nuclear buttons? Probably not even the president of Pakistan knows reliably."
"The strategic nuclear system is more prone to false alarms, accidents, and unauthorized launches than the public (and even most high officials) has ever been aware."
For decades after the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s, US nuclear weapons were targeted at thousands of cities in both Russia and China—and our country's nuclear war doctrine held that every weapon in the arsenal would be released all at once in the event of war . . . on both countries.
If you're old enough, or read enough history, you might remember the "missile gap" that played a part in elevating John F. Kennedy to the White House. Of course, there was no gap, as was revealed not far into Kennedy's short stay there. But Ellsberg reveals that the actual number of Soviet nuclear weapons at the time was not hundreds but . . .  four. The US then had forty. (Today, there are nearly 15,000 nuclear warheads stockpiled around the world; the US and Russia account for 93 percent of them.)
If you were an adult during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, as I was, you're surely aware that the world came extremely close to nuclear armageddon. Ellsberg reveals, however, that the chances of war were even greater than was known for many years after the fact. Four nuclear-armed Soviet submarines were in the Caribbean—and one came perilously close to detonating a nuclear torpedo that would have destroyed US Navy ships in the vicinity. Only the chance intervention of a single man on that submarine prevented that catastrophe, which would unquestionably have caused the US military to unleash a first strike on the USSR and China. And that event took place two days after the world believed the crisis had been resolved by agreement between Kennedy and Khrushchev.
In Part Two of The Doomsday Machine, Ellsberg probes the origins of the notion that attacking cities was acceptable. It's a fascinating account of the history of airpower, from the use of planes for reconnaissance in World War I to strategic bombing in World War II. Though less dramatic than his earlier revelations about nuclear war, Ellsberg's explanation of how the US and Britain came to justify the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden is deeply distressing. This experience laid the foundation for the use of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and makes clear how "there was no moral agonizing at all among Truman's civilian or military advisors about the prospect of using the atom bomb on a city." Yet "seven of the eight officers of five-star rank in the U.S. Armed Forces in 1945 believed the bomb was not necessary to avert [an] invasion" of Japan.

We still live under the nuclear hammer. "Two systems still risk doomsday," Ellsberg concludes. "Both are still on hair-trigger alert that makes their joint existence unstable."

[Bill Rasche · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remember Daniel Ellsberg from the Watergate era? His book will freak you right on out when you discover just how close we came to a nuclear holocaust more than 50 years ago. Spellbinding!

[Michael Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished on the same day as the Hawaii ICBM alert.

Every adult needs to read this book and put pressure on Congress to reduce our On Alert Nuclear status. .. below is a quote from Kruschev a few years after the Cuban missle crisis.


“When I asked the military advisors if they could assure me that holding fast would not result in the death of five hundred million human beings, they looked at me as though I was out of my mind, or what was worse, a traitor. The biggest tragedy, as they saw it, was not that our country might be devastated and everything lost, but that the Chinese or the Albanians might accuse us of appeasement or weakness. So I said to myself, “To hell with these maniacs. If I can get the United States to assure me that it will not attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, I will remove the missiles.” That is what happened, and now I am reviled by the Chinese and the Albanians.… They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact? “

That last line, indeed the whole quote, deserves to be studied by all those whose fingers hover over the trigger to a Doomsday Machine.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘The most dangerous man in America’, gives an inside look at what it was like to be involved in planning for nuclear war. Daniel Ellsberg had originally planned to release the documents on nuclear plans along with the Pentagon Papers, but the documents he collected have now been lost.

Ellsberg sets out to debunk the myth that the United States has not used nuclear weapons since 1945. Nukes have been used to threaten and intimidate, as a gun is in a robbery, even if the gun is never fired.

Ellsberg knew much more about nuclear strategy than most civilians, yet it is remarkable all the things he didn’t know and took decades to come out. He was unaware of how close the world was to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It is amazing how accurate Dr. Strangelove was in its depiction of nuclear strategy (as is indicated by the title of this book). A general really could have ordered a nuclear attack as shown in the movie, that could not be recalled. Dr. Strangelove showed the truth long before it was public knowledge.

I read this right after Command and Control, which reveals the terrifying state of nuclear management. This book makes the state of affairs even more worrisome. Ellsberg calls for an end to the nuclear first strike policy. It is well known that a full scale nuclear war would destroy life as we know it. No political advantage can be gained from that.

[Simon Mee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometime I read a book that isn't wrong on its main points, but kinda keeps niggling you on the details. The Doomsday Machine is one of those books.

Nuclear War is bad, ok

The Doomsday Machine is about the precipice of nuclear annihilation that we have stood upon since the Cold War. While Russia and other countries are mentioned, the main focus is the American command and control system, which Ellsberg had consulted on since about the 1950s.

There are some interesting anecdotes that carry wider points. Ellsberg watched scramble drills in Japan for nuclear bombers, but they would never actually launch (due to the risk of crashing and accidentally exploding their weapons), nor practice the abort and return to home drills that were fail-safes against unauthorised bombings (if a pilot had not received a positive in-flight order to engage the target after launching, they were to return to base). As Ellsberg points out, if there was an emergency launch with atomic bombs on board:

They would believe the war was on, or was imminent, because the commanders who had launched them without precedent would appear to have thought so.

...which could colour those pilots' decision-making while waiting for a positive inflight “engage” order.

There are further layers of detail on this point, things that are intuitive but not apparently obvious. Ellsberg’s experiences are the best parts of the book, such as learning how speeches can conveying different meaning to their intended parties (and the timing of those speeches can have an impact).

The problem is that book as a whole suffers from being a little on the late side. Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control (which Ellsberg cites) was earlier and, on the balance, better. Doomsday Machine is interesting but most of the “confessions” were already out there. We kind of know nuclear systems rest on dangerous (“doomsday”) machinery.

The severe limitations of sheer intellect

Ellsberg splits his book between his own experiences, and the mental framework that led to targeting urban cities with nuclear weapons as part of "total war", running right through to World War 2 and the early Cold War.

I don’t want to argue that the strategic bombing of German and Japanese cities were a good thing. I'm probably in general agreement with Ellsberg. The problem is that he is loose about the history of “total war”. For him, an early example of the blurring of distinctions between combatant and non-combatant is the burning of Atlanta in 1864:

And the innovation that he introduced - which was observed from Europe as an act of barbarism and is so remembered in the South to this day - was to allow his troops to attack the city of Atlanta as a whole, destroying most of its stores and burning the city.

I’ve got a couple of problems with this:

- I get that Ellsberg is writing for an American audience and “memories” of Atlanta are a cultural touchstone, but the notably brutal Indian Mutiny ran from 1857, the burning of the Summer Palace in China was in 1860 and… …well look up any reputable text on Imperialism or even “Manifest Destiny”. It’s embarrassing for Ellsberg to treat Atlanta as a notable escalation.

- Even allowing for an American audience, the stripping of events from their context flirts dangerously with “Lost Cause” mythology. He’s writing sympathetically about an insurrection that enslaved during the Gettysburg campaign African Americans living in the Union. The Confederate States both before, during and after the Civil War, committed “barbarism” on non-combatant African Americans. Atlanta was not an “innovation” even in an American context.

Ellsberg then writes that the strategy of large-scale military attack on the economy and social order of an opponent didn’t really occur in World War 1. Ellsberg’s argument appears to be that the military stalemate made attractive the theories of total war via bombing undefended cities. I don’t believe Ellsberg’s totally off on the motivators, but he removes context in such a way that makes acts of bombing a city more of an escalation that it was in practice. The British imposed a punishing naval blockade in World War 1 and the Germans committed (fitfully) to unrestricted submarine warfare.

As for World War 2, the German bombings of Warsaw and Rotterdam are explicable to Ellsberg as being cities under siege (not sure how Atlanta isn’t covered by that exception) whereas the Blitz was a reaction to mistakes on both sides. There’s no mention of the German Palm Sunday bombing of Belgrade in April 1941 or the bombings of refugee columns, neither of which fall under either of those qualifiers.

Ellsberg might be strictly correct with:

But deliberate bombing of urban populations as the principal way of fighting a war by a major industrial power can be said to have started on February 14, 1942, with a specific British directive.

…but he makes a lot (and I do mean a lot) of “strictly correct” statements in his book where the qualifiers can substantially change the impact. Ellsberg essentially ignores the atrocities of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. My comments may read as “whatabouterism” but my main point is this – Ellsberg creates a pattern of escalation that isn’t as clear as he makes out in the narrative and leans abit heavily on Anglo-Americans being the agents of change.

There’s also a section about high level figures in the US military opposing the atomic bombing of Japan. It’s the old “seven of the eight five star generals/admirals opposed it” canard that doesn’t really mean much. Kinda crazy none of those seven five star generals stopped it at the time.

An alternative interpretation to bombing cities is this: Faced with an existential threat and a limited toolbox of responses, Britain and the United States were willing to bomb cities, whether conventionally or by nuclear weapons. Other than that, the general trend post World War 2 has been towards minimising collateral damage, even against non-Western powers. You can fill up several volumes of exceptions but it is still a very different story that Ellsberg makes out, that being of an American force desperate to pull the trigger on total war.

So, there are some interesting anecdotes, mostly stale revelations, and a bit of wonky, or at least incomplete history. It’s not terrible, it’s just a bit limited.

[Bettie]

Description: From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the awful dangers of America’s hidden, fifty-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day.

When former presidential advisor Daniel Ellsberg famously took the top-secret Pentagon Papers, he also took with him a chilling cache of top secret documents related to America’s nuclear program in the 1960s. Here for the first time he reveals the contents of those documents, and makes clear their shocking relevance for today.

The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg’s hair-raising insider’s account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization, whose legacy—and proposed renewal under the Trump administration—threatens the very survival of humanity. It is scarcely possible to estimate the true dangers of our present nuclear policies without penetrating the secret realities of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, when Ellsberg had high-level access to them. No other insider has written so candidly of that long-classified history, though the policies remain fundamentally, and frighteningly, unchanged

Ellsberg, in the end, offers steps we can take under the current administration to avoid nuclear catastrophe. Framed as a memoir, this gripping exposé reads like a thriller with cloak-and-dagger intrigue, placing Ellsberg back in his natural role as whistle-blower. It is a real-life Dr. Strangelove story, but an ultimately hopeful—and powerfully important—book.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

[the U.S.] are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction, firebombs, and atomic bombs—and believes that it was fully justified in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.

Update 20 June 2023:
In light of Dan Ellsberg's passing on 16 June, I thought it apropos to add some of his words of hope to my admittedly somewhat down-beat review...

The death of humanity is not something that moves [people] to vote. They act as if there is no chance to make any difference. As if it’s impossible to change things.

Yet, we all thought the Berlin Wall coming down was impossible. Nelson Mandela becoming president of South Africa without a violent revolution seemed impossible.

In the same way, I currently cannot see any chance of getting rid of ICBMs, or of no-first-use. But miracles do happen. I choose to act as if it makes a difference. And it’s just a choice. I can’t defend that. It’s just a better way to live. It’s the way I choose to live. We can work to prevent the cataclysm.

The fact that the soulless ghoul known as Kissinger today outlives the man he labelled "the most dangerous man in America" could, if we chose, symbolize the state of the Western world as run by the U.S.: that the demonic, sociopathic "realists", those who casually justify world-ending powers and believe there are circumstances that entitle a handful of men to end humanity, have won.

Indeed, we are closer to the end of humanity than ever before in recorded history, whether that end is brought about by atmospheric ignition, nuclear winter, or the ongoing poisoning of air, water and soil as the by-products of return on capital.

It's tempting to give up and try to enjoy whatever time humanity have left, or we can act as if we each matter and can make a difference.


my original notes:
A terrifying true history of America's moronic group-think-driven shambolic development of "strategy" for the inevitable thermonuclear war with Russia and China, which will probably ignite the atmosphere, boil the oceans, and end all life on earth in one bright, hot moment.

Ellsberg notes the numerous milestones along America's slide into the full-on embrace of strategic bombing--after initially decrying the UK's immoral firebombing of German population centers: the untold tragedy of our times. "Strategic" of course being a psychotic euphemism for killing as many ordinary people as possible to disrupt the economy and convince the enemy to give up. This is the same definition of "strategic" in Strategic Nuclear War.

I had always entertained the thought that Truman and his advisors, at least his non-military, nominally "civilian" advisors, had some doubts, misgivings, regrets, fears, etc. around their decision to test two different atomic weapons on innocent noncombatants in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Alas, Ellsberg shows that none of these human emotions were in play by that point. Indeed, these same "people" had already signed off on the incineration of over 100,000 people in Tokyo during a single, day-long, incendiary bombing raid on the city designed to burn up families in their homes. What was another 100k or so? All the better, went the discussions. Show the weapons work and slaughter the enemy. Winning was all that mattered. The only real concern some had was about the whole atmospheric ignition risk. Many of the scientists thought there was better than zero chance of ending all life on earth, even with the first tests, but they went on anyway.

Damning indeed that Hitler himself, Adolf fucking Hitler himself, when faced with the inevitability of atomic war that would kill all life on earth, chose NOT to pursue atomic weapons. Probably helped that the fuhrer's scientists thought a bomb wouldn't be ready in time to win the war, but Hitler--HITLER--turns out to be literally more human (albeit limited to the method of genocide) than Truman and all his handlers and lackeys, and every other leader since who has had the chance to stop, reverse course, and eliminate the greatest, clearest and most present threat to humanity. Hitler was Hitler, but Truman and many others are no lesser monsters. Every president and general since have used WMDs as a man uses a gun to commit robbery. They may not want to use the gun, but are fully prepared to.

One of the lighter moments in the book explains that there was--and likely still IS--no allowance in the programmed strategies for attacking Russia or China separately. It is logistically impossible by design. I'm sure the neocons have managed to program Iran in there as well--it will be a three-fer.

Reading this book alongside The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry may have made it more frightening, but it did help me understand why America's leaders have made some of their more-objectively-horrific decisions: because they personally got off on exploiting, hurting, and killing. It's the only rational answer: we are ruled by sociopaths.

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely interesting, often illuminating, disturbing book, marred only by a certain naïveté expressed by Ellsberg’s concluding optimism, such as it is.

[Sean Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are a few books out there that expertly detail nuclear war logic and the existential absurdity it entails. The Doomsday Machine is one of them. Read this and you'll see how close we were (and still are) to near extinction.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daniel Ellsberg will always be the patron saint of whistleblowers. He earned his place in history by leaking the Pentagon Papers, documenting that the American government knew the war in Vietnam was based on lies and going poorly long before it admitted anything of that sort to the public. Vietnam was the end of Ellsberg's official career. He real passion was nuclear war, and trying to make sure that one never occurred. In a twist of fate, the nuclear documents that Ellsberg also copied in the 1970s were lost in a landslide, but decades later much of that material has become available through FOIA and similar requests.

I thought I knew a fair bit about the Cold War and nuclear brinksmanship, and even so this book was astounding. The conventional wisdom is that nuclear war is MAD-Mutually Assured Destruction. Peace is preserved in a tense equilibrium where each side knows that any nuclear exchange will lead to annihilation of it's own population via a sure retaliation. The paradoxical credibility of peace by violence is restrained by the twin promises that nothing can stop the fire and that nukes will only be launched in response to a nuclear attack. The first point is true, the second point is a lie.

As Ellsberg points out, the American government has never disavowed the first use of nuclear weapons, or the potential of a nuclear first strike (First use is any unprovoked use. First strike is massive first use intended to prevent retaliation). Every American president since Truman has used the nuclear arsenal like a robber with a gun. That the gun has not been fired yet is secondary to the basic fact that it is loaded, aimed, and used to compel obedience.

This book is best when it hews closest to Ellsberg's work at RAND and in the White House. Coming out of the Marines and Harvard with a PhD in decision-making under uncertainty, he embarked on a survey of nuclear strategy in the Pacific in 1959 or so, and what he found was incredibly alarming. President Eisenhower had delegated the authority to launch a nuclear strike to CINCPAC in Honolulu, who had further devolved authority to theater commanders on Okinawa, Guam, Korea, and various ships. All of these commands were routinely out of contact with higher headquarters due to distance and poor radio communications. While there was in theory a 'two man rule' that prevented any single officer from broadcasting the order to launch a nuclear strike, in reality every ship and base had procedures for bypassing the two man rule.

Bases practiced alerts on a daily basis and were capable of launching aircraft on 10 minute notice, a stated objective of the attack plan. The attack plan was "fail-safe", in that if an aircraft had not received a go order by the time it reached bingo fuel and had to either commit to the attack or return to base, it would return to base. Strategic Air Command (SAC) practiced full alerts with armed bombers flying to their holding points. In the Pacific, Tactical Air Command merely taxied to the flightlines with bombs. This was both to save fuel and maintenance, and also because the bombs used were not one-point safe, and F-100s were difficult airplanes to flying, meaning there was a small but real chance a plane crash could lead to a nuclear detonation.

As Ellsberg pointed out, visiting a small airbase in the ass-end of Korea, a real alert would be the first time that these pilots had taken off with live bombs. There was also a non-zero chance that plane 8 of 12 would crash on take-off, and the remaining pilots would find themselves out of communications with command, their base enveloped in a mushroom cloud, and with the fate of their world in their hands.

Ellsberg asked the officer in command, a major, what would happen. Would the pilots returned to base as planned? "Yes they would. They're good boys. Well, probably... Hell, if one goes, they might as well all go!" The end of the world could be triggered by an honorable and dutiful officer at the very low rank of major, on his own orders, based on his own very partial understanding of the strategic situation. And there was nothing the entire chain of command, from the President on down, could do to stop it.

Worse than accidents was the actual proper plan. The effort involved in coordinating thousands of aircraft and bombs and avoiding mutual fratricide meant that there was only one plan, a massive all-out attack on the Soviet Union, Communist China, and the Warsaw Pact that would drop thousands of hydrogen bombs in a single spasm until nothing remained in the American arsenal. This plan was to be activated on the event of general war, a conflict with the Soviet Union larger than a skirmish. The plan itself, the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, was so secret that it was concealed from the President and the White House staff, the anodyne JSCP acronym also kept secret. It was a plan for genocide. The initial bombardment would kill hundreds of millions. Fire effects were too difficult to estimate, so they were assumed to cause zero casualties. Radioactive fallout would kill an estimated another five hundred million or so, wiping out allies and neutrals in Western Europe and South Asia. Plumes of fallout would drift around the globe, and ash lofted into the stratosphere would trigger a nuclear winter and years-long famine.

In one rather acid summary of his career, Ellsberg describes his life's mission as moving a piece of paper from one desk to a desk with higher authority. The truth about the Vietnam War shifted from the Pentagon to the public. JSCP from the Air Force to the President. Ellsberg joined the Kennedy administration on a part-time leave from RAND, and drafted a new nuclear war plan that proposed leaving cities untouched, hostages for a second round, and reducing the triggering events for nuclear war. There is a lot of canny bureaucratic knife fighting, and great descriptions of the proper deployment of informational memos around the Cuban missile crisis, for those who care about those sorts of things.

The latter half of the book weapons lags as Ellsberg discusses general nuclear strategy, rather than his own experience, but he makes an ironclad case that current nuclear policy in the United States is inherently unsafe and that the soft power gained by joining international arms controls norms would override the veiled, and not-so-veiled threats, made by American Presidents. We've been lucky that there have been no fatal technical glitches, and that at moments of maximum tension people who understood the consequences had the last word, but luck is not enough. Something has to change before the doomsday machine goes off.

As the motto of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces goes, "After us - silence".

[Bob H · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a frightening story of the US nuclear war policy from the 1950s on, by someone who was a witness (at RAND) and a participant. Daniel Ellsberg was privy to the secret war planning at that time, which apparently is still largely in place. The film "Dr. Strangelove" turns out to be uncomfortably close to true life, he says.

We find out that:

- there really was a doomsday machine, of sorts: in the US, a single plan for nuclear war, triggered by any use of nuclear weapons, tactical or strategic -- and one that automatically, massively targeted not only the Soviet Union but China as well, whether or not China was a party to the war. In Russia, the "Perimeter" program would trigger a nuclear salvo in much the same way as the "Dr. Strangelove" device.

- that the US presidents had delegated authority to launch nuclear weapons to lower commanders. Ellsberg tells of visiting a remote airstrip in Korea where 12 F-100 jets, each armed with a 1.2 megaton H-bomb, were kept; whose commanding officer, a major, could launch a strike if he deemed it necessary. This was not the only such field commander who had such weaponry, we learn.

- that the US did maintain a nuclear-weapons cache just offshore in Japan, ready to land and load on waiting bombers, in violation of agreements with Japan.

- that the US did have a first-strike and first-use policy, at least unofficially.

- that, on Oct. 27, 1962, the height of the Missile Crisis, the two sides came very close, on three different incidents, to launching all-out war.

- that the US had a massive superiority in strategic weapons, overkill, which would have not only destroyed the Communist powers but, through fallout, our European allies as well. Further, the US underestimated the amount of heat and smoke that firestorms would have put into the atmosphere, possibly extinguishing most life on earth, so it was not just "Dr. Strangelove" but "On The Beach" as scenarios.

There's more. Let's just say it's gripping reading, especially now that the same doomsday framework is still in place, and the danger, in North Korea and elsewhere, is still real. All that's different are the national leaders and the new instabilities they bring.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the easiest book to read. Lots of breaks in sentences, and a lot of repetition particularly in the early chapters. In fact I nearly gave up before the halfway point because it became quite tedious the way that the relatively few points were laboured upon. The second half focuses on the early days of nuclear weapons and is a far better read. If you can push through the early meh, it gets good, and scary!

[Marc Sims · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, written by the same Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam war during Nixon’s presidency, was eye-opening. A little slow at first, at about the half-way point the book became fascinating. The book is part memoir, party history lesson, and part policy recommendation.

The author worked for the Rand Corporation and the Department of Defense through the Cold War, planning nuclear war with Russia and its allies. By the end of the book, here is what he convinced me of:

- If Russia or America launches one nuclear missile at the other, the other will respond with its entire nuclear arsenal, which will result in the death of every human being on the planet. In other words, there is no possibility of one country using nuclear warheads against the other without wiping out the human race. So these two countries should be lowering nuclear tensions, not amping them up.
- All humanity will die from that scenario not just from the blast or from radiation, but from nuclear winter, which is the result of smoke and debris being propelled into the stratosphere above rainfall, blocking out the sun and putting the world into a perpetual ice age.
- The bombs we currently have are now 1,000 times stronger than the ones used in WWII.
- It is a myth that only the president has the capability to authorize a nuclear launch. There are many, many people with that capability in the military.
- Both America and Russia have automated middle launch systems that will launch the entire nuclear salvo automatically without a human being’s input if they detect incoming missiles (systems that have malfunctioned in the past). Thus, Armageddon could begin without anyone causing it, just a computer. This is what the author calls “doomsday machines.”
- During the Cuban Missile Crisis we came only a breath away from total nuclear war. I knew that before the book, but the stories he retells in here are palm-sweating accounts that I had never heard of that make your mind reel at just how close it was. We really should have gone to war with Russia over that (thank God we didn’t).
- It was—though not at first—the Allies policy to intentionally target civilians and cities in WWII with bombing. Aiming at one military compound was much more difficult and costly then indiscriminately bombing a city. He retells the gruesome accounts of us firebombing Tokyo and Dresden, killing more in both of them than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Essentially, when it came time to drop the Atom bomb, it wasn’t out of character with our previous practices. The author actually makes a compelling case that what we did in targeting civilians to demoralize a country was, by definition, a war crime.
- You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and you can’t unlearn how to make a nuclear bomb. So while total nuclear disarmament would be ideal, it isn’t likely. But a serious reduction in our nuclear stockpiles and ending our constant posturing of a “finger hovering over the button” in any conflict would be a great start. He also proposes that the US should sign a “No First Use” agreement, that commits us to not using a nuke as a first response.
- Our current nuclear position is something that, surprisingly, both political parties support and every major presidential candidate has endorsed. Obama hinted at a reduction in nuclear use, but quickly changed his mind.


All in all, this was a great and challenging book. I am fairly conservative when it comes to most things, but this book changed my mind on our nuclear use.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and compelling. An insider's view of what seemingly rational decisions led us to the path we're on. A lot in here to like for fans of nuclear policy and military and political history. If you think the end of the Cold War made most of this irrelevant, think again. Despite being fairly long there was a lot to cover and I found it easy to finish. It also has a dark humor in it, in particular with the comparisons to Dr. Stangelove. I especially appreciated that Ellsberg presented it through a lens of decision-making under uncertainty, which was his original area of research expertise. I also found it interesting that others inside the system also saw the madness in it, and tried to do what they could. At the end, Ellsberg also presents a hopeful plan to make the world safer, but doesn't pretend it'll be easy. I was lucky to see Ellsberg at the Commonwealth Club in 2018 talk about this book and spotted it at the S.F. library. He's an inspiring person and the world could use more folks like him.

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frightening revelations and some repetition, this book tries to accomplish a few different things. It achieves one well, and is somewhat convincing that we the people aren't powerless.

Economist Daniel Ellsberg, famous for the Pentagon papers, has collected a lifetimes worth of research and thoughts into the risks of Nuclear War, both strategic and tactical. This is the best part of the volume, and it reveals a lot, including just how many people could actually launch nuclear weapons (hint - it's a LOT more than just the president). Because of the doomsday systems in place, most of these launches would trigger automatic responses, ending in nuclear winter or omnicide (great, if depressing, term).

Per the many-worlds hypothesis, are we just the lucky ones who have survived thus far?

Other portions of the book include the transition from attacking military targets to bombing civilian centers, the de-facto target of nuclear weapons. The history here is muddled, and has been presented better in other books. I think a more concise one-chapter summary would have been better. The best part of this section is where Ellsberg points out that the atom bomb actually did less damage than the campaign of firebombing in place up to that point - but using less planes.

He concludes the book calling for disarmament, calling for commitments to no first strike, and others. What would have been more impactful (and may in actuality be the case, though still classified) is that we could easily replace the nuclear weapons with missiles that could destroy the weapons and weapon systems - reverting to the original goal, and leaving cities and innocent populations out of jeopardy. He does point out how difficult it would be to change the direction of our current military-industrial complex, and that probably applies equally well to other countries - especially those that lack the newest technology. He also shows where people have effected change related to nuclear topics - all hope is not lost.

Aside from the muddled history, there were sentences and small paragraphs that were duplicates. It almost feels like this was a series of articles collected into a book, and if so, it needed a lot more editing. The best result would have focused on what the author knows best, including details on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the risks and flaws in the system used in the 60s and 70s. In the end, this was a book that was equal parts enlightening, depressing, and frustrating. 3 stars (out of 5).

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a rollercoaster. And by rollercoaster, I mean only the part where you're slowly click-clacking your way further and further up toward impending doom. And, while you're making your way up there the person next to you leans over and tells you that your best friend killed your cat because she's actually a homicidal lunatic.

But, really, this book is phenomenal as a historical record, a dire warning to humanity, and a call to action. My only hesitation in recommending it to others is the guilt I'll feel for scaring the shit out of the people I care about.

[Nick Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

ellsberg is a big self-aggrandizing, but there's lots of interesting information here.

[Charlie White · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the scariest books ever written.

[Vheissu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book will interest general readers as well as subject matter experts, including students of bureaucratic politics.

The title derives from the classic film, Dr. Strangelove. Ellsberg demonstrates that Stanley Kubrick got some things right and some things wrong in his movie, although in both respects things in the late 1950s and early 1960s were much, much worse than the disaster depicted on screen. One of the things Kubrick got right was the problem of a "doomsday shroud." In reality, it wasn't "cobalt thorium G" that would destroy "all plant and animal life" on the planet for ninety-three years; instead, it would be "nuclear winter," something that was not understood or accounted for (or ignored) in Air Force projections at the time, but is understood today as accomplishing pretty much the same thing. A nuclear exchange involving as few as 100 megatons in ground burst weapons would quickly destroy planetary vegetation and everything that depends upon it (e.g., human beings). Today's stockpiles of hydrogen bombs are well in excess of 10,000 megatons.

One of the things Kubrick got wrong, perhaps intentionally for dramatic purposes, was a "recall code." In fact, there was no recall code, only a "Go Code." The Air Force resisted the idea of a recall code because, they argued, it might confuse airmen and be exploited by the enemy. In fact, Ellsberg recalls, Strategic Air Command didn't believe politicians had the guts for nuclear warfare and might get cold feet. So, if an aircraft was 12 hours away from its target and the enemy capitulated in the meantime, the bomber would continue to its target and drop its weapons anyway (!).

The book is essentially two books. The second part of the book reviews the history of strategic bombing, starting with World War I. This story is familiar to anybody who has studied the matter. Before 1945, strategic bombing was intended to destroy cities (and the civilians who lived in them); after 1945, the intention was to kill nations, even at the risk of destroying allies and neutrals (1 million dead in NATO countries; see below).

The first part of the book, and the more interesting of the two, recounts Ellsberg's personal history as a civilian consultant for RAND. Ellsberg reports that he had higher security clearances than almost anybody else in the Santa Monica think-tank, higher clearances, indeed, than almost any civilian official in the U.S. government, including secretaries of defense and, in a least some cases, presidents of the United States (i.e., Kennedy and Johnson). Navigating the worlds of military, consultancy, and civilian authority, knowing things that others didn't and understanding better than anybody else the insanity of U.S. strategic policy at the time, Ellsberg paints a brilliant picture of bureaucratic politics that transcends the narrow focus of his responsibilities. Students of policy-making will find a lot of good material to mine here.

[Charles Gonzalez · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t expecting to give this book a 5 star rating - I started it on the basis of the title , taken from the work of Herman Kahn , and its author , the celebrated source of the Pentagon Papers. While I had an inkling of Ellsberg’s history in intelligence matters I really had no idea of the depth of his experience and knowledge as it related to nuclear planning. The man is a veritable Zelig , making an appearance, even taking a leading role in most of the key and mostly unknown nuclear weapons policy developments between 1954 and 1980. He was, as Dean Acheson said of his diplomatic career, “present at the creation “. Ellsberg arrived just after the birth of the nuclear age but just in time to witness the tremendous growth in its complexity and terribleness.
Why wait for so long to write this book? I asked the same question after a few pages. It turns out that he, Ellsberg has been stewing on this for decades and waited for time to free up official and classified documents that corroborate his opinions and statements of fact. His overarching mission is to rid the world of nuclear weapons to prevent what the title states is the ultimate risk of the nuclear age, The Doomsday Machine; the thought to be fictional device created by Stanley Kubrick in his movie, “Dr. Strangelove.” However the device was not fictional at all having been described by Herman Kahn the celebrated and infamous physicist/futurist who was a colleague of Ellsbergs at Rand Corp.
Ellsberg’s mission is to tell the history and story of the Doomsday Machine and it’s immoral existence as the threat to mankind’s existence .
Ellsberg describes the machine as a series of weapons, systems and technology that could, via an accident or automatic response to an unforeseen event trigger the kind of thermonuclear war that triggers the “nuclear winter” phenomena that he says is true inheritor of Kahn’s famous weapon.
The reader can imagine Ellsberg now , in his 80’s reflecting on his life’s work and the reality that we continue to live under this threat even though we are led to believe that it cannot and will not happen.
Ellsberg’s value is in illuminating our ignorance and demanding that we change as a society recognizing the existential threat to all human life.
It is a book for the ages and should explode the collective myths that have and continue to surround this issue in the minds of Americans and human kind.

[Janne Peltola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

I thought I was relatively knowledgeable about WMDs. I've read Richard Rhodes' scholarly epics about the origins of nuclear weapons and then tempered my technocracy with Scholler's Command & Control and Hoffman's Dead Hand. All very good books that provide one with a comprehensive view of WMD history and policy.

Turns out, I was naive.

Ellsberg's book is the best antidote to the idea that technology is an unmitigated good or that socio-technical problems can be solved by better technology. He uses his years of access with high-level clearances to show us the petty infighting within the nuclear bureaucracy and the ruthless mindset of the nuclear planners.

He lays out case after case of instances where institutional prerogatives and dominant personalities created a culture where hundreds of millions of casualties were just a cost of doing business and building personal empires. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy applies even to genocide.

After reminiscing about bureaucratic catfights around mass extinction, he moves on to explain how we got here. I had never connected the dots between the Dresden and Tokyo bombings and the Nato strategic posture on nuclear weapons. Now I do.

Ellsberg is at his sharpest when he lays out how the whole of human civilization could be turned to rubble (or saved, as in the case of his chilling account of the Cuban missile crisis) by a single soldier's well-intentioned initiative. This might sound implausible, but that's the doomsday machine we built for ourselves.

All in all, the book should be mandatory reading for anyone who deals with socio-technical systems or security policy. You come away with a sober appreciation for how bureaucracy and culture trump common decency and common sense.

If this book doesn't make one a nuclear abolitionist (for which Ellsberg lays out a realistic roadmap), I don't know what to tell you.

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Could also be titled: Let's all take a minute to appreciate what a giant fucking miracle it is that the human race hasn't managed to wipe itself out yet, despite insane Americans with nukes who merrily draw up plans to annihilate millions, potentially billions of people (and that's not even counting the tiny little problem of nuclear winter) and then pat themselves on the back for a job well done. (Certain other nuclear nations might of course very well have developed similar plans, involving similar numbers of fatalities, but that's not what the book offers concrete evidence for.) Fascinating, very scary stuff. The world would be a far safer place with a few Ellsbergs in charge and the complete abolition of any and all nuclear weapons worldwide. (Not that that's likely to happen, but hey, a girl can dream.)

[Laura Passin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, this is one of the most frightening books I've ever read. Absolutely chilling.

[Behzad · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many details that I never thought could be there and Ellsberg elaborated on them masterfully and sometimes with humor.

The complexity and multiple layers of Nuclear War planning is quite frankly unbelievable. This is particularly so because despite all the complexity the trigger has not been pulled since the first use of nuclear bomb.

The book is very well written, filled with details that is not commonly known. Towards the end we are confronted with questions that are original, at least for someone who doesn’t have clearance, and constructive.

[Raquel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hahahahhahahahahahhahaha wtf are we doing with nuclear weapons

[Kat V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another terrifying book. For extra terror, pair this with Nuclear War by Annie Jacobson. I liked the author. 4.1 stars

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading this, feel pretty lucky to have ever been born. Ellsberg, best known for The Pentagon Papers, goes back to the well for this report on the history of our nuclear-weapons policies, and just how problem-riddled and risk-heavy they have been. It can be dry at times, but it's a critical read for understanding the importance, even now, of nuclear disarmament.

[Dick Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a good book to read at night because you probably won’t get any sleep.
Daniel Ellsberg reveals much about his career at the RAND Corporation following his 1957 discharge from the Marine Corps. Along the way he punctures the balloons of many myths regarding the safety and employment of nuclear weapons by U. S. forces. Contrary to public opinion, the authority to launch such a weapon was not solely entrusted with the President and his nuclear “football.” Instead, such authority was delegated to senior military in the Pacific and Atlantic and then sub-delegated to even lower level commands. Such weapons could also be found in unlikely places. He tells of a Navy LST anchored in Japan’s Yokosuka harbor with a nuclear weapon aboard. The ship was moved to Okinawa when the Japanese learned of this serious safety violation. He also tells about seeing H-bombs slung under the wings of F-100 fighter-bombers on alert at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, ready to take off on ten minutes notice. Overall the book is full of interesting (and frightening) information about the number of nuclear weapons held by several countries and what the more powerful ones can do to eliminate human life on our globe.
One of the most harrowing stories Ellsberg tells centers around the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s. There was a fleet of U. S. Navy ships off the Cuban coast and they were to monitor the removal of Russian missiles. There were also four Russian submarines in the same general area and our Navy ships were “practicing” dropping depth charges on the subs with inert hand grenades. The subs were equipped with nuclear torpedoes and, an one point, three officers in one sub seriously considered firing torpedoes but were overruled by the two most senior ones of the trio. Such a weapon would have destroyed all of the ships in the fleet and probably caused a more drastic response from the U. S.
So we “dodged a bullet” this time. But it was only one of many such occurrences. Ellsberg documents some twenty-six (!) nuclear crises starting with the August 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and concluding with nuclear threats by Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton in 1996. Of course there have been others such as the recent threats made by President Trump against North Korea.
Ellsberg ends the book with a chapter called “Dismantling the Doomsday Machine.” In order to greatly diminish the likelihood of global annihilation, U. S. and Russia would have to enter an agreement to disarm and never use nuclear weapons in a first strike. Such an agreement would require a huge amount of trust on both sides and perhaps that is just not realistic, given the personal characters of Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. In our current world, we also have a large unknown in the person of Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, probably the least trustworthy of all. The next several months will probably give us greater assurances (or sleepless nights) on just whom we can trust.