The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

by Daniel Ellsberg

Overview

Shortlisted for the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

From the legendary Pentagon Papers whistle-blower, an eyewitness exposé of America's Top Secret, seventy-year nuclear policy that continues to this day.

Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand 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 exposé 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 whistle-blower. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608196746
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	12/05/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	223,742
File size:	870 KB

About the Author

In 1961, Daniel Ellsberg, a consultant to the White House, drafted Secretary Robert McNamara’s plans for nuclear war. Later he leaked the Pentagon Papers. A senior fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, he was the author of Secrets and the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America. He was also a key figure in Steven Spielberg’s film about the Pentagon Papers, The Post. Through numerous media interviews, he robustly communicated his lifelong concerns about the dangers of nuclear weapons and wars of intervention until his death in 2023.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

There was a secret well-kept during the two years I was under indictment for copying the Top Secret Pentagon Papers and during the two years of Watergate investigations that followed — and for more than forty years since. On my defense team during the trial, it was known, aside from by me, only by my principal attorney, Leonard Boudin. Not by his associate lawyers; not by my co-defendant, Tony Russo; not even by my wife, Patricia.

During my trial in Los Angeles I was often asked by reporters, in particular Peter Schrag, who was writing a book about the case, "How much time did you spend copying? How long did it take?" I always answered vaguely and changed the subject. A realistic estimate would have indicated that it was a lot longer than was necessary to copy the Pentagon Papers alone. It would have led to a question that I wanted to avoid then: "What else did you copy?"

The fact is that from the fall of 1969 to leaving the RAND Corporation in August 1970, 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 — and a good deal more from my several safes for files classified Secret or Confidential, perhaps fifteen thousand pages in all. I made several copies of each. I intended to disclose it all, not just the Pentagon Papers. That intent, along with the nature of these other documents, was the secret kept from the time of my copying until now.

Many of these other documents also had to do with Vietnam, including Top Secret work I had done in late 1968 and early 1969 for Henry Kissinger after president-elect Richard Nixon had named him as the assistant for national security affairs. But most of what else I copied — "the other Pentagon Papers" — consisted of my notes and studies on classified nuclear war planning, the command and control of nuclear weapons, and studies of nuclear crises. They included verbatim extracts or copies of critical documents, past war plans (none of which were, at the time, current), cables, and studies by me and by others, including some on nuclear policy by Kissinger's National Security Council staff.

Most of those who have heard my name at all in the past forty-seven years have known me only in connection with my release of the Top Secret study of U.S. decision-making in the Vietnam War that became known as the Pentagon Papers. They may also know that I came to have access to that study because I had helped produce it, and that I had earlier worked on Vietnam escalation in the Pentagon and then for the State Department in South Vietnam.

What is less known is that for years before that, I had worked as a consultant from the RAND Corporation at the highest levels of the U.S. national security system on completely different issues: deterring and averting — or if necessary, however hopeless the attempt, trying to control, limit, and terminate — a nuclear Armageddon between the superpowers. RAND (an acronym for Research and Development) was a nonprofit organization incorporated in 1948 to do mainly classified research and analysis for the Air Force.

In the spring of 1961 I drafted the Top Secret guidance issued by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) for the operational plans for general nuclear war. That January I had briefed McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy's assistant for national security, on the peculiarities and risks of the existing nuclear planning in his first weeks in office in the White House. It was soon after that I was given access in the White House to the Top Secret estimate of casualties expected from our planned nuclear attacks.

The following year I was the only person to serve on two of several working groups reporting to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) during the Cuban missile crisis. A year later, just before I joined the Defense Department full-time at the highest civilian supergrade leveT (f indicates additional information is available in the endnote). I was the sole researcher in an interagency study of past U.S. nuclear crises — including Korea, Cuba, Berlin, Quemoy, Lebanon, and Suez — with classified access several levels above Top Secret. All these functions gave me an unusual knowledge, at that time almost unique for a civilian, of the nature of the plans and operations of the nuclear forces and the dangers these posed.

It was a closely held secret, until now, that soon after I had begun to copy the Pentagon Papers and other Vietnam documents from my office safes at the RAND Corporation (to which I had returned from my government service in Vietnam), I had decided that it was even more important to release the other contents of my safes: those bearing on nuclear matters. I wanted to reveal to Congress, to my fellow citizens, and to the world the peril that U.S. nuclear policies over the last quarter century had created. Almost no other person known to me had the experience — let alone the will — to expose the breadth and intensity of those dangers, with documents as well as notes as detailed as mine. The documents, I felt, were essential to the credibility of what were otherwise almost unimaginable secret realities.

I told just one person what I was doing in this respect and what I intended to do: Randy Kehler, whose example of draft resistance had set me on this course a month earlier. He was due to report to prison shortly when I spoke with him in San Francisco in November 1969. I wanted to let him know, before he disappeared into prison, how much his example had meant to me and that it would have a tangible effect. And I wanted his advice as an activist.

His judgment was the same as mine on the relative importance of the nuclear data versus the Vietnam study that was later to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In fact, he urged me to forget about disclosing the latter at all. "By this time, we know all we need to know about Vietnam," he said. "What you reveal about that won't make any difference. From what you tell me, you're the one person who can warn the world about the dangers of our nuclear war plans. That's what you ought to put out."

I said, "I agree with you when it comes to the importance, but Vietnam is where the bombs are falling right now. If I put it all out now, including the nuclear material, the press won't pay any attention to the history about Vietnam. I think I have to give that as much of a run as I can first, for whatever difference it might make to shorten the war. Then I'll turn to the nuclear revelations."

On the basis of that tactical judgment, I had separated all the nuclear notes and documents from the Vietnam material and given them to my brother, Harry, to keep for me at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, in Westchester County, New York.

I thought of these two sets of documents as essentially separate, to be subject to two distinct acts of disclosure, the nuclear documents later. From the time I was indicted in 1971, after nineteen newspapers had published parts of the Pentagon Papers in the face of four federal injunctions, I was saving the nuclear material for after my trial. That was why I didn't want to be asked "What else did you copy?" during the trial. I didn't want to be forced to release the nuclear documents until the Vietnam material had run its course.

I might also have waited until after the second trial we were expecting for the distribution of the Pentagon Papers. The charges in Los Angeles focused on the copying and retention of the documents by me and my friend and "co-conspirator" Tony Russo, who had made possible and initially helped me with the copying. A separate, secret grand jury was meeting in Boston to investigate the distribution and publication of the Pentagon Papers. It was preparing to indict me again — Tony was not involved in these later stages — along with New York Times reporters such as Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith, and perhaps others with whom I had shared some of the documents, including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Richard Falk.

I expected that my third trial — for putting out the nuclear secrets I was determined to expose — was going to be the killer for me. I wouldn't beat that one. It would nail down the prosecutors' efforts to give me a life sentence — which had actually started with the first trial — and they would almost surely succeed this time, if not on the earlier attempts.

Things didn't turn out that way, for rather extraordinary reasons. First, after I had spent nearly two years in court facing a possible sentence of 115 years, the twelve felony counts in my initial trial were dismissed with prejudice (meaning, I couldn't be tried again on these charges), after exposure of White House criminal misconduct against me during the prosecution.

It turned out eventually that President Nixon had secretly been informed that I had copied material beyond the Pentagon Papers from his own National Security Council. He plausibly feared that I could reveal and document his secret threats to North Vietnam of escalations, including nuclear attacks, aiming essentially to win the war. To avert my possible exposure of his secret demands and threats — which had already prolonged the war for two years, widened it to Cambodia and Laos, and which would ultimately add twenty thousand American names to the Vietnam Memorial — he had set in motion a variety of criminal steps to keep me silent about his secret policy.

These crimes against me — including warrantless wiretaps, burglary of my former psychoanalyst's office seeking blackmail material, illegal use of the CIA, and an abortive effort to "totally incapacitate" me — when they were revealed, were a critical part of the impeachment proceedings that led to Nixon's resignation, which made the war endable nine months later. Since these same crimes would have tainted a second prosecution for distribution of the Pentagon Papers, the Boston grand jury was abruptly terminated, and the second trial was averted.

Yet in the end, it wasn't the White House, or its crimes, that stopped me from disclosing to the world in the mid-seventies, or after, the thousands of pages of notes and documents on a possible nuclear holocaust that I had begun to copy from my safe at RAND four years earlier. It was an act of nature: a tropical storm. An act of grace, my wife, Patricia, calls it, since — though it frustrated my deepest plans and caused me great anguish — it allowed me to sleep next to her, in loving embrace, for the last forty years instead of in prison.

After I had entrusted my nuclear papers to Harry, he kept them for almost two years, until June 13, 1971, in the basement of his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, where he lived with his wife, Sofia.

Then, when the New York Times and the Washington Post were enjoined from publication and a manhunt was on for me and Patricia, Harry buried this material in a compost heap in his backyard, in a cardboard box inside a green garbage bag.

During the next thirteen days, while the FBI was still searching for us — as Patricia and I, with the help of friends and a pickup team of antiwar recruits (a "Lavender Hill Mob," as I thought of them, in honor of Alec Guinness) were putting out other copies of the Vietnam history to seventeen more newspapers — Harry transferred them again. It was good that he did. The very next day, his neighbor told him that she had observed men in civilian clothes probing his compost heap with long metal rods.

Just in time, Harry had buried the box, inside its bag, in the town trash dump. He had dug out a space for it into the side of a bluff rising above the dirt road that bordered the dump. There was an old gas stove resting on the bluff just above the burial spot, to identify it.

But that summer, not long after I had been indicted, a near-hurricane (tropical storm Doria) hit Hastings-on-Hudson. The bluff and its contents collapsed over the roadway and down the slope below it. The stove was blown down and rolled a hundred feet or more from its last position. Harry didn't tell me right away, not until he had spent days and then weeks trying to find the lost box.

Then he and his friend Barbara Denyer and her husband spent weekend after weekend searching. At one point they rented a backhoe bulldozer to turn up the dirt in the dump. (The driver, a town employee, got in trouble when it came out that he had allowed the bulldozer to be used for a private purpose. Barbara had told him she was looking for a thesis manuscript that had been put in the trash by mistake.)

All this led to the discovery of more than one green garbage bag — perhaps a thousand of them, in the trash dump — but none with Top Secret documents inside. Denyer's husband quit the project — her weekend obsession had put a strain on their marriage — and eventually Harry did too, though Barbara continued to look for most of a year, sometimes with her daughter.

Meanwhile, I was on trial and not thinking much about the revelations still to come. Harry's heroic efforts kept me thinking that eventually the treasure would be found. That didn't wane until nearly the end of the trial, when he reported that much of the contents of the dump had been moved to become landfill for the foundation of a condominium nearby, which was about to be covered with concrete. There might no longer be any way to get at the missing box, he said, without using dynamite. A joke. The documents were lost.

Forty-five years have gone by, and most of what was buried then has remained secret. What a backhoe or dynamite could not pry loose, the Freedom of Information Act has not (with many important exceptions) freed from the safes where this information has wrongfully been sequestered for half a century. Yet a good deal of what was lost has since been declassified, in particular over the last thirty-two years by FOIA requests and tenacious appeals by William Burr for the National Security Archive of George Washington University, and even earlier by Fred Kaplan for his remarkably revealing account, The Wizards of Armageddon (1983), an exemplary work of investigative scholarship (using interviews as well as FOIA suits) on contemporary, classified history. Enough has been released by now to corroborate, in great part, the account that follows.

Moreover, taking advantage of the digital era, I will put all my files, memos, and notes, and my outtakes from this manuscript, on my website, ellsberg.net. And there are scores of important subjects closely related to what is presented here that I had neither time nor space to include in this book, especially dealing with developments and events after my own participation in the sixties. Many of those I aim to deal with on my website or elsewhere on the Internet.

Those memos and documents that are referred to in this book can be found on my website under the heading Doomsday. That includes all my documents and notes still in my possession from my work at RAND, at the Pentagon, and in Vietnam in the fifties and sixties, including in particular very voluminous files on the Cuban missile crisis and the Quemoy crisis of 1958, and my drafts of the 1961 guidance for the JSCP and accompanying memos. There will also be on a continuing basis additional notes on this text, keyed to pages in the published edition, for which there is no room in the endnotes published here. I will be publishing there and/or elsewhere commentaries on current events to which the themes discussed here are relevant, the ongoing North Korean nuclear crisis for one.

*
From the account that follows, backed up by recently declassified documents (many cited in the endnotes) and the notes and files that will be available on my website, it should become clear why it seemed unquestionably worth my freedom, worth risking life in prison, to expose these truths almost half a century ago. I would certainly seize that risk today if I still had the same or comparable inside documentation that I had then. Lacking that, I have tried in many ways and venues (though not before in a narrative or a book of my own) to awaken audiences of Americans and others to the substance of what I then wanted to reveal: precisely because I do not believe it is just history. Tragically, I believe that nothing has fundamentally changed.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Doomsday Machine"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Daniel Ellsberg.
Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Prologue, 1,
Introduction, 5,
Part I: The Bomb and I,
1: How Could I? The Making of a Nuclear War Planner, 23,
2: Command and Control: Managing Catastrophe, 41,
3: Delegation: How Many Fingers on the Button?, 67,
4: Iwakuni: Nuclear Weapons off the Books, 77,
5: The Pacific Command, 83,
6: The War Plan: Reading the JSCP, 90,
7: Briefing Bundy, 104,
8: "My" War Plan, 119,
9: Questions for the Joint Chiefs: How Many Will Die?, 129,
10: Berlin and the Missile Gap, 145,
11: A Tale of Two Speeches, 169,
12: My Cuban Missile Crisis, 186,
13: Cuba: The Real Story, 199,
Part II: The Road to Doomsday,
14: Bombing Cities, 225,
15: Burning Cities, 246,
16: Killing a Nation, 265,
17: Risking Doomsday I: Atmospheric Ignition, 274,
18: Risking Doomsday II: The Hell Bomb, 286,
19: The Strangelove Paradox, 297,
20: First-Use Threats: Using Our Nuclear Weapons, 309,
21: Dismantling the Doomsday Machine, 335,
Glossary, 351,
Notes, 353,
Acknowledgments, 389,
Index, 397,

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/01/2017
Before he researched the background of the Vietnam conflict, ex-marine Ellsberg (Secrets) analyzed nuclear warfare decision-making for the RAND Corporation and the Pentagon. He would go on to leak the Pentagon Papers. This book's title, with the phrase popularized in the iconic 1964 Stanley Kubrick movie Dr. Strangelove (many in the know considered it a documentary), refers to how nuclear weapons might be employed almost automatically, as events can spiral out of control. The author terms it as "self-assured destruction" and urges more time be built into the process to allow for more communication among state actors and for evaluation of a confusing situation. Ellsberg utilizes declassified documents along with his own notes, interviews, and memories to examine the loose delegation of nuclear launch authority and dangerous international incidents (e.g., the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis). The book is a critique of American weapons policies, as well as a call for rationally rethinking U.S. policy on using nuclear weapons. VERDICT Ellsberg's book is essential for facilitating a national discussion about a vital topic.—Daniel Blewett, Coll. of DuPage Lib., Glen Ellyn, IL

Library Journal

Daniel Ellsberg and his colleague Harry Rowen slipped away from work at the Pentagon one afternoon in 1964 to see Stanley Kubrick's madcap Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, which begins with an American general ordering an unauthorized nuclear attack against Russia and ends in Armageddon. They emerged from the theater in a daze, agreeing, in Ellsberg's words, that what they had just seen "was, essentially, a documentary."

Ellsberg worked for the RAND Corporation, a think tank that advises the U.S. Air Force, and for the Defense Department, in positions with high-level clearances that afforded him access to classified military intelligence unknown to almost anyone else in the world. He went on, in 1971, to leak the top-secret Pentagon Papers, which detailed decades of American involvement in Vietnam, in an attempt to hasten the end of the Vietnam War. (That story is told in Steven Spielberg's film The Post.) In The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, the famous whistleblower reveals information that is even more unnerving, in this case about the jaw-dropping recklessness and deception inherent in our government's nuclear program.

Ellsberg is now eighty-six, and his firsthand experience with government nuclear policy dates back nearly to the dawn of the nuclear era; he believes, however, based on available evidence, that little has changed in the ensuing decades. What shocked him most then, and what continues to vex him today, concerns the hidden purpose of our nuclear program and the widespread delegation of authority to initiate a nuclear strike.

It's commonly believed that the purpose of our nuclear weapons program is to deter a nuclear first strike on the United States. Ellsberg argues that this is a fiction that our nuclear forces exist "to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia." He explains, "This capability is, in particular, intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them -- U.S. threats of 'first use' -- to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts involving Soviet or Russian forces or their allies." Ellsberg lists twenty-five instances in which presidents from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton, usually in secret, threatened the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the midst of a non-nuclear conflict, including Nixon's threats against the North Vietnamese and George H. W. Bush's against Iraq. Barack Obama is the only president to have considered a "no first-use policy" regarding nuclear weapons, but he ultimately declined to adopt one. "Few Americans are aware of the extent to which the United States and NATO first-use doctrine has long isolated the United States and its close allies morally and politically from world opinion,” Ellsberg writes.

As for who has the power to launch a strike: during presidential elections, Americans are routinely asked to consider which candidate they would prefer have his or her finger on "the button." Working for RAND during the Eisenhower administration, Ellsberg was astonished to learn that a number of lower commanders had been given the power to launch nuclear missiles; the common belief that only the president has access to a unique set of authorization codes is, Ellsberg claims, political theater. It would have to be, he reasons -- if only the highest-ranking government official could launch nuclear weapons, then an adversary would need only pull off a "decapitating attack" on Washington in order to escape retaliation. It's nerve-racking to think of blustery Donald Trump, not known for impulse control, having the ability to precipitate a nuclear conflict. (He has, Ellsberg drily notes, applied Nixon's "madman theory" with "more plausibility than some of his predecessors.") It's equally unsettling to consider the unauthorized actions that could result from this widespread delegation, which, Ellsberg says, is precisely why it's been hidden from the public.

The Doomsday Machine, as its subtitle suggests, has a confessional tone, as Ellsberg chronicles his involvement, as a onetime committed Cold Warrior, in drafting nuclear war plans during the administration of John F. Kennedy. (The book also includes a condensed but enlightening history of modern warfare, tracing the shattering of the longstanding international norm of not targeting civilians.) In 1961 the Joint Chiefs of Staff drafted a top- secret memo for Kennedy, estimating that a general nuclear war would result in 600 million deaths. Ellsberg, one of the few people to see the memo, was struck that there was "no shame, apology, or evasion" in the answer, no acknowledgement that the discussion was deranged. "That expected outcome exposed a dizzying irrationality, madness, insanity, at the heart and soul of our nuclear planning and apparatus," he writes. It was then that his commitment began to waver.

What we have since learned about nuclear winter, the climatic effects that scientists expect would follow a nuclear war, makes clear that the numbers were extreme underestimates, that in fact a general nuclear war would likely bring about the destruction of human civilization. The United States and Russia both have the capability to bring about this destruction, with systems that are "still on hair-trigger alert" and are "susceptible to being triggered on a false alarm, a terrorist action, unauthorized launch, or a desperate decision to escalate," Ellsberg writes. He asks a question whose answer ought to be simple: "Does the existence of such a capability serve any national or international interest whatsoever to a degree that would justify its obvious danger to human life?" How much risk are we willing to tolerate, and for what purpose?

At the end of this alarming, galvanizing, and brilliantly written book, Ellsberg calls on "patriotic and courageous whistleblowers" to go public about nuclear dangers and urges readers to become more informed and engaged in order to pressure the government for change. He knows that the genie can't be put back in the bottle, but he makes a strong argument that the purpose of nuclear weapons should be deterrence alone, a goal that the U.S. could meet with a "radically lowered" number of weapons. "This shift would not totally eliminate the dangers of nuclear war, but it would abolish the threat of nuclear winter," he writes.

I lost track of how many times Ellsberg used the word insane as he described the existential threat under which we all knowingly live. The Doomsday Machine went to print before President Trump began threatening "fire and fury" against North Korea and before he expressed a desire for a nearly tenfold increase in America's nuclear arsenal. I expect that Ellsberg, and most anyone who reads this important book, would use the same word to describe these recent, worrying developments: insane.

Barbara Spindel has covered books for Time Out New York, Newsweek.com, Details, and Spin. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies.

Reviewer: Barbara Spindel

The Barnes & Noble Review

For those who have not read other recent books on nuclear dangers, Ellsberg provides valuable reminders of stubborn realities. By employing personal stories from his time in the 1950s and 1960s working alongside [Herman] Kahn and other "wizards of Armageddon" at the RAND Corporation and as a consultant at the Pentagon, he makes hard-to-believe truths more credible…Ellsberg's effort to make vivid the genuine madness of the "doomsday machine," and the foolishness of betting our survival on mutually assured destruction, is both commendable and important. And his inability to describe a feasible way to eliminate nuclear dangers does not distinguish him from scores of others who have also been trying to rethink the unthinkable. Especially for young readers, by making earlier generations' failures clear, The Doomsday Machine challenges them to rise to a grand and urgent opportunity.

The New York Times Book Review - Graham Allison

★ 10/09/2017
Ellsberg (Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers) mixes autobiography and history as he details the horrifying realities of America’s nuclear-weapons apparatus, with an aim to inspire future “courageous whistleblowers.” As a Harvard postgraduate fellow, Ellsberg’s work on decision theory attracted the RAND Corp.’s attention. In 1959 he joined a study of the communication of the “execute” message to launch nuclear strikes, coming to focus on how to ensure that no subordinate decided to attack without clear authorization. To Ellsberg’s amazement, the military’s vaunted “fail-safe” system didn’t work. He also learned that America’s pledge never to attack first is fiction; the U.S. would have struck if convinced that the U.S.S.R. was about to attack. He describes how a single, exquisitely detailed plan would have directed thousands of bombs onto Eastern Bloc targets, as well as China, even if China was not involved in a planned attack. America’s sole deterrence of the Soviet Union was to threaten Armageddon. Ellsberg recounts with precision both public and top secret arguments over American nuclear-war policy during the three decades after WWII. Despite modest improvements since, little has fundamentally changed. Ellsberg’s brilliant and unnerving account makes a convincing case for disarmament and shows that the mere existence of nuclear weapons is a serious threat to humanity. Agent: Andy Ross, Andy Ross Literary. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"The Doomsday Machine is being published at an alarmingly relevant moment, as North Korea is seeking the capability to target the United States with nuclear missiles, and an unpredictable president, Donald Trump, has countered with threats of 'fire and fury.' " - New York Magazine

"A groundbreaking and nightmare-inducing account of how the whole mad system works." - Esquire

"One of the best books ever written on the subject—certainly the most honest and revealing account by an insider who plunged deep into the nuclear rabbit hole's mad logic and came out the other side." - Fred Kaplan, Slate

"Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine (Bloomsbury) unpacks the power of our atomic arsenal." - Vanity Fair

"Ellsberg, the dauntless whistle-blower, has written a timely plea for a reassessment of a weapons program that he describes as 'institutionalized madness.' " - Best Books of the Year 2017, The San Francisco Chronicle

"A passionate call for reducing the risk of total destruction . . . Ellsberg's effort to make vivid the genuine madness of the 'doomsday machine,' and the foolishness of betting our survival on mutually assured destruction, is both commendable and important." - Editor's Choice, New York Times Book Review

"Brilliantly and readably tackles an issue even more crucial than decision-making in the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, which is policy on the handling of nuclear weapons." - 10 Excellent December Books, Huffington Post

"This candid and chilling memoir describes how Ellsberg came to recognize that the U.S. military’s approach to preparing for nuclear war was terrifyingly casual. If war came, the United States was ready to obliterate not only the Soviet Union but also China—a plan that would have immediately produced 275 million fatalities and then led to another 50 million, owing to the effects of radiation." - Foreign Affairs, "Best Books of the Year"

"Gripping and unnerving . . . A must-read of the highest order, Ellsberg's profoundly awakening chronicle is essential to our future." - Starred review, Booklist (“High Demand Backstory”)

"Ellsberg’s brilliant and unnerving account makes a convincing case for disarmament and shows that the mere existence of nuclear weapons is a serious threat to humanity." - Starred review, Publishers Weekly

Noted gadfly Ellsberg returns with a sobering look at our nuclear capabilities . . . When the author hurriedly copied the contents of his RAND "Corporation safe to reveal, in time, what would become known as the Pentagon Papers, that was just the start of it. He had other documents, even more jarring . . . Especially timely given the recent saber-rattling not from Russia but North Korea and given the apparent proliferation of nuclear abilities among other small powers." - Kirkus Reviews

"His point is simple: We and our political leaders must stop thinking of nuclear war as a manageable risk. We must stop thinking of the possibility of nuclear war as normal." - St Louis Post-Dispatch, "Our Favorite Books of 2017"

"The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner blends personal recollections and historical analysis with a set of considered proposals for reducing the threat of apocalyptic war. Many years in the making, it’s a book that arrives at an opportune moment." - San Francisco Chronicle

"Ellsberg’s book, perhaps the most personal memoir yet from a Cold Warrior, fills an important void by providing firsthand testimony about the nuclear insanity that gripped a generation of policymakers . . . The Doomsday Machine is strongest as a portrait of the slow corruption of America’s national security state by layer upon layer of secrecy. He relates how the Cold War, the nuclear build-up and trillions of dollars of defense spending were compromised by information purposely withheld from the policymakers and politicians who debated and shaped our path" - Washington Post

"History may remember Ellsberg as the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers and helped end the Vietnam War, but his alarmingly relevant new book should also assure his legacy as a prescient and authoritative anti-nuclear activist. The Doomsday Machine, which takes its title from Dr. Strangelove, reads like a thriller as Ellsberg figures out that America's pledge never to attack first was fiction and that the so called 'fail-safe' systems are prone to disaster." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"Ellsberg writes briskly in the service of opinions formed by long and sober study. What he means is never in doubt and it is always interesting . . . He is a vigorous writer with a gift for dramatic tension and the unfolding of events as they cascade toward disaster." - Thomas Powers, New York Review of Books

"Ellsberg presents his thoughts on how best to dismantle a program that could lead to global annihilation, while once again proving how deeply disturbing and radically ignorant our country's leaders are when it comes to thermonuclear warfare." - SF Weekly

"The Doomsday Machine is chilling, compelling and certain to be controversial." - Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Is it really necessary to declare that a knowledgeable, detailed and passionate book about the odds-on danger of cataclysmically destroying all human life on earth is important? Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine demands to be widely read. Its claims should be examined by experts, corroborated, rebutted, taken up by Congressional committees (alas, unlikely) and generally forced into public consciousness . . . The Doomsday Machine is engrossing and frightening." - Peter Steinfels, America Magazine

"In the era of barbed insults regarded as precursors to nuclear threat, the warnings yielded by The Doomsday Machine have become required reading. . . . Daniel Ellsberg's title evokes Kubrick's film on purpose, a metaphor that culminates in his definition of the 'Strangelove Paradox.' The United States has thousands of 'Doomdsay Machine' weapons and hundreds of 'fingers on the button.' The question the reader must ask, now mortified by the necessary horrors of Ellsberg's masterpiece, is how to save the world" - Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

"The Doomsday Machine is, in fact, a Bildungsroman, a tale of one intellectual’s disillusionment with the country in which Ellsberg had placed so much trust. It reveals how the horrors of US nuclear war planning transformed a man of the establishment into a left-wing firebrand." - Los Angeles Times

"[The Doomsday Machine is] an important tome that’s as optimistic as it sounds. It’s vital reading that reminds people that both poor planning—such as the US under Dwight Eisenhower having no contingency in place for only bombing the USSR into dust, but it being a package deal with China, something that confirmed the rigidity of these planners as well as their blithely democidal tendencies—and the potential for simple mistakes still run rampant in US nuclear policy." - antiwar.com

"Gripping . . . The Doomsday Machine is essential reading—both a terrifying ‘Doctor Strangelove’ saga and a hopeful consideration of future scenarios." - Mercury News

"Ellsberg's book is essential for facilitating a national discussion about a vital topic." - Starred review, Library Journal

"Alarming, galvanizing, and brilliantly written." - Barnes & Noble Review

"Given the current crises, both domestic and international, the timeliness of Ellsberg’s exposures—and warnings—is unnerving... The Doomsday Machine is not for the faint of heart, but its sense of urgency should make it required reading, and—more importantly—a call to action." - BookPage

"From a close insider's perspective, he describes how the U.S. came to create and adjust this potentially world-destroying arsenal, how presidents have used it to threaten foreign leaders, and the responses of other nuclear powers. We have narrowly avoided many previous crises, but he fears that the current U.S. administration could charge straight into a worst-case scenario. This book deserves to be widely read, discussed and acted upon." - Shelf Awareness

"In his recent book The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg reports that the basic elements of US preparations for nuclear war have been little changed over the past three generations . . . Ellsberg's warning needs to be taken seriously." - Truthout

"Speaking with the authority of an insider who was intimately involved with nuclear strategy and policymaking at the highest levels, he reveals that practically everything the American public believes about nuclear war and nuclear weapons is, quite simply, a 'deliberate deception.' . . . One can only hope Daniel Ellsberg's singular combination of moral credibility and personal knowledge will work its magic one more time to forestall an even greater tragedy than the Vietnam War." - Undark Magazine

"The book is a revelation, and it raises so many essential questions that have been very inadequately discussed about nuclear war, realistic appraisal of its consequences and nuclear winter. Ellsberg places his discussion inside a history of the law of war since the early 20th century. . . . Ellsberg has performed his greatest public service yet with the publication of this book." - The Concord Monitor

"A treasure of finely woven secrets and insights lies in Daniel Ellsberg’s new memoir, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Their importance grows each day that the nuclear stand-offs on the Korean Peninsula, in South Asia and between the United States and Russia go unabated." - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

"Shocking . . . 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." - Five out of Five, Berkleyside

"Daniel Ellsberg's latest book is a disturbing analysis about how close we have been—and still are—to a nuclear holocaust." - Buffalo News

"As with the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg has performed a public service in writing a candid book that states where we are more than seven decades into the nuclear era. This book provides abundant evidence that describes our nuclear predicament and how we got here, as well as ideas and insights that may help extricate us from the potentially devastating path we now walk." - Arms Control Today

"This is a compelling and alarming book, and it should be read by anyone who cares about the human future." - The Montreal Gazette

"There is much in Ellsberg’s book that is new, and may even be revelatory to many readers . . . To be sure, Ellsberg is hardly the first Jeremiah to warn that nuclear war is ‘a catastrophe waiting to happen' . . . Ellsberg is, nonetheless, the most recent, the best informed—and plainly the most motivated—to remind us, since then, of our present and continuing danger." - H-Diplo

"An absolutely imperative read in this day and age of Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Un, and global instability." - Helen Caldicott, Founding President, Physicians for Social Responsibility

"This long-awaited chronicle from the father of American whistle-blowing is both an urgent warning and a call to arms to a public that has grown dangerously habituated to the idea that the means of our extinction will forever be on hair-trigger alert." - Edward Snowden

"Nobody could have told this horrifying story better than Daniel Ellsberg. He introduces us to the men who have coldly and with a God-like sense of righteous entitlement, put in place a plan that can, on a whim—not virtually, but literally—annihilate life on Earth. What a book." - Arundhati Roy, anti-nuclear activist and author of THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS and the Pulitzer Prize-winner THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

"A fascinating and terrifying account of nuclear war planning by a consultant from the RAND Corporation at the highest levels of government in the Kennedy administration. Ellsberg tells us of the close calls with nuclear war and of the policies developed then that still threaten the planet with annihilation. I couldn't put the book down." - Frances FitzGerald, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of FIRE IN THE LAKE

From the Publisher

2017-09-19
Noted gadfly Ellsberg (Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, 2002) returns with a sobering look at our nuclear capabilities and the likelihood that they'll one day end in tears.When the author hurriedly copied the contents of his RAND Corporation safe to reveal, in time, what would become known as the Pentagon Papers, that was just the start of it. He had other documents, even more jarring. The good news is that the world didn't come to an end during the Cuban missile crisis or a dozen other nuclear flashpoints before and since. The bad news, much in abundance, is that it's rather amazing that we didn't all go up in cinders. As fans of Dr. Strangelove knew all along, there really was a doomsday machine, still operational, by which a president could order nuclear Armageddon. The worse news is that this power is much more broadly distributed than the president, so that even more or less minor area commanders can send the missiles flying. What is more, writes the author, American policy is not really premised on retaliation in the event that a foreign power attacks first, but instead on our striking first. That would make us the bad guy in any future history of the world—and it's something that Ellsberg worries about given Donald Trump's blustery musing aloud about why we don't use all those beautiful weapons we have, "in the delusion," as Ellsberg writes, "that such an attack will limit damage to the homeland, compared with the consequences of waiting for actual explosions to occur." Striking first would also mean abandoning the much-vaunted principle of "just war." True deterrence is possible, Ellsberg urges, while at the same time reducing the nuclear arsenal—especially that doomsday machine—and imposing tighter limits on its potential use here and elsewhere.Especially timely given the recent saber-rattling not from Russia but North Korea and given the apparent proliferation of nuclear abilities among other small powers.

Kirkus Reviews