The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
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 civilizationand its proposed renewal under the Trump administrationthreatens 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 memoira chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participatingthis 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 hopefuland powerfully importantbook about not just our country, but the future of the world.
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The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
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 civilizationand its proposed renewal under the Trump administrationthreatens 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 memoira chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participatingthis 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 hopefuland powerfully importantbook about not just our country, but the future of the world.
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The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
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 civilizationand its proposed renewal under the Trump administrationthreatens 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 memoira chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participatingthis 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 hopefuland powerfully importantbook about not just our country, but the future of the world.
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 Manin 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.
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