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:	9781608196739
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	12/04/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	177,598
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.30(d)

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.

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

"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

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

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