The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

By Daniel Ellsberg

From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, the first insider exposé of the dangers of America's hidden, seventy-year-long nuclear policy.

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

The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg's account of the most dangerous arms build-up in the history of civilisation, the legacy of which threatens the very survival of humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Dec 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781408889145

Reviews for The Doomsday Machine

[nmele_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is a compelling but truly terrifying account of U.S. nuclear plans and policies from the Manhattan Project to the present. Why terrifying? Because it is a thoroughly-documented history of deceit, military obstinacy and insubordination, miscommunication and brinkmanship. According to Ellsberg, that history continues today. He also confesses his role in the nuclear stalemate which has continued from the 1950s to today and issues a call for a popular movement aimed eventually at abolition but initially at dismantling what Ellsberg, after Herman Kahn, calls the Doomsday Machine, the mechanisms for automatic launch and the system of values, assumptions and policies that hold the entire world at risk of nuclear annihilation. For those who are not policy wonks or nuclear weapons nerds, the going can be slow at times, but Ellsberg is often arresting, especially in his accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the evolution of U.S. values from abhorrence at the bombing of civilians to dismissing civilian deaths as a necessary component of strategy.