The doomsday machine : confessions of a nuclear war planner /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Finalist for The California Book Award in Nonfiction
The San Francisco Chronicle's Best of the Year List
Foreign Affairs Best Books of the Year
In These Times "Best Books of the Year"
Huffington Post's Ten Excellent December Books List
LitHub's "Five Books Making News This Week"


From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness expos é of the dangers of America's Top Secret, seventy-year-long 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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

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

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Ellsberg titled his first memoir, an account of his legendary leak of the Pentagon Papers, Secrets (2002), but he has been harboring many more disclosures of far greater impact for the last 47 years. In this gripping and unnerving book of confessions, Ellsberg reveals that along with the top-secret materials about the Vietnam War he copied as a high-clearance strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation and the Defense Department, he also amassed a large cache of classified papers documenting the appalling truth about the perilously inadequate control of nuclear weapons. Ellsberg would have brought these records forward decades ago, but after his trial, which led not to his conviction but to Nixon's resignation, they were lost in a hurricane. Now, thanks to government declassification and online archives, he is finally able to recount with searing specificity such hidden horrors as the delegation of the authority to initiate nuclear attacks, the erroneous assumptions behind the arms race, his role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the facts about other near-disasters. Entwining affecting personal revelations with jolting governmental disclosures, declaring that Stanley Kubrick's infamous nuclear-weapons satire, Dr. Strangelove (1964), was, essentially, a documentary, and citing our tense standoff with North Korea, Ellsberg concludes his dramatic elucidation of how the nuclear arsenal endangers all of life on Earth with steps for dismantling this Doomsday Machine. A must-read of the highest order, Ellsberg's profoundly awakening chronicle is essential to our future. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Ellsberg's concussive nuclear confessions will generate heated media coverage, which will be further escalated by Steven Spielberg's forthcoming Pentagon Papers movie, The Post, starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Daniel Ellsberg, a Harvard graduate, ex-Marine, and Rand Corporation analyst, was recruited to serve in the Pentagon during the Johnson administration. Now a prominent speaker, writer, and activist, Ellsberg lives in California and Washington, D.C.