...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 ... it’s rare to get the history laid out in such human detail by someone who was so immersed in the scene ... The marvel of Ellsberg’s book is that he captures that world from both of those angles—that of the ground-burrower who can’t see past his confining premises and that of the mile-high flyer who views the landscape in its full moral context—without flinching from the fact that he has occupied both of those personas in his lifetime with equal measures of passion.
His book is chilling, compelling and certain to be controversial ... Ellsberg recognizes that it is 'entirely quixotic' to expect the present president or Congress to announce a 'no first-use' policy; the elimination of ICBMs and doomsday machines; and a probing investigation of war plans in light of a 'nuclear winter.' But who can blame him for warning us, as the Rev. Martin Luther King did about Vietnam, that 'there is such a thing as being too late.'
...[a] gripping and unnerving book ... 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.
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 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.
The book’s exposés, such as they are, offer for historians not much that is new or revelatory, but casual readers will probably be shocked by just how boneheaded and illogical much of the Cold War’s grand strategy really was. Yet 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.
His incredibly detailed observations tell a horrific tale of competing egos, deliberate deceptions, human error and near-cataclysmic disasters, as in the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Crisis. 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.
Many years in the making, it’s a book that arrives at an opportune moment … A portion of the information contained in those storm-tossed papers has since been unearthed by journalists and activists. But The Doomsday Machine is nonetheless effective, a book that challenges some big assumptions about America’s weaponry — and questions the shaky intellectual foundation on which the nuclear program rests … In the book’s final pages, Ellsberg makes several admittedly ‘quixotic’ recommendations...Ellsberg isn’t optimistic that these things will happen — but he maintains that they must.
Ellsberg’s attempt to make sense of this casual approach to mass death makes for a compelling narrative. He records his efforts to improve matters but is doubtful whether the risks are much less now than they were 50 years ago … Ellsberg’s message is that in the nuclear age nothing should be taken for granted. He wishes for the abolition of nuclear weapons, but his prescriptions stress measures to make them harder to launch, abandoning strategies that envisage first use and risk hair-trigger alerts.
Much of the new book is a review of strategies since the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 to end World War II. Some of the schemes he cites are beyond bizarre … 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.
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) … 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.
The book is, in fact, a Bildungsroman, a tale of one intellectual’s disillusionment with the country in which he 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 … Ellsberg recognizes that no president has ‘actually desired ever to order the execution of [nuclear] plans.’ But he rightly concludes that no one, no matter how well intentioned, should have access to the awesome power of a Doomsday Machine … Ellsberg’s plan is a noble one that suffers from two defects. First, he doesn’t discuss how to change the minds of those whose livelihoods and identities are wrapped up in the United States maintaining its nuclear arsenal...Second, he does not address how to change public opinion.
Yet positive reviews for 'The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner' are tricky for him to assess.
'Some people read the book and tell me they enjoyed it, which is a little hard for me to relate to entirely,' Ellsberg said last month from his home in Berkeley, Calif. 'How can one enjoy a book like that?'
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 ... This is not a young man’s argument, assured and confident. It is an old man’s warning, the fruit of long reflection and tinged with sorrow, as clear as he can make it: these weapons are too dangerous to have because they are too dangerous to use.
...a sobering look at our nuclear capabilities and the likelihood that they’ll one day end in tears ... 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.
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.
