The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel EllsbergMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The first act of this book was so disappointing to me that I felt certain I would be giving this book 2 stars here. First, there is all this build-up about the absconded material in addition to the Pentagon Papers only to find it washed away in a hurricane and we'll never read it. Then, all this about the loose handling of nukes while so detailed was so much rooted in Ellsberg's first-hand '60s experience that it reads as very dated and possibly irrelevant. Things heat up - get interesting - with the details on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dropping grenades on nuclear armed Soviet subs while tens of thousands of in-place troops hold tactical nukes within reach of a trigger-happy Castro. Did we bring a knife to a gunfight, or what? Every time I read of that event I realize more how close we came to nuclear conflict there and in our own hemisphere. For the final act, Ellsberg really lays out the case that we have a Doomsday Machine too much like that "imagined" (documented?) in Dr. Strangelove vis-a-vis the Russian Dead Hand 'Perimeter' system and the natural inclination to formally or informally delegate nuclear responsibility to guarantee response, even in the even of a successful decapitation strike. The more I consider nukes I think some enlightened stage of humanity will treat it like smallpox: encircle, contain and eradicate until the last is gone. Or, something as simple as a false alarm will initiate a civilization disrupting nuclear event due to human or machine response based on the wrong data...
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