Doomsday Machine

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.

Daniel Ellsberg is an exceptionally informed doomster … The Doomsday Machine describes how nuclear-war planning, some of it unknown to presidents, brought the world closer to incineration than most people understand, 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, 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, The Doomsday Machine is not simply a work of history. It was not written to remind us of catastrophes narrowly averted. It is partly a memoir of Ellsberg’s years at Rand when he was working on nuclear strategy, but more a warning, delivered by an 86-year-old man who understands the urgency of the present. His memories provide a timely lesson precisely because the crisis he witnessed more than 50 years ago remains painfully relevant, 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 … Especially for young readers, by making earlier generations’ failures clear, The Doomsday Machine challenges them to rise to a grand and urgent opportunity

In 1961, Daniel Ellsberg, a consultant to the Department of Defense and the White House, drafted Secretary Robert McNamara's plans for nuclear war. Later he leaked the Pentagon Papers. He lectures and writes on the dangers of the nuclear era and the need for whistle-blowing. A Senior Fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Ellsberg is the author of Secrets and the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America. He is also a key figure in Steven Spielberg's upcoming film about the Pentagon Papers, The Post, scheduled to be released in December 2017. He lives in Kensington, California, with his wife, Patricia.