The Doomsday Machine : Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

Shortlisted for the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-FictionAt the same time former presidential advisor Daniel Ellsberg took the top-secret Pentagon Papers, he also took with him a cache of documents related to America's nuclear program in the 1960s. The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg's hair-raising account of the most dangerous arms build-up in history, whose legacy - and proposed renewal under the Trump administration - threatens the very survival of humanity. It is scarcely possible to estimate the dangers of present nuclear policies without penetrating the secrets of the nuclear strategy of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, when Ellsberg had access to them. No one has written so candidly of that long-classified history, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era. Ellsberg's discussion of recent research on nuclear winter shows that even a 'small' nuclear exchange would cause billions of deaths. Framed as a memoir, this gripping exposé reads like a thriller. It is a real-life Dr Strangelove story, but an ultimately hopeful - and powerfully important - book.