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Archive 1986 - 2017

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

 

By Daniel Ellsberg

• From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the dangers of America’s Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that–chillingly–continues to this day.

Here, for the first time, former high level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking first-hand 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 expose 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 whistleblower. 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.

• •

“This long-awaited chronicle from the father of American whistleblowing 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.” –Edward Snowden

“Nobody could have told this horrifying story better than Daniel Ellsberg. He introduces us to the men who have coldly and empirically put in place a plan that can, on a whim–not virtually, but literally–annihilate life on Earth. What a book.” – Arundhati Roy, anti-nuclear activist, author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

 

Read more on Ellsberg’s homepage here…

 

Recommended reading and viewing

Thomas Power’s review of Ellsberg’s book in the New York Review of Books

Video conversation with Ellsberg about his life and this book on Democracy Now!

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Archive 1986 - 2017Nuclear dangersNuclear possessionNuclearismNuclearism – philosophyproliferationUnited States - Empire and domestic

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