The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner - Hardcover

Ellsberg, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1408889293 ISBN 13: 9781408889299

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction

From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, the first insider exposé of the awful dangers of America's hidden, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that is chillingly still extant

At the same time former presidential advisor Daniel Ellsberg famously took the top-secret Pentagon Papers, he also took with him a chilling cache of top-secret documents related to America's 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 hair-raising account of the most dangerous arms build-up in the history of civilisation, whose legacy - and proposed renewal under the Trump administration - threatens the very survival of humanity. It is scarcely possible to estimate the true dangers of our present nuclear policies without penetrating the secret realities of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, when Ellsberg had high level access to them. No other insider 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 by global nuclear famine.

Framed as a memoir - a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating - this gripping exposé reads like a thriller with cloak-and-dagger intrigue, returning him to his role as whistle-blower. It is a real-life Dr Strangelove story, but an ultimately hopeful - and powerfully important - book.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Ellsberg, the iconic whistleblower known for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971, was the author of The Doomsday Machine and Secrets. A lecturer, scholar, writer, activist, and truth teller, he robustly communicated his lifelong concerns about the dangers of nuclear weapons and wars of intervention until his death in 2023.

From the Back Cover

At the same time former presidential advisor Daniel Ellsberg famously took the top-secret Pentagon Papers, he also took with him a chilling cache of top-secret documents related to America's 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1408889293
• ISBN 13: 9781408889299
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432