Ever wonder why you feel a knot in your stomach every time you see a news headline about nuclear tensions? Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine will show you exactly why that fear is completely justified, and why the danger is far worse than you ever imagined.
Table of Contents
Overview
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner is not just another book about nuclear weapons. It is a first-hand, eyewitness account from a man who helped design America’s nuclear war plans in the early 1960s and then spent the rest of his life trying to warn the world about them.
Ellsberg, the same man who later leaked the Pentagon Papers, reveals that for over sixty years, the United States has maintained a nuclear war plan that would, if executed, kill hundreds of millions of people in the first few hours and potentially lead to the extinction of most life on Earth through nuclear winter.
The Doomsday Machine is terrifying, meticulously documented, and ultimately a desperate call to action.
What makes this book unique is its insider perspective. Ellsberg isn’t an academic theorizing about nuclear strategy. He’s a man who literally drafted the nuclear war guidance for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1961. He saw the actual plans, touched the actual bombs, and spoke with the actual commanders who would carry out the orders.
Reader Recommendation for The Doomsday Machine
Who will actually love The Doomsday Machine?
- History buffs who want the real, unvarnished story of Cold War nuclear planning, not the sanitized version.
- Political science students and scholars studying international relations, deterrence theory, or military strategy.
- Activists and anyone concerned about nuclear proliferation and disarmament.
- Readers of investigative journalism who appreciate deeply researched, insider accounts.
Who should probably bounce?
- If you’re looking for a light, uplifting read, this isn’t it. One reviewer called it “easily the scariest Christmas gift I’ve ever received”.
- If you prefer detached, academic analysis without emotional engagement. Ellsberg writes with palpable horror and urgency.
- If you’re already anxious about global affairs, this book will not calm your nerves.
For everyone else: this book is essential reading. As one review put it, it’s “one of the best books ever written on the subject, certainly the most honest and revealing account by an insider who plunged deep into the nuclear rabbit hole’s mad logic and came out the other side”.
Background
Who Is Daniel Ellsberg?
Before we dive into the book itself, it’s worth understanding who Daniel Ellsberg is and why his testimony matters.
Ellsberg was a Harvard-trained economist who worked as a consultant for the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization that did classified work for the Air Force. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was immersed in the highest levels of U.S. national security planning.
He drafted the Top Secret guidance issued by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for operational plans for general nuclear war.
In 1961, he briefed McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s national security advisor, on the peculiarities and risks of existing nuclear planning. He was one of only a handful of people to serve on two working groups during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But Ellsberg is most famous for what he did later: in 1971, he leaked the Pentagon Papers, a classified study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam, to the New York Times and other newspapers. That act made him a legendary whistleblower and, in the eyes of the Nixon administration, “the most dangerous man in America.”
What almost nobody knew at the time, and what this book reveals for the first time, is that Ellsberg had also copied thousands of pages of documents on nuclear war planning. He intended to release those too, but a tropical storm buried them in a landfill before he could.
Why This Book Matters Now
Ellsberg’s central argument is chillingly simple: the nuclear dangers he discovered in the 1960s have not gone away. As he writes in the introduction, “a well-informed briefing of an incoming presidential assistant for national security in 2017 would be closely equivalent to the one I delivered to President John Kennedy’s assistant McGeorge Bundy in January 1961”.
The weapons have changed. The numbers have come down. But the fundamental structure, thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, aimed at Russian military targets, with plans for first use, remains essentially the same.
The Doomsday Machine Summary: What I Learned
Let me walk you through what Ellsberg reveals in this book. I want to give you the full picture, because after reading this, you really won’t need to go back to the original. Everything is here.
Part I: The Bomb and I
Chapter 1: How Could I? The Making of a Nuclear War Planner
Ellsberg begins with a deeply personal question: how did he, a man who was horrified by the bombing of civilians in World War II, end up planning nuclear war?
He traces his journey back to a ninth-grade social studies class in 1944. His teacher, Bradley Patterson, introduced the class to the concept of a uranium bomb, U-235, and asked them to write an essay on whether such a weapon would be good or bad for humanity. Ellsberg and his classmates concluded it would be a disaster.
When he read the headline about Hiroshima in August 1945, he thought: “I know exactly what that bomb was”.
Yet by the late 1950s, Ellsberg found himself at RAND Corporation, working on nuclear strategy. His motivation? The belief that the Soviet Union was trying to achieve world domination and that the United States needed a survivable second-strike capability to deter them.
He writes: “From the analyses by men who became my mentors and closest colleagues, I had come to believe, like Szilard and Rotblat a generation earlier, that this was the best, indeed the only way of increasing the chance that there would be no large nuclear war in the near future”.
The irony is painful. He was working to prevent nuclear war by planning for one.
Chapter 2: Command and Control: Managing Catastrophe
Ellsberg’s research focused on a question almost nobody else was asking: how would the president actually make a decision about nuclear war, and could the system be trusted?
He discovered the terrifying ambiguity of warning systems. The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) had, in its first week of operation, reported a missile attack that turned out to be radar signals bouncing off the moon.
As Ellsberg notes, “The radars of the Arctic Distant Early Warning Line (DEW Line) had more than once been fooled by a flock of high-flying geese”.
But the deeper problem was human. Ellsberg visited airbases across the Pacific and discovered that the fail-safe system was full of holes.
At Kunsan Air Base in South Korea, he found a major in command of twelve F-100 fighter-bombers, each carrying a 1.1-megaton thermonuclear weapon. Each bomb had the explosive equivalent of half the tonnage the United States dropped in all of World War II.
When Ellsberg asked the major what would happen if his pilots were launched on warning and then lost communication with higher command, the major replied: “If they didn’t get any Execute message? Oh, I think they’d come back. Most of them”. Then he added: “If one of them were to break out of that circle and go for his target, I think the rest would follow”.
Think about that. A single pilot, acting on his own judgment, could trigger World War III.
Chapter 3: Delegation: How Many Fingers on the Button?
Perhaps the most shocking revelation in the book is about delegation. The public has always been told that only the president can authorize a nuclear attack. That is a lie.
Ellsberg discovered that President Eisenhower had secretly delegated authority to initiate nuclear attacks to theater commanders in case communications with Washington were cut off. In the Pacific, Admiral Felt had in turn delegated that authority to subordinate commanders. And those commanders had delegated further.
Ellsberg asked Admiral Kivette, commander of the Seventh Fleet, what he would do if communications with Hawaii were out and he thought nuclear war might have commenced. Kivette replied: “I stand mute”. He was smiling, indicating he knew the answer but couldn’t say it aloud.
The two-man rule, designed to prevent a single officer from launching nuclear weapons, was a facade. Ellsberg found that duty officers throughout the Pacific had secretly figured out how to bypass the safeguards. He writes: “I found this in every post I visited”.
In a later revelation, Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman launch control officer, confirmed that SAC had set the launch codes to all zeros to circumvent safeguards.
As Blair put it: “SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders”.
Chapter 4: Iwakuni: Nuclear Weapons off the Books
Ellsberg uncovered a secret that could have blown up the U.S.-Japan alliance. Under the U.S.-Japan security treaty, nuclear weapons were not supposed to be stationed in Japan. But the Marines had a landing ship, the USS San Joaquin County, anchored just off the coast of Iwakuni with nuclear weapons aboard.
In a nuclear emergency, the ship would come ashore, and amphibious tractors loaded with nuclear weapons would head straight to the airstrip. This was a blatant violation of the treaty.
When Ellsberg’s memo about this reached the Pentagon, Admiral Burke, the Chief of Naval Operations, was furious. Not because of the treaty violation, but because a civilian was interfering with Navy operations. As Ellsberg recounts: “Burke made no attempt to deny the facts of the reports or to justify anything.
The only thing he had to say, in a fury, was ‘What did you think you were doing, as a civilian, interfering with the operations of ships of the U.S. Navy?'”
Secretary of Defense McNamara initially backed Ellsberg, but then withdrew the directive when faced with Burke’s opposition. The ship stayed in Iwakuni until 1967.
Chapter 5: The Pacific Command
Ellsberg discovered that the Pacific Command’s nuclear war plans included China in every scenario, even if the war was only with the Soviet Union. The admirals were so horrified by the idea of fighting Russia while letting China off scot-free that one of them said it was “so insane”.
But there was a practical reason too. The planners had only one plan, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), and it included targets in both countries. Creating a separate plan for war with Russia alone would have been too much work.
As Ellsberg discovered, the planners’ maps didn’t even demarcate between China and Russia. The Sino-Soviet bloc appeared as “one giant landmass”. If the president ordered an attack on Russia alone, there was no way to quickly identify which targets were in which country.
Chapter 6: The War Plan: Reading the JSCP
Ellsberg gained access to the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan (JSCP), the highest-level nuclear war plan. What he found was staggering.
The JSCP defined “general war” as “armed conflict with the Soviet Union”. That meant that any armed conflict with Soviet forces, even a brigade-level skirmish, would trigger an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and China.
The plan was designed as a first-strike plan. It assumed the United States would strike first, before enemy warheads had arrived. The targets included every city in the Soviet Union and China with a population of 25,000 or more.
Ellsberg quotes John Rubel’s description of the SIOP briefing: a chart showing deaths from fallout alone in the Soviet Union leveled off at about 100 million, more than half the population. Another chart for China showed 300 million deaths, half the population.
When someone asked General Power, the SAC commander, if the plan could be changed to exclude China in a war only with the Soviets, Power replied: “Well, yeah, we can, but I hope nobody thinks of it, because it would really screw up the plan”.
General David Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps, objected: “Any plan that murders three hundred million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That is not the American way”. But the plan went ahead anyway.
Chapter 7: Briefing Bundy
Ellsberg briefed McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s national security advisor, on the war plans. He described the JSCP, the delegation of authority, and the lack of physical controls on nuclear weapons.
Bundy was shocked. He began taking furious notes. But when Ellsberg later confirmed that Eisenhower’s delegation letters actually existed, Kennedy decided to let them stand. Carl Kaysen explained: “This is not the time for Lieutenant Kennedy to reverse the decision of the Great General”.
Kennedy didn’t want to challenge Eisenhower’s judgment, even though the delegation was dangerously broad.
Chapter 8: “My” War Plan
Ellsberg was tasked with drafting the new basic national security policy guidance for nuclear war. He wrote a document that called for flexibility, reserve forces, and avoiding attacks on cities.
He thought he was making the plans less insane. But in retrospect, he acknowledges that his guidance was still based on the assumption that nuclear war was possible to fight and win. He writes: “To be quite plain here, I am talking about the madness of the strategy and planning I personally laid out in the spring of 1961”.
Chapter 9: Questions for the Joint Chiefs: How Many Will Die?
Ellsberg drafted questions for the Joint Chiefs, asking how many people would die if the war plans were executed. The answer came back: 275 million would die in the first few hours, and 325 million within six months, just in the Soviet Union and China. Another hundred million in Eastern Europe, and another hundred million in neutral countries from fallout.
The total death toll: roughly 600 million.
Ellsberg writes: “I thought, This piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project ever”.
Chapter 10: Berlin and the Missile Gap
The Berlin crisis of 1961 brought the possibility of nuclear war terrifyingly close. Ellsberg learned that the JCS had assured President Kennedy that if worst came to worst, a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union would result in “less than ten million deaths” in the U.S..
But this was based on a fantasy. The Air Force was still claiming the Soviets had a thousand ICBMs, when in reality they had four. The missile gap, the fear that had driven U.S. nuclear buildup for years, was a complete illusion.
Ellsberg tried to brief his RAND colleagues on this, but nobody believed him. They had spent years believing in the Soviet threat, and they couldn’t accept that it was a myth.
Chapter 11: A Tale of Two Speeches
Ellsberg drafted portions of speeches for both Deputy Secretary Gilpatric and Secretary McNamara. The Gilpatric speech in October 1961 publicly revealed U.S. nuclear superiority. Ellsberg thought he was calling Khrushchev’s bluff. But in retrospect, he realizes he was participating in a nuclear threat.
As historian Michael Beschloss later noted, “By asking Gilpatric to make this speech, Kennedy may have strengthened his own domestic political standing and reassured American allies, but he also provocatively undermined Khrushchev’s position in the Kremlin and in the world”.
Khrushchev’s response? Within months, he had decided to put nuclear missiles in Cuba.
Ellsberg writes with painful honesty: “In October 1961 I had done my part in greasing the skids toward the Cuban missile crisis”.
Chapter 12: My Cuban Missile Crisis
Ellsberg was one of the few people to serve on two working groups during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He worked on plans for invasion and on options for responding to a Soviet attack on U.S. missiles in Turkey.
He was confident that Khrushchev would back down. He thought the risk of nuclear war was extremely low. But he later learned that the ExComm estimated the risk of nuclear war at one in ten if the U.S. attacked the missiles.
Ellsberg writes: “One in ten?! Nuclear war … And we were doing what we were doing?!”
Chapter 13: Cuba: The Real Story
Ellsberg reveals that the risk during the Cuban Missile Crisis was far higher than anyone knew at the time. Soviet troops in Cuba numbered 42,000, not 7,000 as initially estimated. They had tactical nuclear weapons, and authority to use them had been delegated to local commanders.
On October 27, 1962, a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear torpedo was being depth-charged by American destroyers. The commander, Valentin Savitsky, ordered the nuclear torpedo readied for firing. Only the intervention of another officer, Vasili Arkhipov, prevented its launch.
Ellsberg quotes Olga Arkhipova, who said her husband had become known as “The Man Who Saved the World”.
Part II: The Road to Doomsday
Chapters 14-15: Bombing and Burning Cities
Ellsberg traces the moral descent that made nuclear war planning possible. In World War II, the Allies secretly adopted terror bombing of civilians. By February 1942, British Bomber Command was explicitly targeting enemy civilian morale.
The firebombing of Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945, killed between 80,000 and 120,000 people, more than died at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. General Curtis LeMay, who ordered the attack, said: “If you don’t destroy the Japanese industry, we’re going to have to invade Japan. And how many Americans will be killed in an invasion of Japan? Five hundred thousand seems to be the lowest estimate. Some say a million”.
The atomic bomb, Ellsberg argues, was simply the logical extension of policies already in place.
Chapter 16: Killing a Nation
By 1948, U.S. war plans called for hitting 70 Soviet urban areas with 133 atomic bombs, killing an estimated 2.7 million people. But that was just the beginning. By 1961, the U.S. had over 18,000 nuclear weapons, and the Joint Chiefs were planning to kill hundreds of millions.
The change came with the hydrogen bomb. When SAC replaced atomic bombs with thermonuclear weapons, the number of predicted deaths jumped tenfold. Not because anyone had decided more deaths were necessary, but simply because that’s what the new weapons would do.
Chapter 17-18: Risking Doomsday
Ellsberg reveals a little-known fact: the scientists who built the first atomic bomb seriously considered the possibility that it might ignite the atmosphere and destroy all life on Earth. They calculated the odds and decided to proceed anyway.
As Arthur Compton later recounted: “Might not the enormously high temperature of an atomic bomb be just what was needed to explode hydrogen? And if hydrogen, what about the hydrogen of sea water? Might the explosion of an atomic bomb set off an explosion of the ocean itself?”
Compton said he would not proceed if the chances were more than “approximately three in a million” that the Earth would be vaporized. He was told the chances were slightly less, and the project continued.
Chapter 19: The Strangelove Paradox
Ellsberg explains the paradox of the Doomsday Machine: if you build one, you have to tell your adversary about it for it to work as a deterrent. But the U.S. kept its delegation and Dead Hand systems secret, undermining their deterrent value.
The Soviet Union built its own Dead Hand system, Perimeter, which would automatically launch missiles if Moscow was destroyed. A Russian commander later confirmed: “The system is on alert. If there’s a need for a retaliatory strike, the command for an attack may come from the system, not people”.
Ellsberg notes: “The bottom line is that arrangements made in Russia and the United States have long made it highly likely, if not virtually certain, that a single Hiroshima-type fission weapon exploding on either Washington or Moscow, whether deliberate or the result of a mistaken attack, would lead to the end of human civilization”.
Chapter 20: First-Use Threats
Ellsberg documents the long history of U.S. nuclear threats, from Truman’s deployment of B-29s during the Berlin blockade to Nixon’s secret threats against North Vietnam.
He reveals that Nixon, in 1972, told Kissinger: “I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?” Kissinger replied, “That, I think would just be too much”.
Ellsberg also documents the Carter Doctrine, which threatened nuclear use if the Soviets moved into the Persian Gulf. Assistant Secretary of State William Dyess explained the policy: “We make no comment on that whatsoever, but the Soviets know that this terrible weapon has been dropped on human beings twice in history and it was an American president who dropped it both times”.
Chapter 21: Dismantling the Doomsday Machine
Ellsberg concludes with a call to action. He argues that the U.S. should dismantle its land-based ICBMs, de-alert its nuclear forces, and adopt a no-first-use policy.
He writes: “The good news is that dismantling the Doomsday Machine in one country or both would be relatively simple in concept and in physical operation. It could be accomplished quickly, easily within a year”.
But he acknowledges the political obstacles are immense. Both parties support maintaining the nuclear arsenal.
The Doomsday Machine Analysis
This is the most important book I have ever read on nuclear weapons, and one of the most terrifying.
Ellsberg accomplishes something extraordinary: he takes a subject that most people find too abstract or too depressing to think about and makes it painfully, urgently real.
What Makes This Book Effective
First-person authority. Ellsberg isn’t writing as an outside observer. He was there. He drafted the plans. He saw the bombs. He spoke with the commanders. When he tells you that nuclear war would kill hundreds of millions, he’s not speculating, he’s quoting the Joint Chiefs’ own estimates.
Moral clarity. Ellsberg doesn’t pretend that nuclear planning is a difficult moral question with no clear answer. He calls it what it is: insane, evil, and criminal. He quotes Nietzsche: “Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule”.
Honest self-criticism. Ellsberg doesn’t let himself off the hook. He acknowledges that his own guidance for nuclear war was still based on a fundamentally insane premise. He admits that he participated in nuclear threats without fully acknowledging what he was doing.
Does the Book Fulfill Its Purpose?
Yes, and then some. Ellsberg’s goal is to wake people up to the reality of nuclear danger. He provides the evidence, the reasoning, and the historical context. Anyone who reads this book and still thinks nuclear weapons are a necessary or acceptable part of international relations has not been paying attention.
The book also contributes meaningfully to the field of nuclear history. It reveals details about command and control, delegation, and war planning that were previously unknown to the public.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
Unmatched insider perspective. Nobody else has written about nuclear war planning with this level of firsthand access.
Moral courage. Ellsberg doesn’t sugarcoat anything. He calls nuclear planning what it is: insane.
Thorough documentation. The book is based on Ellsberg’s own notes, declassified documents, and Freedom of Information Act requests.
Accessible writing. Despite the technical subject matter, Ellsberg writes in a clear, engaging style. One reviewer noted the book “reads like a thriller”.
Weaknesses
Length and detail. At over 400 pages, the book is dense. Some reviewers felt it could have been shorter.
Overly personal at times. Ellsberg’s personal journey is central to the book, but some readers might prefer a more detached analysis.
Dated revelations. Some of what Ellsberg reveals was already known to specialists. But for the general public, it’s still shocking.
Comparison with Similar Works
The Wizards of Armageddon by Fred Kaplan covers similar ground but focuses more on the intellectual history of nuclear strategy. Ellsberg’s book is more personal and more urgent.
Command and Control by Eric Schlosser focuses on nuclear accidents and safety. Ellsberg’s book is broader, covering planning, threats, and command structure.
On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn is the classic text on nuclear strategy. Ellsberg’s book is a critique of that entire approach.
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen imagines a nuclear attack in real-time. Ellsberg’s book is a factual account of what we’ve actually planned.
Conclusion
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner is not a book you read and forget. It’s a book that changes how you see the world.
Ellsberg shows that for over sixty years, the United States and Russia have maintained nuclear arsenals that could end human civilization, not in some distant future, but within hours of a decision. And that decision could be made by a president, or by a commander who loses communication with Washington, or by a computer responding to a false alarm.
The scariest part? Ellsberg believes the danger is just as great today as it was in 1961. The weapons have changed, but the fundamental structure, hair-trigger alert, first-use doctrine, inadequate command and control- remains.
As Ellsberg writes: “The hidden reality I aim to expose is that for over fifty years, all-out thermonuclear war, an irreversible, unprecedented, and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization and most life on earth, has been … a catastrophe waiting to happen”.
Who should read this book? Anyone who cares about the future of humanity. Anyone who wants to understand the single greatest threat to our species. Anyone who has ever wondered why we still have nuclear weapons and what it would mean if they were used.
This book is a warning, and a call to action. Ellsberg believes we can still dismantle the Doomsday Machine. But only if we understand what we’re dealing with.
Read The Doomsday Machine. Then do something about it.
