The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

            As we are in the midst of spring here in the Midwest, when we emerge from winter and bask in the more frequent bouts of sunshine and begin plotting on how to best take advantage of the impending summer. People associate spring with regeneration and hopefulness, as do I. However, due to the nature of my job as a high school history teacher, I also associate the springtime with something else: The Vietnam War. The structure of my U.S. History class allows me to dive deep into this subject on a yearly basis, and I become more fascinated every single time I walk a new group of students through our country’s most infamous quagmire. Within this unit of study, I spend some time discussing the contents and impact of the Pentagon Papers, and we debate the actions of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg remains an important figure in the study of this era, and combined with the upcoming anniversary of his death, I thought it appropriate to recommend one of his books. 

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of  a Nuclear War Planner

is entirely unrelated to what made him famous, instead detailing the insights he gleaned during his career working on nuclear preparedness within the mid century Defense Department. As the subtitle alludes to, Ellsberg used this 2017 book to expose what he believed were shocking and oftentimes dangerous policies and procedures engaged in by the nation’s military planners at the height of the Cold War. His stated purpose in bringing this information to light, despite it being so distant from his time on the job, was to bring awareness to just how frightful the nuclear tensions of the era were, and to make an attempt to instill in the American people the idea that fear of nuclear war is not an outdated or irrelevant mindset. The nuclear saber rattling of the last two years has proven just how prescient Ellsberg was. 

The security clearance Ellsberg maintained allowed him to be privy to some of the most sensitive information regarding the United States nuclear program of the 1950s and 1960s. While obviously technology has advanced since then, meaning we cannot take his descriptions of the past as factual information that applies today, he gives the reader a great window into a time in which the prospect of nuclear war did not feel as remote as it does today (at least until very recently). He bounces around to a few subject matters throughout the book, such as when he explains how seemingly ripe for miscalculation and disaster the US Pacific Command’s handling of nuclear weapons was. At the time, Ellsberg questioned some senior air officers who were well aware of the situational protocols that would lead their men to deliver a nuclear weapon. Ellsberg poked some frighteningly simple holes in the procedure, explaining how the response he got from military commanders was anything but reassuring. When you read those descriptions, you will understand just how unnerved Ellsberg was in those moments (and clearly still was) while writing his book. Another scary account he included was the lack of distinction the United States military made between targets in the Soviet Union and targets in China. A full scale nuclear exchange with one of those states (far more likely to have been the USSR) would have meant the full destruction of both. The map of targets the military utilized did not even include the border between the two countries! It was viewed as one single communist bloc that would be annihilated if a worst case scenario came to fruition. In connection to that, Ellsberg walks the reader through an in depth understanding on just what a full scale nuclear exchange would look like, focusing not only on the death tolls from the immediate firing of weapons between the two sides, but also the prospect of a “nuclear” winter. U.S. officials at the time seemed rather cavalier about these numbers, at least according to Ellsberg, and did not dwell on the scale of them in their planning. I can think of few things more terrifying than the prospect of starving to death as plant and animal life all around me dies off, but maybe I’m overreacting? (I’m not). 

  Ellsberg was not terribly organized in how he presented this information in each chapter, and one can certainly question his reliability in his recounting these moments some six decades later, but if only half of the things in this book are accurate, we sure are fortunate as the human race that things did not go down a different path during the Cold War. I found this read both fascinating and frightening, and the historical impact the writer had in a different context adds to the interest of the work. If nuclear proliferation in our current era is a topic you find yourself gravitating towards, this is definitely a work of historical recounting that will appeal to you.