DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of A Nuclear War Planner

Former presidential advisor Daniel Ellsberg famously took the Pentagon Papers and also took with him a cache of Top-Secret documents related to America's nuclear programme in the 1960s. Here for the first time he reveals the contents of those now-declassified documents and makes clear their shocking relevance today. The legendary whistle-blower gives the first insider account as he tells of the most dangerous arms build-up in the history of civilisation, whose legacy and proposed renewal under the Trump administration had threatened the very survival of humanity. As Einstein said in 1946 'The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.' Chapters include How Many Fingers on the Button?, Iwakuni: Nuclear Weapons Off the Books, The War Plan, Questions of the Joint Chiefs: How Many Will Die?, Berlin and the Missile Gap, My Cuban Missile Crisis, Bombing and Burning Cities, Killing A Nation, The Hell Bomb and Dismantling the Doomsday Machine among them. These dossiers are for the President's Eyes Only no more. The death toll calculated was roughly 600 million dead, or 100 Holocausts. 'It depicted evil beyond any human project ever.' '...Accepted 'collateral damage' was summarised on that second piece of paper, which I held a week later in the spring of 1961: the extermination of over half a billion people. From that day on, I had one overriding life purpose: to prevent the execution of any such plans.' A witty, precise and hard-nosed book. 420pp, paperback.