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Description
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 documents, and makes clear their shocking relevance for today.
The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg's hair-raising insider's account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization, whose legacy--and renewal under the Obama 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 analysis of recent research on nuclear winter shows that even a "small" nuclear exchange would cause billions of deaths by global nuclear famine.
Ellsberg, in the end, offers steps we can take under a new administration to avoid nuclear catastrophe. Framed as a memoir, this gripping exposé reads like a thriller with cloak-and-dagger intrigue, placing Ellsberg back in his natural role as whistle-blower. It is a real-life Dr. Strangelove story, but an ultimately hopeful--and powerfully important--book.
Product details
| Published | 01 Jan 2018 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 432 |
| ISBN | 9781608196708 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Dimensions | 235 x 156 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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This long-awaited chronicle from the father of American whistle-blowing 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
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Nobody could have told this horrifying story better than Daniel Ellsberg. He introduces us to the men who have coldly and with a God-like sense of righteous entitlement, 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 and author of THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS and the Pulitzer Prize-winner THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS
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The Doomsday Machine is not simply a work of history. It was not written to remind us of catastrophes narrowly averted. It is partly a memoir of Ellsberg's years at Rand when he was working on nuclear strategy, but more a warning, delivered by an 86-year-old man who understands the urgency of the present. His memories provide a timely lesson precisely because the crisis he witnessed more than 50 years ago remains painfully relevant
Gerard DeGroot, The Times
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Ellsberg's effort to make vivid the genuine madness of the “doomsday machine”, and the foolishness of betting our survival on mutually assured destruction, is both commendable and important … Especially for young readers, by making earlier generations' failures clear, The Doomsday Machine challenges them to rise to a grand and urgent opportunity
Graham Allison, International New York Times
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Daniel Ellsberg is an exceptionally informed doomster … The Doomsday Machine describes how nuclear-war planning, some of it unknown to presidents, brought the world closer to incineration than most people understand
Max Hastings, Sunday Times
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Gripping and unnerving ... A must-read of the highest order, Ellsberg's profoundly awakening chronicle is essential to our future
Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)




















