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

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

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

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

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

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)