For the President's Eyes Only: Book Review: The Doomsday Machine (published 2017) by Daniel Ellsberg; reviewed July 2026 by Ace Hoffman
Daniel Ellsberg (b. April 7, 1931; d. June 16, 2023) was one of the most important figures of the Atomic Age. Few tried as hard to warn humanity about the many dangers we are facing because of the Mighty Atom.
Ellsberg risked his career and his freedom in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers to tell America what the Vietnam War was really about and how it was going. He was in a unique position to do so, and did his duty to country, freedom, and truth.
But there was a lot more that Ellsberg wanted to say. Unfortunately, those records were lost, so he could not reveal what he knew in addition to what was in the Pentagon Papers. Many decades later Ellsberg did us all a great service again, after he was able to use declassified documents, public statements, personal interviews, and his own notes and recollections to reconstruct what he had lost. The result was The Doomsday Machine.
The Doomsday Machine is a thriller, a mystery, a horror story and a love story: Love of country, love of humanity. Ellsberg wanted the world to survive, with its humanity, its history, its DNA, and its accumulated knowledge intact. Nuclear weapons have made that goal tenuous at best, and, if we don't change course, utterly unattainable in the long run. We don't have forever to fix this!
Few people (especially outside the military) had access to anywhere near as much information as Ellsberg did: Security clearances most people have never even heard of (far above "Top Secret").
Because of his access, Ellsberg was able to recognize and define problems nobody else even knew existed. Problems such as: Who, really, can launch a nuclear weapon?
Not: "Who has the authority?" That is (theoretically) solely the president, of course. But rather: Who (if anyone) could pull a General Jack D. Ripper-style act of terrorism (as in the movie Dr. Strangelove), actually TRYING to start an apocalyptic nuclear war? Could a nuclear war be started because of a misunderstanding or miscommunication... or even a simple technical failure?
If a single unexpected nuclear explosion occurred somewhere, what would prevent that event from initiating World War III?
And when did mass-murder of non-combatants including children, along with total destruction of entire cities: their historic and religious buildings and symbols, their museums, universities, hospitals, etc. — become a standard way to fight a war?
After performing dozens of "all access" interviews and seeing hundreds of classified documents while working for the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California on Air Force contracts, Ellsberg began to suspect that more than just the President could start a nuclear war — accidentally or on purpose, carelessly or nefariously.
Or at least, a lot of people he talked to in the early years of the nuclear military build-up in America THOUGHT they had authority to launch a "tactical" nuclear weapon if it seemed to them to be the right thing to do "under the circumstances." WHAT circumstances?!?
Technically, they should never do that without explicit authorization. But those who actually had their fingers on the triggers of the nuclear weapons didn't necessarily see it that way.
What if they completely misunderstood the situation and thought they were doing their most patriotic duty? Would they carry out the mission they were constantly training and practicing to do "on command," thinking the command somehow never got through? Ellsberg found the answers he heard disturbing...
Ellsberg couldn't find anything to guarantee that one person, one soldier somewhere, couldn't launch a nuclear weapon. But everywhere, only the president (or only the emperor, king, or other ruler) is supposed to be able to do that. At least, that's what the public is expected to believe — because that's what all the officials tell us. (All the others are sworn to secrecy.)
But what if someone goes rogue? That's bad enough by itself, but it might be the start of something far worse: A full-scale nuclear war could result — even if the original action was without proper authorization! Because everybody is on hair-trigger alert.
The first problem would be that there's no way to know that it's just one loon who did something stupid, mean, and unauthorized that is about to murder millions of people. There's no way to be certain it's not the first missile of a salvo of 100 missiles, and 100 American cities are about to be destroyed, or more importantly (to the military minds) 100 USAF missile sites are about to be attacked. Either way, the thinking is that it's better to use 'em than lose 'em. So off go the missiles, heading for Russia (presumably).
And all this happens too fast to think in real time, faster than you can read it, so there has to already be a plan in place — and a computer to speed things up even more. "False alarms" indicating the start of a global thermonuclear war are simply not allowed — there's no time for that! But it can happen in the movies, and it can happen in reality, too.
In part (perhaps as a result of Ellsberg's (then secret) research), Permissive Action Links (PALs) have supposedly been added, which require a signal, positively identified as coming from the president, before any nuclear weapon can be armed, launched, dropped, fired... whatever.
But there's a lot of reason to believe that PALs either do NOT really exist, exist but are not activated, or are not actually "perfect" since a "perfect" PAL might be so complex as to be difficult and time-consuming to use — and time is everything — seconds matter — at the start of a nuclear war.
(Aside: In 1979, this reviewer was told by a former U.S. Navy submariner that in the Russian nuclear forces the individual commanders could fire their nuclear weapons without higher level authorization. He was contrasting that with the way our system worked (presumably he was talking about the PALs by then, which may or may not have actually existed at the time, and may or may not have worked as intended when/if the time ever came, if they exist.)
Ellsberg gives examples of some "small" events that could have gone a little further and started a full-scale nuclear exchange between Russia and the USA. None went that far, of course. The Cuban Missile Crisis is an obvious one, but there were quite a few others (that we now know of).
If World War Three ever happens, aside from the hundreds of millions who would die in the first few minutes, a full-scale war could (and likely would) result in a phenomena called "nuclear winter."
Nuclear winter would mean the death of nearly every living thing — especially large animals such as humans. (Rodents will probably live a bit longer than humans, subsisting on the corpses of the larger creatures, and then on the corpses of each other.)
We are at imminent risk of nuclear war every minute of every day, but the risk varies with a thousand different factors: Political, economic, military, environmental...and sometimes, just a lot of luck.
If the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' clock were changed as frequently as circumstances change, it would be quivering almost constantly. But most events that affect it are hidden from the public. The threats. The bluffs. The raised threat levels. The misunderstandings...
Ellsberg shows that guardrails (such as PALs) against a calamitous nuclear war are insufficient.
But haven't they worked so far? We all know they have, because we're still here, and the planet is not covered in a lethal blanket of radioactivity. The upper atmosphere is not blocking out the sun with dust from the inevitable firestorms a nuclear war would bring.
But luck is nothing to rely on for very long (if at all), especially when we're talking about avoiding global thermonuclear war — which could happen by accident, but it could also start with a small conflict that simply gets out of hand.
What is worth risking THAT?!?
Perhaps this is why nuclear weapons have NOT been used since August, 1945: The risk of escalation is just too great.
To avoid it, America seems to have chosen two concurrent paths: First, to have an overwhelming nuclear force (the "Triad" of submarines, missiles and bombers) so that no one can defeat America so thoroughly that it cannot respond forcefully regardless of the losses American civilians suffer in the initial attack.
Second, America consistently threatens tactical nuclear use — always stating it is "on the table" as an option that America has chosen not to use since ending World War II with it. (Not that the atom bombs dropped on Japan REALLY ended the war; it was far more complicated than that. See the book.)
But how far into the future can America project the ultimate threat (that tactical nuclear weapons are "on the table") and have that threat carry any weight if America never actually uses them (again)? Will some future(?) president find an excuse to use them JUST TO PROVE THE POINT?
Can America afford to keep threatening to use a nuclear weapon (which would be a war crime by any definition) when the response is invariably to want a nuclear weapon to threaten back with? Or have an ally with one (or hundreds)?
In The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg beautifully lays out the need to answer these questions — if beauty can be found in a compelling description of an impossible conundrum involving a violent tribe of advanced, seemingly-intelligent monkeys (yep, that's us!).
The more we pay attention to — and act on — what Ellsberg had to say, the better our chances of survival as a species and as a planet teaming with life — unless we let Artificial Intelligence (AI) have a finger on the button. Unfortunately Ellsberg didn't discuss that, since the book was published in 2017. I'm sure he'd find problems there too (because they are there to be found, and always will be).
The last chapter of The Doomsday Machine offers a first step towards reducing the risk. It's not a small step, but not a giant leap either when compared to the goal. It's just a start. The basic idea is that one side or the other (that is, America or Russia) needs to start REDUCING the threat to the other side — and Ellsberg's conclusion (and this author's as well, FWIW) is that Russia will NOT be the first to do that... which leaves America having to take the initiative. Because somebody absolutely has to.
Ellsberg wrote The Doomsday Machine so that the American people would know the true stakes of NOT reducing the risk of World War III and nuclear winter, and the loss of all human life on earth. He felt that if the American public knew the risk, they would demand that SOME first step be taken. The protests, demonstrations, arrests (including his own arrests) — and the media attention, the Hollywood and T.V. movies... all of it made a difference to Ronald Reagan, and probably to Gorbachev too (watching American television from within the then Soviet Union).
Ellsberg had all the qualifications to know what would be the best available first step, if there is one.
It's the missiles. The ICBMs. That third of the triad. To be useful, the ICBMs have to be launched early, before their targets (Russian missiles still in their silos) are fueled and launched. Once launched, neither side's ICBMs can be recalled.
We need to start by dismantling the silos to reduce the chance of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
But even that step has problems — ANY first step has problems (besides the inevitable political nightmare), and the most important problem is this: The more you reduce the risk of MAD, the more you INCREASE the risk of "tactical" atomic bombs being used by one of the nuclear-armed states — even though they are condemned around the world by all the non-nuclear states.
That theory is hard to argue with since the fear of MAD seems to be working. But "seems to be working" isn't good enough. Thus, Ellsberg believed that the missiles have to be removed as a first step.
None of this is easy to solve when you add in the political, economic, and social issues. But when people — especially the general public — know the facts, most realize that the problem MUST be solved. There is no way on God's Green Earth (GGE) that He/She/They/It/none of the above/whatever wants us to turn the only known life-sustaining planet in the universe into a radioactive dust-bowl as a direct result of having given humans the power of thought.
We're supposed to make beautiful things, not destroy everything just because somebody pushed a button and things escalated exponentially in a matter of minutes. That would be MAD!
Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA
The author is a computer programmer by trade and owner and founder of The Animated Software Company (started in 1984 as P11 Enterprises), but started studying nuclear issues far sooner — in the 1960s as a preteen. Over the years Ace was personally tutored/mentored/helped on nuclear issues by three Manhattan Project scientists (John W. Gofman, Karl Z. Morgan, Marion Fulk) as well as dozens of additional experts including Ernest Sternglass, Rosalie Bertell, Helen Caldicott, Judith Johnsrud, Jack Shannon, Stanley Thompson, Richard Webb, Oscar Shirani, Janette Sherman and countless others...
Additional notes:
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"The British reaction to the use of poison gas by the Germans was very fast... within a day [of the first German attack] Sir William Ramsay had guessed from the description of the battle reports that chlorine had been used and came to the War Office with a protective measure... within a fortnight every man in the British army at the front was supplied with a rudimentary respirator. Fast as the reaction was, it would be too slow in a modern war, one in which the decisive events are likely to be over in the first day if not the first minutes. It might even have been too late in World War I if the Germans had been prepared to exploit their new weapon."
— from: On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn (Princeton University Press, 1961, pg. 353)
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The New York Times published an opinion piece by author Fred Kaplan on Wednesday, October 13, 2004 which discussed Kubrick's movie as well as mentioning Ellsberg's recollection of saying, when the film first came out (also mentioned in The Doomsday Machine) that the film "was a documentary!" Most importantly, Kaplan also quotes General Curtis LeMay in 1957, when he was head of Strategic Air Command (SAC), specifically saying he would violate the national policy if he sees: "that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack."
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On April 2, 1997, an Air Force pilot on a training flight crashed his A-10 Warthog into a mountain near Vail Colorado after flying hundreds of miles off course, apparently intentionally. The pilot never attempted to eject, and it took weeks to find the crash site. The aircraft was armed with a variety of ammunition including four (non-nuclear) Mk-82 bombs, which were never found.
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On March 24, 2015, a Germanwings first officer locked the pilot out of the cockpit and crashed a jet full of passengers into a mountain. No survivors. Several other airline crashes are strongly suspected of being suicide/mass murder by one of the pilots.
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On May 17, 1995 a "crazy" guy stole a tank in San Diego and drove it over parked cars, then onto the highway. He tried to cross to the other side (where it could crush occupied cars) but broke
a track on the barrier, and a local law enforcement officer jumped on the tank, opened the tank door and eliminated the threat. Miraculously, there were no other injuries or deaths.
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The 9-11 hijackers considered hitting nuclear power plants: Three Mile Island and/or Indian Point and/or Calvert Cliffs, or perhaps others. Thousands died that day when they hit New York twice, the Pentagon, and crashed a fourth plane in Pennsylvania.
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In the 1970s some airplane hijackers considered crashing the plane into a nuclear site (Oak Ridge). They landed in Cuba, where they were jailed and the hostages were freed.
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A list of "broken arrows":
https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/broken-arrows/index.html
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And lastly: This reviewer met Daniel Ellsberg once when we both spoke at a rally protesting NASA's nuclear Cassini space probe prior to its launch in October, 1997.
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Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download:
acehoffman.org
Blog:
acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube:
youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at]
acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner,
The Animated Software Company
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