Daniel Ellsberg The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (Bloomsbury, New York, London and Sydney, 2017, 420 pp)
There are a great many newly published books that might be interesting, instructive or entertaining to read. There are relatively few that can rightly be called required reading. This is one of them. Every literate person should read it - now.
It is about a deadly existential threat to human civilization and even life on Earth: nuclear arms and the danger of nuclear winter. It is written by a person unusually well informed on this particular subject, having worked at the highest levels with extraordinary access to the most secret plans and discussions and fully conversant with the subject.
He is a brilliant individual whose specialty for sixty years and more has been decision making under conditions of uncertainty. His book is uncommonly lucid, highly readable and remarkably dispassionate. At eighty six, he writes as crisply and incisively as he did in his youth and with uncommon humanity and wisdom.
Ellsberg has been a hero of mine for decades: as a thinker, a Harvard, RAND and Pentagon prodigy, a dissident against the Vietnam War from the late 1960s, the leaker of the famous Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and eighteen other newspaper in 1971 (as depicted in the current film The Post), the object of a vendetta by the Nixon administration that brought down Nixon himself instead and the author Papers on the War (Simon and Schuster, 1972).
He was, also, the subject of a classic study by Peter Schrag Test of Loyalty: Daniel Ellsberg and the Rituals of Secret Government (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1974), the author of an exceptional memoir Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Viking, 2002) and the subject of a first class documentary by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2009). If you haven’t seen that film, do so.
His Papers on the War and the Pentagon Papers themselves, as well as Schrag’s book, were all grist for my mill when I wrote my doctoral dissertation thirty years ago and more. Ellsberg’s evident brilliance, his all but unrestricted access to secret files and his deeply thoughtful and moral questions made a profound impression. His 2002 memoir and the 2009 film were belated confirmations of what I had (mostly) long known.
What I had not known, or at least not registered adequately, was that his work on the Vietnam War was small beer compared with his work on nuclear war fighting strategy between 1957 and 1971. Nor did I have the slightest idea that, in 1971, as he copied 7,000 pages of secret documents on the Vietnam War, he also copied 8,000 pages of even more highly classified documents about nuclear war plans, which he fully intended to leak as well.
His account of how and why he came to this point in 1971, why he leaked the Vietnam papers first and then lost the nuclear war papers in an attempt to conceal them from the FBI, makes astonishing reading. But the really eye-opening points in the narrative are twofold: that it was because Nixon and Kissinger believed Ellsberg had the nuclear plans that he was called ‘the most dangerous man in America’, not because of the Vietnam papers; and that he intended to leak these far more important and deeply disturbing documents, because he knew that American plans for a nuclear first strike threatened to inflict ‘one hundred Holocausts’ on the human world and believed that they simply should never, as plans or possibilities, ever have come into existence.
He referred briefly to this aspect of his concerns in Secrets (pp. 57-59), in 2002, but remarked in that book that the book on American nuclear strategy remained to be written. I have a small library of books on nuclear weapons, including studies of the US, British, Soviet, Chinese, Israeli, North Korean, Iraqi and Iranian nuclear programs. I have books on the origins of the bomb, espionage and the bomb, strategic arms talks, the Cuban missile crisis and the nuclear scientists.
But I had for years waited, in vain I thought, for Daniel Ellsberg to write his own account of what he learned from inside the system in the 1950s and 1960s. He has at last done that and it is a stunning book. As soon as I saw it – by chance in a small bookshop down by the sea – I snapped it up, knowing what it was likely to contain. My expectations were exceeded. He says it will be his last book. If so, it is a remarkable way to conclude what has been a remarkable life.
The book has two Parts: The Bomb and I and The Road to Doomsday. It begins with asking how he could ever have become involved in working on nuclear war planning and concludes with an impassioned, but closely reasoned call for an unequivocal US declaration of no first use of nuclear weapons, the dismantling of the still vast nuclear arsenals of the major powers and a serious global commitment not simply to non-proliferation but to the abolition of nuclear weapons.
There are many highlights both in detail and in theme. Thematically, two stand out. The first is Ellsberg’s honest examination of the psychology of his own work sixty years ago and that of the thousands of security cleared colleagues, civilian and military, who built the American nuclear arsenal at that time. The second is the acute fragility of command and control systems – contrary to public claims and widespread naïve assumptions – as a consequence of how the system was designed and how it was and is maintained.
Ray Monk’s Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Jonathan Cape, London, 2012) is a first rate exploration of the thinking and moral qualms of the man who led the Manhattan Project (from a scientific angle) but opposed the building of thermonuclear weapons later. Ellsberg was a schoolboy when Oppenheimer was master-minding the creation of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But Oppenheimer was stripped of his clearances for opposing the H-bomb. Ellsberg joined RAND at the age of 26, in 1957, with the nuclear build-up well under way, knowing full well that the US had a large arsenal of ICBMs and bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons. The access he got at that very young age is striking. It was because he was seen as a brilliant theoretician of decision theory and decision-making under uncertainty.
RAND’s job was to think through the acute uncertainties of nuclear strategy and Ellsberg became one of it’s – and the Pentagon’s – golden haired boys on this terrifying subject for well over a decade. An interesting point of comparison with his memoir is that of Raymond Garthoff, who joined RAND before Ellsberg and stayed far longer in the system than he did: A Journey Through the Cold War: A Memoir of Containment and Co-Existence (Brookings Institution, 2001).
Garthoff never broke ranks like Ellsberg, though both knew basically the same things. Both were and are highly intelligent and decent men. The differences in their attitudes and actions are, therefore, highly instructive. Garthoff’s latest book (2015) is Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary during the Cold War. In the whole of his 2001 memoir, he mentions Ellsberg only once, in passing.
But Ellsberg’s memoir is by far the more compelling of the two. Beginning as someone who genuinely felt that at RAND he was among an intellectual elite trying to solve excruciating problems in good faith, he was stunned by the realities he discovered at first hand and concluded that in fact the whole nuclear arms race, having sprung from flawed premises, was clinically and criminally insane and had to be stopped - by ensuring that the American public was informed of what was really going on and how perilous the situation was.
Ellsberg was closely involved with the famous Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and provides hair raising insights into what happened and how the thinking was being done during that fortnight, again based on flawed premises and seriously deficient knowledge. He knew, by then, of very serious weaknesses in the system and of a culture within the Strategic Air Command (SAC), run by Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power, that was fully prepared to unleash thermonuclear war and was morally blind to its consequences.
In 1964, when Stanley Kubrick’s celebrated black comedy Doctor Strangelove was released, he and his senior RAND colleague Henry Rowen went to see it during the workday ‘for professional reasons’. He says they ‘came out into the afternoon sunlight, dazed by the light and the film, both agreeing that what we had just seen was, essentially, a documentary.’ Knowing what he did about the command and control flaws and SAC, he wondered how the film makers had picked up the insights that they had. You can now pick up those and a vast amount more by reading this gripping and deeply thought-provoking book. Do so. There is no better book on the subject.