'The Doomsday Machine' review: The nuts and bolts of Armageddon

The Doomsday Machine 

Confession of a Nuclear War Planner

Daniel Ellsberg

Bloomsbury 

420 pages; Rs 499

Daniel Ellsberg first achieved notoriety for leaking the Pentagon Papers, which revealed how the Johnson administration and the Pentagon had lied to the public and to Congress about the scope of the Vietnam War. The sensational circumstances of those revelations — from a Pentagon insider, a US Marine and Vietnam veteran at that — and the Nixon administration’s fierce response — burgling his former psychoanalyst’s office, warrantless wire-tapping et al — overshadowed the fact that the dossier confirmed what Americans had long suspected anyway. 

Had Mr Ellsberg had the opportunity to leak other documents that he had copied around the same time, the public furore would have been greater by several orders of magnitude. These documents dated from his time as a consultant with RAND Corporation, the R&D institution affiliated to the US Air Force, and they concerned his research at the highest levels of the security establishment.

Hounded by the security agencies after the Pentagon Paper expose, Mr Ellsberg had entrusted these “Doomsday” papers to a friend to hide. As a noose around Mr Ellsberg and his associates tightened, his friend transferred them to garbage bag and buried them in a public trash dump with an old stove as a marker. 

Later, a tropical storm caused a landslide on the dump, pushing the marker away from the paper trove. Frantic searches yielded thousands of garbage bags but no papers. Eventually, the contents of dump became landfill for a condominium and the documents were irretrievably lost.

This book is the result of Mr Ellsberg’s study of documents declassified over the years. It contains enough granular detail to suggest that Mr Ellsberg didn’t lose all his notes, and the statute of limitations protects him from the attentions of the security agencies. 

Mr Ellsberg begins his narrative dramatically enough by quoting a graph in a document marked “For the President’s Eyes Only”. It contained a reply from the Joint Chiefs of Staffs’ office to a question about how many people would be killed in Soviet Union and China if the US launched a general nuclear war. Answer: 100 million in the first month, rising to 325 million in six months. A subsequent table added 600 million from nuclear fallout in Europe and Asia — or, as he puts it, “A hundred Holocausts”. 

As that preface indicates, the drama in The Doomsday Machine lies in the unadorned narration of facts. The potential annihilation of mankind is a well-established narrative of a nuclear war, however. The key takeaways from this book are: (a) The world is potentially closer to Armageddon than we think; and (b) it doesn’t require maverick leaders such as Donald Trump to tip the world into a nuclear war — the US chain of command is set up in such a way that quite sane people can do so by mistake or even in the line of duty. The “nuclear football” bearing the codes that every US president carries around is, Mr Ellsberg says, “theater — essentially a hoax”.

Mr Ellsberg, fresh from Harvard, joined RAND Corporation in 1958 and chose a fairly esoteric field of study at the time — the “vulnerability and reliability of the military’s ‘nervous system’: command posts, information and decision-making processes at different levels, communication, warning systems and intelligence”.

Given the kind of access for which any journalist would give an arm and a leg, he set about his research with workman-like thoroughness — asking inconvenient questions, visiting sites, and painstakingly tracing paper trails. Among his early findings is that “President Eisenhower had secretly delegated authority to initiate nuclear attacks to his theater commanders under various circumstances…” such as sickness, a breakdown in communications or the destruction of Washington by a missile. This delegation, he says, continues to this day. 

This makes sense, of course, but Mr Ellsberg’s researches, which principally covered the Pacific Command, revealed two unsettling facts. First, atmospheric conditions over the ocean meant that command outposts on, say, Oahu or Okinawa, where nuclear weapons-carrying aircraft were located, were out of touch with headquarters for a few hours every day, a circumstance Mr Ellsberg witnessed during tactical alert drills. 

Second, every theatre commander had delegated those powers down the chain. As Mr Ellsberg writes, “…I had a growing unease…that this delegation reverberated downwards in a widening circle that permitted authorized launch by more and more subordinate commanders, not to mention the physical possibility of unauthorized action by control officers or by crews of alert nuclear vehicles, whether planes of submarines.”

The big story of The Doomsday Machine is that more than two decades since the end of the Cold War, America’s nuclear arsenal remains the juggernaut that encourages global proliferation. Along the way are other astonishing revelations. For instance, the US thought nothing of violating treaty obligations with Japan by stationing nuclear weapons on its territory. Then, the nuclear war plan against the Soviet involved destroying Chinese cities too (the intelligence agencies hadn’t picked up on the Sino-Soviet split). And the “missile gap” between the superpowers on which John F Kennedy campaigned was a fiction perpetuated by sections of the military.  

The books ends with an urgent plea for the US to take the lead in dismantling the Doomsday Machine on grounds that no country has the moral right to possess the means to destroy humankind. The credibility of the message is all the stronger because it comes not from a professional peacenik but an Establishment maven.