金石堂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 buildup 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 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 in this election year 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 whistleblower. It is a real-life Dr. Strangelove story, but an ultimately hopeful--and necessary--book.
