FEAR OF A NUCLEAR WINTER REMAINS
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner Daniel Ellsberg
Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney, 2017, $40, 420 pages.
What would you do if you were a young professional working at your dream job, and you discovered your employer was lying to the public, promoting a disastrous foreign war and steadily expanding a weapons program that threatened to destroy human life on earth? In 1971, that was the dilemma facing Daniel Ellsberg, a brilliant young academic and consultant at the Rand Corporation, a Cold War think-tank with close ties to the U.S. air force.
His work for Rand gave him a close look at the dysfunctional underbelly of U.S. nuclear war policy and the decades-old record of government lies that surrounded and supported American involvement in Vietnam. He resolved the crisis of conscience that resulted from these discoveries by smuggling documents out of his office at Rand and arranging for the evidence they provided that the U.S. government had lied to the American people about Vietnam to be leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Known as the Pentagon Papers, these documents played an important role in the emerging resistance to the war around the world and made Ellsberg a kind of prototypical whistleblower. (Part of this drama is captured in Steven Spielberg ’s recent movie The Post.)
According to his new book, The Doomsday Machine, Ellsberg wasn’t just concerned about Vietnam and government mendacity about the war. He was also terrified by what he had learned about America’s nuclear arsenal and the dangers to life on Earth posed by the inadequate provisions made to prevent the outbreak of an accidental nuclear war.
We tend to think that the end of Cold War tensions has resolved any concerns about nuclear war, but Ellsberg points out that the existing arsenals held by nine states (which come to nearly 15,000 warheads) still represent a clear danger to human survival. Even a limited nuclear exchange would be enough to trigger a life destroying “nuclear winter,” and the combination of blast, radiation and climate disruption could wipe out all human life. The seasoned whistleblower argues for a series of reforms that would reduce the risk these weapons pose and challenges his readers to support demands for dismantling the “doomsday machines” maintained by all the nuclear powers. This is a compelling and alarming book, and it should be read by anyone who cares about the human future. Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. As a child, he was encouraged at school to “duck and cover” under his desk if atomic war broke out. It didn’t seem like an adequate response at the time, and it still doesn’t. He welcome feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net