The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

by Daniel Ellsberg

extraordinary reasons. First, after I had spent nearly two years in court facing a possible sentence of 115 years, the twelve felony counts in my initial trial were dismissed with prejudice (meaning, I couldn’t be tried again on these charges), after exposure of White House criminal misconduct against me during the prosecution.

reveal and document his secret threats to North Vietnam of escalations, including nuclear attacks, aiming essentially to win

which had already prolonged the war for two years, widened it to Cambodia and Laos,

which would ultimately add twe...

against me9—including warrantless wiretaps, burglary of my former psychoanalyst’s office seeking blackmail material, illegal use of the CIA, and an abortive effort to “totally incapacitate” me—when they

endable nine months

safe at RAND four years earlier. It was an act of nature: a tropical storm. An act of grace, my wife, Patricia, calls it, since—though it frustrated my deepest plans and caused me great anguish—it allowed me to sleep next to her, in loving embrace,

pickup team of antiwar recruits (a “Lavender Hill Mob,” as I thought

Information Act has not (with many important exceptions) freed from the safes where this information has wrongfully been sequestered for half a century. Yet a good deal of what was lost has since been declassified,

requests and tenacious appeals by William Burr for the National Security Archive11 of George Washington University, and even earlier by Fred Kaplan for his remarkably revealing account, The Wizards of

account that follows, backed up by recently declassified documents13 (many cited in the endnotes) and the notes and files that will be available on my website, it should become clear why it seemed unquestionably worth my freedom, worth risking life in prison, to expose these truths almost half a century ago. I would certainly seize that risk today if I still had the same or comparable inside documentation

substance of what I then wanted to reveal: precisely because I do not believe it is just history. Tragically, I believe that nothing has fundamentally changed.

seventies, but not, of course, the last word—a well-informed briefing of an incoming presidential assistant for national security in 2017 would be closely equivalent to the one I delivered to President John Kennedy’s assistant McGeorge Bundy in January 1961 (see chapter 7), plus what I would have added for Bundy just a few years

the following pages on nuclear winter, however, were revealed only decades after that,