The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

by Daniel Ellsberg

The hidden reality I aim to expose is that for over fifty years, all-out thermonuclear war—an irreversible, unprecedented, and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization and most life on earth—has been, like the disasters of Chernobyl, Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, Fukushima Daiichi, and before these, World War I, a catastrophe waiting to happen, on a scale infinitely greater than any of these. And that is still true today.

But that meant that the two-man rule was only a facade throughout the Pacific. The system’s ability to prevent one man alone from sending off Go commands to subordinate units was a false promise. And that was in addition to the fact that the two-man rule, even if both men were present, was obviously vulnerable to collusion between them or coercion (such as a gun in the hand of one of them), either of these especially plausible in a crisis.

There was no Stop or Return code in the envelope or otherwise in the possession of the plane crew. Once an authenticated Execute order had been received, there was—by design, it turned out—no way to authenticate an order to reverse course from the president or anyone else. And no such unauthenticated order was to be obeyed. There was no officially authorized way for the president or the JCS or anyone else to stop planes that had received an Execute order—whether they had just taken off or had passed beyond their positive control line—from proceeding to the target and dropping their bombs. From that point on, the planes, whether tactical or strategic, could no more be called back by the president or any subordinate from their attack project than a ballistic missile.

“General War is defined as armed conflict with the Soviet Union.” To properly understand the hair-raising import of this proposition, one had to read it in the context of two other key assertions in the JSCP: “In general war, Annex C will be executed”56; and “in general war, a war in which the armed forces of the USSR and of the U.S. are overtly engaged, the basic military objective of the U.S. Armed Forces is the defeat of the Sino-Soviet Bloc.”

“All I can say is,” [Shoup] said in a level voice, “any plan that murders three hundred million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That is not the American way.”

The danger of this strategy lay in increasing U.S. military pressure to attack the missiles before they all became operational. And since that would likely be followed by invasion, Khrushchev might end up triggering the very event the missiles and other equipment had been intended to forestall. On the other hand, the stronger his hand, the more likely that Kennedy might seek a diplomatic solution. And there were “private” indications from the Kennedys that he was leaning in that direction.

Suspecting that an invasion was under way and unable to reach Pliyev, he had acted on his own authority and gave the order to fire. As

Khrushchev’s son Sergei later told me, this was a turning point for his father. He knew things were getting out of his control; he could not control Castro, and now he had to wonder whether Soviet-manned SAMs were under his control.

We had come to the time of final decision123 … I felt we were on the edge of a precipice with no way off.… One thousand miles away in the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, the final decisions were going to be made in the next few minutes. President Kennedy had initiated the course of events, but he no longer had control over them.

They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?

That change preceded the formal dawn of the nuclear era, but it relied on two crucial developments, which happened to converge in World War II: first, the belief by some militarists that airpower was the key to victory; and second, the increasing willingness by civilian leadership and air commanders to regard cities—which is to say, civilian populations—as legitimate military targets. Each of those developments has its own particular history.

One of those principles was that the characteristics of the bomber gave an overwhelming advantage to the side that struck first in massive force. There were controversies as to what should be struck first, but Douhet’s emphasis was on bombing cities for what he called the “morale effect”—paralyzing the other side’s will, not simply its capability to carry on the war.

However, the moral justification of any of this was clear in the minds of these strategists: Better to kill a few civilians and get the war over with quickly than to observe scrupulously and meticulously a distinction between civilians and military and thereby doom both countries to a repetition of World War I. In other words, it was their ethical conviction that this was the most humane, indeed the only moral way to carry on a modern war. Fewer people would be killed overall, on both sides, from this approach.

For the first couple of years of the war (the Americans didn’t come into the European theater until 1943), the British were bombing as the major part of their war effort. In fact, after their troops were forced off the continent at Dunkirk in 1940, it was the only offensive effort they could take. And making that effort, effective or not, was prompted by strong political motivations. They had to counter the general conviction in the world that Hitler was bound to win the war, especially after his early successes in Russia in 1941.

The document was an Air Staff directive later confirmed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the civilian Defense Committee: TO THE BOMBER COMMAND: The primary object of your operations151 should now be focused on the morale of the enemy’s civil population, and in particular of the industrial workers. With this aim in view, a list of selected area targets … is attached.

The largest part of the tonnage dropped by the British through the rest of the war was directed at the centers and most built-up parts of cities—not at factories or military installations, which tended to be on the outskirts—although high officials continued, falsely, to deny this to Parliament and the public every year of the war. When it came to killing civilians, practice preceded intention; but a change in intention did make quite a difference. It was possible to kill more people from the air than the Germans had succeeded in doing in the London Blitz or the British had attempted to do by the end of 1941. The February 14, 1942 decision was the British authorization and directive to do just that.

Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

The super-secret Norden bombsight (whose development had cost half as much as the Manhattan Project) required visual sighting of the target, impossible through clouds. In actual combat conditions, dodging flak and fighters, and with frequent cloud cover—none of which they had encountered in their bombing practice in Arizona—American bombardiers weren’t hitting165 what they were aiming at in their high-altitude “precision” bombing. Their actual bomb patterns on the ground and their effect on the civilian population of cities weren’t all that different from the British area bombing.

Everybody following was to drop their bombs in a pattern when he dropped his. The idea was to fly straight through the flak without any evasive action and thereby do the job, destroy the target, without having to return and run the risks again. He became known, he said, as “Iron Pants” (elsewhere, “Iron Ass”) for his own willingness and ability to fly a straight course through heavy antiaircraft fire. Fewer repeat missions did become necessary, overall losses went down, and “no evasive action” became the rule168 in the whole Eighth Air Force.

We’re at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed? … Crank her up. Let’s go.

The atomic bomb simply did it more efficiently, one bomb doing what it took three hundred bombers to do in March. But we had three hundred bombers, and more, and they had been doing the same job, night after night, city after city, some sixty-seven of them before Hiroshima. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey reported, shortly after the war, “It is probable that more persons were killed in one six-hour period176 … than in any other recorded attack of any kind.”

Seventy years of public controversy about “the decision to drop the bomb” have been almost entirely misdirected. It has proceeded on the false supposition that there was or had to be any such decision. There was no new decision to be made in the spring of 1945 about burning a city’s worth of humans.

Whether that was true or not, the U.S. Army Air Force came out of the war convinced it had won the war in the Pacific by burning masses of civilians to death.

In LeMay’s eyes, that was something of a semantic question. In a lengthy interview with historian Michael Sherry, he said, “There are no innocent civilians.182

Its code name was Perimeter; it was known informally by a Russian phrase that translates as “Dead Hand.” Low-level officers in deep underground centers well away from Moscow would receive by a variety of channels several forms of evidence—seismic, electronic, infrared, radioactivity—that Moscow had suffered a nuclear explosion, along with breakage in all forms of communication to and from Moscow. In that event, they were authorized to send off ICBMs that would beep a Go signal to any ICBM sites they passed over. The Soviet rockets would not merely communicate an authorization to launch to ground officers but would actually bypass them and launch the missiles.

David Hoffman,249 former Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post who had interviewed Yarynich many times for his book The Dead Hand,

In the course of the operations, Russia tested the Perimeter System, known as the ‘doomsday weapon’ or the ‘dead hand.’ The system assesses the situation in the country and gives a command to strike a retaliatory blow on the enemy automatically. Thus, the enemy will not be able to attack Russia and stay alive.”

Does the existence of such a capability serve any national or international interest whatsoever to a degree that would justify its obvious danger to human life?

The sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons should be to deter nuclear attack on the United States and its allies. That sole purpose can and should be accomplished with radically lowered numbers of U.S. nuclear weapons, almost entirely SLBMs, ICBMs having been dismantled as they should have been generations ago. This shift would not totally eliminate the dangers of nuclear war, but it would abolish the threat of nuclear winter.

no concern for remaining in office, or maintaining a particular power structure, or sustaining jobs, profits, votes—can justify maintaining any risk whatever of causing the near extinction of human and other animal life on this planet. Omnicide—threatened, prepared, or carried out—is flatly illegitimate, unacceptable, as an instrument of national policy; indeed, it cannot be regarded as anything less than criminal, immoral, evil.

As Martin Luther King Jr. warned us,328 one year to the day before his death, “There is such a thing as being too late.” In challenging us on April 4, 1967, to recognize “the fierce urgency of now” he was speaking of the “madness of Vietnam,” but he also alluded on that same occasion to nuclear weapons and to the even larger madness that has been the subject of this book: “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”