The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

by Daniel Ellsberg

yes, Admiral Felt had delegated to Admiral Kivette the same authority that, he said, President Eisenhower had delegated in writing to Admiral Felt: to launch nuclear weapons at his own initiative during a crisis in case of communications outage.

By some counts, over eighty weapons were dedicated to Moscow; other counts put this at a hundred and eighty.

The price of bringing all the theater and component service plans into harmony with each other, into one plan, was the total elimination of any flexibility in carrying it out.

The preplanned targets for the whole force included, along with military sites, every city in the Soviet Union and China. There was at least one warhead allocated for every city of 25,000 people or more in the Soviet Union.

With the age of warring nation-states persisting into the thermonuclear era, it was a species problem.

I can’t think well on a vertical surface.

But it had never been forced on the attention of the American public that a large Soviet non-nuclear attack on Europe—not on the continental United States—would almost automatically trigger a full-scale U.S. nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, with the certainty of Soviet retaliation on the United States to the full limits of its capability.

Among the aphorisms in Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”