Review: The Doomsday Machine
Daniel Ellsberg walks in controversy. Specifically he’s an anti-war activist who has made a life’s work out of exposing the internal operations of the US government. He’s the person who stole and published the Pentagon Papers, internal documents describing Vietnam War internal motivations and policies. He believed that the government behaving hypocritically and risked his freedom to draw attention to those policies and actions. Despite that playing out when I was a child, it’s still controversial.
Whatever you might think of him, Ellsberg is consistent. In Doomsday Machine he continues to speak out about what he believes are immoral government policies. Doomsday Machine aims at US nuclear policy throughout his tenure in the government. Unfortunately he doesn’t have the physical copies of the documents he cites, which means readers have to treat Doomsday as a memoir. He does make some pretty serious accusations about how branches of the government and military are competitive when they should be cooperative. He claims that military branches routinely misrepresented the intelligence they had about the USSR to the State Department and the President.
I’m making that sound more diplomatic that Ellsberg does. I don’t have any idea what the truth of the matter was in the 1960’s and 70’s much less now. Still, these stakes are high and as a call for transparency, I find it compelling.
There’s a second half of Doomsday that Ellsberg devotes to persuading readers that the concept of mutually assured destruction through nuclear war – or any such extermination system – is unsound. He does a nice job of bringing that home, IMHO, and it’s certainly worth deep thoughts. It is natural to mentally distance yourself from the destructive power that a doomsday machine entails, and Ellsberg reminds you that the plan is to kill as many people as possible. People have to decide for oneself if there’s a benefit worth that price, but I think there’s real value in seeing the price clearly.
Doomsday is certainly a reflective surface. Readers will see themselves as much as Ellsberg in it – know it or not – but as a nucleation site for these ideas, I think it’s worthwhile.
Recommended.