Summary of Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I was nine years old when I saw newsreels of the London Blitz, and I was shocked by the cruelty of the Nazis. I believed what we were told about American and British bombers bravely flying through flak to drop their loads on targets in Germany.
#2 I was 13 when I learned about the challenges of the nuclear era in a social studies class. The teacher, Bradley Patterson, explained that the development of technology regularly moved much faster than other aspects of culture.
#3 The existence of a bomb like that would be bad news for humanity. It would be too powerful to be safely controlled. The power would be abused, and civilization would be in danger of destruction.
#4 The first person to form a judgment about the bomb was Leo Szilard, who first conceived the idea of a chain reaction in a heavy element like uranium. He was in London in 1933 as an émigré, having left Berlin just days after the Reichstag fire.

Sujets

• Arms control
• International relations

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 28 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669372035
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I was nine years old when I saw newsreels of the London Blitz, and I was shocked by the cruelty of the Nazis. I believed what we were told about American and British bombers bravely flying through flak to drop their loads on targets in Germany.

#2

I was 13 when I learned about the challenges of the nuclear era in a social studies class. The teacher, Bradley Patterson, explained that the development of technology regularly moved much faster than other aspects of culture.

#3

The existence of a bomb like that would be bad news for humanity. It would be too powerful to be safely controlled. The power would be abused, and civilization would be in danger of destruction.

#4

The first person to form a judgment about the bomb was Leo Szilard, who first conceived the idea of a chain reaction in a heavy element like uranium. He was in London in 1933 as an émigré, having left Berlin just days after the Reichstag fire.

#5

Szilard was a key figure in bringing the atomic bomb into the world. He believed that the race was between Germany and America to obtain this explosive power, and he was willing to help America get it.

#6

I was a Cold Warrior, and I had taken note when Churchill, in 1946, pointed to the Iron Curtain that had descended across Europe, dividing free Europe from tyrannical rule in the East. I had come to accept all the Cold War premises and attitudes.

#7

I was a Truman Democrat: a liberal Cold Warrior, pro-labor and anti-Communist, like Senators Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson. I admired Truman’s action in sending bombers filled with coal and food instead of weapons to resupply the people in Berlin during the Soviet blockade that began the month of my high school graduation.

#8

I had expected to pursue an academic career as an economic theorist, but I was offered a postgraduate fellowship at the Society of Fellows in 1957. I knew what I wanted to work on: choices in situations of extreme uncertainty.

#9

The first reports from Project RAND, which were a proposal for a world-circling spaceship, were released in 1946 and 1947. They had predicted the political impact of a satellite: The psychological effect of a satellite will in less dramatic fashion parallel that of the atom bomb. It will make possible an unspoken threat to every other nation that we can send a guided missile to any spot on earth.

#10

The summer of 1958 was the high point of secret intelligence predictions of a vast Soviet superiority in deployed ICBMs. But even before those predictions, Top Secret RAND studies had concluded that the ability of the Strategic Air Command to retaliate against a Soviet surprise attack against our strategic bombers was far from reliable.

#11

I was in the company of very smart people at RAND, and it was clear from the start that this was as smart a group of men as I had ever met. I loved working there, and I spent ten years there, in two stints, in 1958 and 1967.

#12

I had the privilege of working at RAND, a think tank that was dedicated to the study of the dangers of nuclear war. My colleagues and I were driven men who felt we were saving the world from our Soviet counterparts.

#13

I worked for RAND in the 1950s, and I was assigned to the department that was tasked with finding ways to frustrate the Soviet versions of RAND and SAC. I was reading an analysis of the optimal conditions for a Soviet attack on SAC bases deep in America, and I felt a shiver.

#14

I worked at RAND in 1959, and I had learned there that the only way to increase the chance of avoiding a large nuclear war was to have a survivable, assured second-strike capability to kill more than 20 million Soviet citizens.

#15

I chose to specialize in the command and control of nuclear retaliatory forces by senior military officers and especially by the president. I was drawn to this particular command problem not only because of its importance, but also because it exemplified and drew on everything I had analyzed in my graduate study of decision-making under uncertainty.

#16

The same problem arose in the field of tactical warning: indications from long-distance ground radars or infrared satellites that enemy planes or missiles had left their launch sites, headed for the United States, before any of them had arrived on target.

#17

Wohlstetter had proposed a way to increase the survivability of alert bombers without committing us to war. He had done this by introducing a launch on warning option with respect to bombers that was separable from the decision to execute the war plans.

#18

The term positive control and its synonym fail-safe procedure meant that the pilots were to be trained and drilled to understand that they were never to go to target under any circumstances without a positive order from a higher authority.

#19

The launch-on-warning procedure was practiced frequently at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, but not continuously. The pilots were allowed to be elsewhere, at the PX or in their quarters, each with their individual jeep and driver, because they practiced the alert at least once a day.

#20

The practice drill that was done to prepare the planes for takeoff in case of an emergency was much more time-consuming and expensive in fuel and maintenance than the actual drill. It was clear that the theater forces did not practice this part of the exercise very often.

#21

The first time a nuclear alert pilot takes off on a mission, he or she will be extremely likely to believe that the war is on, or imminent, because the commanders who launched them without precedent seemed to think so.

#22

The F-100s, despite a command obsession with realistic drills, rarely rehearsed to the point of takeoff. The reason was that if a number of these planes actually took off and flew, one or more of them might bump into another and turn over, spreading lethal radioactivity over a large area.

#23

The thought that a false alarm could be serious enough to trigger a launch command and alert tactical forces on any base in the Pacific, and possibly anywhere in the world, led me to believe that some airborne pilots armed with nuclear weapons might believe that general nuclear war was underway, and that they had no ability to receive an Execute order because communications had been disrupted.

#24

I landed in Seoul and took a plane to Kunsan, where I met with an Air Force major in charge of twelve F-100s. Each one of those bombs had the explosive equivalent of half the tonnage the United States dropped in all of World War II.

#25

I asked the major how he would launch his planes in such a situation. He said that as the commander of the base, he had the authority to protect his forces. He explained that the oldest principle of war is for military commanders to have the right and authority to protect their forces, even if it goes against directives.

#26

The major was not answering differently from other bases. He just wasn’t acknowledging that his directives, which were different from those of other bases, were supposed to slow him down.

#27

The American pilots under the planes at Kunsan were also given the Mark 28 guns. The premise of the question was that the pilots had been launched on alert for the first time ever, which made them certain that an attack was under way. They would go on to their targets.

#28

I had come across a SAC manual in 1958 that described the procedures for authenticating the Execute order for bombers. It indicated to me another vulnerability in the fail-safe system. I suggested that one pilot on alert might have decided that the circumstances were good enough to go ahead and launch nuclear weapons.

#29

The codes were the same for all planes and changed rarely, so any pilot in the alert force could learn the entire authentication code by opening his envelope. The two-man requirement applied only to command post procedures, since most PACAF bombers were single-pilot planes.

#30

I found that there was a universal and supposedly ironclad rule that at least two officers be on duty at all times, day and night, and they must both be involved in the authentication of an order to execute nuclear war plans. But in practice, not.

#31

The two-man rule was a lie, as the system was unable to prevent one man from sending off Go commands to subordinate units. The system’s ability to prevent one man from launching a nuclear weapon was a false promise.

#32

The first task assigned to the study group was to ensure that every unit under Felt’s command would receive as promptly and reliably as possible a Go order for general nuclear war operations when Felt issued it. The military commanders were far more concerned with responding to enemy attacks than they were with preventing a false alarm or unauthorized action.

#33

There was only one card in the envelope with which to authenticate the last four digits in the eight-character signal. It was a Go code to execute the general war plan. There was no Stop or Return code in the envelope or otherwise in the possession of the plane crew.

#34

The real concern was that a civilian