The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel EllsbergMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Man, this was so good.
The first impression it left me with was: Daniel Ellsberg is so cool.
The second impression was: I guess a lot of my friends, and people who tend to share my political views, are pacifist-leaning and oppose the national security establishment and such. And I’ve never felt that confident that they’re right. “War is bad, killing people is bad” just seems like such an obvious, dumb take that the people who are against that must have good reasons. I can imagine what some of them might be: it does seem legitimately better to have a world under US influence than Russian or Chinese. And probably a lot of the good reasons people have for doing stuff are classified.
And The Doomsday Machine left me with the very strong impression that nope, there are no wise and thoughtful leaders behind the scenes making all the right decisions on national security. Actually, a lot of our plans and strategies and doctrines are not only based on disregard for non-American life and for future generations, but are just … dumb? They’re the product of incompetence and bureaucratic infighting and make no sense under any value system.
Anyway, it was all pretty scary, and I felt kind of amazed that we’re all still alive.
View all my reviews