Narrator: Imagine being a young government consultant in 1961, a man with top-secret clearance, standing in an office in the White House. You are handed a single piece of paper, a graph marked "For the President's Eyes Only." It shows the estimated number of deaths from a planned U.S. nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union and China. The line on the graph climbs relentlessly, plateauing at a horrifying number: 325 million dead in just the first six months. A week later, you see a table that adds to the toll: another 100 million dead in allied Eastern Europe from fallout, potentially 100 million more in Western Europe, and at least 100 million in neutral countries. The total comes to approximately 600 million deaths—a hundred Holocausts. For the man who saw that paper, Daniel Ellsberg, this was not a theoretical exercise. It was a glimpse into the heart of a real, operational plan. He realized he was looking at a machine designed for global annihilation, a machine that should never have existed.

In his chilling account, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Daniel Ellsberg exposes the institutional madness that created and maintained America's nuclear war strategy. He reveals a system so secret, so rigid, and so prone to accident that it held the entire world hostage, a threat that he argues has not disappeared with the Cold War.

Narrator: The most terrifying revelation in Ellsberg’s work is that the "Doomsday Machine"—a concept often associated with the satirical film Dr. Strangelove—was not fiction. It was a tangible, pre-delegated, and largely automated system of mass extermination. The 1961 plan Ellsberg saw was not a worst-case scenario; it was the plan. The Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan (JSCP) and its successor, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), dictated that any armed conflict with the Soviet Union, no matter how small, would trigger a full-scale nuclear assault on every city in both the USSR and China.

There were no options for restraint. The plan mandated the immediate use of the entire U.S. arsenal to destroy not just military targets but population centers. The goal was not just to win a war but to ensure the "defeat of the Sino-Soviet Bloc," which in practice meant killing hundreds of millions of people. This plan was endorsed by President Eisenhower and passed on to the Kennedy administration. The machine was built, fueled, and waiting for a single trigger, a trigger that could be pulled in response to a minor border skirmish in Berlin.

Narrator: This machinery of death was able to exist because it was deliberately hidden, not just from the public, but from the highest levels of civilian government. Ellsberg reveals that the Joint Chiefs of Staff actively concealed the true nature of the war plans from the Secretary of Defense and even the President. When McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, first requested a copy of the JSCP, the director of the Joint Staff refused, stating it had never been released to the White House before. It took a direct presidential order to get the document.

Even then, the military attempted to deceive civilian leaders. Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric was given a sanitized briefing paper, not the full plan. It was Ellsberg who, having seen the real JSCP, recognized the deception and drafted a series of "penetrating questions" for the Joint Chiefs that could only have been written by someone who knew the truth. This culture of secrecy was so pervasive that Ellsberg intended to release thousands of pages of these nuclear documents alongside the Pentagon Papers. However, in a bizarre twist of fate, the box of nuclear secrets, entrusted to his brother for safekeeping, was buried in a town dump and irretrievably lost after a tropical storm caused a landslide.

Narrator: The public has always been assured that only the President has the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Ellsberg shatters this illusion. He discovered that President Eisenhower had secretly delegated nuclear launch authority to theater commanders, like Admiral Harry D. Felt, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Command (CINCPAC). This authority was to be used if communications with Washington were cut off, a frequent occurrence at the time.

This delegation cascaded down the chain of command. During a visit to Kunsan Air Base in South Korea, a major in command of nuclear-armed jets told Ellsberg that he believed he had the "inherent right" to launch his planes without orders if he felt his base was in danger. When asked if the pilots would return if they didn't receive a final "Execute" order, the major chillingly replied, "Oh, I think they’d come back. Most of them." This revealed a terrifying reality: the decision to end the world could be made by a lone commander in a remote location, acting on incomplete information in a moment of panic.

Narrator: The command-and-control system was not only decentralized but also dangerously vulnerable to false alarms. In one harrowing incident in October 1960, the brand-new Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radar at Thule, Greenland, reported a massive Soviet missile launch with 99.9% certainty. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) went to its highest alert level. War seemed imminent. The cause was only discovered later: the powerful new radar had mistaken the rising moon for an incoming attack.

The system was designed to prioritize a swift "go" order over a cautious "stop." Ellsberg found that authentication procedures were flawed. For a time, the launch codes for Minuteman missiles were set to 00000000 to ensure they could be fired quickly. Furthermore, there was no authenticated "stop" or "recall" code. Once bombers were sent on their way, there was no reliable, official way for a President to call them back, partly because military planners feared a civilian leader might lose his nerve.

Narrator: The war plans were not only secret and accident-prone; they were also breathtakingly rigid. Ellsberg discovered that CINCPAC’s war plan made no provision for a war with the Soviet Union that did not also include China. If the President ordered a strike on the USSR, the plan automatically included a full-scale attack on every major Chinese city and military base. When Ellsberg questioned this, senior admirals told him it was "insane" to even consider fighting one communist power without destroying the other.

This inflexibility was compounded by the discovery of "nuclear winter." The initial estimate of 600 million deaths did not account for the firestorms that would be created by bombing cities. The smoke and soot from these fires would block out the sun, plunging the planet into an artificial ice age and causing a global famine that would kill nearly every human on Earth. The Doomsday Machine, once activated, would kill everyone, whether by blast, fallout, or starvation.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The Doomsday Machine is that the greatest threat to human existence is not a rogue state or a terrorist group, but the institutionalized, bureaucratic systems of annihilation created by superpowers. These systems, born of fear and secrecy, operate on a logic of their own, far removed from public accountability or even effective leadership control. Ellsberg’s confession is a warning that this machinery has not been dismantled; it has only been updated.

The book leaves us with a deeply unsettling challenge. For decades, the world has lived with a gun pointed at its head, a gun held by a complex and fallible system we are encouraged to ignore. Ellsberg’s life work was motivated by the belief that such a system should never have existed. The question he poses to us is a profound one: now that we know the truth, what are we prepared to do to finally dismantle it?