Michael: Alright Kevin, I'm going to say the title of a book, and I want your gut reaction. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Kevin: Sounds like the worst 'Take Your Kid to Work Day' ever. "What'd your dad do, Timmy?" "Oh, he drafted a plan to cause a hundred Holocausts before lunch." Michael: That's... disturbingly accurate. We're diving into The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg. Kevin: The Pentagon Papers guy, right? So he has a history of finding documents that people really, really don't want found. Michael: Exactly. And this book, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Medal, reveals secrets he considered even more dangerous than the Pentagon Papers. He argues the public's belief that only the president controls the nukes is, and I'm quoting him here, a "deliberate deception." Kevin: Whoa. Okay, that's a bold claim. A deliberate deception? That's not just a misunderstanding, that's a lie. Michael: It's a lie he was part of. And the truth he uncovers is so much more terrifying than a simple lie. It starts with a single piece of paper he saw in 1961, a document that changed his life forever.

Michael: Picture this: it's the spring of 1961. Ellsberg, a young, brilliant analyst and consultant for the Secretary of Defense, is in the White House. He's shown a top-secret document, marked "For the President's Eyes Only." It’s a single graph. Kevin: What was on the graph? Michael: Projected deaths from a single, planned U.S. nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union and China. The line on the graph climbs over six months, and it levels off at about 275 to 325 million people. Kevin: Hold on. Three hundred million people? That's just... a number so big it's meaningless. That's more than the entire population of the United States at the time. Michael: And that was just the beginning. A week later, he's shown a table with the full breakdown. Another 100 million dead in Eastern Europe from fallout. Potentially another 100 million in Western Europe, our allies, depending on which way the wind blew. And at least 100 million more in neutral countries like Finland, Austria, Afghanistan, India, Japan. Kevin: My math isn't great, but that's... 600 million people. That's a third of the earth's population back then. And this was our plan? This wasn't some theoretical worst-case scenario? Michael: This was the plan. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had calculated it. This was what would happen if "general war" broke out. And Ellsberg's reaction in that moment is the heart of the book. He writes, "This piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed... It depicted evil beyond any human project ever." Kevin: I mean, how could it exist? What kind of "plan" is that? It's not a plan, it's a suicide note for the human race. Michael: And the institutional madness gets deeper. The plan was called the SIOP, the Single Integrated Operational Plan. And the 'single' part is key. There was only one plan. Whether the war started over a skirmish in Berlin or a full-scale Soviet invasion, the response was the same: hit everything, everywhere, all at once. Kevin: So no nuance. No, "let's just target their military bases." It was just... burn it all down? Michael: Exactly. Ellsberg describes a briefing on the SIOP for top officials. The SAC commander, General Power, is pointing at the map and casually says something like, "I just hope none of you have any relatives in Albania, because they have a radar station there that is right on our flight path, and we take it out." Kevin: Albania? They weren't even part of the Warsaw Pact! Michael: Didn't matter. They were in the way. Then someone asks, "What if it isn't China's war? What if we're only fighting the Soviets?" And General Power replies, "Well, yeah, we can change that, but I hope nobody thinks of it, because it would really screw up the plan." Kevin: That's unbelievable. The plan was more important than preventing a war with a billion more people. But surely the President, John F. Kennedy, knew about this. He must have seen this and been horrified. Michael: That's the most chilling part. Ellsberg reveals the Joint Chiefs actively hid the full, horrifying details from civilian leadership. The Secretary of Defense, the President's advisors... they weren't given the full plan. When a top official, Roswell Gilpatric, finally demanded to see the JSCP—the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan that authorized all this—they gave him a watered-down, sanitized briefing paper. They literally gave him a fake. Kevin: They gave the Deputy Secretary of Defense a fake war plan? How is that even possible? Michael: Because the military leadership believed, as Ellsberg documents, that civilians couldn't be trusted with these decisions. They saw it as their domain. It took Ellsberg, the insider, to look at the fake document and tell his boss, "Sir, this isn't it. The real plan is on different-sized paper, and it contains a definition of 'general war' so broad that a single border clash could trigger the end of the world." Kevin: Okay, so the plan is a pre-programmed apocalypse, and the people supposedly in charge don't even have the real instruction manual. That's terrifying. But at least it's all locked down, right? There’s one button, and only the President can push it. Please tell me that part is true. Michael: Well, Kevin, that brings us to what Ellsberg calls the biggest and most deliberate deception of all.

Michael: The image of the President with the nuclear football, the sole authority to end the world... it's a powerful myth. And according to Ellsberg, it's almost entirely a fabrication designed to reassure the public. Kevin: What do you mean, a fabrication? Michael: He discovered that President Eisenhower had secretly delegated the authority to launch nuclear weapons to theater commanders in the field. If communications with Washington went down—which happened regularly due to atmospheric conditions—the CINCPAC, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Command, had the authority to execute the war plan on his own initiative. Kevin: So it's not one person with a key, it's more like a dozen people have a copy, and some of them live in places with bad cell service. Michael: A perfect analogy. And it gets worse. Ellsberg suspected, and later confirmed, that this authority was delegated even further down the chain. He tells a story of visiting Kunsan Air Base in South Korea, talking to an Air Force major in charge of planes armed with thermonuclear weapons. The major tells him flat out, "Every commander has an inherent right to protect his forces... if I believed that they were endangered... I would send them off." Without orders. Kevin: He'd just... launch? Based on a feeling? Michael: Based on his judgment in a crisis. And when Ellsberg asked what would happen if those planes didn't get a follow-up "Execute" message, the major replied, "Oh, I think they'd come back. Most of them." Kevin: Most of them? That's possibly the most terrifying two-word phrase in the English language. 'Most of them' would come back from a nuclear bombing run. Michael: It shows a system completely at odds with its public image. It wasn't about control; it was about ensuring the attack happened. The bias was always towards 'Go'. This was built into the technology, too. For years, the launch codes for our Minuteman missiles were set to 00000000. Kevin: You're joking. The password was all zeros? Michael: So that a launch crew could fire them more quickly, without waiting for an authorization code from headquarters. They actively circumvented the safeguards. And there was no authenticated "Stop" code. Once the bombers were in the air with an execute order, there was no official, verifiable way to call them back. The military feared a civilian president might get cold feet. Kevin: This is sounding less like a secure system and more like a Rube Goldberg machine of death. One mistake, one technical glitch, and the whole thing goes. Michael: And it almost did. Ellsberg recounts the BMEWS false alarm in 1960. The brand-new Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radar in Greenland suddenly lit up. Threat level 5. A 99.9% certainty of a massive Soviet missile attack. Alarms are blaring at NORAD, everyone is panicking... a nuclear war has begun. Kevin: Oh my god. What happened? Michael: They eventually figured it out. The radar signals were bouncing off the rising moon. The system's designers hadn't accounted for it. But for a few terrifying minutes, the world was on the brink because of a reflection. The only thing that added a bit of "ambiguity," as Ellsberg wryly notes, was that Khrushchev happened to be in New York at the UN that week. It seemed an odd time to start World War III. Kevin: A lucky coincidence. The fate of the world hanging on the Soviet Premier's travel schedule. It's just... it's institutional madness. Which brings me to the man himself. How does a person, a seemingly moral and brilliant person, get involved in this? How do you become a "nuclear war planner"? Michael: That's the most personal and, in some ways, the most profound part of the book. It's the story of how Daniel Ellsberg became part of the machine he would later try to destroy.

Michael: Ellsberg starts by wrestling with that very question. As a child during World War II, he was horrified by newsreels of the London Blitz. He couldn't understand how people could deliberately drop firebombs on cities to burn children. So how did that boy grow up to work at the RAND Corporation, fine-tuning plans for what he calls "retaliatory genocide"? Kevin: That's a huge leap. What was the logic? Michael: It was the logic of the Cold War. He, like many of his generation, came to see the Soviet Union as an evil equivalent to Nazi Germany. He was driven by the same fear that motivated the Manhattan Project scientists like Leo Szilard: the fear that the enemy would get the ultimate weapon first. He believed his work was essential to deterring a Soviet surprise attack, to preventing a nuclear exchange. Kevin: So he saw himself as saving the world, not planning to end it. Michael: Precisely. He writes that at RAND, they felt they were "rescuing the world from our Soviet counterparts." They were the smart ones, the rational ones, trying to manage an unmanageable situation. He admits, "We were working to assure the survival under attack of a capability for retaliatory genocide, though none of us ever thought of it in those terms for a moment." Kevin: The banality of evil, as they say. It's just a job. You're just solving a complex math problem, and you forget the variables are human lives. So what was the breaking point for him? What made him see it differently? Michael: It was a slow burn, but the moment he saw that graph of 600 million deaths was the beginning. He realized the system wasn't about deterrence; it was about annihilation. He decided he had to expose it. And this is where the story takes a turn that would be comical if it weren't so tragic. He copied over 15,000 pages of documents from his safe at RAND—the nuclear plans were far more voluminous than the Pentagon Papers. Kevin: Fifteen thousand pages. What did he do with them? Michael: He intended to release them after the Vietnam story broke. A peace activist friend, Randy Kehler, had told him, "Forget Vietnam... you're the one person who can warn the world about the dangers of our nuclear war plans. That's what you ought to put out." So Ellsberg separated the nuclear documents and gave the box to his brother, Harry, for safekeeping while the FBI was hunting him. Kevin: Okay, so his brother has the most explosive secrets on the planet. Where does he hide them? Michael: At first, in his basement. But as the heat intensified, Harry panicked. He took the box and buried it in his backyard compost heap. Kevin: In the compost heap? You can't make this up. Michael: It gets better. The next day, a neighbor mentions seeing some men poking around the compost heap. So Harry, now terrified, digs up the box, drives it to the town trash dump, and buries it in the side of a bluff, marking the spot with an old gas stove. Kevin: This is a spy thriller written by the Marx Brothers. What happens next? Michael: A tropical storm hits. The bluff collapses. A massive landslide buries and scatters everything. The documents are gone. Harry and a friend spent weeks searching the dump, even renting a bulldozer, sifting through garbage. They never found them. Kevin: You are kidding me. The most important secrets in the world, the proof of the Doomsday Machine, were lost in the trash. That's... it's almost a perfect metaphor for this whole thing, isn't it? The sheer, random, chaotic stupidity of it all. Michael: It is. And Ellsberg was haunted by it for decades. This book, in many ways, was his attempt to reconstruct what was lost in that landfill—to finally deliver the warning that a tropical storm prevented him from giving in 1971.

Michael: And that's the core of Ellsberg's warning, the central message of The Doomsday Machine. The real threat isn't just a rogue state or a mad leader. It's the machine itself—a system of institutionalized madness, run by ordinary, intelligent people, built on layers of secrecy and deception, and so prone to accident and miscalculation that the fate of the world was once literally buried under a collapsed garbage dump. Kevin: It's staggering. And it forces you to ask a really uncomfortable question. Ellsberg wrote this in 2017, warning that the fundamental dangers—the hair-trigger alerts, the delegated authority, the secrecy—haven't really changed. How much of that machine is still running today, just out of sight? Michael: That's the question he leaves us with. His ultimate plea is for transparency. He argues that secrecy is what allows this madness to persist. His call to action isn't just to leaders, but to current insiders—the Daniel Ellsbergs of today—to reveal the truth, and for citizens to demand knowledge of the plans being made in their name. Kevin: It’s a heavy book, but it feels essential. It’s not just history; it's a user's manual for a weapon that's still pointed at our own heads. It makes you realize that dismantling it begins with simply understanding that it exists. Michael: And understanding that it was never truly under our control to begin with. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.