Well, this is a terrifying book. Ellsberg began as a committed Cold Warrior, before his disillusionment led him to leak the Pentagon Papers and become an antiwar activist. What I didn’t know was that he had a larger cache of secret documents about US nuclear policy, though they apparently got lost when he tried to conceal them from the feds. Still, he worked for RAND and had a lot of access, so his accounts of how, in practice, individual base commanders and even individual pilots could have launched their nuclear missiles—despite what we’ve told the world about the “nuclear football”—were credible. We know a few stories about how individual Soviets averted nuclear war, but not nearly as much about similar decisions by Americans. Luck is not a great strategy, but it’s what we’ve been using and will continue to use as long as America retains a first-strike capability. Ellsberg also writes persuasively about how Presidents, and especially their representatives in private negotiations, have used the threat of nuclear war in political confrontations, and ended up thinking that it worked, to the continued risk of the world. ( )

Absolutely terrifying ( )

Finished Part One. ( )

Wow. I went into this just thinking Ellsberg was a random functionary who had leaked the Pentagon Papers; I also discounted him as a generic antiwar/leftist/commie scum. I was wrong. Overall, this is a very good book, and presents both the issues of the US nuclear/national security establishment and Ellsberg as a person pretty fairly.

Ellsberg was an intelligent RAND analyst with both interest in making nuclear war planning more sane, and access to a lot of information due to his position (and then seeking more access using his knowledge). He used his power to route information from the military (which was tightly controlling it) to civilian leaders in the DOD and White House, and overall on nuclear policy was pretty unambiguously good. He'd been a USMC officer and cold war "true believer" earlier in his career, and became more concerned as he learned more about the war plans and how badly they'd been structured. (Crazy stuff like all-or-nothing plans, such that any attack would be responded to by destroying both USSR and China (and a bunch of other countries), war plans with inherent flaws in timing and coordination, and unexamined couplings in failure modes such that a simple decision to order an alert could have easily led to complete nuclear war.)

I do think he oversold nuclear winter/nuclear cooling as an existential threat, and has some other generic left ideas, but overall I think he did the right thing within government on nuclear matters.

Ironically he tried to exfiltrate a bunch of highly classified nuclear documents, similar to how he'd copied the Pentagon Papers, but let a friend store them for him, losing them in a comedy of incompetence (if he's to be believed). ( )

Excellent first-hand history and perspective. Recommended reading for all Americans and Russians. ( )