The Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

  Kubrick had borrowed the name and the very concept of such a hypothetical machine from my former colleague Herman Kahn, a RAND physicist with whom he had discussed it. In his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War and in popular articles in 1961, Kahn had said he was sure28 he could design such a device. It could be produced within ten years and would be relatively cheap, one of its main attractions as a deterrent system. It would cost closer to ten than to a hundred billion dollars, he guessed—only a fraction of the current budget for strategic weapons—since it could be emplaced in one’s own country or in the ocean. It would not depend on sending warheads halfway around the world by expensive planes and missiles that would have to penetrate enemy defenses.

  But, he said, it was obviously undesirable. It would be too uncontrollable—too inflexible and automatic—and it might fail to deter, and its failure “kills too many people”: in fact, everyone, a result that the philosopher John Somerville later termed “omnicide.”29 Kahn was sure in 1961 that no such system had been built, nor would it be, by either the United States or the Soviet Union.

  The physicist Edward Teller, known as the “father of the H-bomb,” went further to deny that omnicide—a concept he derided—was remotely feasible. In answer to a question I posed to him as late as 1982, he said emphatically it was “impossible” to kill by any imaginable use of thermonuclear weapons that he had co-invented “more than a quarter of the earth’s population.”

  At the time, I thought of this assurance, ironically, as his perception of “the glass being three-quarters full.” (Teller was, along with Kahn, Henry Kissinger, and the former Nazi missile designer Wernher von Braun, one of Kubrick’s inspirations for the character of Dr. Strangelove.) And Teller’s estimate was closely in line with what the JCS actually planned to do in 1961, though a better estimate (allowing for the direct effects of fire, which JSC calculations have always omitted) would have been closer to one-third to one-half of total omnicide.

  But the JCS were mistaken in 1961, and so was Herman Kahn in 1960,30† and so was Teller in 1982. Nobody’s perfect. Just one year after Teller had made this negative assertion (at a hearing of the California state legislature which we both addressed, on the Bilateral Nuclear Weapons Freeze Initiative), the first papers appeared on the nuclear-winter effects of smoke injected into the stratosphere by firestorms generated by a thousand or more of the fifty thousand existing H-bombs used on cities. Contrary to Kahn and Teller, an American Doomsday Machine already existed in 1961—and had for years—in the form of pre-targeted bombers on alert in the Strategic Air Command (SAC), soon to be joined by Polaris submarine-launched missiles. Although this machine wasn’t likely to kill outright or starve to death literally every last human, its effects, once triggered, would come close enough to that to deserve the name Doomsday.

  * * *

  Like discussion of covert operations and assassination plots, nuclear war plans and threats are taboo for public discussion by the small minority of officials and consultants who know anything about them. In addition to their own sense of identity as trustworthy keepers of these most-sensitive secrets, there is a strong careerist aspect to their silence. Such officials have been concerned to maintain their high clearances, their access, and their possibility of being consultants after they’ve left service. This seamless discretion, coupled with systematic official secrecy, lying, and obfuscation has created extremely deficient scholarly and journalistic understanding and almost total public and congressional ignorance.

  In sum, most aspects of the U.S. nuclear planning system and force readiness that became known to me half a century ago still exist today, as prone to catastrophe as ever but on a scale, as now known to environmental scientists, looming vastly larger than was understood then. The present risks of the current nuclear era go far beyond the dangers of proliferation and non-state terrorism that have been the almost exclusive focus of public concern for the past generation and the past decade in particular. The arsenals and plans of the two superpowers represent not only an insuperable obstacle to an effective global anti-proliferation campaign; they are in themselves a clear and present existential danger to the human species, and most others.

  The hidden reality I aim to expose is that for over fifty years, all-out thermonuclear war—an irreversible, unprecedented, and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization and most life on earth—has been, like the disasters of Chernobyl, Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, Fukushima Daiichi, and before these, World War I, a catastrophe waiting to happen, on a scale infinitely greater than any of these. And that is still true today.

  No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral. Or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians, and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.

  a Though there will be little Pentagon jargon in this book—and almost no footnotes—some matters of terminology will be recurrent. In particular, in technical language, a “first strike”—by one of the two superpowers, U.S. or Soviet Union/Russia—is distinguished from “first use” of nuclear weapons by any one of the now nine nuclear weapons states (NWS).

  The former, first strike, refers to a full-scale attempt by a superpower—Soviet Union/Russia or the United States—to disarm as fully as possible the superpower opponent, to prevent or limit its retaliation, by initiating an attack mainly by long-range, relatively high-yield “strategic” weapons against all the enemy’s military forces, especially its strategic nuclear forces in its homeland or at sea.

  The latter term, “first use,” by the United States or other nuclear weapons states, refers to any possible initiation of nuclear attacks other than a first strike, whether the opponent is nuclear-armed or is a non-nuclear-armed state (NNWS) (as was the case of U.S first use against Japan in 1945).

  Nine states have some strategic weapons, though none but the United States and Soviet Union/Russia have ever had a “first strike” capability, the ability to attempt to disarm a nuclear-armed opponent. Along with their longer-range strategic weapons, all of them have had—and all but France and Britain retain—shorter-range, lower-yield “tactical” nuclear weapons with which to threaten or carry out first use against either a NNWS or a NWS opponent.

  To launch a disarming, “damage-limiting” first strike on the expectation—possibly based on short-term “tactical warning” from radars or space satellites—of an imminent or ongoing first strike by the opponent is known as “preempting,” or, ironically, “striking second first.”

  b See footnote a, on “first strike” versus “first use”; the question was about the latter.

  PART I

  The Bomb and I

  CHAPTER 1

  How Could I?

  The Making of a Nuclear War Planner

  If the Doomsday Machine is ever to be dismantled, it would be well to have some understanding of how it came to be constructed and maintained. How could we? How could Americans—or, for that matter, Russians—ever have done this?

  I plan to come at this question from several directions, but first I’ll address it to myself. How did I come in my late twenties to be working on guidance for nuclear war plans—plans that I knew, if they were ever enacted, would kill hundreds of millions of humans (and, in reality, far more than that)?

  That question is a loaded one for me. My eventual participation is especially ironic in view of my own earliest attitudes toward bombing and my unusual introduction to the nuclear age. An intense abhorrence of both population bombing and nuclear weapons went back to my childhood during World War II. A year before Pearl Harbor, when I was nine years old, newsreels of the London Blitz impressed me with the incomprehensible cruelty of the Nazis. The demolition and burning of c
ities filled with people of all ages seemed to express their demonic character.

  In grade school after Pearl Harbor, we had air raid drills. One day my teacher handed out a model of a short, slim silver-colored incendiary bomb, which was used to spread fires. We were told it was a magnesium bomb, whose blaze couldn’t be extinguished by water. You had to cover it with sand to keep oxygen from feeding the flames. In every room in our school there was a large bucket filled with sand for this purpose. I take it that this was a way of making us identify with the war effort, the likelihood of German or Japanese bombers penetrating as far as Detroit being quite small in retrospect. But the notion of the magnesium bomb made a strong impression on me. It was uncanny to think of humans designing and dropping on other humans a flaming substance that couldn’t easily be extinguished, a particle of which, we were told, would burn through flesh to the bone and wouldn’t stop burning even then. It was hard for me to understand people who were willing to burn children like that.

  Later newsreels showed American and British bombers bravely flying through flak to drop their loads on targets in Germany. I believed what we were told—that our daylight precision bombing was aimed only at war factories and military targets (even if, regrettably, some civilians were also hit by accident).

  My own father, a structural engineer in Detroit, was helping to send most of the American bombers. At the start of the war, he was the chief structural engineer in charge of designing the Ford Willow Run plant, a factory for making B-24 Liberator bombers for the Air Corps. He told me that it was the largest industrial building under one roof in the world. It put together bombers the way Ford produced cars, on an assembly line. The assembly line was a mile and a quarter long.

  Once my father took me out to Willow Run to see the line in operation. For as far as I could see, the huge metal bodies of planes hanging from hooks were moving along tracks with workers riveting and installing parts as they moved. It was an exciting sight for a twelve-year-old, and I was proud of my father. His next wartime job was to design a still larger airplane engine factory—again the world’s largest plant under one roof: the Dodge Chicago plant, which made the engines for B-29s.

  I certainly didn’t know that his bombers would, increasingly, be dropping incendiaries of the same kind we had handled in school—magnesium, or other substances like white phosphorus and napalm, with similar characteristics of clinging to flesh and burning inextinguishably. I doubt Dad knew that either. We never saw films of what was happening on the ground under our planes or in the firestorms in Hamburg, Dresden, or Tokyo.

  And if I had been fully aware how commonly—particularly in the B-29 raids over Japan—we were imitating Nazi terror bombing practices, how would I have reacted? I don’t really know. Perhaps any concerns would have been quieted by the thoughts that they had started the war and the bombing of cities, that retaliation was fair and necessary, and that anything that would help win a war against such atrocious foes was justified.

  Those same thoughts might have reassured me about the use of atomic bombs on Japan, as they did for most Americans, if it hadn’t been for an unusual classroom experience I had had in the last year of the war. Unlike nearly every other American outside the Manhattan Project, my first awareness of the challenges of the nuclear era had occurred some nine months earlier than the announcement of the destruction of Hiroshima, and in a crucially different context.

  This occurred in a ninth-grade social studies class in the fall of 1944. I was thirteen, a boarding student on full scholarship at Cranbrook, a private school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Our teacher, Bradley Patterson, was discussing a concept that was familiar then in sociology: William F. Ogburn’s notion of “cultural lag.”

  The idea was that the development of technology regularly moved much further and faster than other aspects of culture: our institutions of government, values, habits, ethics, and understanding of society and ourselves. Indeed, the very notion of progress referred mainly to technology. What lagged behind, what developed more slowly or not at all, was everything that bore on our ability to direct technology and to control it wisely, ethically, prudently.

  To illustrate this, Mr. Patterson posed a potential advance in technology that might soon be realized. It was possible now, he told us, to conceive of a bomb made of U-235, an isotope of uranium, which would have an explosive power a thousand times greater than the largest bombs being used in the present war. German scientists in late 1938 had discovered that uranium could be split by nuclear fission in a way that would release immense amounts of energy.

  Several popular articles about the possibility of atomic bombs and specifically U-235 bombs appeared during the war in journals like the Saturday Evening Post and some sci-fi magazines. Though each of these articles led to secret investigations of security breaches within the Manhattan Project, whose existence was Top Secret, none of them actually represented leaks. In every case it turned out they had been inspired by earlier articles on the subject that had been published freely in 1939 and 1940, before scientific self-censorship and then formal classification had set in. Mr. Patterson had come across one of these wartime articles. He brought the potential development to us as an example of one more possible leap by science and technology ahead of our social institutions.

  Suppose, then, that one nation, or several, chose to explore the possibility of making this uranium isotope into a bomb and succeeded. What would be the probable implications of this for humanity? How would it be used by humans and states as they were today? Would it be, on balance, bad or good for the world? Would it be a force for peace, for example, or for destruction? We were to write a short essay on this due in a week’s time.

  I recall the conclusions I came to in my paper after thinking about it for a few days. As I remember, everyone in the class had arrived at much the same judgment. It seemed pretty obvious: the existence of such a bomb would be bad news for humanity. Mankind could not handle such a destructive force. It could not be safely controlled. The power would be “abused”—that is, used dangerously, with terrible consequences.

  A bomb like that was just too powerful. Bad enough that bombs already existed that could destroy a whole city block. They were called “block-busters”: ten to twenty tons of high explosive. Humanity didn’t need the prospect of bombs a thousand times more powerful, single bombs that could destroy whole cities. Civilization, perhaps our species, would be in danger of destruction.

  As I recall, this conclusion didn’t depend mainly on who had the bomb, or how many had it, or who got it first. It would be a bad development, on balance, even if democratic countries got it first. After we turned in our papers and discussed them in class, it was many months before I thought of the issues again. I remember the moment when I did.

  It was a hot August day in Detroit. I was standing on a downtown street corner, looking at the front page of the Detroit News in a news rack. A streetcar rattled by on the tracks as I read the headline: a single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought: “I know exactly what that bomb was.” It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about the previous fall.

  I thought: We got it first. And we used it. On a city.

  I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very dangerous for humanity had just happened. A feeling, new to me as an American, at fourteen, that my country might have made a terrible mistake. I was glad when the war ended nine days later, but it didn’t make me think that my first reaction on August 6 was wrong.

  I felt uneasy in the days ahead, about the triumphal tone in Harry Truman’s voice on the radio—flat and Midwestern as always, but unusually celebratory—as he exulted over our success in the race for the bomb and its effectiveness over Japan. This suggested, for me, that our leaders didn’t have the full picture, didn’t grasp the significance of the precedent they had set and the sinister implications for the future.

  Unlikely thoughts for a fourteen-year-old American boy to have had the wee
k the war ended? Yes, if he hadn’t been in Mr. Patterson’s social studies class the previous fall. All members of that class must have had the same flash of recognition of the bomb as they read the August headlines during our summer vacation.

  And we were set apart from our fellow Americans in another important way. Perhaps no others outside our class or the Manhattan Project ever had occasion to think about the bomb—as we had, nine months earlier—without the strongly biasing positive associations that accompanied their first awareness of it in August 1945: that it was “our” weapon, an instrument of American democracy, developed to deter a Nazi bomb, a war-winning weapon34 and a necessary one—so it was claimed and almost universally believed—to have ended the war without a costly invasion of Japan.

  Even if the premises of this last justification31 were realistic (and for many scholars of the subject whom I respect, they are not), the consequences of such beliefs in our public were bound to be fateful. Whether rightly or wrongly, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction, firebombs, and atomic bombs—and believes that it was fully justified in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.

  But given even a few days’ reflection in the earlier period before a presidential fait accompli was framed in that fashion, you didn’t have to be a moral prodigy to arrive at the sense of foreboding we all had in Mr. Patterson’s class. It was as easily available to thirteen-year-old ninth graders as it had been to some Manhattan Project scientists, who also had the opportunity to form their judgments before the bomb was used.

  The one with the earliest experience of recording such a judgment was Leo Szilard, who first conceived (and patented) 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 earlier that year, anticipating the Nazi dictatorship that would quickly emerge and foreseeing the subsequent European war.