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The Doomsday Machine

By: Daniel Ellsberg
Narrated by: Steven Cooper
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Publisher's Summary

At the same time former presidential advisor Daniel Ellsberg famously took the top-secret Pentagon Papers, he also took with him a chilling cache of top secret documents related to America's nuclear program in the 1960s. Here for the first time he reveals the contents of those documents and makes clear their shocking relevance for today.

The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg's hair-raising insider's account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization, whose legacy - and renewal under the Obama administration - threatens the very survival of humanity. It is scarcely possible to estimate the true dangers of our present nuclear policies without penetrating the secret realities of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, when Ellsberg had high-level access to them. No other insider has written so candidly of that long-classified history, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era. Ellsberg's analysis of recent research on nuclear winter shows that even a 'small' nuclear exchange would cause billions of deaths by global nuclear famine. Ellsberg, in the end, offers steps we can take under a new administration to avoid nuclear catastrophe.

Framed as a memoir, this thriller with cloak-and-dagger intrigue places Ellsberg back in his natural role as whistle-blower. It is a real-life Dr. Strangelove story but an ultimately hopeful - and powerfully important - audiobook.

©2017 Bloomsbury US (P)2017 Audible, Ltd
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

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Remarkable, terrifying and hugely important

Remarkable insight into the worlds biggest threat and inner workings of nuclear war planning from an unusually informed source

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A must read

Everyone should read this book. And if everyone did read this book, humanity might have a hope for the future.

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Necessary reading

Both utterly terrifying, and amazingly insightful in its contents. Absolutely necessary reading for everyone, everywhere.

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Wise and terrifying

Our species is hanging on by a slender thread of our own making. This is the most important, erudite and terrifying book you’ll ever read.

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Frightening

The insight and clear, objective perspective on past and current nuclear policy is truly unsettling. Chapter after chapter expertly makes a sound case for the real dangers facing the world with respect to the possibility of nuclear destruction and the intransigence of US policy to consider means of averting it. Indispensable.

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