The Doomsday Machine
Confession of a Nuclear War Planner
Daniel Ellsberg
Bloomsbury
420 pages; Rs 499
Daniel Ellsberg first achieved notoriety for leaking the Pentagon Papers, which revealed how the Johnson administration and the Pentagon had lied to the public and to Congress about the scope of the Vietnam War. The sensational circumstances of those revelations — from a Pentagon insider, a US Marine and Vietnam veteran at that — and the Nixon administration’s fierce response — burgling his former psychoanalyst’s office, warrantless wire-tapping et al — overshadowed the fact that the dossier confirmed what Americans had long suspected anyway.
Had Mr Ellsberg had
