Highly Recommended: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

Daniel Ellsberg is remembered by many simply as the man who leaked the classified Pentagon

Papers to the press in 1971, to the mighty embarrassment of the administration, which was revealed to have lied extensively to the American public. The government tried to prosecute him for this, but prosecutors engaged in so many illegal acts in trying to discredit him that the charges were eventually dismissed. But in fact Ellsberg was intimately involved in shaping our government's nuclear planning in the Cold War. He knows first hand what he is talking about.

The book is very, very important, because it details the thinking of American military planners as they thought about nuclear war and about nuclear strategy during the Cold War. His discussion of the Cuban Crisis, and what we now know that neither the Soviets nor we knew then, will alarm you, and it should. The impracticality and inflexibility of our early nuclear strategy will alarm you. True, Ellsberg is reporting on what things were like half a century ago – they might be different today, but then, they might well not be any better, any more practical, or any safer. Bureaucracies, military or civilian, are relatively inflexible and change little over decades.

Don’t read this book if you want to protect comfortable illusions about government control of nuclear weapons