{"id":2553,"date":"2018-03-17T14:35:27","date_gmt":"2018-03-17T22:35:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=2553"},"modified":"2018-03-17T14:35:27","modified_gmt":"2018-03-17T22:35:27","slug":"review-the-doomsday-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=2553","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Doomsday Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daniel Ellsberg walks in controversy.\u00a0 Specifically he’s an anti-war activist who has made a life’s work out of exposing the internal operations of the US government.\u00a0 He’s the person who stole and published the Pentagon Papers<\/a>, internal documents describing Vietnam War<\/a> internal motivations and policies.\u00a0 He believed that the government behaving hypocritically and risked his freedom to draw attention to those policies and actions.\u00a0 Despite that playing out when I was a child, it’s still controversial<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Whatever you might think of him, Ellsberg is consistent. In Doomsday Machine<\/em> he continues to speak out about what he believes are immoral government policies.\u00a0 Doomsday Machine<\/em> aims at US nuclear policy throughout his tenure in the government.\u00a0 Unfortunately he doesn’t have the physical copies of the documents he cites, which means readers have to treat Doomsday<\/em> as a memoir.\u00a0 He does make some pretty serious accusations about how branches of the government and military are competitive when they should be cooperative.\u00a0 He claims that military branches routinely misrepresented the intelligence they had about the USSR to the State Department and the President.<\/p>\n

I’m making that sound more diplomatic that Ellsberg does.\u00a0 I don’t have any idea what the truth of the matter was in the 1960’s and 70’s much less now.\u00a0 Still, these stakes are high and as a call for transparency, I find it compelling.<\/p>\n

There’s a second half of Doomsday<\/em> that Ellsberg devotes to persuading readers that the concept of mutually assured destruction through nuclear war – or any such extermination system – is unsound.\u00a0 He does a nice job of bringing that home, IMHO, and it’s certainly worth deep thoughts.\u00a0 It is natural to mentally distance yourself from the destructive power that a doomsday machine entails, and Ellsberg reminds you that the plan is to kill as many people as possible.\u00a0 People have to decide for oneself if there’s a benefit worth that price, but I think there’s real value in seeing the price clearly.<\/p>\n

Doomsday<\/em> is certainly a reflective surface.\u00a0 Readers will see themselves as much as Ellsberg in it – know it or not – but as a nucleation site for these ideas, I think it’s worthwhile.<\/p>\n

Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniel Ellsberg walks in controversy.\u00a0 Specifically he’s an anti-war activist who has made a life’s work out of exposing the internal operations of the US government.\u00a0 He’s the person who stole and published the Pentagon Papers, internal documents describing Vietnam War internal motivations and policies.\u00a0 He believed that the government behaving hypocritically and risked his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2553"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2556,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2553\/revisions\/2556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}