The Doomsday Machine, by Daniel Ellsberg
We're all doomed.
This is one of the most important books I've ever read, and I think you all should read it, but it's sure not fun.
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The key points:
- we were way, way closer to global nuclear annihilation than I ever imagined... on many, many occasions.
- the military command are not effectively controlled by their civilian overseers. (Example: American gov declared all nukes should have passwords on them to prevent them getting launched without authorisation; military command set all the passwords to 00000; I am not kidding)
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After reading this book, I had to update strongly on a few things:
- how likely it is the world will end in my lifetime. I didn't do any clever maths on this but my feeling from reading this book is that it might be 20-30%. But I'm not really sure what to do with that information; it feels like I should live my life differently, if/now I really believe that, but so far I haven't and I'm not sure what specifically to change
- how likely it is that there are terrible, terrible secrets held by our countries which just never get released -- Ellsberg was the Pentagon Papers leaker and now is revealing all this stuff about the American nuclear programme, and Ellsberg seems to be really unique in his access and willingness to reveal stuff.
(I started thinking this after the Snowden leaks -- that everything I'd been taught in school about how "thousands of people can't keep a secret" was clearly not true -- and Ellsberg actually makes that same point explicitly in his book, re: Snowden and the surveillance programme. So how many other big secrets are out there that we'll just never hear about?) - how likely it is that, frankly, we're the baddies. Ellsberg basically thinks the US was willing to commit genocide, or every-genocide, I don't even know what to call it; that the American firebombing of Japan was already a horrific massacre of civilians that went against all previous rules of war, and killed just as many civilians as the nuclear bomb did; and that during the Cold War the American gov and military were calmly willing (and planning!) to e.g. immediately nuke China if there were hostilities between the US and Russia, even if China hadn't done anything wrong, and even though the Chinese and the Russians had already fallen out.
The American calculations of how many civilians would die did not include deaths by fire after a nuclear bomb because those were supposedly "too unpredictable", but actually their predicted toll is another 2x the deaths caused directly by the bomb. The Americans were predicting they would kill 400 million civilians (in a first strike by the US!), so actually it would have been 1.2 billion or so, even before the Russians or Chinese retaliated.
In other news, literally Hitler stopped German attempts to develop a nuclear bomb because German physicists, like American ones, weren't sure if a nuclear bomb might actually ignite the sky or sea and just kill everyone on earth, immediately. And Hitler was like "it's not worth the risk."
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As I said, this is not a fun book, but it's well written and snaps along very nicely and is probably the most important book I've read in years. It's by a very famous person and was released in 2017. It seems to have had very little impact (public, at least), I had never heard of it till a few months ago. Idk what to do with that information.
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It's weird to think that these world-almost-ends moments might be happening all the time, and I'm one of the X billion people just going about their day, drinking coffee, writing an email, not-knowing that once again the world has nearly ended and we've been saved only by the whims of chance, or the Gods, or whoever it might be.
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possibly relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAEmhqdLFs