Daniel Ellsberg Signs Deal to Write Memoir on U.S. Nuclear War Strategy

Dan Duray, for The New York Observer:

Tentatively titled The American Doomsday Machine, Mr. Ellsberg’s latest book concerns “the approved US nuclear strategy calculated to kill 600,000,000 people,” as Publisher’s Marketplace put it.

“One of his first jobs [at the DoD] was studying command and control of nuclear weapons — in fact he drafted the operational plan for nuclear war in 1961,” Bloomsbury Publisher and Editorial Director Peter Ginna told The Observer in an email. “As he said to me on the phone, when he saw Dr. Strangelove with a colleague, they agreed ‘It’s a documentary.’”

★ Tuesday, 21 December 2010