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The Doomsday Machine, by Daniel Ellsberg
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First half is a personal narrative of Ellsberg's investigations into nuclear
command and control and general war planning issues, particularly in the pre-
and early ICBM period (when the Soviets has very few ICBMs, but many US leaders
thought they had thousands), up to the Cuban missle crisis.
Second half is a history, starting before WW2, of how "strategic bombing"
developed as the status quo of large scale warfare (at least by the USA and
allies), cumulating in the normalization of strategic nuclear bombing
infrastructure.
"Fire insurance executives, who were experts in averting the spread of fires
(to keep rates down), proved inventive in advising how to reverse that
process. American economists [...] came to London air headquarters as experts
in how an economy worked, how it hung together and what its nodes of
interdependence or bottlenecks were, and thus how it could be dismanteled by
bombing. This gradually merged with the unacknowledged quest of Bomber Command:
how to destroy a city." (p252)
"Sam, war is killing people. When you kill enough of them, the other guy quits"
-- Curtis LeMay
A Vast Machine
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Shadow Libraries
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