Also worth reading: Daniel Ellsberg's book The Doomsday Machine. Ellsberg's job was nuclear strategy, and most of the classified documents he snuck out of his

Also worth reading: Daniel Ellsberg's book The Doomsday Machine. Ellsberg's job was nuclear strategy, and most of the classified documents he snuck out of his office were related to that. He published the Pentagon Papers first because he felt that if he started with the nuclear papers, nobody would even care about the Vietnam stuff. He gave the nuclear papers to his brother, who hid them in a garbage bag on the edge of the town dump. Then a storm washed away that whole corner of the dump. They spent a year trying to find them and finally gave up. Ellsberg wrote that his wife considered that a miracle from God, because he got a pass on the Vietnam leak but would have certainly spent the rest of his life in prison for the rest. Until recently he didn't talk about this stuff because he couldn't substantiate it, but now, enough has been declassified that he could back up his claims, which are horrific. US nuclear strategy in the '50s and '60s included the destruction of every city over 25K people in Russia and China in response to surprisingly minor conventional provocation, and acceptance of the death by radiation of everyone in Europe. An especially startling point was that the authority to launch nukes was not just at the top. Theater commanders could do it on their own. According to Ellsberg that is still the case today.