Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg is probably most famous for his role in leaking the Pentagon Papers and the break-in of the office of his psychiatrist as part of Richard Nixon’s notorious crime spree as President. However, Ellsberg was also a high level consultant working on America’s nuclear weapons strategy throughout the 1960’s. His expertise was directed specifically toward that element of the strategy related to the process of the President actually making the decision to engage American’s nuclear force by transmitting the codes which would result in missiles being launched.
Robert McNamara
Robert McNamara served as the Secretary of Defense during the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. A key point in the book is Ellsberg’s recollection of a speech given by McNamara that the author had wanted to completely rewrite as a result of its lack of diplomacy. McNamara goes on to give the speech without major alterations, resulting in an unnecessary increase of tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Dr. Strangelove
The title character of Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about an atomic war started as a result of a flaws in the failsafe system designed to protect from doomsday machine nightmare scenarios became the iconic face of the danger of nuclear weaponry. Ellsberg reveals that the quite mad Strangelove was a composite character based on various elements of personality traits of Henry Kissinger, Edward Teller, Wernher Van Braun and Herman Kahn, a RAND physicist alongside whom Ellsberg worked.
General Curtis LeMay
So deeply does Kubrick’s film penetrate into the zeitgeist of 1960’s Cold War nuclear weapons planning and fears that the insane general who exploits the flaws in the failsafe system is also based on reality. In this case, however, the General Jack D. Ripper is not a composite, but directly inspired by U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff during the first half of the 1960’s, General Curtis LeMay. The point of contentious conflict in the book arises as a result of LeMay seeking to have Ellsberg fired from his job as a result of whistleblowing on a potentially dangerous flaw in the nuclear system.
