We Don’t Want To Die In A Nuclear War

“Nuclear war has no rules,” the author and journalist Annie Jacobsen reminds us multiple times in her terrifying tome, Nuclear War: A Scenario. The scenario – a single thermonuclear missile launched by North Korea at Washington D.C. causing a cascading series of civilization-ending choices – is just one of many ways that a nuclear war could begin. Post-apocalyptic pop-culture to the contrary, Jacobsen’s book convincingly argues that there’s no such thing as a small-scale war of this kind or post-nuclear civilization. Any detonated nuke likely would propel the entire world to World War III and, inevitably, the kind of extinction event that did in the dinosaurs.

The power in this essential book, eyed as a movie for Dune director Denis Villeneuve, is that Jacobsen has done so much research, interviewing scholars, scientists, U.S. generals, even former secretaries of defense such as Leon Panetta, that her made-up scenario stands firmly rooted in documented fact. Jacobsen has done her homework, poring over recently declassified documents and decades of research in addition to her own reporting. What all that dark knowledge, she is telling us exactly what none of us want to hear: that we are closer to nuclear Armageddon – either by accident or by chaotic intent – than we’ve been since the Cold War. Policy shifts and suspicious North Korea moves from the last decade inform this timely book. It warns that the situation we’re in, which has always been precarious, is getting worse.

The disconnect is that the idea of nuclear war hasn’t terrified our culture since the 1980s TV movies The Day After and Threads traumatized a generation. Jacobsen’s part of that generation and, in the audiobook version of the book, you can hear some urgency in her presentation, which takes the form of a rundown of everything that happens after the Korean missile launches in second-by-second intervals, then 30-second intervals.

There are asides: short history lessons on things like the effects of radiation on the human body and the history of military terms such as “Launch on Warning.” But Jacobsen also emphatically repeats phrases and information because some of the policies around nuclear deterrence and the technology of, say, nuclear missile defense systems (which, by and large, do not and will not work) are hard to get your head around. That’s because the information is surprising and infuriating; some of the world’s smartest people haven’t done much more than create an elaborate burial plot for our planet.

Admirably, Jacobsen pulls no punches. When the 1-megaton bomb reaches its target, ground zero generates millions of degrees of heat, killing everyone and leveling everything around it. High-ranking government officials in underground bunkers don’t escape; they avoid vaporization only to be instantly baked alive. The blast doesn’t spare citizens miles away, either. She writes, “It has been three seconds since the initial blast. There is a baseball game going on two and a half miles due west at Nationals Park. The clothes on a majority of the 35,000 people watching the game catch on fire. Those who don’t quickly burn to death suffer intense third-degree burns. Their bodies get stripped of the outer layer of skin, exposing bloody dermis underneath.”

Further out, a fire vortex unintuitively vacuums people, vehicles, and structures into it instead of pushing them away. These are just a few brief scenes of horror in a book full of them. A separate missile reaches a California nuclear power plant, creating a “Devil’s scenario,” a meltdown with fire reaching a massive storage cache of spent radioactive fuel rods. Radioactive rubble and rod fragments launch into the sky while molten radioactive material burrows like lava deep under the Earth.

If the nuclear blasts weren’t enough, a single electromagnetic pulse attack from a satellite orbiting above the U.S. triggers a nationwide electrical Armageddon, knocking out the entire energy infrastructure. That single attack cuts off communications nationwide, derails trains, takes down all power plants, sends disabled automobiles crashing into each other, brings all planes down from the sky and leads to dam ruptures, gas-main explosions and countless other forms of destruction. Americans try to evacuate major cities but have nowhere to go and no way to get there.

In the book’s sole moment of levity, Jacobsen writes about the servers for X (formerly Twitter) losing power even as photos of the nuclear power plant’s mushroom cloud are going viral. She notes that once X goes down in a nuclear attack, it will never, ever return.

Like a scab you can’t stop picking at, Nuclear War: A Scenario is relentlessly itchy, a book that pulls you in if you can handle knowing just how ugly the end of the world might be. Jacobsen makes the case that decades of military propaganda and the public’s short attention span rendered us blind to the risks of a global deterrence policy that, as she ruefully relays, only works until it doesn’t.

Her sources, she says, all agree on one thing: nuclear war is crazy. But none of them can figure a way out given the strained geopolitical relations between the major warhead owners: The U.S., Russia, China, North Korea and the European NATO nations. Those NATO nations, which include England, France, Germany, and Italy, must support any NATO member that gets attacked first and some of them have U.S.-provided missiles, bombers and nuclear submarines. (In Jacobsen’s scenario, NATO’s support comes too late and only results in bombing of those countries as well.)

Time is the other horror in Jacobsen’s scenario: after the first missile launches, a U.S. or Russian president only has about six minutes to respond to a nuclear attack in progress. That’s less time than many of us can decide on pizza toppings, and the options presented to a world leader, we learn, are indeed like simplified offerings on a restaurant menu. It takes about 26 minutes for a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile (or ICBM) to reach the U.S. capital and should Jacobsen’s scenario come true, the world as we know it would be over in about 60 minutes.

That happens after Russia fails to get a direct heads-up from the U.S. president, who has met an ignominious end while being transported out of D.C., and the superpower misinterprets a Korean-bound U.S. attack for missiles targeting on its own soil. Another crazy-but-true fact: if the U.S. responded to a North Korea attack with its own nuclear weapons, those missiles would have to fly over Russia to get there. And Russia’s missile-detection systems are not great.

The human foibles in Nuclear War: A Scenario like missed video calls and world leaders basing decisions on past humiliations and cultural biases, are all too relatable. The details Jacobson carefully includes–Pentagon workers obliviously at their desks on a weekday afternoon one second and dead the next, CNN reporters realizing on air that FEMA will not be rushing in to help people anywhere near blast zones, zoo animals on fire and abandoned as world landmarks instantly vaporize in a mass clearing of human life and culture–make the book unforgettable.

You will know far too much about nuclear war if you make it through this book, but it’s important knowledge that we all should have known about for decades.