Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it is fair to say the threat of nuclear war has receded in the public’s mind. Sure, regional wars have broken out, terrorist attacks have taken place, and missile launches in the Korean peninsula raise the diplomatic temperature from time to time, but the existential, build-a-bomb-shelter-in-your-home level of fear that loomed over the world during the Cold War no longer exists. But if you long for the days of “stop, drop, and roll,” Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario is here to remind you that civilization as we know it could end in less time than it takes to watch a Columbo rerun.
The scenario of the book’s title is not far-fetched. A paranoid North Korean dictator sends a lone ICBM missile hurtling toward the United States. That act is the jumping off point for Jacobsen’s book, which proceeds in a tick-tock manner of minutes and seconds, jumping across time zones and countries, putting us in the rooms where decisions are being made, be it the White House, Pentagon, military bases across the globe, the Kremlin, or the capitals of our NATO allies. It would read like a high tech thriller if the stakes were not so high and the actions so possible.
Jacobsen has done her homework, the book is littered with interviews and quotes from the men and women who have been at the highest levels of government, the military commanders who have led strategic planning for a nuclear war, and the soldiers whose fingers have been on buttons that would send millions to their deaths. In other words, when Jacobsen puts words in the mouths of presidential advisers bickering in front of the President as to what protocols need to be followed or calls to be made as a nuclear missile bears down on the U.S. at Mach 6, she is not pulling these ideas out of thin air, but rather, using the input she has received to inform her story.
And it is a grim one. As that lone missile speeds toward Washington, D.C. in an attempted “decapitation” of our government, the President orders a retaliatory strike with more than 80 nukes, but as he is departing the White House, a second, submarine-based missile launches, its target a nuclear power plant in California. Things spiral quickly. Both bombs hit their marks. The President is taken out of action when he bails out of Marine One and suffers life threatening injuries, civilian and military leaders who attempt to alert the Russians we are not preemptively attacking them fail to do so, and a Russian counter strike results in a domino effect of the other nuclear powers launching their missiles in a “use them or lose them” strategy that erases much of humanity in a scant 72 minutes.
There is more, and Jacobsen is not stingy with the gory details. Bodies vaporized, buildings turned to ash, modern telecommunications eliminated, the sheer magnitude of the destruction is difficult for the human mind to process or envision, it truly is the stuff of nightmares. Underlying all of this is the futility of so much of what we have done to avoid this ending. We may comfort ourselves in the fiction that abstract ideas like the presidential line of succession or the use of special codes to launch these weapons will somehow save us (or at least protect us) from the worst case scenario, but the book makes clear that is not the case. To take one example, when the President parachutes out of Marine One and is seriously injured on landing, the military and civilian leadership who make it to some place called Site R (which is a real place and is in fact an underground nuclear bunker built into the side of a mountain in Pennsylvania) cannot locate him and do not know if he is alive or dead. While others within the line of succession may still be alive, one, the Secretary of Defense (fifth in line if you care) is on site and by default is determined to be the Acting President because decisions have to be made. In the end, does it matter? No, but the point is that policies are just abstractions when life and death decisions about the fate of humanity need to be made on the fly.
Worse, Jacobsen makes clear (although does not explicitly say) that the trillions we have spent on defense can only do so much. *One* nuclear missile launched by the North Koreans evades any attempt to knock it down, triggering our response. The “red phone” between Washington and Moscow fails to keep the nation’s two leaders in touch to mitigate the risk of civilization-ending escalation. Even the consequences from the fact that the trajectory of our missiles, which breach Russian air space on their way to North Korea, appear not to have been considered in real life, yet that flight pattern is what convinces the Russians they too are under attack and poof, humanity ends shortly thereafter.
Jacobsen may have more accurately subtitled her book a worst case scenario because hey, it is possible our missile defense with a 50 percent failure rate might knock down an incoming ICBM or the President might be able to track down his Russian counterpart to assure him we are not preemptively attacking his country. Cooler heads may prevail and “only” a few nuclear warheads might deliver their lethal blows, but even those scenarios are hardly comforting. Little has changed since the 1983 movie War Games concluded that the only way to “win” the game of nuclear war is not to play it.