'Nuclear War: A Scenario,' a wake-up call as prospect of hell-on-earth nightmare looms
Journalist Annie Jacobsen's urgent book war-games extinction itself
Deep in the warm hurricane of 1980s nostalgia-minded groups on Facebook are the occasional references to fearful school-kid preparation exercises for a forefront haunt to humanity at the time— the night-shaking stalk of the prospect of a world-ending nuclear holocaust.
Remember duck and cover under the chewing-gum-ridden desk chairs? Or the 1983 Parade magazine article by Carl Sagan about nuclear winter — back when 10 million pajama-clad read the Sunday national glossy in their local newspapers.
Those were the days.
Here's the thing: those are still the days.
That's what hits home in alarming, affecting reporting in a book that likely will win the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Jacobsen's "Nuclear War: A Scenario."
Jacobsen's book, written with an expert eye and stack of reporters' notebooks full of string, lays out how the world rests on the "razor's edge" of a nuclear annihilation. With the pacing and insider detail and language of a Tom Clancy novel (she's involved in producing and writing "Jack Ryan" for TV), blended with a career of reporting on national security and the sources and receipts to back it up, Jacobsen walks us through a realistic and terrifying scenario.
Minute by minute. Missile by Missile. She describes a modern nuclear war in graphic detail. The scale of destruction, firestorms and the incineration of millions of people, clothes blown off, stunned survivors running naked with third-degree burns, even for a moment, is hair-raising, nightmare-inducing. It makes Oppenheimer's World War II bombs seem like Revolutionary War muskets by comparison. What many, myself included, envision when we think of nuclear war, the bombs, is not in line with the reality of the lethality, which is thousands of times more powerful than what the United States unleashed on Japan. It's the devil's furnace versus a struck matchstick.
"Nuclear War: A Scenario" should vault organizations like the Nuclear Threat Initiative to urgent relevancy.
Vladimir Putin has recently said he is “not bluffing” about the potential of using weapons of mass destruction, Jacobsen notes. North Korea, whose leaders have constructed elaborate underground bunker system designed to survive thermo-nuclear attacks, has alleged the United States has a "sinister" plan to start a war of nukes.
"We all sit on the razor's edge," Jacobsen writes. "What if deterrence fails? Humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation, away from nuclear annihilation."
All it takes is one nuclear-armed narcissistic madman, Jacobsen writes.
"As history demonstrates, mad rulers disobey rules of war," Jacobsen writes. "In words often attributed to Adolph Hitler, if you win, you need not explain.'"
Jacobsen war-games a scenario in which North Korea attacks California and Washington, D.C. with nuclear weapons, setting off a chain reaction, a system of industrial inhumanity, that kills hundreds of millions of people in an hour, and ushers in a nuclear winter in which, as Nikita Krushchev predicted, the "survivors would envy the dead."
She takes us through how the planes would be scrambled with bombs, the missiles launched, the decisions made in minutes affecting hundreds of millions of lives — and how once it starts, once mutually assured destruction, the policy of deterrence, is violated, there is no going back, no time for hero-ball moves from a divinely inspired military leader in the hierarchy.
"Right now, we are closer to having a nuclear war happen even by accident than we were during the cold war," former Defense Secretary William Perry says in the book.
He knows of what he speaks.
"It looked very, very real," Perry, an under secretary of defense at the time, said.
"So real, that he actually believed it was real," Jacobsen writes.
Perry prepared to tell President Carter that he needed to launch a counter attack.
But the chief nuclear watch officer at NORAD "dug into it" and discovered the error. Perry never woke up Carter from sleep that night.
Here's the thing: it's hard to imagine that happening today as technology is gospel to so many Americans of younger generations. I don't trust the GPS on my iPhone. It's saved my life. Driving in Kansas City, I didn't trust the directions being belted out by Siri. I instinctively disobeyed Siri, and the passengers in the car looked shocked when they realized Siri would have sent us head first, the wrong way, into one-way traffic on an inner-city freeway. Bug off Siri.
Toss in the influence of artificial intelligence and a growing sheep mentality where tech is concerned, and it's impossible to summon the prospect of a modern nuclear watch officer questioning, doubting, anything on a screen. The call would be made. The missiles launched. Our world ended.
Near the end of "Nuclear War: A Scenario" Jacobsen deals with an ethical consideration I've thought about for years. Let's say North Korea and Russia did first strike the United States, condemning 200 million Americans to immediate death, and tens of millions more to horrors in a nuclear winter, one in which the temperature in Iowa, which Jacobsen references in the book, would not go above freezing for six years, killing agriculture?
Is there a "for-the-good-of-humanity" argument in which the president, or the acting president, who might be a cabinet secretary seven or eight deep in the line of succession, would not retaliate, reasoning that the millions of innocents in Russia and Korea shouldn't have to die, too?
Such an argument would be quickly dismissed, Jacobsen reasons, noting that deterrence relies on never countenancing such humanity. Even speaking it makes the system of deterrence vulnerable.
"With time after a nuclear war all present day knowledge will be gone, including the knowledge that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran, or anyone else vilified as a nation or a group," Jacobsen concludes. "It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all, all along."
(Douglas Burns, a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Read 48 of the most talented writers in Iowa in just one place. The Iowa Writers' Collaborative spans the full state. It’s one of the biggest things going in Iowa journalism and writing now — and you don’t want to miss. This collaborative is — as the outstanding Quad Cities journalist Ed Tibbetts says — YOUR SUNDAY IOWA newspaper. Please follow other writers on the roster below. )
Read "on the beach".
Thanks for recommending this! I read her book about Area 51. She writes about some very interesting topics.