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Nuclear War: A Scenario
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“In Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen gives us a vivid picture of what could happen if our nuclear guardians fail…Terrifying.”—Wall Street Journal
There is only one scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end the world as we know it in a matter of hours: nuclear war. And one of the triggers for that war would be a nuclear missile inbound toward the United States.
Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds’ notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.
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Categories: Best Books of 2024 So Far
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Nuclear War: A Scenario
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Original price was: $30.00.$14.99Current price is: $14.99.
Joe Terrell –
A minute-by-minute account of a potential general nuclear war scenario, Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War is one of the most dread-inducing and heart-pounding reading experiences I’ve ever had.
Beginning with the annihilation of the Washington D.C. by means of a 1-megaton nuclear warhead, Nuclear War rewinds the clock a full 24 minutes to the moment North Korea unexpectedly launches an intercontinental ballistic missile with trajectory aimed for somewhere in the United States. What follows is an account of “speculative narrative nonfiction” or “fictional nonfiction” as author Annie Jacobsen uses that postulated scenario to document the interplay between all of the various processes and policies that go into effect when the U.S. is under threat of nuclear attack—a scenario that leads, almost by accident, to full-bore nuclear exchange with Russia in a little over an hour.
The full breadth of Nuclear War’s narrative unfolds over just 72 minutes—from the first missile launch to the end of human civilization. Seem unrealistic? Well, in this account that unfolds in real time, Jacobsen’s shows how it’s not only plausible, it’s possible. Based on recently declassified government reports and studies, reading Nuclear War is like having the veil of “assumed safety” torn from your eyes—it’s being unplugged from the Matrix and realizing we’re all just a hair trigger away from Armageddon because of the insatiable greed and madness that fueled the proliferation of “bigger and better” nuclear weapons in the wake of World War II and the Cold War.
Intercutting between various government agencies, military personnel, public officials, submarines, satellites, silos, and ground zero impact zones, Nuclear War demands to be read in as few sittings as possible. The cascading and escalating effects of the world’s Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) policies coupled with faulty, inconsistent deterrent technology and zero-sum game assumptions about human nature mean the 72 minutes Nuclear War depicts unfold with inevitable grimness typically reserved for the likes of horror novelists.
And in the final section of Nuclear War, Jacobsen reveals what a post-nuclear war Earth would actually look like and, in the process, shoots down any post-apocalyptic or prepper fantasies one might have about “surviving” the end of the world.
So, why read Nuclear War? For one, it’s a morbidly fascinating depiction of one of the most likely endgame scenarios for human civilization. It also works as one of the most effective nuclear disarmament arguments you’re likely to ever read and a fierce warning against the electing of morally incongruous, hot-headed, and incompetent political leaders. Nuclear War is disturbingly prescient, paced liked a thriller, and will stay with you for a long, long time. Highly recommended.
Surveyor Skip –
Forget everything anyone has told you about Global Thermonuclear War. It is NOT survivable for 90% of the worlds population. There are no winners.
Extremely well researched. The author interviewed dozens of top experts from highest levels of government, military, research and development. Some that were around for the Manhattan project. Pages of sources and footnotes.
The outcome is grim. If it is to happen, pray that your are at ground zero for one of the bombs – your death will be instantaneous and painless – if you survive the first day your life will be a living hell until you finally die.
If you have an expensive, very deep and well stocked bunker in which you can survive for a year, there will be nothing to come out to but a seething wasteland full of lethal radiation, toxins and ash. Nothing will grow, no animals or plants and your supplies are gone. Go back in your bunker and die already.
The hubris of Mutually Assured Destruction and Deterrence is madness. It only works for sane and moral leaders. But if all we have are sane and moral leaders there would never be a need for nuclear weapons. All it will take is for a madman like the leader of North Korea to kick the ladder over and in the minutes it takes to figure out what’s going on, everyone reacts and launches. There will be no winners.
golo45 –
J’ai dévoré cet ouvrage d’une seule traite. L’auteure nous offre un récit sombre, détaillé minute par minute, de l’horreur absolue qu’est une guerre nucléaire, chimique, totale. Elle a réussi à clarifier les différentes notions que j’avais sur les conséquences d’un tel conflit. À plusieurs reprises, elle cite N. Khrouchtchev, qui aurait déclaré : “Les survivants envieront les morts” dans un tel scénario.
Pour ne pas ajouter à la noirceur de ce drame, avec ses milliards de morts, l’auteure ne mentionne pas toutes les nouvelles armes de destruction massive : l’ingéniosité humaine dans ce domaine est sans limites. Elle rappelle que toutes les grandes inventions au service de l’humanité ont leur versant négatif, pouvant mener à sa destruction.
Écrit en anglais, l’ouvrage est facile à lire pour ceux qui ont une certaine maîtrise de la langue. Il sera probablement traduit en français.
Maximilian Malterer –
I couldn’t put this book down. Frighteningly captivating, I used every spare moment in the last 72 hours to read it.
It is one of the best thrillers I’ve read, with the sad add-on that this is too close to reality to be purely entertaining.
In the end, it leaves you oscillating between how to prep for World War III, and how you as individual could play any role in keeping it from happening.
Stephen Dedalus –
I am a chemist, and worked for more than forty years in the defense industry. So, let me say, I am in a good position to understand the technical aspects and the implications of the book. What strikes me about this excellent book is that it contains very clear, actual premises about what could eventually trigger the nuclear war and a terryfing description of the outcome but also how poor is the public acknowledgment (not to say control) of the decision making processes involved, all highly classified. But in the end what surfaces very clear is the role of hate and distrust in the triggering of the events.
Jorge –
Un libro impactante e inquietante. Una lectura obligada para entender la situación de riesgo permanente que se vive en el mundo en materia de guerra nuclear
Soso –
Tom Clancy once said, “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
This book shows the multi trillion dollar US nuclear war machine in action in what it presents as a plausible scenario for a nuclear war.
Read this book for its very well researched portrayal of the huge US nuclear war establishment, what it is, the logic behind it, and how it is likely to operate in a nuclear crisis. Very few people in the US are aware of the immense scale of America’s preparation for nuclear war. This book will bring much of that to life.
The book is a revelation, presenting information in a non-political way that every voter should know. It does an outstanding job of credibly conveying how the many organizations and technologies in the US nuclear complex would interact and ratchet forward with unstoppable pseudo-logic in a war that kills hundreds of millions of people in less than two hours.
The details of how the US’s vast nuclear military organizations, which already exist and practise their work every day, will function in a crisis make it clear that the death of hundreds of millions is neither fantasy nor exaggeration. Hundreds of millions of Americans will indeed be killed in a general nuclear war. If anything, the death of hundreds of millions is simply a base case on the way to killing billions of people around the world, including billions of bystanders.
But the fictional scenario the author employs to show the nuclear establishment in action does not make sense at almost all key junctures. Even allowing for the fog of war and the possibility that something as catastrophic as general nuclear war might result from a chain of unlikely accidents, the inexplicable implausibility of how the plot is written gives a sense of unreality to the book.
That’s a bad thing because the accuracy, truth, and real consequences of how this book presents US nuclear war plans should not be tainted by any sense of unreality arising from readers considering the plot and thinking “Oh, that’s absurd, it could never happen that way.”
So read the book to understand what the US has already built and what those trillion dollar organizations will do in a nuclear crisis, while cutting the author some slack for an implausible plot. The author knows her stuff when it comes to the US weapons complex but she’s no Tom Clancy. That’s OK as the rest of the book delivers as it should.
I’ve been studying nuclear matters for many years and even for me there were many revelations in this book. Some of them, like the news that there were four nuclear explosions during the Cuban Missile Crisis (yes, really, up in space, two from the US and two from the USSR…) were annoyingly buried in the notes at the end of the book. But despite such flaws this book is full of wake up calls and fresh insights.
After reading this book, readers will know down to the marrow of their bones three key truths about the reality of nuclear war:
1. The scale of destruction. Some people tell themselves nukes aren’t the problem they were because now there are fewer of them, they are smaller, and what’s out of mind is not a threat. Not so. There are thousands of nukes on both sides on hair trigger alert, ready to launch, and a single one of them can annihilate an entire city, as shown in the opening sequence. A fraction of the nukes on either side can kill hundreds of millions of people. They’re real and they’re ready for action.
2. The speed of action. There is almost no time to deliberate how to de-escalate a war, given how the nuclear establishments have been designed for speed of action. It only takes 15 minutes from the time an order is given in Washington or Moscow for the missile subs of either side to have lifted to launch depth and to have launched all their missiles. With possibly only a few minutes of flight time for a sub-launched missile, not hours, the leaders of either side will have only a few minutes to make the decision of how many millions of people they will kill in their response, those decisions taken from complicated menus of options that usually US presidents will see for only the first time in the heat of a crisis.
3. The unstoppable decisions. There is no stopping a missile once launched, no self-destruct option from the launching side, and no realistic hope to defend. The hundreds of billions that have been spent on missile defense systems have been wasted on pork projects that have proven to be total failures.
Besides the unfolding catastrophe shown in this book’s scenario, the historical moments it reports are also appalling. For the first time you can read what actually was said in one of the big meetings to plan future nuclear wars in which it was decided the US would kill 300 million Chinese people as collateral damage in a war between the US and Russia in which China took no part. Only one general attending, a Medal of Honor winner, complained about the plan, saying it was not American to kill 300 million bystanders. He was ignored.
The book also conveys many technical details about nuclear weapons, which for the most part are accurate enough but which informed people will realize contain many obvious errors. That’s OK, as the details of how a 1 megaton nuclear explosive works or the effects it has make no difference to the key information provided, about the incredible scale of the US’s nuclear war fighting establishment and how it would function in a crisis.
The plot (it is a bit too implausible to call it a “scenario” as the author does) of the book is that some unknown reason North Korea launches a single ICBM at the Pentagon in a “Bolt out of the Blue” decapitation strike at US leadership. During the 33 minute flight time of the missile we see how the US initially detects the launch in North Korea, tracks the missile by satellite until radar can confirm the launch, attempts and fails to knock down the missile, and the warhead annihilates Washington. In the rush to make decisions and get the President to safety we see how all that works and we learn about the many locations and people across the US that are involved.
While the ICBM is in flight, a North Korean sub surfaces off the US West Coast and launches another nuke with shorter flight time that blows up the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, sucking up and dispersing that plant’s spent and operational nuclear fuel in a greatly enhanced fallout cloud. Just after Washington’s destruction, a North Korean satellite orbiting over the US explodes to cause a strong electromagnetic pulse, knocking out all electric power and most electronics of all kinds in the continental US, to render inoperable the US’s ability to feed or fuel itself.
Before the ICBM destroys Washington, the US president orders a nuclear strike on North Korea using over 80 missiles, fired from US silos and from US nuclear subs. But the strike plan ordered requires the US missiles to leave their silos on a path that takes them over Russia on their way to North Korea, without advising Russia of the US’s intent.
The plot contrives a situation where the US cannot get anyone from Moscow on the line, so when Russia sees what looks like a massive US missile attack on Russia, the Russian president orders all of Russia’s missiles to be launched at the US and US allies in an all-out strike. When the US sees such a massive launch, the US also fires all of its missiles at Russia. Billions die from fallout and the ensuing nuclear winter.
While the book does a first-rate job of accurately presenting in detail how the US nuclear establishment works, it barely mentions anything about the Russian side that the plot has destroying the US, and what it does mention is wildly inaccurate, citing absurd propaganda from Internet as “sources” for the information. That works against the credibility of the plot, which already is implausible.
A key flaw is that if North Korea wanted to do a decapitation strike on US leadership, it wouldn’t fire an ICBM that had a 33 minute flight time, enough time for the US to launch survivable airborne command centers, order a response, and to get the national leadership to safety. It would have started with a submarine firing from just off the US’s East Coast, so the Pentagon and Washington would have been destroyed in five minutes. North Korea also would have fired the EMP satellite right away, and it would have launched all 100 or so of the warheads it has, not just one ICBM, at the US, at South Korea, and at Japan.
North Korea could also send nukes in containers to major US ports like New York and LA and avoid the possible unreliability of missile launches, detonating the nukes before even Customs could take a look. The US could have zero warning.
Without contact with Russia, there is no way the US would launch many ICBMs on flight paths to North Korea on trajectories that take them over Russia, flight paths that would look like a US strike on Russia. Instead, the US would launch from nuclear subs that the US maintains on station in the Sea of Japan exactly so they can strike North Korea in the event of war.
Russia would also have known about the launches from North Korea, and would know that US responses were aimed at North Korea, not Russia. Contrary to the absurd implication in the book that the country from which the US has had to buy rides into space for over 20 years cannot track launches and orbits, Russia would know that US missiles launched at North Korea would not have been aimed at Russia, and would not order the end of Russia along with the rest of the world. At a minimum it would ride out the impacts of missiles obviously headed for the thinly populated far East, far away from Moscow and 95% of Russia’s population and industry.
A far more likely scenario for general nuclear war would be the result of escalation arising from the war in Ukraine. If NATO forces intervene and Russia destroys those, the US might strike targets in Russia with conventional weapons. Russia would react with conventional weapons strikes that could be unprecedented game changers for the US, such as using hypersonic missiles (against which the US has no defense) to sink all of the US’s, UK’s and French carrier task forces, or to strike US nuclear weapons systems in Europe on the borders of Russia.
In such a grave scenario the US, France, or the UK might use a nuke to erase the Russian base from which such missiles were launched. Once a nuke is used, the war could very rapidly escalate into general nuclear war.
But that scenario is politically incorrect, because it raises the asymmetry of Russia’s hypersonic weapons with conventional warheads being able to inflict damage that the West can only accomplish using tactical nukes, leading to a greater likelihood of first use of tactical nukes by the West. You can’t have any mention of a Russian technical advantage in a book which hopes to sell well in the West, so perhaps that is why the author wrote an implausible, but politically correct, plot.
Overall, despite the flaws this is an outstanding book and a great read for anybody who wants to be informed on what may be the cause of a catastrophic turning point in human history. It is a gripping narrative so start it on a weekend when you can read it without stopping.
Bookwoman –
This is a sobering scenario. The fact that it is so well researched makes it even more so as you can truly visualize this happening in the not so distant future. There is very little dialogue here and the book is neither hopeful nor uplifting. However, she is an excellent writer., thus the five stars. Be prepared to not be able to stop reading even while you wish that you could. (Oh, and don’t read at night before sleeping or your dreams will not be pleasant. )
Amazon Customer –
Great book detailing how humans and governments should be more careful safeguarding against the wider civilization threat of nuclear weapons. Well written and researched book.