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A review by aaronj21
Nuclear War : A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen
4.0
Nuclear weapons are an unmitigated evil, their creation is one of mankind’s greatest sins and their continued existence and escalation is a glaring sign of insanity.
Nevertheless, they compel me. Since I first learned about nuclear power, weapons, and radiation in high school I’ve been oddly fascinated by all things atomic. Something about the fundamental oddity of it all, that natural or man-made elements can reach into living tissue and dissolve the very building blocks of life, can explode with the heat of stars, felt apocalyptic and inherently terrifying on an existential level. Since then I’ve learned a lot more about this subject; I’ve read non-fiction titles on Hiroshima, the Manhattan Project, and the Chernobyl disaster. It’s a sobering topic that I always seem to return to. Yet despite my familiarity with these subjects they still frighten me in a way nothing else really can.
This book is a detailed, exhaustively researched play by play of what a nuclear war might look like. In this scenario North Korea launches an ICMB at the Washington DC, setting into motion contingency operations for retaliation. While DC is reduced to rubble and our own nuclear weapons are launched, the president and other high up government officials are moved to increase their chances of survival while the civilian population is left to “self-rescue” a ghoulish euphemism that means in a nuclear exchange fire, police, and emergency services are not coming to help.
The contingency plans related here are real, the nuclear strength of all countries involved is as accurate as it can be, the attention to detail makes the whole book read like a disturbing documentary. Once nuclear weapons are detected en route to US soil, the president has about six minutes to decide how to respond. He can select from a pre made list of targets and can authorize a nuclear strike completely independent of anyone else. There is no oversight for this. The plans in place for scenarios like this must be made in absurdly short amounts of time, lest the US lose its ability to retaliate at all since nuclear launch sites are well known and are probably targets themselves. So by definition options like pausing to reflect, conferring with others, confirming intelligence, are all extremely limited here. It’s incredibly easy to escalate and almost impossible to deescalate. By design any nuclear attack basically invites all out nuclear war.
This book, perhaps more than any other I’ve read, highlights the utter insanity of nuclear weapons, an insanity not lost on the very people whose job it is to plan for this sort of thing. By showing beat by beat exactly what a nuclear war would look like, the author makes as compelling a case as any I’ve heard for the end of these weapons. There is an adage that there are no winners in a nuclear war and that might as well be the thesis statement for this book. Even if something we could technically label “victory” were achieved, the loss of human life would be almost incalculably high. It hardly matters which country got off the most rockets when the world is starving in a decades long nuclear winter.
Nevertheless, they compel me. Since I first learned about nuclear power, weapons, and radiation in high school I’ve been oddly fascinated by all things atomic. Something about the fundamental oddity of it all, that natural or man-made elements can reach into living tissue and dissolve the very building blocks of life, can explode with the heat of stars, felt apocalyptic and inherently terrifying on an existential level. Since then I’ve learned a lot more about this subject; I’ve read non-fiction titles on Hiroshima, the Manhattan Project, and the Chernobyl disaster. It’s a sobering topic that I always seem to return to. Yet despite my familiarity with these subjects they still frighten me in a way nothing else really can.
This book is a detailed, exhaustively researched play by play of what a nuclear war might look like. In this scenario North Korea launches an ICMB at the Washington DC, setting into motion contingency operations for retaliation. While DC is reduced to rubble and our own nuclear weapons are launched, the president and other high up government officials are moved to increase their chances of survival while the civilian population is left to “self-rescue” a ghoulish euphemism that means in a nuclear exchange fire, police, and emergency services are not coming to help.
The contingency plans related here are real, the nuclear strength of all countries involved is as accurate as it can be, the attention to detail makes the whole book read like a disturbing documentary. Once nuclear weapons are detected en route to US soil, the president has about six minutes to decide how to respond. He can select from a pre made list of targets and can authorize a nuclear strike completely independent of anyone else. There is no oversight for this. The plans in place for scenarios like this must be made in absurdly short amounts of time, lest the US lose its ability to retaliate at all since nuclear launch sites are well known and are probably targets themselves. So by definition options like pausing to reflect, conferring with others, confirming intelligence, are all extremely limited here. It’s incredibly easy to escalate and almost impossible to deescalate. By design any nuclear attack basically invites all out nuclear war.
This book, perhaps more than any other I’ve read, highlights the utter insanity of nuclear weapons, an insanity not lost on the very people whose job it is to plan for this sort of thing. By showing beat by beat exactly what a nuclear war would look like, the author makes as compelling a case as any I’ve heard for the end of these weapons. There is an adage that there are no winners in a nuclear war and that might as well be the thesis statement for this book. Even if something we could technically label “victory” were achieved, the loss of human life would be almost incalculably high. It hardly matters which country got off the most rockets when the world is starving in a decades long nuclear winter.