On the likely end of the world

Annie Jacobsen's new book, "Nuclear War," is the terrifying must-read book of the year.

If you haven’t heard of it, and you’re not afraid to explore the most terrifying scenario imaginable, I highly recommend Annie Jacobsen’s new book Nuclear War: A Scenario. The book is a minute-by-minute accounting of what would happen if North Korea (or some other nation or non-state actor) launched a single nuclear ICBM at the United States of America.

Spoiler alert: it’s not good.

Double spoiler alert: a single nuclear missile flying towards the United States is likely to unleash a much broader nuclear exchange.

Jacobsen’s book delves deep into what is known about the US’s nuclear war plans: its defenses, decision tree, chain-of-command, and response options. The book also details the terrible force of nuclear weapons.

These are weapons that can never be used because to use even one risks – or, in Jacobsen’s telling, makes likely - a global conflagration. Consider the two times atomic weapons were detonated during World War II. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both devastated. Casualties were at least 100,000 and, possibly, double that.

Not good.

Those bombs were firecrackers compared to what we have now. A single hydrogen bomb, which is a nuclear fission bomb whose detonating trigger is another nuclear bomb could be as powerful as 1,000 of the kinds of bomb dropped back then. We have over a thousand such weapons.

Russia also has a thousand or so. A dozen other nations have smaller nuclear arsenals. Iran is close to joining their ranks.

Jacobsen’s book isn’t political, merely technical. This is the cause, this is the reaction, this is the counter-reaction. Each person making decisions in Jacobsen’s scenario understands that they are taking actions that will destroy life on Earth. Each one feels helpless to do anything other than what they are doing.

The book is terrifying for its plausibility. The only thing required for humanity to be inalterably reduced, and possibly made extinct, along with most other land-based life, is one person deciding to launch a single ICBM. Or maybe a short-range missile from off the coast. Or set off a couple tactical nukes in a couple American cities. After that, Armageddon.

What does Armageddon look like? It looks like mile-wide fireballs. It looks like 300 mile per hour winds. Secondary and tertiary radioactive fires. It looks like skin being blown off bodies. It looks like nuclear containment facilities going boom and sending radioactive shrapnel across hundreds of miles. Armageddon looks like entire cities being reduced to ash, buildings outside the immediate blast zone collapsing, services gone, electricity gone, food gone. It looks like the end of the world.

Jacobsen compares even a single kiloton bomb being detonated over a city as roughly equivalent to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Millions would be killed almost immediately. Millions more in the days that follow. If the conflict escalates, human casualty figures will go into the billions.

Since the Atomic Age began, the world has come to the brink several times. Some, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, are well known. Others are less so. In 1982, a Russian officer neglected to inform his superiors that he had detected five ICBM launches from the continental US toward Russia because he suspected it a sensor mistake. He reasoned that the US would never send only five missiles if it were an actual attack. Thankfully, he was right. There have been other incidents like this. Jacobsen seems to believe we’ve gotten lucky; she also seems to believe that luck cuts both ways.

Her own book is a “bad luck story,” though everything she discusses seems not only possible, but probable. Contrary to what many people believe, the US does not have a good system for shooting down ICBMs. We do have anti-missile technology, but we don’t have a lot of it, and it doesn’t work very well. If an enemy were to launch a fusillade of nuclear missiles at us, we could do nothing other than respond with our own. The old cliché about nobody being able to win a nuclear war is not only true, it’s worse than true. Nobody will be left to even determine a winner.

The other cliché about nuclear war is that those killed in the immediate blast would be the lucky ones. If anything, I think the cliche understates how awful it would be to survive. There would be no electricity or infrastructure, food would start to run out very quickly, water undrinkable. Communication, gone. Sanitation, gone. Fancy Japanese toilets – useless. Do you want to live in a world without fancy Japanese toilets? I do not.

Within an hour of a satellite first detecting the plume from an ICBM, much of the developed world would be gone, the rest on its way to annihilation. Everybody you know will be dead or dying. Even worse, your frequent flyer miles will be useless.

This isn’t some doomsday book reeling out implausible sci-fi misadventures. Instead, Jacobsen’s book is a clear-eyed and undramatic telling (or at least as undramatic as the end of the world can be) of what nuclear war would actually look like. Hell seems preferable.

I have yet to finish the book. As I said, it’s a minute-by-minute telling of how a nuclear war would happen. I’m only forty minutes in and, already in that time, Washington DC is gone and a California nuclear power plant has been struck by a nuclear missile, the so-called, “Devil’s scenario.” Forty minutes after a single ICBM is launched, and millions are already dead. It’s about to get a lot worse for the rest of the human population. I suspect before the book is over, I will be reading about a planetary atmosphere closer to Venus than it is to modern day Earth.

The question I’m left with is, and I think the question Jacobsen is trying to get all of her readers to wrestle with is simple: can we continue to afford playing chicken with life on Earth? Or, and I suspect this is probably the better option, do we gradually de-escalate and figure out some other way to keep ourselves from mutually assured destruction?