Civilization's Last Few Hours
Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario, Dutton, 2024.
We are witnessing a nuclear bomb moment in our culture.
In 2022 the canonical American novelist Cormac McCarthy released his final two-volume novel Passenger / Stella Maris, whose main characters are the haunted children of a Manhattan Project scientist. In 2023 Christopher Nolan released the Oscar-sweeping biopic film Oppenheimer. Now in 2024, investigative journalist and Pulitzer-prize finalist Annie Jacobsen has published Nuclear War: A Scenario.
Something is in the air…and thank God it is not a mushroom cloud.
In this doggedly researched book, Jacobsen gives us an omniscient front row seat to a (terrifyingly) realistic nuclear war scenario. The shocking thing is just how quickly this thing we call civilization could come to an end. It takes a mere 33 minutes for an ICBM (inter-continental ballistic missile) to reach American soil from North Korea and according to American nuclear defense protocols the POTUS has a mere 6 minutes to decide on retaliation. Which option, not if.
That is the long version. Nuclear submarines, the unlocatable “vessels of death, nightmare machines, handmaidens of the apocalypse” can unload eighty nuclear warheads in a minute and a half and reach much sooner than an ICBM. Long story short, “the world could end in the next couple of hours,” warned General Robert Kehler, a former commander of the United States Strategic Command.
In fact, we have come within a hairs breadth of accidental annihilation such as when in 1967 the Russian Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov overrode mistaken satellite data with nothing but his gut feeling and ended up saving us all from a fate we didn’t know was coming.
The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only a small foretaste of the destruction that we are now capable of. The thermonuclear/hydrogen bomb invented in 1952 boasted the power of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Some Manhattan Project scientists upon seeing the results, Jacobsen tells us, wrote to President Truman calling it “an evil thing.”
Naturally, by 1967 the world had manufactured a staggering 31,255 nuclear bombs in pursuit of the only defense doctrine we deemed reasonable—nuclear deterrence. The doctrine of nuclear deterrence states that the only way to prevent a nuclear attack is to threaten immediate nuclear retaliation. An eye for an eye keeps the whole world safe.
The doctrine works.
Until it doesn’t.
That is the scenario Jacobsen paints in exquisite and exhaustive detail in this book, admitting us into the “room where it happens,” laying out the plans, protocols, personnel, and places that would be involved, including graphic descriptions of the devastating destruction that such a bomb entails. At times, I was surprised by the strongly emotional reaction I had to her story despite knowing that it is fictional. Perhaps I sensed that this fiction only remains fiction by virtue of the fact that it just hasn’t happened yet but very well could.
Reading this book renders FEMA materials such as these a sad comedy:
When it does happen, the living will soon envy the dead.
Our world has never been the same since August 6th, 1945. We have been invaded on all fronts by our own creation, as Arundhati Roy wrote in The Cost of Living:
“It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer.”
Pick up a copy of this book for the closest thing we have to an official guide to the coming nuclear war.