Consistent Life Blog

Apocalypse Imagined: The Urgent Message of Nuclear War: A Scenario

Posted on June 11, 2024 By Rachel MacNair

by John Whitehead

Among the recent signs of renewed attention in the United States to the threat from nuclear weapons, perhaps the most important is the book Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen. Published earlier in 2024, the book was a New York Times best-seller for several weeks and the focus of a well-attended webinar organized by the Back from the Brink Campaign and co-sponsored by the Consistent Life Network.

Having read Nuclear War: A Scenario, I would say the book is well worth the attention it has received to date and should receive still more. Jacobsen has written a fascinating, profoundly disturbing book about the potential nuclear catastrophe hanging over humanity. If enough people read the book and take its message to heart, Jacobsen’s work may help to inspire the action necessary to diminish or even end the nuclear threat.

Imagining the End of the World

Jacobsen begins her book with an arresting, detailed description of the effects of a 1-megaton nuclear bomb hitting the Pentagon. She reviews the physical effects—the initial fireball, the blast-wave, the subsequent fallout and firestorms—and what the consequences would be for Washington, DC, and its inhabitants.

When the fireball hits Nationals Park, two-and-a-half miles from ground zero, Jacobsen writes, “The clothes on a majority of the 35,000 people watching the game catch on fire. Those who don’t quickly burn to death suffer intense third-degree burns. Their bodes get stripped of the outer layer of skin, exposing bloody dermis underneath” (p. xix). This would happen within a few seconds of the bomb’s detonation.

Amid the later firestorm, Jacobsen describes how, within a seven-and-a-half mile radius around ground zero, “Asphalt streets turn to liquid from the intense heat, trapping survivors as if caught in molten lava or quicksand” (p. xxiii).

After this shocking opening, which made a particular impression on me as I live in the greater DC area, Nuclear War: A Scenario becomes only more disturbing.

The book provides some brief chapters of historical context: the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, the US build-up of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, and American planning for nuclear war. In these introductory sections, Jacobsen devotes special attention to a fateful meeting of top US military officials in December 1960.

During the 1960 meeting, the officials received a briefing on US plans for carrying out a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union or China, should the order to do so ever come. This briefing on nuclear war planning was recounted more than 40 years later by John H. Rubel, a defense official who attended the meeting and wrote a memoir shortly before his death.

As Rubel recalled, US plans called for massive nuclear bombing of the adversary nations: the total explosive power used on Moscow would be about 4,000 times that used on Hiroshima, for example. The resulting death toll would be in the hundreds of millions, many in neighboring countries that would not be directly targeted but would be affected by nuclear fallout. Such numbers did not take into account the hundreds of millions of Americans and others killed in the inevitable counter-attack.

Having provided this historical context, Nuclear War: A Scenario proceeds to its main topic, announced by the title: imagining a scenario in which a planetary holocaust like that discussed in 1960 might come to pass.

Jacobsen bases the nuclear war scenario on an impressive amount of research, drawing on government documents, news reports, and interviews with scientists and former government officials. She uses this research to describe, within the limits of what is publicly known, how the military establishments of the United States and other nations would react to a nuclear attack, including how they would carry out their likely counter-attacks. The book gets into the nuts-and-bolts of such matters, describing which kinds of a satellites and early warning systems would receive data on an incoming attack, which civilian and military officials at which locations the warnings would be relayed to, and so on.

The account of a hypothetical nuclear war is written in a quasi-novelistic way that imagines the thought processes and conversations of the various participants, but Jacobsen intersperses the narrative with explanations of the various technical concepts involved and other relevant information.

Nuclear War: A Scenario imagines North Korea launching a limited surprise nuclear attack on the United States, with the American retaliation consequently drawing Russia into a general nuclear war. I don’t know whether this is the most plausible scenario for how nuclear war would break out (and I’m not keen to find out), but the plausibility of the war’s political context isn’t really the point.

The book’s purpose is to describe the practical details of how nuclear war would unfold once initiated and what the consequences would be. Moreover, Jacobsen’s scenario is undoubtedly correct in two crucial respects: once nations use nuclear weapons, the conflict will likely spin out of control; and nuclear war will unfold very quickly—Nuclear War: A Scenario imagines it happening over roughly an hour.

Jacobsen’s account is filled with information that underlines both how easily the nuclear threat could become a reality and what the nightmarish results would be. To pay Jacobsen a dubious but sincere compliment, I can say that after spending 20 years of my life reading, thinking, and worrying about the nuclear threat, her book found new ways of scaring me.

To highlight just a few of the book’s points that will keep me from sleep:

• Both former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Hans M. Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists confirm that nuclear missiles fired from the United States at North Korea would have to fly over Russia to reach their targets. Thus, a nuclear exchange between the United States and North Korea (a horrifying enough possibility by itself) could very well accidentally spark a wider nuclear exchange between the nations with the world’s largest nuclear arsenals.
• Although in theory only the president of the United States can order nuclear weapons’ use, a contingency exists for the president to authorize “the universal unlock code.” This code effectively delegates nuclear launch authority to officials further down the chain of command. Intended to preserve the nuclear deterrent in the event the country’s political leadership is killed, this “universal unlock” policy effectively means that in a crisis a military officer outside the civilian leadership may be given the discretion to use nuclear weapons at will.
• A single nuclear weapon, if detonated at a certain altitude and position over the United States, can generate an electromagnetic pulse that effectively destroys the entire American electric grid. The resulting collapse of the country’s electricity-dependent infrastructure means, as Jacobsen writes, “No more fresh water…No sanitation. No streetlights, no tunnel lights, no lights at all…No gas pumps, no fuel…No hospital equipment that works” (p. 267). Even absent any other nuclear detonations, a single weapon can destroy an entire nation.

This information and innumerable other facts provided by Jacobsen drive home the central reality that “human beings [who] developed slow and steady over hundreds of thousands of years, culminating in the creation of vast and complex civilizations, [can] get zeroed out in a war that takes less than a few hours from beginning to end” (p. 267).

Coming Back from the Brink

Nuclear War: A Scenario makes indelibly clear the catastrophic threat we are all living under. The book makes equally clear the catastrophic moral reality we are living in today: the world is currently governed by people willing and able to unleash global mass murder at a moment’s notice.

In his account of the 1960 nuclear war planning briefing, Rubel drew a parallel between the US officials’ meeting and the 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which high-level officials in Nazi Germany planned the Holocaust. A crucial difference, as Jacobsen points out, is that officials in the United States, and presumably their counterparts in Russia, China, and elsewhere, are planning the deaths of far more human beings. Another crucial difference is that, unlike the Nazis, contemporary officials have not carried out their plans—yet.

This situation cannot be allowed to continue. Humans need to step back from the nuclear precipice, and the Back from the Brink campaign has identified some important practical steps to take.

As the panelists in the webinar with Jacobsen observed, the time is now ripe for a revived mass movement against nuclear weapons. Nuclear War: A Scenario can play an important role in reviving such a movement. Everyone who can read it should.

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For some of our posts on nuclear weapons, see:

Are We Finally Waking Up? Signs of New Awareness of the Nuclear Threat

Sleepwalking toward Nuclear War: The Lessons of the Able Archer Scare

The Persisting Threat of Nuclear Weapons: A Brief Primer

Nuclear Disarmament as a Social Justice Issue

 A Global Effort to Protect Life: The UN Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons / John Whitehead

Catastrophe by Mistake: The Button and the Danger of Accidental Nuclear War  / John Whitehead

Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons

nuclear weapons

Are We Finally Waking Up? Signs of New Awareness of the Nuclear Threat

Posted on April 30, 2024 By Rachel MacNair

by John Whitehead

Nuclear weapons have threatened humanity’s survival for almost 80 years. During the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the nuclear threat received substantial attention and inspired significant anti-nuclear activism, such as the June 1982 rally against nuclear weapons in New York City that drew roughly 1 million people. In the 21^st century, however, the nuclear threat has not galvanized the same kind of action, at least in the United States, that it did in the 20^th, despite the nuclear threat growing amid various conflicts among nuclear-armed nations.

Americans’ comparative neglect of the nuclear threat in the 21^st century may finally be ending, though. In the first half of 2024, elements of the media and entertainment industry, which can play a major role in shaping public opinion, have given renewed attention to the colossal threat posed by nuclear weapons. These signs of serious concern about the nuclear threat are very encouraging and worth noting.

The Times’ “At the Brink”

The New York Times ran a series of opinion pieces in March on the nuclear threat, entitled “At the Brink.” The series’ introduction declared “The risk of nuclear conflict is rising . . . Is anyone paying attention?”

One opinion piece gives a sense of how pressing the nuclear threat is today by revealing the Biden administration’s fears of Russia using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. In late 2022, when Russia was losing ground to the Ukrainian counter-offensive, such a resort to nuclear weapons loomed as a real possibility. The opinion piece notes “The possibility of a nuclear strike, once inconceivable in modern conflict, is more likely now than at any other time since the Cold War.”

Seeking to remind readers of the precise nature of the threat, “The Brink” series portrays, through words and graphics, what a nuclear strike would be like: “A brilliant white flash envelops the sky for miles, briefly blinding everyone who witnesses it  . . . Temperatures inside the explosion reach millions of degrees, hotter than the surface of the sun . . .  The wreckage — what once was asphalt, steel, soil, glass, flesh and bone — is suctioned into the roiling stem of a mushroom cloud rising for miles.” The article also covers the long-term health and environmental consequences of nuclear weapons’ use.

Another opinion in the series examines the president’s authority, without any checks or balances, to order nuclear weapons’ use and the dangers this authority presents. The opinion piece makes the modest but significant proposal that “Congress should immediately establish a new legal framework that restricts the president from being able to issue a nuclear launch order without the consent of another senior official unless the United States is already under attack.”

A different “At the Brink” piece identifies further concrete steps to reduce the nuclear threat and makes the welcome declaration that “It’s Time to Protest Nuclear Weapons Again.”

Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War

Another encouraging sign is a documentary series that debuted on Netflix in March, Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. This nine-part series surveys the history of both of first Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and the second, current Cold War between the United States and Russia. As the title suggests, nuclear weapons and their threat are the series’ central concern.

The Bomb and the Cold War has limitations and flaws. Its emphasis on the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia and focus on Europe means huge parts of Cold War history receive minimal coverage or are left out altogether. China’s role in the Cold War receives a cursory treatment and the wars in Korea and Indochina are scarcely mentioned. The treatment of the second Cold War is disappointing, as the series largely embraces the view that the conflict is the result solely of Vladimir Putin’s malevolence and neglects the west’s responsibility for the current situation.

Nevertheless, the series doesn’t adopt a simplistic, jingoistic view throughout. Many Cold War-related injustices committed by the United States are covered, from the harm caused by nuclear testing; to the US role in overthrowing democratic governments in Iran, Guatemala, and elsewhere; to the civil liberties violations of the Red Scare. Particularly refreshing is the careful treatment of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, where the series gives time to both supportive and critical views. The episode recounting the Berlin Wall’s collapse (by far the most moving part of the series) also offers an excellent case study in the power of nonviolent resistance.

Most important, The Bomb and the Cold War devotes significant time and attention to the ongoing nuclear threat. As noted, nuclear testing and the atomic bombings of Japan are covered in detail, with powerful testimonials from bombing survivors included. The series also covers the nuclear arms race in detail, including such terrifying events as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Able Archer scare, and cases of narrowly averted accidental nuclear war.

Among the many historians, journalists, and former officials interviewed for the series, perhaps the most significant commentator is whistleblower and peace activist Daniel Ellsberg (who appears in what must have been one of his last interviews before his death in 2023). Ellsberg describes his time working for the US military establishment and his exposure to nuclear war planning, which might be more accurately called “mass murder planning.” He sums up a US nuclear war plan that would cause the deaths of over 600 million people as being “the most evil and insane plan that had ever existed in the history of humanity.”

The series correctly highlights that the nuclear threat is not merely a matter of history but a very real and pressing danger today. The concluding episode features the apt warning from Tom Nichols, a professor at the US Navy War College, who comments, “I worry about a cataclysm . . . That we wake up in the morning and the world is a peaceful place, and by that evening, for any number of contingent reasons — accidents, miscalculation, misunderstanding — suddenly we’re facing the extinction of billions of people.”

“An Open Letter from Hollywood”

One reason the nuclear threat is receiving more attention is the impact of the movie Oppenheimer. While flawed from a peace advocacy standpoint, Oppenheimer has at least re-started public debates about nuclear weapons.

A welcome direct consequence of the movie’s critical and commercial success is the “Open Letter from Hollywood on Oppenheimer and Nuclear Weapons.” Published in the Los Angeles Times and online on March 6 and signed by a variety of actors, directors, and others, the letter states “As artists and advocates, we want to raise our voices to remind people that while Oppenheimer is history, nuclear weapons are not.” The signatories declare “To protect our families, our communities, and our world, we must demand that global leaders work to make nuclear weapons history.”

A notable signatory is writer-director Nicholas Meyer, who directed the 1983 TV movie The Day After. The movie, which dramatized the likely consequences of nuclear war, was one of the most-watched programs in American TV history. Among those deeply affected by the nightmarish story was a former member of the entertainment industry, President Ronald Reagan. The Day After may have contributed to Reagan eventually softening his ultra-hawkish policies.

The recent “Open Letter from Hollywood” raises the hope history might repeat itself and latter-day versions of The Day After will emerge to motivate renewed opposition to nuclear weapons.

Continuing the Work

Whether the concerns about the nuclear threat reflected in the opinion pieces, series, and statement described above continue to gain prominence remains to be seen. Nevertheless, these expressions of concern are hopeful signs that the nuclear threat may yet become a major public concern again in the United States. These signs show peace advocates that at least some people are listening and should serve as a spur to further advocacy efforts.

In his final comments in The Bomb and the Cold War, Daniel Ellsberg offered some simple, sobering yet, to me, encouraging words: “I do have to say now, in this point in my life, the chance of actually affecting [the nuclear threat] is lower even than I thought it was [previously] . . . Can it be worth, then, risking your life, your freedom, for a very low chance of saving lives? And the answer is ‘yes.’ Of course it can be worth it.”

Let’s keep moving forward with the work of Ellsberg and others to raise awareness about the nuclear threat and ultimately to end it.

one of the quarterly anti-nuclear vigils we do with a coalition of groups. Christy Yao is at the microphone.

Those wishing to witness against the nuclear threat can join the Consistent Life Network on May 18^th outside the White House for a Vigil to End the Nuclear Danger.

nuclear weapons