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<\/a><\/p>\nAmong the recent signs of renewed attention<\/a> in the United States to the threat from nuclear weapons, perhaps the most important is the book Nuclear War: A Scenario<\/em><\/a> by Annie Jacobsen. Published earlier in 2024, the book was a New York Times <\/em>best-seller for several weeks and the focus of a well-attended webinar<\/a> organized by the Back from the Brink Campaign<\/a> and co-sponsored by the Consistent Life Network.<\/p>\n Having read Nuclear War: A Scenario<\/em>, 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\u2019s work may help to inspire the action necessary to diminish or even end the nuclear threat.<\/p>\n Imagining the End of the World<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2014the initial fireball, the blast-wave, the subsequent fallout and firestorms\u2014and what the consequences would be for Washington, DC, and its inhabitants.<\/p>\n When the fireball hits Nationals Park, two-and-a-half miles from ground zero, Jacobsen writes, \u201cThe clothes on a majority of the 35,000 people watching the game catch on fire. Those who don\u2019t quickly burn to death suffer intense third-degree burns. Their bodes get stripped of the outer layer of skin, exposing bloody dermis underneath\u201d (p. xix). This would happen within a few seconds of the bomb\u2019s detonation.<\/p>\n Amid the later firestorm, Jacobsen describes how, within a seven-and-a-half mile radius around ground zero, \u201cAsphalt streets turn to liquid from the intense heat, trapping survivors as if caught in molten lava or quicksand\u201d (p. xxiii).<\/p>\n After this shocking opening, which made a particular impression on me as I live in the greater DC area, Nuclear War: A Scenario <\/em>becomes only more disturbing.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Having provided this historical context, Nuclear War: A Scenario <\/em>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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Nuclear War: A Scenario <\/em>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\u2019t know whether this is the most plausible scenario for how nuclear war would break out (and I\u2019m not keen to find out), but the plausibility of the war\u2019s political context isn\u2019t really the point.<\/p>\n The book\u2019s purpose is to describe the practical details of how nuclear war would unfold once initiated and what the consequences would be. Moreover, Jacobsen\u2019s 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\u2014Nuclear War: A Scenario<\/em> imagines it happening over roughly an hour.<\/p>\n Jacobsen\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n To highlight just a few of the book\u2019s points that will keep me from sleep:<\/p>\n This information and innumerable other facts provided by Jacobsen drive home the central reality that \u201chuman 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\u201d (p. 267).<\/p>\n Nuclear War: A Scenario <\/em>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\u2019s notice.<\/p>\n In his account of the 1960 nuclear war planning briefing, Rubel drew a parallel between the US officials\u2019 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\u2014yet.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> to take.<\/p>\n 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 <\/em>can play an important role in reviving such a movement. Everyone who can read it should.<\/p>\n =======================================<\/p>\n For some of our posts on nuclear weapons, see:<\/em><\/p>\n Are We Finally Waking Up? Signs of New Awareness of the Nuclear Threat<\/a><\/p>\n Sleepwalking toward Nuclear War: The Lessons of the Able Archer Scare<\/a><\/p>\n The Persisting Threat of Nuclear Weapons: A Brief Primer<\/a><\/p>\n Nuclear Disarmament as a Social Justice Issue<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>A Global Effort to Protect Life: The UN Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons<\/a>\u00a0\/ John Whitehead<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n\n
<\/a><\/p>\nComing Back from the Brink<\/strong><\/h3>\n