A New Nuclear War Scenario
BOOK REVIEW: Nuclear War: A Scenario
By Annie Jacobsen / Dutton
Reviewed by John A. Lauder
The Reviewer – John A. Lauder is a Senior Fellow at the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control and is a founder of the James A. Garfield Center for Public Leadership at Hiram College. He retired from the US government with over 33 years of managerial, analytical, and policy experience in the Central Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and as an arms control negotiator.
REVIEW — We older Baby Boomers remember hiding under our desks in grade school to practice covering from the falling debris of the nuclear blasts that were expected from a Soviet attack. Later, we watched movies such as On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, and Fail Safe that made the prospect of nuclear war terrifying and perhaps unavoidable. Later still was the TV movie, The Day After, with frightening images of Americans struggling to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear war. The movie was so compelling that it was said to have influenced President Ronald Reagan’s arms control policy.
The starkness of those images of nuclear war has faded until recently. In the wake of the end of the Cold War and with the US focused on regional conflicts and a global war against terrorism, the existential threat of a full-scale nuclear war became less prominent in the public psyche.
That sense of false security is withering now in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the prospect of war with China over Taiwan, nuclear threats from North Korea, and an Iranian nuclear program on the brink. We again awake in the middle of the night worried whether deterrence will hold or whether mutual assured destruction is indeed truly MAD.
The media is again presenting graphic depictions of nuclear war. Oppenheimer the movie recently reminded us of the origin story and reraises the enduring question of how to manage the power to destroy the world. The New York Times has launched a new opinion series, At the Brink, to explore “the threat of nuclear weapons in an unstable world.”
What national security news are you missing today? Get full access to your own national security daily brief by upgrading toSubscriber+Memberstatus.
In case you aren’t already having nightmares about Armageddon, Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen may give you them. The book’s prologue will immediately grab you with its detailed description of the death and maiming in the Washington DC area that would follow a single 1-megaton, nuclear strike on the Pentagon. Jacobsen paints a sobering picture of the path of the fireball and blast – and later firestorms and radiation — mile by mile out over the city and its suburbs. The author tells us that over a million people will die or be dying within two minutes and tens of thousands more will die painfully over time — on their own without any prospect of rescue or aid by first responders.
But Jacobsen does not stop there. She weaves a scenario for an escalating full-scale war second-by-second and hour-by-hour until billions die, the infrastructure of survival is destroyed, and – as Kruschev was said to have observed and is quoted by Jacobsen: “the survivors envy the dead”.
The scenario the author depicts is not the most plausible way that the use of nuclear weapons might escalate to full-scale global catastrophe. Her depiction is of a “bolt from the blue’ decapitating strike against Washington by North Korea followed within minutes by a retaliatory large salvo of US land and sea-based missiles against North Korea but with some US missiles flying across Russian territory. The book’s scenario is a bit contrived, but the pace of the depicted events underscores the time pressures, uncertainties, and misperceptions that might lead rapidly up the ladder of escalation in any scenario.
Jacobsen’s book is based primarily on interviews with former government officials, miliary officers, and scientists – including some who have been Cipher Brief experts or contributors. The book is full of facts and figures from those interviews and the written sources cited at the end. The author uses nine text boxes, which she calls mini-history lessons, to disgorge even more details on such subjects as the contents of the President’s nuclear football. Some of the detail – for example, that the 2019 Nebraska floods damaged 118,000 square feet of Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) space at the U.S. Strategic Command – is interesting but not directly relevant to the main theme of the book.
The Cipher Brief hosts expert-level briefings on national security issues for Subscriber+Members that help provide context around today’s national security issues and what they mean for business. Upgrade your status to Subscriber+today.
With so many facts and figures running around the pages, it is no surprise that there are errors or misleading statements. For example, the author credits the National Reconnaissance Office with the government’s analysis of imagery when most of that responsibility falls within the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. She writes erroneously that John Kennedy was the last U.S. President to serve in combat forgetting about George H. W. Bush.
The book will be infuriating in places to those well steeped in the theory and practice of deterrence and arms control. Although Jacobsen cites some of the key works of deterrence literature and interviewed many well-respected experts, her text conveys few of the insights and nuances from the vast literature and experience of nuclear strategy and even of debates over the ethics of nuclear war.
The author seems breathless in her discovery that millions or even billions would die in a nuclear war, often repeats key statistics about the numbers and capabilities of weapons as if to pound them into the consciousness of the reader, and throws around polemics about the miliary industrial complex and government secrecy that detract from the main message of the book — the relentless rush toward the extinction consequences of the scenario that she paints.
Perhaps the most maddening sentence in the book for many readers of The Cipher Brief is that “no one did anything substantial to prevent nuclear World War III.” To the contrary, this is what many of us in the national security community have spent our lives doing – at least so far successfully — from the end of World War II to the present.
The author seems to think that deterrence itself is evil, but the strategy has arguably kept major powers from engaging in conflict for decades. Policymakers and military commanders drew back from escalation during crises because they were rightly concerned that no one could predict whether an escalating conflict might lead to full-scale nuclear war. That was the point of deterrence, which was strengthened by a series of arms control agreements, confidence building measures, and intelligence programs that were designed to reduce uncertainty and lower the threat of catastrophe.
It’s not just for the President anymore. Are you getting your daily national security briefing?Subscriber+Members have exclusive access to the Open Source Collection Daily Brief, keeping you up to date on global events impacting national security. It pays to be a Subscriber+Member.
Still, Jacobsen might be right in her visceral response to the dangers of nuclear war. We may all have just been lucky to avoid accidental conflict and miscalculation, but the odds may now be against us. We live in a world with a growing number of nuclear weapons states, and we are not confident about current leaders’ understanding of the awesome power of nuclear weapons and the certainty of their own destruction in a general conflict.
The fabric of international arms control and nonproliferation agreements that has provided strategic stability for decades is fraying, and the future of treaties and international norms that have reduced military threats and provided predictability and transparency is uncertain. The world is entering a new nuclear arms race with a growing number of participants.
So read Nuclear War to be reminded of the horrors that may await us. Better still go watch The Day After. And be grateful for the wisdom and dedication of those entrusted with the control of nuclear weapons since 1945. But be afraid that those throughout the world that control such weapons in the next 79 years may not be as wise or as lucky.
Nuclear War: A Scenario earns a respectable 2 out of 4 trench coats
The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.
Interested in submitting a book review? Send an email to [email protected] with your idea.
Sign up for our free Undercover newsletter to make sure you stay on top of all of the new releases and expert reviews.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business.