Nuclear War, a Scenario
Annie Jacobsen
Transworld Publishers, Penguin Random House, 2024
You’ve got to read this book. You’ve just got to. I read it in two days, not because it brought me happiness, or peace and joy; not because it changed my life, or altered my world view; not even because it was a page turner – although clearly it was. Its compulsion rather resided in its authenticity. The book was so carefully researched, referenced, and annotated, that it was hard to keep in mind that the scenario was imagined and not real.
Spoiler alert: if you want to read the book without this trailer, stop now. But make sure you buy the book and read it.
Annie Jacobsen conjures a scenario in which North Korea, with all its paranoia, and its known long range ballistic missile capacity, launches a surprise attack on the United States. Three missiles are launched. One burns up on re-entry. The other two hit their targets – a nuclear power station in California, and the Pentagon, in Arlington County Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington DC. In the short time that it takes for these missiles to traverse the globe, the US detects their approach, and advises the president, who authorises a counterattack on Pyongyang.
But here’s the rub. The retaliatory missiles must cross Russian soil. And in all the blind panic and confusion of war, the US fails in its attempts to inform Russia that they themselves are not under attack. Now Russia is confronted with the threat which faced the US barely thirty minutes previously. Apparently, the US has launched a full scale attack in their direction. Ergo, they respond, with an all-out attack upon the US.
It does not end well. The word Armageddon comes to mind. And “nuclear winter”. This is what will happen if things get out of hand.
Annie Jacobsen based her scenario on a lengthy series of conversations with people in the US military who have spent their professional lives in defence. (Should that read “defense”?) So in a sense all of the putative scenarios are real; something like each of them has already occurred. She doesn’t pull her punches. The sheer hellishness of a nuclear apocalypse is graphically depicted. When I read some truly gruesome descriptions, I thought, this is a bit over the top. But no. I understand why Annie Jacobsen is spelling it out. She wants people, she wants us, to understand what the reality of nuclear warfare would mean.
One of the most upsetting, perhaps the most upsetting, description in the book is not of a conjured scenario, but actually of something which really did occur, at Omega Site, in the Los Alamos woods, in May 1946. A physicist, one Louis Slotin, was working on a plutonium bomb core. Slotin accidentally dropped a nuclear sphere, which went critical. There was a quick flash of blue light, and a wave of intense heat. Nine days later, Slotin died from acute radiation poisoning. The description of his gradual physical deterioration is so gruesome that I almost wished I had been spared the graphic detail, but I can quite see why Annie Jacobsen opted to spell it out. It is peculiar that one can read, in an apparent state of equanimity, of the demise of billions of people; but that it is the description of the demise of one single individual that turns out to be so upsetting. She drives her central thesis home: the doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction” is, truly, mad.
The core idea of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence is that a nuclear attack will instantly result in nuclear retaliation. The system is “locked and loaded”. Annie Jacobsen’s book shows how frighteningly dangerous the nuclear stand-off is.
Some people might argue that there is nothing to be gained by being frightened to death. Henry Kissinger, with the crackling voice of an oracular cicada, said as much when the 1983 film, The Day After, starring Jason Robards, was broadcast by ABC, and caused widespread panic, much as had Orson Welles’ 1938 radio drama of his (near) namesake’s The War of the Worlds. On its first showing, The Day After was watched by over 100,000,000 people. What is the point, asked Kissinger, of putting everybody into a state of blind panic? But in this regard I side with Nikita Khrushchev, whose remarks are recorded on the frontispiece of another book well worth reading, Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly, a New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Allen lane, 2021):
Of course, I was scared. It would have been insane not to be scared, I was frightened about what could happen to my country and all the countries that would be devastated by a nuclear war. If being frightened meant that I helped avert such insanity, then I’m glad I was frightened. One of the problems in the world today is that not enough people are sufficiently frightened by danger of nuclear war.
That still rings true today. There is a fearful complacency apparent in the attitude of our politicians, who champion the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. They say it has kept us safe for 80 years. Maybe, but if Mr Putin chose to deploy a “tactical” nuclear weapon above Kiev, how would we respond? It’s a question politicians dodge. Because of the deterrent, it won’t happen. Yes, but what if it did happen? It won’t. When Putin says, “I’m not bluffing”, he’s bluffing. Thus is a problem kicked into the long grass.
How are we going to rid the world of these hellish contraptions? Annie Jacobsen doesn’t tell us. Perhaps that’s her next book. I hope so. We need our best minds to grapple with this issue, not to pretend that it is not a real and present danger. The Prime Minister is currently much exercised about a TV drama, Adolescence, all about toxic masculinity. He wants it to be aired in schools. In a similar vein, I think Transworld Publishers should send copies of Annie Jacobsen’s book to every member of the Cabinet.
I wonder what Sir Keir has written, in his letter of last resort, to the submariners aboard Trident. In the event that BBC Radio 4 stops broadcasting, I hope he has advised them to deactivate and shut down all the missiles, and sail to a friendly port, if they can find one. After all, if the UK has ceased to exist, it will prove that the nuclear deterrent doesn’t work, and has never worked. So I sincerely hope that Trident is a bluff. But if it is, it’s a hellish expensive one.
jamescalumcampbell 