Nuclear War, A scenario review: What if the US faces a first strike?

Nuclear War: A scenario
Annie Jacobsen (Torva)

IN 1985, US President Ronald Reagan and USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev declared in a joint statement that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”. A year later, the number of atomic weapons globally began to fall from a peak of nearly 70,000. By 1989, the cold war was ending, and the world rejoiced at being less likely to die in a flash of light at 100 million °C – more than six times hotter than the centre of the sun.

Reporter Annie Jacobsen was nominated for a Pulitzer prize in 2016 and has written for the Jack Ryan TV series. Her extraordinary book Nuclear War: A scenario reminds us the nuclear nightmare never really ended, it just shifted from a duel to a Mexican standoff. She has consulted scientists, soldiers, emergency management experts and presidential advisors to imagine a scenario in which one of the world’s eight other nuclear powers attacks the US.

Her book delivers more detail than has been available to the public before. She even managed to get the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to declassify the origins of the “football”. This is a suitcase carried by a military aide who accompanies the US president at all times, containing the emergency action documents needed for them to initiate a nuclear strike.

We are taken minute by minute through the flight of an intercontinental ballistic missile as it journeys towards the US, carrying three nuclear warheads – a fraction of the total held by the US and Russia. When it strikes, millions are killed, buildings are vaporised, animals are burned alive in zoos and the first mushroom cloud is uploaded to social media.

But posting very quickly becomes a thing of the past as more bombs cut electricity. “The electromagnetic pulse of the bomb obliterates all radio, internet, and CCTV,” notes Jacobsen, an unsparing narrator. Panic, paranoia, comms breakdown and the failure of countermeasures (only ever tested in simulation) soon bring in other nations. Each is poised for a “decapitation strike”, where a country targets its enemy’s nuclear arsenal and the officials with the power to authorise action.

The speed at which Jacobsen’s conflict escalates explains why the Doomsday Clock, which shows how close we are to catastrophe, was set at an unprecedented 90 seconds to midnight in January 2023.

Despite talks and promises of disarmament, Jacobsen outlines how the modern world is no more stable than during the days of the so-called Iron Curtain. Nuclear submarines roam international waters, with the USS Nebraska alone capable of “unleashing twenty times more destruction than all the explosives used in World War II, including both atomic bombs dropped on Japan”, she writes.

As well as graphic descriptions of what nuclear winds do to humans, Jacobsen describes the “nuclear winter” in detail. This is forecast to happen when 150 teragrams (150 million tonnes) of soot is lifted into the upper troposphere by the blast. Survivors will subsist under a sky thick with cyanides and vinyl chlorides from burning buildings. The attack’s radiation will decay, but take about 24,000 years to do so.

At the outset of her terrifying account, Jacobsen reveals that the US’s Single Integrated Operational Plan – a first-strike system active from 1961 until 2003 against the USSR, China and Soviet-aligned states – wasn’t hampered by the potential retaliatory attacks that would kill an estimated 100 million US citizens and many more millions in China, Russia and other countries.

After the cold war drama, Jacobsen leaves us with an opinion of her own: “Nuclear war is insane. Every person I interviewed for this book knows this.”

George Bass is a writer based in Kent, UK