“Today…every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”
John F. Kennedy.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s citizens and schoolchildren in the USA practiced atomic bomb drills, and nuclear disaster movies such as Dr Strangelove (1964), Fail Safe (1964) and On the Beach (1959) pulled in curious but nervous audiences.
Since the end of the Cold War, there has been little overt concern over the threat of nuclear war. This seems to be changing. Conflicts involving Russia and Israel, both nuclear-armed countries, together with the sabre-rattling of North Korea which has developed a nuclear weapons program and Iran which is on the verge of producing its first nuclear weapon, have reminded us that the threat of nuclear war may be growing rather than receding.
Annie Jacobsen’s timely book Nuclear War: A Scenario is a reminder of the risk and consequences of nuclear war. Jacobsen does this not just by describing the destruction and long term effects of nuclear war, but by focusing, on the minute-by-minute decisions that would have to be made during an ‘alert’ and by whom.
In her example scenario North Korea has launched a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USA using an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). The launch is detected immediately and an alert is sounded. But given the stakes, a second corroboration is required before any retaliation response by America is considered. It is estimated that the nuclear missile will take 26 minutes to strike its target on the East Coast.
Eight minutes after the North Korean launch, Long Range radar provides the necessary secondary corroboration of an attacking ICBM. Interception is attempted but is extremely difficult and fails. The President now has a six minute window to make a decision. The President orders US forces to move to Defense Readiness Condition 1 (DEFCON 1) status.
However it’s not known for sure whether there are nuclear warheads inside the ICBM. Does the President order a retaliatory strike on North Korea? The target sites in North Korea are close to both the Chinese and Russian borders. He wants to contact Russia but can’t get through.
In the end the President orders a nuclear decapitation strike on North Korea involving 82 nuclear warheads aiming for 82 North Korean key targets. The President and key advisers are evacuated from Washington DC, the target of North Korea’s ICBM.
The ICBM strikes Washington. Within ten seconds a fireball obliterates the center of American democracy. Within a nine mile ring of the blast most structures collapse, everything is on fire. Metals melt. The nuclear flash burns skin off peoples bodies. Survivors die of shock, heart attack, blood loss. One to two million people are dead or dying.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) issues a text warning to all Americans “U.S. Under Nuclear Attack. Seek Immediate Shelter. This is not a Drill”. Panic sets in.
Russia detects a nuclear explosion on America’s east coast. They also detect America’s ICBM retaliatory volley. To hit North Korea, the U.S. missiles have to fly over Russia. The Red Alert sounds in Russia. Unable to get clarity over what’s happening within their short decision time window, the Russian president orders a major counter-attack on the USA. One thousand missiles are launched at targets across the United States.
It is only forty-four minutes since North Korea launched their ICBM at Washington.
This is an extremely brief synopsis of the example scenario. The book goes on to consider the next twenty-eight minutes in as much fear-inducing detail as the first forty-four minutes. The final section of the book describes the aftermath of a deadly nuclear winter.
The power of this book is not the plausibility of the attack/response scenario but rather the use of an example scenario to explore nuclear and missile technology, the measures that are currently in place against a nuclear threat, the steps that have been planned out in that event, and the effects of a nuclear strike. It details the technology at the multiple U.S. monitoring and defense sites, the President’s ‘safe’ bunker, the transport readiness, the nuclear codes, the chain of command, and illustrates the vulnerabilities and how easily mistakes could be made.
It has been said that during the Cold War, Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) prevented direct war between the nuclear-armed powers, so that the nuclear deterrence kept the peace between superpowers. However that ignores the near misses due to faulty alarms when common sense fortunately prevailed.
We now have nuclear-armed states that are more unpredictable, particularly if they are threatened. The example scenario illustrates the knife edge we live on and how naïve the safety drills of the 1950s were.
“One of the problems in the world today is that not enough people are sufficiently frightened by the danger of nuclear war.”
Nikita Khrushchev
Annie Jacobsen’s book reminds us how close to oblivion we really are. It is worth reading for that reason alone. By using an example scenario there is a thriller thrown in as a bonus.
The reviewer is a co-author of Court of the Grandchildren, a novel set in 2050s America.
Main image credit: Wikilimages via Pixabay
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