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Nuclear War: A Scenario
There is only one scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end the world as we know it in a matter of hours: nuclear war. And one of the triggers for that war would be a nuclear missile inbound toward the United States.
Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds’ notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.
Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds’ notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.
400 pages, Hardcover
Published March 26, 2024
About the author
Annie Jacobsen
9 books1,832 followersANNIE JACOBSEN is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author. Her books include: AREA 51; OPERATION PAPERCLIP; THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN; PHENOMENA; SURPRISE, KILL VANISH; and FIRST PLATOON.
Her newest book, NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO, publishes March 26, 2024.
Jacobsen’s books have been named Best of the Year and Most Anticipated by outlets including The Washington Post, USA Today, The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Apple, and Amazon. She has appeared on countless TV programs and media platforms—from PBS Newshour to Joe Rogan—discussing war, weapons, government secrecy, and national security.
She also writes and produces TV, including Tom Clancy’s JACK RYAN.
Jacobsen graduated from Princeton University where she was Captain of the Women’s Ice Hockey Team. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Kevin and their two sons.
Her newest book, NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO, publishes March 26, 2024.
Jacobsen’s books have been named Best of the Year and Most Anticipated by outlets including The Washington Post, USA Today, The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Apple, and Amazon. She has appeared on countless TV programs and media platforms—from PBS Newshour to Joe Rogan—discussing war, weapons, government secrecy, and national security.
She also writes and produces TV, including Tom Clancy’s JACK RYAN.
Jacobsen graduated from Princeton University where she was Captain of the Women’s Ice Hockey Team. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Kevin and their two sons.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 872 reviews
February 10, 2024
This book terrified me—and I wrote it.
As an investigative journalist, I've previously written 6 books about military and intelligence programs designed to prevent, or deter, Nuclear World War III. Along the way, I've often wondered: what would happen if deterrence failed? In NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO, I take the reader through the shocking, systematic reality of it all—from nuclear launch to nuclear winter. Based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who built the weapons, were privy to the response plans, and were responsible for the decisions should they needed to be made, in this new book I take readers behind the curtain with never-before publicly reported details.
The premise of using nuclear weapons is madness. It is irrational. And yet here we are. Russian president Vladimir Putin recently said that he is “not bluffing” about the possibility of using weapons of mass destruction. North Korea recently accused the U.S. of having “a sinister intention to provoke a nuclear war.” We all sit on the razor’s edge. What if deterrence fails? “Humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently warned the world. “This is madness,” he says. “We must reverse course.” How true.
The fundamental idea behind this book is to demonstrate, in appalling detail, just how horrifying nuclear war would be. Join the conversation. Read NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO.
As an investigative journalist, I've previously written 6 books about military and intelligence programs designed to prevent, or deter, Nuclear World War III. Along the way, I've often wondered: what would happen if deterrence failed? In NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO, I take the reader through the shocking, systematic reality of it all—from nuclear launch to nuclear winter. Based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who built the weapons, were privy to the response plans, and were responsible for the decisions should they needed to be made, in this new book I take readers behind the curtain with never-before publicly reported details.
The premise of using nuclear weapons is madness. It is irrational. And yet here we are. Russian president Vladimir Putin recently said that he is “not bluffing” about the possibility of using weapons of mass destruction. North Korea recently accused the U.S. of having “a sinister intention to provoke a nuclear war.” We all sit on the razor’s edge. What if deterrence fails? “Humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently warned the world. “This is madness,” he says. “We must reverse course.” How true.
The fundamental idea behind this book is to demonstrate, in appalling detail, just how horrifying nuclear war would be. Join the conversation. Read NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO.
January 29, 2024
*4.5 stars*
I have to admit to harbouring some serious doubts about requesting this particular title, but in the end, the desire to know what would happen behind the scenes, got the better of me.
Based on interviews with both military and civilian experts, ‘Nuclear War’ A Scenario is hugely informative, and details minute by minute how a nuclear attack on the United States by North Korea, might play out, and what would happen to the target areas and the people and establishments within it - and importantly, the response to these attacks.
I was astounded to learn about various countries’ nuclear capacities, all of them meant to act as a deterrent, but in reality just waiting to be unleashed in a moment of madness by some rogue leader.
The results of a nuclear war are so terrifying and utterly devastating, that surely only a madman would be evil enough to launch insanely dangerous nuclear missiles, given that a nuclear response of immense proportions from their adversaries would be the only outcome.
NO ONE would win this particular war! One nuclear missile will provoke two dozen in return - this is not a movie, there will be no superhero to save the world. The entire conflict bringing about Armageddon would last for an hour, yes just 1 HOUR!
Exceptionally well researched, the author’s sources are impeccable, ably supported by technical information. This is obviously frightening stuff, but it’s a hugely powerful, sobering and compelling read. Highly recommended.
*Thank you to Netgalley and Random House UK, Transworld Publishers for an ARC in exchange for an honest unbiased review *
I have to admit to harbouring some serious doubts about requesting this particular title, but in the end, the desire to know what would happen behind the scenes, got the better of me.
Based on interviews with both military and civilian experts, ‘Nuclear War’ A Scenario is hugely informative, and details minute by minute how a nuclear attack on the United States by North Korea, might play out, and what would happen to the target areas and the people and establishments within it - and importantly, the response to these attacks.
I was astounded to learn about various countries’ nuclear capacities, all of them meant to act as a deterrent, but in reality just waiting to be unleashed in a moment of madness by some rogue leader.
The results of a nuclear war are so terrifying and utterly devastating, that surely only a madman would be evil enough to launch insanely dangerous nuclear missiles, given that a nuclear response of immense proportions from their adversaries would be the only outcome.
NO ONE would win this particular war! One nuclear missile will provoke two dozen in return - this is not a movie, there will be no superhero to save the world. The entire conflict bringing about Armageddon would last for an hour, yes just 1 HOUR!
Exceptionally well researched, the author’s sources are impeccable, ably supported by technical information. This is obviously frightening stuff, but it’s a hugely powerful, sobering and compelling read. Highly recommended.
*Thank you to Netgalley and Random House UK, Transworld Publishers for an ARC in exchange for an honest unbiased review *
December 14, 2023
QUICK TAKE: here's what you need to know: THIS IS THE SCARIEST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ IN MY ENTIRE LIFE AND I HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT IT EVERY NIGHT SINCE I READ IT A FEW MONTHS AGO. YOU WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AFTER YOU READ THIS. GOOD LUCK.
May 11, 2024
“A 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend… In the first fraction of a millisecond after this thermonuclear bomb strikes the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., there is light. Soft x-ray light with a very short wavelength. The light superheats the surrounding air to millions of degrees, creating a massive fireball that expands at millions of miles per hour. Within a few seconds, this fireball increases to a diameter of a little more than a mile…its light and heat so intense that concrete surfaces explode, metal objects melt or evaporate, stone shatters, humans instantaneously convert into combusting carbon…”
- Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario
In Nuclear War, Annie Jacobsen attempts to imagine an event that has never happened, but that could happen, and that if it does happen, will only happen once: the doomsday of a full-scale nuclear exchange.
There is a robust genre of post-apocalyptic books, movies, video games, and television shows dwelling on the aftermath of a war waged with atomic weapons. In Nuclear War, Jacobsen goes a different route, envisaging how the war itself would unfold. As such, this is a tough title to classify. Though it is deeply researched, it is also speculative, meaning it is not true nonfiction. At the same time, while the central event is – thankfully – fictional, this is not truly a novel, though there is some rather cheesy dialogue and characterizations that distract from Nuclear War’s potency.
Ultimately, the best category in which to place Nuclear War is horror. Pure, unadulterated horror.
***
Without giving away too much, the “scenario” presented by Jacobsen begins with a limited nuclear attack on the United States, which then escalates due to retaliatory measures. Unless you literally do not know what happens when an atomic bomb explodes – in which case, I don’t know what to tell ya – it’s not a spoiler to say that everything ends with the world’s great cities in irradiated ruins, and five-thousand years of recorded history given its final, glowing period.
***
To tell this tale of mercilessly splitting atoms, Jacobsen divides Nuclear War into four separate sections. The first section is entirely factual, and gives an extremely brief primer on how we began the twentieth century moving about on horses, and started the twenty-first with nine separate nations stockpiling enough thermonuclear weaponry to take the world all the way back to the original dawn.
Unfortunately, this opening showcases all of Jacobsen’s worst traits as a writer, including disorganization, reductionism, and a tendency to highlight her own journalistic efforts within the text, at the cost of smooth storytelling.
Beyond that, part one is almost useless contextually, and serves mostly as a scattershot critique of America’s nuclear posture, filled with heightened rhetoric that includes comparing the United States’s single integrated operational plan (SIOP) to the Final Solution. There are trenchant points to be made about Cold War-era nuclear planning – in the U.S., and elsewhere – but Jacobsen does not make them. Additionally, she entirely fails to realistically describe why her imagined war began in the first place.
***
Thankfully, the rest of Nuclear War is better constructed, more focused, and effectively terrifying. Sections two, three, and four are broken into twenty-four minute increments that describe the initial 1.2 hours of Armageddon. With a galloping pace, frequent place-stamped changes in location, and the recitation of hardware specifications reminiscent of the techno-thrillers of Tom Clancy, Larry Bond, and Ian Slater, Jacobsen takes us from the first warning of launch, to the last explosions caused by multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles.
The time-sensitive nature of Nuclear War initially felt gimmicky, especially when Jacobsen is narrating from second to second. Eventually, though, her purpose becomes clear. Though much is automated, with early-warning satellites detecting the launch, radar stations projecting missile routes, and computers calculating the time-on-target – the big, fateful decisions are still made by human beings. As Jacobsen forcefully demonstrates, it’s asking a lot of a man or woman to decide the fate of the world in a time-frame measured in minutes, all while knowing that you, your family, and several million of your neighbors will soon be dead.
***
Interspersed throughout the imagined scenario are a series of “history lessons” that are offset in grayscale, and which tackle various subjects that don’t fit comfortably within the main narrative. This proved to be my favorite part of Nuclear War, and I wish there’d been more of them, because they are absolutely fascinating.
For example, one lesson discusses the origin of the infamous “nuclear football” that is always at the president’s side. Another describes the workings of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Once an ICBM gets going, they can’t be withdrawn, and there is no real way to stop them. Due to this, Jacobsen describes how two experts proposed putting a Reaper drone into the air twenty-four hours a day off the coast of North Korea, ready to take out a missile just after launch, the only time they’re vulnerable. A third subsection discusses the role of submarines, and how they dramatically cutdown on the available time to respond – or escape – from a missile barrage.
***
As Jacobsen notes – more than a bit ruefully – the United States has spent trillions of dollars preparing for the unpreparable. This includes the development, construction, and upkeep of the actual weapons, the bases and manpower devoted to servicing them, and a constellation of classified sites dedicated to detecting launches against North America. According to Jacobsen, much of this money is squandered. In particular, she comes close to ridiculing the Missile Defense Agency, and its forty-four – forty four! – interceptors, which don’t really work anyway.
***
This is the third book I’ve read by Jacobsen, even though I’ve never been impressed with her style. In my experience, she has incredible premises marred by so-so execution. Here, the kindest thing I can say about the writing is that it’s not distracting most of the time.
That said, it is distracting some of the time. Partly this is a result of Jacobsen’s insistence that we be impressed with her effort. While most authors put their endnotes at the end, one of the first things you come across upon opening Nuclear War is a list of interview subjects. Throughout the book, she will often let you know – awkwardly – that she talked to an important person in order to get a certain opinion or piece of information.
Beyond this, Jacobsen occasionally relies on portentous, overheated prose, which undercuts the tension and dread her material otherwise evokes. For some reason, Jacobsen seems to think that you – yes, you, dear reader – might believe that hundreds of H-bombs dropping like rain isn’t that big of a deal. So, she keeps reminding you, over and over – as though it’s a secret she uncovered in the archives – that it’s actually a bad thing.
***
Despite these flaws, Jacobsen makes plenty of good points. Some insist you ponder big ethical decisions, such as the so-called “launch on warning” strategy, which calls for a retaliatory nuclear strike once sensors have determined that the enemy has sent forth its missiles. Based on the premise that a first-strike is going to target your own stockpile, “launch on warning” decrees that you gotta use ‘em or lose ‘em. The problem – of course – is that sensors can be wrong, meaning that your “retaliatory” strike is actually a “first strike” that is going to end mankind.
Some of Jacobsen’s other points are just going to keep you up at night. Having trouble sleeping? Well, add to your worries the likelihood that every U.S. state has at least one spot whose coordinates have been typed into a Russian ICBM topped by a multi-megaton MIRV. You might also toss-and-turn thinking about the effects of an electromagnetic pulse erasing time’s progress, or the out-of-control forest fires that burn as a side-effect, or the worldwide famine, or the reality that you probably won’t see any of that, because it’ll all be over if you’re anywhere near a population center.
***
The whole point of a book like Nuclear War is to serve as a warning. Thus, it belongs on a continuum of media that includes the novel On the Beach and the television movie The Day After, which purportedly changed Ronald Reagan’s geopolitical outlook.
In terms of messaging, Nuclear War does not really contain a coherent call to action. At least, there are no pragmatic suggestions for making everyone safer from a radioactive nightmare. Jacobsen definitely makes a meal out of American nuclear stockpiles, American strategic plans, and American dollars spent, implying this is a problem with a unilateral fix. But it isn’t.
If the United States got rid of everything tomorrow – detached all the warheads, brought all the subs to port, turned all the ICBM silos into homes for mad-eyed preppers – nothing will have changed. Russia – which has the largest nuke force to begin with – isn’t getting rid of theirs. North Korea – which has starved its own people and stolen from others to create an armament – isn’t getting rid of theirs. China – which is massively increasing their atomic weaponry – isn’t getting rid of theirs. India and Pakistan – tensely facing off since the Partition – aren’t getting rid of theirs. Israel – which believes itself to exist under a continuing existential threat – isn’t getting rid of theirs.
The harsh reality is that “mutually assured destruction” is the only practical deterrence. Part of that deterrence rests on the understanding that once those missiles are let loose upon the world, most of that world will end. It is in evoking the beyond-grim results of such a conflict that Nuclear War is most effective. The message is to get leaders to see what they’ve done, before they do it.
- Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario
In Nuclear War, Annie Jacobsen attempts to imagine an event that has never happened, but that could happen, and that if it does happen, will only happen once: the doomsday of a full-scale nuclear exchange.
There is a robust genre of post-apocalyptic books, movies, video games, and television shows dwelling on the aftermath of a war waged with atomic weapons. In Nuclear War, Jacobsen goes a different route, envisaging how the war itself would unfold. As such, this is a tough title to classify. Though it is deeply researched, it is also speculative, meaning it is not true nonfiction. At the same time, while the central event is – thankfully – fictional, this is not truly a novel, though there is some rather cheesy dialogue and characterizations that distract from Nuclear War’s potency.
Ultimately, the best category in which to place Nuclear War is horror. Pure, unadulterated horror.
***
Without giving away too much, the “scenario” presented by Jacobsen begins with a limited nuclear attack on the United States, which then escalates due to retaliatory measures. Unless you literally do not know what happens when an atomic bomb explodes – in which case, I don’t know what to tell ya – it’s not a spoiler to say that everything ends with the world’s great cities in irradiated ruins, and five-thousand years of recorded history given its final, glowing period.
***
To tell this tale of mercilessly splitting atoms, Jacobsen divides Nuclear War into four separate sections. The first section is entirely factual, and gives an extremely brief primer on how we began the twentieth century moving about on horses, and started the twenty-first with nine separate nations stockpiling enough thermonuclear weaponry to take the world all the way back to the original dawn.
Unfortunately, this opening showcases all of Jacobsen’s worst traits as a writer, including disorganization, reductionism, and a tendency to highlight her own journalistic efforts within the text, at the cost of smooth storytelling.
Beyond that, part one is almost useless contextually, and serves mostly as a scattershot critique of America’s nuclear posture, filled with heightened rhetoric that includes comparing the United States’s single integrated operational plan (SIOP) to the Final Solution. There are trenchant points to be made about Cold War-era nuclear planning – in the U.S., and elsewhere – but Jacobsen does not make them. Additionally, she entirely fails to realistically describe why her imagined war began in the first place.
***
Thankfully, the rest of Nuclear War is better constructed, more focused, and effectively terrifying. Sections two, three, and four are broken into twenty-four minute increments that describe the initial 1.2 hours of Armageddon. With a galloping pace, frequent place-stamped changes in location, and the recitation of hardware specifications reminiscent of the techno-thrillers of Tom Clancy, Larry Bond, and Ian Slater, Jacobsen takes us from the first warning of launch, to the last explosions caused by multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles.
The time-sensitive nature of Nuclear War initially felt gimmicky, especially when Jacobsen is narrating from second to second. Eventually, though, her purpose becomes clear. Though much is automated, with early-warning satellites detecting the launch, radar stations projecting missile routes, and computers calculating the time-on-target – the big, fateful decisions are still made by human beings. As Jacobsen forcefully demonstrates, it’s asking a lot of a man or woman to decide the fate of the world in a time-frame measured in minutes, all while knowing that you, your family, and several million of your neighbors will soon be dead.
***
Interspersed throughout the imagined scenario are a series of “history lessons” that are offset in grayscale, and which tackle various subjects that don’t fit comfortably within the main narrative. This proved to be my favorite part of Nuclear War, and I wish there’d been more of them, because they are absolutely fascinating.
For example, one lesson discusses the origin of the infamous “nuclear football” that is always at the president’s side. Another describes the workings of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Once an ICBM gets going, they can’t be withdrawn, and there is no real way to stop them. Due to this, Jacobsen describes how two experts proposed putting a Reaper drone into the air twenty-four hours a day off the coast of North Korea, ready to take out a missile just after launch, the only time they’re vulnerable. A third subsection discusses the role of submarines, and how they dramatically cutdown on the available time to respond – or escape – from a missile barrage.
***
As Jacobsen notes – more than a bit ruefully – the United States has spent trillions of dollars preparing for the unpreparable. This includes the development, construction, and upkeep of the actual weapons, the bases and manpower devoted to servicing them, and a constellation of classified sites dedicated to detecting launches against North America. According to Jacobsen, much of this money is squandered. In particular, she comes close to ridiculing the Missile Defense Agency, and its forty-four – forty four! – interceptors, which don’t really work anyway.
***
This is the third book I’ve read by Jacobsen, even though I’ve never been impressed with her style. In my experience, she has incredible premises marred by so-so execution. Here, the kindest thing I can say about the writing is that it’s not distracting most of the time.
That said, it is distracting some of the time. Partly this is a result of Jacobsen’s insistence that we be impressed with her effort. While most authors put their endnotes at the end, one of the first things you come across upon opening Nuclear War is a list of interview subjects. Throughout the book, she will often let you know – awkwardly – that she talked to an important person in order to get a certain opinion or piece of information.
Beyond this, Jacobsen occasionally relies on portentous, overheated prose, which undercuts the tension and dread her material otherwise evokes. For some reason, Jacobsen seems to think that you – yes, you, dear reader – might believe that hundreds of H-bombs dropping like rain isn’t that big of a deal. So, she keeps reminding you, over and over – as though it’s a secret she uncovered in the archives – that it’s actually a bad thing.
***
Despite these flaws, Jacobsen makes plenty of good points. Some insist you ponder big ethical decisions, such as the so-called “launch on warning” strategy, which calls for a retaliatory nuclear strike once sensors have determined that the enemy has sent forth its missiles. Based on the premise that a first-strike is going to target your own stockpile, “launch on warning” decrees that you gotta use ‘em or lose ‘em. The problem – of course – is that sensors can be wrong, meaning that your “retaliatory” strike is actually a “first strike” that is going to end mankind.
Some of Jacobsen’s other points are just going to keep you up at night. Having trouble sleeping? Well, add to your worries the likelihood that every U.S. state has at least one spot whose coordinates have been typed into a Russian ICBM topped by a multi-megaton MIRV. You might also toss-and-turn thinking about the effects of an electromagnetic pulse erasing time’s progress, or the out-of-control forest fires that burn as a side-effect, or the worldwide famine, or the reality that you probably won’t see any of that, because it’ll all be over if you’re anywhere near a population center.
***
The whole point of a book like Nuclear War is to serve as a warning. Thus, it belongs on a continuum of media that includes the novel On the Beach and the television movie The Day After, which purportedly changed Ronald Reagan’s geopolitical outlook.
In terms of messaging, Nuclear War does not really contain a coherent call to action. At least, there are no pragmatic suggestions for making everyone safer from a radioactive nightmare. Jacobsen definitely makes a meal out of American nuclear stockpiles, American strategic plans, and American dollars spent, implying this is a problem with a unilateral fix. But it isn’t.
If the United States got rid of everything tomorrow – detached all the warheads, brought all the subs to port, turned all the ICBM silos into homes for mad-eyed preppers – nothing will have changed. Russia – which has the largest nuke force to begin with – isn’t getting rid of theirs. North Korea – which has starved its own people and stolen from others to create an armament – isn’t getting rid of theirs. China – which is massively increasing their atomic weaponry – isn’t getting rid of theirs. India and Pakistan – tensely facing off since the Partition – aren’t getting rid of theirs. Israel – which believes itself to exist under a continuing existential threat – isn’t getting rid of theirs.
The harsh reality is that “mutually assured destruction” is the only practical deterrence. Part of that deterrence rests on the understanding that once those missiles are let loose upon the world, most of that world will end. It is in evoking the beyond-grim results of such a conflict that Nuclear War is most effective. The message is to get leaders to see what they’ve done, before they do it.
April 14, 2024
The survivors will envy the dead.
- Nikita Khrushchev
This book is terrifying and tedious at the same time. In fact, I might say it’s borderline unreadable – not because of the ghastly scenario it spells out but because of the horrible uncontrolled gushings of military acronyms falling like fallout on each and every page
SIOP
NORTHCOM
STRATCOM
SBIRS
FEMA
COOP
SLBM
The Football
The Black Book
SecDef
KNEECAP
And so on, but also because of the inevitable GIGANTISM of everything being described here : because everything concerning nuclear war is extreme ! The power of the bombs, the vastnesses of the military bases, the complexities of the delivery systems, the silos, the subs, the casualties, the deaths, the deaths. I must say that Annie Jacobsen appears to be obsessed with the size of everything :
The Ivy Mike prototype bomb weighed around 80 tons (160,000 pounds), an instrument of destruction itself so physically enormous it had to be constructed inside a corrugated aluminium building eighty-eight feet long and forty-six feet wide.
The underground Battle Deck, a 1000 square foot, concrete-walled room
Some 720 million gallons of sewer-infested waters flooding the base, ruining 137 buildings and destroying 1 million square feet of workspace, including 118,000 square feet of Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility space (also known as SCIF space)
With its 16 petaflops of speed and 236 petabytes of storage capacity
This one-of-a-kind, stadium-sized, seagoing, self-propelled radar station weighs 50,000 tons, requires 1.9 million gallons of gas to run, can withstand 30-foot-tall waves, is larger than a football field, requires 86 crew members
CUT TO THE CHASE! WHAT HAPPENS ?
Annie imagines the following possibility :
1. North Korea fires a missile towards the USA, targeted on the Pentagon. This is spotted quickly but the Americans can’t tell what’s in the warhead – could be a dummy, could be biological or nuclear weapon. Might have been fired accidentally. The Americans try to shoot it down and don’t succeed, because, as the quote on p 73 says, it’s “akin to shooting a bullet with a bullet”. But I did not really understand this bit – as luck would have it, I’m writing this on 14 April 2024. Overnight, Iran sent around 300 drones and missiles towards Israel, and “almost all” of them were intercepted and shot down. Probably it’s because drones are easier to hit because they’re slower than an ICBM? But also they’re smaller! So I don’t know.
2. 17 minutes later, a second missile, fired from a Korean submarine off the coast of California, aimed at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, a nuclear plant. This second one detonates first.
3. Americans retaliate with 50 missiles aimed at N Korea. Because of limitations of range, these missiles have to go over the North Pole. Because of the known inadequacies of the Russian detection system (Tundra) they can’t tell the destination of over-the-pole missiles, so they could easily think it was Russia under attack, and that is what happens in this scenario. Because of the chaos of the NK attack, the Americans have not been able to get in touch with the Russian president. The whole thing from beginning to end has only taken 34 minutes.
4. The first missile hits the Pentagon; Washington DC is eliminated from American geography.
5. After that, things go downhill rapidly.
THE FOURTH WORLD WAR
Everybody knows it will be fought with bows and arrows, in about ten thousand years from now. The first chapters of Annie Jacobsen’s horrifying book are the best, dealing with the way the American military has successively considered the way a nuclear war should be conducted, exactly how many millions would die, how many cities should be deemed expendable and so forth. Because they were “governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink” they just got on with the assigned task, they never refused to contemplate the uncontemplatable. Everybody should read this part. This is where we are right now, flinging lighted matches around in a leaking gasoline storage depot.
The worst part of Annie’s book, which I would be most surprised if she doesn’t now regret, is the reason for the initial North Korean missile strike. Kim Jong Un, it seems, harboured a very deep grudge about photos released by Western sources showing satellite images of the Korean peninsula at night. The south was awash with bright electric light, the north was dark, and North Korea was ridiculed as “electricity poor”. To a mad king, this comparing image was like a poke in the eye…. What happens next is revenge for that insult.
Really, this is very bad! I hope no copies of this book end up in Pyongyang.
- Nikita Khrushchev
This book is terrifying and tedious at the same time. In fact, I might say it’s borderline unreadable – not because of the ghastly scenario it spells out but because of the horrible uncontrolled gushings of military acronyms falling like fallout on each and every page
SIOP
NORTHCOM
STRATCOM
SBIRS
FEMA
COOP
SLBM
The Football
The Black Book
SecDef
KNEECAP
And so on, but also because of the inevitable GIGANTISM of everything being described here : because everything concerning nuclear war is extreme ! The power of the bombs, the vastnesses of the military bases, the complexities of the delivery systems, the silos, the subs, the casualties, the deaths, the deaths. I must say that Annie Jacobsen appears to be obsessed with the size of everything :
The Ivy Mike prototype bomb weighed around 80 tons (160,000 pounds), an instrument of destruction itself so physically enormous it had to be constructed inside a corrugated aluminium building eighty-eight feet long and forty-six feet wide.
The underground Battle Deck, a 1000 square foot, concrete-walled room
Some 720 million gallons of sewer-infested waters flooding the base, ruining 137 buildings and destroying 1 million square feet of workspace, including 118,000 square feet of Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility space (also known as SCIF space)
With its 16 petaflops of speed and 236 petabytes of storage capacity
This one-of-a-kind, stadium-sized, seagoing, self-propelled radar station weighs 50,000 tons, requires 1.9 million gallons of gas to run, can withstand 30-foot-tall waves, is larger than a football field, requires 86 crew members
CUT TO THE CHASE! WHAT HAPPENS ?
Annie imagines the following possibility :
1. North Korea fires a missile towards the USA, targeted on the Pentagon. This is spotted quickly but the Americans can’t tell what’s in the warhead – could be a dummy, could be biological or nuclear weapon. Might have been fired accidentally. The Americans try to shoot it down and don’t succeed, because, as the quote on p 73 says, it’s “akin to shooting a bullet with a bullet”. But I did not really understand this bit – as luck would have it, I’m writing this on 14 April 2024. Overnight, Iran sent around 300 drones and missiles towards Israel, and “almost all” of them were intercepted and shot down. Probably it’s because drones are easier to hit because they’re slower than an ICBM? But also they’re smaller! So I don’t know.
2. 17 minutes later, a second missile, fired from a Korean submarine off the coast of California, aimed at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, a nuclear plant. This second one detonates first.
3. Americans retaliate with 50 missiles aimed at N Korea. Because of limitations of range, these missiles have to go over the North Pole. Because of the known inadequacies of the Russian detection system (Tundra) they can’t tell the destination of over-the-pole missiles, so they could easily think it was Russia under attack, and that is what happens in this scenario. Because of the chaos of the NK attack, the Americans have not been able to get in touch with the Russian president. The whole thing from beginning to end has only taken 34 minutes.
4. The first missile hits the Pentagon; Washington DC is eliminated from American geography.
5. After that, things go downhill rapidly.
THE FOURTH WORLD WAR
Everybody knows it will be fought with bows and arrows, in about ten thousand years from now. The first chapters of Annie Jacobsen’s horrifying book are the best, dealing with the way the American military has successively considered the way a nuclear war should be conducted, exactly how many millions would die, how many cities should be deemed expendable and so forth. Because they were “governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink” they just got on with the assigned task, they never refused to contemplate the uncontemplatable. Everybody should read this part. This is where we are right now, flinging lighted matches around in a leaking gasoline storage depot.
The worst part of Annie’s book, which I would be most surprised if she doesn’t now regret, is the reason for the initial North Korean missile strike. Kim Jong Un, it seems, harboured a very deep grudge about photos released by Western sources showing satellite images of the Korean peninsula at night. The south was awash with bright electric light, the north was dark, and North Korea was ridiculed as “electricity poor”. To a mad king, this comparing image was like a poke in the eye…. What happens next is revenge for that insult.
Really, this is very bad! I hope no copies of this book end up in Pyongyang.
April 10, 2024
This was an absolutely terrifying book to read. This was my fourth book from Annie Jacobsen, she is a fantastic journalist and writes excellent history books.
In Nuclear War she tackles what would happen to the world if a nuclear war broke out and the answer is pretty much the end of civilisation. She narrates minute by minute what would happen in the US if a North Korean nuclear attack was launched, how the US would react and how Russia would react. After that she explaims what would happen to the US civilian population, how the emergency services would react, how all of the electricity, water, internet would be cut off. Many of the scenarios have been simulated and played out numerous times by specialists and the results have always been terrible.
Annie Jacobsen interviewed lots of generals, scientists, diplomats and former security officials that were part of the US nuclear response apparatus. One of the scientists she interviewed was known as the trigger man because he personally triggered the detonators for many nuclear bombs during tests.
A few things I learned:
- Once a country launches a nuclear missile it is very likely that it will result in all out nuclear war
- The US has a launch on warning policy, this means that they will launch a retaliatory strike as soon as they receive a warning that an enemy missile has been launched. They will not wait to absorb the impact
- Due the Earth's curvature and the positioning if the US launches nuclear missiles against North Korea they will have to fly over Russia. This means Russia will need to decide if those missiles are actually meant for them or the Koreas. As such, any missile attack by North Korea and counter-attack by the US will likely result in nuclear war with Russia too
- North Korea actually has quite a large submarine fleet, they are old and have old technology but at least one is capable of carrying nuclear missiles
- submarine launched balistic missiles are the most scary because they can be launched from close proximity without being detected
- The US has only about 40 missiles capable of intercepting an ICBM, Russia has over 1,000 ICBMs and SLBMs, China has hundreds
- North Korea, Russia and China have truck mounted nuclear missiles which can be moved around, the US does not have this because the population does not like nuclear weapons being driven around the country
- due to the danger associated with misinterpreting a nuclear launch the US, Russia and China maintain open channels of communication and announce each other of nuclear tests, this continues even after the 2022 Ukraine invasion and worsening of relations. North Korea does not notify the US of the nuclear tests it does
- North Korea has a network of tunnels and nuclear bunkers designed for the leadership to survive a nuclear war
- During a nuclear war there will be several sources of death: radiation, massive fire, disease caused by all the dead bodies and finally nuclear winter caused by the nuclear clouds covering the sky and blocking the sun
After reading this book I realise even more the madness of Russia threatening the use of nuclear weapons. These sort of threats have never before been made even in the depths of the cold war because everyone knew a nuclear war meant the end of the world, the end of civilisation and of humanity.
In Nuclear War she tackles what would happen to the world if a nuclear war broke out and the answer is pretty much the end of civilisation. She narrates minute by minute what would happen in the US if a North Korean nuclear attack was launched, how the US would react and how Russia would react. After that she explaims what would happen to the US civilian population, how the emergency services would react, how all of the electricity, water, internet would be cut off. Many of the scenarios have been simulated and played out numerous times by specialists and the results have always been terrible.
Annie Jacobsen interviewed lots of generals, scientists, diplomats and former security officials that were part of the US nuclear response apparatus. One of the scientists she interviewed was known as the trigger man because he personally triggered the detonators for many nuclear bombs during tests.
A few things I learned:
- Once a country launches a nuclear missile it is very likely that it will result in all out nuclear war
- The US has a launch on warning policy, this means that they will launch a retaliatory strike as soon as they receive a warning that an enemy missile has been launched. They will not wait to absorb the impact
- Due the Earth's curvature and the positioning if the US launches nuclear missiles against North Korea they will have to fly over Russia. This means Russia will need to decide if those missiles are actually meant for them or the Koreas. As such, any missile attack by North Korea and counter-attack by the US will likely result in nuclear war with Russia too
- North Korea actually has quite a large submarine fleet, they are old and have old technology but at least one is capable of carrying nuclear missiles
- submarine launched balistic missiles are the most scary because they can be launched from close proximity without being detected
- The US has only about 40 missiles capable of intercepting an ICBM, Russia has over 1,000 ICBMs and SLBMs, China has hundreds
- North Korea, Russia and China have truck mounted nuclear missiles which can be moved around, the US does not have this because the population does not like nuclear weapons being driven around the country
- due to the danger associated with misinterpreting a nuclear launch the US, Russia and China maintain open channels of communication and announce each other of nuclear tests, this continues even after the 2022 Ukraine invasion and worsening of relations. North Korea does not notify the US of the nuclear tests it does
- North Korea has a network of tunnels and nuclear bunkers designed for the leadership to survive a nuclear war
- During a nuclear war there will be several sources of death: radiation, massive fire, disease caused by all the dead bodies and finally nuclear winter caused by the nuclear clouds covering the sky and blocking the sun
After reading this book I realise even more the madness of Russia threatening the use of nuclear weapons. These sort of threats have never before been made even in the depths of the cold war because everyone knew a nuclear war meant the end of the world, the end of civilisation and of humanity.
January 27, 2024
As someone who loves a process document, I was immediately smitten with Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War from its cold, step-by-step detailing of what begins to unfold across the US government when North Korea launches an ICBM at us.
Even the frequent use and defining of acronyms (which, who uses acronyms more than the US military?) it felt like what I’ve done for the past 5 years, if my job entailed documenting Nuclear Armageddon.
Because, in this scenario, it is Armageddon, minus Bruce Willis sacrificing himself for the benefit of Liv Tyler and…mankind.
This is a disaster movie more along the lines of Deep Impact, or recently Don’t Look Up. Our heroes—and us—likely aren’t making it out of this one alive.
While I never need to hear the phrase “Handmaidens of the Apocalypse” again, or the descriptor “carbonized,” I appreciate what Jacobsen is trying to do here: scare some sense into people by painting the reality of what US military process is in Nuclear War—and how instability of foreign leadership could literally end civilization in less than two hours.
The key takeaway, which I won’t spoil: there are like 3 countries that’ll probably come out of it all largely unscathed. And now I’m researching citizenship requirements for each of these.
I’ll also never judge a prepper again.
Short chapters that made it easy to blast through, with a disaster-movie feel that had me wide-eyed and wanting popcorn, I’d recommend this to folks who want to know the realities of our current nuclear situation and what could happen if Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD) no longer holds. If you find yourself frequently awake at 3am with worst-case scenario anxiety, do not read this.
Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Group Dutton for the advanced copy!
Read with: 📱 ebook
Recommended to fans of:
-disaster movies
-military process
-military technology
-nuclear disarmament
Even the frequent use and defining of acronyms (which, who uses acronyms more than the US military?) it felt like what I’ve done for the past 5 years, if my job entailed documenting Nuclear Armageddon.
Because, in this scenario, it is Armageddon, minus Bruce Willis sacrificing himself for the benefit of Liv Tyler and…mankind.
This is a disaster movie more along the lines of Deep Impact, or recently Don’t Look Up. Our heroes—and us—likely aren’t making it out of this one alive.
While I never need to hear the phrase “Handmaidens of the Apocalypse” again, or the descriptor “carbonized,” I appreciate what Jacobsen is trying to do here: scare some sense into people by painting the reality of what US military process is in Nuclear War—and how instability of foreign leadership could literally end civilization in less than two hours.
The key takeaway, which I won’t spoil: there are like 3 countries that’ll probably come out of it all largely unscathed. And now I’m researching citizenship requirements for each of these.
I’ll also never judge a prepper again.
Short chapters that made it easy to blast through, with a disaster-movie feel that had me wide-eyed and wanting popcorn, I’d recommend this to folks who want to know the realities of our current nuclear situation and what could happen if Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD) no longer holds. If you find yourself frequently awake at 3am with worst-case scenario anxiety, do not read this.
Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Group Dutton for the advanced copy!
Read with: 📱 ebook
Recommended to fans of:
-disaster movies
-military process
-military technology
-nuclear disarmament
Currently reading
May 19, 2024The thought of this book alone is unsettling, but let's tackle it anyway!
May 4, 2024
This book starts out pretty amazing but fizzles out. Because this is a hypothetical scenario it reads a lot like fiction and allows the author to fill in the gaps as she pleases. I know this is all likely and possible but the sheer scope of devastation feels a bit numbing and by the end I was ready for the book to be over. Also, she completely ignores Africa and South America in book which I hated because in a nuclear WW3 scenario those people and places would be impacted as well.
April 17, 2024
A book you can read in one sitting. If you've got the time. And the stomach. The scenario itself might seem a little farfetched (with nukes in the air would the Russians really refuse to take a call from the Americans, whoever was on the other end of the line?), but not as farfetched as the consequences. Yet if the former was to happen, the latter would inevitably follow. The complete and utter destruction of human civilisation. Maybe even the total extinction of humankind. In a little over one hour. There is no such thing as a limited nuclear war, Jacobsen tells us. Or a winnable one. One misunderstanding. One malfunction. One madman. One mistake. And that would be it. Once started, nuclear war is difficult (maybe impossible) to stop. Jacobsen should know. It seems like she's spoken to many of the leading authorities and read just about all the relevant documents. And then woven them into a readable narrative that is both fast-moving and highly detailed. Un-put-downable and terrifying at the same time, it's the literary equivalent of the worst car crash you can imagine.
April 10, 2024
It takes only one hour for the world to end
February 15, 2024
I grew up in the 70s and 80s and had nightmares for years after watching "THE DAY AFTER", so I have no idea why I read this book. If I was hoping conditions had improved, I was wrong.
As the other reviews state, this book seems very well-researched (which makes it even more upsetting) and will stay with you for a long time. This should be your go-to if you want a quick, easy, minute-by-minute account of a nuclear war. Just expect a spike in your anxiety levels.
I guess it's a good thing that the younger generations didn't grow up with this hanging over their heads because the existence of nuclear weapons from concept to execution is truly and irrevocably, evil.
As the other reviews state, this book seems very well-researched (which makes it even more upsetting) and will stay with you for a long time. This should be your go-to if you want a quick, easy, minute-by-minute account of a nuclear war. Just expect a spike in your anxiety levels.
I guess it's a good thing that the younger generations didn't grow up with this hanging over their heads because the existence of nuclear weapons from concept to execution is truly and irrevocably, evil.
Read
April 9, 2024Researched reporting on the most hair-raising impact event-- the terrifying, mind-numbing, worst-case scenario-- the dreadful apocalypse-- nuclear war. This book forms a minute-by-minute breakdown of the cascade of events after a nuclear attack, especially the chain of reactions from the US chain of command involved, such as the Department of Defense and STRATCOM, as well as counterparts in Russia.
In the scenario envisioned in this book, an submarine-launched nuclear attack hits a civilian target of a nuclear power plant in California, expanding the ramifications from mere radioactive fallout contained in time and space, into a nuclear core reactor meltdown within the plant that renders the area uninhabitable for thousands of years. A second ICBM-launched attack hits Washington, eviscerates the architectural symbols of standing American democracy-- from the Supreme Court to the Library of Congress to the Academy of Sciences-- in a 180-million-degree Fahrenheit pillar of fire that consumes all life within a 9 mile radius, and jeopardizes other lives for several more miles in a haze of heat. Humans die. Animals die. Human civilization is imperiled.
The fraught danger of this crisis is terrifying all the more because it is plausible. In the book's scenario, practice drills, strict chains of commands, and rote preparations cannot match the disarray and paranoia that follow nuclear attacks. NATO, duly honoring the sworn promise of collective defense, readies the nuclear-armed ICBMs owned by the US and hosted on its member nations' bases; Russia, initially uninvolved but watching the developments that leap by the second in the haze with suspicion, makes a time-critical decision to launch its own attack after US ICBMs cross its own airspace to reach North Korea without the two presidents being able to communicate with each other. China also gets involved as radioactive fallout affects its own citizens.
What this book shows, is that what starts off as a carefully reasoned philosophy of deterrence, fails to survive this test of real life in this scenario, and as nations attack in dimly-thought defense and get attacked in return, in a mere march of historic seconds, life and civilization gets snuffed out in an exchange of nuclear rain. As the author shows, this philosophy of deterrence necessitates the enactment of retaliation-- even in cases where the strike was a misguided decision by the other side. (As one US general reflects in the book: Is it worth it to bomb Russian civilians after they have bombed Americans? Isn't it better to have humans left? Alas, deterrence only has room for tit for tat). Mutually assured destruction is not concerned with maximizing human survival overall. So the world ends in fire and fear. This book is an alarming warning into the possible end of the world, and worth reading for our chance to aim to prevent it. We would have used the peak of human ingenuity towards the goal of decimating ourselves; it would all be for our own loss.
In the scenario envisioned in this book, an submarine-launched nuclear attack hits a civilian target of a nuclear power plant in California, expanding the ramifications from mere radioactive fallout contained in time and space, into a nuclear core reactor meltdown within the plant that renders the area uninhabitable for thousands of years. A second ICBM-launched attack hits Washington, eviscerates the architectural symbols of standing American democracy-- from the Supreme Court to the Library of Congress to the Academy of Sciences-- in a 180-million-degree Fahrenheit pillar of fire that consumes all life within a 9 mile radius, and jeopardizes other lives for several more miles in a haze of heat. Humans die. Animals die. Human civilization is imperiled.
The fraught danger of this crisis is terrifying all the more because it is plausible. In the book's scenario, practice drills, strict chains of commands, and rote preparations cannot match the disarray and paranoia that follow nuclear attacks. NATO, duly honoring the sworn promise of collective defense, readies the nuclear-armed ICBMs owned by the US and hosted on its member nations' bases; Russia, initially uninvolved but watching the developments that leap by the second in the haze with suspicion, makes a time-critical decision to launch its own attack after US ICBMs cross its own airspace to reach North Korea without the two presidents being able to communicate with each other. China also gets involved as radioactive fallout affects its own citizens.
What this book shows, is that what starts off as a carefully reasoned philosophy of deterrence, fails to survive this test of real life in this scenario, and as nations attack in dimly-thought defense and get attacked in return, in a mere march of historic seconds, life and civilization gets snuffed out in an exchange of nuclear rain. As the author shows, this philosophy of deterrence necessitates the enactment of retaliation-- even in cases where the strike was a misguided decision by the other side. (As one US general reflects in the book: Is it worth it to bomb Russian civilians after they have bombed Americans? Isn't it better to have humans left? Alas, deterrence only has room for tit for tat). Mutually assured destruction is not concerned with maximizing human survival overall. So the world ends in fire and fear. This book is an alarming warning into the possible end of the world, and worth reading for our chance to aim to prevent it. We would have used the peak of human ingenuity towards the goal of decimating ourselves; it would all be for our own loss.
April 20, 2024
From the book:
”There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.” p.194
There are some books worth reading that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt are going to be devastatingly disturbing. Two that come to mind for me are Hiroshima Nagasaki by Paul Ham and Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor. I can confidently say that this book is even more gut-wrenchingly horrifying than those two.
This book lays out a plausible scenario for how a nuclear war could play out, and detailing the many horrors it would entail. And if that were to occur, make no mistake about it—human civilization would end. So, it is important not to lose awareness of the threat of nuclear war, and why we should seek leaders who want to take steps toward avoiding its likelihood. The fact is, the threat remains all too real even 60 years after the height of the Cold War.
This book shook me to my core. Fucking hell, maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t read it. Too late now. All I can advise is: Read this at your own risk.
”There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.” p.194
There are some books worth reading that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt are going to be devastatingly disturbing. Two that come to mind for me are Hiroshima Nagasaki by Paul Ham and Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor. I can confidently say that this book is even more gut-wrenchingly horrifying than those two.
This book lays out a plausible scenario for how a nuclear war could play out, and detailing the many horrors it would entail. And if that were to occur, make no mistake about it—human civilization would end. So, it is important not to lose awareness of the threat of nuclear war, and why we should seek leaders who want to take steps toward avoiding its likelihood. The fact is, the threat remains all too real even 60 years after the height of the Cold War.
This book shook me to my core. Fucking hell, maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t read it. Too late now. All I can advise is: Read this at your own risk.
April 18, 2024
Jesus Christ. That is all. I need a physical copy of this and I put it immediately in my favorites list of 2024!
April 29, 2024
Absolutely bizarre book to be climbing best-seller lists right now. 400 pages of a geopolitcally nonsensical scenario with a heavy focus on describing mass death and destruction in the United States. There are some interesting pieces of information in here, but it's layered between pages of Jacobsen describing people's skin pealing off. I can see what she was attempting here, but when no solutions are proposed for disarmament I see this as a completely pointless book that almost seems to enjoy imagining a nuclear holocaust. (There's an entire chapter devoted to descibing animals in the National Zoo being burned alive by a nuclear bomb. It's ridiculous.) It's ironic to describe the horror of the United States being nuked by North Korea when we are the only nation to ever use these weapons on people. It seems disingenious to spend so much time and energy researching what would happen when we know what would happen, because we've done it, and we got away with it.
April 21, 2024
This was very enlightening and anxiety inducing. Our world could end in two hours time, at any given time. All it takes is one person to end 12,000 years of human progress.
May 2, 2024
(Thanks to @PRHAudio #gifted.) 𝗡𝗨𝗖𝗟𝗘𝗔𝗥 𝗪𝗔𝗥 by Annie Jacobsen was an easy 5⭐️ book for me. I was shocked and terrified the entire time I listened, but I could NOT stop. The threat of nuclear war has loomed deep in the recesses of our minds our entire lives. With the “safety net” of mutual deterrence as a preventative for the use of nuclear weapons, we are lulled into pushing the idea of that threat away. Sadly, all it would take is one crazy world leader (and there are many) making one misguided decision and the world as we know it would be gone.
It’s an incredibly tough topic, but Jacobsen’s delivery also makes it riveting. The prologue is the hook. You won’t be able to stop after reading it. From there, she takes you on a minute by minute hypothetical nuclear attack on the United States. Within that, Jacobsen presents the relevant history of nuclear proliferation, data on testing, the number and variety of weapons out there, potential plans for defense, so many interviews and more. It moves very quickly. It has to. Once a nuclear warhead is launched, there’s very little time left.
That’s all I can really say, except a couple of notes about this book. I listened and it was excellent on audio, read by Jacobsen herself. However, I also have a print copy which is full of pictures, documents, and maps. They definitely enhance the book, but don’t seem to be included in a PDF with the audiobook. That’s a shame. Second, the book is listed as being 400 pages, but it’s really about 300, with the rest being bibliography, index, etc. Whether reading or listening, the scenario unfolds very FAST. Finally, don’t let fear keep you from this book. We need to know. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
From a member of a high-level team exploring the ramifications of a nuclear war: “Over the course of two weeks, in every simulated scenario - and despite whatever triggering event started the war game - nuclear war always ended the same way. With the same outcome. There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.”
It’s an incredibly tough topic, but Jacobsen’s delivery also makes it riveting. The prologue is the hook. You won’t be able to stop after reading it. From there, she takes you on a minute by minute hypothetical nuclear attack on the United States. Within that, Jacobsen presents the relevant history of nuclear proliferation, data on testing, the number and variety of weapons out there, potential plans for defense, so many interviews and more. It moves very quickly. It has to. Once a nuclear warhead is launched, there’s very little time left.
That’s all I can really say, except a couple of notes about this book. I listened and it was excellent on audio, read by Jacobsen herself. However, I also have a print copy which is full of pictures, documents, and maps. They definitely enhance the book, but don’t seem to be included in a PDF with the audiobook. That’s a shame. Second, the book is listed as being 400 pages, but it’s really about 300, with the rest being bibliography, index, etc. Whether reading or listening, the scenario unfolds very FAST. Finally, don’t let fear keep you from this book. We need to know. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
From a member of a high-level team exploring the ramifications of a nuclear war: “Over the course of two weeks, in every simulated scenario - and despite whatever triggering event started the war game - nuclear war always ended the same way. With the same outcome. There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.”
March 27, 2024
Funny that media from the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons typically imagines that a nuclear holocaust will be started by someone else.
May 9, 2024
DNF
I should have minded my business
I should have minded my business
April 2, 2024
"A nuclear strike on the Pentagon is just the beginning of a scenario the finality of which will be the end of civilization as we know it..."
Nuclear War was an interesting look into a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario. Mankind has come close to nuclear disaster a few times in the past, and these civilizational-ending weapons are still one of the greatest existential threats that humanity faces. The author drops quote above at the start of the book.
Author Annie Jacobsen is an American investigative journalist, writer, and a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. She writes for and produces television programs, including Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan for Amazon Studios, and Clarice for CBS. She was a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine from 2009 until 2012.
Annie Jacobsen:
Jacobsen gets the writing going here with a lively and energetic intro. She writes with a decently engaging style here, for the most part, but I felt that the book was a bit too long; overall. The version I have clocked in at ~11.5 hours.
The audio version I have of this book is read by the author, which was a nice touch.
The quote from the start of this review continues:
As the book's title implies, it is a long-form examination of what a real-life nuclear war would look like. The book proceeds in a blow-by-blow fashion, counting down the minutes after a hostile nation launches a nuclear-tipped missile towards the US.
Unfortunately, I felt that this format style may be more suited to documentaries, and/or the film/visual medium. There is quite a lot of superfluous writing here. She includes many extensive descriptions of hypothetical settings, such as workers eating lunch outside a power plant while a pelican eats fish nearby, mentioning that seaweed covers the rocks. There are description of trees, local weather, and other assorted minutia that detracted from the overall story. I can see that some people may be a fan of this style of presentation, but I was not among them...
She makes this note on the source material, and the nature of the threat:
The mass proliferation of nuclear arms following the end of the Second World War has raised alarm about the possibility of global nuclear armageddon. In this bit of writing, she talks about just how many bombs the US had built in the post-war period:
Some more of what she covers here includes:
• A brief history of the Atomic bomb
• The creation of the hydrogen bomb; dubbed "The Super"
• Nuclear bomb buildup
• Nuclear submarines
• South Korea and the nuclear threat from North Korea
• Russia's "Dead Hand" system
• Possible detonation of a high-altitude EMP weapon that would destroy the entire power grid
• The landscape after 1000 nuclear bombs explode
• The world immediately post-war
• The world thousands of years later
********************
Nuclear War was a well-researched book. The author did a decent job of the presentation and narration, too. Unfortunately, I think that it could have benefited from a more rigorous editing if a gripping story was the desired aim of the book.
3 stars.
Nuclear War was an interesting look into a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario. Mankind has come close to nuclear disaster a few times in the past, and these civilizational-ending weapons are still one of the greatest existential threats that humanity faces. The author drops quote above at the start of the book.
Author Annie Jacobsen is an American investigative journalist, writer, and a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. She writes for and produces television programs, including Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan for Amazon Studios, and Clarice for CBS. She was a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine from 2009 until 2012.
Annie Jacobsen:
Jacobsen gets the writing going here with a lively and energetic intro. She writes with a decently engaging style here, for the most part, but I felt that the book was a bit too long; overall. The version I have clocked in at ~11.5 hours.
The audio version I have of this book is read by the author, which was a nice touch.
The quote from the start of this review continues:
"...This is the reality of the world in which we all live. The nuclear war scenario proposed in this book could happen tomorrow. Or later today.
“The world could end in the next couple of hours,” warns General Robert Kehler, the former commander of the United States Strategic Command."
As the book's title implies, it is a long-form examination of what a real-life nuclear war would look like. The book proceeds in a blow-by-blow fashion, counting down the minutes after a hostile nation launches a nuclear-tipped missile towards the US.
Unfortunately, I felt that this format style may be more suited to documentaries, and/or the film/visual medium. There is quite a lot of superfluous writing here. She includes many extensive descriptions of hypothetical settings, such as workers eating lunch outside a power plant while a pelican eats fish nearby, mentioning that seaweed covers the rocks. There are description of trees, local weather, and other assorted minutia that detracted from the overall story. I can see that some people may be a fan of this style of presentation, but I was not among them...
She makes this note on the source material, and the nature of the threat:
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
"Since the early 1950s, the United States government has spent trillions of dollars preparing to fight a nuclear war, while also refining protocols meant to keep the U.S. government functioning after hundreds of millions of Americans become casualties of an apocalyptic-scale nuclear holocaust.
This scenario—of what the moments after an inbound nuclear missile launch could look like—is based on facts sourced from exclusive interviews with presidential advisors, cabinet members, nuclear weapons engineers, scientists, soldiers, airmen, special operators, Secret Service, emergency management experts, intelligence analysts, civil servants, and others who have worked on these macabre scenarios over decades. Because the plans for General Nuclear War are among the most classified secrets held by the U.S. government, this book, and the scenario it postulates, takes the reader up to the razor’s edge of what can legally be known. Declassified documents—obfuscated for decades—fill in the details with terrifying clarity.
Because the Pentagon is a top target for a strike by America’s nucleararmed enemies, in the scenario that follows, Washington, D.C., gets hit first —with a 1-megaton thermonuclear bomb. “A Bolt out of the Blue attack against D.C. is what everyone in D.C. fears most,” says former assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs Andrew Weber. “Bolt out of the Blue” is how U.S. Nuclear Command and Control refers to an “unwarned large [nuclear] attack.”
This strike on D.C. initiates the beginning of an Armageddon-like General Nuclear War that will almost certainly follow. “There is no such thing as a small nuclear war” is an oft repeated phrase in Washington..."
The mass proliferation of nuclear arms following the end of the Second World War has raised alarm about the possibility of global nuclear armageddon. In this bit of writing, she talks about just how many bombs the US had built in the post-war period:
"The race to build even more atomic bombs now accelerated dramatically. By 1950, the U.S. added 129 atomic weapons to its stockpile, bringing the total from 170 to 299. At the time, the Soviet Union had five.
The following year, in 1951, the number climbed again—this time to an astonishing 438 atomic weapons in the U.S. arsenal. More than twice the number the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been told could “depopulate vast areas of the Earth’s surface leaving only vestigial remnants of man’s material works...”
...The next year, there was a near-doubling of the near-doubling yet again. By 1952, there were 841 atomic weapons in the U.S. stockpile. By 1954, there were 1,703 nuclear weapons in the stockpile. The U.S. military-industrial complex was now churning out (on average) 1.5 nuclear weapons per day.
1955: 2,422. Almost two bombs per day, and with ten new systems introduced including three new styles of thermonuclear bombs.
1956: 3,692 bombs. The numbers continued to escalate to the point of dizziness. With production levels soaring, these mass-destruction weapons were now coming off literal assembly lines at an average pace of 3.5 nuclear bombs per day.
By 1957, there were 5,543 bombs in the U.S. stockpile. That is, 1,851 new nuclear weapons in a single year. More than five per day. And the numbers kept growing.
1958: 7,345.
1959: 12,298. By 1960, when the U.S. war planners met in the underground bunker in Nebraska, the U.S. stockpile contained 18,638 nuclear bombs. By 1967, it reached an all-time high of 31,255 nuclear bombs."
Some more of what she covers here includes:
• A brief history of the Atomic bomb
• The creation of the hydrogen bomb; dubbed "The Super"
• Nuclear bomb buildup
• Nuclear submarines
• South Korea and the nuclear threat from North Korea
• Russia's "Dead Hand" system
• Possible detonation of a high-altitude EMP weapon that would destroy the entire power grid
• The landscape after 1000 nuclear bombs explode
• The world immediately post-war
• The world thousands of years later
********************
Nuclear War was a well-researched book. The author did a decent job of the presentation and narration, too. Unfortunately, I think that it could have benefited from a more rigorous editing if a gripping story was the desired aim of the book.
3 stars.
February 19, 2024
As you'd expect from the title, Nuclear War: A Scenario is a bleak and horrifying read. This is meticulously researched and detailed non-fiction with the pace of a thriller.
The biggest difficulty with describing nuclear war is that the scale of the event - the geography, the death toll, the recovery time - it's almost unimaginable. By breaking her scenario down almost second by second, Jacobsen goes some way to making it comprehensible - as well as illustrating just how quickly the world could end.
The scenario Jacobsen imagines is very much an American one. Europe gets a brief mention, but places outside of the northern hemisphere are little more than a footnote (despite the fact the impact of a nuclear strike anywhere in the world is likely to be global). There is also a level of assumed knowledge about American government and defence, which as a British reader I sometimes found quite difficult to follow.
This is just one possible scenario. But as Jacobsen makes clear, in the game of nuclear war, once the first die is cast, no one wins.
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*
The biggest difficulty with describing nuclear war is that the scale of the event - the geography, the death toll, the recovery time - it's almost unimaginable. By breaking her scenario down almost second by second, Jacobsen goes some way to making it comprehensible - as well as illustrating just how quickly the world could end.
The scenario Jacobsen imagines is very much an American one. Europe gets a brief mention, but places outside of the northern hemisphere are little more than a footnote (despite the fact the impact of a nuclear strike anywhere in the world is likely to be global). There is also a level of assumed knowledge about American government and defence, which as a British reader I sometimes found quite difficult to follow.
This is just one possible scenario. But as Jacobsen makes clear, in the game of nuclear war, once the first die is cast, no one wins.
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*
April 3, 2024
Nunca he terminado un libro tan rápido.
¿Qué pasaría si estallara una guerra nuclear dentro de las próximas semanas, días u horas? Creo que todos sabemos que el mundo acabaría, pero ¿qué pasaría *exactamente*?
La autora nos detalla, literalmente minuto a minuto, qué sucedería de iniciarse un hipotético intercambio nuclear entre Corea del Norte y Estados Unidos.
De verdad, este libro me dejó atónito. No solo por la atención al detalle de la autora, sino también porque, de acuerdo con expertos, que nunca hemos estado tan cerca de una guerra nuclear, ni siquiera durante la Guerra Fría. Y es que muchas cosas pueden salir mal, un malentendido, una confusión, una falta de comunicación, un error humano (o computarizado) y la civilización humana se terminó.
Quizá mi lectura más importante de los últimos años. Tengo miedo.
¿Qué pasaría si estallara una guerra nuclear dentro de las próximas semanas, días u horas? Creo que todos sabemos que el mundo acabaría, pero ¿qué pasaría *exactamente*?
La autora nos detalla, literalmente minuto a minuto, qué sucedería de iniciarse un hipotético intercambio nuclear entre Corea del Norte y Estados Unidos.
De verdad, este libro me dejó atónito. No solo por la atención al detalle de la autora, sino también porque, de acuerdo con expertos, que nunca hemos estado tan cerca de una guerra nuclear, ni siquiera durante la Guerra Fría. Y es que muchas cosas pueden salir mal, un malentendido, una confusión, una falta de comunicación, un error humano (o computarizado) y la civilización humana se terminó.
Quizá mi lectura más importante de los últimos años. Tengo miedo.
April 13, 2024
For most of my reading time I thought this would merit two stars for being reasonably informative and at times suitably chilling, despite Jacobsen's eye-rolling use of the DPRK boogeyman—she openly admits there is absolutely no reason why North Korea would launch a first nuclear strike on America, only to handwave it away because sometimes crazy people do crazy things (to illustrate this, she misattributes the most famous thing ever said by Louis XV to fucking Napoleon—speaks real strongly to the fact-checking process this book must have gone through).
But in the final act, this racist fantasy of a crazed Eastern assault—which has already severely undermined the credibility of Jacobsen's project—turns openly lurid and frothing in a way that has to be read to be believed. The DPRK has struck the United States not just to show their might, but in a deliberate attempt to end the world. Their motivations snap from lamely unknowable to insanely petty—"the mad king" is peeved that American photos show North Korea as having no light at night compared to the constellations of the South, and so decides to rob America of electricity forever. It's the kind of stuff that you'd roll your eyes at in a comic-book villain, a snide impotent fury of the kind that's only ever described when it's being projected. In an "isn't this a shame?" tone that thinly veils her enjoyment at the "irony," Jacobsen writes of how the rest of the world will be reduced to foraging for roots and insects to eat once nuclear winter hits—just like Koreans are right now! Jesus fucking wept.
It's especially galling that this kind of persecution fantasy—in which America only commits the great sin of initiating nuclear armageddon because the oriental strongman made them—arrives in readers' hands at a time in which the international community is the closest it's been to World War III in over half a century, not because of aggression on the part of North Korea, or Iran, or any number of other trumped-up monsters in America's closet, but because Israel has embarked upon a genocidal project of singular insanity—and has been backed by America every step of the way. Even when disaster is staring us right in the face, we'll deny it right to the end—much better to shift responsibility to the other hemisphere, whose denizens have all the reason in the world to attack us and yet have kept their fingers off the triggers. If the world somehow averts an ending by fire, it will never, ever be our doing.
But in the final act, this racist fantasy of a crazed Eastern assault—which has already severely undermined the credibility of Jacobsen's project—turns openly lurid and frothing in a way that has to be read to be believed. The DPRK has struck the United States not just to show their might, but in a deliberate attempt to end the world. Their motivations snap from lamely unknowable to insanely petty—"the mad king" is peeved that American photos show North Korea as having no light at night compared to the constellations of the South, and so decides to rob America of electricity forever. It's the kind of stuff that you'd roll your eyes at in a comic-book villain, a snide impotent fury of the kind that's only ever described when it's being projected. In an "isn't this a shame?" tone that thinly veils her enjoyment at the "irony," Jacobsen writes of how the rest of the world will be reduced to foraging for roots and insects to eat once nuclear winter hits—just like Koreans are right now! Jesus fucking wept.
It's especially galling that this kind of persecution fantasy—in which America only commits the great sin of initiating nuclear armageddon because the oriental strongman made them—arrives in readers' hands at a time in which the international community is the closest it's been to World War III in over half a century, not because of aggression on the part of North Korea, or Iran, or any number of other trumped-up monsters in America's closet, but because Israel has embarked upon a genocidal project of singular insanity—and has been backed by America every step of the way. Even when disaster is staring us right in the face, we'll deny it right to the end—much better to shift responsibility to the other hemisphere, whose denizens have all the reason in the world to attack us and yet have kept their fingers off the triggers. If the world somehow averts an ending by fire, it will never, ever be our doing.
April 14, 2024
I don’t think I have been more afraid than when reading this book. We go about our days not knowing. But, death is all around us. We are mere minutes away.
May 4, 2024
Must read for everyone. A scenrio that must never happend in real life. Very scary.
Was such an interesting and informative read. How nuclear Armageddon would happen. Described step by step, minute by minute.
Would not want to be a survivor. This would really be a time were the living would envy the dead as Nikita Khrushchev said
Was such an interesting and informative read. How nuclear Armageddon would happen. Described step by step, minute by minute.
Would not want to be a survivor. This would really be a time were the living would envy the dead as Nikita Khrushchev said
May 14, 2024
I learned a lot from this book. I wish it was more sad and had more story to it. I wanted a good cry but didn’t get one so that was a bummer. Otherwise though, it held my interest throughout and got me thinking about a lot that I never thought about before, which is what I love about books!
April 5, 2024
This is the scariest book I will ever read. It’s shocking how quickly you or I (and civilization, as a whole) can be wiped off the planet (spoiler: 24 mins or less). “Thanks,” nuclear weapons.
It’s fitting Annie Jacobsen ends with the famous Albert Einstein quote, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” That is, if anyone is left.
It’s fitting Annie Jacobsen ends with the famous Albert Einstein quote, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” That is, if anyone is left.
March 15, 2024
This is a book that I wish I could say was a science fiction or a fantasy, dystopian genre, but it isn't it is a nonfiction and it is brilliant if terrifying reading.
The author uses her knowledge and experience from her previous books to bring a scenario we all hope will never happen. What if a nuclear weapon was launched and what would happen? Because she uses an almost fictional approach it is so easy to follow and this is something that makes this factual book so readable to the point that it felt as if I was reading a fictional thriller.
The book gives various points of information about the basics of a nuclear weapon, the tests that have been done, and the various types of weapons that various other countries have got. There is a piece toward the end of the book that suggests that some countries have almost copied in a "follow the leader" way and that if a third world war was a nuclear one, then the fourth one would be fought with sticks and stones, this is a quote from Einstein.
The author takes the reader through the various stages of an attack, how long a missile would take, what defences could be used, what the US responses would be and how the various protocols that are in place would potentially work... or not!
The main part of this book goes through a minute-by-minute account of what would happen, from the US and other countries. Another scary point that is made is that the US President would have to make decisions within 6 minutes. It would take just under half an hour from launch to destruction. What can you do in less than half an hour?
Obviously, once a nuclear attack has happened it is not just strategic sites that are affected, it is the billions of people around the world that are caught amid this end-of-world scenario. Many will not be aware as they will be instantly incinerated, but others will have the terrible lingering aftermath of illness, disease and survival.
While this is in some ways quite a horrific book to read, it is, nevertheless so addictive and mindblowing. It is such an easy non-fiction book to read and understand, there is some science-y stuff as you would expect but the majority is manageable for a non-science-headed person like me!
It is a fabulous book and one I would definitely recommend.
The author uses her knowledge and experience from her previous books to bring a scenario we all hope will never happen. What if a nuclear weapon was launched and what would happen? Because she uses an almost fictional approach it is so easy to follow and this is something that makes this factual book so readable to the point that it felt as if I was reading a fictional thriller.
The book gives various points of information about the basics of a nuclear weapon, the tests that have been done, and the various types of weapons that various other countries have got. There is a piece toward the end of the book that suggests that some countries have almost copied in a "follow the leader" way and that if a third world war was a nuclear one, then the fourth one would be fought with sticks and stones, this is a quote from Einstein.
The author takes the reader through the various stages of an attack, how long a missile would take, what defences could be used, what the US responses would be and how the various protocols that are in place would potentially work... or not!
The main part of this book goes through a minute-by-minute account of what would happen, from the US and other countries. Another scary point that is made is that the US President would have to make decisions within 6 minutes. It would take just under half an hour from launch to destruction. What can you do in less than half an hour?
Obviously, once a nuclear attack has happened it is not just strategic sites that are affected, it is the billions of people around the world that are caught amid this end-of-world scenario. Many will not be aware as they will be instantly incinerated, but others will have the terrible lingering aftermath of illness, disease and survival.
While this is in some ways quite a horrific book to read, it is, nevertheless so addictive and mindblowing. It is such an easy non-fiction book to read and understand, there is some science-y stuff as you would expect but the majority is manageable for a non-science-headed person like me!
It is a fabulous book and one I would definitely recommend.
April 18, 2024
The author attempts to make her book exciting, almost novelistic, by using short sentences, sentence fragments, flashbacks, and other tricks. I found this condescending and distracting. The prospect of nuclear war doesn't need to be jazzed up to be made interesting.
And yet somehow her portrayal of a nuclear attack manages to be dull. I think this is partly because most of the book is a recitation of facts: this would happen in an attack, then this would happen, then this would happen, and on and on. There's very little analysis or context. For instance, there's no discussion (that I saw, at least) of how likely this scenario is, or if the response could be modulated, etc.
Essentially, this an unnecessarily dramatized yet strangely dull account of a nuclear attack that adds almost nothing to what most people already know: i.e., nuclear weapons are extraordinarily powerful and dangerous. Did we need a new book telling us this?
And yet somehow her portrayal of a nuclear attack manages to be dull. I think this is partly because most of the book is a recitation of facts: this would happen in an attack, then this would happen, then this would happen, and on and on. There's very little analysis or context. For instance, there's no discussion (that I saw, at least) of how likely this scenario is, or if the response could be modulated, etc.
Essentially, this an unnecessarily dramatized yet strangely dull account of a nuclear attack that adds almost nothing to what most people already know: i.e., nuclear weapons are extraordinarily powerful and dangerous. Did we need a new book telling us this?
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