Book review: Day in and day out, the American Secret Service trains its staff for nuclear war. If it ever happens, they will be more prepared than the president, who in Annie Jacobsen’s terrifyingly realistic scenario gets six minutes to decide whether to kill millions of people while being yelled at by senior commanders and carried into a helicopter by his armpits.
Nuclear war is unimaginable – but Jacobsen would like you to try. As nuclear nations quietly build up their arsenals, nuclear protest has become as outdated as fashion designer Katharine Hamnett’s anti-nukes T-shirt. But the risk of nuclear conflict is increasing. Jacobsen, an American author and journalist, wants you to understand how truly insane that is.
Her minute by minute timeline of unfolding Armageddon reveals long practised US and Russian plans for nuclear war. The author has salted these with entirely plausible “shit happens” accidents of a kind that can never be ruled out.
Jacobsen says her timeline is based on the “razor’s edge of what can legally be known” – recently declassified documents and her own interviews with a spectacular array of top US military brass, nuclear weapons engineers, spooks, pilots, physicists, defence analysts and scientists. They include the first pilot to fly a spy plane over Soviet airspace (Colonel Hervey Stockman, who died in 2011), a Manhattan Project scientist, a nuclear submarine commander, a nuclear weapons designer, the inventor of the laser (Charles Townes, who died in 2015), and a former US secretary of defence. All of them understood one thing, Jacobsen writes: “Nuclear war is insane.”
Within its inverted logic, a few world leaders can kill billions of people without consulting anyone first.
Like the US, Russia has admitted a policy to “launch on warning”, without waiting to absorb a nuclear missile strike first. This is because a “successful” nuclear blow might restrict its ability to respond, in a ghastly version of “use it or lose it”. For this reason, World War III would not last long. Jacobsen’s chapter titles convey this speed and apocalyptic quality: “The First 24 Minutes”; “The Next 24 Minutes”; “The Next (and Final) 24 Minutes”; “24,000 Years Later”.
In her scenario, the end of the world begins in a paddock in North Korea. Jacobsen is able to put readers on the spot with the mastery of a writer who can conjure a detailed, almost cinematic picture from jargon-packed military science papers. “The missile launches in a ‘seemingly barren field’ outside Pyongyang in the early hours. A massive cloud of fire erupts just feet off the ground. Hot rocket exhaust spews from the tail end of North Korea’s powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, an ICBM, as it launches off a 22-wheeled vehicle parked in the dirt. The Hwasong-17, which analysts call ‘the monster’, begins its ascent.”
Once launched, the ICBM, a one-megaton thermonuclear weapon, cannot be recalled. It is aimed at The Pentagon. If it lands, it will obliterate Washington DC, likely killing nearly everyone in every branch of the head office of US government.
As far as Jacobsen and her experts know, the US is unlikely to be able to shoot it down, having spent billions of dollars on developing interceptor missiles that don’t work very well. In this scenario, four fail to stop the monster.
US policy on incoming missiles, under “launch on warning”, is to shoot first – before they land – and ask questions later.
The monster will take 33 minutes to reach its target. The US president responds from a helicopter whisking him to safety by launching 50 Minuteman III ICBMs to land at predetermined sites in North Korea. His decision sentences millions of innocent North Koreans and Chinese – thanks to their shared border – to death.
There is a worrying logistical issue for the US: their missiles need to fly over Russia to get to North Korea. Tundra, Russia’s satellite early warning system, is notorious, says Jacobsen, for making mistakes, and in this scenario, it misreads the number of missiles. The Russian president is alerted to a large number of US missiles which appear to be flying in his direction. What is especially sinister, under the circumstances, is the lack of contact from the US president.
By now, the US president isn’t talking to anyone, in one of Jacobsen’s imagined strokes of bad luck. He is lying under a tree, shackled to a dead man, with compound fractures after tandem-jumping out of Marine One. His Secret Service agent guessed, correctly, that the helicopter was about to crash after being hit by an electromagnetic pulse caused by the thermonuclear explosion over DC. In the kerfuffle, the president lost his iPhone. So the Russian president orders a massive nuclear attack on the US, and on Nato sites in Europe.
Reading this, I sometimes felt like I was sitting on a “bus” – the homely sounding name for the business end of an ICBM. By the end, after the final, inevitable trajectory, I felt in need of a defibrillator.
It is important to Jacobsen to convey the horrific effects of nuclear weapons, and she describes their effects on human bodies, depending where you are when one lands on or near you. The tunnels under the White House, the reinforced basement of the Pentagon, and deeply buried mountain lairs are apparently no match for weapons of such devastating power. North Korea, on the other hand, has much better hideouts.
A nuclear war, of the kind planned for and rehearsed by the US and Russian military, will lead to the deaths of billions of people. Under the ensuing “nuclear winter” – radiation, plus atmospheric smoke and dust destroying much life and causing freezing temperatures – the death toll could rise as high as five billion, Jacobsen writes.
New Zealand gets a mention, along with Australia, Argentina and parts of Paraguay – all regions that may be spared a famine caused by nuclear winter.
But there would be few people alive, anywhere else, to take our call.
Nuclear War: A scenario by Annie Jacobson (Torva, $40) is out now.
