Paul Bryant's Reviews > Nuclear War: A Scenario

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.