This book makes a Stephen King novel read like a romcom
The title is a hint: Nuclear War: A Scenario. By Annie Jacobsen.
Thoroughly researched, this is what I would call speculative non-fiction. As a fiction writer, I write books based on “what if”. What happened in this book is that Ms. Jacobsen thoroughly researched the topic and asked the inevitable “what if it happens”?
The scary thing after finishing it, you almost feel like that unless we do something drastic the real question is “what happens when it inevitably does happen?” And we are damn lucky it hasn’t happened yet.
She asked the question and answered it thoroughly but what should scare us all profoundly is that almost every person who actually will make the decision to initiate nuclear war apparently has not. She highlights our misconceptions even among top ranked government officials (such as missile intercept, with the infamous hitting a bullet with a bullet analogy, except, to make it worse, there are thousands of bullets come at you, but you only have 40 to shoot back). We are under the delusion that things can be walked back. They can’t. Once a missile is launched it’s like we said with artillery: looked good when it left here and there is no calling it back and no self-destruct or abort possible (for fear of it being hacked).
Want more scares? It will happen FAST. A submarine launched missile (SLBM) will take less than ten minutes from launch to target and devastation.
Essentially, the premise, and frightening promise, of this book is that once initiated, a nuclear war is an Extinction Level Event. It can’t be “de-escalated”. The book details all the reasons why, both technical and human.
I’ve always enjoyed Ms. Jacobsen’s nonfiction because most of her nonfiction topics parallel my fiction topics. She wrote the definitive Area 51 book, I wrote an Area 51 series. She wrote about Operation Paperclip; I have that program in several of my series. She wrote Surprise, Kill, VanishThe Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins and I was in Special Forces and touch on those units in almost all my books. My review of that book is here.
She got a lot of her “what if’s” answered by the world’s premier experts on this topic. Spoiler alert about something you should know anyway. We did a target analysis of a nuclear power plant while I was in Special Forces (among many other targets such as the Alaskan pipeline). The ultimate scary assault on such a plant that we cannot stop is hitting the nuclear power plant with a nuclear warhead.
She has the North Koreans launching only 4 nuclear warheads. The first one from land heading toward the DC area. That one is the initiation and plays out through the book. But then, suddenly, you get an SLBM launched off the coast of CA striking the Diablo Canyon Reactor while that ICBM is still in flight.
Now someone is going to say “hey, NK doesn’t have boomers”! Well, they have a shitload of diesel-powered subs and they have successfully launched a SLBM. I researched SOSUS and other underwater detection systems for some of my books and I learned a lot. But as she illustrates and soldiers know, often low-tech beats high tech. And she explains in excruciating detail how NK could pull this off.
Back to a nuke on a nuke plant. We’re talking about an Armageddon event. The ultimate dirty bomb.
But wait, there’s more. There’s the EMP bomb overhead that wipes out our grid. I worked with some experts on how vulnerable the grid is and it is scary vulnerable to even a small terrorist cell. But an EMP nuke overhead? The North Koreans already have satellites over us that are suspected of containing an EMP blast warhead. That goes off and its lights out, perhaps forever.
Oh yeah, the fourth warhead fails. Who cares at that point because we’ve already launched a retaliatory strike against NK with hundreds of our own nukes. Unfortunately, our missiles have to overfly Russian airspace to get there. And, oops, the Russians aren’t as good as us in knowing exactly where our missiles are going.
Meanwhile, they try to get the President to Raven Rock, but in a chopper and the nuke will hit DC first. And I assume she got this from one of her Secret Service contacts, perhaps Lew Merletti who gave me a nice blurb for one of my books, but the Blackhawk, even though shielded, will lose electronics with such a close EMP from the blast, so the SS tandem jump the president out of the chopper right before the nuke goes off. That was a new one for me. Thus, he’s out of the loop. Except the Russians want to talk to him. And can’t.
Well, it doesn’t end well. Let’s put it this way, she goes 24,000 years into the future in the last chapter to discuss how the Earth might heal. Us? We’re toast.
Because we, the human race, are fucking idiots. We’ve spent trillions of dollars and dedicate hundreds of thousands of people to something that will wipe us out. And I hate to say this, think about the few individuals right now who have their finger on the button? We have mentally unstable people in those positions.
This book is a flashing warning for every single member of the human race, but is anyone paying attention?
