For unknown reasons, North Korea launches a nuclear missile that destroys Washington DC. The US responds with 82 nuclear missiles that fly over Russia on their way to North Korea. Russia responds with a volley at the US, which fires back. About an hour later and millions of deaths later, a nuclear winter is inevitable, and with it the end of human civilization.
This is how you can summarize the inky plot of Nuclear War: A Scenario by the American defense and national security journalist Annie Jacobsen (56). She previously wrote books about the CIA and the American military research agency DARPA, among others.
Her latest book is on the The New York Timesbestseller list and is being adapted into a film by Dune-director Denis Villeneuve. Jacobsen hopes it can lead to broader response and awareness.
It didn’t really happen, but still “not fiction,” Jacobsen emphasizes. “I call it hypothetical non-fiction: people describe what they would do, what would happen.” For the book, she spoke to about a hundred sources from the American intelligence and defense world over the course of twelve years, including former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA chief Leon Panetta, hydrogen bomb designer Richard Garwin and General Robert Kehler.
NRC interviews Jacobsen in March at the anti-nuclear weapons conference NukeEXPO in Brussels, where she speaks alongside survivors of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and victims of French nuclear weapons tests in French Polynesia. There are also representatives of ICAN, the disarmament organization that received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.
Catastrophic ending
“The premise of the book is that deterrence has failed,” says Jacobsen. Nuclear deterrence is the idea that the more than 5,000 nuclear weapons of the US, Russia’s nearly 6,000, and hundreds of other countries are so threatening that no one will ever use them unless the other uses them first. Jacobsen describes the cascade of inevitable next steps, and how they can lead – through failure or deliberately – to the catastrophic end.
For example, the potential North Korean launch is monitored from the first seconds by the American satellite system SBIRS (Space-Based Infrared System), which detects the flame of the taking off rocket from an altitude of 36,000 kilometers. The track shows that it is aimed at the east coast of the United States. At that moment, DEFCON 1, the highest military alert phase, comes into effect.
journalistAnnie Jacobsen Ultimately, American war simulations almost always ended in a nuclear HolocaustAnnie Jacobsen journalist
Missile Defense, the system that is supposed to shoot down an incoming nuclear missile, is failing miserably. Panic breaks out in Washington, where generals want nuclear codes from the president, the only one with the authority to fire nuclear weapons. But that same president is unavailable because his security wants to get him out of Washington very quickly.
Jacobsen describes the dangerous and controversial Launch on Warning-doctrine. This prescribes that the US will retaliate nuclearly as soon as an incoming missile is detected and not only after the impact, when it is clear that it is a nuclear weapon. The US fires 82 nuclear missiles back at North Korea, with the aim of ‘decapitating’ the regime, but they have to fly over Russia’s territory. Attempts to assure the Russians that the missiles are not aimed at Russia fail: the presidents – nameless in the book – cannot even get on the phone with each other.
Firestorms
Jacobsen describes in gruesome detail how the Pentagon, the American Ministry of Defense with 27,000 employees, is wiped out in a fraction of a second along with the entire city center when a hydrogen bomb hits. How that first impact killed millions of people due to heat, shock waves and debris, and many others were doomed by radiation and especially the immense firestorms that erupted. A conversation with William Craig Fugate, former director of disaster relief organization FEMA, makes it clear that survivors should not expect any help.
Climate researchers tell Jacobsen how the firestorms of the subsequent nuclear war herald a nuclear winter in which temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere drop by tens of degrees in some places. Agriculture becomes impossible, and hunger kills billions of people.
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Jacobsen, a quiet man in her fifties with a warm voice, likes to speak in one-liners and always quotes her sources in a familiar tone. “Annie, we would never send just one interceptor against an incoming missile.”
Why did you choose this scenario with North Korea?
“The premise is that nuclear deterrence has failed, but I also wanted a realistic scenario. I spoke to Richard Garwin, the designer of the hydrogen bomb, who is now 95. He told me that people in Washington are most concerned about a bolt-from-the-blue scenario in which a megalomaniac autocrat decides he doesn’t care about the consequences.
“North Korea has nuclear weapons and now also intercontinental missiles, which they have tested hundreds of times. But in the end, the reasons don’t matter. My book is not about foreign policy or policy, it starts with the launch of a nuclear missile.”
The American defense system, which has been developed at a cost of billions of dollars, is failing miserably.
“That’s just a matter of numbers. The anti-ballistic missiles must disable incoming nuclear missiles by colliding with them. The fact is that even in carefully prepared tests they are only successful in between 40 and 55 percent of the cases. We have a total of 44 such interceptor missiles. In the book, four go up, without waiting to see if the first one hits the target. At first I only had one, but I showed it to a general who said, “Annie, we would never fire just one.” So I asked: So you use 10 percent of all interceptors for one incoming missile. Russia has 1,674 nuclear warheads ready, so that system is not of much use to us.”
More systems fail. For example, the president cannot call the Russian president because his security personnel have taken him away.
“I was shocked at how poorly organized the contact with Russia is. When it appeared that a Russian missile had landed in Poland in 2022, it took more than 24 hours before contact was made with the Russians. In this scenario, contact should be made within minutes.
“And when I spoke to the secret agents who have to protect the president, I discovered that they have a completely different agenda than the generals, who in this case want the nuclear codes.
“People always talk about: Would the generals in charge, the soldiers in the missile silos, the crews of nuclear submarines really turn the key when push comes to shove? But of course they do, they have trained for years for it. Rarely is it about the fact that conflicting interests and orders have been poorly considered.”
You already give us a lot of information about technology and doctrines, but in the end it matters little.
“That has to do with our Hollywood feeling, that ultimately a hero saves us. I spoke to Yale political science professor Paul Bracken, who was involved in US war simulations that were initially classified but recently declassified. His conclusion: it does not matter how the war starts, whether NATO is involved or not, whether China participates, or whether smaller ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons are used first.
“In the end, the simulations almost always ended in a nuclear holocaust. As soon as a nuclear missile is launched, deterrence no longer works, and de-escalation is extremely difficult.”
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On the other hand, there have been people in the past who have used common sense, such as the Russian Stanislav Petrov, who stopped a nuclear attack in 1983 due to a false alarm.
“We have had ballistic missiles ready since the late 1950s. Multiply all those years by 365 times 24 hours a day. There have been plenty of other incidents, we’ve just been lucky so far. In my scenario, luck is not with us.
“We know that all systems fail. The people I interviewed thought, when they were in it, that they controlled the system. But once they get out of it and can look through the long lens of history, when they have grandchildren, they’re not so sure anymore. That’s terrifying. The illusion that deterrence can continue to work, that nuclear weapons are inevitable and that more weapons make us safer has, for me, Orwellian undertones.”
Who are those sources anyway?
“That is my rolodex, my contacts that I have collected over the years, they are all in the book. However, almost all of them are retired people in their eighties and nineties. Generals in service don’t talk to a journalist about a potential nuclear war.
“Everyone speaks on the recordbut there’s nothing in there either classifiedis secret. A lot of information is public but unknown, difficult to find if no one points it out to you.
“I think it helped that former defense secretary under Bill Clinton, William Perry, wanted to talk to me. He is outspoken against nuclear weapons. I started my book before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At the time, the attitude among many sources was: no one is talking about this, the subject has fallen off the radar. But after the raid, with all the hints Putin gave, people became even more persistent. Time and time again I have asked: ‘am I spreading fear?’. And the answer was always: no.”
The real solution, banning nuclear weapons from the world, currently seems politically difficult to achieve. But in addition, the system is full of irrational risks, such as the fact that the president can use nuclear weapons without consultation, or, for example, the Launch on Warning-doctrine.
“Every president, with the exception of Donald Trump, has started his term after saying that Launch-on-Warning was a relic of the Cold War, and incredibly dangerous. But once they become president, you never hear from them again. Why? No idea.”
Is there any reason for optimism?
“A little bit, I think. For example, there is the reversal of Ronald Reagan [president van de VS tussen 1981 1989]. A television film was released in 1983, The Day After, which showed in gruesome detail the consequences of a nuclear attack on the United States. 100 million Americans have seen the film, and the producer ABC received fierce criticism for it: it was said to be too gruesome.
“But one of those Americans was Reagan, until then an outspoken proponent of nuclear weapons. He wrote in his diary that he was ‘very depressed’.
“Then he went to Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, and they started working on the first nuclear weapons treaties. There were also massive protests at that time, in the US and also in Europe. It helps to put pressure on leaders, so people need to know more about this. It is also human nature to retrace your steps.”
‘Nuclear War – The Scenario’ by Annie Jacobsen was published by Prometheus on March 26.
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