‘A nuclear crisis is not a worst-case scenario, it is the worst-case scenario…’
When researching her previous book about the CIA, American journalist Annie Jacobsen kept rubbing up against one idea again and again. If current tensions continued to escalate than nuclear war would eventually become inevitable. The law of statistics tells us that while ever there are thousands of nuclear warheads across the world, at some point, someone will start WWIII. Upon exploring this idea further, she hit upon a chilling conclusion. One day, not so far in the future, there will be nobody alive on earth who has lived through a nuclear attack. If people start to forget… that’s when complacency creeps in. Nuclear War: A Scenario serves as a chilling reminder of a universal truth that Jacobsen also explores in this book – nuclear war is insane…
Written as a mixture of historical future-fiction and straight up non-fiction, this exhaustively researched book takes us through a minute-by-minute guide of what would happen if North Korea (apparently the most likely culprits) launched a nuclear attack on America. The results are devastating. Like myself, I imagine most people are still using the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the basis for what a nuclear attack would actually look like, coupled with fictional portrayals such as Threads, The Day After and, more recently, A House of Dynamite. Well, this book confirms that whatever truly awful scenario you can imagine in your head is nothing compared to what a nuclear war would actually look like. The numbers involved are dizzying – not just terrifying, but also impossible to comprehend. It’s truly frightening to hear how temperamental early warning and deterrent systems are, and it soon becomes clear that in nuclear war, de-escalation is impossible. If anyone was ever deranged enough to push the button, there would be absolutely no going back from that point on.
I left Nuclear War: A Scenario feeling exhausted and, frankly, depressed. While it is genuinely fascinating throughout, it also paints a pretty forlorn picture of the fate of the world at large. It’s the kind of book that everyone should read, but I totally understand why most people will want to stay clear of it. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is a unrelentingly bleak piece of work.