Oracle of the Apocalypse

william bernsteinThe views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.

Americans used to worry about Armageddon. I’m old enough to recall ducking and covering in elementary school, and fallout shelters as a must-have home improvement.

That long-gone popular obsession with nuclear holocaust was appropriate; on several occasions during the Cold War, the planet came within seconds of incineration. Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario describes, in agonizing detail, just what that cataclysm – far too weak a word – would look like, and how astonishingly quickly it would play out: Because of the inexorable use-it-or-lose-it logic of nuclear conflict, the spasm would unfold in less than one hour.

Human beings are the apes that forget. While the list of today’s pressing global challenges is long – climate change, pandemics, increasing authoritarian politics, fiscal deficits, and demographic decay, to name just a few – all of them put together don’t hold a candle to the risk that the planet could stumble into the nuclear abyss.

No matter how conversant one is with global security issues, it’s hard to fully grasp what that abyss would look like; Jacobsen accomplishes this formidable task by spending more than a decade with the dramatis personae in the history of nuclear weaponry. Most of them are folks you’ve never heard of, like Richard Garwin, who has been deeply involved with nuclear strategy ever since he designed the first H-bomb, detonated in 1952. (In case you’re wondering, he’ll soon be celebrating his 97th birthday and demonstrably still has his fastball. Enrico Fermi was his doctoral advisor.)

Another Jacobsen subject, John Rubel, who died in 2015 at age 94, wrote about how, in 1960, he attended a meeting of the top national security staff, from the Defense Secretary and Joint Chiefs on down. That grim conclave learned, in cold, clinical terms, that a nuclear response by the United States would annihilate, by itself, about a fifth of the world population.

China, even if it hadn’t been involved in the conflict, would have been targeted by the U.S. and lost hundreds of millions. No one at that meeting, including Rubel, spoke up against perpetrating what would have been, by a wide margin, history’s greatest genocide; he later felt guilt for failing to sound the alarm, as did most of Jacobsen’s subjects and interviewees.