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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.
A hypothetical nuclear scenario
The bulk of the book revolves around its subtitle, “A Scenario,” that begins with North Korea striking, out of the blue, the U.S. with two nuclear-armed missiles: a one megaton-tipped ICBM targeting the Pentagon and a submarine-launched cruise missile bearing a 300-kiloton weapon at California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor.
The first weapon obliterates everything within nine miles of the Pentagon ground zero – essentially everything within the Beltway – all structures and living things. Those killed within this radius are the lucky ones. Nikita Khrushchev famously observed that after a nuclear war, the survivors will envy the dead: Six miles beyond that inner radius of total destruction, nearly all structures are reduced to molten hot rubble, and nearly all inhabitants are unspeakably injured. Many of these will die quickly, but those who do not will suffer slow, agonizing deaths. As in Hiroshima, many will, in extremis, reflexively immerse themselves in the Potomac River, which soon becomes clogged with the dead. The fires started in this outer ring will release 15-50 times more energy than the bomb itself, and will kill more people than those in the inner ring.
In some ways, the Diablo Canyon attack rains down destruction on an even grander scale. The California reactor stores 2,000 tons of radioactive waste that is vaporized by the bomb. The resultant aerosol contaminates much of the Western U.S. and renders a large swath of central coastal California uninhabitable for millennia.
Kim Jong Un, it turns out, has an even greater horror up his sleeve. As suspected but not proven, he had in fact previously lofted a thermonuclear weapon into earth orbit; when detonated 300 miles over Nebraska, its electromagnetic pulse (EMP) destroys nearly all electronic devices in North America. Hundreds of thousands die as dams, their controlling mechanics gone, burst, and passenger jets, nearly all of which “fly by wire,” fall out of the sky.
The nation’s critical transportation, communication, water, and agricultural infrastructure are destroyed and must be rebuilt from the ground up by a rump population of traumatized survivors cast back into the stone age. The soot propelled into the stratosphere produces a global nuclear winter of extreme low temperatures and nearly absent sunlight that make agriculture almost impossible. Worse, the survivors will have to avoid the outdoors for decades because the ozone layer, which protects life on earth from ultraviolet radiation, will have been decimated.
Beyond the near obliteration of most life on earth, Jacobsen’s book fairly brims with more minor, but equally astonishing, horrors. Many of these dramas revolve around the attempted reconstitution of the government. In her scenario, the president, hustled out by his armpits from the White House into Marine One, is forced to tandem parachute out of it with a secret service agent specifically trained for the task when the helicopter is disabled by the thermonuclear EMP; their bodies are not found for days. The Secretary of Defense, who is sixth in the presidential succession line, is sworn in as Commander in Chief; unfortunately, he has been blinded by the nuclear flash.
Another tidbit: During a nuclear exchange, FEMA will focus on saving the nation’s leaders; the rest of us will fend for ourselves. Finally, for weapons geeks: Since submerged Trident submarines cannot fix their positions accurately enough for precise targeting, the warheads released by their D-5 missiles guide themselves to their targets by celestial navigation.
An all-too-plausible outcome
Had Tom Clancy spun out this scenario, he would have been accused of jumping a giant fictional shark. Alas, Nuclear War is meticulously researched, and Jacobsen’s list of interviewees is pages long. It includes not only obscure experts like Garwin, but also well-known principals like ex-Defense Secretaries William Perry and Leon Panetta, along with numerous strategic forces general officers.
In other words, this book is not a drill. If anything is lacking in credibility, it’s her supposition that the North Korean leader is a “mad king” whose strategic vision has jumped the bounds of rationality. Although all three generations of Kims have been casually labeled as “mad,” they have in fact proven supremely rational in their pursuit of their regime’s overarching goal: its survival.
Additionally, the book elides the policy elephant in the room: Now that we’ve gotten ourselves into this impossible situation, how do we get out? The three START treaties, first signed in 1991, reduced the worldwide nuclear weapons count of 70,000 down to about 12,000 today. Alas, tensions among the U.S., Russia, and China have currently stalled the process; even a further 90% reduction in nuclear weaponry, while greatly reducing the risk of an accidental detonation, would not leave us otherwise much better off.
Other authors, most notably Daniel Ellsberg (The Doomsday Machine) and Eric Schlosser (Command and Control) have covered the same ground and have catalogued a far longer, and scarier, list of near misses than Nuclear War. Jacobsen barely mentions Ellsberg, and Schlosser not at all. This is too bad, since their accounts provide a more credible menu of events that might trigger a nuclear holocaust than an uncharacteristically suicidal Kim Jong Un.
But these are just minor quibbles: Nuclear War stands as a stark and compelling reminder of the Sword of Damocles hanging over humanity, and that we lose sight of it only at the greatest of peril.
William J. Bernstein is a neurologist, the co-founder of Efficient Frontier Advisors, an investment management firm, and a writer with several titles on finance and economic history. He has contributed to the peer-reviewed finance literature and has written for several national publications, including Money Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. He has produced several finance titles, and four volumes of history, The Birth of Plenty, A Splendid Exchange, Masters of the Word, and The Delusions of Crowds about, respectively, the economic growth inflection of the early 19th century, the history of world trade, the effects of access to technology on human relations and politics, and financial and religious mass manias. He was also the 2017 winner of the James R. Vertin Award from the CFA Institute.
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The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
