Reading note: Nuclear War
Nuclear War: A Scenario | Annie Jacobsen (2024)
This was a hesitant purchase… partly due to Annie Jacobsen's reputation of covering revisionist history, and partly because of the title and cover art.
And yet, the read itself was fantastic.
The book outlines a ‘timeline’ of a hypothetical nuclear first strike against the United States by North Korea.
It then steps through, minute by minute (and in some cases second by second) the US’ response - and the butterfly effect around the world.
There’s a few bits which will stick with me:
The US will know within 2 seconds if Russia or North Korea launches an ICBM from land. Almost all ICBM locations are well known (and often publicly available). There are ample satellites waiting and watching ready to report activity in a split second. Missiles launched from submarines are a tad harder to pick up - but not by much.
There’s only 24 minutes to detect a nuclear launch, analyse impacts, determine a course of action, and respond. What if it happens to be 3am? What if the President is sick? What if all the top brass are travelling through a remote village in Afghanistan? What if there’s already a (seperate) domestic emergency underway? Doesn’t matter. This is why there is an abundance of redundancy systems in place (some technology based, some staff based) for detection and analysis.
One ICBM = multiple nuclear warheads. This was news to me. One missile can have multiple warheads that target different assets, making the damage from a single missile even more catastrophic. The secondary damage (e.g. a resulting nuclear meltdown if a reactor is damaged) will multiply the casualties. Seeing large chunks of the US’ web traffic will almost certainly go down immediately after a nuclear strike, people far from the strike (i.e. overseas) could well have more information about what’s going on than folks on the continental US.
Deescalation is near impossible once an ICBM is launched. One of the biggest risks to the attacked country (in this book, the US) is that a first strike will knock out its own (land based) nuclear weapons. Therefore retaliation (with greater force) by getting ICBM’s into flight becomes the paramount priority before the enemy’s missiles have struck. Submarines complicate things here - they almost guarantee a ‘second strike’ capability for the country that is attacked. Some pundits say this makes the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) more stable. I’m undecided.
While notionally there’s a system in place for who’s gets to decide targets and responses, in practice there are likely to be many loud voices in the room. At the end of the day it is the single responsibility and decision of the President to launch nuclear weapons - yet the laws of logic start to breakdown a bit when deciding between ‘very catastrophic’ and ‘ultra catastrophic’ options.
The book includes hypothetical dialogue between the President, military generals, and key staff. Rather than find this tacky, I thought it was quite liberating.
The folks with their fingers on the buttons are all human at the end of the day - and none of them have done this before. The more I think on it - that’s a good thing.