With threats of nuclear war being tossed like Nerf balls into mainstream conversations, it feels to many like the younger generations don’t have a firm grip on what an atomic Apocalypse would mean for the world.
Boomers lived through the horrific aftermath of Hiroshima. Along with GenX, they practiced diving under their school desks during Cold War bomb drills. And if that didn’t convince them that nuclear should never be an option, a 1983 star-studded, made-for-television film called “The Day After” scared the bejesus out of enough people that the mere thought of spiking the nuclear football seemed too insane to consider.
But, in the decades since, and with some of the world’s most dangerous players at each other’s throats, people seem to have forgotten that “mutually assured destruction” is a thing, and a nuclear exchange is a war game that cannot be won.
Investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen, in her new non-fiction book, “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” takes readers on a nail-biting, minute-by-minute ride that starts with a hypothetical North Korean launch of its ” most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile.”
In an excerpt adapted for the Daily Mail, Jacobsen writes:
Nuclear war begins with a blip on a radar screen. It is 4.03am and in a seemingly barren field 20 miles outside the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, a massive cloud of fire erupts just feet off the ground as the country’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is launched. Known as ‘the Monster’, it begins its ascent.
Hovering 22,300 miles above Earth, sensors from the U.S. Defence Department’s satellite systems spot the fire from the missile’s hot rocket exhaust.
“As a general rule, nuclear-armed nations inform one another of ballistic missile tests, usually via diplomatic back channels, because no one wants to start a nuclear war by accident,” according to Jacobsen, who notes, “Even Russia continues to notify the U.S. of its test launches.”
“The exception,” she writes, “is North Korea. None of the more than 100 missiles it has test-launched since January 2022 — including nuclear-capable weapons — was announced beforehand.”
Just five seconds after the launch, the author states, “A vast, world-wide network of U.S. intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets begins churning out information.”
Within two minutes: “Beneath the Pentagon, inside the nuclear command bunker, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff take charge.”
Three minutes after launch time, the secretary of defense delivers the news to the president.
“He has no idea that as soon as he has been briefed on what is happening, he will have only six minutes to decide which nuclear weapons to launch in response,” Jacobsen writes.
“And so, in roughly the time it takes to brew a pot of coffee, the President will be asked to make a counterattack decision that could kill tens of millions of human beings on the other side of the world,” she explains. “Civilization could end within a matter of hours.”
Jacobsen describes in intense detail the likely chain of events that would follow.
In reviewing the book, Forbes writes, “the reality of mutual assured destruction is (and this should come as a shock to no one born since August 1945) unimaginably, uncomprehendingly horrific.”
Forbes on NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO
“Timeless, masterful. . .A stomach-clenching, multi-perspective, ticking-clock, geopolitical thriller. Jacobsen expertly delivers a madman’s portrait of Armageddon.”https://t.co/D98Q7BcEgH
— Annie Jacobsen (@AnnieJacobsen) April 6, 2024
Just over an hour after North Korea’s not-implausible launch — at the 72-minute mark — Jacobsen writes:
Across the U.S., Europe, and the Korean peninsula, hundreds of millions of people are dead and dying, while hundreds of military aircraft fly aimlessly in the air until they run out of fuel. The last of the nuclear-armed submarines move stealthily out at sea, patrolling in circles until the crews run out of food.
On land, survivors hide out in bunkers until they dare go outside, or run out of air.
The few survivors who eventually emerge from these bunkers will face what the Cold War Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev foresaw.
In the event of a nuclear war, he said: ‘The survivors will envy the dead.’
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Author: Melissa Fine
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