Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario, Transworld, London, 2024.
“Nuclear war is insane,” writes Annie Jacobsen in her best-selling non-fiction thriller, Nuclear War: A Scenario. Jacobson interviewed more than 40 retired military officers and civilian professionals directly involved in planning and preparations for nuclear war, including a former Secretary of Defense. “Every person I interviewed for this book knows [that nuclear war is insane]. Every person.”
Jacobsen describes in great detail how a nuclear war could unfold, ending in global nuclear Armageddon over a period of just 72 hours. It’s an important story, well told.
Jacobsen explains that part of the reason we teeter daily on the edge of sudden nuclear catastrophe is that strategic missiles are designed for “launch on warning.” If one nuclear nation believes that its missiles are under attack, then it has the strongest possible incentive to pre-emptively launch those missiles before they can be destroyed in their silos like sitting ducks. That decision to “use it or lose it” must be made in mere minutes, with consequences that could last for thousands of years.
And the belief that one is under attack does not have to be based in reality to spark a full-blown nuclear war. Nuclear Armageddon may also be sparked by a radar error, a misinterpretation of data, a miscommunication, an accident, or an act of sabotage or terrorism. Indeed, the Cuban Missile crisis is only one of 13 times the world has come dangerously close to a nuclear exchange as a result of such mishaps.
This makes it all the more surprising that Jacobsen has chosen for her otherwise realistic scenario a “bolt from the blue” nuclear attack on Washington, DC from North Korea. Jacobsen knows that such an attack would be “national suicide… all but ensuring [North Korea’s] total and complete destruction.” And yet she offers no attempt to explain why North Korean leader Kim Jong-un might launch such a suicide attack, except to assume that he is a “nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal.” A nihilist madman presumably doesn’t need a reason.
And yet, the reality is that North Korea, just as the United States, might well decide to launch its nuclear weapons if it had good reason to believe that those weapons were about to be attacked and destroyed (along with much of its population and infrastructure). In other words, Kim Jong-un does not have to be a nihilistic madman to decide to launch nuclear weapons. He merely has to follow the exact same nuclear logic followed by his American counterparts and described in such great detail in Annie Jacobsen’s book.
Every US President since Clinton has been advised by numerous military advisors, think-tanks and academic strategists to attack and destroy North Korea’s nuclear weapons infrastructure “before it’s too late.” The only reasons no President has so far done so are that a) this can’t be done without the use of nuclear weapons because these facilities are too well fortified to be effectively destroyed by conventional weapons, and b) to attack North Korea with nuclear weapons would have devastating consequences on South Korea and Japan, two crucially important allies in the region, not to mention on the more than 75,000 US servicemen and women based in those two countries.
Kim Jong-un knows that these factors make his country less likely to be attacked by the United States. But he also knows the danger is a real one. The US has long considered his regime part of the “axis of evil,” along with countries like Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya. He has seen what has happened – and may still happen – to the other countries on that list. He can reasonably assume that his country is next. It is not irrational for North Korea to gird itself against this ever-present threat.
If Kim Jong-un were to believe that a US attack on his country was imminent, he could well decide to launch his nuclear weapons at the US before that happens, perhaps in the hope of being able to prevent such an attack, but more likely as “pre-emptive retaliation” for the impending destruction of his own country. Such is the logic of any leader – madman or not – cornered and facing certain destruction, with nothing left to lose.
That’s a more realistic scenario for nuclear war: North Korea does not launch a nuclear weapon at Washington, DC as a “bolt out of the blue.” It attacks the United States in anticipation of being attacked by the United States. That, of course, also changes the rest of the scenario in this book, since it must be assumed that North Korea would not believe an attack was imminent without the US already being in a heightened state of alert and readiness to launch such an attack.
Indeed, an even more realistic scenario for nuclear war begins with the US thinking it is about to be attacked by North Korea, and launching a pre-emptive attack on North Korea, despite all the risks mentioned above, to try to prevent or minimize such an attack. In this scenario, it is the US that launches the first nuclear weapon(s) and North Korea who then retaliates with all they’ve got.
That particular scenario is unfortunately made all the more likely because of the fear of a North Korean attack that will inevitably be generated by Jacobsen’s book. And by basing her whole scenario on an unexpected, unprovoked attack from North Korea, Nuclear War: A Scenario is actually reinforcing the idea that the real threat of nuclear war comes from an unhinged dictator in North Korea, rather than from our own foolish foreign and military policies that push countries like North Korea into a corner with nowhere else to go.
Imagining that there are madmen out to destroy the United States for no reason blinds us to the complexities and nuances of the real world. It leads to the belief that events like 9/11, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, or the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel all took place unprovoked and in a complete vacuum. And it results in policies that are overwhelmingly based on the use of force and threats to use force (“because force is the only language these people understand”) rather than on dialogue and diplomacy. Without dialogue and diplomacy to negotiate our way through differences of opinion and belief, we really are on the road to Armageddon.
Ironically, back in 2016, in a vote at the UN, only one of the nine nuclear-armed countries was willing to negotiate a treaty to ban these weapons. Which country was willing to quit the rush to build up its nuclear arsenals with a whole new generation of world-ending weapons? North Korea.
Trump’s “fire and fury” speech subsequently changed all that, but the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was negotiated and adopted in 2017. It entered into force in 2021 and has so far been ratified by 70 countries. It remains the best – and only – pathway we have so far for the total elimination of these weapons.
And every year that goes by without our own government taking this treaty more seriously, the greater becomes the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon unfolding as described in Annie Jacobsen’s book. She ponders in her final paragraph the loss of everything in a nuclear war, including the knowledge of what caused it:
“With time, after a nuclear war, all present-day knowledge will be gone. Including the knowledge that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran, or anyone else vilified as a nation or a group. It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all. All along.”
