Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024)

Nuclear War: A Scenario is a 2024 book by American journalist Annie Jacobsen, published by Dutton and Transworld. The book combines historical analysis of U.S. nuclear war planning with a minute-by-minute account of a hypothetical first strike by North Korea against the United States, showing how the conflict escalates to global thermonuclear war within 72 minutes, leading to nuclear winter and 5 billion deaths. The work examines both the historical development of American nuclear doctrine since the 1960s and contemporary protocols that would govern U.S. response to a nuclear attack.

Summary

The book presents a fictional but fact-based nuclear war scenario, constructed from expert interviews and declassified documents. In the Prologue, Jacobsen depicts how a one-megaton thermonuclear detonation above the Pentagon would kill one million people in 90 seconds, and why such an attack would inevitably escalate into a global conflict ending human civilization.

Part I, the only historical background of the book, examines secret U.S. nuclear war planning, particularly a classified 1960 meeting at U.S. Strategic Command where military officials finalized plans for nuclear war against the Soviet Union that would have killed 600 million people.

The initial 24 minutes of the scenario form Part II. North Korea launches a surprise ICBM toward Washington, D.C. followed by a second nuclear missile targeting California's Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. U.S. defense systems fail to intercept either warhead. The president, initially evacuated for safety, eventually authorizes massive nuclear retaliation with 82 warheads against North Korea.

Communication breakdown and escalating retaliation form the core of the next 24 minutes of the scenario (Part III). Russia's flawed Tundra satellite system overestimates the number of incoming U.S. missiles, leading Russia to conclude it is under attack and retaliate with over 900 nuclear warheads aimed at the U.S. and NATO countries.

The concluding 24 minutes (Part IV) culminate in global nuclear apocalypse. The United States and NATO launch their remaining nuclear arsenals at Russia, while North Korea detonates a Super-EMP weapon 300 miles above the United States, destroying all electrical systems. Within 72 minutes, 1,000 Russian nuclear warheads strike the U.S. and Europe, resulting in hundreds of millions of deaths.

Part V examines the long-term consequences: nuclear winter lasting 10 years, global famine killing 5 billion people, and the eventual collapse of civilization.

Background

Development and conception

Nuclear War: A Scenario develops a concept introduced in the final chapter of Jacobsen's Surprise, Kill, Vanish. In that earlier work, Billy Waugh tells Vo Dien Bien and Colonel Bon Giong—the son and former aide-de-camp of General Giap—that the U.S. had seriously considered using a Special Atomic Demolition Munition to sever the Ho Chi Minh trail and that he regretted they didn't. Jacobsen, who fundamentally disagreed with Waugh's view on using a nuclear weapon on a battlefield, concluded that section with a quote that foreshadowed her next book: "Every nation wants to win at any cost. Except the cost and consequences of nuclear war."

Nuclear War: A Scenario is Jacobsen's seventh book. It rests on raw material Jacobsen collected during fifteen years of interviewing people for prior works. The seed for the book was planted in 2014 when Paul S. Kozemchak, special assistant to the director of DARPA, shared with her that the USA and the USSR had each detonated two test nuclear bombs in space during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This "testing [of] fate" was echoed fifty-six years later when on January 1 and 2, 2018, Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un had a short but heated exchange on Twitter on the respective sizes of their nuclear buttons, which led Jacobsen to start to wonder what would happen if deterrence failed. "What if the words of the deputy commander of STRATCOM, [...] Lieutenant General Thomas Bussiere, [spoken] to an inner circle was true: 'deterrence holds unless it doesn't, and then it all unravels'. That word 'unravels' [...] really underpinned my narrative, because that is exactly what happens, and it happens fast."

As Jacobsen was probing the foundations of deterrence, the generation that had experienced nuclear blasts was disappearing, which gave yet more urgency to passing on their message. Through her interviews with engineers who worked on thermonuclear weapons, Jacobsen noted a common theme: many "lived in fear of the day when everyone [...] who had been alive and had seen [a nuclear explosion] was dead, and no one would remember. [This is why] so many of the Cold War warriors who spoke to me on the record did so because they have that fear that where we are headed is [...] stemming from a [...] lack of information, lack of knowledge about the history of the bombs."

Writing in New Scientist, Jacobsen stated she wrote the book "to demonstrate—in appalling, minute-by-minute detail—just how horrifying a nuclear war would be," echoing UN secretary-general António Guterres's August 2022 warning at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference that "Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation." "This is madness. We must reverse course."

Lastly, Shane Salerno gave Jacobsen the idea for her book and worked with her on the manuscript during COVID, in 2020. Nuclear War: A Scenario was published on March 26, 2024.