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Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements
While promoting her new book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, journalist Annie Jacobsen landed a choice spot on Joe Rogan’s podcast where she laid out the dismal story she tells in her book. “One of the reasons why nuclear war is not spoken about by the general public,” Jacobsen told Rogan, “is that it’s set up to be intimidating. You’ll hear a lot of defense officials and analysts using very esoteric language and it kind of excludes the average Joe or Annie.”
Even without her dulcet-toned voice, Jacobsen is a professional, and she deftly responds to Rogan’s misconceptions about the topic, (Frankly, it didn’t seem as if he’d read her book.) using terms like “hypersonic” and imagining that there’s some kind of “Iron Dome” defense system to deal with a barrage of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) heading toward their target. The story Jacobsen tells in her book is a deeply disturbing one, but what shocked me was how Rogan was so visibly dismayed by their interview.
Rogan – born in 1967 – seemed (whether in fact or for effect) to have forgotten all of the atomic warfare facts that I assumed anyone who lived through the Cold War, whether as an adult or a child, would have filed away in the forefront of their memory. But perhaps it’s just me (born in 1964), who grew up in the era where “duck and cover” and survival in the wake of an all-out nuclear attack was a joke. I have a collection of hours of footage of detonations of atomic weapons in addition to a shelf of books, including a glossy coffee table book (100 Suns) of official U.S. government photography documenting the hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests made between 1945 and 1962.
Which is why Jacobsen’s book, while depressing, was hardly revelatory in anything except small details that update the nuclear Armageddon narrative I’ve imagined since I was a boy – a modernized reboot of an old classic, like making Spiderman a black teenager. Faces have changed and smartphones have been added to the props, but the basic story is the same.
Jacobsen’s book is organized into three acts: the first 24 minutes after a nuclear ICBM is launched against America, the next 24 minutes after the first warhead lands and a counterattack is launched, and a final 24 where the skies fill with missiles and nuclear war annihilates all the major players and most of the innocent bystanders. On either side is a prologue and epilogue laying out the foreground and imagining the aftermath months, years and centuries into the future.
It’s a gripping story, told with the taut language of a spy thriller written by Tom Clancy or Vince Flynn, which shouldn’t be surprising since, aside from her work for the Los Angeles Times, Jacobsen was a scriptwriter and consultant on Amazon’s TV series Jack Ryan, based on Clancy’s spy hero. But in Jacobsen’s scenario there are no names – everyone from heads of state to cabinet members to chiefs of staff remain generic, though her U.S. vice president is a woman, the paranoid Russian leader is clearly Vladimir Putin, and it’s hard to imagine the North Korean dictator who launches the unprovoked nuclear attack as anyone but Kim Jong-Il.
We arrived at this point, according to Jacobsen, through simple escalation and bureaucracy: from the moment the first atomic weapon was used, military and geopolitical consensus declared that we must have more and bigger ones, and by 1967 – the year both Rogan and Jacobsen were born – the U.S. alone had 31,225 nuclear bombs. That total came down slightly over the next quarter century, dropped off more steeply when the Cold War ended, and had settled at around 3,750 weapons in the U.S. arsenal by 2020.
Not as many, but more than enough to destroy the world. But I was sure everybody knew that.
Exactly why there’s no scenario where most if not all of these weapons will get used over one deadly hour is, in Jacobsen’s book, a simple matter of nobody with the authority to use them being able to imagine another option once a sequence of events, laid out in official guidebooks and battle plans, is initiated.
Voices of dissent within the military and political establishment are rare, Jacobsen writes. During a series of meetings in 1960 laying out plans for nuclear war, apparently only a single attendee found it worthwhile to voice their objection to the scenarios under discussion. General David M Shoup, commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a Medal of Honor winner took issue with the 300 million Chinese casualties counted as collateral damage in a missile exchange between the U.S. and Soviet Union. “All I can say is, any plan that murders three hundred million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan,” Shoup said, according to the recollection of John Rubel, assistant secretary of defense in the Kennedy administration. “That is not the American way.” Rubel remembers the silence that met Shoup’s words, and how the meeting simply moved on.
From the moment the first heat signature of a missile launch is detected a byzantine series of interlocking protocols, procedures and duties are put into play, without much leeway for reflection or chance to stop what the system has designed as an inevitability. A Russian functionary neglects to pass on messages from U.S. officials to their counterparts because they have insufficient rank; the Secret Service exercises their mission to get the president to a safe place so relentlessly that they remove him from his crucial place atop the chain of command at a critical moment.
The logic of nuclear deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) has effectively eliminated any leeway for action when deterrence actually fails to work. “The madness of MAD,” Jacobsen writes, “is that the two sides are like a mirror. Like the myth of Narcissus but with a biblical twist: a madman stares in a pond, sees his image on the surface of the water, and mistakes himself for his enemy. Falling for the illusion, he attacks, slips into the water, and drowns. But not before he unleashes Armageddon first.”
Jacobsen is careful to pare away particulars from the players in her scenario, but it’s hard not to imagine her story playing out right now. As I write this the U.S. president is essentially a figurehead, judged not just by his opponents but by his own party as superfluous while his vice-president fights to win an imminent election. And yet the system, flawed as it is, continues running in his absence. How would Jacobsen’s relentless nuclear bureaucracy cope with this change in the landscape of leadership? And does it even matter?
As Jacobsen’s scenario hurtles onward, the actual purpose of FEMA – ensuring the survival of the U.S. political and military establishment – has been revealed, and the public is given rote commands to “Stock water. Drink Pedialyte. Stay indoors. Don’t forget your morals.” With the destruction of key parts of power and information networks and the decimation of major cities and the TV newsrooms and media outlets based there, the average person is in the dark, unaware of the severity of the events about to overtake them. They are on their own.
This story has been told many times, from Hal Lindsey’s millenarian The Late, Great Planet Earth to Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine to a subgenre that spans literary fiction, sci-fi and thrillers – books like A Canticle for Liebowitz, Cat’s Cradle and On the Beach. I have lost track of how many movies and TV series were set during or after a nuclear apocalypse, but Jacobsen’s book has apparently been optioned by acclaimed director Denis Villeneuve and will join their number.
My generation grew up assuming that the bombs might fall on them, but subsequent ones were spared our shared nightmare, growing up after the end of the Cold War, assured that the Taliban and ISIS could never aspire to anything more destructive than a low-tech, junk shop weapon like a “dirty bomb”. But at some point in the last few years, though, we’ve begun thinking about nuclear war again, not in sci-fi but in real life.
One thing that changed is that, as Sarah Palin once inferred, we can all see Russia from our house again, since their invasion of Ukraine, and last year Newsweek published an article warning the United States “against becoming desensitized to the threat” of the nuclear option returning to the table.
In an article titled “The Risk of Nuclear War Fatigue”, writer Nick Mordowanec said that “Lieutenant General Bob Ashley, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Newsweek Putin’s ‘boy who cried wolf’ approach to nuclear weapons could eventually cause the U.S. to discount the threat and significantly increase aid to Ukraine. However, he added, ‘I don’t think we’re there yet.’”
Phrases like “boy who cried wolf,” like “shouting fire in a crowded theatre,” are among those metaphors – sun-bleached and dogeared from overuse – that turn real problems into ritual handwringing. Much as ascribing a refusal to take Putin’s threats as mere “fatigue” plays into a larger indifference to the threat of nuclear weapons – perhaps based on the reasonable assumption that we’re never going to stuff the nuclear genie back in the bottle and, after all, isn’t reducing the total arsenal from tens of thousands to mere thousands good news?
The truth is that there really isn’t any good news here which is, in a story full of speculative assumptions in service to its message, the one big thing Jacobsen gets right in Nuclear War: A Scenario.
