Nuclear War: A Scenario

ICBMs, B-52 bombers, and nuclear submarines all prepare for nuclear retaliation against Russia, understanding that their goal is simply to annihilate the other side as they face annihilation. At NATO airbases in Europe, nuclear bombs load bombers, with pilots grimly aware of how unlikely they are to survive this final takeoff.

The SLBMs from US submarines explode over Pyongyang, annihilating the city and the vast majority of its 3 million inhabitants. Its explosive power is vastly beyond the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Warheads strike the Supreme Leader’s residences, private train station, the headquarters of the Workers’ Party Central Committee, and various summer homes for the party elite. 772 square miles of urban territory will become a fireball. Twenty more missiles strike the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, replicating the disaster visited upon Diablo Canyon, as well as a host of nuclear test sites and suspected missile silos.

Humanity is about to follow the dinosaurs into extinction, this time brought about by their scientific innovations. Meanwhile, the North Korean leader is nowhere near Pyongyang, instead taking refuge in a bunker near Mount Paetku and preparing to detonate an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) device to knock out America’s power grid and get revenge for years of mockery at the expense of North Korea’s shoddy electrical infrastructure.

At the Army Space and Missile Defense Command in Huntsville, Alabama, observers watch the North Korean satellite carrying the EMP, a possibility that Congress warned about in 2004 and generated panic in government circles in 2016 when another satellite orbited directly over Washington, DC and New York City.

Confirming their worst fears, the North Korean leader decided to “set America back to a time before there was electricity before modern weapon systems existed” (259). He also decides to attack his neighbor South Korea. North Korea launches thousands of artillery rockets toward the main US base in Seoul, many of them containing chemical weapons. Anti-missile defenses shoot down only a small fraction, and millions die or suffer terrible injuries.

As the president stands alone on a forest floor, screaming to no avail, the Army Space and Missile Defense Command sees the North Korean EMP detonate. The explosion “damages or destroys major portions of all three of America’s electrical grids” (264), ushering in an “Electrical Armageddon” as cars, planes, refineries, pipelines, dams, and other infrastructure cease to function, compounding the already horrific effects of a nuclear attack. Civilized society collapses, reducing people “to their most basic, mammalian instincts” (267). 

Providing a historical background, Jacobsen explains that in 1975, a former defense official named Paul Warnke published an article in Foreign Affairs calling out the absurdity of nuclear weapons, calling policymakers “apes on a treadmill” who don’t realize that they engaged in a pointless and self-destructive enterprise (269). In 2007, a group of researchers put human beings and chimpanzees on treadmills with oxygen masks and noticed that the apes were quick to stop the treadmill when they no longer wished to continue. Warnke pointed out the differences between the two groups, saying “If the apes know how to get off the treadmill, why don’t we?” (270).

Back in the hypothetical narrative, the Russian nuclear strike arrives, obliterating STRATCOM and Site R, the latter of which was supposed to withstand a nuclear attack but was designed at a time of much less potent weapons. The nuclear strike incinerates the president, military installations, ballistic missile launch sites, and their support systems across the country. The same happens in bases across NATO countries, as well as in major cities like London, Paris, Athens, and Kyiv. The US fires its last missiles from its submarines, not knowing what their targets might hit.

Just over an hour after North Korea launched its first missile, 1,000 more nuclear weapons strike the United States, killing tens of millions more and leaving the scant survivors in a state that barely qualifies as human. As Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said many years ago, in a nuclear war, “the survivors will envy the dead” (277).