53 pages • 1 hour read
Annie JacobsenNuclear War: A Scenario
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Fragility of Deterrence
The systems and ideas designed to make a nuclear war impossible are far more delicate than the public has been led to believe, or that even key decision-makers are willing to admit. The key assumption is that enemies will be deterred from using nuclear weapons because a sufficiently large nuclear arsenal, along with a complex bureaucracy dedicated to ensuring that it remains in a constant state of readiness, will ensure swift and devastating retaliation. There is evidence for this proposition in the many decades that have ensued since the development of the atomic bomb, as there has not been an exchange between two or more nuclear powers. As Jacobsen points out, this is in no small part due to luck rather than superior institutional design or widely agreed-upon norms. In 1979, “a simulation test tape mistakenly inserted into a NORAD computer deceived analysts into thinking the U.S. was under attack” (79), and only the added vigilance of the watch officer helped clarify the mistake. In 1983, a Soviet officer similarly surmised that Western forces were only conducting exercises when many of his colleagues feared an imminent attack.
Nor are accidents the only gap for networks of deterrence. In Jacobsen’s hypothetical scenario, the leader of North Korea (unnamed but implied to be Kim Jong Un) is described as a “nihilistic madman” who knowingly initiates a world-ending project. Jacobsen offers no speculation as to his specific motives, other than to suggest that “paranoia almost most certainly played a role” (226). Jacobsen highlights that the specific reasoning or political context is not important. Only the slightest hint of human irrationality, for which there is plenty of evidence in history, is enough to throw off the entire delicate balance of deterrence, or supposedly more complicated variations like “tailored deterrence” or “flexible retaliation” (239), all of which Jacobsen argues prove themselves to be fallacies as soon as there is one significant deviation from the plan.
The great irony of Jacobsen’s work is that in most respects, the plan goes off flawlessly. Agencies communicate promptly and effectively with one another, and intelligence travels instantaneously. Everyone knows their jobs, and no one’s nerves falter—or if they do, someone else comes in to finish the job. Plans translate into operations, and despite a few quirks, such as the president falling out of communication, the system of deterrence does what it is supposed to do, which is to destroy the world. In the cruelest of all ironies, it does so to prove the costs of violating deterrence in the first place.
Government Procedure Versus Human Reality
The elaborate procedures surrounding the planning and execution of a nuclear war starkly contrast with the basic principles of humanity. As Jacobsen describes throughout the book, there is a broad apparatus of agencies, each with strict procedures that they practice with dedicated regularity, focused on nuclear threats. Many of these agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), have a whole range of possible emergencies for which they must plan, of which nuclear war is among the most devastating. However, all a group like Strategic Command (STRATCOM) does is prepare for nuclear war.
Since nuclear war occurs in Jacobsen’s narrative, STRATCOM assumes a leading role among the various military and intelligence agencies (with the crucial exception of the president’s authority, which then later delegates to the STRATCOM commander). From that point, given the extremely limited amount of time available to make decisions involving the lives of millions of people, STRATCOM gains an even more decisive advantage by having exclusive access to off-the-shelf “Alpha, Beta, and/or Charlie options” (94), each designating the precise targets for retaliation. Such plans must be carried out in minutes to work as intended, putting an enormous amount of pressure on the president. Even though he is technically at the top of the chain of command, he is susceptible to arguments like “use them or lose them” (240). Here, Jacobsen highlights how high-ranking government officials in the hypothetical scenario, employ nuclear weapons to retaliate. In doing so, they simultaneously follow government procedure, with many agencies working in quick concert to address the attack, and further threaten humanity by using their nuclear weapons.
It is at this point that policy achieves its final triumph over humanity. In the second half of the book, Jacobsen’s intricate descriptions of government give way to increasingly harrowing, catastrophic portrayals of what the carefully laid plans of highly trained officials have done to ordinary human beings, millions of whom have been “incinerated on the go, melted into streets and surfaces, sucked into horrifying hurricanes of fire [...] impaled by flying shards and crushed under buildings [...] screaming and burning and hemorrhaging to death” (25), for no purpose other than for one set of leaders to show another set of leaders that inflicting such damage is wrong and ought to be punished. By the end of the book, the fate of humanity itself is uncertain, trapped in a “nuclear winter” that reduces the few survivors to the utter baseline of existence. Only the tiniest fraction of the victims had any responsibility for this catastrophe, and few of them had much of an idea that such a thing was possible, much less imminent. They are simply the ones who pay the price for the tit-for-tat approach to nuclear warfare that influences the world of power politics. In providing real historical background, framed as numbered “history lessons,” Jacobsen offers the critical context for established government procedure and the power to enact it. Through the narrative’s hypothetical scenario, Jacobsen demonstrates the devastating human impact of such policy decisions and highlights the looming danger that intensifies as global tensions rise.
The Burdens of History
The scenario of this book is not a sudden event that plunges the world into catastrophe in a matter of about an hour. It is the culmination of a historical process, crucial decisions made, and past geopolitical dynamics repeating. In the first part of the book, Jacobsen underscores that after the use of atomic weapons against Japan in World War II, which had a devasting impact on the population, a nuclear world was not inevitable. With the end of the war, “the Los Alamos lab and town infrastructure crumbled” (14). It was bureaucratic politics, not military necessity, which launched the postwar arms race, with the US Navy pushing for an arsenal of bombs for fighting a nuclear war at sea, followed by the development of a hydrogen bomb with vastly greater power than the weapons used over Japan. Inertia took over, and the US committed itself to building as many of the most destructive weapons it possibly could, which Jacobsen highlights as defiance of any reasonable national interest and a surefire way to “ignite a wider, unstoppable, civilization-ending nuclear war” (21). Jacobsen sees this as a vicious cycle where the nuclear state claimed prerogatives to empower itself, and with its power, claimed greater prerogatives.
Throughout the narrative, Jacobsen offers a series of “history lessons” to illustrate key moments in the evolution of the nuclear state. The first is deterrence, the doctrine that “maintaining a massive nuclear stockpile is imperative for the purpose of discouraging nuclear attack” (22). The second is the development of the ICBM, which drastically reduced the timeframe of a nuclear war and gave even further proof of it being unwinnable. In a futile effort to cope with this fact, Launch on Warning systems prepare a nation for instant retaliation against an adversary, even before it has actually suffered an attack. Missiles developed increasingly effective delivery systems, from mobile launch pads to submarines which may fire their payloads and disappear without any hope or prevention or punishment. The president’s infamous “football” secured the chain of command in a nuclear event, granting the power of near-infinite destruction to a single person capable of giving the order at any time. Jacobsen’s narrative shows that these innovations built on and reinforced each other. As the system grew more complex, it framed itself as elaborate and sophisticated, covering every contingency to prevent the worst from occurring. Jacobsen shows that in a stable system of deterrence, the threat of nuclear warfare is fragile and unstable, where the disruption of one part throws everything into a series of chaos and destruction.
