Nuclear War
By Annie Jacobsen
Annie Jacobsen is a prolific author on subjects the US government tries to hide. I have read her book on Area 51, Operation Paperclip (using Nazi war criminals to develop NASA), the CIA, the Pentagon and now Nuclear War.
Unlike most of her books which are investigative, this one is a fictional scenario peppered with interviews with a lot of senior officials in the US.
North Korea launches a single inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) at the US. An ICBM is a missile that travels into space before re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere to find its target. It travels at 6 times the speed of sound and is nearly impossible to intercept.
There is a well-known nuclear doctrine of mutual assured destruction.
In conventional warfare you launch a bomb, the other guy launches one back at you and you can go on doing this till either one is exhausted or bored or both. When it comes to nuclear war, If I launch one I am sure the other guy will go straight after me. Hence, you tend to launch everything at once. The response of the opposite side is to launch everything at once as well.
Hence mutually assured destruction.
War planners in the Pentagon are confused to see this one Nuclear Bomb; because it is so dumb to do that.
From the moment that an ICBM is launched the US president has 6 minutes to determine if a retaliatory strike is to be ordered. A missile from North Korea would take about 33 minutes to land on the East Coast.
There is confusion, chaos, indecision and uncertainty. They don’t know if the missile is just a dummy test or if it is carrying a nuclear payload.
As the indecision persists, the Secret Service moves into action and carries the president physically out of the white house to move him to Raven Rock, an underground bunker for such contingencies. He has still not made up his mind and the minutes are ticking by.
In the meantime, a submarine surfaces off the West Coast and fires another nuclear missile at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. Attacking a Nuclear Power Plant with any bomb is illegal according to the UN Charter but in a nuclear conflict, no rules apply. The bomb detonates and destroys the plant and creates a fallout that will make Northern California uninhabitable for centuries.
The US decides to fire 80 Nuclear missiles at every known target in North Korea but those missiles have to cross Russian territory to reach North Korea.
Russians are alerted of the launch. The Russian president pauses to think but then decides the US is not trustworthy since they lied to effect regime change in Iraq, their words hold no value.
Russia assumes that it is being attacked. It prepares to respond by firing over 1000 nuclear ICBMs on every known American target. American planners see the Russian launch and decide to launch everything in their arsenal as well.
The missiles destined for North Korea also kill millions of Chinese citizens who are then drawn into the war and make their launches.
Only one time has a nuclear bomb been used against a foe. Only one side possessed it. In the world we live in today, a nuclear war would imply that a handful of humans would be left sitting in holes in the Earth waiting to die slowly.
From time to time there are flippant conversations about nuclear war but the true consequences of it are not well understood.
This book makes it all too real. It should be a mandatory read so that we can at least ask all the right questions to leaders who sit on the triggers of such weapons.