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Nuclear War: A Scenario
Annie Jacobsen
Dutton
373 pages
Every nuclear-armed nation depends on the hope that Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) will keep us all safe from nuclear attack, because they all know that any nation that starts a nuclear war would be committing certain suicide.
But what if one nation’s mad leader actually did attack another? What would happen then?
To answer that question, Annie Jacobsen, the internationally acclaimed American investigative journalist, interviewed dozens of top military and civilian experts who built the weapons, are privy to the response plans, and will be responsible for putting those plans into motion should it ever become necessary.
The answers she received form the basis of this scenario, which takes us to the razor’s edge of what can legally be known about what could happen, and almost certainly would happen, if we were attacked. It’s a story of unimaginable horror, but Jacobsen, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist book The Pentagon’s Brain, can be trusted to write truth without exaggeration.
In Jacobsen’s scenario, North Korea unexpectedly launches a one-megaton thermonuclear weapon at the United States. An American satellite discovers the launch within a fraction of a second after ignition, and less than three minutes later American officials in Washington know an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is headed for America’s East Coast, probably New York or Washington. They also know that intercepting it would be next to impossible, akin to shooting a bullet with a bullet.
That changes everything. No longer does MAD play a part; it is officially, automatically, instantly and irrevocably replaced by “Launch on Warning,” which dictates that before North Korea’s missile lands, the U.S. will return fire.
Jacobsen traces what happens in the U.S. government’s higher echelons of government during the 24 minutes it takes for the missile to reach America: the protocols that must be followed, the myriad decisions that must be made, how to protect the people who must survive so that the government can continue to operate, and the sparse information they have upon which they must make decisions that will affect tens of millions of lives forever.
And then North Korea’s missile lands inside the Pentagon.
A flash of light and heat nearly five times hotter and brighter than the center of our sun — 180 million degrees Fahrenheit – creates a fireball that expands at millions of miles an hour.
The fireball balloons to more than a mile across, disintegrating everything in its path. The Pentagon explodes into dust. Concrete surfaces elsewhere explode. Metal objects melt or evaporate. Stone shatters. Asphalt boils. Humans become soot. Nothing inside the fireball remains alive. Nothing.
The intense heat creates a giant wall of highly compressed air that moves out in all directions, far beyond the fireball and faster than the speed of sound. The change in air pressure destroys every large building it touches.
Winds behind the wave travel at several hundred miles an hour, multiple times faster than any hurricane winds that have ever hit the United States. They toss cars, trucks, rail cars, whatever is left from the exploded buildings – everything — into the air as if they were plastic toys.
Next comes a deadly reverse suction effect, with all those objects sucked back into the burning inferno and consumed by flames.
One mile away from ground zero, across the Potomac River, the marble walls and columns of the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials superheat, split, burst apart and disintegrate. Steel and stone bridges spanning the Potomac River heave and collapse.
The White House, the United States Capitol and all other buildings in Washington crumble.
Two and a half miles out, 35,000 people attending a Washington Nationals baseball game burn to death instantly. If any survive they are stripped of all their clothes and the outer layer of their skin.
Seven and a half miles out cars and buses crash into one another. Asphalt streets melt into liquid, trapping survivors as if caught in molten lava or quicksand. Hurricane-force winds fuel hundreds of fires into thousands of fires, into millions of them.
Ten and 12 miles out, tens of thousands of people have ruptured lungs. Birds in flight ignite into flames and fall from the sky.
Fifty miles out, the flash of light at least temporarily blinds anyone who happens to be looking in that general direction.
Millions of people are dead or dying.
The bomb’s mushroom stem climbs into the troposphere, higher than commercial jet planes fly and the region where most of Earth’s weather phenomena occurs. The cap extends outward 30 miles or more, spewing radioactive particles on everything below.
No help is coming for anyone. Millions of fires burn wildly out of control, and there is no point in trying to extinguish them.
But, in Jacobsen’s scenario, the Pentagon attack is just the beginning of North Korea’s attack. The worst is yet to come.
Shortly before the missile hits the Pentagon, a North Korean submarine off America’s West Coast launches a nuclear missile at the nuclear power plant in Diablo Canyon. There is no way to stop it. It lands three minutes later, causing a core reactor meltdown. A huge, molten radioactive mass sinks into the earth that will continue to grow for about two years. A hot sphere of radioactive lava about 100 feet in diameter will form and will persist for a decade. It cannot be extinguished and it will force the abandonment of an area the size of two New Jerseys for thousands of years, if not forever.
And yet, the worst of all, by far, is still yet to come.
After that attacks on the Pentagon and Diablo Canyon’s nuclear reactor, North Korea detonates a nuclear device 300 miles over Nebraska – yes, it really has that capacity — that destroys America’s electrical grid. Millions of valves along 2.6 million miles of oil and gas pipelines rupture and explode. Coal-fired boiler systems falter and explode, causing dams to burst and sweep away infrastructures and people. The detonation from space assures that 90 percent of Americans will be dead inside a year.
But the United States has an overload of wherewithal it can use, and does use, to retaliate.
The bomb that hit the Pentagon was a one-megaton thermonuclear weapon. The United States has nuclear weapons more than 10 times that powerful.
It has thousands of nuclear weapons at the ready, including 400 ICBMs that are buried in silos around the nation and are on hair-trigger alerts, primed to be launched at a moment’s notice.
It also maintains 14 Ohio-class nuclear submarines, 12 of which are believed to be prowling the oceans at any given time. Each submarine carries 80 nuclear warheads, all of which can be launched within 90 seconds.
The U.S., following its suddenly activated Launch on Warning protocol, begins its response two minutes before the Pentagon explodes by launching 50 nuclear-armed missiles at North Korea. However, because of limitations on how far they can travel, they must fly over the Arctic Ocean and then over Russia. The American president must personally notify the Russian president that the launch is intended for North Korea, not Russia.
But because of the time restraints and the madhouse actions being taken in America to protect the president and deal with all the other problems, the call is not completed. Russian officials therefore believe America’s missiles are aimed at them, and according to their Launch on Warning protocol they reply in kind – not only at the U.S., but at all NATO nations because they know NATO nations are obligated to respond if another NATO nation is attacked, and the U.S. is a NATO nation.
The U.S. has nuclear weapons at the ready in those nations so, under NATO’s Launch on Warning plan, those weapons are unleashed on Russia.
American submarines rise to 150 feet beneath the ocean’s surface and within 90 seconds unload all their weapons, then disappear again deep under the surface.
The war lasts two, maybe three hours.
And then, all around the Northern Hemisphere, intense firestorms involving forests, oil refineries, peat moss, cities, towns, everything everywhere, burn out of control. Over the next weeks and months a thick coating of soot develops in the entire world’s upper troposphere, reducing the sun’s rays by 70 percent.
The result is a nuclear winter. Temperatures across the northernmost states – and nations at and above that latitude throughout the world — drop below freezing and stay there for six years. Farther south there is not enough sunlight to grow plants on whatever land that has not been contaminated by fallout. Nothing grows. Rivers and streams are poisoned. Aquatic life dies. Billions of people died as a direct result of the war, and those who survive starve.
Insects survive and proliferate, but only time will tell if humanity does.
Related Reading
- At the Brink: A Series about the Threat of Nuclear Weapons in an Unstable World – New York Times
- Preventing Nuclear War – Union of Concerned Scientists
- Next Steps to Universal Nuclear Disarmament – United Nations
- Reducing the Risks of Nuclear War — The Role of Health Professionals
- Thinking about the Unthinkable: Five Nuclear Weapons Issues to Address in 2024 – CSIS
- We must Trump-proof the nuclear codes before 2024
