A Review of Annie Jacobson's Nuclear War

You don't really want to know the odds. But you probably should.

I recently read Annie Jacobson’s Nuclear War, which is a unique treatise sourced from interviewing members of America’s nuclear weapons program over the past decade. It outlines – in morbid detail – exactly what would happen in the event of a worst-case scenario nuclear war with America.

As the scenario progresses, the Jacobson directly quotes experts personally involved in developing each stage of the nuclear strategy and response as they are being deployed.

I picked up this book for a few reasons:

1. it seems we are nearer to the possibility of a nuclear exchange than we’ve ever been, as a third world war evolves on a 4-pronged axis.

2. in the event a nuclear war breaks out, there is no time left to become informed on what is happening. It is simply a situation that you are in, blind to the realities of it. I would at least like to have some modicum of knowledge of exactly what is happening at a governmental level, and what will play out after I’m gone.

3. The Air Force nuclear weapons center website has a surprising statement:
   “Nuclear deterrence is the #1 priority mission of the Department of Defense. The nuclear deterrent underwrites every U.S. military operation on the globe—it is the backstop and foundation of our national defense and that of our allies.”
   If nuclear war is completely central to every aspect of the most highly funded organization of the U.S. government, shouldn’t I understand more about it?.

4. I selfishly had to wonder: was there any hope surviving it?

5. People keep likening AI to nuclear weapons. Are the dynamics actually similar?

There were lots of things that were surprising about the book. At the core of it is this discovery that nuclear war is not really managed in any sort of conscious way by people in charge. It’s a highly mechanical process, with multiple redundancies built in.

To reiterate the air force statement, all strategy is built around deterrence. To prevent nuclear war from starting in the first place. Once it starts, there is a very small window to turn things around, or to at least keep the total nukes detonated to a small amount. After that window passes, it’s a fire in a mad house. There are is no escape hatch if deterrence fails.

The Scenario

The scenario depicted has North Korea launching a decapitation strike at Washington D.C. American satellites monitor launch plumes all over the world and calculate rocket trajectories within seconds; Within this case they immediately confirm it’s heading to D.C.

An array of satellites across the Pacific and in Alaska monitor over-the-horizon projectiles. The president is rushed into a room where he has about 6 minutes to make a decision on which targets to strike using which missiles. He’s presented a black book, which is described as an à la carte dinner menu of strike options. It turns out the president has little to no foreknowledge of these nuclear-war procedures.

He chooses to launch a selection of land-based minuteman missiles out of their silos around Wyoming, and a cluster of 82 submarine-launched nuclear bombs. He’s rushed to a helicopter and begins flying to Raven Rock, a mountain-embedded nuclear bunker in southern Pennsylvania.

In the meantime, several things are happening. The most interesting is that the U.S. actually attempts to shoot down the ICBM launched by North Korea.

It turns out the U.S. has a handful of ICBM air defense missiles called the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system. It uses enormous, 55-foot tall missiles, carrying a 160-pound kinetic payload to attempt to hit an incoming nuclear missile head-on.

The incoming missiles are traveling over 15,000 MPH, several hundred miles above the earth. It is essentially like trying to shoot a bullet with another bullet. The success rate is roughly 40% in ideal conditions. And the U.S. only has 44 interceptors. In this scenario, all 4 attempts miss.

Oh, and during this time North Korea also fires a submarine-launched missile at a nuclear power plant in California.

There’s a couple of problems in the response though. Apparently America’s minuteman missiles need to fly over Russia to reach North Korea, setting off alarms across Russia’s nuclear response complex. The incoming submarine missiles are also misinterpreted as targeting Russia, and Russia unleashes its entire nuclear arsenal in response at America.

While North Korea waits for a response, its leader Kim Jong-Un actually has another weapon he’s planning on using. A nuclear bomb stored inside a satellite, detonating above the center of the United States, and destroying all electronics in an EMP. It sounds like sci-fi, but it turns out that North Korea launched a satellite in 2016 that exactly met the specifications of a soviet satellite design containing this capability.

U.S. intelligence was fairly certain this was an EMP device; North Korea insisted it was solely a satellite radio antennae to broadcast patriotic songs. But it had an odd north-south orbit when satellites often travel east-west, and its orbit went directly over New York and D.C. Luckily it burned up in June of 2023.

Surprisingly enough, EMP devices don’t impact nuclear missile guidance at all. As the submarine-launched trident missiles reach outer-space, they don’t use GPS to target their programmed coordinates. They use star-based navigation.

Meanwhile, as nuclear bombs flatten North Korea, the U.S. is in chaos. There’s no electricity. Cell phones are not working. No one has any clue what is happening. The president has to jump from his helicopter before the nuclear winds knock it out of the sky. He’s presumed dead, and is unable to issue any more launch codes.

It turns out there’s a redundancy for this as well. A STRATCOM commander boards a hardened doomsday plane in Nebraska and takes to the skies. He has a copy of the black book of nuclear strike options and launch codes. He’s informed of the incoming Russian missiles and begins supplying the launch codes.

The remaining 350 or so minuteman land-based missiles launch. Similarly, nuclear bombs are armed and loaded into long-range bomber planes at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, outside of Shreveport. They take off and begin the long flight to dropping nukes on Russian targets.

Boeing E-4 Doomsday Plane. Note the weird knob on top.

Shortly after this point, America is getting decimated by hundreds of Russian nuclear missiles. Each bomb creates an initial fireball over a mile wide. 300 MPH winds radiate out for miles, superheating and destroying everything. Enormous firestorms begin, creating 100-200 mile rings of fire that expand out, and further burn and start new fires until there’s hardly anything left in reach that can be burnt.

There are no electronics, no hospitals, and no running water. Industrial safety controls fail and toxic waste and pollution spill into waterways, while the air and water are also poisoned with radioactive waste. It’s expected these initial 1,000 or so detonations would kill 90% of Americans through vaporization, burn wounds, and radioactive poisoning.

Anyone remaining then has to deal with suddenly learning how to survive on their own. Roadways are blocked by cars disabled by EMP, there is no supply chain left to rely on, and nuclear winter is about to start.

As this nightmare concludes, America’s E-4 doomsday planes make one final maneuver out over the Atlantic Ocean. They open their rear bay doors and let down a 5-mile long antennae (yes, five miles long!) designed to transmit signals while circumventing EMPs. It broadcasts final launch codes and coordinates to the nuclear submarines to unleash the last of their nuclear weapons.

A series of further apocalypses happen here. Soot from the fires clouds out the sun. Global temperatures drop 27 degrees Fahrenheit on average. In America, the drop is 40 degrees. The entirety of North America ices over quickly, crops fail, and life becomes near impossible for both humans and animals. Nuclear winter is expected to last 10 years before a full recovery.

The challenges don’t stop there though. After many months the soot disperses some and the sun is able to shine through, even while diminished. There’s a new problem: The firestorms from the war kicked up enormous amounts of nitrous oxides, reducing Ozone-layer shielding by 75%. This makes the surface of the Earth uninhabitable for mammalian life due to killer ultraviolet rays from the sun. Humans can only live underground, not unlike subway rodents.

In essence, Earth becomes like an alien world. It is still Earth, but it is no longer our Earth. In a full-scale nuclear war, humans have lost the mandate of heaven. We are revoked of our dominion on this planet.

In such a scenario, perhaps only a few thousand people survive long enough to return to the surface in 50 to 100 years.

Initial Thoughts

There was a lot that troubled me about this book. To be fair, its intention is to trouble. A lot stood out to me, but perhaps what stood out most clearly was my own misperceptions about how bad such an exchange would be.

I had some notion that if you sought shelter underground, you might at least have some chance of surviving at a good distance from the explosion. I vaguely thought there might even be some attempt to set up civilian shelters

But, no, there are no plans for regular civilians. And it seems even underground you’d still get wiped out by the superheated, 300 MPH winds, or the resulting massive firestorm.

It doesn’t seem possible for there to be any form of small nuclear war between large powers either; For an adversary to be willing to strike a large nuclear power, they presumably would be willing to go face a national suicide. Thus, they won’t strike unless they can strike many times and massively.

The Powder Kegs

This has me thinking a lot about our global geopolitical situation. It’s under-discussed how much of the current global conflict is happening in order to prevent nuclear war.

My particular concern is in Ukraine, where:

1. The U.S., the U.K., and Russia all forced Ukraine to give up its nukes in exchange for “protection” and peace

2. Russia is now invading it and regularly threatening to use nukes on it.

3. Ukraine is likely wishing it held onto - or developed its own - nukes.

This situation is particularly perilous because it has nearly every non-nuclear power in the world assessing if they need to arm themselves with nukes. U.S. guarantees of protection clearly have limits, and everyone’s sovereignty is in their own hands.

This also highlights why we keep sending Ukraine tens of billions of dollars in arms. No, this is not just about helping a nation protect its sovereignty. It’s not just about vague fears that Russia will invade other European nations once they are done with Ukraine.

It’s that if Ukraine loses, most other nations with threatened borders and western-allied conventional arms protection will race to acquire a thermonuclear arsenal. Only 9 nations have nukes today. This is a somewhat calculable threat model. A neo-nuclear-arms race among dozens of smaller nations is harder to predict, manage, and keep cool.

The U.S. has had to add additional pressure on Russia in light of this. In essence, it seems they’ve likely promised to somehow eliminate all of Russia’s conventional forces in Ukraine if a nuke is used in Ukraine. They’ve likely also promised to sink all of what’s left of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. I suspect they promised additional threats to strategic conventional assets, communicated through backchannels.

The message ultimately is: Even if you use a nuke, we still won’t use a nuke, but we’ll make you regret having used one through the sheer force of conventional weapons. Whatever the promised response was, it seems to be enough of a deterrent for now. It’s not guaranteed to last forever, with Russia having moved its tactical nukes into Belarus.

Another area of concern – which Jacobson didn’t touch on – was the Middle East. The book mentions that in most of the Pentagon’s war games, people walk away feeling dejected, because everybody dies every time. It’s not so clear that this is what would play out in a Middle Eastern nuclear exchange.

The two main actors of concern there are Israel and Iran. The situation is challenging, because it’s not like Pakistan and India, where the two nations are mostly peaceful with small border skirmishes.

Iran has been funneling weapons to groups attacking Israel from all sides for decades. This includes Hezbollah in the north, Hamas in both Gaza (to Israel’s South West) and the West Bank (to the East), the Houthis firing long-range rockets and drones to the far south, and various militant groups in both Syria and Iraq. Iran has made explicitly clear over and over that their intent is the complete destruction of Israel.

At the same time, they have been enriching Uranium on and off for years now. Supposedly, they have stopped, but are only weeks away from reaching weapons-grade enrichment, if need be. To me, this seems like an even more unstable situation than Ukraine. With rockets firing at Israel from all sides, and Israel’s north burning down from rocket attacks, there is little reason to believe the source of these attacks will be a rational actor that would only use nukes if the continuity of their nation was threatened.

This situation seems like its own powder keg. I suspect if the Israelis determine that Iran is on the verge of completing its own bomb, they have little incentive in place to hold back from using their own nukes on Iran immediately. They certainly have little incentive to wait to find out what Iran would do with its nukes.

The doomsday scenario for Israel would be Iran funneling its nuclear weapons to its proxy militia groups, and for them to fire these from all sides all at once. This unexpected, short-range strike could decapitate an Israeli response (Israel has its own doomsday planes and submarine-launched nuclear missiles), and the tolerance of its possibility would be considered widely unacceptable by the Israelis at large.

It’s a dangerous game; perhaps Iran recognizes this calculus and has partially held off on the completion of a nuke for this reason.

Israel in particular makes me think about what’s coming next for nuclear war in general.

The Changing Calculus of Nuclear War (Star Wars)

Israel itself has been in development of a laser defense system known as Iron Beam; it’s a directed energy weapon that can shoot down drones, mortars, and missiles through a high-energy laser.

The U.S. has deployed a similar system (P-HEL), and the U.K. is in the process of deploying its own (Dragonfire). These systems change the balance of power when it comes to drone warfare, but as the technology is perfected, they also change the balance of nuclear war.

For instance, the U.S. could feasibly deploy a constellation of nuclear-powered satellites that carry a high-powered laser. This matrix of satellites would perpetually orbit the Earth, and constantly be able to shoot down ICBMs and SLBMs reaching their apogee from any point in the world.

This is actually a completely legal approach. While Russians or North Koreans might illegally place nuclear weapons into orbit, there is no restriction on placing a nuclear energy reactor into orbit.

An orbiting laser-defense array would actually render an enormous portion of nuclear war infeasible. It could only be performed at extremely short range, possibly even only as a suicide mission with immediate death for the people launching them. An array of ground-based lasers around the most valuable targets could even render this aspect of nuclear war infeasible.

All this to say that large-scale nuclear war may be rendered nearly impossible by technological advances. But obviously all that means is that warfare will advance until it is somehow rendered pointless or obsolete by a penultimate equalizer.

AI Arms Race

AI does seem to have a similar arms race playing out as the cold war nuclear race. The U.S. is pouring investment into creating the most advanced AI possible. At the same time it is banning exports of full-powered AI training hardware to China. High-ranking members of the military apparatus are joining AI company boards. Labs are locking down security of their best models heavily.

It’s clear that AI has a significant future to play in warfare. Drones, humanoid robotic soldiers, and robotic dogs are going to dominate conventional arms. If they can operate autonomously without any worry of jammers disrupting control signals from afar, they are perfect war-fighting weapons. Any significant lead that can be made by one party in AI could be as decisive in a conventional conflict as it would be for a single party having sole-ownership over satellites with lasers that can down ICBMs in a nuclear one.

Unfortunately, that isn’t to say that we should slow down AI development. China will continue to push ahead with their own AI research and robotics manufacturing whether we do or not. And just like nuclear, AI is a dual-use technology. Nukes can be used for creating energy or creating warfare. AI can be used for advancing humanity’s knowledge, art, and science, and it can also be used for destructive warfare.

last notes

Overall, the book was pretty good. It was an informative read and I’d recommend it if you’ve never dived into all the details of nuclear war before. You can get it here.

However, there are times where it kind of drags on.

For instance, there’s lots of scenes where it details every single major historical landmark in a well-known city getting vaporized. It gets repetitive – you get the picture pretty quickly and kind of don’t need to read those details over and over for each city that gets vaporized.

I also felt it left what happens on an individual level slightly unexplored. You get a picture of the mass-panic going on, but what’s going on psychologically on the personal level, which is perhaps the most relatable aspect for a nation of people undergoing nuclear war, remained untouched.

There also was a lack of exploration of less-than-full-scale war scenarios. It seems possible for there to be a partial nuclear conflict, or nuclear conflicts between large nuclear powers and small non-nuclear powers.

I can’t fault the book for this because its structure specifically explored one specific scenario, but it left a long series of “what-ifs” in my mind about other nuclear scenarios that could play out that wouldn’t necessarily seem to entail the end of the world – which, seemingly makes them more dangerous, and even more relevant.