By Dylan Kwok

Nuclear War: A Scenario
Annie Jacobsen
Torva (2024) / 400 pages / SGD 34.88

In March 2024, a United States Department of Defense satellite detected a flash of light over Pyongsong, a city in western North Korea. This wasn't a flash from a mundane source – rather, it was a telltale indicator of an explosion of rocket fuel, usually a result of North Korea's regular but spasmodic ballistic missile tests. The intensity of this particular flash, however, suggested this was neither a routine test nor a satellite launch. Within three minutes, Joe Biden, the then-president of the US, was alerted, and within the next six he had to decide how the US would respond to this possible nuclear attack.

His response was to launch 82 nuclear warheads at North Korea.

Thankfully, his retaliatory strike was not realised. But not because he changed his mind at the last moment or because his orders were defied, but because this is an entirely imagined scenario, and the inciting incident of Annie Jacobsen's latest thriller, which, though non-fiction, consists largely of well-researched speculation as to how the major nuclear-armed nations would act were such a scenario to occur. And she has the receipts to prove it, having conducted interviews with over 40 individuals high up in the US Nuclear Command and Control, including William J. Perry, Clinton's second Secretary of Defense. From these interviews and the book's shocking opening, she spins a scenario of nuclear war so packed with quotes and so specific in detail that every other page the reader has to resist the urge to check the BBC to confirm the events aren't really happening.

Or at least, not happening yet.

Because while Jacobsen isn't emphatic that general nuclear war is inevitable once one missile is fired, she and her sources are pessimistic that deterrence – the idea that no nation will use a nuclear weapon against another because of fear of reprisals – will hold under those circumstances. The safeguards are too flimsy, and the breakdowns in communication in her book that cause the inciting launch to spiral into full-blown apocalypse feel eerily realistic. First, of course, is the fact Russia appears to have a habit of leaving their end of the Moscow-Washington hotline – a secure line between the two superpowers used to de-escalate misunderstandings – unattended for hours at a time. This happened as recently as 2022, when a US call to clarify a report that Russia had fired a missile into NATO territory went unanswered. Second is the fact that any missile launched from continental US at the DPRK has to enter Russian airspace to reach the Korean Peninsula. Third, virtually any missile hitting North Korea would affect the Chinese border as well, inadvertently drawing them into the fray.

From there, it's simply a race to see who can launch their entire arsenal the fastest.

The next 72 minutes – or the rest of the book – is a morbidly satisfying read, as the nuclear superpowers line up to take atomic potshots at one another until most of the northern hemisphere is levelled, and the rest of the world is ruined by fallout for the next 24,000 years. Jacobsen pulls no punches describing the gory details of skin being removed from flesh in the initial blast, or the debilitating diarrhoea and vomiting the survivors hit with radiation experience which precedes agonising death, or even the vaporisation of the US President – who, to be clear, was not called Joe Biden in the book, but simply, "the president in this scenario", which appears to take place in March 2024. No one besides misanthropes and the misguided really want to see nuclear war happen, of course, but there is definitely macabre reading pleasure seeing the nuclear-mad nations bite the radioactive dust raining from the sky, and Jacobsen's control of the prose and pacing makes the entire scenario feel not just realistic but horrifyingly inevitable, as long as nuclear weapons exist.

Except for one problem.

The linchpin to Jacobsen's entire book is the idea that Kim Jong Un – again, not named, but the description is unmistakably him – is petty and mad. The kind of man who would dictate policy based on what Western news media say of him and his country, the kind of man so susceptible to goading and mockery that he would retaliate by plunging the world into nuclear apocalypse. Jacobsen obviously could not interview the man himself or anyone close enough to him to give a fair evaluation of his psyche, but to assume he is off his rocker feels like a cheap analysis, an image formed by believing wholesale the persona Kim displays to Western media. Reading her depiction, it feels she has forgotten that despite his public statements, Kim's actions have generally prioritised preservation of his dynasty over righting perceived slights. Perhaps, like other dictators, he would act insane if backed into a corner, but in Jacobsen's scenario Kim launches the attack unprovoked – and in fact attacks in such a haphazard order that the Americans are able to launch a devastating counterstrike. Granted, this distortion is required for the book to happen, but that begs the question: what's the chance this scenario, or one like it, ever occurs?

Jacobsen argues that any non-zero chance is too high, and that we need to zero out the chance by disarming all nuclear weapons. Which some have been calling for since the birth of atomic weapons. The difficulty in achieving this, of course, is that it would require the nine nuclear-armed nations to agree to disarm – a situation so unrealistic it belongs in the domain of novelists and satirists. As long as one nation has nuclear weapons, it seems preferable that another balances it out. In the words of Theodore Hall, a Soviet spy who worked on the Manhattan Project: "I decided to give atomic secrets to the Russians because it seemed to me that it was important that there should be no monopoly, which could turn one nation into a menace and turn it loose on the world… the right thing to do was to act to break the American monopoly."

Reams and reams have been written arguing both sides of this debate. The strength of Jacobsen's book is that she rarely dwells long on the philosophical, cutting through lofty arguments with the visceral truth that those not incinerated will suffocate, and that those not suffocated will die of radiation poisoning, and that those not poisoned will starve to death. In a world still fascinated with the idea of survival post-nuclear war – just look at the popularity of Mad Max or Bethesda's video game franchise Fallout – Jacobsen tells us the unglamorous reality: in the scenario of a nuclear war, you will surely die.

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