Book Review: Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024). Annie Jacobsen.

Hello, friends and readers,

As I mentioned in a recent post, this year I’m planning to continue writing about more books, movies, TV and other topics, but hope to make the articles a lot shorter.

I know from my own Substack subscriptions that I am drowning in too much content from too many smart and interesting people. No doubt many of you are too. What’s most important is that I share my recommendations about content I found worthwhile, rather than trying to summarize and analyze the whole story every time. So let’s get started!

This book, Nuclear War, is not technically non-fiction, in the sense that the story it tells hasn't happened – at least not yet. The author, Annie Jacobsen, is an award-winning reporter who has written a number of acclaimed non-fiction books about different aspects of the U.S. defense and intelligence communities. But in this case she uses a chilling fictional scenario of a single unidentified incoming ICBM missile to illustrate in great (and extensively researched) detail the systemic problems in our nuclear war command and control mechanisms, flaws which would almost certainly lead to a global war of human annihilation in the case of even a single missile launch or nuclear attack against the United States or its allies.  

 In 2025, almost exactly the same scenario was used as the basis for the movie A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, a very well-made thriller that reached the same conclusions. Curiously, few reviewers seem to have made the connection between Jacobsen's book and the movie, and I don’t know to what extent the director may have been aware of the book, or the author of the impending movie. But the book and the movie do seem very similar in plot and outcome.

Jacobsen asserts that nuclear war defense strategies against even a single missile or nuclear attack have been exhaustively war-gamed by the Pentagon, as well as by the other major nuclear powers, and always end with the same result – the end of human civilization within a period of minutes or hours. Even a sociopathic fascist leader like Vladimir Putin knows this, which is why his numerous threats to use his nuclear arsenal against Ukraine and the West have ultimately rung hollow. Which does raise a powerful question about why we continue to build and maintain these vast arsenals of planet-destroying weapons, and keep them at a hair-trigger state of readiness. 

This is a deeply disturbing but well-researched case for nuclear disarmament, made palpable by showing how the individual humans with their hands on the triggers, in a situation requiring almost instantaneous decision-making, would be ill-equipped and unable to overcome the built-in institutional assumptions and biases toward immediate escalation that are inherent in Cold War era deterrence theory and strategies.

It’s unfortunate that we’re unlikely to make much progress on this ongoing threat to humanity in the current global and national political climate. Highly recommended.