Nuclear Armageddon

I’m the person who is generally unmoved when I read about the ‘looming climate apocalypse’, the probabilities of an asteroid collision with the earth or say, a future pandemic. I’ve always been a rational optimist when it comes to human progress and the belief in man’s ingenuity. Despite this, I was shaken, spent a few days worrying and looked around in a surreal manner wondering about the folly of mankind. I had just finished reading Annie Jacobsen’s ‘Nuclear War – A Scenario’.

In her book, Jacobsen plays out a scenario – North Korea launching an ICBM towards the American mainland. What follows is a second-by-second analysis of the American response right from the initial tracking to the eventual response. Spoiler alert! In her version, human civilization as we know it will come to an end in around 57 minutes from launch.

In nuclear doctrine, the concept of deterrence rests on the premise that if attacked, the country would retaliate disproportionately, thus assuring the total destruction of the aggressor. This also explains the stockpiles that the nuclear powers hoard when a single warhead is sufficient to cause mayhem. Exercising the nuclear option is madness and if exercised, be ready to kiss your country goodbye. North Korea’s extensive underground network of tunnels should be a cause for concern. According to Jacobsen:

Defectors recount stories of polished marble walkways, escape hatches, and tunnel shafts interconnecting these underground warrens. North Korea’s leadership has enough food, water, and medical supplies, they say, to hide out underground for years, or even decades. That these bunkers have backup generators and air circulation systems to allow the regime to remain alive, cut off from a postnuclear-war world for as long as necessary. That the Supreme Leader keeps with him a tunnel-boring machine, so that he can choose when, where, and how he will eventually dig himself out of the nuclear rubble.

America also follows a ‘Launch on Warning’ doctrine. This means, that even a suspicion of an attack can warrant a response. Reagen, George W Bush and Obama have publicly questioned the rationale of this. But as of today, no change has been brought about in this doctrine.

Earlier this year, with Putin’s saber-rattling over nuclear weapons, the US granted exclusive access to Vanity Fair for a photo essay on one of its nuclear submarines. Nothing like a nice comms outreach to remind your adversaries of what you are capable of! Nuclear submarines have been called the handmaidens of the apocalypse. When deterrence fails, it will be nuclear submarines across the globe that will unleash hellfire across the globe. And if you, like me, assumed that America had the world’s largest submarine fleet, you were wrong. Its North Korea!

This Reddit thread has a nice lively thread on Jacobsen’s work. Many were sceptical of her claims but I’m buying her scenario and I’m really nervous. Five billion are expected to die in a nuclear exchange between Russia and America. The nuclear winter scenarios are simply horrendous to even summarize here.

Obliterated in this mayhem are not just the millions of people living, working, and visiting these places, but also scores of civilization’s engineering masterpieces: Rome’s Colosseum, Notre Dame de Paris, Hagia Sophia, Stonehenge, the Parthenon. Iconic representations of human ingenuity and imagination disappear in a succession of nuclear fireballs: the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Banya Bashi Mosque in Bulgaria, the National Library of Finland, Estonia’s Toompea Castle, the Temple of Augustus in Ankara, Big Ben. Like everything in Washington, D.C., it was all there one moment, and then, just seconds later—gone.

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