I recently joined the Todmorden Dystopian Book Club. The second book I read with them was Nuclear War: A Scenario, which I previously read last year. My re-read finished a few days before I watched the new Kathryn Bigelow movie A House Made of Dynamite – probably the most stressful film I’ve ever seen – and I’m back to having nightmares about nuclear war.
The value of nuclear weapons lies in deterrence. The problem comes if this deterrence fails. Most of the crisis plans are based upon clear communications and slow escalation, allowing a situation to diffuse. In Jacobsen’s book and Bigelow’s film, a ‘bolt-from-the-blue’ launch forces decisions about retaliation to be made in a very short period of time.
It takes about 20 minutes for a land-launched ICBM to travel from North Korea to the continental United States. Retaliations could take place before this landed, with the deaths of “a half billion people in the war’s opening salvo alone”. Up to 90% of the world’s population could die in the months following, if calculations about nuclear winter are correct.
These weapons do not kill just the people fighting the war – they kill children, civilians, people who don’t care about international tensions. Clouds of fallout don’t respect international borders – cold war plans for war with Russia involved the deaths of up to 300 million Chinese people. A war with the North Korean dictatorship would kill all tens of millions of North Korean civilians – most of them innocent people oppressed by the regime.
In his memoirs, Reagan wrote: “Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to release Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?” A House Made of Dynamite sums up how much more difficult things are with nuclear proliferation – retaliation is planned, but it’s not obvious who launched the weapon, North Korea, Russia or China. But the doctrine of deterrence demands a response before the missile lands.
These weapons are almost unthinkably powerful. We don’t engage with the threat of them as the idea is overwhelming. In 1954, America was producing two new nuclear weapons every three days, each many times more powerful than the weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many people are scared of climate change but I’ve stopped worrying about that since reading Jacobsen’s book – I think we will be lucky to last that long.
Jacobsen considers other horrors beyond the nuclear explosions. EMP weapons could destroy the American power grid, killing 90% of Americans. Russia’s ‘dead hand’ automated retaliation system used seismic monitoring to automatically launch missiles. Project Sunshine studied the increase in radiation in children’s teeth from nuclear testing. There’s ‘the Devil’s scenario’ of a nuclear strike on a nuclear power plant, causing a meltdown. Jacobsen takes a couple of pages to describe the death of Louis Slotin from radiation poisoning. The same horrific experience would be faced by millions in a nuclear war.
I find myself praying for a small incident, something that is enough to shock us away from this path. We’re trapped in a paradox, with no easy way to de-escalate. Trillions of dollars are spent on nuclear weapons and preventions, which we could be spending on better things.
Jacobsen’s book ends with a warning, that in the event of a war, it would seem obvious that we should have done something; “…this didn’t have to happen”.