The new book “Nuclear War” by Annie Jacobson has received multiple rave reviews. It portrays a scenario in which billions of people die within three days of a North Korean strike on the US with two nuclear warheads. The problem? The US deterrent policy that Jacobsen believes is based on nuclear war fighting, and which relies on an automatic launch on warning strategy if Washington discovers a missile has been launched at the United States.
The nuclear Armageddon story starts with North Korea launching a one megaton bomb that hits the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, described as a “bolt-out-of-the blue strike” for which the US is unprepared. Another nuclear weapon takes out a nuclear power plant in California. The United States immediately responds with a launch of 82 ICBMs at the DPRK but inside a short six-minute window within which the US President supposedly must decide whether and how to retaliate.
Jacobson also argues the US has to use our ICBMs because submarine-based missiles cannot be launched to fit within the six-minute window. And since as she claims, Russia’s early warning satellite and radar system are, unfortunately, not very good, and since the US ICBM range is inadequate to hit North Korea without going over Russia, Moscow incorrectly believes that the US retaliatory missile launch is on its way toward Russia, not North Korea.
Believing that the US launch is a first strike against Russia and Putin having adopted a new policy of “launch on warning of an attack,” Jacobson concludes that “Putin will not wait” for confirmation that nuclear warheads have landed on Russia soil. Russia will then launch a massive nuclear strike on the United States. And this would in turn push the United States into attacking Russia with its on-alert remaining nuclear force [which at the start of the war numbered some 1800 strategic nuclear warheads according to Jacobsen.]
The resulting tens of millions of immediate deaths would then be followed by the breakdown of food and energy supplies and the subsequent death of additional hundreds of millions of Americans and Russians. Even worse, the 300 billion pounds of soot produced by the massive fires brings with it “nuclear winter”, as the sun’s warming rays are blocked out from reaching the earth’s surface. The death of billions of people worldwide results.
In a number of interviews with Vanity Fair and Mother Jones, for example, and in reviews by the New York Times and the Cyber Brief, Jacobson argues that the US has a plan to conduct nuclear war fighting which is automatic and set down as a series of previously adopted requirements that leave US officials little leeway to change the US response.
Jacobson also say that one person, the President of the United States, can make the decision to destroy the world, and can do so even without very much information. And she warns, the military “war mongers” have a very “aggressive culture” that has a predilection to “jam” the President toward a “quickly launching a massive retaliatory strike.”
