Review of NUCLEAR WAR
The book should have a warning label ...
Vanity Fair has a decent little box in its review section where half a dozen books of interest are shown with a catchy blurb. It was in this section that I noticed this provocative title and given that it had gotten this far critically, I looked into it and bought it. I kind of wish I had not. Its purpose, which it achieves, is to make you realize at what a knifes edge we are living when it comes to nuclear annihilation. According to the veteran journalist and her impressive and extensive sources, we are at greater danger than at any time since the Cold War ended. In fact, short of the Cuban Missile Crisis, we may be in greater peril now than ever before given the collection of tyrants, zealots and crackpots who have access to a massive weapon 50X the Hiroshima explosion and the vehicles required to deliver it not only against a dreaded neighbor but into a major American city.
Her story is in real time and covers the minutes after North Korea fires an ICBM at the United States. What follows is far from graceful reading with acronyms galore, ticking clocks, good photos and a style that mirrors the urgency of a ticker tape version of the end of the world. The horror is that it is all entirely according to the book, entirely plausible in every respect and easily read in one sitting, drink at hand. If we ALL read it (including all the bad boys), maybe we might get together and at least come up with triggers and procedures that can avoid the worst case. For now, we (and the Russians) are still following the Mutually Assured Destruction rulebook that was so brilliantly rendered in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Instead of a madman at an airbase in the Midwest, we have Kim in a mountain in North Korea and instead of a bomb straddling cowboy falling out of a B52, we have unrecallable boomer subs each capable of ending the world. There is one from some bad actor just off each of our coasts as you read this. It is waiting to respond to a series of protocols established 60 years ago when, prophetically and maybe with frighteningly little irony, labeled it M.A.D.
Nuclear War
Anne Jacobsen
2024 400 pages (including Notes
)