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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.
Summary of Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen: A Scenario
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Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen is a bestseller that explores the potential consequences of a nuclear missile inbound towards the United States. The book, based on interviews with military and civilian experts, provides a vivid picture of what could happen if our nuclear guardians fail. It is essential reading for understanding the world we live in, where decisions made on seconds' notice require massive intelligence.
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Summary of
Nuclear War
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Summary of Annie Jacobsen’s book
A Scenario
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Summary of Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen: A Scenario
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This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War: A Scenario” designed to enrich your reading experience.
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Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.
NOTE
The US government has been preparing for a nuclear war since the 1950s, with trillions of dollars spent on preparations and protocols. This book presents a scenario of what could happen after an inbound nuclear missile launch, based on interviews with various experts. The Pentagon is a top target, and Washington, D.C., is hit first with a 1-megaton thermonuclear bomb. This attack initiates an Armageddon-like General Nuclear War, which could lead to the end of civilization as we know it. The nuclear war scenario could happen tomorrow or later today.
PROLOGUE
Hell on Earth
A 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation occurred in Washington, D.C., resulting in a massive fireball that expanded at millions of miles per hour. The Pentagon and its 6.5 million square feet of office space were destroyed, with 27,000 employees perishing instantly. The radiating heat from the fireball ignited everything flammable within its line of sight several miles out in every direction, causing a great firestorm that consumed a 100-or-more-square-mile area that was the beating heart of American governance and home to some 6 million people.
Across the Potomac River, the marble walls and columns of the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials superheated, splitting, burst apart, and disintegrating. The Fashion Centre at Pentagon City, with its abundance of stores filled with high-end clothing brands and household goods, and the adjacent Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City hotel, were all obliterated.
Within seconds, thermal radiation from this 1-megaton nuclear bomb attack on the Pentagon deeply burned the skin on roughly 1 million more people, 90 percent of whom will die. Defense scientists and academics have spent decades doing this math, but most won't make it more than a few steps from where they happen to be standing when the bomb detonates.
At the Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, there are another 17,000 victims, including almost everyone working at the Defense Intelligence Agency headquarters, the White House Communications Agency headquarters, the U.S. Coast Guard Station Washington, the Marine One helicopter hangar, and scores of other heavily guarded federal facilities that cater to the nation's security. At the National Defense University, a majority of the 4,000 students attending are dead or dying.
In the twenty-first century, the nuclear weapon has become a threat to the world. The science behind the bomb is profound, with two pulses of thermal radiation embedded in the thermonuclear flash of light. These pulses cause human skin to ignite and burn, leading to a blast that creates a high-pressure wave that moves out like a tsunami, causing massive destruction. The air behind the blast wave accelerates, creating several-hundredmile-per-hour winds.
The nuclear fireball in Washington, D.C., destroys all structures in its immediate path, instantly changing the physical shapes of engineered structures. Buildings collapse, bridges fall, cranes topple over, and objects become airborne like tennis balls. The nuclear fireball rises up like a hot-air balloon, causing the formation of the iconic mushroom cloud.
As the explosion continues, radioactive particles spew across everything below, raining back down on Earth and its people. More than a million people are dead or dying and less than two minutes have passed since detonation. The inferno begins, causing gas lines to explode, tanks containing flammable materials to burst open, chemical factories to explode, pilot lights on water heaters and furnaces to set anything not already burning alight, and collapsed buildings to become giant ovens.
Survivors shuffle in shock, desperate to escape, and face the insidious truth about nuclear war. The U.S. government has been preparing for and rehearsing plans for a General Nuclear War, a nuclear World War III that is guaranteed to leave at least 2 billion dead. To know this answer more specifically, we go back in time, more than sixty years ago, to December 1960, when U.S. Strategic Air Command held a secret meeting.
PART I
The Top Secret Plan for General Nuclear War
In 1960, a group of American military officials convened in Omaha, Nebraska, to discuss a secret plan that would result in the death of 600 million people, one-fifth of the world's then population of 3 billion people. The meeting was attended by U.S. Secretary of Defense Thomas S. Gates Jr., Deputy Secretary of Defense James H. Douglas Jr., U.S. Deputy Director of Defense Research and Engineering John H. Rubel, Joint Chiefs of Staff General Thomas S. Power, Army Chief General George H. Decker, Navy Chief Admiral Arleigh A. Burke, Air Force Commander General Thomas D. White, and Marine Corps Commandant General David M. Shoup.
Rubel, a former business executive turned defense official, revealed this information in 2008, expressing remorse for participating in such a "heart of darkness" plan. He recounted witnessing a full-scale nuclear attack against the Soviet Union, with airmen carrying a large roll of clear plastic and a red ribbon encircling a large roll of clear plastic. The plan called for a total of forty megatons on Moscow alone, about four thousand times more than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and twenty to thirty times more than all non-nuclear bombs dropped by the Allies in both theaters during World War II.
Rubel's admission is remarkable as it is the first known instance where an attendee of this meeting dared reveal such personal details about what went on, conveying the simple truth that this plan for nuclear war was genocide.
The Girl in the Rubble
The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945 killed over 80,000 people, with the total numbers still debated. The mass destruction of Hiroshima's government facilities, hospitals, police, and fire departments created chaos and confusion in the immediate aftermath. Thirteen-year-old Setsuko Thurlow was 1.1 miles from ground zero when the atomic weapon, code-named Little Boy, detonated at an altitude of 1,900 feet. Setsuko was knocked unconscious by the blast and regained consciousness after hearing whispering voices of the girls around her.
At the time of the atomic bombing, Setsuko was one of thirty teenage girls who had been recruited and trained to do top secret recording work at the Japanese army headquarters in Hiroshima. She managed to crawl out of the rubble and through a doorway, but by the time she came out, about 30 other girls were burning to death. The bomb's actual yield was debated among defense scientists and military officials, but in 1985, the U.S. government settled on 15 kilotons of TNT. A Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that 2,100 tons of conventional bombs would have had to have been dropped on Hiroshima all at once to achieve a similar effect.
Setsuko Thurlow's survivor experience and Dr. Michihiko Hachiya's survivor experience were for decades suppressed by the U.S. Army and its occupation forces in Japan. The effects of atomic weapons used in combat were kept classified and proprietary because U.S. defense officials wanted that information for themselves.
In flashes of energy and light, two atomic bombs ended a world war in which 50 to 75 million people already died. Starting in 1945, a small group of nuclear scientists and defense officials in the U.S. began making new and bigger plans to use scores of atomic weapons in the next world war, which could be expected to kill at least 600 million people, one-fifth of the entire world's population.
The Buildup
In 1960, the U.S. secretly showed a plan for nuclear war at Strategic Air Command headquarters. Fifteen years had passed since the two atomic weapons were dropped on Japan, causing widespread destruction. The U.S. had a third bomb ready to be shipped out in August 1945, and had enough nuclear material in its arsenal to produce a fourth bomb by the end of the month. The Los Alamos nuclear laboratory crumbled after the war, but the U.S. Navy intervened to prevent its obsolescence in atomic warfare. Operation Crossroads, a public relations-based military test, demonstrated how eighty-eight naval vessels could survive in a future nuclear battle. Over 42,000 people gathered at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands to witness the live-fire atomic explosions.
Operation Crossroads in mid-1946 led to the atomic bomb program's resurgence, with the American stockpile growing to nine atomic bombs by mid-1946. The Joint Chiefs of Staff requested an evaluation of the "atomic bomb as a military weapon" to determine its next move. The report warned that atomic bombs could be both a threat to mankind and civilization, but also useful in nullifying any nation's military effort and demolishing social and economic structures. The board recommended stockpiling more bombs, as Russia would soon have its own atomic arsenal, making America vulnerable to a surprise attack.
