Among the factors that have spared humanity the horrors of nuclear war is luck. “No one made wrong decisions at critical moments, and mistakes and failures were rectified in time,” according to a UN report on nuclear disarmament. In Nuclear war, a scenario, Published on October 2 by Denoël, American journalist Annie Jacobsen, a multiple Pulitzer Prize finalist, starts from the principle that luck can fail. Specializing in intelligence and internal security, the investigative journalist at New York Times interviewed a hundred high-level sources, such as Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense and head of the CIA under Obama, or General Kehler, head of the United States Strategic Command from 2011 to 2013.
“People who know” what would happen if the United States were attacked by a nuclear missile. The nuclear deterrence strategy is not at all designed for the scenario of a single bomb launched by an unreasonable actor, a “mad king”. Annie Jacobsen explains, second by second, minute by minute, what would happen if an intercontinental ballistic missile carrying a nuclear warhead were launched from North Korea towards the United States. A single missile, “and everything unravels”, summarizes the author. A single missile, and the nuclear war becomes unstoppable. A scenario considered perfectly plausible by the generals who have read the book. Through its realistic unfolding, Jacobsen’s investigation exposes the flaws in the postulate that nuclear weapons consist of a means of defense, in a captivating story, worthy of a thriller. Director Denis Villeneuve, the filmmaker of Dune, was not mistaken because he decided to adapt the book to the cinema. For L’Express, in a preview, Annie Jacobsen explains this spiral of the apocalypse.
How did you come up with the idea of imagining a nuclear war scenario? Who did you contact to develop a credible scenario?
Annie Jacobsen. As a national security journalist, I investigate war, weapons, and secrets. In each of my six previous books, there are about a hundred sources, people who have worked their entire lives in the military and intelligence community.
I can’t tell you how many people have said to me in interviews, with a kind of inflated pride, “Annie, everything I’ve done in my career, I’ve done to prevent World War III.” During the previous administration, with former President Donald Trump in office, you may remember the rhetoric about fire and fury and how the president or the leader of North Korea started talking about nuclear war. I started wondering what would happen if deterrence failed. And I asked that question at the highest levels, to national security officials, to former presidential advisers, to generals, to the people closest to the president if the decision had to be made to launch a nuclear war.
When you started the investigation, the nuclear threat did not seem as great as it is today. Today, the number of “mad kings” who could trigger a nuclear attack seems to have increased.
When I started working on the book during Covid, it was an extraordinary time. For one thing, I had more free time than usual. And so did many former nuclear command and control officials. They were at home, so they agreed to speak to me on Zoom from their living rooms.
And you’re absolutely right: the nuclear threat seemed to have diminished. I’ve had officials, including former secretaries of defense, say to me, “It’s good that you’re writing this book. People seem to have forgotten about this issue.” I had no idea that when this book came out, the world would be on a knife-edge in terms of nuclear threats. I’m fortunate to have interviewed them before that critical moment, because I’m not sure they would have been as open and frank in their answers.
How plausible is the scenario of an all-out nuclear war?
There are about 12,500 nuclear weapons in the world today. The two superpowers, the United States and Russia, each have about 5,000. In a conversation I had with the former commander of the United States Strategic Command, General Robert C. Kehler, who commanded all of the United States’ nuclear forces, I asked him what would happen in the event of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. “The world could collapse in a matter of hours,” he told me.
When you dig into it the way I did, you realize that we are all targets at all times, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The Pentagon thinks that deterrence will hold. But if it doesn’t, the whole thing unravels. That notion is deeply troubling. From the launch of a missile to nuclear winter, it all happens in seventy-two minutes, that’s what the book tells us. In a nuclear war, every strike kills hundreds of thousands. And in a nuclear war, all the weapons are launched, that’s the way it’s designed. Besides, once the fires stop burning, the world will go into nuclear winter, and everyone will die.
Even though the United States is on alert, it does not seem very prepared to find any diplomatic solution if a single missile were launched.
An Army nuclear war game that took place in 1983 has been declassified. One of the participants, Paul Bracken, a political science professor at Yale, was released from his security confidentiality obligations and was able to speak generally about what he learned. He writes that no matter how nuclear war starts, whether NATO is involved or not, whether China is involved or not, whoever is involved, it ends in annihilation, in Armageddon. That’s why I chose the Mad King scenario, because that’s the most dangerous reality that we’re all facing right now.
In your book, one of the people who seems least prepared for all of this is the president of the United States, who, if he were attacked, would have six minutes to decide which targets to attack with which weapons. We’re a month away from a crucial election. Does that concern you?
The United States, like Russia, has a policy of implementing the “launch on warning” strategy, that is, launching the response before impact on its soil and without even knowing what the warhead contains. When Americans go to the polls, they will vote for the person who will have control over the fate of the world. We can say that the same is true in Russia. In this election, a female vice president is running against a former president. This is a unique fact in history. The vice president of the United States is responsible for this authority in the event of the incapacity of the president of the United States. So both are aware. So why have we heard nothing from Kamala Harris about nuclear policy? As for Donald Trump, we have heard flagrant distortions of the facts. In particular, that he wants to create an “Iron Dome” type structure over America that would shoot down all incoming missiles. This is scientifically implausible. This works when it comes to short-range and even medium-range missiles. It doesn’t work when it comes to long-range strategic missiles, ICBMs and SLBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles. These are unstoppable weapons. Once they’re launched, they can’t be recalled and they can’t be redirected.
Since Barack Obama delivered his famous speech in 2009 on a nuclear-free world, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize, the issue has not really moved forward…
The president has the sole authority to launch a nuclear response. Why do citizens, not only in the United States but around the world, remain so ignorant? No president except Ronald Reagan has mentioned the six-minute window during which a president must decide which weapons to launch at which targets.
Reagan called it irrational. “Six minutes to figure out how to respond to a beep or a radar code and decide whether or not to trigger the apocalypse. Who can use reason well at that time?” He is the only president who has spoken so frankly on the subject. Former Defense Secretary William Perry confirmed to me that most presidents come into office unprepared for nuclear war. And some don’t seem to want to know.
Your book suggests that nuclear war is inevitable, especially given the many “mad kings” in the world…
There is a note of hope in all this, what I call the Reagan turnaround. At the height of the Cold War, President Reagan was a nuclear hawk. He came into office believing that increasing nuclear weapons would make America safer, and the Western world safer. In 1983, a movie aired on ABC. It was called The Day After. It was a fictional account of a nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Russia. 100 million Americans watched it. So did Reagan. He wrote in his diary that he had become very depressed. And he decided to take action. He reached out to Russian leader Gorbachev, which led to the Reykjavik Summit of 1986. The world was able to go from a record level of 70,000 nuclear warheads to about 12,500 today. They issued a joint statement: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” It was a very powerful moment. We need to get back to it. Nuclear weapons have been around for seventy-nine years. There are moments that seem to be cyclical when people wake up to this issue. I think that moment has come.
What surprised you most when you conducted this survey?
Technical problems. I was shocked to learn that the US Department of Defense’s detection system is extraordinarily advanced, but that the Russian system is apparently very poor. As a result, the Russians can mistake sunlight or clouds for an intercontinental ballistic missile launching from America. Furthermore, our intercontinental ballistic missiles do not have sufficient range to target North Korea in case a counterattack is necessary. They have to fly over Russia. This was confirmed to me by former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. I told him that Russia might think that the United States is striking Russia. And Panetta replied, “When the nuclear bombs start flying, you don’t think about what’s going on in other people’s heads.” That statement coming from someone who is the former Secretary of Defense of the United States, the former Director of the CIA, and the former White House Chief of Staff, alarmed me. And in hindsight, I think that’s one of the reasons Leon Panetta agreed to speak to me. He understands the heightened threat level that we’re in right now.
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