Nuclear War: a Scenario

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• “There is no such thing as a small nuclear war” is an oft repeated phrase in Washington.
• Humans created the nuclear weapon in the twentieth century to save the world from evil, and now, in the twenty-first century, the nuclear weapon is about to destroy the world. To burn it all down.
• Anyone aboveground who is looking directly at the blast—in some cases as far as thirteen miles away—becomes blinded.
• The localized electromagnetic pulse of the bomb obliterates all radio, internet, and TV. Cars with electric ignition systems in a several-mile ring outside the blast zone cannot restart. Water stations can’t pump water. Saturated with lethal levels of radiation, the entire area is a no-go zone for first responders. Not for days will the rare survivors realize help was never on the way.
• What shocked Rubel most, he wrote, was that with regards to Moscow alone, “the plan called for a total of forty megatons—megatons—on Moscow, about four thousand times more than the bomb over Hiroshima and perhaps twenty to thirty times more than all the non-nuclear bombs dropped by the Allies in both theaters during more than four years of World War II.”
• Setsuko Thurlow’s survivor experience, and Dr. Hachiya’s survivor experience, and countless others like theirs were for decades suppressed by the U.S. Army and its occupation forces in Japan. The effects that atomic weapons used in combat had on people and buildings were kept classified and proprietary because U.S. defense officials wanted that information for themselves. For another nuclear war. The Pentagon wanted to make sure it knew more about nuclear blast effects than any future enemy could possibly know.
• The bomb’s blueprints had been stolen from the Los Alamos laboratory by a German-born, British-educated, communist spy. A Manhattan Project scientist named Klaus Fuchs.
• The year 1952 saw the invention of the thermonuclear bomb, also called the hydrogen bomb. A two-stage mega-weapon: a nuclear bomb within a nuclear bomb. A thermonuclear weapon uses an atomic bomb inside itself as its triggering mechanism. As an internal, explosive fuse. The Super’s monstrous, explosive power comes as the result of an uncontrolled, self-sustaining chain reaction in which hydrogen isotopes fuse under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion.
• Garwin’s own mentor, the Manhattan Project’s Enrico Fermi, experienced a crisis of conscience at the very thought of such a horrifying weapon being built. Fermi and colleague I. I. Rabi temporarily broke ranks with their weapons-building colleagues and wrote to President Truman, declaring the Super to be “an evil thing.”
• Ivy Mike exploded with unprecedented yield. The bomb crater left behind was described in a classified report as being “large enough to hold 14 buildings the size of the Pentagon.”
• Why stockpile 1,000 or 18,000 or 31,255 nuclear bombs when a single one of them the size of Ivy Mike, dropped on New York City or Moscow, could leave some 10 million people dead? Why continue to mass-produce thousands of these weapons when the use of a single thermonuclear bomb will almost certainly ignite a wider, unstoppable, civilization-ending nuclear war? A new term was afoot. A figure of speech known as “deterrence.” To keep something from happening. But what does that even mean?
• Some people see deterrence as a peaceful savior. Others see it as doublespeak, asking, How could having nuclear weapons keep people safe from having a nuclear war?
• As crazy as this now seems, before December 1960, each U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force chief had control over his own stockpile of nuclear weapons, their delivery systems, and target lists. In an attempt to rein in the potential for mayhem from these multiple, competing plans for nuclear war, the secretary of defense ordered all of them to be integrated into one single plan, which is how the Single Integrated Operational Plan—the SIOP—got its name.
• In 1960, the world’s population was 3 billion. What this meant was that the Pentagon had paid 1,300 people to compile a war plan that would kill one-fifth of the people on Earth in a preemptive nuclear first strike. It’s important to note that this number did not account for the 100 million or so Americans who would almost certainly be killed by a Russian equal-measure counterattack. Nor did it account for another 100 million or so people in North and South America who would die from radioactive fallout over approximately the next six months. Or the untold numbers of people who would starve to death from the climate effects of a world set on fire.
• “Shoup was a short man with rimless glasses who could have passed for a schoolteacher from a rural mid-American community,” recalled Rubel. He remembered how Shoup spoke in a calm, level voice when he offered a sole opposing view on the plan for nuclear war. That Shoup said: “All I can say is, any plan that murders three hundred million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That is not the American way.” The room fell silent, Rubel wrote. “Nobody moved a muscle.” Nobody seconded Shoup’s dissent. No one else said anything. According to Rubel, everyone just looked the other way. It was decades later that Rubel confessed that this U.S. plan for nuclear war he participated in reminded him of the Nazis’ plans for genocide. In his memoir, he referred to a time in an earlier world war when a group of Third Reich officials met at a lakeside villa in a German town called Wannsee. It was there, over the course of a ninety-minute meeting, that this group of allegedly rational men decided among themselves how to move forward with the genocide in a war they were presently winning—World War II—so as to ensure total victory for themselves. Millions of people needed to die, these Reich officials agreed.
• Nearing the end of his life, Rubel decided to tell the world what he could not back in 1960. “I felt as if I were witnessing a comparable descent into the deep heart of darkness, a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one third of the earth’s surface.”
• “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev cautioned the world in a joint statement in 1985. Decades later, in 2022, President Joe Biden warned Americans that “the prospect of [nuclear] Armageddon” is at a terrifying new high.
• As a general rule, missile tests as significant as an ICBM launch are announced, usually to neighbors—through diplomatic channels, back channels, some other kind of channel, but almost always through a channel. The exception is North Korea. Between January 2022 and May 2023, North Korea test-launched more than 100 missiles, including nuclear-capable weapons that can hit the continental United States. None of them were announced.
• “When you’re looking for things that are abnormal,” Colonel Brunderman warns, “a lot of things appear abnormal.”
• “This kind of Bolt out of the Blue attack is [characterized] as a surprise attack, a sneak attack,” former secretary of defense William Perry tells us. A military tactic as old as warfare itself. But in this age of nuclear weapons, it is national suicide for any country to be as foolhardy as to preemptively strike the United States. All deterrence is predicated on the idea that a Bolt out of the Blue attack against a nuclear-armed superpower all but ensures the attacking nation’s total and complete destruction.
• The result, Herb York learned, was 26 minutes and 40 seconds from launch to annihilation. Just 1,600 seconds. That is it. A copy of this secret assessment lies hidden among Herb York’s personal papers at the Geisel Library in San Diego. Perhaps York left it there out of carelessness, or maybe he wanted the world to know for certain what war planners and weapons builders have known for decades, but have never revealed in such cold, hard terms. That there is no way to win a nuclear war. It simply happens too fast.
• “Our military is very powerful, very lethal,” says Captain Ryan La Rance, an officer who manages the airmen on a Doomsday Plane, “but it doesn’t happen without communication.”
• Launch on Warning policy means America will launch its nuclear weapons once its early-warning electronic sensor systems warn of an impending nuclear attack. Said differently, if notified of an impending attack, America will not wait and physically absorb a nuclear blow before launching its own nuclear weapons back at whoever was irrational enough to attack the United States. Launch on Warning “is a key aspect of nuclear war planning the public rarely hears about,” says William Burr, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Launch on Warning—in place as policy since the height of the Cold War—is also incredibly high-risk. “Inexcusably dangerous,” presidential advisor Paul Nitze warned us decades ago. Launch on Warning during a “time of intense crisis” is a recipe for catastrophe, Nitze said. During the presidential campaign of George W. Bush in 2000, the future president vowed to address this perilous policy if elected. “Keeping so many weapons on high alert may create unacceptable risks of accidental or unauthorized launch,” Bush said. “High-alert, high-trigger status [is] another unnecessary vestige of Cold War confrontation.” No change was made. Barack Obama echoed the same fundamental concern during his campaign. “[K]eeping nuclear weapons ready to launch on a moment’s notice is a dangerous relic of the Cold War,” Obama declared. “Such policies increase the risk of catastrophic accidents or miscalculation.” Like his predecessor, President Obama made no change. When President Biden took office, physicist Frank von Hippel urged him to eliminate the perilous policy. “President Biden … should end the launch-on-warning option and the danger it entails of an unintended nuclear Armageddon,” von Hippel wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. But like his predecessors, President Biden has made no change. And so, decades later, we’re still here. With Launch on Warning in effect.
• The job of the secretary of defense is to ensure civilian command of the military, a position that is second only to the president, who serves as the commander in chief. The secretary of defense and president are the only two civilian positions within the military chain of command.
• In a nuclear war, confusion over protocol and speed of action will have unintended consequences beyond anyone’s grasp. It will send the United States of America into the heart of darkness that defense official John Rubel warned about in 1960. Into what he called “a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one third of the earth’s surface.”
• Theft of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems is often how nations accelerate their fledgling nuclear programs. Property theft saves a nation not just time but treasure—by avoiding complex research and development programs. Back in the 1940s, after Klaus Fuchs stole blueprints for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, he gave them to his handler in Moscow. From that moment, it was only a matter of time before Stalin had his own atomic bomb.
• The ICBM is now in its last few seconds of Boost Phase. Once the missile enters Midcourse Phase it becomes almost impossible to stop. Now is the last opportunity to shoot down the attacking ICBM, but this cannot happen because the U.S. Defense Department has no system in place. “We told all kinds of people in D.C. about this and all of them disregarded the idea,” Postol tells us. “We proposed a joint initiative with Russia,” Garwin reveals. “They also have an interest in keeping North Korea from launching a nuclear weapon. Just as we do.” But Postol’s and Garwin’s suggestions fell on deaf ears. There are no Reaper drones presently patrolling over the Sea of Japan, to try to shoot down this attacking ICBM.
• There is a myth among Americans that the U.S. can easily shoot down an incoming, attacking ICBM. Presidents, congresspeople, defense officials, and countless others in the military-industrial complex have all said as much. This is simply not true.
• One catchy descriptor that SBX advocates use to explain how powerful the SBX is, is to say if placed in the Chesapeake Bay, its radars would be able to see a baseball-sized object in San Francisco from an observation post in Washington, D.C., some 2,900 miles away. This is true, sort of. The baseball needs to be hovering 870 miles above San Francisco in a direct line of sight with the radar in D.C. in order to be seen.
• Mike Corbett, a retired air force colonel who oversaw the program for three years, had by 2017 already predicted it would fail. “You can spend an awful lot of money and end up with nothing,” Corbett told the Los Angeles Times in 2015, “billions and billions [were spent] on these [SBX] programs that didn’t lead anywhere.”
• One of the men on the visit was Harold Agnew, a scientist with a unique history. Agnew was one of the three physicists assigned to fly on the Hiroshima bombing mission as a scientific observer. He carried a movie camera with him and took the only existing film footage of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, as seen from the air. Now, in 1959, Agnew was at Los Alamos overseeing thermonuclear bomb tests; he later became the lab’s director.
• FEMA is the government entity assigned to prepare for nuclear war. Its special access programs are highly classified. They also hide, or obscure, a misperception. The truth is, there is no federal agency to help citizens survive a nuclear war per se. What FEMA does is focus on how to save specific government officials in the event of a nuclear attack.
• From this moment forward, the job of the FEMA chief is to stay focused on the Program. Everything else must be ignored. “You’d have to get over the fact that after a nuclear strike, you couldn’t do anything for [most] people,” Fugate warns. He says that if someone in his position were to focus on the reality of what is about to go down in a Bolt out of the Blue nuclear attack, “you’d be paralyzed,” he opines. “It’s almost like you’d have to disassociate yourself from the horrors. Our line of work is low-probability, high-consequence events. I mean, we plan for asteroids.”
• And the truth is, he says, “the best the federal government could do is to tell people … people who still have a radio … what they can do for themselves to self-survive.” Things like: “Stock water. Drink Pedialyte. Stay indoors. Don’t forget your morals.” Self-survive.
• When a nuclear bomb hits Washington, D.C., chaos will grip the nation. Without a functioning government, there will be no rule of law. Democracy will be replaced by anarchy. Moral constructs will disappear. Murder, mayhem, and madness will prevail. In the words of Nikita Khrushchev, “The survivors will envy the dead.”
• One missile could be a misread. Two is not a mistake. Deterrence has failed. Nuclear war is happening. Now. Most of them knowing, This is the beginning of the end of the world.
• Former secretary of defense William Perry tells us what a secretary of defense might be considering in a moment such as this. When there is still time for a SecDef to try to save himself and get out. “In this case, if it was a [nuclear] bomb in Washington, D.C., the cabinet would likely be decapitated and an emergency government [would have] to be brought into play,” Perry says. “An immediate consequence of a nuclear strike [would be] that democracy would be completely gone and military rule would take place.” Perry believes that if military rule is ever imposed on today’s America, “it would be almost impossible to undo military rule” in the United States.
• “It’s easier to find a grapefruit-sized object in space than a submarine at sea,” former vice admiral Michael J. Connor, commander of the United States (nuclear) submarine forces tells us. And that, conversely, “anything fixed is destroyable.”
• Fearsome and revered, they are masterpieces of engineering. Self-contained ecosystems that generate their own power, make their own oxygen and potable water, and can remain at sea, underwater, almost indefinitely, or until the crew runs out of food. Hidden from reconnaissance satellites, submarines move around the ocean with impunity. Because they have zero detectability, they’re immune from first-strike attack, or almost any attack, until they’re forced to surface upon return to port.
• The firepower on one of these submarines can pretty much destroy a nation.
• For example, a Russian sub lurking off the U.S. West Coast can launch its missiles near simultaneously, at targets in all fifty states, all at once. This is because the multiple warheads in the nose cone of each missile can be deployed to individual targets hundreds of miles away. This is a primary driver of the Launch on Warning policy, and why the U.S. nuclear triad—like Russia’s nuclear triad—remains on Hair-Trigger Alert.
• It’s the speed with which submarines can launch nuclear weapons that makes them handmaidens of the apocalypse. In the words of defense analyst Sebastien Roblin, “ballistic-missile submarines promise the unstoppable hand of nuclear retribution—and should deter any sane adversary from attempting a first strike, or resorting to nuclear weapons at all.”
• But as the world is about to learn, there are no laws in nuclear war. The premise of deterrence is that nuclear war is never supposed to happen.
• To defend against short-range ballistic missiles, the U.S. Navy has developed its Aegis program, an anti-ballistic missile system mounted on navy Aegis cruisers and destroyers at sea. Unlike the faulty interceptor program, Aegis missiles have a shoot-down record of 85 percent. But these battleships are out on patrol in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and in the Persian Gulf—defending America’s NATO and Indo-Pacific partners from attack. They are thousands of miles away from being anywhere near shooting range of America’s West Coast.
• In the laws of war, there exists a promise among nations never to attack a nuclear reactor. Expanding on the Geneva Conventions Protocol II, Article 15, the International Committee of the Red Cross calls this Rule 42.
• But as history demonstrates, mad rulers disobey rules of war. In words often attributed to Adolf Hitler, “If you win, you need not have to explain.”
• Every three years, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission carries out force-on-force maneuvers where security guards practice how to counter a direct attack. Exercises include tabletop games, like chess, and mock drills that simulate combat against an adversary force like a terrorist organization. But there has never been such a thing as a rehearsal against an incoming nuclear missile. This is because no such defense exists. Rule 42, like the concept of deterrence, is psychological. A theoretical supposition predicated on supposed future behavior and follow-on consequences that promise to work—until it doesn’t work.
• America’s 400 land-based ICBMs are generally accepted as the leg of the U.S. nuclear triad most vulnerable to attack because their locations are publicly known and don’t change. This also makes them among the first weapons systems to be launched in a nuclear counterattack—a concept known to insiders as the “use them or lose them” strategy. Launch your ICBMs fast or expect them to be targeted and destroyed.
• An ICBM can be launched—meaning the time it takes from the moment a launch order is received, to the weapon’s physical launch—faster than any other weapon system in the arsenal, including those on submarines. “They weren’t called Minutemen for nothing,” wrote former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair. “The process of arming and targeting and firing the missiles [happens] in a grand total of 60 seconds.”
• “If Wyoming were a nation,” journalist Dan Whipple points out, F. E. Warren Air Force Base outside Cheyenne “would make it one of the world’s major nuclear powers.”
• But before any of these fifty ICBMs reach this final speed and height, a phone call gets made by an old man living down the road from one of these launch facilities here in Wyoming. The old man is a Russian spy. “There are spies everywhere, watching nuclear-launch facilities across the United States,” the CIA’s first science and technology director, Dr. Albert “Bud” Wheelon, told us before he died.
• This is shocking. This is catastrophic. But most of all, this is terrifying. Deterrence is a psychological phenomenon. A state of mind. Now that deterrence has failed, anything can happen. Anything at all.
• Crisis mindset can be a dangerous thing.
• In a 2015 briefing on Capitol Hill (open to the public) called “Accidental Nuclear War between Russia and the United States,” Postol told a group of congresspeople that Russia’s “fragile early-warning system poses one of the greatest dangers of nuclear use [that is] currently facing the U.S.” That if misinterpretation of satellite data were to happen, “Russia could engage in a gigantic, spasmodic launch of all its nuclear forces.”
• For years, the CIA remained convinced that North Korea’s ballistic missiles did not have reentry capability. Then, in 2020, for reasons not made public, their assessment changed.
• In 1983, Petrov made the decision to interpret the early-warning signal as a “false alarm,” he said, thereby not sending a report up the chain of command. For his well-placed skepticism, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov famously became known as “the man who saved the world from nuclear war.”
• “The power to hurt is bargaining power,” Schelling famously wrote in his book Arms and Influence. “To exploit it is diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.”
• Paul Bracken, a professor of political science at Yale, was one of the civilian individuals invited to participate in playing the classified nuclear war game. The results were horrifying, Bracken says. Over the course of two weeks, in every simulated scenario—and despite whatever particularly triggering event started the war game—nuclear war always ended the same way. With the same outcome. There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.
• Nuclear war is not supposed to happen. Deterrence is supposed to hold. But if it doesn’t, restoring deterrence is what happens next. “Changing an adversary’s decision calculus regarding further [nuclear] escalation” is how a 2020 White House briefing document described it.
• The radiation poisoning had caused the near complete loss of tissue that once separated one of Slotin’s organs from the next. Without this lining, his organs had merged into one. And to think, just a few months prior, Manhattan Project chief General Leslie Groves had assured the public and Congress that death by radiation poisoning was “a very pleasant way to die.”
• “We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle,” Robert Oppenheimer once said of the arms race between the U.S. and Russia, “each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”
• Russian submarines have, of late, traveled so unnervingly close to America’s East Coast that the Defense Department included in its Fiscal Year 2021 Budget Request to Congress a map of the alarming tracking data it has gathered on both Russian and Chinese submarines. Enemy submarines patrol perilously close to America’s shores. (U.S. Department of Defense; image redrawn by Michael Rohani)
• Time and again, declassified nuclear war games have demonstrated that if deterrence fails, this is how it ends. With Armageddon. With civilization being destroyed.
• Speaking over the Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite constellation from inside Site R, the secretary of defense presents his for-the-good-of-humanity idea. That maybe there is no point in killing hundreds of millions of people across the world in Russia. That just because hundreds of millions of innocent Americans are about to die, maybe the other half of humanity—full of so many innocents—does not have to die. His suggestion gets dismissed without consideration.
• “Every capability in the DoD is underpinned by the fact that strategic deterrence will hold,” U.S. Strategic Command insists publicly. Until the fall of 2022, this promise was pinned on STRATCOM’s public Twitter feed, then taken down. But to a private audience at Sandia National Laboratories later that same year, STRATCOM’s deputy director, Lieutenant General Thomas Bussiere, admitted the danger of deterrence. “Everything unravels itself if those things are not true.”
• As President Kennedy once remarked after a briefing on likely nuclear death tolls: “And we call ourselves the human race.”
• How tragic and ironic it is that human beings developed slow and steady over hundreds of thousands of years, culminating in the creation of vast and complex civilizations, only to get zeroed out in a war that takes less than a few hours from beginning to end.
• What will become of humanity after nuclear war? The dinosaurs had a 165-million-year run. They came, they dominated, they evolved. Then an asteroid hit Earth and the dinosaurs went extinct (not counting their descendants, birds). No trace of the killer reptiles was found by anyone, that we know of, for 66 million years. Until just a few hundred years ago, in 1677, when the director of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Robert Plot, found a dinosaur femur in the village of Cornwall and drew it for a science journal, misidentifying the bone as belonging to a giant. After nuclear war, who, if anyone, will know we were once here?
• For decades, North Korea’s leaders have constructed vast underground facilities (UGFs in military parlance) for themselves to hide out in before, during, and after a nuclear exchange. “North Korea’s UGF program is the largest and most fortified in the world,” the Defense Intelligence Agency reported in 2021, “estimated to consist of thousands of UGFs and bunkers designed to withstand U.S. bunker-buster bombs.” This network of subterranean buildings is said to be connected internally by railways and roads, some with remote-controlled bridges and movable gates. “The entire nation must be made into a fortress,” Supreme Leader Kim Il Sung publicly proclaimed in 1963. “We must dig into the ground to protect ourselves.”
  • Add to subterranean warfare section
• “There [had] been fears expressed that North Korea might use a satellite to carry a small nuclear warhead into orbit and then detonate it over the United States for an EMP strike,” Oberg wrote in the Space Review. Trained as a nuclear weapons engineer, Oberg says he initially thought “these concerns seem[ed] extreme and [would] require an astronomical scale of irrationality on the part of the regime.” But after traveling to North Korea to examine the country’s satellite control facilities and hardware, Oberg reported back that he’d changed his mind. He became convinced that what he saw, in fact, presented an existential threat to the United States. Oberg called it the Doomsday Scenario. “The most frightening aspect,” Oberg wrote of what he witnessed, “is that exactly such a scale of insanity is now evident in the rest of [North Korea’s] ‘space program.’ That Doomsday Scenario … has become plausible enough to compel the United States to take active measures” to stop such a thing, Oberg warned. To make sure that a North Korean satellite, capable of carrying a small nuclear warhead, never “be allowed to reach orbit and ever overfly the United States.”
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• But no actions were taken and in February 2016 North Korea successfully launched this kind of satellite into space—a satellite with a payload big enough to carry a small nuclear warhead. North Korean officials insisted it was carrying a 470-megahertz UHF radio payload into orbit, designed only to broadcast patriotic songs to its citizens. And maybe it was. But the satellite’s orbit was an unusual south-to-north orbit, one that allowed it to fly directly over the United States, including over Washington, D.C., and New York City. The following year, North Korea published a technical paper called “The EMP Might of Nuclear Weapons,” zeroing out the idea they were being assigned a military intention they did not possess.
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• Ambassador Henry Cooper, former director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, went on record with his worst-case-scenario fears regarding a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse detonated over the United States: “The result could be to shut down the U.S. electric power grid for an indefinite period, leading to the death within a year of up to 90 percent of all Americans.”
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• “North Korea has a chemical warfare (CW) program that could comprise up to several thousand metric tons of chemical warfare agents, and the capability to produce nerve, blister, blood, and choking agents,” Defense Intelligence Agency analysts warned in their 2021 report.
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• In an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Kirby did the math on what would happen in what he terms a “Sea of Sarin” attack, basing casualty rates “on a generalized application of how chemical weapons operate.” Using a “likely overall rate of … 10,800 rounds every 15 minutes,” Kirby calculates, coupled with the fact that “the Sarin payload of each 240 mm rocket is known to be 8 kilograms per rocket,” and while also taking into consideration “misfires and duds …” Kirby maintains that a 240-ton Sarin attack on South Korea would inflict a 25 percent casualty rate on Seoul. The casualty numbers are horrific: between 650,000 and 2.5 million civilians dead, with another 1 to 4 million more injured.
• Humans are wired to advance. Humans do whatever it takes. And yet, nuclear war zeros it all out. Nuclear weapons reduce human brilliance and ingenuity, love and desire, empathy and intellect, to ash. In this moment, the most horrifying part of the shock and the despair is revelation, about what life will be like from this second forward. Followed by the stark realization that no one did anything substantial to prevent nuclear World War III. That this didn’t have to happen. And now it is too late.
• The epic, existential tragedy is that these last and final nuclear battle maneuvers cease to matter on anyone’s scoreboard. Everyone loses. Everyone.
• Survivors who eventually, inevitably emerge from these bunkers to face what Nikita Khrushchev foresaw when he said, “The survivors will envy the dead.”
• The world’s first nuclear explosion occurred on July 16, 1945, at a site on the plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, known locally as the Jornada del Muerto. How the story of nuclear weapons began is how it will end. Jornada del Muerto. The Journey of the Dead Man.
• The Earth plunges into a new horror called nuclear winter. The concept of nuclear winter first caught the world’s attention in October 1983 when Parade magazine (then read by more than 10 million Americans) featured on its cover a spooky image of a darkened Earth and news of a “special report” inside, authored by one of the world’s most famous scientists, Carl Sagan. “Would nuclear war be the end of the world?” Sagan asked, and answered: “In a nuclear ‘exchange,’ more than a billion people would instantly be killed. But the long-term consequences could be much worse.” Consequences that Sagan, his former students James B. Pollack and O. Brian Toon, and meteorologists Thomas P. Ackerman and Richard P. Turco laid out in terrifying detail in a paper published two months later, in the journal Science.
• “Our first models [in 1983] said nuclear winter would last about one year,” Toon explains. “New data suggests the Earth’s recovery time would be more like ten years.” That the sun’s warming rays will reduce by roughly 70 percent.
• Death by radiation is an excruciating way to die. As acute vomiting and diarrhea run their course, bone marrow and intestinal destruction sets in. The lining on victims’ organs ruptures and hemorrhages. The insides of people’s bodies liquify as blood vessel lining sloughs away. These are grueling maladies to endure in a hospital, near impossible to overcome in the cold and the dark, on the run from firestorms and toxic smoke.
• When transportation stopped, when there was no fuel to pump, and no vehicles to drive, the distribution of food ceased. What was stored locally burned, radiated, froze, or has rotted. The people who survived the blast, wind, and fire effects of the initial nuclear war—who survived radiation poisoning and bitter cold—now begin starving to death.
• The conclusion drawn in 2022—by ten scientists working on four continents, in a paper for Nature Food—is succinct: “More than 5 billion could die from a [nuclear] war between the United States and Russia.”
• Nuclear explosions and the ensuing firestorms inject mass amounts of nitrous oxides into the stratosphere. As a result, more than half the ozone layer is in ruin. A 2021 study on “Extreme Ozone Loss Following Nuclear War,” conducted with computational support by the National Science Foundation, found that after a fifteen-year period the ozone would lose as much as 75 percent of its shielding power worldwide. Survivors must move underground. Into the damp and the dark. Into spaces infested with spiders and insects, like sucking louse.
• So much has been damaged, but planet Earth has a way of always recovering and repairing herself, at least so far. The soil rebounds, as does the quality of the water supply. The ultraviolet rays that sent human survivors underground have softened and become nurturing again. If human beings do survive, how will they begin anew? And will these new humans of the future become archaeologists? Will they ever know we were all once here?
• As of early 2024, no living quarters have yet been found at Göbekli Tepe. No cemeteries, no bones. In other words, people didn’t live here, it seems, but they gathered here—for centuries, perhaps even thousands of years. Why? We don’t know. To do what? We don’t know.
• In the dawn of the nuclear age, Albert Einstein was asked what he thought about nuclear war, to which he is said to have responded, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
• The story you have just read imagines exactly this. A story where 12,000 years of civilization in the making gets reduced to rubble in mere minutes and hours. This is the reality of nuclear war. For as long as nuclear war exists as a possibility, it threatens mankind with Apocalypse. The survival of the human species hangs in the balance.
• With time, after a nuclear war, all present-day knowledge will be gone. Including the knowledge that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran, or anyone else vilified as a nation or a group. It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all. All along.
• “Humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned the world in the fall of 2022.
• Goldberger told me he wished he’d spent more time doing science for science’s sake and not doing science for war. “At the end of your life you think about these things,” he said.
• Dr. Jay W. Forrester (1918–2016), a pioneer in computer engineering and the father of System Dynamics, schooled me on a fundamental concept underpinning nuclear command and control: it is a system of systems. A giant machine made of many moving parts. Knowing this, and knowing all machines eventually break, is a terrifying thought.