Praise for Nuclear War:

“Gripping . . . essential if you want to understand the complex and disturbing details that go into a civilization-destroying decision to drop the Bomb on an enemy. . . . Jacobsen has done her homework. She has spent more than a decade interviewing dozens of experts while mastering the voluminous literature on the subject, some of it declassified only in recent years.” — New York Times Book Review

“Timeless, masterful. . .A stomach-clenching, multi-perspective, ticking-clock, geopolitical thriller. Jacobsen expertly delivers a madman’s portrait of Armageddon, one made all the more impactful by the thought that it could literally occur at any moment. Almost novel-like in its presentation, Nuclear War: A Scenario represents the equivalent of an existential gut punch, a sickening and necessary reminder of how fragile every 21st century convenience becomes in the face of a blinding flash of light and near-instantaneous shockwave. Exhaustively researched and featuring interviews with professionals who truly understand just how close we continue to creep toward thermonuclear annihilation Nuclear War: A Scenario should be required reading for everyone alive today, especially for the politicians and policymakers who literally hold the precarious fate of our species in their hands.” — Forbes

“At once methodical and vivid. In documenting the minutiae of the apocalypse, the writing is redolent of 'Hiroshima', a seminal article by John Hersey published in the New Yorker in 1946.” — The Economist

“Nuclear War sketches out a global nuclear war with by-the-minute precision for all of the 72 minutes between the first missile launch and the end of the world. . . .  the scenario is constructed from dozens of interviews and documentation, some of it newly declassified, as a factual grounding to describe what could happen.” — Politico

“An urgent warning guaranteed to cause nightmares.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Jacobsen seeks to break through jargon and details in order to tell a terrifying story in a devastatingly straightforward way.” — The Guardian

"Based on hundreds of interviews with many retired security officials and more-or-less declassified information in the public domain, what it captures brilliantly is the emotional chaos into which leaders would be plunged in such a situation. . . . These are scenes straight out of Dr Strangelove." — Telegraph

“Raises critical questions . . . . the theories are complex, and the solutions are anything but easy.” — National Security Institute

2024-03-26
A scarifying, play-by-play exercise in gaming an apocalyptic war.

When the Cold War ended, military tacticians pronounced nuclear warfare a thing of the past. Instead, writes Jacobsen, author of The Pentagon’s Brain, Area 51, and Operation Paperclip, the threat of nuclear holocaust is ever with us. Her scenario—based, she notes, on facts that will lead readers “to the razor’s edge of what can legally be known”—begins with a single thermonuclear missile landing on the Pentagon, atomizing millions of Washingtonians far out into the distant suburbs. That scenario hinges on the gamed-out supposition that it will be a rogue North Korea that fires a single offending missile, one hard to detect given that the existing technology can track the heat signature of a “hot” missile and perhaps shoot it down if given a time frame of five minutes, after which, as one technician says, “they cannot see the rocket after the rocket motor stops.” Still worse is to come, for in a counterlaunch that would surely vaporize North Korea with overwhelming force, Russia, fearing that some of those American rockets are heading its way, might launch a retaliatory strike that would unleash every available resource in the arsenal of both nations—collectively capable of destroying humankind hundreds of times over. Updating Orville Schell’s groundbreaking (and better written) 1982 book The Fate of the Earth, Jacobsen then outlines the very rapid collapse of civilization and the erasure of all our technologies—no more electricity grid, no more industrially farmed food, certainly no more internet—all leading to a world in which “only the ruthless survive” and in which “everyone loses. Everyone.” It’s a cheerless prognosis; however, by Jacobsen’s account, it’s altogether plausible.

An urgent warning guaranteed to cause nightmares—and frustrating, since we’re all powerless in the face of nuclear weapons.