There is always Armageddon

Let me take your mind off our war of survival against Hamas, off the hostages held in Gaza, and off the sociopathic killers we would need to release in return for our captives – not that we know how many are still alive. Let me show you how to mentally brush off those ignoramuses of Jewish ancestry who have made a common cause with wokes, socialists, and Islamists in an orgy of intersectionality. How to ignore the tidal waves of anti-Israelism and antisemitism sweeping university campuses around the world. How to put aside the hypocrisy of world leaders and the international community and – even disregard the stupidities, hubris, and miscalculations of our own government. I can help you momentarily forget all those maddening posts on social media that suck up your time. And even how to figuratively mute the red alerts that are set off on your phone when Hezbollah attacks from the north or Hamas gets off rockets and mortars from the parts of Gaza it holds or has retaken.

For I have just finished a book that is so mind-shattering, so attention-grabbing, that it can temporarily numb us from our present travails.

The book is Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, in which the author sets out cinematically what might happen in the first 72 minutes of a nuclear war that begins one mid-afternoon when North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un launches two or three nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles at the US.

Time is of the essence. Begin with the fact that the president has just six minutes to evaluate what he has been told about incoming ballistic missiles before he must give the launch order.

By organizing her deeply researched book into minutes, Jacobsen is able to play out a situation in which there is no time for decision-making, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Instead, decision-makers must abide by a playbook.

Pyongyang has attacked – why, we never find out. With absolute plausibility, Jacobsen shows how the foretold US retaliation is misread by not-ready-for-prime-time sensors in Russia. Its generals think Washington is exploiting the North Korean aggression to launch a First Strike against Russia.

She takes us from the moment when US eyes in the skies pick up the North Korean launch to a series of ill-fated – but emphatically credible – actions that inexorably ensue, which the reader can’t help but intuit will lead to the unraveling of human civilization.

The book brought to mind the 1983 made-for-ABC-TV film The Day After. President Ronald Reagan found the film depressing and compelling; it encouraged him to urge Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to agree to the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Unfortunately, while there has been a reduction in the number of nukes around the globe since the USSR collapsed in 1991, there are still too many – on the order of 12,000.

This book is non-fiction not a post-apocalyptic novel like The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 magnum opus. Annie Jacobsen has produced a corrective for all those books and journal articles that students of politics and wargaming read in graduate school and military academies. Its starting premise is that, for some unknowable reason, deterrence fails.

At the end of the book, in a sort of epilogue, we get to find out how humanity fared when the last of the detonations are over —spoiler alert. Those not incinerated immediately in the US, North Korea, Russia, and Europe will likely face extinction because of nuclear winter and the depletion of the earth's ozone layer.

Would things really turn out that bad? I am thinking about how well Israel did – with the invaluable assistance of the US and other allies – in shooting down the blitz of 120 ballistic missiles, 170 drones, and about 30 cruise missiles, all conventionally armed, that Iran fired at us in the early morning hours of Sunday, April 14.

Why couldn’t the US take down a few North Korean missiles? And why did it choose to retaliate instantly? Thus giving the inept Russians the opportunity to miscalculate. I am thinking about how Washington dissuaded Israel from immediately reacting against Teheran’s attack.

We don’t have a complete picture of how Iran’s missiles were intercepted, but we do know it was not a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack. We had hours to ponder the appearance of the drones. And there was no immediate retaliation that might have been misinterpreted as a First Strike by some non-involved nuclear power.

Furthermore, while Iran has 3,000 conventional ballistic missiles, its leaders made an apparent decision not to try to overwhelm Israel’s defenses. Certainly, had Iran acted differently and had Lebanon and Yemen simultaneously unleashed all their Houthi and Hezbollah-controlled missiles, rockets, and drones, that night would have ended catastrophically. Perhaps the Shi’ite Islamists decided they would bide their time until they had a nuclear deterrent to inhibit any devastating Israeli retaliation.

In Jacobsen’s telling, there are very few interceptors (maybe 44) based in the continental US, making the chances of shooting down a state-of-the-art North Korean ballistic missile low. As part of the scenario, besides devastating strikes on California and Washington, North Korea also detonates a satellite bomb already in orbit above the US that unleashes an electromagnetic pulse or EMP that takes down America’s power grid and everything that works on electrical components – meaning the whole shebang of US society.

Deterrence has worked so far. It is supposed to operate so long as an irrational leader or fanatical terror group does not get hold of a nuclear bomb. Or until there is a glitch in some country’s early warning system. Or until there is some human error. Except that if deterrence fails – Jacobsen’s point is that there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war. In a nuclear war, there are no rules about “proportionality” or anything else.

Plainly, the best course for humanity to follow is one of universal nuclear weapons disarmament.

So, while the useful idiots on America’s campuses have been protesting a “genocide” that is not happening in Gaza and shilling for a genuinely colonial and imperialist worldview, attention has undeniably shifted away from the nuclear threat posed particularly by North Korea, Iran, and Putin’s Russia.

Tilting at windmills in kaffiyehs and face masks even as the fate of all mankind hangs in the balance strikes me as unforgivably criminal.

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Here is a C-SPAN interview with the author, which may encourage you to read/listen to this important book.