Image by Kayle Kaupanger.
How can Annie Jacobsen’s enthralling “Nuclear War: A Scenario” be a NY Times bestseller while there continues to be zero candidate conversation around fundamentally nutty U.S. policies like “launch on warning”? Why don’t we hear anything on the subject from the politicians? The silence is deafening.
Jacobsen’s book proves the utter insanity of genocidal nuclear weapons as the only way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. She dramatizes the total breakdown of “logical” decision-making as the fog of war thickens in the midst of the ridiculously short time-frame constraining officials as they try vainly to prevent the end of the world. And she is stomach-churningly specific about the varieties of gory violence visited upon millions of human bodies by nuclear war.
It becomes clear is that no human being possesses the capacity to think their way calmly through excruciating choices as information pours in from billion-dollar communications systems whose only utility, once Armageddon begins, is to count the minutes remaining for the president to be helicoptered out of Dodge before he is vaporized.
The fact that there is no way to fight and win as such events unfold leaves only the military’s weird assumption that the hair-trigger systems of the nine nuclear nations will deter war forever without any error. As so many authors, including Jacobsen, have documented, the list of near-misses that have already happened is far too long, including a Russian early-warning system mistaking the moon for a squadron of incoming missiles.
Yet the beat goes seamlessly on. Trillions of our tax dollars, Chinese yen, and Russian rubles needed for the conversion to sustainable sources of energy continue to be poured down the rathole of nuclear “upgrading.”
The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has worked to ensure that nuclear weapons have become illegal under international law. Where is any discussion of this in the mainstream media? We are passive victims of what Noam Chomsky called “manufactured consent.”
Reportedly Jacobsen’s book will be made into a film by the director of the Dune films, Denis Villeneuve. This project could not be more timely when we recall the moment Reagan watched the relatively tame TV film “The Day After” and was inspired to change his attitude toward the evil Russian empire, allowing him to make real progress on disarmament with his visionary counterpart in Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev. The two leaders openly considered the mutual standing down of all their nuclear weapons—before alarmed aides jumped in to restore the “sanity” of the status quo. While Putin is no Gorbachev, he surely doesn’t want to risk incineration.
Even leaders of autocratic nations are vulnerable to pressure from informed and aroused populations. The United States, possessor of both the most deadly and advanced weapons systems and a long tradition of free speech, can help accelerate a worldwide debate.
“Nuclear War: A Scenario” gives average citizens the tools to begin conversations and ask effective questions. One doesn’t need to be an expert. The book shows that once nuclear war starts, the “experts” possess neither more expertise nor moral clarity than you or me. Someone should ask:
•“Candidate X, have you rehearsed scenarios of incipient nuclear war and the choices you have to make? Do you think you could maintain your cool once you are told that missiles are incoming, or have you realized that a deterrence breakdown would put you or any leader in an impossible position?”
•”Obama considered eliminating such protocols as launch-on-warning and no-first-use, but they remain official U.S. policy. Given the opportunity, would you try to change such policies?”
•”If responding vengefully to an attack with massive retaliation would make planet-killing nuclear winter a certainty, wouldn’t it make sense not to retaliate at all?”
•”Are there unilateral initiatives that the U.S. could take, including ex-Secretary of Defense Perry’s suggestion that we stand down our entire land-based missile fleet, that would enhance rather than threaten our security?”
•”The vast majority of the world’s citizens would be grateful if the U.S. signed the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Why not sign as an initial commitment to our long-term intention to help move the world beyond mass suicide?”
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