Nuclear War

A Scenario

Hardcover, 400 pages

English language

Published March 26, 2024 by Transworld Publishers Limited.

ISBN:
978-1-911709-59-6
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(3 reviews)

Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen uses nuclear weapons knowledge gleaned from declassified documents and expert interviews to describe the first minutes of a full-scale nuclear weapons exchange between the USA and Russia; and then the last hours and weeks of the world as humans have known it for the past 12,000 years or so.

4 editions

reviewed Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen

Insulting

Honestly found this book insulting to its readers. The author loves sentence fragments and will make a point in a single sentence then pad it with half a dozen fragments from a batch of their favorite phrases. I don't think you need to work very hard to find a reasonably plausible scenario for an actual nuclear exchange, but the scenario in this book appears to be "the unnamed leader of North Korea decided to launch a decapitation strike against the USA for funsies". At one point the author has a sentence along the lines of "We don't know why NK launched this attack" -- MOTHERFUCKER YOU WROTE THE BOOK! YOU PUT THE IDEA IN THEIR HEAD!

There's random math errors that probably aren't important but are certainly confusing. There's a lot of arbitrary twists and turns to ensure the worst case outcome. Also, there's a lot of talk about EMP …

A book the world should read 😳

If you think you already know that nuclear weapons are a nightmare, you don't. I promise you.

Read this book. Then tell everyone you know about it. Call and write your representatives in government, ask them to read it.

Then ask them to work to rid the world of this nightmare before it ends us all.

Subjects

  • military art and science
  • military history
  • nuclear weapons
  • war
  • nuclear war