Fun Facts About Nuclear War
Three Things #144: November 10, 2024
I touched upon nuclear war last week, but I want to spend a bit more time on it this week. As a species and as a global community we face several existential threats, including pandemic, climate change, and nuclear war. But among these, nuclear war is unique for several reasons. For one thing, it’s 100% man made and 100% avoidable. For another, it’s in many ways a bigger threat than the others, due to how quickly and completely it could destroy human civilization. I don’t know about you, but to me the threat of nuclear war feels much more present and much more real than most other threats.
I’ve just read Annie Jacobsen’s fantastic and terrifying new book, Nuclear War: A Scenario. I highly recommend it, and I promise that it’ll make the threat feel much more real and much more present to you, as well, if you read it. Here are some fun facts I learned from the book.
Thing #1: Devastation 🌪️
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” - Albert Einstein
There are many shocking truths in Jacobsen’s book. I discuss many of them below, and I plan to discuss more next week. But the most shocking is also the simplest: the utter devastation caused by even a single nuclear attack, to say nothing of the hundreds or thousands that might occur in the case of nuclear war. Jacobsen describes in terrifying clarity what happens in the seconds, minutes, and hours following a nuclear blast. She describes the impact at varying places, from ground zero to nearby cities and towns to the impacts of fallout on the entire planet over many years. The degree of human tragedy and suffering should come as no surprise to anyone who’s aware of what happened after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Jacobsen nevertheless describes it in gruesome, necessary detail.
Actually, it’s worse than that. As horrifying and tragic as the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, keep in mind that they were individual warheads with a yield of around 10-20 kilotons. By contrast, most modern nuclear warheads have a yield of 100 kilotons to a megaton or more, and some nuclear-armed missiles in fact carry many individual warheads. In other words, a single modern warhead is as powerful as 50-100 Hiroshimas and a single missile can carry 10x that much. While we’re on the topic of yield, consider as well that the most powerful bomb ever tested was 5,000-10,000x more powerful than the bombs used in WWII. It’s simply impossible to conceive of that degree of death and destruction, but we must try because the reality is that these weapons exist today.
With even a one megaton detonation, absolutely everything within a radius of several miles is completely destroyed, and no one inside that radius has any chance of survival. The detonation creates a fireball a mile in diameter with temperatures exceeding millions of degrees. A shockwave causes buildings 5-10 miles away to be destroyed. An EMP blast destroys all electronic equipment within dozens of miles: phones, computers, cars, and aircraft, but also hospitals, power generation equipment, and the systems that control dams, sewers, and other civic infrastructure.
Then there’s the firestorm that ensues and destroys everything that’s left, over an area of 100 square miles. The mushroom cloud carries radioactive debris several miles high, and the fallout can literally travel around the planet, causing death and destruction hundreds or even thousands of miles away. And all of this is just the tip of the iceberg compared to what comes next—more on this below.
One may naively believe that, while civilians and civilian infrastructure are at risk, surely the government and military are better prepared and better positioned to withstand a nuclear attack. One would think wrong. The government and military have bunkers, command centers, and aircraft that are designed to withstand a nuclear detonation and the ensuing EMP blast, but none has actually been tested in a real nuclear blast, and no one knows whether they would survive one, to say nothing of the dozens of attacks they may face in the case of nuclear war. Hopefully we’ll never find out.
It is quite literally impossible to fathom the nightmarish degree of chaos, death, destruction, and suffering that would be unleashed by even a single warhead attacking any world city. But we must nevertheless try to imagine it, as the best way of ensuring that it never happens again. Jacobsen’s book helps greatly in this process.
Thing #2: Speed ⏱️
“Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” - Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad Gita
Nuclear War is laid out chronologically, and details a series of events that play out following the launch of a nuclear-tipped ICBM through the breakout of a full-scale global nuclear holocaust. I won’t spoil the book for you, but I imagine most readers will be as shocked as I was to learn how fast it all plays out.
Here are some numbers to put things in context: it takes around 30 minutes for a nuclear ICBM to travel around the world, say, from North Korea to Washington, DC. It can happen much faster with submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Once there’s confirmation that an ICBM is en route to the United States, the President, who receives very little information about nuclear war ahead of time and is barely briefed on the subject, has six minutes to decide about a counterstrike. Six minutes to make a decision that could kill hundreds of millions of people and almost certainly end human civilization as we know it.
The US and Russia both have hundreds of missiles on hair-trigger alert status, meaning they can be launched in mere minutes, and both subscribe to “launch on warning,” which means launching a retaliatory strike before absorbing even a single attack. The system is also known as “use them or lose them,” since the locations of most nuclear silos are known and they’d be among the first targets.
Within an hour, many millions of people would be dead or dying.
Six minutes isn’t very long. No human being can be prepared to make such massive decisions on any timescale, much less in only six minutes. It’s truly difficult to imagine, borderline impossible, but it’s something that we must imagine nonetheless, and Jacobsen’s book does a fantastic job of forcing us to do this.
Ballistic missiles travel at insane speeds, and once they’re launched, they cannot be called off. There’s a very tiny window for action to try to shoot them down, just a few minutes. And the President, all of the President’s staff, and military leaders would all be wasting precious time scrambling to get out of harm’s way while simultaneously being forced to make a decision about how to respond, adding to the chaos and insanity of such a situation. One cannot imagine that any person could make a rational decision in such a situation.
You should read the book for yourself, but suffice it to say that the end of the world and society as we know it plausibly comes to pass in the case of nuclear war in a timeframe that’s shockingly, mind-numbingly short.
Thing #3: MADness 😵💫
“Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” - Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev
Reagan and Gorbachev made this famous joint statement after a summit in Geneva in 1985. Jacobsen reiterates this important point several times in her book. As the name suggests, mutually assured destruction dictates that in any nuclear war scenario there are only losers. In this respect, nuclear war is unprecedented and unlike every other form of warfare that humans have engaged in.
One reason is the speed element just described. There’s literally no time for negotiation, no time for diplomacy. Once deterrence fails and the missiles are flying, as famously parodied in Doctor Strangelove, it’s all over.
Another reason is game theory. Mutually assured destruction (MAD) is an iron law because the game theory dictates that it be so. As described above, launch on warning means that the US and Russia will respond to an incoming ballistic missile with a massive show of force. This is true even if the incoming missile is ultimately shot down or fails on reentry, or if it wasn’t nuclear-armed to begin with.
The show of force is intended to decapitate the attacking adversary and to prevent any further attacks. Other euphemistic names for this strategy include “decisive response,” “reestablishing deterrence,” and “escalate to deescalate.” But, as Jacobsen outlines in her book, these names are just fancy ways of saying “cause as much destruction as possible.” These strategies have never been tested in the real world, and the likelihood of this ending rather than escalating nuclear conflict is close to nil. Once dozens of nuclear missiles are flying, the world is already ending and there’s no looking back.
The best minds in the world have analyzed the game theory of nuclear war and found it to be so. Most notably, economics professor and foreign policy scholar Thomas Schelling, who received a Nobel prize for his work in game theory, ran a series of nuclear war games on behalf of the Reagan administration in 1983. The games tested different scenarios: different sets of countries, different first aggressors, different responses. Every single scenario ended the same way: an all-out nuclear holocaust, described as “the total destruction of both sides involved, and a death toll nearly reaching half a billion with the remaining dying from starvation or lethal doses of radiation” (Wikipedia).
Mutually assured destruction ensures there’s no chance that one nuclear power can successfully decapitate another before the target has a chance to respond. There are literally thousands of nuclear missiles on hair-trigger launch, and there are thousands more that can be launched by air or sea. This is absolute madness. Deterrence works until it doesn’t, but we don’t know for sure that it will work, and if it doesn’t, we’re in big trouble, fast.
Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.