By Dan Worthen
“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”
~ President John F. Kennedy, address to the United Nations General Assembly, September 25 th , 1961
As the facilitator of the WPSR-sponsored Nuclear Weapons Abolition Reading Room, I read a steady stream of hair-raising books related to nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Such reading isn’t for the faint of heart, and it’s not what I’d normally choose to do, month after month, with my free time. But these abnormal times call us occasionally to step out of our comfort zones, and this is a role I welcome. The book club started up in January, and each title we’ve read since then has, in its own way, shown clearly how our world keeps edging further and further down the path toward nuclear annihilation.
I can’t speak for the rest of the group, but for me, our subject matter has produced a certain mental toughness that has enabled me to carry on more or less as usual with the rest of my life while still delving into this atomic darkness on an almost daily basis. Or at least I thought it had. But then along came Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen’s chilling account of how a civilization-ending thermonuclear war would unfold. Whatever toughness I thought I’d gained just evaporated. Now, a day after finishing the book, I’m struggling to pick up the pieces. Nuclear War: A Scenario is by far the most terrifying thing I’ve ever read.
It’s the specificity that does it: the intimate step-by-step details of how our leaders in government and the military would respond to a “bolt out of the blue” nuclear strike (perpetrated in this scenario by North Korea). Jacobsen portrays how our leaders, in retaliation, would execute our government’s calamitous “launch on warning” policy. How the leaders of Russia, thinking they themselves are under attack by the United States, would respond in kind. How, in a time of ultimate crisis, the dependability of individuals to act rationally would cease to exist. How the “system of systems” our government has in place for a full-scale thermonuclear exchange would absolutely ensure global cataclysm.
The insanity of it all leaps from nearly every page, and no wonder: Jacobsen interviewed dozens of retired top-level government officials and military commanders, among others, for the book, and all of them (all of them) conveyed to her an awareness of the madness they’d facilitated in preparing for general nuclear war.
That most of Jacobsen’s interviewees during their careers helped to foster today’s nuclear danger raises questions about those individuals’ complicity – questions Jacobsen doesn’t address. (If she had, of course, she might not have gotten her interviews.) She simply gives “a huge nod of gratitude for everyone bold and brave who went on the record and allowed me to quote them ....” Her gratitude is justified, but what of the roles those leaders knowingly played in helping to shape and perpetuate this monstrous, immoral, omni-suicidal system we live under? Were they blind to the realities of nuclear war until the moment they retired? Were they just trying to protect us? Just doing their jobs? Advancing their careers? Feeding their families?
Maybe I’m missing something, but nobody seems to be asking these questions. Maybe it’s time someone did.
What disturbs me the most is the blind (that word again) willingness on the part of our decision makers to expose billions of innocent non-combatants – I’m thinking of the world’s children – to the unspeakable horrors of nuclear war. Punctuated by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Twentieth Century presents a long and sordid blueprint for governments’ almost casual acceptance of civilian deaths as “unavoidable casualties of war.” Today, most nations accept the wartime killing of civilians as “regrettable” but unacknowledged policy. Nuclear war as national policy casts aside all pretense of limiting civilian deaths, and Nuclear War: A Scenario takes that policy to its logical conclusion.
In my opinion, this book is a must-read that should be placed in the curricula of colleges and universities across the country and around the world. In its fact-based chain of events, the sword of Damocles spoken of by President Kennedy has fallen. Looking forward, the amount of time we have to stop the sword from actually falling remains uncertain. However long or short the time may be, we must take it as pure gift. May we use it well.
To join the Nuclear Weapons Abolition Reading Room, go to tinyurl.com/nwareadingroom. Upon registering, you’ll receive the book club’s Zoom link and meeting schedule in your email.