Nuclear War: A Scenario

About

Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.

Nuclear War: A Scenario is Annie Jacobsen’s minute-by-minute reconstruction of how a nuclear war between the United States and its adversaries would actually unfold, built from extensive on-the-record interviews with retired Secretaries of Defense, STRATCOM and submarine-force commanders, FEMA directors, nuclear-weapons engineers, and other officials at the centre of US nuclear command and control, cross-checked against declassified Cold War-era documents. The book deliberately sets aside the politics and diplomacy that might precede a nuclear exchange, opening instead with a single ‘bolt out of the blue’ launch and tracing, in a real-time, near-hourly structure, the sequence of detection, decision, retaliation, and eventual civilisational collapse in nuclear winter that would follow.

The book became a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, praised for translating classified, highly technical command-and-control material into an accessible narrative, and credited with renewing public and policy attention to the mechanics — as opposed to the abstract theory — of nuclear deterrence. It draws on the same interview base as several of Jacobsen’s earlier books, notably The Pentagon’s Brain and Area 51, several of whose central sources reappear here late in their lives, going on the record for the first time about details they had previously withheld.

In the wiki

• Annie Jacobsen on Nuclear War, Deterrence, and Government Secrecy — Jacobsen discusses the book’s reporting and central scenario at length
• Annie Jacobsen — the book’s author
• Launch on Warning — the command-and-control doctrine the book’s opening sequence dramatises
• Nuclear Winter — the long-term catastrophe the book’s later chapters cover, via physicist Brian Toon