Nuclear War: A Scenario

Humans are wired to advance. Humans do whatever it takes. And yet, nuclear war zeros it all out. Nuclear weapons reduce human brilliance and ingenuity, love and desire, empathy and intellect, to ash.

A nuclear crisis is not a worst-case scenario, it is the worst-case scenario.

The fundamental idea behind this book is to demonstrate, in appalling detail, just how horrifying nuclear war would be.

Albert Einstein was asked what he thought about nuclear war, to which he is said to have responded, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Perry believes that if military rule is ever imposed on today’s America, “it would be almost impossible to undo military rule” in the United States.

It is the astonishing speed with which ballistic missile submarines can launch nuclear weapons, and hit multiple targets nearly simultaneously, that makes them the handmaidens of the apocalypse.

When a nuclear bomb hits Washington, D.C., chaos will grip the nation. Without a functioning government, there will be no rule of law. Democracy will be replaced by anarchy. Moral constructs will disappear. Murder, mayhem, and madness will prevail. In the words of Nikita Khrushchev, “The survivors will envy the dead.

Paranoia is a psychological phenomenon, same as deterrence.

An immediate consequence of a nuclear strike [would be] that democracy would be completely gone and military rule would take place.” Perry believes that if military rule is ever imposed on today’s America, “it would be almost impossible to undo military rule” in the United States.

With time, after a nuclear war, all present-day knowledge will be gone. Including the knowledge that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran, or anyone else vilified as a nation or a group. It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all. All along.

If it’s a Bolt out of the Blue attack,” says Fugate, “population protection planning is a different animal. With a Bolt out of the Blue attack, population protection planning won’t happen because everyone will be dead.

Over the course of two weeks, in every simulated scenario—and despite whatever particularly triggering event started the war game—nuclear war always ended the same way. With the same outcome. There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.

Russian early-warning satellites don’t work accurately,” he says. “As a country, Russia doesn’t have the technological know-how to build a system as good as we have in the United States.” This means “their satellites can’t look straight down at the earth,” a technology known as look-down capability. And as a result, Russia’s Tundra satellites “look sideways,” Postol warns, “which handicaps their ability to distinguish sunlight from, say, fire.

A story where 12,000 years of civilization in the making gets reduced to rubble in mere minutes and hours. This is the reality of nuclear war. For as long as nuclear war exists as a possibility, it threatens mankind with Apocalypse.

An atomic bomb will kill tens of thousands of people, as did the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A thermonuclear bomb, if detonated on a city like New York or Seoul, will kill millions of people in a superheated flash.

The year 1952 saw the invention of the thermonuclear bomb, also called the hydrogen bomb. A two-stage mega-weapon: a nuclear bomb within a nuclear bomb. A thermonuclear weapon uses an atomic bomb inside itself as its triggering mechanism. As an internal, explosive fuse. The Super’s monstrous, explosive power comes as the result of an uncontrolled, self-sustaining chain reaction in which hydrogen isotopes fuse under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion

Those who somehow manage to escape death by the initial blast

It’s hard to capture and explain the fog and friction of war,” Colonel John Brunderman says of his experiences in the bunker beneath the Pentagon on 9/11. A command post that “functions as the top of the pyramid for all U.S. command posts around the world.” A classified facility that ensures “connectivity for the Single Integrated Operational Plan execution, worldwide situation monitoring, and crisis management.

The Russian president’s nuclear bunker, like Site R, presently has electricity, internet, and hardwired telephone service. Underground bunkers are built for redundancy, their critical infrastructure components—including air, heat, and water—duplicated for resilience in emergencies and crises. Multiple high-capacity fiber-optic lines provide uninterrupted communications systems. The backup generators have backup generators.

As crazy as this now seems, before December 1960, each U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force chief had control over his own stockpile of nuclear weapons, their delivery systems, and target lists.

In the dawn of the nuclear age, Albert Einstein was asked what he thought about nuclear war, to which he is said to have responded, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.

Dr. Jay W. Forrester (1918–2016), a pioneer in computer engineering and the father of System Dynamics, schooled me on a fundamental concept underpinning nuclear command and control: it is a system of systems. A giant machine made of many moving parts. Knowing this, and knowing all machines eventually break, is a terrifying thought.

In the 1950s, President Eisenhower created the U.S. highway system with this kind of dual-use in mind. He modeled America’s original “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways” after “the superlative system of German autobahn,”138 he wrote in his presidential memoirs. Not only could U.S. highways facilitate large-scale evacuation of cities in a nuclear war, but the broad, flat interstate lanes could be used as runways for takeoff and landings on bombing runs. For setting down a helicopter in the median strip, or along the side of the road in the grass. This is how many of America’s mid-century transportation systems were designed.

In the words of former vice admiral Michael J. Connor, commander of U.S. submarine forces, “anything fixed is destroyable.

They are also increasing at unprecedented speeds. In 2021, the U.S. Space Force tracked 1,968 missile launches around the globe, a number that “increased more than over three and a half times in 2022,” says Space Systems Command’s Colonel Brian Denaro. As of September 2023, Russia continues to notify the U.S. of its ballistic missile test launches. No one wants to start a nuclear war by accident

According to the U.S. Army, this task—on a scale of military hardship—ranges from difficult to impossible.

No trace of the killer reptiles was found by anyone, that we know of, for 66 million years. Until just a few hundred years ago, in 1677, when the director of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Robert Plot, found a dinosaur femur in the village of Cornwall and drew it for a science journal, misidentifying the bone as belonging to a giant. After nuclear war, who, if anyone, will know we were once here?

The Global Operations Center, Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska

With time, after a nuclear war, all present-day knowledge will be gone. Including the knowledge that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran, or anyone else vilified as a nation or a group. It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all.58 All along.