"Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War”" Topic

In which I read this best seller so that you don't have to. I'm just getting started; a couple of observations:

- Apparently, neither she nor her editor know what a sentence fragment is.
- Her understanding of physics contrasts poorly with other authors who have taken on the same project: she is no Richard Rhodes.
- Much of what she discusses in the opening chapters (description of a nuclear detonation, accounts of the early SIOP) is told in a breathless tone, with the suggestion that it's a major revelation. It may be, to her, but much of it was described with greater accuracy and better strategic context in Richard Rhodes' "Dark Sun."
- None of the stuff I have read so far is as secret as she seems to think it is.

I have some hope that the post-apocalyptic descriptions will be more interesting, but so far, her writing style strongly suggests it will wind up a considerable distance behind other attempts at the genre, such as "Alas, Babylon" or "Warday." Haven't given up yet, though.

How bad is the prose? This bad:

"Everything that will happen in a nuclear war when it comes hinges upon what analysts at these ground stations interpret as happening in the moment. In this scenario, that means now."

Another example: inability to discern the difference between "detection" and "warning":

"The Space-Based Infrared System is America's twenty-first-century version of Paul Revere. But it's not the British who are coming, not on foot or on horseback."

Bad List Run-on, compounded by a failure to imagine and explain how real-time intelligence processing actually works:

"At once, a vast worldwide network of U.S. intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets begins churning out every manner of intelligence information in the arsenal. SIGINT (signals intelligence), IMINT (image intelligence), TECHINT (technical intelligence), GEOINT (geospatial intelligence), MASINT (measurement and signature intelligence), CYBINT (cyber intelligence), COMINT (communications intelligence), HUMINT (human intelligence), and OSINT (open source intelligence)—all of it surging into the system in order to create an accurate picture of this detected event."

Wow, that is amazing. I have read and re-read those "sentences", and they make me feel like I'm not as smart as I thought I was. There are comedy writers that try hard to come up with material like that.

Pulitzer Prize filnalist?
4.6 stars on Amazon?
93% like it on Audible?

But of course, you are cherry picking the worst sentences. So I went to the Amazon preview and read some random passages. They are bad. Seems like in trying to be dramatic (in nearly every sentence), the text just turned out weird.

I guess I'm happy for all the people that enjoyed this, but eww.

I read her book "Area 52". Her conclusion was the Roswell UFO was a Soviet project made for them by the Horton brothers and piloted by human hybrids engineered by Dr. Mengele. She never explained how if the Soviets had intercontinental UFOs in the late 1940s why they failed to conquer the world then, nor what has happened to the tech since.

I cannot take anything she writes seriously.

"It is 3:21 p.m. Federal employees and staff are still hard at work,"

Some things don't even require comment!

I don't blame her for linking Napoleon's name to the phrase, "apres moi le deluge," but a better writer and an informed historian would have understood what Louis XV had in mind when he uttered it. It's characteristic of the slapdash thinking in this book.

"The STRATCOM commander stares at ghastly images of where the mighty U.S. Pentagon once stood."

Buildings aren't mighty. They are large, imposing, sprawling, perhaps beautiful or ugly- ah, you get it. The style makes Tom Clancy seem like Joseph Conrad.

"in an undisclosed location known only to its commander and crew,"

Good grief- perhaps phrases like this just betray hasty composition, but that's what editors are for. Princeton and St. Paul's School, too- is it any wonder Americans think elites are a massive system-gaming fraud these days?

"But as humans around the world are collectively about to learn, the first rule of nuclear war is that there are no rules."

Cliche, and a particularly egregious violation of George Orwell's basic commandment for good writing: "never use a phrase you are used to seeing in print."

"hasty composition"

She probably dictated the book into a tape recorder (which would explain the "dramatic tone") then sent that off to a typist to transcribe word-for-word.
But, what do I know, having been writing myself for 35+ years (with pencil & paper… ;-)

Well, that would explain the rather breathless, AWFL/Valspeak tone and word choice. But not even that can explain pieces of historical illiteracy like this:

"Russia calls these missiles the RS-28 Sarmat, in honor of a tribe of warrior-horsemen from the fifth century BCE. In much the same way, the U.S. calls its ICBMs the Minutemen, an homage to its tribe of warrior-horsemen from the American Revolutionary War. "

, SERIOUSLY?

I can see why Richard Rhodes is supposed to have described her as "extraordinarily gullible or journalistically incompetent."

It's a shame. I read her book on the history of DARPA as well as Nazi medical experiments and I was impressed. Was planning on reading this one. Your posts give me pause.

So now, the meat: the doomsday scenario: how plausible is it?

Reduced to its essentials, her storyline runs like this: North Korea launches an ICBM attack on Washington, and just before ICBM impact, launches an SLBM attack on the Canyon Diablo nuclear plant in California. DC is destroyed, but before his helicopter crashes, the President authorizes a full scale strike on the DPRK. The Russians, seeing the trajectory of the American missiles and not having heard from the President, ignore the entreaties of the Defense Secretary and Vice Chair of the JCS and launch a thousand missiles at the US, which in turn attacks Russia.

I'm nowhere near consummation, but I find several elements of this scenario implausible. I have difficulty imagining a set of circumstances that would lead a North Korean dictator to trade his life above ground (pretty plush, by all accounts) for life in an underground vault.

Secondly, I have trouble believing that the Green Machine would make a plan for nuclear war against North Korea that involved weapons flying over Russia. It seems so easy to avoid. That's why we keep subs and bombers in WestPac, for Pete's sake.

So far, she keeps reiterating the point that once deterrence fails, there's no path back from the brink, but I find that argument unconvincing. She bases her condemnation of deterrence on a hypothetical scenario that even an internet rando like me can see is fundamentally implausible.

Hilariously, I should note, she seizes the moment when the US has just turned North Korea into a parking lot to imagine what she thinks is the DPRK stabbing at us from Hell's heart: they launch an EMP weapon! With 900 Soviet ICBMs in the air, she heads off on a tangent about the terrors of EMP, without any apparent thought that the detonation of 900 air and ground burst ICBMs is going to destroy everything so comprehensively that the loss of our iPhones is probably the least of it.

An important lesson of modern journalism is, of course, always read what they have to say about things you understand, and that will give you some idea of the accuracy of comments about matters outside your ken.

Here's her description of what happens to the railroads when EMP fries the SCADA systems that link dispatching centers with the signals they control (which she hilariously calls "routers," a sure sign she didn't talk to anyone in the railroad business):

"With the failure of SCADA systems, thousands of subway trains, passenger trains, and freight trains traveling in every direction, many on the same tracks, collide with one another, crash into walls and barriers, or derail."

No. Railroad signals were some of the first technology built on the "fail safe" principle: in the absence of an electrical signal intended to move them to a permissive indication (signaling "go"), railroad signals automatically revert to their most restrictive indication (typically "Stop" for those that would be controlled with SCADA systems). The consequence is not collision: it is everything grinding to a halt. Trains don't somehow find their way off the tracks and go looking for a wall to run into if the signals don't work.

Now, I don't expect her to know this. But what I do expect, and what it's reasonable to expect, is that she would have talked to someone who knew what they were talking about, if not before she wrote this, than before it went to publication. Fact checking used to be basic, and this isn't just her fault: it's her editor's, too.

It's done. I skimmed the last few chapters, but they were a polemic anyway, with a lot of bad, repetitive boilerplate passages like this one:

"There are 1,000 flashes of light, superheating the air in each ground zero to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.

1,000 fireballs, each one more than a mile in diameter. 1,000 steeply fronted blast waves.

1,000 walls of compressed air, accompanied by several-hundred-mile-per-hour winds pushing forward from the 1,000 fireballs, mowing down everything, and everyone, in the path.

1,000 American cities and towns, where all engineered structures in a five-, six-, or seven-mile radius change physical shapes, collapse, and burn.

1,000 cities and towns with molten asphalt streets.

1,000 cities and towns with survivors impaled to death by flying debris.

1,000 cities and towns filled with tens of millions of dead. With tens of millions of unfortunate survivors suffering fatal third-degree burns."

After awhile, you just get to the point where you're thinking, "alright, I get it, everyone does, everything is destroyed, we get a nuclear winter, the living envy the dead, etc, etc.".

Writing style aside, what makes this such a bad book? The answer, I think, is the writer's disconnect from the kinds of actual events that would have helped her construct a plausible scenario for nuclear war- because if all it took was an angry, irrational man with control of a nuclear weapon, humanity might not have survived Nikita Khrushchev, let alone Josef Stalin. Her sense for how real people with responsibilities behave seems defective to me, and her ability to imagine actual contingencies is accordingly impaired.

Why is that? Presumably because she has no personal acquaintance with the rougher side of life, in which people make difficult decisions, and try to survive harsh environments. I find her imagination of events and reactions to be cinematic, rather than plausible.

Why does it matter? It matters because people who should know better are telling other people to read this book – and they are drawing mistaken conclusions from it, and acting on them. And we should always be careful about drawing conclusions and making decisions on the basis of false premises.

As an aside, if you really want to read a well-imagined book about what the world looks like after a comparatively limited exchange, you should try Whitley Streiber's "Warday." It was written in about 1985, and Streiber himself is a bit of an oddity (he went off the deep end on UFOs), but as an attempt to imagine what a nuclear conflict and the succeeding years would have looked like, it has a much better sense of human contingency than this rather hasty production.

"Reduced to its essentials, her storyline runs like this: North Korea launches an ICBM attack on Washington, and just before ICBM impact, launches an SLBM attack on the Canyon Diablo nuclear plant in California. "

*snort*
A much better target would be the Yellowstone caldera. Get that super-volcano to go off, and it pretty much takes out most of North America… ;-)

Thanks for reviewing this book. I'll be sure to skip it even if I see it in the public library…

Thank you for your service. You have saved me and countless others from reading this book.

I'm running across more and more books that are just chatty and unresearched. It's like someone talking at a party, spouting their opinions, except they typed it up and called it a book. It's really weird. I have quit reading half way through short books, and even returned them to Amazon for a refund, which I would not normally do. But I am not going to waste my time reading it if you didn't double check anything. Our standards are just really low.

Yes, that's the tone, and it also describes the way she uses evidence. There are periodic pull quotes, some from people who worked in the system (who are not invariably quoted on the subject of their specific narrow technical expertise), and some from the sorts of gadflies who pop up whenever a subject like this is raised. It might be interesting to listen to some of her taped interviews, and compare what was said to what made it into the book.

I'm not going to claim my review is thorough, or that I'm an expert- I'm definitely not. But if the book's weakness as an argument is this obvious to someone of my layman's understanding of the subject, it ought to be a warning for everyone else. You'd be better off reading Richard Rhodes' books, for my money- they aren't infallible either, but both are well worth the money, and bring a serious understanding of physics to the table.

One bigger question that is worth asking, though: why has American journalism become so bad? I can remember the reportorial quality of the NYT and WP in the 1980s and 1990s; for all their subtle bias and undeniable self-satisfaction, they were far better at reporting than either is today.

Just watch "The Day After" or "Threads". I read Warday in the 80s – thought it was good – I think I still have it – must re-read over the summer.

Other things aside mr 9 pounds I think you wrote a good review of the book. But you should not write "Jesus". Some people here consider it blasphemy

Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Matthew 7:3-5

One other element of this book has kept me thinking about it: the sources, in particular the military ones. Scientists and academics can and do say a lot of things, as they enjoy a lot of independence, particularly if they don't hold current security clearances. Military people, particularly general officers, are a different kettle of fish.

Jacobsen did talk to some general officers, but the general tendency of their remakes had a common thread: the system will work, and it is scary who rapidly and effectively it can work. She describes in great detail all of the measures that are built in to the nuclear command and control system to make it work, and make retaliation by the United States in the event of an attack- even if, as in the story, the president is confused, hesitant and indecisive (to the point where people have to yell at him and order him to transfer authority to launch, which he quickly does) in the face of an immediate "bolt from the blue" attack on DC.

This is very different from what is typically published- in the past, officials have generally gone to great lengths to reassure everyone that the system possessed elaborate safeguards designed to prevent accidental and unauthorized launch. These are two types of descriptions that are in clear tension with one another, as they say in the executive branch.

It makes me wonder whether someone in her pool of informants used her to mount a minor-league pop culture psy-op aimed at emphasizing the reliability of our deterrent, even if the most important link in the chain of command isn't quite up to the job. Probably not; and yet the breathless, expose tone of the book suggests it will get attention and readership, and there is more in the way of description of how easily and quickly the President (or indeed, the people in the room with him) can transfer launch authority than you would think is needed to make a dramatic point.

It may sound crazy to imagine a pop book like this having influence- but there's ample reason to believe that popular works have more influence than ten times their weight in soberly researched academic, scientific or governmental studies. You have only to think of the impact John Kennedy's reading of "The Guns of August" had on his decision-making during the Cuban Missile Crisis (baleful, I would argue, but not necessarily the intended goal of the author).