Nuclear War: A Scenario
by Annie Jacobsen

If you are at least a little interested in what may become of this world in the nuclear age you could do worse than read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. In it she posits a nuclear world war based on studies made by RAND Corporation, Sandia Lab, and other similar think tanks.

It is an interesting work, and quite frightening.

The scenario for the war she proposes begins with the launch of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) by North Korea headed for the Washington D.C. area, in particular the Pentagon. U.S. satellites spot and identify the missile, but don’t yet know where it’s going, although analysts have a pretty good idea, and it doesn’t much matter because any target in the D.C. area will mean obliteration of the entire city.

As the president and others scramble to safety, another ICBM launches from North Korea, this one headed for the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California where it will create an ungodly nuclear firestorm. Rather quickly these two bombs go off. But the president has gone missing, and the Russians won’t talk to a lesser official.

Much scrambling going as the U.S. government tries to retaliate without offending the Russians (impossible), England and France get involved as do India and Pakistan, and the next thing you know nuclear hell has broken loose. Russia and the U.S. have fired their entire arsenals, as have the rest of the Western and Eastern spheres.

So, there is nothing left to shoot, or for that matter, nothing left to shoot at. There is nothing left standing, everything is just piles of smoldering carbon, and there is no animal or plant life remaining.

The book gets a little tedious as it drags you through the officialdom that makes all this happen, but it does seem quite real, and quite frightening, and it all potentially occurs in just over an hour’s time.

Scary.