Apes on a Treadmill
Going to Defcon 1 with Annie Jacobsen's "Nuclear War: A Scenario".
In Annie Jacobsen's new work of geopolitical speculation, Nuclear War: A Scenario, it only takes 72 minutes to destroy civilization on Earth, but perhaps more than twenty millennia for a new one to emerge, if at all. You might question if it's even deserved by the end of the book.
NW:AS is an unusual work that compels the reader to push through due to its topic and structure. It moves from one tick of the clock to the next as the end of the world rushes toward you. For the first time in my life, I read the 300-page text in under 24 hours, including seven hours of restless sleep in the middle. Many of the tweets and reader reviews I've seen say the same. Events unfold at such a pace that the humans in the story, almost all highly trained and procedurally encumbered figures in the chain of command in several countries, struggle mightily to keep up.
The language is crisp, spare, and non-emotional, written as a war game narrative might be. At points, you feel as if you might be holding a thick binder rather than a bestselling book. The book is deeply researched and based on interviews with officials who would know doctrine and what level of that doctrine can be shared. The detailed reference notes cite a rich trove of documents from DoD, FEMA, NATO and many more acronymed bodies and labs charged with building, running, or restraining each other's instruments of death. Much also comes from the first-person interviews of critical figures who have sat in the relevant situation rooms or siloes.
As a scenario, it follows a single thread and provides technical or brief historical detail when useful, without disappearing down any rabbit holes. The author doesn't try to impress with her knowledge but only provides relevant context and description. This is what makes the book work so well, and the careful attention to detail acts as a vehicle to carry the reader through the narrative. It's only one scenario and doesn't deviate into "what ifs" and alternative possibilities, only choices as those choice-points arrive. Nothing in it is illogical or unbelievable. In fact, Jacobsen has done a deft job of capturing the essence of the principle decision-makers—a handful of national leaders—without clouding the picture with their identities. What matters here is mindset, not personality, and how those mindsets drive action.
Procedure and infrastructure are major players here. What stopped me halfway through was the reminder that, since the end of WWII, trillions of dollars and possibly millions of people's work have been dedicated to the development of an intricate global system designed to destroy everything and everyone. This is contrasted with the availability of low-yield, tactical weapons, and assurances that these can be used in limited ways. Jacobsen's scenario shows how rules and systems, as much as people, likely ensure that this isn't the case. This is illustrated by the title of this review, taken from a 1975 Foreign Policy article by Paul C. Warnke that Jacobsen cites. Warnke's point was that we have created a system that puts the nuclear powers, and everyone else, on a path to nowhere—apes on treadmills, not willing to get off.
As a cultural artifact, NW:AS is interesting. As a teen in the 80s, and one who was deeply interested in geopolitics, the Cold War, and nuclear proliferation even then, this book feels like a throwback to a period where Threads, The Day After and WarGames were topical, nuclear brinkmanship made the nightly news, and we bopped to Nena and Ultravox. It's interesting that this book and this topic is, if you'll pardon the dark pun, blowing up now. For me, this story was like looking at a high school yearbook: Oh yeah, MIRVs, ICBMs, EMPs, I remember those punks. For many people born after the 1980s, and who grew up in decades where nuclear conflict wasn't part of the daily background (replaced, as it was, by school shootings as an existential threat), reading this book must be bracing, even alarming.
We see signals of a revival of nuclear apocalypse culture all around, likely driven by the reality of a hot war in Europe amongst nuclear-equipped powers. This war is existential for the aggressor state as well as for the leader for whom it is a pet project. There is also the compounding possibility of a round two of Madman in the White House, only this time with an even more unstable protagonist, and cast of batshit supporting actors.
Nuclear armageddon is back on TV as well; January was Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi month on Criterion Channel, featuring Testament, Threads, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Panic in Year Zero, and more for those who taste was whetted by Oppenheimer, and who want a deeper induction into the cinema of annihilation. For a solid historical grounding, Netflix currently offers Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, which transports the viewer across the last 80-odd years from Los Alamos to Luhansk.
Jacobsen's book may yet join this canon of nuclear cinema. I found out about NW:AS unexpectedly via Deadline, the entertainment news website, as it carried news of Dune/Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve's optioning of the title for a big screen adaptation. It was unexpected to see the book's genesis coming in part from a Hollywood agent, but perhaps not surprising.
After all, as I wrote about in How to Future, the use of the term "scenario" comes to us from the meeting of RAND Corporation's own modeler of nuclear megadeath, Herman Kahn, and screenwriter Leo Rosten at a social gathering in LA in the early 1960s*. This narrative approach of turning numbers—of weapons, targets, minutes, casualties, etc—into stories that an audience can feel as well as understand, is precisely what Annie Jacobsen has done here, and done almost too well.
*This meeting was possibly at the house of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter in Laurel Canyon. The Wohlstetters were both RAND fixtures and early advocates of a strong US nuclear posture as a deterrent to strategic surprise, as well as hosts of intellectual salons high in the Hollywood hills. It was Albert Wohlstetter's 1974 articles in Foreign Policy challenging what he saw the flawed idea of an arms race that Warnke rebutted the following year.