Nuclear War: A Scenario

The brief author’s note introduces a stark contrast. For all the effort and money that the government spends on preparing for a nuclear war, it spends barely any of that effort educating the public on what it is doing or what people should do in such a nightmarish situation. Instead, “the plans for General Nuclear War are among the most classified secrets held by the U.S. government” (xi), and Jacobsen’s investigative journalism can only scratch the surface. As a result, people do not know how plausible, and how immediate, nuclear war is, as Jacobsen’s work underscores. The prologue drives this reality home with gruesome detail, immediately highlighting the theme of Government Procedure Versus Human Reality. Although the scenario Jacobsen creates in Nuclear War is hypothetical, she underscores the ever-present, real threat of nuclear attack, something for which many are unprepared. The systems and ideas designed to make nuclear warfare impossible are much more delicate than the public has been led to believe, or even as key decision-makers are willing to admit.

Contrasting the author’s note, which provides a brief historical backdrop and introduces US governmental preparation for nuclear war, with the prologue, which quickly dives into a chaotic, disaster situation where a mile-wide fireball detonates in the nation’s capital and continues its expansive destruction, Jacobsen introduces the theme of The Fragility of Deterrence. The logic holds that political adversaries will be deterred from utilizing nuclear weapons because a significant, large nuclear arsenal ensures a constant state of readiness and the assurance of swift, catastrophic retaliation in the event of instigation. However, by jumping into a hypothetical, yet very real possibility, Jacobsen’s narrative highlights that this deterrence strategy can quickly be rendered obsolete. While it is true that retaliation occurs, as will become apparent later in the narrative, the author underscores that this deterrence strategy is not a safeguard alone. As the prologue makes clear, the threat of retaliation in the abstract means nothing on the ground when a nuclear attack immediately kills or gravely injures thousands—and is likely to lead to losses in the billions.

Trillions of dollars and an extensive government apparatus exist for the sole purpose of making the horrific images Jacobsen describes a reality, further highlighting Government Procedure Versus Human Reality. As will soon be evident, there is nothing that those preparing for nuclear war can or will do for the victims of this atrocity, because governmental concern is entirely focused on delivering a similar measure of suffering upon other peoples, whose governments have been similarly concerned with their geopolitical interests. What makes the scenario Jacobsen describes visceral and disturbing is that even though it has not happened with weapons anywhere near the magnitude of the ones used in her pages, the US government has spent extraordinary amounts of time and money figuring out exactly what those weapons can do, namely one that could culminate in “a nuclear World War III that is guaranteed to leave, at minimum, 2 billion dead” (xxiv). They know what will result, and they continue to prepare for it anyway. By introducing context for this mutual antagonism and nuclear preparation, as well as the narrative’s hypothetical, destructive result, Jacobsen introduces the theme of The Burdens of History, which will continue to develop throughout the work.