Nuclear War: A Scenario

For nearly a half-century, the United States and its allies pointed tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union and its allies, building ever-more destructive devices and more elaborate delivery systems. At different points throughout the Cold War, one-third of US bombers were airborne and nuclear-armed at any given time, schoolchildren learned “duck and cover” drills to provide at least the illusion of protection against a nuclear attack, and pieces of popular culture like Dr. Strangelove (1962) and The Day After (1983) explored the illogicalities and horrors of a world preparing to destroy itself.

One of the main symbols of this anxiety has been the so-called Doomsday Clock, presented annually by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which shows a time relative to midnight to show how close they think the world is to a nuclear catastrophe. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, fears of nuclear war tended to recede, if not fade entirely. There were certainly concerns about “loose nukes” slipping out of the control of a weak Russian state, potentially falling into the hands of criminal or terrorist organizations (fears which reached their apotheosis after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center), and North Korea’s outlaw program became a source of perennial concern, but the good news generally outweighed the bad. In 1991, India and Pakistan began observing a treaty vowing not to target one another’s nuclear facilities in conflict, which has so far held up. That same year, the Bullet of Atomic Scientists placed the Doomsday Clock at 17 minutes, the furthest from midnight in the entire clock’s history. In 2010, President Obama and then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev signed the New START treaty which would bring the level of nuclear weapons in the world to the lowest levels in decades.

This optimistic mood did not last long. As described in the book, efforts to contain or negotiate North Korea’s nuclear program failed utterly, leaving it with the near-certain capability of targeting any major city in the US. The disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan proved that a major industrialized nation, and not just the struggling Soviet Union of the mid-1980s, could accidentally unleash hellacious radiation into the atmosphere. Most significantly, ties between the US and the Russian Federation sank to levels that many observers refer to as a new cold war. While tensions were brewing for many years, they exploded into hostility following the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (it had invaded and occupied part of the country since 2014). When the US and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members began supplying Ukraine with aid and weapons, Russian President Vladimir Putin began making frequent, though usually qualified, threats to use nuclear weapons should he feel threatened.

Modern technology helps make such insecurities even more dangerous. The rise of cyberwarfare capabilities raises the specter of interfering with an enemy computer system before it can launch. In a crisis, this could further accelerate an already short timeline to put a missile in the air before it is rendered ineffective. Concerns have only grown since axes of conflict have multiplied around the globe, from China and Taiwan to Israel and Iran. As a result, in 2024 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds, the closest to midnight in its history.