53 pages • 1 hour read
Annie JacobsenNuclear War: A Scenario
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Index of Terms
Nuclear Triad
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes war and the effects of nuclear attack.
There are three different ways to deliver a nuclear weapon, known as a nuclear triad. The first is with a bomber, originally the B-29s which dropped the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now the United States’s B-52 and B-2 stealth bomber. Bombers can be recalled until the very moment when they drop their payloads over their targets, and they take a comparatively long time to prepare.
The second method is through intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which are missiles stored deep underground. They can launch very quickly and cover enormous distances, but their location (especially those of the US arsenal) is public knowledge and they are likely targets in a nuclear attack.
The last, and arguably most dangerous, nuclear weapon is submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). These submarines lurk deep underneath the ocean and are capable of surfacing, firing their payloads, and then disappearing. This makes them extremely resistant to deterrence, and therefore an acute vulnerability in the networks designed to prevent nuclear war.
First-Strike and Second-Strike Capability
In nuclear strategy, a “first strike” refers to the ability to overwhelm an enemy with destructive power, inflicting catastrophic damage on their military capabilities, political leadership, and basic social functioning. The building of large arsenals was, in part, meant to signal the potential for such an attack. In the scenario Jacobsen describes, North Korea’s decision to only launch two missiles (far below what is necessary for a first strike, despite the effects still being catastrophic), puzzles Americans.
A second-strike capability is the ability to withstand a first strike and still retain the capability to retaliate with sufficient strength to inflict unacceptable damage upon an enemy. Here, large arsenals also signal to an adversary that a first strike could not eliminate all such weapons. This doubt may deter their willingness to attack.
DEFCON 1
DEFCON is short for defense condition, a term for a basic state of readiness across the entire United States military, particularly concerning nuclear war. The Department of Defense implemented the DEFCON system in the late 1950s, as the Soviet Union began to gain parity with the nuclear arsenal of the United States and fears of a first strike were high.
The system ranges from DEFCON 5, a normal state of readiness, to DEFCON 1, preparation for imminent or ongoing nuclear war. The US has never gone to DEFCON 1, at least as far as the public knows, and has only gone to DEFCON 2 twice: during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when fears of a nuclear exchange reached their historic climax, and during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when there was concern of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq using chemical or biological weapons to defend against coalition attacks.
Multiple Independently Targeted Re-Entry Vehicle (MIRV)
MIRVs refer to delivery systems, most often with an ICBM or SLBM, where one missile carries a series of warheads, which while launching, may separate to strike multiple targets. While defense against nuclear weapons is difficult enough, MIRVs are particularly destabilizing, particularly in the context of arms control negotiations between the US and the USSR (later Russia), when attempts to arrive at fixed numbers often stumbled over whether to count MIRVs by the actual delivery systems or the warheads they carried. The US has mostly dismantled their land-based MIRVS due to nuclear arms agreements and because they were too vulnerable a target for retaliation. However, they remain in place aboard nuclear submarines.
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)
Mutually assured destruction (MAD) is one of the most infamous and ironic acronyms to come out of the Cold War. MAD proposes that the most effective check on the potential use of nuclear weapons is the certainty that any such action would trigger an equally devastating response upon the adversary. The idea predates nuclear weapons, tracing back to the early age of industrialized warfare.
MAD was not an automatic conclusion of the atomic era. For decades, many theorists pondered the possibilities of winning a nuclear war or limiting its scope so that it would not be fundamentally different from conventional warfare. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 helped to dispel this myth, and both sides settled on large weapons, many of them easily susceptible to retaliation, to reinforce the purported stability of MAD. Jacobsen’s book shows the precarious nature of that stability.
