Nuclear War: A Scenario

As millions flock to social media for information, the demand compared to the damage to California’s power grid knocks out the social media platform, X, and others for the last time. Around Diablo Canyon, an incomprehensible amount of energy is released, obliterating the plant’s infrastructure and forcing the abandonment of the area double the size of New Jersey.

Russia sees the explosion in California. Russia realizes that “deterrence has failed” in the most unequivocal way possible. Russia knows it is not responsible but wonders if the Americans know that. With the rules invalidated, there are no more rules left to follow. The night commander at Russia’s Nuclear Command and Control scrambles to communicate with his superiors.

Russian satellites detect the launch of the ICBMS, but they do not have the precision of their American counterparts. They struggle to guess exactly how many missiles there are and where they might be headed. With little time to decide and an enormous arsenal at their disposal, a Russian miscalculation could lead to the destruction of the entire United States.

Marine One scrambles to escape the Washington, DC area and bring the president to Site R in Pennsylvania. The JCS Chairman demands the “universal unlock codes” (156), granting STRATCOM the ability to fire any remaining weapons in case of severe damage to the chain of command. The president had no previous knowledge of such a capability, but he assents, passing launch authority to the STRATCOM commander. While the Secretary of Defense flies to Site R (far ahead of the president), he realizes that the ICBMs that have already launched must pass over Russia to reach their targets, and he is more desperate than ever to get in touch with the Russian president.

As US soldiers stationed in South Korea prepare for a possible nuclear, biological, or chemical attack, the Secret Service orders the president and his aide to jump by parachute out of Marine One. As they fall through the air, the North Korean missile detonates over Washington, DC, incinerating everything and everyone within a nine-mile radius and leaving upwards of 2 million people dead or dying. The end of the world has begun.

A radar station southwest of Moscow detects the ICBM launches from the United States, and in contrast to a few notable instances in the past, when cooler heads refused to escalate Cold War tensions into a nuclear exchange, the commander panics and decides to tell Moscow that “[t]he Americans are attacking us with ICBMs” (169).

In New York City, general panic accompanies the scramble among journalists to try to collect and convey accurate information to the public. With cell service and internet difficult to access, an anchor finally receives official notice from FEMA that the US is now under nuclear attack. In the area around Diablo Canyon, hundreds of thousands of people struggle to escape “by way of a historic highway that is almost 100 years old” (172).

Providing a historical background, Jacobsen highlights that in 1983, President Ronald Reagan commissioned a war game called Proud Prophet to “explore the outcome and effects of nuclear war” (173). The simulation had a variety of permutations, but every single variation produced the same result: total annihilation. The results were only publicized, in heavily redacted form, in 2012, but one of its participants, Paul Bracken, can speak about it without legal repercussions. He fears that military leaders have not properly learned the game’s lessons. Several years later, Bracken also took part in a 1997 exercise inside the World Trade Center designed to prepare for the collapse of the stock market. Fifteen participants in that game later died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, which the government failed to anticipate.

Back in the hypothetical narrative, the STRATCOM commander is aboard the Doomsday Plane with access to the universal codes and the knowledge that the nuclear “Football” has been secured outside Washington. The location and status of the president remains unknown. The commander receives a full brief regarding the attack on Washington, with access to up-to-the-minute drone footage. In the Pacific Ocean, the USS Nebraska surfaces to launch its nuclear payload at North Korea. It will launch eight missiles, which in just over 15 minutes will inflict catastrophic damage.

As military installations around the country establish a condition of Force Protection Condition-1, Washington, DC is a hellscape of rubble and fire. Outside the nine-mile radius of Ring 1 is the 15-mile diameter of Ring 2, where a gigantic and ever-spreading fire will eventually kill more people than the initial blast. People die of burning, radiation, and collapsing infrastructure, all with no hope of outside help: “In Washington, D.C., all is lost” (187).

At Site R, watching the explosion in Washington has blinded the Secretary of Defense. Everyone above him in the presidential line of succession is either confirmed dead or unaccounted for. He ought to be sworn in for the sake of continuity, but they are also loath to tell other powers (especially Russia) that the president is missing, lest they seem weak. When they finally make contact with the Russians, they are offended at not being granted direct access to the president and abruptly break off communication.

At NATO headquarters in Brussels, leaders from various alliance partners scramble to the conference hall, as the US maintains combat-ready nuclear weapons in five countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Türkiye) that are all waiting for orders to attack. At that same time, in Moscow, the National Defense Management Center debate over what to do before they have to brief the president.

The attacks on North Korea are supposed to “restore deterrence,” but it is unclear how to do that, especially against a country like North Korea which just launched an unprovoked first strike and allegedly has an elaborate network of tunnels, bunkers, and other defenses to protect its leadership. Intelligence on North Korea is sparse and unreliable, and so beyond the difficulties of accurately identifying the right targets for retaliation, it is unclear how exactly “killing more people can prevent killing more people” (197).

In one of those very underground facilities, another mobile launcher with another Hwasong-17 ICBM rolls out of a concealed steel door, moves a few hundred feet, fires its missile, and returns. At that same time, the Russians receive belated notice from their spy that the ICBMs have launched, and in New York City, a CNN journalist tries to read official advisories on how to act during nuclear war. After telling people to stay still, she receives another set of instructions telling them to evacuate. Meanwhile, at Diablo Canyon, the impossibility of escape by vehicle becomes apparent. People begin fleeing on foot.

In a remote base in Russia’s Far East, the local commander misinterprets the data coming from the country’s Tundra satellite system and conveys the message that hundreds of warheads are heading straight toward Russia. In the Doomsday Plane, the Secretary of Defense (SecDef) and the STRATCOM commander continue their ongoing dispute about whether to establish channels with their foreign counterparts or to prioritize retaliatory launches and swear in a now-blind SecDef as the acting president. Meanwhile, the actual president survived the jump from the helicopter but is badly hurt, lost, and unable to contact anyone. Meanwhile, at the National Zoo in Washington, DC, the animals are suffering no less than the humans.

Providing a historical background, Jacobsen explains that in May 1946, an accident occurred at the Los Alamos labs in New Mexico that contributed significantly to contemporary knowledge of radiation poisoning. After a scientist named Louis Slotin dropped a plutonium sphere, he stayed to sketch a diagram while everyone else fled. By the time he finally received medical attention, he had experienced multiple painful symptoms, including terrible bruising and death of the limbs. After nine days, his organs failed, and he died. His own body then became an invaluable source of knowledge regarding what radiation does to the human body.

Back in the hypothetical narrative, in a bunker in Siberia, the Russian president consults with his top advisors. Seeing the chaos in America and wondering who is in charge, he realizes the time to act is at hand. It is unclear what the US is thinking vis-à-vis Russia and where their missiles are headed, but Russia has become increasingly paranoid in its assessment of US intentions. Russia recently revealed that its own weapons stand on hair-trigger alert, though it long denied this. Desperate to act before Russia suffers the brunt of a potential first strike, and furious at the lack of communication from the US government, the president gives in to paranoia, which is “a psychological phenomenon, same as deterrence” (226). He opts for a full-scale attack on the United States.

Russia launches its missiles, with 1,000 targets in the United States, overwhelming the computer screens of the various agencies dedicated to tracking nuclear launches. With “hundreds of millions of Americans about to die” (231), the only thing left to do is prepare remaining weapons for a retaliatory strike.