The Enemy All Along

Six minutes.

Several years ago, at a Fresno Unified School District school site, that’s how long students had to go from one period to the next.

And, according to Annie Jacobsen’s meticulously researched book Nuclear War: A Scenario, six minutes is roughly the amount of time that an American president will have to decide how to prosecute a nuclear war.

Based on interviews with scores of military, government and academic experts, her work describes a plausible and deeply unsettling way in which an atomic holocaust might start and then continue. In addition to moment-by-moment accounts of how it could develop, she includes informative and chilling intercalary chapters that explore the history of nuclear weapons.

Spoiler alert: Early on, an enemy missile strikes a site in California with especially dire consequences.

Her grim depiction, sometimes overwhelming in its amount of detail and the magnitude of horror that it portrays, left this author with a few key takeaways.

Speed

World-shaking events erupt within a matter of minutes. Due to this rapid pace, major decisions need to be reached in short order and under duress—something that can, of course, lead to miscalculations and errors.

Once made and implemented, those decisions can’t be changed.

Military Networks

An intricate worldwide tapestry of sites watches for enemy missiles; should it be deemed necessary, they can help to launch an attack. In the United States alone, installations in Alaska, Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming play central roles in the developing catastrophe.

Fog of War

Early on in Nuclear War, American military installations detect an ICBM that’s hurtling toward the continental United States. But they have a blind spot: They can’t determine whether it’s armed—and, if so, whether it’s loaded with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Still, they need to figure out what their response will be. Most likely they’ll act according to an established doctrine called Launch on Warning.

This precept, which has been in place for decades, means that the United States won’t delay its response to an initiated nuclear attack until after the first missile has actually struck its target. Once officials are aware that such a strike is imminent, they’ll hit back in kind. They’ll feel obliged to launch a counterstrike before the missile hits its destination and reveals what its payload was.

Paul Nitze, who served under several presidents and helped to shape nuclear policy, admonished long ago that Launch on Warning heightens the possibility of disaster, calling it “inexcusably dangerous.”

Level of Destruction

Jacobsen’s book explores the amount and nature of devastation that a nuclear exchange would unleash instantly and over the long haul.

An initial enemy attack, her scenario suggests, would most likely cost millions of lives in our country alone.

True, she notes—the U.S. military does have interceptor missiles at its disposal. But there are only 44 in total—not enough by far to neutralize an attack with potentially hundreds of enemy rockets. She also points out that in the past, when the effectiveness of those interceptor missiles was tested, they demonstrated an abysmal success rate.

Enemy rockets that hit their targets would, of course, wipe out a lot immediately—cities, ecosystems, human and animal life.

Adding to the Devastation: EMP

A nuclear device detonated over the American Midwest could precipitate an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack affecting the entire continental United States. Among many other things, such an event would disable air traffic control, train service, ATMs and a significant number of private vehicles.

It would also jeopardize the safe operation of nuclear power plants.

Many who initially survived would confront another danger: radiation sickness. Jacobsen’s intercalary chapter about the subject shows just how awful this can be. 

In May 1946, during an experiment at a clandestine laboratory called Omega Site, physicist Louis Slotkin accidentally dropped a plutonium sphere. Immediately, there was a burst of blue light and Slotkin’s fate was sealed. Despite medical care, his body began “failing to oxygenate its own blood.” Ultimately, in the final phase of his ordeal, the tissue separating his internal organs was almost completely lost, so that his internal organs “merged into one.”

Another Long-Term Consequence: Nuclear Winter

Massive fires would erupt, throwing an estimated 330.6 billion pounds’ worth of soot up into the atmosphere. The average temperature on the globe would plummet by 27 degrees Fahrenheit—and that decline would be more on the order of 40 degrees in our country. Agriculture as we know it would cease to exist.

In 1983, the U.S. military conducted a war game named Proud Prophet to determine how nuclear war might develop, to investigate how various scenarios might play out. No matter which variations were examined, the results of the exercises were consistent—“complete Armageddon-like destruction…[w]ith the death of, at minimum, a half billion people in the war’s opening salvo alone.”

Back in the 1960s, my father, a mechanical engineer, landed a plum job at Aerojet in Rancho Cordova. Among the projects he worked on was the MX missile, which was capable of carrying several warheads and thus striking several targets.

Sometimes, when he drove to work in the morning, he passed by anti-nuke protesters who were passing out flyers.

Knowing about my interest in their arguments, he took those flyers now and then and shared them with me. Over time, it became clear that he occasionally felt conflicted about the “cutting-edge” science that he was a part of.

Given such bleak circumstances, what have nations with such weapons been up to?

Efforts to curb nuclear proliferation and shrink nuclear arsenals have fallen by the wayside.

Some countries, including China and the United States, are expanding their weapons capabilities. “The Price,” a New York Times op-ed that appeared in October 2024, sheds light on America’s efforts in this new arms race.

Its author, W.J. Hennigan, reports that the United States aims to spend $170 trillion over three decades to upgrade its nuclear capabilities. The project, which got going 14 years ago, is proceeding “in at least 23 states—nearly 50 if you include subcontractors.”

Included is the construction of 12 ballistic missile submarines—560 feet long—estimated to cost $11 billion each.

Hennigan’s piece leads to one final takeaway.

Opportunity Cost

Resources devoted to such purposes can’t be used in other areas. Suppose that a fraction of this amount were made available for the perennial ills now facing us—deep-seated poverty, food insecurity, homelessness—or just making sure that every student who goes through K-12 education winds up with effective reading and math skills?

But no such luck. The Times article makes it clear that a virtually endless stream of cash is available for such state-of-the-art weaponry.

Jacobsen’s final section, brief but thought-provoking, throws us 24,000 years into the future and asks what archaeologists, were they to locate remnants of our world, would come to know about us. Lost to time would be the awareness “that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran or anyone else…”

“It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all,” she concludes. “All along.”