There is no way to read Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario and conclude other than that nuclear abolition should be a top priority for all world leaders. Nothing could be worth the risk to humanity of a highly emotional species, given to miscalculations, mistakes, and misunderstandings, possessing tens of thousands of the instruments of its own destruction.
A lot of people know about the Cuban Missile Crisis, or at least know enough to understand that in 1962 humanity stumbled to the very edge of mass suicide and nearly toppled over. But there have been dozens of other near-misses (or, as George Carlin would say, near-hits). We can't keep depending on luck to forestall armageddon.
Jacobson is as wonderful an audiobook narrator as she is a writer, but this is not an easy listen (I had to laugh at the end when she was reading the publisher’s boilerplate: “Audible hopes you have enjoyed Nuclear War…”). It feels extremely real (it is extremely real). I can barely imagine what it must have cost Jacobson to research and write this story.
I saw somewhere that Jacobson is adapting the book into a movie, with Denis Villeneuve attached to direct. That is great news. The more people who understand the reality of nuclear weapons, the better.
Often these days when I hear belligerent rhetoric about China and Russia, my sense is that the people in the grip of this Manichean framework don't understand how close we are to ending it all. Some of the problem, I think, is that for whatever reason—ignorance, denial, misunderstanding the nature of nuclear command and control—too many people assume that nuclear war could just never happen. I hope this book will provide a corrective. Once these weapons are used, no one will remember the cause. No one will care. But the few starved and suffering survivors will wish we'd done something, anything—while we still could.
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