The End of the World
A review of Nuclear War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen
I remember the day World War II ended. I was five. Our tiny apartment was filled with adults in various stages of euphoria, and inebriation. My one-month-old brother slept through it all in a basket on the kitchen sink.
My Uncle Jack was there on leave from the Coast Guard, which, during the war, escorted Navy ships carrying our troops, munitions, and supplies to Europe, protecting them from U-boat attacks. Jack was my hero. Each time he came back, there were gifts for my mother and for me. I still have the Turkish leather trinket box with the harem girl figure on the top.
The room was so small that we kids were sent outside. We felt the excitement and played as hard as our parents partied, long into the night, eventually finding our way back to our beds when we had nothing left. Several times we would hear one of the adults shout, “Never again!”
My memory of the Korean conflict relies mainly on my prayers for Nickie, my schoolgirl crush, the son of the butcher who owned the neighborhood grocery store. He came back a different person. As did my neighbor, Tony, who I did not recognize at first because his face had been completely transformed by plastic surgery.
During this conflict, schools held drives to help the war effort, although because of the post-war industrial boom, they were not as necessary as they had been for WWII. But we kids collected wire coat hangers and aluminum foil peeled from gum wrappers for the cause.
My understanding of war came from these men and women who had served and the images captured by Pathé News that were shown between the feature film and cartoons at the Saturday matinee. I wonder if today’s kids even think about war, or are they too distracted by the trivia created to keep them from serious thought.
I remember the 60s, from moving back to the States from Puerto Rico just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, through the war protests and Chicago convention riots. Actual journalists covered it all. We were outraged. But where is the outrage now?
And now the book report. I recently read Nuclear War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen. Jacobsen draws on interviews with various military leaders and scientists to describe a scenario in which we come to the brink and beyond. Mistakes are made, leaders misspeak, communications are misinterpreted. The insanity of power and testosterone are in full force. Buttons are pushed, and Jacobsen fully lays out the steps that would occur as this doomsday action is set in motion. She documents the failures of our defenses, from ineffective warning systems to outdated equipment. So many things can go wrong, and would.
One of the most startling themes of the book is how if the United States were to retaliate in kind by an attack from another, in her example North Korea, another country, in her example Russia, could detect missiles over the Arctic Circle as being directed at them, leading to exchanges between the United States and both countries.
Nearly seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Jacobsen lays out a picture of the destruction a one megaton bomb would cause, including how many would die instantly, and the effects at various distances from the bomb site. She writes of the nuclear winter that would destroy the ozone layer and life on earth itself, of the almost nil chance of survival anywhere on the planet, and the pain and suffering of those few who managed to hang on for a short time. As Nikita Khrushchev once noted, following nuclear war, “the living would envy the dead.” Nuclear War is a well-researched and frightening read.
We need new goals similar to the anthems of the 60s, of Peace and Love. All the petty bickering of the day over issues that in the end make no real difference in our lives must be kicked to the curb. We need to get off our phones and stand in the town square, gathering our communities together to force real change that will make the future better for all children and families, across the globe, and to ensure that there is a future.
This book should be required reading for politicians, policymakers and media who control and report on the fate of our planet and the human race. We may only have one chance to get this right.
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