TITLE
Published by Transworld, Hardback, 400 pages, £20, ISBN: 9781911709596
Nuclear War: A Scenario
AUTHOR Annie Jacobsen
REVIEWER
Professor Andrew Stewart, Head of Conflict Research, CHACR
A TIMELY WARNING OF THE WORLD’S DEMISE
Nuclear strategy has re-emerged as a topic for discussion, in large part due to Vladimir Putin’s implicit – and at times not particularly subtle – threats of possible outcomes to external military support for Ukraine. Red lines have come and gone, most recently in the last week of September during a televised meeting of Russia’s Security Council when the Russian leader announced planned doctrinal revisions in which an attack against the country by a non-nuclear power with the “participation or support of a nuclear power” would be seen as a “joint attack on the Russian Federation”.
There has been much supportive media rhetoric from Moscow along with drills and tests but red lines have been crossed ever since February 2022 and the full invasion of its neighbour. As a Carnegie expert noted earlier in the year, this nuclear escalation is not new: “Since the start
of the fighting in Ukraine, Russia’s Defense (sic) Ministry has seen nuclear weapons as the sole obstacle to a war with NATO, while the Foreign Ministry approaches them as just another diplomatic tool.” Blackmail, bullying or a more straight-forward coercive instrument which sits as a cornerstone in a finely balanced deterrence construct, the dire warnings have become a regular feature of British tabloid media reports, most often accompanied by a headline involving ‘World War 3’. The Sword of Damocles appears freshly sharpened but with little evidence of what, if anything, might blunt its force.
In addition to being a pleasingly easy ‘soft’ read, Annie Jacobsen’s book presents an impressively researched and considered contribution which offers a timely reminder of what this could all actually mean. Certainly, it has continued to create considerable discussion in the
United States where it was published in Spring 2024, perhaps best summarised by the leading business magazine Forbes, which concluded this “ominous wake-up call” should “be required reading for everyone alive today” (on cursory review, the book and its message have perhaps not achieved the same impact closer to home). For those of us who were participants in the Cold War’s final decade, there is the memory of Threads, The Day After and By Dawn’s Early Light (and grainy video copies of The Wargame before them) as powerful reminders of previous bouts of popular discussion about worst case scenarios. With the author’s involvement in television writing and production, this updated warning is surely, even now, being adapted to a form which, in the contemporary learning environment, is much more easily absorbed by a far greater audience. For those who are interested, Jacobsen’s fascinating interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists provides some explanation as to why Nuclear War: A Scenario was written along with valuable additional insights.
It is a book to be read and reflected upon rather than reviewed in minute detail. Suffice to say it is based around a fictitious scenario in which the launch of a nuclear weapon against the United States leads to rapid escalatory responses. Without the deliberately fantastic – although not to say incredible – plot turns of recent military fiction such as Ghost Fleet or 2034, it draws on nearly 50 interviews with military, political and academic practitioners who provide everything the author needs to present a clear, objective and often distinctly unemotional account of how the world destroys itself. Jacobsen writes: “Nuclear war is insane. Every person I interviewed
“Whether it was Einstein’s observation or not, there is no reason to disagree with the claim that ‘insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results’. Also recent events appear to have restored an almost impossibly complex strategic environment and a multi-polar rivalry in which multiple actors now have the ultimate deterrent.”
for this book knows this. Every person. The whole premise of using nuclear weapons is madness. It is irrational. Yet here we are.” Whether it was Einstein’s observation or not, there is no reason to disagree with the claim that ‘insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results’. Also recent events appear to have restored an almost impossibly complex strategic environment and a multi-polar rivalry in which multiple actors now have the ultimate deterrent. In this context, it is not difficult to see why there has been so much American interest in Jacobsen’s scenario.
Perhaps of more immediate concern, the book has a contribution to offer to a longrunning conceptual irritant for the British Army. Within a new edited book being published in 2025 by the CHACR, there is some discussion of the post-Cold War study of how to survive and conduct meaningful military operations on the nuclear battlefield. In both General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War (written in 1978 but set in 1985) and Harold Coyle’s Team Yankee (published in 1989 but very much a Cold War story), conventional fighting in Europe escalates to a point where the climax of both ‘futures histories’ is not tactical but strategic nuclear interventions. Chemical-biological warfare is a persistent threat in both scenarios, much more so than the tactical weapons which worried British planners in the 1950s and 1960s and are now again dangled by Russian commentators as they discuss how they could be used in Ukraine and elsewhere. An army that aspires to increase its lethality must recognise that its success could lead to an irrational and extreme response, not least by an opponent that views victory and defeat in a nuanced fashion.