Pearls and Irritations

On 12 September, Vladimir Putin threatened retaliation, not excluding nuclear, against NATO countries if Washington allows Ukraine to attack targets inside Russia with US missiles. President Joe Biden backed off – for the moment. But the doomsday clock of the Atomic Scientists now stands at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to signalling Armageddon.

In a chillingly relevant book Nuclear War – A Scenario, (Transworld Publishers 2024), New York Times journalist Annie Jacobsen predicts what could occur. Interviews with nearly 40 US authorities, all having held positions in the US Nuclear Command and Control structure, add authority to her narrative.

Jacobsen names North Korea as the ignition point of a nuclear war. Without warning, Kim Jong-un launches a Hwasong-17 ICBM at Washington. Within four minutes, it is identified and tracked in Washington. But contrary to repeated public assurances that an ICBM can be intercepted, it is almost impossible to do so after the initial boost phase.

There is massive confusion in Washington between protocol and speed of action. While a national security adviser tries unsuccessfully to get a North Korean official on the phone, the president, in the White House dining room, is hustled by his security detail to a bunker under the West Wing. After several panicked relocations, and only after he has authorised nuclear retaliation against Pyongyang, he ends up bleeding and broken in a field somewhere in Maryland after the electronics on his fleeing helicopter, Marine One, are fried by a massive electro-magnetic pulse from a nuclear device detonated on a North Korean geo-stationary satellite hovering over the US.

Meanwhile, the North Korean ICBM hits the Pentagon. The explosion creates soft X-ray light with a very short wavelength, superheating the air to millions of degrees, instantly carbonising most of Washington’s inhabitants. In the aftermath, just as in Hiroshima 79 years earlier, decomposing bodies soon choke Washington waterways and any hospital that still functions after the atomic blast is completely overwhelmed by burned supplicants seeking relief or merciful death.

Kim follows up with a second nuclear strike – on the existing nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon on the Californian coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The strike melts down fuel rods in the twin 1100MW pressurised water reactors, rendering a vast area of California uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.

Things get rapidly out of control. Under America’s highly classified Operational Plan, 1,770 US nuclear weapons are cleared for launch, including single hydrogen bombs on land-based Minutemen missiles buried in silos around the US mid-west, multiple-headed sea-launched ballistic missiles aboard Ohio-class “boomer” submarines under the Pacific, and on piloted B-52 and B-2 bombers, the third leg of America’s nuclear triad.

A disproportionately extravagant nuclear salvo (use ‘em or lose ‘em) aimed at North Korea must fly over eastern Russia before entering Korean air space. It is mistakenly assumed by Moscow to be targeting Russia. In the absence of any urgent correcting phone call from Washington (which has ceased to exist), Russia launches its own onslaught against the US, as well as against NATO bases in Europe known to keep US nuclear weapons and delivery systems on standby. Too late for a pre-emptive strike, US commanders in military bases strung around the US mid-west give nuclear launching codes to commanding officers at all US nuclear bases including submarines, to strike hundreds of designated targets in Russia.

The dreadful situation worsens as China, seeing nuclear death and destruction engulf cities near its border with North Korea, launches its own nuclear weapons on the United States.

Jacobsen doesn’t spare us the details of what happens after the bombing stops. Across the northern hemisphere everything burns unchecked – cities, towns, suburbs, villages, roads and forests. Black powdery soot blocks the sun, first across the northern hemisphere, then the south. As predicted as early as October 1983 by Carl Sagan, one of the world’s most respected scientists, nuclear winter steps in. Crops can’t grow without sun. Nor can life. Mass extinction of humans and animals from radiation, and then starvation, follows.

Sagan’s theory was initially scorned as Soviet propaganda, but as computers developed, his theory gained validity, then acceptance. Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid struck Earth and 70% of all species perished. Jacobsen correctly says that nuclear war would cause many of the same phenomena.

Where Jacobsen can be questioned, however, is on her assumptions that Kim Jong-un would ignite the war. Why he would do such a reckless and foolish thing, she claims she simply “doesn’t know”. But she apparently doesn’t remember how in 1945 the United States, without seeking any opinion from Koreans, divided Korea at the 38th parallel to stop the Soviet Union occupying the whole peninsula; and how General Curtis LeMay saturation bombed North Korea during the Korean War as revenge for Chinese troops comprehensively defeating panicking American forces and forcing them back across the 38th parallel in 1950. So the animus is there.

But Kim Jong-un is neither mad nor stupid. Why would he court certain nuclear destruction of his small country by the United States? A much more likely ignition point is currently unfurling in the Middle East, where Israel seems to be bent on provoking a war with Iran, into which US forces would inevitably be drawn with uncertain, but highly dangerous consequences.

Closer to home, it would be a salutary exercise for all Australian militarists, including uncritical devotees to AUKUS, to read and reflect on Jacobsen’s book, and see how closer and closer integration of the ADF with US forces could draw us ineluctably into a nuclear war of American choosing against China.

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