Nuclear War: A Scenario

"I read this book a couple of times and the second time I did have a pang of, ‘Hang on a minute! Is this really nonfiction?’ One of the interesting experiences of being a judge this year is that the category of nonfiction has become much more creative than it was. The reason I asked myself that question is that this book is a scenario for what would happen if North Korea were to launch a missile at the United States. Now, fortunately, North Korea has not yet launched a missile at the United States, so everything that then happens in this book, hasn’t happened. But it is a scenario that is entirely based on documents, many of which have very recently been declassified, and on 10 years of interviews with people who were deeply engaged in the whole question of deterrence and of thinking about nuclear war and trying to prevent it. So the book is very rooted in fact. She describes what happens if an unusual missile is launched. It’s picked up quite early and it’s tracked to determine where it’s headed. It’s heading for the United States. They try to intercept it. They fail. It hits Washington. Then what happens? Essentially, you have about half an hour from the beginning of the episode to the end of the world. It is utterly terrifying. It is about what can go wrong. It’s about what happens when deterrence, which is all we have to prevent nuclear war, fails and then the fail-safe, interception, also fails. There’s also another launch from a submarine—also originating from North Korea—which is off the west coast of the United States. That hits a nuclear power plant and is a whole separate disaster. Because it’s a nuclear power plant, a different set of things happen. The book told me lots of things I didn’t know or hadn’t thought about. For example, it is now clear that the United States is under nuclear attack from North Korea, and it responds. But to respond to North Korea, the missiles have to fly over Russia. What does Russia do? Russia interprets that as an attack from the United States. The fail-safe there is to get Moscow on the phone, which they try to do. After several attempts, they get through, and Moscow says, ‘Get your president to call our president.’ But by then, they’ve lost sight of the American president, because he was being evacuated from Washington when the bomb hit. It’s a completely gripping but utterly terrifying scenario. It’s about the world we currently live in, an increasingly dangerous world, and it’s a really hard look at systems that we would probably rather not think about. It’s written very sparingly, very tellingly, very compellingly and you pretty much can’t put it down. You may wish you’d never read it, but you can’t put it down while you are reading it."