A Nuclear Scenario

Annie Jacobsen’s book uses declassified documents and accounts from pertinent ex officials to describe a scenario involving nuclear war, step by step, beginning with the launch of a single weapon and laying out plausible events over the next 24 minutes, then the next 24, and beyond.

It’s full of interesting and deeply troubling facts about the physics of explosions and the effect of the blast, inferno, radiation, and then extreme cold that would result. Other facts to think about:

• The 1983 Proud Prophet Project concluded that all scenarios escalate to total devastation no matter how or where they begin, i.e., there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war.
• US plans for attacking Russia are expected to kill hundreds of millions of people in other countries, due to fires and radioactive fallout.
• The Launch on Warning doctrine means the US will launch weapons before it is hit by any weapons. The president has about 6 minutes to decide.
• There is no system to effectively stop ICBMs, so a nation that knows it is about to be wiped out could be deciding whether the rest of humanity goes on.

Organizations and policies for conducting nuclear war are described in detail for the US and their Russian counterparts. In both the President has sole and unchecked authority. Consider that these two men are each elected by around 80 million people. These lucky 80 million have some say, in that at least they assented to giving this authority to this person, rather than voting for the other guy or staying home.

The other people of earth, approximately 99% of humanity, have zero voice in this.

As Jacobsen describes, when the U.S. plan for a nuclear attack on Russia was originally crafted in 1960, it was estimated that it would kill 300 million people in China. China, whose people were not at war in this scenario and squarely among the 99% who did not vote for the man with his hand on the button, would suffer more deaths than either of the combatant countries.

This is before considering the effects of nuclear winter, which could end 5 billion lives and make the northern hemisphere uninhabitable for a very long time.

How can we reconcile this situation with any notion of a world made up of nations with sovereignty and self determination?

How many of us chose this risky situation? If, hypothetically, the majority of people thought hey this is a pretty bad idea, what would they do? Is there a non-extinction candidate they could vote for?