Can’t take the stressful news anymore? Do the conflicts that multiply and bring their share of horror stories every day upset and worry you? The book Nuclear War – A Scenario is not for you.
And if Denis Villeneuve soon makes a film from it – we learned at the beginning of April that he was in talks with the studio which bought the rights to adapt this essay for the cinema – you probably won’t want to go see it.
This book is even more nightmarish than the most terrifying of Stephen King’s horror books.
Be warned though: this book is also a tour de force.
The premise is disarmingly simple: a rogue state launches a nuclear attack against the United States.
The story is complex and strikingly realistic.
It is based notably on a series of interviews with experts (including former US defense secretaries and nuclear engineers) who know what is likely to happen in such an eventuality. And many know the details of the American government’s plans.
The word “scenario” is not found in the title of the book by chance. Each event in the chain reaction caused by such an attack is described in detail.
And all of this is presented chronologically. Sometimes to the nearest second. With nervous writing.
Quite frankly, essays that keep us in suspense in this way are rare.
According to the thesis of the author, journalist Annie Jacobsen, it is the Pentagon which would be targeted first.
It is located, I remind you, in Virginia. Close to the nation’s capital, Washington. If the missile hits its target (no spoilers here!), there will be an apocalypse in the heart of the United States.
The American president must then decide whether his country counterattacks. He has “only six minutes to deliberate and decide which nuclear weapons he launches to respond.”
This strategy is called “launch on alert”. Because the United States would probably not wait for the impact of a nuclear missile on its territory to launch a nuclear attack with the aim of annihilating its enemy.
Hence the theory of “mutually assured destruction”, according to which a country would not be crazy enough to use nuclear weapons against another, knowing that it would thereby condemn itself to an atrocious end.
But deterrence has its limits. Our leaders know this, even if they prefer to react by burying their heads in the sand.
“All adversaries” of the United States “are not balanced,” we recall in this essay. And “all it takes is one nihilistic, crazy man with a nuclear arsenal to start a nuclear war that no one can win.”
What Annie Jacobsen tells us is fiction. But that could easily, too easily, not be the case.
This is, in my opinion, the great merit of this book. He shakes his readers in such a way that it is subsequently impossible to deny that the risk of a nuclear apocalypse is today too high.
And it reminds us of an intolerable truth. So far, “no one has done anything substantial to prevent nuclear World War III.”
Extract
What will become of humanity after a nuclear war? Dinosaurs lived for 165 million years. They arrived, they dominated, they evolved. Then an asteroid hit Earth and the dinosaurs became extinct (not counting their descendants, the birds). As far as we know, no one has found traces of these killer reptiles for 66 million years. Until just a few hundred years ago, in 1677, when the director of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Robert Plot, discovered a dinosaur femur in the Cornwall village and drew it for a scientific journal, falsely identifying the bone as belonging to a giant. After a nuclear war, who, if anyone, will know we were once here?
Who is Annie Jacobsen?
American investigative journalist born in 1967, Annie Jacobsen studied at Princeton University and now lives in California. She is the author of several essays, mainly on defense and intelligence issues. We learned at the beginning of April that Legendary Entertainment had acquired the rights to his essay Nuclear War – A Scenario with the intention of associating the filmmaker Denis Villeneuve with this project.
Nuclear War – A Scenario
Dutton
375 pages