Nuclear War: A Scenario is a 2024 book by American journalist Annie Jacobsen, published by Dutton and Transworld. The book combines historical analysis of U.S. nuclear war planning with a minute-by-minute account of a hypothetical first strike by North Korea against the United States, showing how the conflict escalates to global thermonuclear war within 72 minutes, leading to nuclear winter and 5 billion deaths. The work examines both the historical development of American nuclear doctrine since the 1960s and contemporary protocols that would govern U.S. response to a nuclear attack.
Summary The book presents a fictional but fact-based nuclear war scenario, constructed from expert interviews and declassified documents. In the Prologue, Jacobsen depicts how a one-megaton thermonuclear detonation above the Pentagon would kill one million people in 90 seconds, and why such an attack would inevitably escalate into a global conflict ending human civilization.
Part I, the only historical background of the book, examines secret U.S. nuclear war planning, particularly a classified 1960 meeting at U.S. Strategic Command where military officials finalized plans for nuclear war against the Soviet Union that would have killed 600 million people.
The initial 24 minutes of the scenario form Part II. North Korea launches a surprise ICBM toward Washington, D.C. followed by a second nuclear missile targeting California's Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. U.S. defense systems fail to intercept either warhead. The president, initially evacuated for safety, eventually authorizes massive nuclear retaliation with 82 warheads against North Korea.
Communication breakdown and escalating retaliation form the core of the next 24 minutes of the scenario (Part III). Russia's flawed Tundra satellite system overestimates the number of incoming U.S. missiles, leading Russia to conclude it is under attack and retaliate with over 900 nuclear warheads aimed at the U.S. and NATO countries.
The concluding 24 minutes (Part IV) culminate in global nuclear apocalypse. The United States and NATO launch their remaining nuclear arsenals at Russia, while North Korea detonates a Super-EMP weapon 300 miles above the United States, destroying all electrical systems. Within 72 minutes, 1,000 Russian nuclear warheads strike the U.S. and Europe, resulting in hundreds of millions of deaths.
Part V examines the long-term consequences: nuclear winter lasting 10 years, global famine killing 5 billion people, and the eventual collapse of civilization.
Background
Development and conception Nuclear War: A Scenario develops a concept introduced in the final chapter of Jacobsen's Surprise, Kill, Vanish. In that earlier work, Billy Waugh tells Vo Dien Bien and Colonel Bon Giong—the son and former aide-de-camp of General Giap—that the U.S. had seriously considered using a Special Atomic Demolition Munition to sever the Ho Chi Minh trail and that he regretted they didn't. Jacobsen, who fundamentally disagreed with Waugh's view on using a nuclear weapon on a battlefield, concluded that section with a quote that foreshadowed her next book: "Every nation wants to win at any cost. Except the cost and consequences of nuclear war."
Nuclear War: A Scenario is Jacobsen's seventh book. It rests on raw material Jacobsen collected during fifteen years of interviewing people for prior works. The seed for the book was planted in 2014 when Paul S. Kozemchak, special assistant to the director of DARPA, shared with her that the USA and the USSR had each detonated two test nuclear bombs in space during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This "testing [of] fate" was echoed fifty-six years later when on January 1 and 2, 2018, Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un had a short but heated exchange on Twitter on the respective sizes of their nuclear buttons, which led Jacobsen to start to wonder what would happen if deterrence failed. "What if the words of the deputy commander of STRATCOM, [...] Lieutenant General Thomas Bussiere, [spoken] to an inner circle was true: 'deterrence holds unless it doesn't, and then it all unravels'. That word 'unravels' [...] really underpinned my narrative, because that is exactly what happens, and it happens fast." As Jacobsen was probing the foundations of deterrence, the generation that had experienced nuclear blasts was disappearing, which gave yet more urgency to passing on their message. Through her interviews with engineers who worked on thermonuclear weapons, Jacobsen noted a common theme: many "lived in fear of the day when everyone [...] who had been alive and had seen [a nuclear explosion] was dead, and no one would remember. [This is why] so many of the Cold War warriors who spoke to me on the record did so because they have that fear that where we are headed is [...] stemming from a [...] lack of information, lack of knowledge about the history of the bombs."
Writing in New Scientist, Jacobsen stated she wrote the book "to demonstrate—in appalling, minute-by-minute detail—just how horrifying a nuclear war would be," echoing UN secretary-general António Guterres's August 2022 warning at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference that "Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation." "This is madness. We must reverse course."
Lastly, Shane Salerno gave Jacobsen the idea for her book and worked with her on the manuscript during COVID, in 2020. Nuclear War: A Scenario was published on March 26, 2024.
Literary and historical context Nuclear War: A Scenario builds upon a long tradition of nuclear war literature and analysis that has evolved since the atomic age began. When asked about works that informed her understanding of nuclear war, Jacobsen has highlighted several key texts. Among them is John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946), which pioneered the minute-by-minute documentation of nuclear catastrophe through eyewitness accounts. Next is historian William L. Shirer who offered not only a stark assessment of future warfare in the preface to his 1960 work The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich but also encapsulated a summary of Jacobsen's own work, warning that the next great war "will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.". Finally, Fred Kaplan who exposed in The Wizards of Armageddon (1983) the strategic thinking behind nuclear war planning.
The book also draws comparisons to other seminal works in nuclear literature, with reviewers noting connections to Jonathan Schell's influential 1982 work The Fate of the Earth, which provided one of the most influential examinations of nuclear war's potential consequences. Earlier fictional treatments of nuclear conflict, including Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957) and the television film The Day After (1983), demonstrated the power of narrative to influence public opinion and policy—a tradition Jacobsen explicitly hopes to continue.
Jacobsen's approach differs from previous works by combining the documentary rigor of policy analysis with the immediate, real-time narrative structure more commonly found in fiction. Unlike the retrospective approach of Hersey's Hiroshima or the theoretical framework of Schell's The Fate of the Earth, Jacobsen presents a forward-looking scenario grounded in contemporary military capabilities and protocols. Her work also distinguishes itself from earlier Cold War-era analyses by incorporating modern nuclear threats, including electromagnetic pulse weapons and the multi-polar nuclear landscape of the 21st century. For her "literary north-star" in crafting speculative non-fiction, a first for her, Jacobsen drew inspiration from Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, which similarly presents a meticulously researched scenario of potential future events.
Synopsis
The book opens with an Author's Note in which Jacobsen emphasizes four key points. First, the U.S. government has spent trillions of dollars since the early 1950s preparing for nuclear war and ensuring continuity of government during such conflicts. Second, while the book's scenario is fictional, it is constructed from facts gathered through interviews with experts and declassified government documents. Third, she chose to assume Washington D.C. would be struck by a one-megaton bomb because a "Bolt out of the Blue" attack represents what American defense officials fear most. Finally, following U.S. retaliation, a general nuclear war would necessarily ensue and end to human civilization, or as former STRATCOM Commander General Robert Kehler observed: "The world could end in the next couple of hours."
Prologue The prologue introduces the immediate consequences of the hypothetical scenario developed in the book. In the milliseconds following the detonation of a one-megaton thermonuclear weapon above the Pentagon, temperatures reach 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, instantly carbonizing its 27,000 employees. "Ground zero is zeroed." The destruction then radiates outward. At one mile, Arlington National Cemetery and surrounding infrastructure are obliterated. At 2.5 miles, the clothes of 35,000 baseball fans at Nationals Park catch fire; they suffer third-degree burns, but MedStar Washington Hospital Center has only ten burn beds. One million people die within 90 seconds. The second stage begins when mega-fires ignite as gas lines rupture and chemical factories explode. Survivors shuffle through radioactive wasteland with ruptured lungs. No electricity, water, or first responders remain. Yet while the public remains unaware of these horrifying details, the United States government has rehearsed World War III scenarios for 65 years—conflicts that would kill over two billion people worldwide. To address this disconnect, Jacobsen takes readers back to a secret 1960 meeting at U.S. Strategic Command.
Part I - The buildup (or, how we got here) December 1960: a secret, mass extermination plan
A classified meeting at U.S. Strategic Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base gathers Secretary of Defense Thomas S. Gates Jr., his deputy James H. Douglas Jr., Deputy Director of Defense Research and Engineering John H. Rubel, the Joint Chiefs of Staff—Commander of U.S. Strategic Air Command General Thomas S. Power, Army Chief General George Decker, Navy Chief Admiral Arleigh Burke, Air Force Commander General Thomas D. White, and Marine Corps Commandant General David M. Shoup—and numerous other top-ranking military officials. Its purpose, as documented in participant John Rubel's 2008 memoir, was to finalize a secret plan for waging nuclear war against the Soviet Union. This "mass extermination" plan would have resulted in 500 million deaths across the USSR, with B-52 bombers dropping 40 megatons of thermonuclear bombs on Moscow alone—equivalent to 4,000 Hiroshimas.
August 6, 1945: two Hiroshima victims speak
To express the human meaning of this comparison, Jacobsen recounts the experiences of two survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which instantly killed 80,000 people. Thirteen-year-old Setsuko Thurlow, who was 1.1 miles from ground zero when the 15-kiloton Little Boy bomb detonated 1,900 feet above the city, witnessed victims with missing skin and body parts, and Dr. Michihiko Hachiya, whose clothes were blown off, was left naked and bleeding. The U.S. military classified their stories, as well as those of countless other victims, as intellectual property to maintain strategic advantages in understanding nuclear weapons effects.
1946-1960: The buildup