I’ve been reading over the past week Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War: A Scenario.[1] The book develops a scenario of a nuclear holocaust that starts with the launch of a nuclear missile by North Korea on Washington. The scenario describes in detail the causal chain that the attack triggers, logistically, militarily, and politically. We learn about the U.S. system of defense against nuclear attack (not very effective), the protocol in case of an attack, the planned strategies in response, and so on. We also learn about the damage, to cities and bodies, caused by a megaton bomb. The tone is dramatic, and the objective is clearly to make the reader feel in her bones the panic and absolute distress that would occur in case something like the scenario were to happen.
That said, this is not a very good book, for several reasons. I’m far from an expert on nuclear war and the U.S. military defense system, so I’ve no clue whether all the technical details provided in the book are correct. The author seems to have done her homework (i.e., interviewing an impressive number of former insiders) and so I’m inclined to trust her. However, contrary to a fictional work on the same topic as Ken Follett’s Never novel, Jacobsen’s book belongs to the non-fiction category. You don’t read the book for the deepness of its story or its fascinating characters. You read it to learn about how a nuclear holocaust could unfold and how military and political actors would react in case someone would be mad enough to start the hostilities. The problem is that the book basically tells a linear story without exploring the possible forks at different moments of time. To be valuable, such a work should help the reader to have a sense of the different possibilities and their related probabilities. Here, the reader gets the impression that everything is already settled in advance, from the initial launch to the complete annihilation of the world. Maybe this is what would happen – nobody knows. But since it is not a novel, what we want is not a story (which may be more or less plausible, or more or less interesting), but an exploration of a plausible scenario with its ramifications. From this perspective, the book reads more as sensationalist journalism than anything else.
Ironically, the determinism of the scenario contrasts with the naivety Jacobsen accounts for the current nuclear state of affairs. The writing of the book is clearly made to convey to the reader the idea that nuclear weapons are a collective folly and that deterrence theory is a poor excuse for having left the world literally sitting on a pile of bombs that can destroy the planet several times. I think that nobody sane in this world thinks that the state of affairs is satisfactory. The impressive reduction of the worldwide stock of nuclear bombs over the last 60 years (from more than 31000 warheads in 1965 to less than 4000 in 2020) also shows that collective action may be effective up to a point. However, exhorting individuals (and especially political leaders) to be reasonable, rational, and moral would not have changed the past, nor will it realistically change the future. As soon as the technology for producing the atomic and then the thermonuclear bomb emerged, it was in a way unavoidable that nuclear weapons would proliferate. This is just a standard arms race. If the Manhattan Project had never existed, it is highly likely that someone else, somewhere else, would have sooner or later the idea, the knowledge, and the resources to build the first atomic bomb. The same race would have started, just a bit later. Though bad in absolute terms, the current state of mutual deterrence may well be our necessary and unimprovable second best.
I’m not saying that the emergence of nuclear weapons was written from the beginning of human history. It was, however, largely unavoidable as soon as something like modern capitalistic societies emerged. In his account of the end of History, Francis Fukuyama identifies two mechanisms that drive history.[2] One of those (that Fukuyama calls “the Mechanism”) is the growth of scientific knowledge. According to Fukuyama, the military advantage that scientific knowledge offers explains capitalist societies, once they have emerged, must ultimately prevail. More than capitalist societies, industrial societies (including therefore non-capitalist societies like the Soviet Union) are the only ones to have displayed the ability to mobilize resources to permit a fast and systematic growth of scientific knowledge. On the path of this growth was the knowledge to build nuclear weapons. Once the knowledge has been created (or discovered), there was just no way to stop their development. That sounds determinist, but evolution is full of what Daniel Dennett was calling “forced moves.”[3]
If there is something to keep from the impressive work of Raymond Aron, it is the idea that our conception of history and historical knowledge is tightly related to our views about political knowledge. A fully determinist conception of history is highly likely to be used at the same time as an explanation and as a justification of anything, including the most atrocious act. To view the development of nuclear weapons as unavoidable up to a point may give the impression that there is no individual responsibility. We have to be more subtle, however. Aron rightly remarks that historical knowledge is a complicated articulation of the subjective reality of contingencies as they are perceived by the actors at the time of the events and the subjective impression of necessity that emerges from the fact of looking backward at historical events that we try to understand.[4] There is no historical knowledge without a perception of necessity because our understanding of history takes place through a framework that ascribes meaning and causes to events. History as perceived by humans cannot be random. That does not mean that historical contingencies and related individual responsibilities are irrelevant. The bottom line is that there are many ways to write the history (past and, in a way, future) of nuclear weapons. I don’t think however that this history is intelligible if we neglect the deterministic force of the growth of scientific knowledge triggered by the emergence of industrial societies in general, capitalism in particular.
[1] Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario (New York: Dutton, 2024).
[2] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992 [2006]). I’ve discussed Fukuyama’s book here.
[3] Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Simon and Schuster, 1996).
[4] Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire: Essai sur les limites de l’objectivité historique (Paris: Gallimard, 1938 [1991]).
Good essay. I was in a strange position reading Jacobsen's book: I believe I may know, through quixotic reading and obsession, more about nuclear weapons and nuclear warfare than all people who do not either (a) have a Top Secret security clearance, and/or (b) study nuclear war professionally. What bothered me most in the book is that the illustrative scenario she has chosen is ludicrously unlikely. I would never place bets on what the first military use of nuclear weapons after Nagasaki will be (seems unvirtuous to do so), but a "bolt from the blue" attack like the one Jacobsen describes is absolutely not it. Vastly more likely is an escalatory dynamic where one power uses one or several tactical nuclear weapon to regain military momentum they are losing and to send a message of resolve to its opponents - think China striking a US aircraft carrier group if their invasion of Taiwan was bogging down. That would be an immensely dangerous and frightening scenario; I would confidently predict the mother of all one day stock market and economic crashes as panic overwhelmed people. That more realistic scenario is much more worth exploring, but it doesn't lead to what you correctly identify as Jacobsen's desired end: convincing the public to want nuclear weapons abolished. In a limited nuclear war scenario, we would be thanking God that we had nuclear weapons too, so our enemies could not dictate terms to us.
I've never really understood how to explicate "meaning" when used by philosophers of history as well historians.