Nuclear War A Scenario Quotes

Humans are wired to advance. Humans do whatever it takes. And yet, nuclear war zeros it all out. Nuclear weapons reduce human brilliance and ingenuity, love and desire, empathy and intellect, to ash.

A nuclear crisis is not a worst-case scenario, it is the worst-case scenario.

The fundamental idea behind this book is to demonstrate, in appalling detail, just how horrifying nuclear war would be.

The greatest enemy of the US government is the truth.

Perry believes that if military rule is ever imposed on today’s America, “it would be almost impossible to undo military rule” in the United States.

Paranoia is a psychological phenomenon, same as deterrence.

It is the astonishing speed with which ballistic missile submarines can launch nuclear weapons, and hit multiple targets nearly simultaneously, that makes them the handmaidens of the apocalypse.

If it’s a Bolt out of the Blue attack,” says Fugate, “population protection planning is a different animal. With a Bolt out of the Blue attack, population protection planning won’t happen because everyone will be dead.

With time, after a nuclear war, all present-day knowledge will be gone. Including the knowledge that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran, or anyone else vilified as a nation or a group. It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all. All along.

An immediate consequence of a nuclear strike [would be] that democracy would be completely gone and military rule would take place.” Perry believes that if military rule is ever imposed on today’s America, “it would be almost impossible to undo military rule” in the United States.

If you are elected, what actions will you take to lessen the risks of nuclear war? What actions will you take to lessen the risks of climate change? What actions will you take to regulate disruptive technologies such as AI and bioengineering? And finally, how do you see the world of 2040? What is your worst-case scenario, and what is your vision for the best-case scenario?

ask these politicians four questions: If you are elected, what actions will you take to lessen the risks of nuclear war? What actions will you take to lessen the risks of climate change? What actions will you take to regulate disruptive technologies such as AI and bioengineering? And finally, how do you see the world of 2040? What is your worst-case scenario, and what is your vision for the best-case scenario?

In 2008, some of the scientists who modeled the original 1983 nuclear winter scenario investigated the likely result of a theoretical regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan, a war they postulated to involve only 100 Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapons, yielding a total of only 1.5 megatons—no more than the yield of some single warheads in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. They were shocked to discover that because such an exchange would inevitably be targeted on cities filled with combustible materials, the resulting firestorms would inject massive volumes of black smoke into the upper atmosphere which would spread around the world, cooling the earth long enough and sufficiently to produce worldwide agricultural collapse. Twenty million prompt deaths from blast, fire, and radiation, Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon projected, and another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation—from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war.

When the next elections come along, and politicians implore you to vote for them, ask these politicians four questions: If you are elected, what actions will you take to lessen the risks of nuclear war? What actions will you take to lessen the risks of climate change? What actions will you take to regulate disruptive technologies such as AI and bioengineering? And finally, how do you see the world of 2040? What is your worst-case scenario, and what is your vision for the best-case scenario?

When the next elections come along, and politicians implore you to vote for them, ask these politicians four questions: If you are elected, what actions will you take to lessen the risks of nuclear war? What actions will you take to lessen the risks of climate change? What actions will you take to regulate disruptive technologies such as AI and bioengineering? And finally, how do you see the world of 2040? What is your worst-case scenario, and what is your vision for the best-case scenario? If some politicians don’t understand these questions, or if they constantly talk about the past without being able to formulate a meaningful vision for the future, don’t vote for them.

A thermonuclear weapon uses an atomic bomb inside itself as its triggering mechanism. As an internal, explosive fuse. The Super’s monstrous, explosive power comes as the result of an uncontrolled, self-sustaining chain reaction in which hydrogen isotopes fuse under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion.

I felt as if I were witnessing a comparable descent into the deep heart of darkness, a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one third of the earth’s surface.

Nuclear Command and Control is predicated on the concept of redundancy, with multiple organizations performing similar tasks in the event one component fails.

The duty of the STRATCOM commander comes with a responsibility unlike any other in the world.

The year 1952 saw the invention of the thermonuclear bomb, also called the hydrogen bomb. A two-stage mega-weapon: a nuclear bomb within a nuclear bomb. A thermonuclear weapon uses an atomic bomb inside itself as its triggering mechanism. As an internal, explosive fuse. The Super’s monstrous, explosive power comes as the result of an uncontrolled, self-sustaining chain reaction in which hydrogen isotopes fuse under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion

Our military is very powerful, very lethal,” says Captain Ryan La Rance, an officer who manages the airmen on a Doomsday Plane, “but it doesn’t happen without communication.

The Russian president’s nuclear bunker, like Site R, presently has electricity, internet, and hardwired telephone service. Underground bunkers are built for redundancy, their critical infrastructure components—including air, heat, and water—duplicated for resilience in emergencies and crises. Multiple high-capacity fiber-optic lines provide uninterrupted communications systems. The backup generators have backup generators.

According to the U.S. Army, this task—on a scale of military hardship—ranges from difficult to impossible.

In the words of former vice admiral Michael J. Connor, commander of U.S. submarine forces, “anything fixed is destroyable.

My vision. In 2027, Israel’s leader will become convinced that Iran is fielding its nuclear arsenal. Israel will ask us to destroy that arsenal for them, using our submarines and ASW aircraft. If we refuse, Israel will attempt to do it alone. There our scenario becomes a true three-body problem. China—wishing to be seen as taking the moral high ground—announces that if we attack Iran, it will seize and hold Taiwan, arguing that Iran has just as much right to self-defense as the Israelis. At that point, the best predictions of our experts are that, if we fulfill the Israelis’ wish, we will set ourselves on the road to global nuclear war. At the very least, the U.S. president will have to disappoint our closest ally and religious cousin in the Middle East—Israel—while at worst, we might actually have to attack Israel to prevent them initiating Armageddon out of paranoia.

Paul S. Kozemchak (1948–2017), DARPA’s longest-serving employee, shared a shocking story with me, in a 2014 interview, that planted a seed for this book. “Guess how many nuclear missiles were detonated during the Cuban Missile Crisis?” he asked, then continued: “I can tell you that the answer is not ‘none.’ The answer is ‘several,’ as in four.” Two by the U.S. (on October 20 and October 26, 1962), and two by the Soviet Union (on October 22 and October 28, 1962), each of which was exploded in space. Firing off nuclear weapons tests in a DEFCON 2 environment was testing fate.

On January 25, 1995, Russian president Boris Yeltsin came within minutes of initiating a full nuclear strike on the United States because of an unidentified Norwegian scientific rocket. Concern has been raised over a U.S. project to replace the nuclear warheads on two of the twenty-four D5 ICBMs carried by Trident submarines with conventional warheads, for possible use against Iran or North Korea: Russian early-warning systems would be unable to distinguish them from nuclear missiles, expanding the possibilities for unfortunate misunderstandings. Other worrisome scenarios include deliberate malfeasance by military commanders triggered by mental instability and/or fringe political/religious agendas. But why worry? Surely, if push came to shove, reasonable people would step in and do the right thing, just as they have in the past? Nuclear nations do indeed have elaborate countermeasures in place, just as our body does against cancer. Our body can normally deal with isolated deleterious mutations, and it appears that fluke coincidences of as many as four mutations may be required to trigger certain cancers. Yet if we roll the dice enough times, shit happens-Stanley Kubrick's dark nuclear war comedy Dr. Strangelove illustrates this with a triple coincidence.

Another reason that this question hasn’t demanded an answer is that most people understandably consider it to be far less relevant than “How can nuclear terrorism be prevented?” Speculating on responses to a nuclear attack is a bit like contemplating the day after any number of disasters that involve an unprecedented scale of devastation. Does the national security community focus on the US government’s potential response to an asteroid striking the planet or the aftermath of a war between China and the United States? It does not, because these types of scenarios fall into the realm of the surreal or at a minimum envision a situation in which there is such massive social disruption and such a severe

Petrov was the commander in charge when satellite data indicated there were five American ICBMs on their way to strike Moscow with nuclear weapons. For reasons having to do with human intuition, Petrov became suspicious of that attack information. Years later, he told Washington Post reporter David Hoffman what he was thinking at the time. “I had a funny feeling in my gut,” Petrov said, asking himself, Who starts a nuclear war against another superpower with just five ICBMs? In 1983, Petrov made the decision to interpret the early-warning signal as a “false alarm,” he said, thereby not sending a report up the chain of command. For his well-placed skepticism, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov famously became known as “the man who saved the world from nuclear war.

When a nuclear bomb hits Washington, D.C., chaos will grip the nation. Without a functioning government, there will be no rule of law. Democracy will be replaced by anarchy. Moral constructs will disappear. Murder, mayhem, and madness will prevail. In the words of Nikita Khrushchev, “The survivors will envy the dead.

They are also increasing at unprecedented speeds. In 2021, the U.S. Space Force tracked 1,968 missile launches around the globe, a number that “increased more than over three and a half times in 2022,” says Space Systems Command’s Colonel Brian Denaro. As of September 2023, Russia continues to notify the U.S. of its ballistic missile test launches. No one wants to start a nuclear war by accident

It’s easier to find a grapefruit-sized object in space than a submarine at sea,” former vice admiral Michael J. Connor, commander of the United States (nuclear) submarine forces tells us. And that, conversely, “anything fixed is destroyable

I’ll never forget that night,” he tells us, now in his nineties, and that “right now, we are closer to having a nuclear war happen, even by accident, than we were during the Cold War.

Between January 2022 and May 2023, North Korea test-launched more than 100 missiles, including nuclear-capable weapons that can hit the continental United States. None of them were announced.

One catchy descriptor that SBX advocates use to explain how powerful the SBX is, is to say if placed in the Chesapeake Bay, its radars would be able to see a baseball-sized object in San Francisco from an observation post in Washington, D.C., some 2,900 miles away. This is true, sort of. The baseball needs to be hovering 870 miles above San Francisco in a direct line of sight with the radar in D.C. in order to be seen.

Limited” is the key word here because the total number of interceptor missiles is forty-four. As of early 2024, Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons, the majority of which are on ready-for-launch status. (China has a stockpile of more than 500; Pakistan and India each have around 165; North Korea has around 50.)

After five years, and many billions of U.S. tax dollars spent, nine out of twenty hit-to-kill U.S. interceptor tests failed, which means there is only an approximate 55 percent chance that a Hwasong-17 will be shot down before it reaches its target.

FEMA is the government entity assigned to prepare for nuclear war. Its special access programs are highly classified. They also hide, or obscure, a misperception. The truth is, there is no federal agency to help citizens survive a nuclear war per se. What FEMA does is focus on how to save specific government officials in the event of a nuclear attack. This is part of a classified FEMA program built upon classified information called the Continuity of Operations Plan, or COOP.

The incoming North Korean warhead will be traveling at speeds of around 14,000 miles per hour, while the interceptor’s kill vehicle will be traveling at speeds of around 20,000 miles per hour, making this action, if successful, “akin to shooting a bullet with a bullet,” according to the Missile Defense Agency’s spokesperson.

There is a myth among Americans that the U.S. can easily shoot down an incoming, attacking ICBM. Presidents, congresspeople, defense officials, and countless others in the military-industrial complex have all said as much. This is simply not true.

With the briefing underway, the six-minute deadline for deliberation has begun. The president has just six minutes to deliberate, and make a decision regarding what nuclear weapons to use, and what enemy targets to instruct STRATCOM to strike. In the words of former launch control officer and nuclear weapons expert Dr. Bruce Blair, “A six-minute deadline for deliberation and decision is ridiculous.” Meaning, nothing can prepare a man for this. It’s too little time. And yet this is exactly where we are.

Inside the Football are papers that are (arguably) the single-most highly classified set of documents in the United States government. Called Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs), they are executive orders and messages that can be put into effect the moment an emergency scenario like a nuclear attack comes to pass. “They are designed ‘to implement extraordinary presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations,’ ” reports the Brennan Center for Justice. “PEADs are classified ‘secret,’ and no PEAD has ever been declassified or leaked.

Its motto is Supra et Ultra—Above and Beyond.

It’s hard to capture and explain the fog and friction of war,” Colonel John Brunderman says of his experiences in the bunker beneath the Pentagon on 9/11. A command post that “functions as the top of the pyramid for all U.S. command posts around the world.” A classified facility that ensures “connectivity for the Single Integrated Operational Plan execution, worldwide situation monitoring, and crisis management.

And yet, in the fog of war, uncertainty remains.

When you’re looking for things that are abnormal,” Colonel Brunderman warns, “a lot of things appear abnormal.” ■ 15 SECONDS Buckley Space Force Base, Colorado Buckley Space Force Base.

Four thousand times more explosive power than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

During the trip to the NATO base, Agnew noticed something that made him wary. “I observed four F84F aircraft . . . sitting on the end of a runway, each was carrying two MK 7 [nuclear] gravity bombs,” he wrote in a document declassified in 2023. What this meant was that “custody of the MK 7s was under the watchful eye of one very young U.S. Army private armed with a M1 rifle with 8 rounds of ammunition.” Agnew told his colleagues: “The only safeguard against unauthorized use of an atomic bomb was this single G.I. surrounded by a large number of foreign troops on foreign territory with thousands of Soviet troops just miles away.” Back in the United States, Agnew contacted a project engineer at Sandia Laboratories named Don Cotter and asked “if we could insert an electronic ‘lock’ in the [bomb’s] firing circuit that could prevent just any passerby from arming the MK 7.” Cotter got to work. He put together a demonstration of a device, a lock and coded switch, that functioned as follows: “[a] 3-digit code would be entered, a switch was thrown, the green light extinguished, and the red light illuminated indicating the arming circuit was live.

To err is human; but machines also make mistakes. These same systems have been responsible for several near-catastrophic false alarms. Once, in the 1950s, early-warning radars interpreted a flock of swans as a fleet of Russian MiG fighter jets en route to the U.S. by way of the North Pole. In October 1960, computers at the ground radar site in Thule, Greenland, misread the moon rising up over Norway as being the radar returns from 1,000 attacking ICBMs. In 1979, a simulation test tape mistakenly inserted into a NORAD computer deceived analysts into thinking the U.S. was under attack by Russian nuclear-armed ICBMs and nuclear ballistic submarines.

The year 1952 saw the invention of the thermonuclear bomb, also called the hydrogen bomb. A two-stage mega-weapon: a nuclear bomb within a nuclear bomb. A thermonuclear weapon uses an atomic bomb inside itself as its triggering mechanism. As an internal, explosive fuse. The Super’s monstrous, explosive power comes as the result of an uncontrolled, self-sustaining chain reaction in which hydrogen isotopes fuse under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion.

The bomb’s blueprints had been stolen from the Los Alamos laboratory by a German-born, British-educated, communist spy. A Manhattan Project scientist named Klaus Fuchs.

If you win, you need not have to explain.

Dr. Jay W. Forrester (1918–2016), a pioneer in computer engineering and the father of System Dynamics, schooled me on a fundamental concept underpinning nuclear command and control: it is a system of systems. A giant machine made of many moving parts. Knowing this, and knowing all machines eventually break, is a terrifying thought.

when you are in charge, nothing is more important than speed.

In 1968,” he continued, “Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich echoed Malthus in many ways in a wildly influential book entitled The Population Bomb, again predicting an inevitable disaster that never came. He later declared with conviction that four billion people worldwide, and sixty-five million Americans, would die of starvation by the year 1990. “In the seventies, many scientists became convinced that the globe was cooling, and raised alarms that a new ice age was just around the corner.” Elias shook his head. “I could provide endless examples of other coming disasters and doomsday scenarios that evoked widespread anxiety, but that were grossly exaggerated. Acid rain and low sperm counts. Y2K, AIDS, Ebola, mad-cow disease, and killer bees. The bird flu and the reversal of Earth’s magnetic poles. Severe shortages of everything under the sun, from oil, to food, to zinc. Black holes created by the Large Hadron Collider, and unstoppable genetically engineered organisms breaking free of the lab. Famine, nuclear war, and asteroid collisions. Oh, yeah, and predictions of the near extinction of all species on Earth, which was supposed to have already occurred. And on and on and on. Esteemed scientists or government experts convinced us to fear all of these coming catastrophes. Most never happened at all. Those that did wreaked only a tiny fraction of the havoc that we were assured was coming.

The year was 1967. The nation lived with this constant low-level anxiety about nuclear war. Some researchers had decided to study how people would actually respond during a nuclear attack. Right there in downtown Chicago, they’d built a nuclear fallout shelter and asked for volunteers. For some reason Carter’s mother had thought it a good idea to raise her hand, and so without Carter’s fully understanding why, he and his parents and his five siblings were taken to the shelter. “There’s barely enough room for four hundred people,” he recalled. “There’s concrete floors with no pillows or blankets. To eat, you had crackers, plus water that tasted like bleach. There’s one light that’s powered by a bike, so someone has to ride the bike to keep the light on. But the bike also can power a fan, so you had to choose between the light and the fan. It’s hot as hell.” The only creature comfort allowed was cigarettes. So the whole place filled with smoke. There Carter and his family remained for three days. The researchers stepped around them, taking notes. “They wanted to watch how people would behave,” said Carter. “So I got to watch, too.” What he realized, as he watched, was that there was no way a nuclear war would be anything like that. “My mom would be at home, and we’d be at school, and my dad would be at work,” he said. “We’d all be separated. We wouldn’t know how to get to the shelter, and that’s not where we’d go anyway.” His mind unspooled a different scenario that left him with a conviction that nuclear fallout shelters were probably a dumb idea. “Going through that experience forever changed my vision of these events.

It is important not to latch onto some strategic fad to justify radical cuts in the U.S. Army or Marine Corps. For two decades, since Operation Desert Storm, some have favored “stand-off” warfare, featuring long-range strike from planes and ships as the American military’s main approach to future combat. But it is not possible to address many of the world’s key security challenges that way including scenarios in places like Korea and South Asia, discussed further below, that could in fact imperil American security. In the 1990s, advocates of military revolution often argued for such an approach to war, but the subsequent decade proved that for all the progress in sensors and munitions and other military capabilities, the United States still needed forces on the ground to deal with complex insurgencies and other threats. A military emphasis on stand-off warfare is some- times linked with a broader grand strategy of “offshore balancing” by which the distant United States would step in with limited amounts of power to shape overseas events, particularly in Eurasia, rather than getting involved directly with its own soldiers and Marines. But offshore balancing is too clever by half. In fact, overseas developments are not so easily nudged in favorable directions through modest outside interventions. One of the reasons is that off- shore balancing can suggest, in the minds of friends and foes alike, a lack of real American commitment. That can embolden adversaries. It can also worry allies to the point where, among other things, they may feel obliged to build up their own nuclear arsenals as the likes of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia might well do absent strong security ties with America. Put bluntly, offshore balancing greatly exaggerates American power by assuming that belated and limited uses of U.S. force can swing overseas events in acceptable directions.

Russian early-warning satellites don’t work accurately,” he says. “As a country, Russia doesn’t have the technological know-how to build a system as good as we have in the United States.” This means “their satellites can’t look straight down at the earth,” a technology known as look-down capability. And as a result, Russia’s Tundra satellites “look sideways,” Postol warns, “which handicaps their ability to distinguish sunlight from, say, fire.

According to Milley’s map, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the exclusion zone were on the path of the main Russian thrust toward Kyiv, but the map suggested that the Russians would bypass the zone. That appeared to be the most plausible scenario. Why would anyone of sound mind send troops into a nuclear disaster zone?

Deterrence has failed. So have all theoretical war strategies—passively in place for decades—to further the idea that nuclear weapons make the world a safer place. Euphemistic policies like “restoring deterrence,” “escalate to de-escalate,” and “resolve to restrain.” Policies that in this scenario are revealed to be their own ticking nuclear time bombs. Policies that seem destined to have failed. The idea that nuclear strategies like “tailored deterrence” and “flexible retaliation”—policies that promised nuclear war could be stopped after it began—are as full of folly as deterrence itself.

Over the course of two weeks, in every simulated scenario—and despite whatever particularly triggering event started the war game—nuclear war always ended the same way. With the same outcome. There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.

The Space-Based Infrared System is America’s twenty-first-century version of Paul Revere. But it’s not the British who are coming, not on foot or on horseback. It is a nuclear-armed, intercontinental ballistic missile. The all-powerful, unstoppable, civilization-threatening ICBM.

As crazy as this now seems, before December 1960, each U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force chief had control over his own stockpile of nuclear weapons, their delivery systems, and target lists.

Albert Einstein feared nuclear weapons could, and might, put an end to the advanced civilization that mankind had spent the last 12,000 years creating. Einstein feared that humans could become hunter-gatherers again, all because of a terrible weapon civilized humans had created to use in wars against their fellow so-called civilized humans.

Thousands of commercial airplanes using fly-by-wire technology systems lose wing and tail controls, lose cabin pressure and landing gear, lose instrument landing systems as they head violently toward the ground. One class of passenger aircraft is mercifully spared, namely the older model 747s, used by the Defense Department for its Doomsday Planes. “747 pilots still use a foot pedal and a yoke, mechanically linked to the control surfaces,” Yago tells us. “There’s no fly-by-wire technology there.

No trace of the killer reptiles was found by anyone, that we know of, for 66 million years. Until just a few hundred years ago, in 1677, when the director of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Robert Plot, found a dinosaur femur in the village of Cornwall and drew it for a science journal, misidentifying the bone as belonging to a giant. After nuclear war, who, if anyone, will know we were once here?

Albert Einstein was asked what he thought about nuclear war, to which he is said to have responded, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

It was decades later that Rubel confessed that this U.S. plan for nuclear war he participated in reminded him of the Nazis’ plans for genocide. In his memoir, he referred to a time in an earlier world war when a group of Third Reich officials met at a lakeside villa in a German town called Wannsee. It was there, over the course of a ninety-minute meeting, that this group of allegedly rational men decided among themselves how to move forward with the genocide in a war they were presently winning—World War II—so as to ensure total victory for themselves. Millions of people needed to die, these Reich officials agreed.

after a briefing on likely nuclear death tolls: “And we call ourselves the human race.