‘What is Done is Done’

A look at Annie Jacobsen’s terrifying book about the end of the world

“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

The maxim is as true today as it was when it was delivered via a joint statement by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev nearly 40 years ago.

Yet, people seem to have taken their eyes off the reality that the world’s leaders could, at any given time, end most life on earth, in about an hour. Fireballs up to five times hotter than the center of the sun incinerating bodies instantaneously. Cities that took centuries to build annihilated in the seconds that would follow. Famine, disease, misery, and a hell on earth during which, as Nikita Khrushchev is known to have said, “the living would envy the dead.”

It's a collective destiny most care not to imagine, but through exhaustive research, firsthand sourcing, and a frightening pace, Annie Jacobsen forces us to confront this unimaginable but all-too-real possibility.

In her book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, the author offers a comprehensive deep dive of how the US government’s nuclear stockpile is maintained and governed, along with a breakdown of the chain of command tasked with both validating and then executing a nuclear strike against a foreign nation.

Woven alongside this research is a minute-by-minute fictional account of how such a conflict might erupt and swiftly play out between the world’s nuclear armed nations.

In the situation Jacobsen composes, the Defense Department’s SBIRS satellite system detects rocket exhaust spewing from a Hwasong-17 as it launches off a 22-wheeled vehicle parked in a field on the Korean Peninsula. Now that North Korea’s made the decision to launch one of its ICBMs, it cannot reverse it. As Jacobsen repeats several times throughout the book, “what is done is done.” In just a few minutes, the missile will reach its cruising altitude several hundred miles above the earth’s surface, before descending towards the target it’s been programmed to strike.

Several billion people go about their day. On the other side of the planet, billions of others sleep soundly in their beds. They have no way of knowing that the society we’ve spent more than 10,000 years constructing is about to end.

In Jacobsen’s timeline, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sprint through the Pentagon and into a tunnel that leads to the National Military Command Center two minutes after North Korea’s missile is first detected. Moments after their arrival in the secure facility, the NORAD commander delivers a devastating confirmation via a secure video connection: the ICBM picked up by the US military’s satellites is headed for the East Coast.

The president – who’s enjoying a midday snack while looking over some paperwork in the White House – is informed approximately 60 seconds after this confirmation is made. Once he’s told, the commander-in-chief will have just six minutes to contemplate what the US government’s nuclear response will be.  

As Jacobsen writes in the book, the US government’s “Launch on Warning policy means America will launch its nuclear weapons once its early-warning electronic sensor systems warn of an impending nuclear attack. Said differently, if notified of an impending attack, America will not wait and physically absorb a nuclear blow before launching its own nuclear weapons back at whoever was irrational enough to attack the United States.” This is a policy multiple presidents have vowed to change once in office but, as of this writing, it remains in place.  

Jacobsen relays how this protocol is likely to play out in a real-world scenario. In the book, the timeline she imagines involves a series of dangerous assumptions and miscalculations that quickly escalate matters past the point of no return.

In this scenario, the US military’s sophisticated early warning satellites lose sight of North Korea’s ICBM about four-and-a-half minutes after they first spotted it.

Less than three minutes later, a 50,000-pound, 54-foot-tall interceptor missile tears out of the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command in Fort Greely, Alaska.

This weapon is a component of a defensive system many Americans have a great deal of faith in, but as Jacobsen notes, this confidence is misplaced. Since 2010, most of the US military’s interceptor tests have failed. More importantly, the Pentagon’s stockpile of these interceptor missiles sits at just 44. Even if these weapons achieved a success rate of 100%, they’d still be no match for the nearly 5,600 nuclear weapons waiting on Russian soil. In Jacobsen’s scenario, this interceptor will also not be able to stop the ICBM that’s about to strike Washington.

Shortly after the mil aide who’s always at the president’s side opens the Football – the satchel containing the nuclear strike options at the commander-in-chief’s disposal – the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff begins “jamming the president,” a term for pressuring POTUS to swiftly retaliate with nuclear weapons while America is still just under suspicion of attack.  

The military’s nuclear armed bombers take off on the president’s orders.

Silo doors across Wyoming swing open, unleashing 50 ICBMs that will kill millions on the other side of the planet in a matter of minutes. They cannot change course once they’ve been fired. What is done is done. An old Russian spy who lives just down the road from one of these facilities calls Moscow to alert them of this unprecedented development.

Meanwhile, a second ballistic missile is detected and is confirmed to be heading for California.

Millions of strangers on opposite sides of the globe are about to pay for decisions they were never aware of and had absolutely nothing to do with.

The end of the world as we know it, however, won’t come as a result of these initial acts. In this scenario, the Kremlin will misinterpret American missiles making their way to North Korea as being a direct threat to Russian territory. Deep inside a forest just south of Moscow, lights flash and alarms sound at a facility in Kaluga Oblast. Because the US ICBMs en route to North Korea must first fly over Russia, the Serpukhov-15 satellite’s fatal conclusion is that Russia is under attack.

Russia also misreads activity at a string of NATO bases [nuclear capable jets idle on runaways as they standby for possible orders] as an indication that Europe is also planning to attack.

Compounding the confusion is a lack of communication between the world’s superpowers. The Kremlin is furious that the US president hasn’t reached out to his Russian counterpart and is refusing to take the US Defense Secretary’s calls. Nobody in Russia knows that the American president will never be able to place that call because he’s dying in a wooded area in Maryland following a tandem jump out of Marine One with a member of the Secret Service.

The Russian president is paranoid and angry. He succumbs to both emotions and orders 1,000 nuclear missiles to be fired at the United States. His commanders comply. What is done is done. They don’t know it yet but souls in European capitals across the continent will suffer the same fate in just a few minutes.   

The US feels it has no choice but to respond and orders nearly 1,000 nuclear missiles to be fired right back at Russia. What is done is done.

The terror Jacobsen depicts makes for a swift, captivating read but the book hasn’t been received without criticism. As some reviews have noted, Jacobsen threads a timeline with details some feel seem less-than-plausible, but this critique is misplaced.

The president, secretary of defense, STRATCOM commander, as well as every other character in this work of creative nonfiction is unnamed, without any connection to any real-world individuals or political parties. The “Bolt out of the Blue” scenario Jacobsen imagines also never contextualizes North Korea’s reasoning for the attack in the first place.

For the nations that have them, nuclear weapons serve as the ultimate deterrent against attack and [in North Korea’s case in particular] Western-led regime change. This makes the probability of an intercontinental nuclear war breaking out as the result of a surprise attack by Pyongyang against the US extremely unlikely. For the purposes of this particular project, however, this angle isn’t all that important; it’s obviously an immeasurably important piece of the puzzle but examining it would require writing an entirely different book.  

Nuclear War’s focus is centered on how nuclear war would unfold, not why. To that end, Jacobsen’s largely apolitical approach is a useful way to explore just how swiftly and catastrophically the situation is likely to come apart at the seams.   

Parts of Nuclear War do read like a Hollywood thriller – Jacobsen’s resume also just so happens to include writing credits for Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan – but if the past few years have shown us anything, it’s that the real world can often be stranger and far scarier than fiction. If the unthinkable happened and a nuclear conflict were to break out, it’s safe to say that the president wouldn’t die after parachuting out of a helicopter, the White House would get a hold of the Kremlin, and orders to destroy Russia likely wouldn’t come from Lloyd Austin.

A real-world scenario likely wouldn’t follow the timeline Jacobsen’s laid out, but it would also bear very little resemblance to any script changes the reader may be tempted to offer.

The main takeaway from Jacobsen’s tome is that a nuclear war would never begin for a rational reason, is very likely to spiral out of control within minutes, and [even with the countless hours of simulation and preparation by the US government] would unravel in ways few would be able to accurately predict.  

A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. It’s a sentiment few would disagree with, yet, while nine nations still possess the most destructive weapons mankind has ever conceived, the case can easily be made that the world is as close to a nuclear disaster as it’s ever been.

President Biden has spent most of his time in office militarizing the region surrounding China, the nation with the world’s third largest nuclear stockpile; and arming Ukraine in its war with Russia, the country with the most nukes on earth. In 1964, the Doomsday Clock maintained by the experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at 12 minutes to midnight. Today, the hands sit just 90 seconds away. With Israel’s ceaseless bombing of Gaza and Lebanon and continuous exchanges with Iran, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been reset once more. 

Even when the president is going through the motions of carrying out the office’s more mundane duties, the prospect of nuclear war never dissipates. Whether the president is pardoning turkeys in the Rose Garden or viewing middle school science projects in the East Room, an aide holding a briefcase that would end civilization is always just a few feet off-frame.

Annie Jacobsen’s book is a stark reminder of this terrifying truth.