I do not recommend reading Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War: A Scenario.” It was released last year by a Pulitzer Prize finalist and journalist. The book received some fanfare in the defense community, so I took it as a fairly serious work. But it’s not.
The premise is simple. The story recounts about 2 hours before and after a surprise North Korean nuclear attack on the United States.
If you like this genre, then it is a page turner, and I finished it in a couple of days (putting aside a much meatier history of the Pacific War). But the book is sensationalized, overblown, and flawed by some of the directions that the story goes.
The book is a mixture of a fictional account of the nuclear attack with background, historical information – that was drawn from a handful of interviews with former nuclear scientists, former defense secretary William Perry, and some others.
The first flaw is that the book is shrill, almost histrionic, in its recounting of the history of nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race. As a 10 year-old, I first realized how terrible a nuclear war would be while watching the movie WarGames and then the TV miniseries The Day After. That was over 40 years ago. But this book reads as if Annie Jacobsen just unearthed information about how bad a nuclear war and feels the compelling need to let the reader know about what she has uncovered through her hard work. And if you aren’t convinced, she punctuates her story by stressing the really bad things she’s uncovered in an over-the-top writing style.
I mean really over the top.
Like this.
The story is flawed. There are technical inaccuracies and shortcomings that she doesn’t account for in the story. There are parts of the plot that are implausible, partly because she tried to compress the story into a 2-hour narrative. And her writing style managed to somehow be both overly dramatic while still dull and lifeless – as if she was trying to artificially dramatize something that was inherently dramatic.
