In November 1983, the ABC network premiered The Day After, a film dramatizing World War III from the vantage point of ordinary Americans in and around Lawrence, Kansas. The film provided a plausible flashpoint for conflict: the Warsaw Pact begins a military buildup followed by a blockade of Berlin. When the deadline for an ultimatum passes the next day, NATO forces attack East Germany, and in turn are overrun by advancing Soviet forces. Tactical nuclear weapons are deployed, and soon after, both sides launch their entire nuclear arsenals. About half the cast clings to life, and we are left with little hope that any of them will survive the extended effects of fallout, starvation, and civilizational collapse.

　　The film presents a sanitized but grim portrait of what comes after a major nuclear exchange. By all accounts, it was an effective one. It gave Ronald Reagan renewed vigor in his belief in the horrific insanity of mutually assured destruction and it provided everyone involved additional reasons to reduce nuclear tensions. The Day After is compelling in part because it provided viewers a clear chain of escalation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact and was modest in its aspirations by focusing on a small number of ordinary Americans and largely avoiding political posturing or exaggeration.

　　Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario attempts to be something like a successor to The Day After, providing a graphic depiction of the direct and indirect effects of a nuclear attack. In this story, the world as we know it ends after a surprise North Korean nuclear attack on the United States triggers a catastrophic nuclear exchange. She claims to provide a deep insider’s look at how nuclear deterrence and strategy work, but the account fails on multiple levels.

　　The book’s brief first part offers a short and intensely biased history of how the US first strategized about the use of nuclear weapons and frantically developed its arsenal throughout the Cold War. The narrative is driven by the memoirs of John H. Rubel, a businessman and defense official, who recounted the meetings where the US developed the Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP)—the nation’s master plan for general nuclear war. Rubel compared the meeting to the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 where Reinhard Heydrich assembled leaders from across the German government to outline the Final Solution. He wrote:

　　I felt as if I were witnessing a comparable descent into the deep heart of darkness, a twilight world 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.

　　Jacobsen’s choice here sets the tone for the book. Her critique of the strategic logic of deterrence and the way it shapes American nuclear strategy flows entirely from her assessment of the potential human costs. She takes every opportunity to press the idea that nuclear weapons are too horrific to be used—and that if one ever is used again, it will probably mean the end of all human life. The book is best understood as an act of passionate activism rather than a plausible account of what nuclear weapons mean for war.

　　The difficulties begin with how Jacobsen constructs her doomsday scenario. To arrive at a failure of deterrence, she chooses North Korea as the aggressor. Here she is on to something but doesnt ever really develop the point. One flaw of nuclear deterrence is that it assumes all the actors are rationally pursuing national goals. Deterrence presupposes that human beings desire some mix of interest, security, and the maintenance of honor and pride—and that using nuclear weapons is unthinkable under normal circumstances of conflict. These assumptions may not hold in the face of madness or extreme ideology.

　　Consider a case where the incentives to use nuclear weapons might be high. It isn’t hard to imagine a nuclear-armed Iran pursuing ways to launch a first strike on Israel. If they had the means to preemptively strike Israeli nuclear platforms, they might accept the risk of retaliation for the reward of destroying one of their great enemies. Hatred here might outweigh the sort of risk calculation most of us assume nations would normally make. Yet, it is hard to imagine a situation where the Iranians have such high confidence in their ability to find and kill most or all of Israel’s nuclear-capable submarines before they launched their war of annihilation, or that they would be certain they could destroy Israel’s nuclear silos. There is at least a plausible future scenario where Iran might attempt a nuclear action against Israel—one which only works if they expect to survive and believe that no one would avenge Israel.

　　Jacobsen observes that “not all adversaries are sane” and uses the concept that North Korea’s “mad king” could choose to strike the US on a whim. An unprovoked act of madness or evil is surely possible. She might have simply and factually traced out the horrific consequences of the two missiles North Korea eventually launched in her scenario and used that as a cautionary tale about deterrence’s blind spot and the horrific aftermath of even a small nuclear exchange. But instead, Jacobsen builds an account that relies on faulty assumptions about the inflexibility of US policy, taking the assertions of her favored expert-activists as fact, and thus crafting a wildly implausible chain of events to arrive at her world-ending outcome.

　　The most accurate parts of this book are the scenes of panic and destruction Jacobsen crafts after the initial two missile strikes. A one-megaton blast over the Pentagon alongside a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) strike on the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California would be devastating and inflict tremendous loss of life. But the wider scenario itself strains belief: The president and his cabinet are unable to reach Russian leadership, who believe that the US will blame them for one or more of the attacks. Rather than just broadcasting a clear message to the world on every conceivable channel that they intend to strike North Korea, the administration orders a launch without confirming that the Russians or Chinese are aware of their intentions. The imagined US response to North Korea includes—logically—the use of SLBMs, and for no other reason than Jacobsen could not get to her apocalypse without it, intercontinental ballistic missiles that must overfly Russia on the way to their targets. Fearing they have been targeted, the Russian president deploys his entire arsenal against US and NATO targets; the US naturally launches in response. And so, the world ends in fire.

　　The most glaring issue here is that any US retaliation against a North Korean attack would take great care to avoid provoking a Russian or Chinese response. But Nuclear War is filled with errors and overly skewed interpretations of fact and strategy. Many of these problems flow from Jacobsen’s overreliance on a handful of authorities rather than a broader group of scholars and practitioners that could help the reader understand the complexities of nuclear strategy. Three examples will suffice.

　　Nuclear War’s misleading rhetoric poses a real danger in that Jacobsen’s preferred outcome—a reckless pursuit of nuclear abolitionism—will not actually make our world safer.

　　Consider her use of the idea of “launch on warning”—a policy of committing missiles to a counter-attack as soon as an adversary’s missiles are detected: She bases her account of it primarily on William Burr, a scholar at George Washington University’s National Security Archive, and assumes the concept forms an inflexible part of US nuclear strategy rather than one possible choice the President could make when faced with an attack. A range of options exist, and scholars and practitioners regularly debate the wisdom of various approaches. Instead, she proceeds as if this doctrine entirely governs nuclear strategy.

　　The book’s treatment of missile defense is similarly skewed. Jacobsen turns to Ted Postel, a scholar whose public career has been built around asserting that it is impossible to stop incoming missiles—even to the point of attempting to deny the effectiveness of Israel’s Iron Dome, which while not perfect, has had significant success. Jacobsen follows Postel in believing that missile defense has no chance of intercepting even a single missile, but, at the same time, also seems incredulous that the US has such a small capability. None of these accord with the facts, as missile defense software and hardware have slowly improved over time—despite never being a top funding priority for the Defense Department. Would the Chinese or Russians have bothered with the creation of hypersonic missiles if the efficacy of their ballistic missiles were not in some doubt?

　　Jacobsen discusses a 1983 series of wargames titled Proud Prophet which were created by Thomas Schelling on the order of the Defense Department, and then run for a two-week period at the National War College. Her source for this study, a participant named Paul Bracken, stated that during the games, once nuclear weapons were used, the escalatory spiral was impossible to avoid: “According to Proud Prophet, regardless of how nuclear war begins, it ends with complete Armageddon-like destruction.” The trouble is that wargames are not predictive tools. As we know next to nothing about the rules under which the games were conducted, the fact they ended in general war cannot tell us how human beings whose actual lives are at stake would behave in a real setting. Confronted with the reality of nuclear devastation, it is hard to imagine anyone would act without great restraint.

　　Jacobsen’s commitment to her preferred narrative leads her to other odd choices. For example, her later chapters detailing the long-term effects of a nuclear exchange proceed as if there is no scientific debate about these matters. In particular, she bases her understanding of nuclear winter on the worst-case scenarios developed in the 1980s, which have been extensively debated since then. A more sober assessment might frame a less dangerous nuclear winter as a greater risk, as policymakers might view nuclear weapons as more usable—an argument that might have given her ideas more persuasive force.

　　Likewise, the danger of nuclear conflict coming to pass through slow escalation in Ukraine or another of Russia’s potentially bloody borders is far more probable than the scenario Jacobsen paints. Russian nuclear doctrine has historically viewed nuclear weapons as tools of war rather than abstract deterrents. It is unsurprising that Putin’s government has threatened their use. This is a real danger that attends the ongoing conflict, and all support for Ukraine should be assessed in light of this.

　　Nuclear weapons have kept great power war in the realm of the unthinkable since 1945. Nuclear War’s misleading rhetoric poses a real danger in that Jacobsen’s preferred outcome—a reckless pursuit of nuclear abolitionism—will not actually make our world safer. By discouraging the maintenance of a reliable deterrent and reinforcing the view that defensive measures like ballistic missile defense are futile, the book could have the perverse effect of making nuclear conflict more likely.

　　We can hope with one analyst that “in the next large war nuclear weapons will be to it what chemical weapons were in WWII. Everyone had them. No one used them.” But if they are used, we are not automatically condemned to Jacobsen’s vision of spiraling disaster. Everyone involved has reasons to show restraint, and the sheer devastation attending their use might shock leaders on both sides of a conflict into remembering why the nuclear taboo held for so long.