Two regional wars are currently raging with no clear outcome, and the world is closer to the threat of nuclear conflict than it has been in decades. Along with that, billions of people could perish just by touching the trigger. Such a scenario is nothing new, but for a new generation raised in the midst of ongoing nuclear disarmament efforts, the reality of nuclear war is both devastating and misunderstood.Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen reveals the hard truth about the power and potential of nuclear attack in her new book “Nuclear War: Scenario”,” Released this week by Dutton. Armed with specially declassified documents and unprecedented deep access to key military officials, from former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to nuclear weapons designer Richard L. Describes the attack. Rich and with amazing precision. The resulting text is both horrifying and thrilling, offering a lens into the future that all politicians should strive to prevent.
Hell on earth.Washington DC, probably in the near future
The detonation of a one-megaton thermonuclear weapon begins with a tremendous flash of light and heat that is incomprehensible to the human mind. 1.8 billion degrees Fahrenheit is four to five times hotter than the temperature at the center of the sun.
In the first milliseconds after the bomb falls on the Pentagon, a light appears. Soft X-ray light with a very short wavelength. The light superheats the surrounding air to millions of degrees, creating a giant fireball that expands at millions of miles per hour. Within seconds, this fireball grows to just over a mile in diameter, and its light and heat are so intense that concrete surfaces explode, metal objects melt or vaporize, stone shatters, and humans are instantly exposed to burning carbon. It changes to Everything inside the five-story, five-sided structure and his 6.5 million square feet of office space explodes into superheated dust. All 27,000 Pentagon personnel died instantly.
Nothing remains in the fireball. there is nothing. Ground zero is zeroed.
Radiant heat from a fireball traveling at the speed of light ignites anything flammable miles away in any direction. Curtains, paper, books, wooden fences, people’s clothing, and dead leaves exploded into flames, sparking a massive blaze that began consuming more than 100 square miles of land and was home to about 6 million people.
All 639 acres of Arlington National Cemetery, northwest of the Pentagon, are occupied on this early spring afternoon by visitors paying their respects, groundskeepers mowing lawns, and members of the white-gloved Old Guard guarding the graves of the unknown. Those who are immediately incinerated, including those immediately incinerated, will be spared the unprecedented horror that will begin to be inflicted on the additional one to two million seriously injured people who have not yet died in this first nuclear attack.
Once across the Potomac River, the marble walls and columns of the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial become so hot that they break apart and collapse. Steel and stone bridges and highways that connect the surrounding areas will rise and collapse. To the south, the fashion center of Pentagon City has disappeared. Ceiling joists, two-by-fours, escalators, chandeliers, rugs, furniture, mannequins, dogs, squirrels, and people explode into flames.
3 seconds will pass. A baseball game is being played at Nationals Park. The clothes of the majority of the 35,000 visitors go up in flames. If you are not burned immediately and die, you will suffer severe third-degree burns and the outer layer of skin on your body will fall off. Third-degree burns require immediate professional treatment to prevent death. Here in the park, there may be thousands of people who initially managed to survive, but who are now in dire need of burn center beds. But now they are all almost certainly destroyed.
The heat radiation from this nuclear bomb attack on the Pentagon would cause deep skin burns to approximately 1 million additional people within seconds, killing 90% of them. Defense scientists and academics alike have spent decades making this calculation. Most people can only make it a few steps from where they happened to be standing when the bomb went off. These become what civil defense experts called “death if spotted” back in the 1950s, when these terrifying calculations first appeared. In the 20th century, humanity created nuclear weapons to save the world from evil, and now in the 21st century, those nuclear weapons are about to burn the world to the ground.
The science behind the bomb is deep. The thermonuclear flash has two pulses of thermal radiation embedded in it. The first pulse lasts just a few seconds, followed by his second pulse that lasts a few seconds and ignites the human skin, giving it a burning sensation. The ensuing intense heat creates high-pressure waves that cascade like a tsunami from a central point. This is a huge wall of highly compressed air traveling at speeds exceeding the speed of sound. It mows people down, throws others into the air, ruptures lungs and eardrums, sucks in corpses, and spits them out.
As the nuclear fireball grows, this shock front causes catastrophic destruction, pushing like a bulldozer and traveling another three miles. The air behind the blast accelerates, creating winds hundreds of miles per hour. It destroys everything in sight, instantly changing the physical form of man-made structures such as office buildings, apartment complexes, monuments, and museums, which collapse into dust. What cannot be shattered by the blast will be torn apart by the wind. Buildings collapse, bridges collapse, cranes fall. Objects as small as a computer or a cement block or as large as an 18-wheeler or his double-decker tour bus fly into the air like tennis balls.
The nuclear fireball rises like a hot air balloon. It lifts off the earth at a speed of 250 to 350 feet per second. 35 seconds have passed. The iconic mushroom cloud begins to form, its giant umbrella and stalk made of incinerated people and debris of civilization changing from red to brownish-orange hues. A deadly reverse suction effect then occurs, and objects such as cars, people, utility poles, road signs, parking meters, and steel carrier beams are sucked into the center of the scorching inferno and consumed by flames.
60 seconds will pass. The cap extends to about 30 miles. Radioactive particles rain down on Earth and its people in deadly fallout. More than 1 million people are dead or dying. Less than two minutes have passed. Unlike the first fireball, hell begins. It is an unfathomable conflagration. Gas pipes explode one after another, spewing out a constant stream of fire. A tank containing flammable material burst. A chemical factory explodes. The starter light in your water heater or furnace works like a torch lighter, igniting anything that isn’t already on fire. The collapsed building becomes like a giant oven. People burn alive everywhere.
Open gaps in the floor or roof act like chimneys. Carbon dioxide from the firestorm sank into the subway tunnels, suffocating passengers in their seats. People who take shelter in basements and other underground spaces vomit, convulse, go into comas, and die. People on the ground looking directly at the explosion could be blinded from 21 miles away.
A car and bus collided 7.5 miles from ground zero (5 psi zone). The intense heat turns the asphalt roads into liquid, trapping survivors as if they were caught in lava. Hurricane-force winds can turn hundreds of fires into thousands or even millions. The hot ash and wind-borne burning debris start new fires that ignite one after the other. He turns the entire Washington DC into one complex firestorm. Mega Inferno. It will soon turn into a fiery mesocyclone. Eight or nine minutes pass.
Ten miles from ground zero, the survivors limped away in shock, almost as if they were dead. He doesn’t know what happened and is desperately trying to escape. Tens of thousands of people had their lungs burst here. The crows, sparrows, and pigeons that were flying overhead burst into flames and fall from the sky, as if it were raining birds.
The bomb’s localized electromagnetic pulse destroys all radio, internet, and television. There’s no electricity. There is no phone service. 911 is prohibited. Vehicles with electric ignition systems within a ring of several miles outside the blast zone cannot be restarted. Water stations cannot pump water. Filled with lethal levels of radiation, the entire area has become a no-go zone for first responders. The rare survivors realize within days that no help has arrived. Those who manage to escape death from the initial explosion, shockwave, and firestorm suddenly find themselves understanding the horrifying truth about nuclear war. that they are completely independent.
How and why exactly do U.S. defense scientists know something so horrifying? How did the U.S. government produce so many nuclear weapons while the public remained blind? Do we know the facts related to the effects of this? The answer is as grotesque as the question itself. Because for many years, since the end of World War II, the United States government has been preparing and rehearsing plans for all-out nuclear war. World War III is certain to kill at least 2 billion people.
Based on Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War: A Scenario.” Copyright © 2024 by Anne Jacobsen Published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Excerpted with permission.
