"Countdown
By Sarah Scoles
Bold Type, 272 pages, $30
Nuclear War: A Scenario
By Annie Jacobsen
Dutton, 400 pages, $30
Nuclear war is our version of the apocalypse -- an end to civilization, to history, to life itself, brought about not by divine decree but by man-made folly.
Fears of an all-out nuclear exchange haunted the early postwar years and notoriously intensified during the Cold War. Hollywood captured the angst and anxiety in, for example, "On the Beach," "Fail-Safe" and "Dr. Strangelove." With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end to the bipolar Cold War rivalry, it seemed for a while as if such fears could be put to rest.
No such luck. The need to "think the unthinkable" has returned with Vladimir Putin's veiled threat to launch nuclear missiles if Russia feels alarmed by the West's actions. Meanwhile, it is reported that Russia is thinking about putting nuclear weapons in space, while China is rapidly expanding its own nuclear arsenal. In the Middle East, there is an increasingly urgent concern that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon and use it on behalf of its geopolitical designs.
So where is the world headed? What is the balance of nuclear terror? Two timely books take up such questions from different perspectives. In "Countdown," the science journalist Sarah Scoles examines in particular how the U.S. government labs that make up the National Nuclear Security Administration monitor the state of the most dangerous weapons in the world. In "Nuclear War: A Scenario," Annie Jacobsen, the author of "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base" (2011), gives us a vivid picture of what could happen if our nuclear guardians fail.
As Ms. Scoles informs us, three laboratories -- in Los Alamos and Sandia, N.M., and Livermore, Calif. -- manage America's nuclear warheads and bombs and monitor worldwide nuclear use. The Tri-labs, as they are known, are viewed as the heart of the beast by nuke opponents.
"I know we are the Antichrist," one Los Alamos scientist says to Ms. Scoles, "and yet I think it's a bit more nuanced than that." Indeed it is.
To judge by Ms. Scoles's account, the three labs have distinct cultures and missions. Los Alamos is the home of the original atomic bombs, the site of their very invention (as portrayed in the film "Oppenheimer"). Set in the bleak New Mexico desert, it focuses today, in part, on detecting nuclear activity in other countries (a task it shares with other sites). Los Alamos is also a major research center, exploring the outer limits of practical nuclear physics, including working on nuclear fusion.
Sandia began as an offshoot of Los Alamos and was (and in some ways still is) the engineering support laboratory for the other two labs. It is more "engineer-centric," in Ms. Scoles's phrase, and concentrates on concrete problem solving, such as modernizing the current nuclear force -- including helping Los Alamos with the production of new "plutonium pits," the hollow spheres of radioactive metal that are the heart of nuclear weapons.
Sandia's employees seem the least ambivalent about the morality of what they do. Ms. Scoles talks to one scientist who concedes that people think of working on weapons as a "warlord" job, but "we have avoided so many conflicts because nuclear weapons exist." What the scientist does at work, she says, "is actually a great thing."
As for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- which made key advances in the development of the hydrogen bomb, the atom bomb's exponentially more powerful successor -- employees there are heavily involved in testing the use of nuclear weapons. With the current international ban on all nuclear testing, whether atmospheric (since 1963) or underground (since 1996, with the U.S. complying without being a formal signatory), such work today relies heavily on computer simulations -- one reason why Livermore maintains four of the world's most powerful supercomputers and is a leader in the development of quantum computing. (The other labs have supercomputers for their work as well.)
Also at Livermore is the National Ignition Facility, which ran the world's first successful controlled nuclear fusion reaction in 2022, and the National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center. The crew at this center uses satellites and other devices to pick up even minute traces of an illegal nuclear test, or accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, and issue warnings.
The lab scientists and employees whom Ms. Scoles interviews are hardly crazed Dr. Strangelove types. On the whole, they take a balanced approach to their jobs, what Ms. Scoles describes as the pursuit of nuclear realism. Someone has to work on nuclear weapons, she notes: "Don't you want levelheaded people -- not war hawks -- to do that?"
One Los Alamos employee, we learn, began as an antinuke protester and still feels qualms. She compares nuclear weapons to "handing a toddler a lighter." Now her life is dedicated to making them safe to handle. Her former friends would be horrified, she admits. But she can live with the duality -- as Ms. Scoles summarizes it, "working for the organization that maintains and betters the bombs that she agrees wholeheartedly should not exist."
Much of our current nuclear arsenal dates back to the 1970s. With China and Russia upgrading their nuclear weapons, the need to modernize ours seems evident -- although the subject is an emotional one among the antinuke activists Ms. Scoles interviews outside the labs' gates. The chances of an outdated weapon failing to operate, or becoming unstable, make modernization an imperative for lab scientists and engineers. "If nuclear weapons are going to continue to exist," one scientist tells the author, "they can't stay as they are -- at least not if they are to remain safe, secure, and reliable."" That phrase, Ms. Scoles observes, runs through all three labs like a motto.
If the actual existence of nuclear weapons doesn't disturb the Tri-lab community, two potential developments do. One is the proliferation of the nuclear threat, with both state and nonstate actors seeking for themselves the ultimate weapon.
The other is the decline in science graduates in the U.S., the kinds of workers who might eventually take over the labs' main tasks. Roughly 40% of the workforce at the National Nuclear Security Administration is going to retire in the next three to four years. Who will carry on their work for the next generation?
At one point, Ms. Scoles concedes that, despite Tom Clancy-style narratives, "the chances that any given bad actor will get their hands on full-on nuclear weapons is small." But with Iran and North Korea in the nuclear hunt, there is plenty of reason to worry anyway. Which is where Annie Jacobsen's "Nuclear War: A Scenario" comes in.
Based on dozens of interviews with scientists and military experts, "Nuclear War" gives us a day-by-day, hour-by-hour account of what would happen following a one-megaton thermonuclear attack on the Pentagon. "The five-story, five-sided structure of the Pentagon and everything inside its 6.5 million square feet of office space explodes into superheated dust," she writes, all 27,000 of its employees "perishing instantly." Five minutes after the blast, "most of everything south to Alexandria, west to Falls Church, north to Chevy Chase, east to Capitol Heights, and all the neighborhoods in between" are incinerated in a mass fire.
And that's just the start. Ms. Jacobsen's scenario expands into a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia that ultimately kills hundreds of millions. The survivors, to paraphrase Nikita Khrushchev, envy the dead.
Terrifying -- and yet somehow familiar. The picture Ms. Jacobsen paints is a version of the nuclear apocalypse we've seen portrayed before -- Jonathan Schell's "The Fate of the Earth" (1982) comes to mind, not to mention Hollywood's disaster scenarios. Yet the apocalypse we all feared in the Cold War didn't happen, largely because we had a formidable nuclear arsenal in the first place.
According to Ms. Jacobsen, our biggest nuclear opponent, Russia, has some 1,674 nuclear weapons ready to launch, while we have 1,770. China has 410, although that number is growing. During the Cold War the combined American-Soviet nuclear arsenal almost topped 70,000. When is enough enough?
The sad truth is that equality alone is not deterrence; overwhelming advantage is, along with the willingness to use it. In the national labs, Ms. Scoles says, most staffers "think of the Deterrent as savior, not destroyer. Nuclear weapons keep us from conflict." Nuke opponents, obviously, disagree, believing that nuclear weapons make conflict more dangerous. Yet there is no question that our arsenal is what keeps Russia from spilling the conflict in Ukraine into neighboring NATO countries -- or that Ukraine regrets the decision to hand over to Moscow the weapons that were on its soil before the breakup of the Soviet Union.
History tells us that all weapons are subject to obsolescence, from the longbow to the battleship. The nuclear bomb is an exception so far, but who knows? For now, nukes are emphatically present and unavoidably at the center of international relations. We may not like them -- or come to "stop worrying and love the bomb," as the full title of "Dr. Strangelove" has it -- but we can't do without them. And while we do have them, it's hard not to conclude, after reading "Countdown" and "Nuclear War," that we are safer if they work than if our enemies think they won't.
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Mr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. His forthcoming book is a biography of the nuclear physicist Edward Teller." [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: The Future Will Be Weaponized. Herman, Arthur. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 23 Mar 2024: C.7.
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