Even a partial list of situations in which American leaders have seriously contemplated a nuclear first strike is more frightening, in my view, than anything in the scenario Jacobsen has concocted. Harry Truman considered using atomic weapons in Korea; Dwight Eisenhower directed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare for nuclear use in response to hypothetical acts of aggression by both the People’s Republic of China and, more implicitly, Iraq; Richard Nixon proposed nuclear bombing in Vietnam; Jimmy Carter seriously considered using tactical nuclear weapons in case of a Soviet invasion of Iran in 1980. The number of cases in which the US has communicated a threat of first use to an adversary, whether or not officials were actually prepared to go through with it, is far greater. As the Pentagon Papers whistleblower and former Rand Corporation nuclear war planner Daniel Ellsberg wrote in 2017 near the end of his life, “US presidents have used our nuclear weapons dozens of times in ‘crises’… in the precise way that a gun is used when it is pointed at someone in a confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled.”
The reality is that properly assessing the risk of US nuclear first use is extremely challenging for a civilian, even one as intrepid as Jacobsen – for reasons that she obscures in her narrative. Channelling Tom Clancy here as well as she does for Amazon, Jacobsen spins a suspenseful yarn about US military surveillance systems detecting the imminent North Korean strike and relaying the intelligence up the chain of command to the president, who agonises over the proper response as the missile speeds inexorably towards the Pentagon. She sketches the scenario with novelistic detail and the techno-thriller genre’s characteristic affection for jargon and acronyms: “When the CAT Element arrives, the SAC is on his phone calling for a status update on KNEECAP, Secret Service code for a Doomsday Plane when carrying POTUS, which is the acronym for president of the United States.”
All this attention to military hierarchy, proper channels, and presidential decision-making skirts the fact that crucial aspects of US nuclear launch protocols remain shrouded in secrecy. Jacobsen avers, dutifully, that “the US president… has sole authority to launch America’s nuclear weapons”. Every administration since Harry Truman consolidated presidential authority over nuclear weapons after the Second World War has said as much. And it is true that if the president were to order a nuclear attack – even if he had been drinking, as Richard Nixon was once, allegedly, when he contemplated a strike during the Vietnam War, or if he were Donald Trump – it is not obvious anyone could stop the missiles from flying.