Nuclear war begins with a blip on a radar screen. It is 4.03am and in a seemingly barren field 20 miles outside the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, a massive cloud of fire erupts just feet off the ground as the country’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is launched. Known as ‘the Monster’, it begins its ascent.
Hovering 22,300 miles above Earth, sensors from the U.S. Defence Department’s satellite systems spot the fire from the missile’s hot rocket exhaust.
The system alarm goes off: Ballistic Missile Launch, Alert!
Ballistic missile launches are not uncommon. As a general rule, nuclear-armed nations inform one another of ballistic missile tests, usually via diplomatic back channels, because no one wants to start a nuclear war by accident.
Even Russia continues to notify the U.S. of its test launches. The exception is North Korea. None of the more than 100 missiles it has test-launched since January 2022 — including nuclear-capable weapons — was announced beforehand.
The North Korean ballistic missile (ICBM) known as the ‘Monster’
1-5 seconds after launch
Some of the fastest computer systems in the world begin calculating the dimensions of the ICBM’s fiery plume.
Measurements reveal the missile is not heading into space, as it would be for a satellite launch, or towards the Sea of Japan, as is commonplace in a test. Is this a provocative test or a nuclear attack?
A vast, world-wide network of U.S. intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets begins churning out information.
In Colorado, combat pilots run towards fighter jets waiting on the Tarmac, ready to take to the air.
15 seconds after launch
The ICBM has travelled far enough for satellite sensors to determine its trajectory more precisely. The outlook is catastrophic: the Monster is travelling towards the continental U.S.
Two minutes after launch
Beneath the Pentagon, inside the nuclear command bunker, the secretary of defence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff take charge.
Once ground radars provide secondary confirmation that an attacking missile is on its way to the East Coast, a perilous nuclear warfighting strategy comes to the fore: Launch on Warning.
This means that once its early-warning systems have warned of an impending attack, the U.S. will not wait to physically absorb a nuclear blow before launching its counterattack.
Three minutes after launch
The president needs to be told. He is in the White House dining room, reading his briefing documents. The national security adviser rushes into the room, phone in hand. Speaking from the bunker beneath the Pentagon, the secretary of defence tells the president North Korea has launched an attacking missile at the U.S.
The president now faces an inexorably small decision-making window of time. What must happen next has been rehearsed by everyone in attendance on satellite comms, except, most likely, the president himself. Like almost all U.S. Presidents since John F. Kennedy, he is entirely underinformed about how to wage nuclear war when it happens.
He has no idea that as soon as he has been briefed on what is happening, he will have only six minutes to decide which nuclear weapons to launch in response.
As Ronald Reagan lamented in his memoirs: ‘Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to release Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason to a time like that?’
And so, in roughly the time it takes to brew a pot of coffee, the President will be asked to make a counterattack decision that could kill tens of millions of human beings on the other side of the world. Civilisation could end within a matter of hours.
The national security adviser is working to get a North Korean official on the phone when he is knocked aside by the special agent in charge of protecting the president. Of all the people in the room prepared for crisis response, the Secret Service agents are among the best rehearsed.
‘Into the emergency bunker now,’ the special agent in charge shouts at the president. Two members of the Counter Assault Team (CAT) grab him by his armpits. He does not yet fully comprehend all that is going on, or how fast a counterattack must unfold.
Nine minutes after launch
At Clear Space Force Station in Alaska, the Long Range Discrimination Radar gets its first sight of the attacking missile as it comes over the horizon. A member of the Air Force picks up the red phone in front of her. ‘This is Clear,’ she reports. ‘Site report is valid. Number of objects is one.’
The dreaded secondary confirmation of an attacking ICBM, headed towards the East Coast has just been made.
This facility in Alaska is one of six early-warning ground radar facilities which have kept watch for nuclear attack since the Cold War. Others are in California, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Greenland, and at RAF Fylingdales on the North Yorkshire Moors.
Now begins the attempt at interception, a feat ‘akin to shooting a bullet with a bullet’. But nine out of 20 hit-to-kill interceptor tests have failed. This means there is only a 55 per cent chance that the Monster will be shot down before it reaches its target.
Sure enough, the interception fails. So do three more consecutive attempts. The die is cast.
Ten minutes after launch
The president has been moved to a bunker beneath the East Wing of the White House, which was originally built to hide President Roosevelt during World War II.
Standing beside him is a military aide carrying the emergency satchel, an aluminium and leather bag containing the executive orders that can be put into effect when a nuclear attack comes to pass.
The U.S. president has sole authority to launch his country’s nuclear weapons.
He asks the secretary of defence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff what he should do. It’s a natural question to ask. No one but a madman would want to launch nuclear weapons of their own accord.
The chairman tells the president that he, as chairman, is part of the ‘chain of communication’, not the ‘chain of command’ for authorising a nuclear launch.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff only gives advice. ‘Advise me,’ the president commands.
The secretary of defence urges the him to consult his counterparts in Russia and China. Others around him are more focused on getting him to launch the counterattack, to ‘retaliate to decapitate’.
The secretary of defence urges caution, voicing what everyone fears but no one else dares to say: ‘To launch now all but guarantees a wider war.’
There is no way of knowing if an incoming ballistic missile attack is a spoof, designed to trick the president into launching nuclear war or even if the warhead is armed with nuclear weapons.
The president reaches into his wallet for the laminated nuclear codes card he must carry with him at all times. The ‘Biscuit’, in national security terms.
The bunker’s doors fly open. Ten Counter Assault Team members armed with SR-16 gas-operated, air-cooled carbines and AR-15 assault rifles burst into the room. They rush to the president and grab him by the armpits, his feet no longer touching the ground.
14 minutes after launch
The president is taken to Marine One helicopter, an aircraft hardened against the electromagnetic pulse that accompanies a nuclear flash. Still, no one has any idea if the system will fall apart in a nuclear war, causing the helicopter to plummet to Earth.
The plan is for one of the CAT operators to tandem jump the president out of the aircraft if the pilot cannot get them out of the danger zone in time.
But the president’s military advisers take issue with this plan as the president has still not given the go ahead for a counterattack.
‘We need launch orders, Mr President,’ says the commander of U.S. Strategic Command [Stratcom].
But the special agent in charge of the president disagrees, and overrrules the commander.
‘We are moving POTUS now,’ he insists.
U.S. President Joe Biden boards the helicopter known as Marine One – an aircraft hardened against the electromagnetic pulse that accompanies a nuclear flash
16 minutes after launch
Satellite sensors have detected the exhaust on a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) which has breached the surface of the Pacific Ocean, 350 miles off the coast of California.
The dreaded SLBM can strike and hit a target inside the U.S. even faster than an ICBM.
No one can say who owns it missile, nor the submarine it was launched from, but everyone’s best guess is North Korea.
In a moment of profound realisation, officers at control centres across the country recognise this situation: the beginning of the end of the world. Deterrence has failed. Nuclear war is happening.
Back on the White House lawn, Marine One readies for take-off. Many of the president’s advisers have stayed behind in the Emergency Operations Centre.
They’ve read briefings about this kind of scenario and have made peace with what is happening. As President Carter and President Reagan are said to have decided, they’ll go down with the ship.
21 minutes after launch
The incoming submarine-launched missile races towards Diablo Canyon Power Plant, a 750-acre facility 85 ft above the Pacific. Diablo is the only nuclear power plant in California that remains active. When a nuclear weapon explodes in the air, the radiation released into the atmosphere will dissipate over time.
Attacking a nuclear reactor with a nuclear-armed missile is entirely different. It all but guarantees a core reactor meltdown, resulting in a nuclear catastrophe that will last for thousands of years.
This violates the Geneva Conventions, and the rules that determine what can be done in war. But, as the world is about to learn, there are no rules in nuclear war.
The missile launched from the submarine explodes in Diablo Canyon. The nuclear power plant is consumed in a flash of nuclear light. There is a massive fireball. A facility-destroying blast. A nuclear mushroom cloud and a nuclear core meltdown.
Known to insiders as The Devil’s Scenario, the worst of the worst-case scenarios has come to pass.
23 minutes after launch
As Marine One takes off, the president is told that a nuclear bomb has hit California. He removes the code card from his wallet and prepares to authorise a counterstrike against North Korea — one involving 82 nuclear warheads. This retaliatory strike will all but guarantee the deaths of millions of people — maybe even tens of millions of people — on the Korean peninsula alone.
24 minutes after launch
Four miles north-west of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, a cattle rancher is tending to his herd when he is blown off his feet by the blast from the nuclear missile. He is alive owing, in part, to geography; the earth and stone buffered some of the bomb’s deadly thermal radiation.
The pressure from the bomb tore off his clothes and threw him to the ground, but he is old as dirt and tough as hell.
Spotting his smartphone in the dirt, he begins to film what’s happening. He is aware of the lethal levels of radiation he is receiving but he uploads the video of the mushroom cloud to Facebook.
His video connects to the internet via a communications satellite passing overhead and begins making its way around the world.
Reports start to flood the internet, with the hashtags #NuclearWar, #Armageddon and #EndOfTheWorld.
The bomb destroys the 750-acre facility. Unlike when a city is targeted, an attack against a nuclear power plant means radioactive pieces of spent fuel rods get seeded into the debris and are dispersed far and wide, as fallout. Diablo Canyon will never recover.
32 minutes after launch
The secretary of defence remains focused on getting the Russian President on the line. American ICBMs, launched from a missile field in Wyoming, must travel directly over Russia in order to reach North Korea.
A motherload of American ICBMs travelling through Russian airspace will almost certainly be interpreted as an incoming attack. Russia needs to be warned.
33 minutes after launch
Hurtling towards the Pentagon, the North Korean ICBM enters Terminal Phase — its last 100 seconds before it detonates.
In the first fraction of a millisecond after detonation, a flash of light superheats the air to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, creating a massive fireball that incinerates everything nearby in a holocaust of fire and death.
Not a single thing in the fireball remains. Nothing. No human, no squirrel, no ladybird. No cellular life. Never in the history of mankind have so many human beings been killed so quickly.
Not since a mountain-sized asteroid smashed into the Earth 66 million years ago has so much global devastation been set in motion in a single strike.
Ten seconds pass. The fireball rises three miles up into the air. Those who have survived the initial blast several miles from ground zero get trapped on melting roads and burn alive.
38 minutes after launch
The 15-mile radius surrounding the Pentagon is an inferno. There is no electricity. No phone service. No 911. In nuclear command bunkers across the country, contact with the President has been lost. He is presumed to have been separated from the core parachute group, in flight.
Inside Site R, the underground command centre in Pennsylvania, the secretary of defence and Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs have been desperately trying to reach their Russian counterparts. Do they tell the Russians that they have lost contact with their president? That he is missing, presumed dead?
As the debate continues, they finally reach an officer from the Russian General Staff. ‘The U.S. is under nuclear attack,’ they say, adding that it’s imperative that Russia refrains from any military action until the two nuclear-armed adversaries can get their two presidents on the phone.
But the Russian officer sees things differently.
‘Your president should have called us by now,’ he says and the line goes dead.
42 minutes after launch
No one has heard from the U.S. president because when the nuclear bomb hit the Pentagon, Marine One experienced a system failure from the electromagnetic pulse and began to crash. The CAT operator tandem-jumped the president out of the open door of the aircraft in an attempt to save his life.
The two men landed violently in a forested area. The agent is dead, his neck broken.
The president was cushioned by the agent’s body. There’s a deep gash on his forehead. His left arm and right leg are fractured. He is helpless and desperate. Will anyone find him before he bleeds out?
43 minutes after launch
The Russian president is furious. The U.S. president has not reached out to him yet. Prone to paranoia, the Russian president now believes that Russia is being targeted for a decapitation strike.
Faced with what he believes are hundreds of nuclear warheads bearing down on Russian soil — launched by the opportunistic Americans in a pre-emptive sneak attack — the Russian president chooses to launch a nuclear counterattack at the United States. One thousand ICBMs are now headed for America.
49 minutes 30 seconds after launch
The secretary of defence is sworn in as Commander in Chief. Early-warning satellite systems show an onslaught of incoming Russian missiles. The now Acting President, vocalises a crisis-of-conscience debate.
Just because hundreds of millions of innocent Americans are about to die, maybe the other half of humanity — full of so many other innocents — need not die, too. His suggestion is dismissed.
In nuclear war there is no such thing as capitulation, no such thing as surrender.
55 minutes after launch
Three hundred miles over the United States, North Korea detonates a high-altitude Super-EMP weapon.
An electromagnetic pulse weapon does not harm people, animals or plants, but it does destroy major parts of all three of America’s electrical grids.
The computer-based, human-interfaced control system architecture known as SCADA [Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition] goes down, creating an instant, out-of-control nightmare. Subway trains, freight trains and passenger trains collide or crash. Planes lose wing and tail control and plummet to the ground.
Oil and gas pipelines rupture and explode. Sewage spills out everywhere. Dams burst, causing mass flooding. There will be no more fresh water, no sanitation. No phone calls, no lights, no fuel, no working hospital equipment. People, everywhere, begin to flee on foot.
57 minutes after launch
Russian nuclear warheads begin to rain down on the U.S., Targets across Europe are hit at the same time. Air bases across the continent are obliterated, and capital cities including London are hit with nuclear warheads. Millions of people die, and scores of civilisation’s masterpieces, from Stonehenge to the Colosseum, Notre Dame and the Parthenon, are destroyed.
72 minutes after launch
Across the U.S., Europe, and the Korean peninsula, hundreds of millions of people are dead and dying, while hundreds of military aircraft fly aimlessly in the air until they run out of fuel. The last of the nuclear-armed submarines move stealthily out at sea, patrolling in circles until the crews run out of food.
On land, survivors hide out in bunkers until they dare go outside, or run out of air.
The few survivors who eventually emerge from these bunkers will face what the Cold War Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev foresaw.
In the event of a nuclear war, he said: ‘The survivors will envy the dead.’
Adapted from Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen (Transworld Publishers, £20). To order a copy for £18 (valid to 20/4/24); UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
Emily Foster is a globe-trotting journalist based in the UK. Her articles offer readers a global perspective on international events, exploring complex geopolitical issues and providing a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
