Apes on a Treadmill

I’ve just finished reading a book that I fear I’ll be thinking about for a long time. One that has profoundly changed my thinking about a lot of things I had long considered closed cases in my own mind.

I stumbled on Annie Jacobsen’s new book “Nuclear War: A Scenario” while looking for something to read on a long day of airline travel this past weekend. I’ve long considered myself a “Prepper” and have devoured more than my share of apocalytpic fiction over the years, and so this book seemed like it would be right up my alley.

It is an engrossing highly-technical story full of bracing details, a book I described to a friend as “A Tom Clancy novel without a happy ending.” What makes it terrifying is that Jacobsen’s “scenario” can only be labeled fiction because well, technically, it hasn’t happened yet.

“Nuclear War: A Scenario” is the story of how a single nuclear-tipped ICBM fired at the United States, in this case by North Korea, leads inexorably to full-scale nuclear war and the end of the world in only seventy-two minutes… just over one hour.

It’s important to understand that in Jacobsen’s story, the world does not end because of “bad luck” or some black swan cosmic misunderstanding… in “Nuclear War: A Scenario” the world ends because it has to… because that’s how the system is designed to work.

Turns out, they don’t call it “Mutually Assured Destruction” for nothing.

As Jacobsen explains in her meticulously researched book which includes interviews with dozens of former officials who were willing to go on the record, the nuclear warfighting strategy of every nation on Earth is based on the concept of “deterence”… essentially, “if you attack me, I will destroy you.”

But what happens when deterence fails? The answer is that nothing happens, or rather more precisely, nothing changes. The system reacts to the failure of deterence by doubling down and demanding even more of that which has already failed. Our Nuclear Armed Forces call it “re-establishing deterence”, which really just means firing more and more missiles at your attacker until you both run out of bombs or everyone is dead, whichever happens first.

The other reason the system is biased in favor of armageddon is speed. In nuclear war, things happen fast… too fast, really, for human beings to process. The time it takes for an ICBM to destroy its target is twenty-six minutes from launch to detonation. American “Minuteman” missiles get their nickname from the elite colonial troops who first took on the British Redcoats in the Revolutionary War, yes… but also because they can be launched in sixty seconds, once the order to do so is given. It takes Russian nuclear missile submarines (“Boomers”) only 80 seconds to launch every single missile on the boat. That means even if a U.S. attack submarine is actively tracking the Boomer when it begins the launch cycle, there wouldn’t be enough time to sink it before it could launch its entire payload at the U.S. Homeland.

Ronald Reagan wrote that from the time a President is notified of an enemy missile launch, he or she has six minutes to decide on a repsonse.

Six minutes.

And in all that time, while a confused and frightened President tries to get his bearings and understand exactly what is happening, every voice in the room will be advocating loudly for an immediate and maximalist response.

This is because our Government’s stated policy regarding a nuclear attack begun by an adversary is known as “launch on warning” (LOW). In other words, once an enemy missile launch is detected, which happens nearly instantly thanks to our own high-tech heat-plume-seeking satellites, the President must shoot back. In that sense, Reagan was being generous when he said the President has only a six minute window to decide what he will do. The truth is that the decision was already made for him, decades ago… written into policy by unelected men for whom warfighting was a singular life’s pursuit. All the President really gets to decide is how many missiles, and where they will go.

And that is why there is no such thing as “limited nuclear war”…. nuclear war always results in nuclear armageddon.

Always.

This was the most shocking realization I had while reading this book. Shocking because I feel like this is a truth I used to know, but forgot somewhere along the way… lulled, I suppose, by Hollywood fantasies of small tacitcal battlefield nukes with nominal yields, limited nuclear engagements and secured phone links between the American and Russian Presidents that never, ever fail.

But I should’ve known better.

After all, “WarGames” is one of my favorite movies of all time. The last six minutes, where “Joshua” teaches itself that nuclear war cannot be won, all while the launch code blinks ominously in the center of the war map, is a master-class in building cinematic tension… it is an action sequence in which the main characters barely speak, in point of fact they do not move, until the movie is over and the world has been saved.

I remember seeing “WarGames” as a kid and being haunted by a simple question “what would’ve happened if Matthew Broderick hadn’t gotten to NORAD before those huge blast doors closed forever?”

It was 1983, and I was 12-years-old.

Years later, I found myself alone on the phone with “WarGames” screenwriter Larry Lasker as I waited to connect him with my boss who was busy on the other line. Unable to resist, I asked him about “WarGames” and we got to talking about it. Over the course of our conversation it became clear that he had immersed himself deeply in the history and the lore of American nuclear warfighting theory and that much of what occurs in the movie actually happened during one or more of America’s many nuclear “close calls.” It was also clear that everyone he spoke to while researching the movie told him the same thing… an idea that is the central message of Annie Jacobsen’s book… that there is no way to win a nuclear war.

In “WarGames”, the computer trying to “win” a global thermonuclear war with Russia eventually learns that “the only winning movie is not to play.” But how does it learn that? It learns by playing out hundreds, if not thousands, of simulations on the big War Room screen. Simulations with fantastic official-sounding names like “Hongkong Variant”, “Iceland Maximum”, “Turkish Heavy, “Sudan Surprise” and “Seato Decapitating.” We watch these scenarios happen over and over… millions die, the simulation resets, and millions die all over again… and it doesn’t matter if the simulation starts with one launch or a hundred or a thousand… in every single case, the end result is nuclear armageddon and the end of the world.

Every. Time.

It turns out that this “truth” at the heart of “WarGames” is more than just Hollywood peacenik propaganda.

Reagan understood it too. Jacobsen writes about the 1983 Proud Prophet simulation, a series of nuclear war games run by SecDef Caspar Weinberger. Much like “Joshua” in Larry Lasker’s screenplay, the Proud Prophet team ran dozens of scenarios. No matter what they did, no matter what choices they made, no matter how they structured the simualtion, every theoretical game run ended in nuclear annihilation and a minimum of a billion dead.

It’s all ghastly, but there’s something else that’s been bothering me ever since I finished the book, and it is something I write about often here at The Continental Congress… America’s ongoing crisis of competence.

With each year that passes it becomes more and more clear to me that we are governed by a cadre of utter mediocrities… men and women with all the right credentials, the proper family lineages and all the right resume boosters from firms like McKinsey Consultants, but with little actual accomplishment. As one reads Jacobsen’s dramatic re-enactments of critical conversations between the President and his advisors as total nuclear war becomes more and more inevitable, it’s not hard to imagine those roles being filled by Presidents, Vice Presidents, and cabinet officials past and present, and the thought of that deepens the story’s sense of dread.

Things were harrowing enough when Ronald Regan and Caspar Weinberger were in charge… try to imagine a scenario where Preisdent Joe Biden has six minutes to decide how to blow up the world, or god forbid, a decaptiation strike scenario where civilization-ending decisions are being made by interim-President Mayorkas.

The title of this essay comes from a paper written by Paul Warnke, former General Counsel for the Secretary of Defense who had become concerned that America’s Nuclear Warfighting Strategy had taken on a certain relentless forward momentum… he worried that no one was asking if it still made sense, or if it might be insane. He likened the situation to a real-life experiment where humans and apes were put on treadmills to measure how their bodies expended energy. But while the humans would run for as long and as often as the researchers needed, the apes kept hitting the stop button and getting off, as if to say “this is stupid and pointless and I won’t do it any longer.” Warnke was asking a simple question, if apes can figure out when something is stupid and pointless, why can’t humans?

As a concept, “Mutually Assured Destruction” has always been crazy. But in a world where all the nuclear powers were fundamentally rational Nation States, it was at least possible to argue that the concept carried with it a sort of ruthless logic. But here in 2024 as we witness the concomitant rise of Rogue Nation States and apocalytpic terrorist death cults with nothing to lose on one hand, and increasingly incompetent U.S. Government officials on the other, it has begun to seem like “Mutually Assured Destruction” is exactly what its acronym suggests it is… “MAD.”

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