A review by meredith_w
Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen

dark informative medium-paced

4.0

I hate this book.  But it was also a good book in the sense that I understand its purpose, and why it was written. This ‘nonfiction’ book is incredibly sobering. And despairing, maddening, upsetting. There were some really frustrating narrative details (Russia never suspected that North Korea might be the target??  really???), but I can look past that and appreciate the big picture of the book – to demonstrate the ‘razor’s edge’ we all sit on regarding the potential realities of nuclear war. This book helped me visualize “…how fast global nuclear war unfolds. How tragic and ironic it is that human beings developed slow and steady over hundreds of thousands of years, culminating in the creation of vast and complex civilizations, only to get zeroed out in a war that takes less than a few hours from beginning to end.” 

 

Jacobsen loves a military acronym and seems obsessed with measurements - the size of various bombs and explosions, depth of bunkers, speed of missiles. Her depth of knowledge and research into these topics was … a lot. The focus of this book is (unsurprisingly) very America-centric, with some of the global impacts only discussed at the very end, and leaving out so many countries (i.e. ALL the countries of Africa, and others in the global south). I get it, not all books can be everything. This book was plenty terrifying as is, without describing the horrifying impact to every corner of the earth.