Armageddon
I’ve tended to think of climate as ‘the one ring to rule them all.’ But what happens if nuclear rhetoric spins out of control?
We live in a world where terrifying scenarios emerge in almost every sector:
Good old-fashioned war is back in style.
Forever chemicals are accumulating, altering the genes of plants and animals.
Soil is depleted and requires even more artificial fertilizers to produce enough food.
Insect death and other species extinction.
Water scarcity.
Mass migration creates suffering and political unrest.
AI technology undermines democracies with fake news, etc., and among all these, I have tended to think…
that climate change is “the one ring to rule them all.”
But is it?
I’m old enough to remember the famous Norwegian activist Ole Kopreitan, the leader of the organization ‘No to Nuclear Weapons,’ his gray beard, his slightly shabby clothes, and the table with buttons—the iconic ‘no to nuclear weapons’ symbol—which he would set up in the middle of the parade street Karl Johan during the busy Saturday rush. Most people walked past, but it didn’t bother him much.
Kopreitan was inspiring. And impressive.
He kept going, no matter what others thought.
At the same time, it feels like nuclear weapons were actually on the agenda back then. It was something my parents and their friends were afraid of.
People were against nuclear weapons.
Still, nuclear weapons aren’t something I have particularly related to.
They somehow disappeared from my mind and the agenda. Yes, nuclear weapons exist, but it’s not something to think about.
Or maybe I couldn’t face dealing with nuclear weapons.
I believe that’s closer to the truth.
Everywhere I encountered the topic, whether it was in Inger Christensen’s legendary poem “Alphabet,” in war films, in “Tasmania” by Paolo Giordano, in the dreadful TV drama “Chernobyl,” in the “Oppenheimer” film, or in documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I always recoiled.
The nuclear reality was too brutal for me.
Brutal, or simply irrational. Incomprehensible. Unfathomable.
While climate change, biodiversity loss, or chemical pollution follow axes I can understand, where there is no evil, madness, or pure self-destructiveness as the fundamental driving force but a complex set of motives on a scale from what is easy to understand (it’s, for example, not easy to imagine how we’d manage without all the products oil gives us) to the grossly selfish, nuclear weapons are violence in its purest form.
And violence is something that makes me sick to think about. I can’t bear it. I insist on believing in the good in humanity.
I can’t believe that if two enemies meet, sit down, and talk, if their families have dinner together and their children play together, they would still want to annihilate each other.
Call me naive. But there are multiple examples of how people come together when they give it time and try, such as the story of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan.
The function of nuclear weapons is precisely to avoid these human encounters. The enemy images should be sharpened instead. We should be annihilated before we even have time to take a breath.
Since I have spent so much time reading about climate and nature and written so many texts about it, without so much as a shred of effect, I sometimes ask myself whether it’s worth it.
When I try to explain to my girls that we must try to show moderation—it’s not sustainable to go to Gran Canaria in summer, autumn, winter, and spring (“But everyone in the class is going away? Why can’t we?”)—I sometimes ask myself: Am I right or wrong?
Shouldn’t we rather “live to the max,” like most other Norwegians?
Why not? If someone presses the nuclear button, I might regret not spending all the money I had—and much more.
Screw it! We should have borrowed way more than we could handle.
When I think about it, why don’t we take out all the short-term loans we can get, why don’t we take the girls out of school (what’s the point of education if you might be gone tomorrow?), why not go on an endless shopping spree on credit?
Gulp the world down the world before it’s too late!
That’s how I think while reading “Nuclear War – a Scenario” by Annie Jacobsen.
In “Nuclear War – a Scenario,” Jacobsen describes in painstaking detail how the world ends in a nuclear Armageddon within a few hours, in line with military protocols for mutual retaliation, based on interviews with advisors to American presidents, government officials, nuclear weapon engineers, intelligence analysts, and military personnel.
In addition, she has studied declassified, previously classified information.
“Nuclear War – a Scenario” is, in other words, a strictly source-based account of how the world will end before we have time to catch our breath if one of the world’s dictators—whether they are democratically elected or not—launches a nuclear attack.
Or, if one of the highly fallible detection systems in Russia misinterprets sunlight or just a strange cloud and sounds the alarm.
The nuclear manual says: Initiate counterattack.
What happens then?
Read the opening chapter of Jacobsen if you have the stomach for it.
There, she outlines the unimaginable result of a single intercontinental ballistic thermonuclear missile (ICBM).
The Pentagon and large parts of Washington are instantly wiped out. The heat wave that radiates outward in concentric circles burns the skin off people’s faces. A firestorm follows in its wake. The mushroom cloud rising into the sky sucks in bodies, buildings, cars; it’s the matter that creates the radiant color in the mushroom’s crown.
You’re lucky if you die instantly. If not, unbearable pain awaits. Those who are not directly affected by radiation injuries have the rest of the (short) nuclear war ahead.
Hunger and thirst, resulting from the fact that there will be no clean food or water available anywhere in the world, means that starvation and dehydration become the cause of death for most of the victims.
How many victims will there be?
In an interview with Annie Jacobsen, podcast host Lex Friedman asks what he calls a very dark question: How many will die in a nuclear war between the US and Russia?
Annie Jacobsen answers:
So I’m coming back at you with a very dark answer, and a very big number, and that number is five billion people.
Five billion people in unbearable pain. And then: death.
Rattling the “Nuclear Sabers”
It’s the aggregated pain of five billion people that I think about when I hear Putin say that Russia is changing its nuclear weapons doctrine. It’s this pain I try to absorb when I hear Joe Biden and voices in NATO and the European and Scandinavian public sphere claim, as if it’s beyond doubt, that Putin is just issuing empty threats.
That the man is rattling his “nuclear sabers,” as they say, using a counterproductive metaphor because it points to something old-fashioned, prehistoric, while the truth is that the world would have melted before you could say … Genghis Khan.
In the opening chapter, Annie Jacobsen outlines the terrifying consequences of a single ICBM (as the hydrogen bomb is euphemistically called), a “bolt out of the blue” attack, which would trigger a relentless response from the American nuclear division.
This is important. It’s the result of just one missile.
How many such missiles do you think the USA has at the ready, prepared to respond to the attack from this single missile, the one that melted almost all of Washington?
1170 deployed nuclear weapons, a majority of which are on ready-for-launch status, with thousands more held in reserve, for at total inventory of more than 5000 warheads.
But surely the USA has shield missiles, you might think. Iron Dome, lingers in your mind. Missiles that can shoot down the nuclear bomb while it’s still in the atmosphere, preventing Armageddon?
No. Or yes. They have about 40. And these have an error margin of 50 percent.
Once the attack is initiated, it simply doesn’t stop. The missiles are virtually already on their way. The doctrine that ensures mutual destruction for all of us is called Launch on Warning.
The USA has a satellite system that detects any ICBM launched anywhere in the world. In the same moment, an enormous network of procedures is set into motion, over a span of about twenty minutes, where the president is brought in and briefed.
If the USA receives a second confirmed observation of the ICBM via radar, the president has six minutes left to decide where the American counterattack should hit and with how many nuclear missiles.
The manual is written and practiced to the point of boredom. Jacobsen writes:
America will not wait and physically absord a nuclear blow before launching its own nuclear weapons back at whoever was irrational enough to attack the United States.
In an enumeration of other nuclear-armed states in the world, several of which are enemies of the USA, all with their own protocols for retaliation—escalate to deescalate—Jacobsen lists:
As of early 2024, Russia has 1674 deployed nuclear weapons, the majority of which are on ready-for-launch status (…) China has a stockpile of 500; Pakistan and India each have around 165; North Korea has around 50.
Ash and nuclear winter are the results. Death and unbearable pain. For the foreseeable future.
Who wants to destroy the world?
Many of the problems I outlined initially—climate change, insect extinction, food and water shortages—are consequences of actions that, at least if I give the benefit of the doubt, were done for the good of humanity.
These are the kinds of topics I’ve wanted to engage with in my writing. It’s there I’ve thought it’s possible to make a positive impact.
If you want to make the world a better place, as I imagine most politicians and the vast majority of ordinary citizens do, you eventually have to realize that, for example, the consumption of fossil fuels has reached a point where it does more harm than good.
Thus, you realize, hopefully, that you must change course.
With nuclear weapons, it’s the opposite. It’s a technology built on paranoia and violence.
John Rubel, who was involved when the USA wrote the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) in 1960, the plan to retaliate against a nuclear attack before the USA is hit, published a memoir, where he expressed deep regret for what he had been part of.
Only one man spoke out while the grotesque plans were being made, Marine Commander David M. Shoup. In a low and controlled voice, Shoup said:
All I can say is, any plan that murders three hundred million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That is not the American way.
No one moved a muscle while Shoup spoke, Rubel writes in his memoirs. But no one took his objection into account either. They just continued working on their grand plan, The Single Integrated Operational Plan.
In his memoirs, Rubel writes about the thoughts that went through his head as he sat there (as quoted in Annie Jacobsen’s book):
I thought of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 when an assemblage of German bureaucrats swiftly agreed on a program to exterminate every last Jew they could find anywhere in Europe (…) I felt as if I were witnessing a comparable descent into the deep heart of darkness, a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one third of the earth’s surface.
Deterrence. Really?
Proponents of nuclear weapons claim that nuclear weapons have ended all wars.
Deterrence makes it impossible for nuclear-armed states to go to war with each other, the argument goes since nuclear war ensures total annihilation for everybody.
But what if it happens anyway, asks Jacobsen.
Yes, what if? The war in Ukraine looms in the back of my mind.
The Doomsday Clock, created by concerned nuclear physicists to visualize how close the world is to nuclear Armageddon, stood at two minutes to midnight in 2019.
In 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, it was moved forward to 100 seconds to midnight. Last year, it was moved another 10 seconds closer.
We are 90 seconds from midnight in a day with 86,400 seconds.
The nuclear philosopher Günther Anders had no faith in deterrence.
With the invention of the nuclear bomb, we had, on the contrary, already entered the end times, Anders believed.
The end was virtually a fact, all we could do was postpone it, because the technology, or the waste from it, would sooner or later result in a massive catastrophe.
The only hope humanity could have of avoiding a nuclear disaster was conditional on enlightenment, activism, and a willingness to disarmament, as Anders formulated in a postulate (quoted from an introductory essay from the philosopher Hanna Winther):
We must ensure that the end times, even though they could become the end of all time at any moment, are endless.
Under the Paving-Stones, the Beach!
Can the danger of nuclear Armageddon break through in the public consciousness, or do we insist on talking about last-minute trips to Crete, Bordeaux wine, and Black Friday right up until the nuclear mushroom cloud?
The Norwegian author Johan Harstad’s new book “Under the Cobblestones, the Beach!” gives me hope (and a bit of envy).
Harstad takes on the strange place Onkalo, which I remember from a lovely documentary I once saw quite a few years ago. Onkalo is a place in Finland where they are working on a solution for the permanent storage of nuclear waste.
There, they have to think in hundreds of thousands of years, through upcoming ice ages, and imagine how other species than humans might think.
As Harstad so aptly writes about the nuclear engineers’ view of time (my translation):
It’s hard for people to grasp that none of us will be here forever. That the planet will get cold again, really cold. That everything we have built and created will disappear and be forgotten by whatever comes after us, but that for the atoms, it will seem like an insignificant change, just the transition from one moment to another. (…) None of this represents a threat to us. Our clocks are bigger and move slower.”
I particularly remember one scene from the film about Onkalo—”Into Eternity”, it’s called—I think it was filmed on a gray granite mountain where they were exploring how to mark the place.
The sensible Finns explained how they tried to avoid the warnings they made being misinterpreted. For wasn’t there a danger that future inhabitants of Earth would be tempted by the power they could interpret the warnings as an expression of?
Could it be that they would dig up the nuclear waste rather than leave it alone?
Wouldn’t people have unearthed this treasure if they thought it gave such power?
The truly absurd thing, when you start thinking about it, is the eons of nuclear contamination life on Earth probably has in store, even without a nuclear war.
You don’t have to search long before you start chattering your teeth at the thought of how poor the storage of nuclear waste really is, for example at Sellafield in my neighboring country England.
The concrete lid over the melted reactor in Chernobyl is supposed to last for a hundred years, but no longer. What will Ukraine, or the country Chernobyl will happen to be located in, do then?
Nuclear waste slowly digs through whatever it comes across. Will the appropriations for nuclear waste storage survive “the next budget year, the next government, and the next recession,” as Harstad writes?
With the problems the world already has up to its neck—nuclear waste, climate change, nature loss, etc., etc.—how is it possible that disarmament isn’t already in full swing?
Why does the world’s population accept standing on the brink of nuclear apocalypse?
Come back, Ole Kopreitan and other activists!
Maybe you know a similar character as Ole Kopreitan from your own country? Or maybe you should become the new Kopreitan, an activist for our time—you know, you can skip the cart with buttons and the worn-out wool sweater!
I miss Ole Kopreitan and other engaged people! How is it possible that here in Norway, which would just be a smoldering ash spot after a nuclear war between the USA and Russia, disarmament and nuclear de-escalation are not on the agenda at all?
That Norway is rich, and Norwegians are well-fed, is an understatement.
But has this made Norwegian public discourse into a dinner party where you’re not supposed to say anything unpleasant, where the prosecco flows and everything is chill, and you’re not invited next time if you happen to mention climate or nature crisis (or, God forbid, nuclear war)?
It’s incomprehensible. And not just incomprehensible. It’s deeply irresponsible.