THE END OF the world takes less than two hours in Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. It begins one spring day when a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) erupts from a mobile launcher in North Korea. Before it hits the Pentagon, a North Korean submarine in the Pacific fires a second nuclear salvo at California. Neither missile is intercepted. Within 40 minutes of the first launch, millions of Americans are dead on both coasts.
The U.S. retaliates by firing a barrage of missiles from underground installations in the Mountain West and from submarines in the Pacific. Russia, aware that the United States has been attacked but unable to communicate with the U.S. president, mistakes the launch of the American ICBMs for an attack on Moscow and fires its nuclear weapons at the U.S. and its NATO allies, which then
