This is the longest thing I've submitted on Reddit but idc, I simply love talking about this kind of shit and it's a Friday night so I'm being courageous.

For anyone who's ready to jump right into this topic full-bore, I always recommend Annie Jacobsen's newest (most recent) book titled *Nuclear War: A Scenario" - an intricately-researched and insanely-detailed account of a fictional nuclear conflict that begins with a bolt-out-of-the-blue ICBM attack from North Korea, the new Hwasong 19 being launched at the continental United States, and an as-accurate-as-possible, minute-by-minute crisis that unfolds in real time and includes a genuinely shocking level of detail as seen from the perspective of not only Americans on the ground but government officials and NORAD employees.

It describes the exact procedure for evacuating a sitting president while simultaneously explaining the truly impossible life and death decisions in which only a literal handful of people in a chain of command have the power to make, and how little time is realistically provided for them to finalize such decisions. It is a mostly-linear, easy to follow scenario that I underestimated, assuming it was just some unoriginal rehashed piece of work that wouldn't have the balls to "go there" so-to-speak. But it is far from unoriginal and I now consider it top 3 most frightening (but totally impossible to put down) reads of my life, and I've seen a lot.

By the middle point of the book I found myself so heavily engrossed, so invested in it that I felt like a kid reading my first Goosebumps book and then getting too scared to fall asleep afterwards!

I also listened to the audiobook with my now-late father and it was such a visceral shared experience (and she reads her own works) that I'll hopefully never forget it. All he kept saying was (paraphrased) "this was something we were told was simply inevitable when I was a kid, but no one had any reasonable idea of how or what would ever happen because at some point we knew the radios and televisions would go out and we'd be in the dark." And this was super cool to hear from him, because even after I'd studied other in-depth Cold War history in college he remained the pretty mute on the whole childhood/youth experience of anything other than Vietnam.

Which, looking back on it all now, is a fucking insane way of living! And a conscious decision to sensationalize current events as they happened in the headlines, nightly news bringing the Cold War and the Russians or the Americans (and on and on) right into your own home every night.

The tragic, fearful resignation to being almost guaranteed nuclear war was "likely" and how LITTLE people actually knew about the realities of how it might begin; what it's like during the apocalyptic bombardment; the lack of fail-safes on both sides of the superpowers; not a fucking word about the terrifying, inhumane biological and chemical weapons that were and probably still are part of the final stage of mutual annihilation; and finally the flat-out lies concerning "recovery" of "what's left" of humanity post-nuclear war... What prompted millions of people to actively dig fallout shelters and fall for the nonsense that there was merely a brief waiting period before it was safe to come back out and ... Resume your activities or something?

Reagan was himself misinformed so badly that even as president he somehow had it in his head that "submarine fired nuclear missiles were able to be recalled" until he gave a press conference saying this exact thing and his top generals sat him down afterwards and had the "well akshually..." chat with him, telling him that they honestly couldn't reverse any of it once launched, and WOW because this was supposed to quite literally be the trump-card, but the bluff that Reagan was actively threatening the USSR with wasn't actually a bluff and never was and never would be. He had a ROUGH wakeup call, it seems, because his nuclear annihilation rhetoric was seriously toned down and then we all know the story of the 3hr television movie that influenced him to change his approach to RU altogether, yada yada.

So I've certainly strayed off of my OG point regarding the Annie Jacobsen book, but actually most of the latter half of what I've said is part of the novel as it provides more than its fair share of what was previously never ever publicly known about super specific aspects of a real-life nuclear threat situation and the precise step by step description of an American response, as well as American responsibility, accountability and faith in the system of diplomacy and deterrence withstanding rogue actors.

If anyone actually reads all of this and has an urge to read or listen to the Nuclear War audiobook etc. I'll show my appreciation by purchasing it for you because I'd love for someone else to willingly join my obsession over here. Goddamn.

Good luck and goodnight. ☠️🪖