End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World

by Bryan Walsh

  Beginning in the 1970s, however, scientists began to examine what thousands of nuclear explosions would do not just to human beings, but to the environment they depended on. Early reports suggested that nuclear war might destroy much of the atmospheric ozone layer for years, damaging crops and leading to a spike in skin cancers. Dust and soot from the explosions and fires, meanwhile, could result in what one report termed “minor changes in temperature and sunlight.”53 But as scientists continued to refine their climate models, those changes in temperature and sunlight began to look less minor and more catastrophic.

  In 1983 a paper was published by Richard Turco, Brian Toon (whom I referred to in chapter 1), Thomas Ackerman, James Pollack, and Carl Sagan. Known as TTAPS—an acronym of the coauthors’ surnames—the paper used meteorological models, derived in part from the study of volcanic eruptions, to predict the global effects of nuclear war on sunlight and temperature.54 TTAPS made the case that the dust and smoke generated by nuclear fires could reduce sunlight levels by more than 90 percent, while global temperatures could fall by as much as 27 to 45 degrees. As with asteroid impact and supervolcano eruptions, such rapid and drastic cooling could make farming impossible, even in those regions spared by the missiles. There would be no escape from what the TTAPS authors memorably termed “nuclear winter.”

  Nuclear winter seized the public’s attention because it blew away the position—built up over the years by strategists on both sides—that nuclear war could be survivable, let alone winnable. New Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was shaken by the argument, as was President Reagan, who said that a nuclear war “could just end up in no victory for anyone because we would wipe out the Earth as we know it.”55 The stakes of a nuclear conflict were now plausibly infinite. “A nuclear war imperils all of our descendants, for as long as there will be humans,” Sagan wrote in 1983.56 “Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise.”

  The nuclear winter theory had its share of detractors, including some scientists who were skeptical of the TTAPS conclusion. Climate models of the early 1980s were crude, and as the authors concluded, the problem of nuclear war is “not amenable to experimental investigation,”57 which was a technical way of saying that the only way to be sure of what would happen after a nuclear war is to have a nuclear war. Some of the TTAPS authors themselves later said that their findings had been somewhat overblown by the media. But while scientists have disagreed on just how wintry nuclear winter might get—some argue that the aftermath of a war would be more akin to “nuclear autumn”—there is no doubt that the climatic effects would be meaningful, even devastating. A 2007 study by Alan Robock forecast cooling by as much as 36 degrees in the core farming regions of the United States, with even more drastic temperature drops in Russia.58 Robock is a climate scientist as well, but he told me, “I’m much more scared of nuclear war than I am of global warming because nuclear war can be instant climate change.”

  The threat of nuclear winter made a difference in public opinion and political policy. In 1986—the year that Turco, the lead author on the TTAPS paper, was awarded a MacArthur genius prize59—the number of nuclear warheads globally reached a peak, and then began to decline.60 The Cold War ended; mutually assured destruction relaxed. In 1996, William Perry, who had become one of the first U.S. defense secretaries of the post–Cold War era, joined his Russian counterpart Pavel Grachev to plant sunflower seeds at a field outside a Ukrainian missile base, a public event meant to symbolize the end of the nuclear threat.61 When Perry came into office the Doomsday Clock was set to seventeen minutes to midnight, as far from annihilation as it has ever been before or since.62 “I thought the problem was over,” Perry told me.

  It isn’t.

  January 13, 2018, was a warm and humid morning in Honolulu, and Robert de Neufville was sleeping in. De Neufville is the director of communications for the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, a U.S. think tank that focuses on existential threats, and at the time he had been hard at work on an important project. Along with his colleagues Tony Barrett and Seth Baum, de Neufville was trying to answer a vexing question: how likely was a nuclear war in the future?

  It was de Neufville’s job to dig through historical archives and uncover every time the world had brushed close to a nuclear conflict, whether because of military tensions or simple accident. History mattered. As near as the world had come to a nuclear holocaust, again and again, more than seventy years had passed since Nagasaki, and no nuclear weapon had since been used in war. We were lucky, clearly—all the near misses demonstrated that. But de Neufville and his colleagues also wondered whether there was some obstacle or complication that made an actual nuclear war unlikely, no matter how close we seemed to come. Knowing that would help us understand how much danger nuclear weapons might pose in the future.

  It was about 8:10 a.m. that morning when de Neufville’s girlfriend woke him up and showed him the message on her cell phone: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”63 “There was a moment of confusion,” he told me. “I thought, ‘Well, this could be it. It’s not totally impossible.’ I don’t know if I was scared, exactly. But in the back of my mind there was a thought: ‘We might all be about to die.’ And I think a lot of Honolulu residents thought that. ‘We might all be about to die this morning.’”

  De Neufville knew that he and his girlfriend should try to find shelter, somehow, against an incoming missile, but instead he found himself thinking about friends who were staying with him. “They had come out from the mainland,” he said. “They had two kids, ten and twelve. And I thought, ‘They were in California, and now maybe they’re going to die.’” He thought about his cats. “My cats are going to die,” he said. “Literally, do I try to save the cats?”

  The best strategy in the event of an imminent nuclear explosion is to shelter in place, away from windows, preferably in the center of a building. But de Neufville’s house was made of wood. He considered herding everyone into the sewers to provide protection against the coming blast wave, but he realized there wasn’t time to get the crowbar he would have needed to pry open a manhole. As he debated, the minutes ticked by. “What really struck me was that I’d actually thought before about what we would do in this situation,” de Neufville said. “But it turns out that when it happened, I didn’t really know what to do.”

  So, eventually, de Neufville did what most of us would probably do in the same situation: he went on Twitter. And there he saw a tweet from Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard: “HAWAII - THIS IS A FALSE ALARM. THERE IS NO INCOMING MISSILE TO HAWAII. I HAVE CONFIRMED WITH OFFICIALS THERE IS NO INCOMING MISSILE.”64 Thirty-eight minutes after the original alert—longer than it would have taken an ICBM to arrive—the state of Hawaii sent out a correction.65 It was indeed a false alarm.

  It’s still not clear exactly what happened. Initial reports suggested that a worker at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency had accidentally activated a real-world alert code instead of a test missile alert—and then for good measure, had clicked “yes” when the computer asked him to confirm his choice.66 The worker himself has said that he thought the alert was real, while Hawaiian officials later put out that the worker—who was fired soon after the incident—froze after he pushed the wrong button.67 Regardless, the damage was done.

  Being awakened by a phone alert warning that a nuclear missile was inbound would shake anyone, but the political atmosphere at the beginning of 2018 made it easy to believe that the possibility of nuclear war—once consigned to the Cold War past—was very real.

  North Korea had spent the first half of 2017 completing a flurry of ballistic missile tests, and in September had conducted its sixth-ever test of a nuclear device—one that the regime claimed was its first hydrogen bomb. President Donald Trump had responded by threatening “fire and fury,” and on January 2, 2018, he tweeted that his nuclear button was “much bigger and more powerful” than North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s.68 At the beginning of
December, Hawaii sounded the nuclear attack warning siren for the first time in three decades.69 No wonder everyone was ready to panic.

  Nuclear tensions between the United States and North Korea ebbed somewhat after Trump and Kim met for a summit in Singapore just six months later. But as of early 2019 Pyongyang had yet to give up a single nuclear warhead, even as Moscow was once again flexing its nuclear might and the United States had embarked on a major upgrade of its own atomic arsenal. Make no mistake: the existential threat of nuclear war is still great, in some ways as great as it was during the darkest days of the Cold War. “I couldn’t imagine how we could go back to a Cold War again and a nuclear arms race again,” said Perry. “But I was wrong.”

  That might seem hard to believe. Years of arms control treaties have vastly reduced the number of nuclear warheads in the world, from a high of nearly 70,000 in 1986 to around 14,500 now.70 The United States and Russia control 93 percent of those warheads, and while relations are clearly strained, the two major nuclear powers are no longer avowed ideological enemies. No one has even seen a mushroom cloud since China undertook the last aboveground atomic test in 1980—every nuclear test since has been done belowground, including those by North Korea.71 Duck-and-cover drills are a thing of the Cold War past—in 2018 New York City began retiring the once-ubiquitous yellow fallout shelter signs, in part because it had been decades since anyone had bothered to take care of the facilities.72

  Beneath those positive signs, however, the nuclear status quo was eroding. During much of the Cold War, there were only five declared nuclear powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China. Today India and Pakistan—enemies that in seventy years have fought three wars and numerous skirmishes—possess growing nuclear arsenals, along with North Korea. Israel has never officially acknowledged its status but is widely known as a nuclear power. By withdrawing from the Obama-era deal that constrained Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, President Trump may have inadvertently opened the door to a future Iranian nuclear weapon, though there is no evidence yet that the country has resumed development. And while preventing the spread of nuclear weapons has long been a goal of Republican and Democratic presidents alike, Trump has signaled in the past that he isn’t too bothered by the thought of American allies like Japan or South Korea, or even Saudi Arabia, developing nuclear arms of their own.73 The math is simple: the greater the number of countries that have nuclear weapons, the harder it is to keep the nuclear peace, and the more likely that accidents will occur.74

  Far from acting to stabilize the nuclear balance, in recent years Russia and the United States have reversed years of nuclear arms cuts, and both nations are now embarking on expensive—and dangerous—nuclear modernizations and expansions. Moscow’s position is reversed from what it was at the start of the Cold War—Russia’s conventional military is hopelessly outmanned and outgunned by America, which spends nine times more than Moscow does on defense.75 So just as the United States once did, Russia is increasingly relying on its willingness to threaten use of its nuclear arsenal to offset its conventional military deficit.

  Russian president Vladimir Putin has raised the possibility of employing tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a conflict with NATO, in the apparent hope that the West would simply back down rather than escalate a border skirmish to a full-scale nuclear war. Moscow is also developing and deploying new nuclear warheads and launch systems,76 including superweapons like a “Doomsday” torpedo—an autonomous stealth submarine armed with a giant nuclear warhead that could reportedly render much of the North American east coast radioactive.77 Nor is Putin shy about showing off the power of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. “Despite all the problems with the economy, finances, and the defense industry, Russia has remained a major nuclear power,” Putin said in his annual address in March 2018. “Nobody really wanted to talk to us about the core of the problem [with the West], and nobody wanted to listen to us. So listen now.”78

  The United States is listening. President Barack Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize in part for his commitment to nuclear nonproliferation, and within thirteen months of his inauguration the United States and Russia had signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the latest in a series of nuclear arms control agreements. Yet by the end of his second term—even as Obama became the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima, where he called for a “world without nuclear weapons”—Washington had begun work to upgrade its nuclear arsenal.79

  Since Obama left office those efforts have only accelerated. According to the Defense Department’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, the Trump administration has planned for an expansion and enhancement of American nuclear weapons systems that will cost an estimated $1.2 trillion over thirty years.80 In February 2019, the United States announced that it would suspend the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a deal signed in 1987 between Reagan and Gorbachev to eliminate their stocks of ground-launched ballistic missiles capable of traveling from 300 to 3,400 miles, what are known as tactical arms. The Trump administration’s stated reasoning was that Russia had been effectively cheating on the treaty for years. That was true, but by unilaterally withdrawing from the treaty rather than punishing Russia over its violations, the United States effectively closed the door to future arms control treaties while raising the possibility of a mini arms race between the two countries to develop low-yield, tactical nukes.81

  The Nuclear Posture Review also stated that the United States reserved its right to respond to nonnuclear strikes—like a major cyberattack—with nuclear weapons. This is no longer a bipolar Cold War. Where once U.S. nuclear policy was wholly dedicated to countering a massive launch by the Soviets—hence the overkill plans that Daniel Ellsberg saw—American presidents must now negotiate a multipolar world of varying dangers from varying competitors with varying aims. Cyberattacks are on the rise, but so is the threat of chemical or biological terrorism, or regional conflicts involving U.S. allies like the bloody war Saudi Arabia has prosecuted in Yemen. If a dictator like Syrian president Bashar Assad seems ready to use lesser weapons of mass destructions on his own people, should the United States threaten to respond with a nuclear attack? What about a cyberattack on a major U.S. corporation that might be linked back to China or Russia? Nuclear war just isn’t as simple as it was in the megadeath days of Herman Kahn.

  What this all means—the changing nuclear posture, the abandonment of arms control treaties, the new weapons—is that the barriers to nuclear war are falling. Tactical, low-yield nukes are seen as “gateway drugs” to full-scale conflict, and expanding the range of attacks the United States might choose to respond to with atomic weapons blurs what should be very sharp lines around nuclear war. Any rational leader would blanch before launching an all-out nuclear attack that could ultimately kill billions of people. But firing off a single tactical nuke might seem a lot closer to ordering conventional air strikes—something American presidents rarely hesitate to do when confronted with a range of threats that all fall short of the existential. Once the nuclear seal has been broken, though—even by what seems like a comparatively minor bomb—no one knows what will happen next. “Once you start using nuclear weapons,” said Joe Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund, an antinuclear nonprofit, “that is not a stable situation.”

  The question of stability brings us to the most unstable factor of all: Donald Trump. The most powerful person in the world is the president of the United States, and above all else that is true because they retain sole control over America’s nuclear arsenal. If the president wishes to launch a nuclear strike—and the United States has never abandoned its right to wield nuclear weapons first in a conflict—no one can stop him or her. Not Congress, not the secretary of defense, not the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The order for a launch goes from the president to an officer at U.S. Strategic Command, and from there to the crews manning the ICBM silos and bombers and nuclear submarines.82 While military officers are technically requi
red to refuse “unlawful” orders—and General John Hyten, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, has said he would push back against what he termed an “illegal” strike83—in practice it wouldn’t be difficult to devise legal rationales for almost any nuclear attack the current occupant of the White House desires. All the president really needs is the support of a majority of American voters to put them in office—and as we’ve discovered a couple of times now, they may not even need that.

  Absolute presidential control of the nuclear arsenal did not begin with Donald Trump. The order to drop nuclear bombs on Japan, though verbally approved by President Truman, was actually drafted by General Groves of the Manhattan Project and signed by Truman’s secretary of war, Henry Stimson. But when Truman raised the possibility of giving military commanders the power to use nuclear weapons in the Korean War, much as they might decide how to employ any other armament, it led to a public outcry. The Truman administration eventually released a statement confirming that the president had to authorize the use of a nuclear bomb.84

  It took some time to work out the chain of command, but by the Kennedy administration it had become policy that the president and only the president could order the use of nuclear weapons. Which, it should be noted, was definitely a good thing. General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of American and UN forces during the Korean War until he was fired by Truman, later told a biographer that he wanted to drop dozens of atomic bombs on North Korea and its ally China.85 In 1968, General William Westmoreland activated a plan to move nuclear weapons to South Vietnam before he was overruled by President Johnson.86 If the Pentagon under President Trump has come to be seen as a moderating force, that has most assuredly not always been the case.