[sbierwagen]

I read it and was not impressed.

It starts with North Korea launching two ICBMs against DC and a nuclear plant in California. Interceptors fail and the warheads hit their targets. This is unlikely, but possible. The launch is explicitly irrational, the act of a mad dictator.

In response, the US counterstrikes with Minuteman, despite having perfectly serviceable air deliverable nukes. Russia detects the launch, and the imprecision of their own early warning systems along with North Korea being next to Russia, they conclude that the US is attacking them. They do a massive launch, the US does a massive launch, worst possible assumptions for a 10C nuclear winter, four billion dead.

The only thing I learned from the book is that if you roll 1 over and over and over again, the worst can happen. But we already knew that?

[jerlam]

A similar book of this category may be The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States which describes how a series of events, which have separately happened in the past, may lead to NK launching nukes. But it is not framed as the irrational actions of a mad dictator, but a series of coincidences that suggest NK was itself being attacked.

It was not fun seeing the saber-rattling on Twitter after reading, as Twitter does have a significant part in the story.

[sbierwagen]

Yes, 2020 was much better, despite the scattering of Orange Man Bad that the author couldn't help from inserting.

One important thing is that the US's response to NK in that book was non-nuclear. They can kill millions of Americans but they are not actually an existential threat. The US did not use nuclear weapons on Afghanistan after 9/11, they used conventional explosives.

Another is that, according to 2020 at least, the North does not have a very robust nuclear command and control communications system, or, being a small country, much in the way of space surveillance assets. They apparently use regular cell phones and commercial imagery.

One of the unfortunate coincidences that kick off the nuclear launch is that the cell phone network is overloaded after South Korea does a missile strike on one of the dictator's residences. From NK's view, missile strikes on official residences and the abrupt collapse of communications, with no reliable information from the outside world, mean that a NATO decapitation strike is underway, so they launch the missiles before they lose them. You wouldn't have the same scenario in the US, simply because we have so many more nuclear weapons and a much longer nuclear command line of succession that a decapitation attack with conventional weapons would take millions of cruise missiles. (North Korea has no backup dictator, while the US has 18 people in the order of succession.)

[lazide]

Russia may be kinda sorta next to North Korea, technically.

But you know who is really next to North Korea and has nukes? China.

It seems weird that Russia would even particularly care to be involved in this scenario, frankly.