Natzsofast, Guido

 h/t WRSA

In the linked post, CA takes note of a Substack blogpost discussing the book in the header.

We read that very book a couple of months ago, and reached entirely different conclusions.

First, Jacobsen can write at grade level.

That's the good part of the book.

Now, the bad, and then the ugly.

Most of the people she's talking to about nuclear scenarios haven't been within a country mile of the operating parts of strategic response for anywhere from 20-40 years.

Pardon me all to hell for noting that in strategic planning, that's about three entire lifetimes. If Jacobsen had set out to write a book about the topic in, say, 1985, this book would have been brilliant. It also would have broken about 50 NDAs, and at least three national security felonies. Which would have put most of her confidantes, and herself, in Supermax to this day.

That's the bad.

The ugly?

She concocts her entire "This is plausible, I swear!" scenario around one very specific set of circumstances. One, out of a universe of 10,000 such scenarios.

This is like looking at one of Edison's thousand failures at inventing a working incandescent light bulb, and then focusing all your effort at straw-manning just that one, then damning electric light on that sole basis.

In the book, for GAK (God Alone Knows) Reasons, the Norks pop off a nuke at the U.S., then follow it up with more canned sunshine.

Then, she, from her decades of no experience in nuclear warfighting and planning, decides that the U.S. response would necessarily be to launch nukes over the North Pole, necessitating overflying Russia and China, yet cleverly without informing either of them of this idiot savant strategy.

Leaving those poor boobs in both countries, with inferior predictive abilities, to conclude that the US was attacking them, instead of the Norks.

Leading directly and happily to Jacobsen's nightmare 'Use them or lose them" orgy of everyone launching everything at everyone else. All life in the Northern Hemisphere ends.

QED.

Point Of Order, Shit-For-Brains: Maybe nuclear war planners at the Pentagon, having wargamed that scenario out, from both sides of the chess board, about 10,000 times before it occurred to you, might have, y'know, figured out for their own goddamned selves, a reason or ten why obliterating Norkistan by launching missiles on a polar route over Russian and Chinese territory might be a bad idea, for a few hundred thousand megatons of reasons, and so they wouldn't do that, even without the ankle-biting genius of some half-bright writer coming up with a flaw in that plan all by her lonesome.

Maybe they'd elect to respond with missile subs closer to Norkistan, and leave the Minutemen in their silos.

Or just conventionally bomb the shit out of Norkistan, all the way to the Yalu River. We've seen us do that before.

We're just spitballing here. Meaning it's theoretically possible that someone whose sole military experience is watching movies and talking to people who retired from the military when Daddy Bush was president, might not be privy to the highest levels of military thinking 10, 20, 30 or more years later, and may be talking out her other end about all the things she doesn't know she doesn't know.

SecDef Rummy called those unknown unknowns. Jacobsen's not even familiar with the concept.

Granted, the recent leadership at the Five-Sided Puzzle Palace leaves a lot to be desired, and the lack of military intelligence is a chasm with no discernible bottom, but the steely-eyed missile men who planned and ran SAC when we had such a thing seemed to have a pretty good handle on the whole smart vs. galactically stupid thingie. And they didn't throw out all common sense in the SIOP just because the Soviet Union folded.

In others words, Jacobsen is no Tom Clancy. She's not even a Fred Clancy. Clancy The Clown, maybe.

In fact, most of her nightmares were better covered, and more succinctly, with none of Jacobsen's lurid verbosity, way back in 1972, (fifty years before this topic even occurred to Jacobsen, if you're keeping score) in a spiffy little tome called When War Comes, by Martin Caidin, whose sci-fi book Cyborg was the basis for the whole Six Million Dollar Man television programs, along with books-turned-into-films like Marooned and The Final Countdown.

If you want the actual nuclear, chemical, and biological nightmare list, and just the facts, without any gratuitous advocacy, you should get a copy (nearly free for the asking from the Internet Archive link above), or hunt down a dead tree edition (you can't have our copy, well-thumbed since the 1970s), and bone up on the topic. Little of it is any less applicable as far as it goes than it was the day it went to print.

But that's because Caidin was a stickler, in his fiction and non-fiction, for actual facts.

Jacobsen starts by describing the indescribable horror of a nuclear holocaust, and then works backwards to make one inevitable, simply by assuming she's the smartest person in the room, having the entire US Strategic Command fight this imaginary scenario in the most asinine way she can concoct, and finding the one way such a thing could be stupidly inflicted on humanity, then riding that pale horse to death, whipping it there with unmatched frenzy, and bankrupting a couple of ink companies in the telling.

Which is why, after reading it, we didn't review it or recommend it to anyone. We're simply not cruel enough to do that.

It doesn't age well (as in, by the time you get to the end of the book, you're wishing you'd spent your time on something profitable).

It is, in point of fact, nothing but someone trying to flog the whole premise behind the excremental TV melodrama The Day After, which focused solely on the horrible effects of a nuclear war, and sought to put wind in the sails of the whole Soviet-sponsored nuclear disarmament movement during Reagan's presidency, but which all looked jackassically stupid and short-sighted by 1990, after the Soviet Union imploded, taking the entire premise with it, not least of which all those Soviet rubles for Useful Idiots' astroturfed peace movements.

If Jacobsen had wanted to do society a service, she could have documented that the major reason nuclear war is even being discussed recently is to only an infinitesimal degree the proliferation of nukes to morons like the Kim Family Crime Syndicate in Norkistan, and overwhelmingly a thing again mainly because the darling superhero despot of the half-bright, Vladimir Putin, has rattled Russia's moldering and rusty nuclear saber about 40 times since his disastrous invasion of Ukraine, to try and bluff and bluster his way to a military conquest he cannot win on the ground.

Write a book on the megalomania it takes to think threatening the release of canned sunshine is a reasonable and rational way to achieve ground conquest, and talk about the threat to world peace that is (recognized as such by such shrieking warmongering political partisans as 250-years-neutral-until-Putin Sweden, and every single country that was under Soviet Russia's thumb from 1945-1991). FFS, not even Stalin nor even actual Hitler got Sweden to abandon its centuries-old neutrality, but Putin accomplished that in less than a year of trying.

Print it in Russian, and send copies to Moscow. What the hell, what's 50 years in a Siberian gulag between friends, right Ms. Jacobsen?

Maybe try the same thing for the lunatics in Pakistan and Iran. If you can find anyone there who can read.

Otherwise, absent that effort, Jacobsen is just beating the nuclear disarmament drum again, 50 years after it failed in America and Europe the first time, and beloved mainly of the continued Useful Idiots of the Stalinism that died in Moscow circa Yeltsin, but thrives in American academia and media among the halfwit class.

Save yourself the twenty bucks and multiple hours it would take you to read Jacobsen's drivel. Get a copy of When War Comes, and John Hersey's Hiroshima, and watch some historical newsreels on YouTube instead, and you'll be $20 richer and forty IQ points smarter than you'd get by wasting the time or money on Nuclear War.

If you own a goat, wait for the book to show up in the $2 rack at a bargain bookstore. Then get it, and feed it to the goat. It's cheaper than goat chow at that point, and whatever Billy or Nanny shits out afterwards will be much smarter than what Jacobsen did.

We can't stop you from wasting your time and money, but afterwards, kindly remember that we tried.

TL;DR: When a half-bright second lieutenant, or even a midwit cadet at Colorado Springs could come up with a decent "Why this scenario would be galactically stupid" position paper on their lunch hour recess, you have not found wisdom, nor anything close to it.

Our rating: Were still trying to figure out how to give this sort of codswallop negative stars. We kind of like the idea of giving it five Black Holes:

 ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ . 

Stupidity so concentrated no illumination or information escapes. 

Or maybe just Five Piles: 

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