New Scientist Space - Cosmology

Not long after the last world war, the historian William L. Shirer had this to say about the next world war. It “will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquers and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.” As an investigative journalist, I write about war, weapons, national security and government secrets. I’ve previously written six books about US military and intelligence programmes – at the CIA, The Pentagon, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency– all designed to prevent, or deter, nuclear world war III. In the course of my work, countless people in the upper echelons of US government have told me, proudly, that they’ve dedicated their lives to making sure the US never has a nuclear war. But what if it did? “Every capability in the [Department of Defense] is underpinned by the fact that strategic deterrence will hold,” US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which is responsible for nuclear deterrence, insists publicly. Until the autumn of 2022, this promise was pinned on STRATCOM’s public Twitter feed. But to a private audience at Sandia National Laboratories later that same year, STRATCOM’s Thomas Bussiere, admitted the existential danger inherent to deterrence. “Everything unravels itself if those things are not true.” If deterrence fails – what exactly would that unravelling look like? To write Nuclear War: A scenario, I put this question to scores of former nuclear command and control authorities. To the military and civilian experts who’ve built the weapon systems, been privy to the response plans and been responsible for advising the US president on nuclear counterstrike decisions should they have to be made. What I learned terrified me. Here are just a few of the shocking truths about nuclear war. The US maintains a nuclear launch policy called Launch on Warning. This means that if a military satellite indicates the nation is under nuclear attack and a second early-warning radar confirms that information, the president launches nuclear missiles in response. Former secretary of defense William Perry told me: “Once we are warned of a nuclear attack, we prepare to launch. This is policy. We do not wait.” The US president has sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. He asks permission of no one. Not the secretary of defense, not the chairman of the joint chief of staff, not the US Congress. “The authority is inherent in his role as commander in chief,” the Congressional Research Service confirms. The president “does not need the concurrence of either his [or her] military advisors or the US Congress to order the launch of nuclear weapons”. When the president learns he must respond to a nuclear attack, he has just 6 minutes to do so. Six minutes is an irrational amount of time to “decide whether to release Armageddon”, President Ronald Reagan lamented in his memoirs. “Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope… How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?” And yet, the president must respond. This is because it takes roughly just 30 minutes for an intercontinental ballistic missile to get from a launch pad in Russia, North Korea or China to any city in the US, and vice versa. Nuclear-armed submarines can cut that launch-to-target time to 10 minutes, or less. Today, there are nine nuclear- powers, with a combined total of more than 12,500 nuclear weapons ready to be used. The US and Russia each have some 1700 nuclear weapons deployed – weapons that can be launched in seconds or minutes after their respective president gives the command. This is what Shirer meant when he said: “Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it.” Nuclear war is the only scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end civilisation in a matter of hours. The soot from burning cities and forests will blot out the sun and cause nuclear winter. Agriculture will fail. Some 5 billion people will die. In the words of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, “the survivors will envy the dead”. I wrote Nuclear War: A scenario to demonstrate – in appalling, minute-by-minute detail – just how horrifying a nuclear war would be. “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” UN secretary-general António Guterres warned the world in 2022. “This is madness. We must reverse course.” How true. Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, published by Torva (£20.00), is available now. It is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club: sign up here to read along with our members

In this terrifying extract from Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario, the author lays out what would happen in the first seconds after a nuclear missile hits the Pentagon

Embryos seem to have a sensor that picks up when nutrients are scarce, prompting them to pause their development until resources become more abundant again

A once-independent bacterium has evolved into an organelle that provides nitrogen to algal cells – an event so rare that there are only three other known cases

About 1.5 billion people worldwide carry a risk of conditions including malnutrition because of parasitic infection, and AI could help identify those affected

We can’t stir ordinary solids, but one research team now claims to have stirred an extraordinary quantum “supersolid”, generating tiny vortices

The physicist Peter Higgs quietly revolutionised quantum field theory, then lived long enough to see the discovery of the Higgs boson he theorised. Despite receiving a Nobel prize, he remained in some ways as elusive as the particle that shares his name

A small early-stage trial of the approach, which involves testing dozens of drug combinations on thousands of dishes of cells, may help people with cancer live for longer

Ground-level ozone, a product of pollution from cars, degrades insect pheromones, and this can result in mismatched mating and sterile offspring

We don’t know what alien life might look like, but if other civilisations can colonise multiple worlds, we might see planets that look unusually similar

These soccer-playing robots can respond faster than ones trained in a standard way because they improved their skills via an artificial intelligence-based technique called deep reinforcement learning

Our favourite sad songs seem to become less enjoyable when we try to take the emotion out of them

The skin microbiome may be a bigger cause of post-operative wound infections than bacteria contaminating hospital equipment

Research-level mathematics might seem an unlikely proving ground for artificial intelligence, but recent developments suggest it offers a route to automated human-like reasoning

My column about the spiritual side of science has seen many of you sharing your own awe-inspiring experiences, says David Robson

The prolific Adrian Tchaikovsky has two terrific sci-fi offerings out this year, one the story of a scientist turned prisoner shipped to a faraway planet, the other a light-hearted tale of robotic murder, says Emily H. Wilson

Since 2012, Mary Jo Hoffman has taken one snap a day of the natural objects around her. She explains what lies behind two of them - and what the "art of noticing" has brought to her life

From the Book of Revelation to extinction fiction, we just love end times. A new guide by Dorian Lynskey is full of gems

Inequality is a major obstacle to sustainability. The super-rich are an environmental horror story that we can't ignore, says Graham Lawton

Feedback finds that despite close investigation, more research is needed to "better quantify tail wagging in general"