My news feed has been full of headlines about the end of the world. “Is war coming to Korea?” “Putin: Nukes in Ukraine?” Even: “Netanyahu may use THESE THREE WEAPONS to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities!”
And yet: there’s something about the threat of nuclear war that doesn’t feel real. Among my parents’ generation, the threat of atomic annihilation is woven through their childhood memories. My parents’ recollections of the Cuban Missile Crisis are especially vivid: saying goodbye to loved ones, last suppers, spectral radio static prophesying doom. My mother recalls Bob Dylan’s lyrics, “somebody tells me death’s comin’ round”—an anthem for North America’s doomed youth living under the threat of impending catastrophe.
As for my generation, our attitude towards armageddon has changed utterly. At best, it is one of weary indifference—at worst, sardonic apathy. Despite persistent announcements that nuclear risk is at its highest since 1962, the threat of nuclear war has become hyperreal, science fiction—and we impervious to shock. All over, nuclear bunkers have been converted into swanky nightclubs. When I mention the Marshall Islands to friends my age, I am usually met with blank looks. As for me: I can only imagine—or begin to piece together—a cultural climate so pervaded by fear that it inspired the absurd and chilling nihilism of a Dr Strangelove.
Ironically, it took reading a (semi)fictionalised account of armageddon to jolt me out of my cheery indifference. Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario is a work of speculative non-fiction—rigorous journalism with a splash of conjecture. One of Prospect’s books of the year and shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, Nuclear War is a minute-by-minute account of what might—would?—happen if the missiles started flying. The “scenario”: North Korea has launched a “bolt out of the blue” attack on the Pentagon. How will the US respond?
The scenario is fictional but it’s far from fantastic. The depth and specificity of Jacobsen’s research—which ranges from archival mining for declassified military documents to conducting interviews with military personnel directly involved in nuclear strategic planning—means that there is little room for conjecture. Nuclear War lays out the real-life protocols, choreographed with an absurd eye for detail by the US government, whose outcomes are, in effect, the end of human civilisation. “This is not fear-mongering,” says one retired general in Nuclear War. This could happen, at literally any moment. Dystopia, yes—but, quite literally, on the razor’s edge of reality.
Nuclear War could be classed as part of an emerging tradition of apocalyptic systems thrillers—dystopian fiction on steroids. Think Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future or Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis’s 2054, a next-world-war novel that opens with naval confrontation in the South China Sea and ends with nuclear conflict. But what makes Nuclear War unique is the breadth, depth and meticulousness of its research. Speculation backed up by an overwhelming mass of data.
Which isn’t to say that other dystopian literature fails to ground itself in facts and contemporary events. Several weeks ago, I found myself in a vast auditorium in Cheltenham’s town hall, one of the venues for the town’s annual literary festival, at an event marking 75 years since the publication of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. At the back of the hall, nursing my second coffee of the day, I listened, rapt, to DJ Taylor and Dorian Lynskey as they brought Nineteen Eighty-Four—a novel too often consigned to banality by repetition—to life. Orwell—primarily a journalist, Taylor emphasised—composed it slowly throughout the 1940s, during which time he came face to face with the twin beasts of Stalinism and Nazism. His impetus was the Tehran conference at the end of 1943, when Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin “effectively divided up the post-war world”.
As one point, with Jacobsen’s Nuclear War on my mind, I asked Lynskey to say more about dystopian fiction. What might have changed between Orwell’s time and our own? “The dystopian novel manifests two things” he responded. “Our nightmares about the future and our anxieties about the present.” In Orwell’s case, he transcribed a not-yet-realised future that was—is—at once futuristic and anachronistic, a surveillance state set in the shabby and greying London of the 1950s.
Today we read Orwell and feel that his ideas were so uncannily prescient as to seem prophetic (Lynskey cautions against this term, and I’d opt for proleptic); words such as doublethink, newspeak, thoughtcrime seem to apply with uncanny precision to our present-day lives, to the extent they have become staples of our vocabulary. Even Shoshana Zuboff, in her Age of Surveillance Capitalism, referred playfully back to Orwell in her description of society’s “distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power: Big Other”.
Present and future. After the Cheltenham event, feeling somewhat perturbed, I turned the words over in my head. In Jacobsen’s book, the “future” part seems to be missing—maybe this is what is bothering me. Nuclear War is not an articulation of a potential future, rather a radical re-articulation of the present—and this is, to me, what makes its dystopia so chilling. The “scenario” the book presents is entirely realistic, entirely possible, and could feasibly come into being, Jacobsen writes, at any moment.
In fact, in Jacobsen’s dystopia, it is as if the temporal structure of Orwell has collapsed in on itself: “future” has been replaced with “past”. She careens, compulsively, towards the archive, to the annals of history. Nuclear War is not just journalistic, it is forensic. Jacobsen charts the terrifying trajectory of scenarios modelled with exacting precision by generations of US military personnel and kept classified for decades. She relates the collateral effects of Electric Armageddon, as detailed by retired Brigadier General Touhill, whose monograph on EMP events is “still classified”. She tells of General David M Shoup, who attended a briefing in which US government officials laid out a “heart of darkness” by which one fifth of the earth’s population would be killed in a horrifying instant. She unearths the medical data of those who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book, in form and content, begins to resemble the petrified landscape of a baroque mourning play, in which corpse-like fragments of the past—and, of course, literal corpses—are reanimated in a vision of the apocalypse.
Nineteen Eighty-Four imagined otherwise: a bleak alternate vision of life under totalitarianism. In Nuclear War, all there is, eventually, is nothing.
In Cheltenham, I was struck by the notion that dystopian literature may be dead—or at least fundamentally changed. Lynskey disagrees. “I think there’s more dystopian literature than ever,” he said to me. And even the tech giants are getting in on the act. Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, proudly professed that he was inspired by Samantha, an AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, when developing ChatGPT, He even tried to employ Johannson to voice his new chatbot. But, in doing all this and admitting all this, he seems to profoundly miss the point: the near-future Jonze envisaged was an atomised and lonely one, in which a man (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with a deferential bot programmed specifically to pacify his insecurities. Depressing, no?
In a world run by the Altmans and the Musks, I don’t think it’s coincidental that Orwell is so often invoked as a ghostly ally. Sure, terms such as “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque” are overused to the point of ridiculousness—Taylor calls them “floating signifiers”—but they do give us a means of articulating how dystopia has, like it or not, become our lived reality. As Taylor observed during the talk: when Alan Bates was asked whether his experience of the Post Office scandal was Orwellian or Kafkaesque, he replied, “A bit of both.”