What with all the other things on our plate, many of us have shoved to the side, or into the background, something that used to be - as in, it was when I was growing up - Topic A among serious items for discussion: Nuclear warfare.
This book, Nuclear War by Anie Jacobsen, ought to restore our consideration of the threat to its proper, and much more prominent, place.
She structures this highly readable overview within a fictional but stunningly compelling frame: A scenario for how a large-scale nuclear war could happen today or in the near future, and what would result if it did.
Such a war could happen all too easily, and the consequences could be far more absolute than many of us probably have come to think.
After all, in this day of super-tech capabilities, the prospects for shooting missiles out of the sky should be realistic, shouldn't they? (Look at what Israel has recently done to non-nuclear missile swarms sent from Iran.) But it turns out that no, we don't actually have a decent defense against something like that.
And we must surely have enough safe4guards and backups to keep sanity at the fore? Well, no. One of the scariest elements of the book is its gamed-out time frame: Less than a half hour from an initial missile launch until World War III is well and truly underway. All the critical decisions probably would be made in the span of about 15 minutes. The whole immense global war could be over and done - along with all of us - in a couple of hours. No time to prepare, or even run for a shelter (not that those would do any significant good, given the power of today's nukes.)
The scenario Jacobsen sketches involves an initial nuclear attack on the United States by North Korea, which on its surface suggests something of limited scope. But no: The whole world is rapidly drawn up, and all or nearly all of human civilization, as well as most of the human population on our globe (not to mention immense numbers of other living things) are rapidly wiped from existence.
There's no going back. Since the first person figured out how to create a nuclear weapon, humanity has been stuck with it: We could (in theory) destroy every nuclear weapon, but we can't eliminate the knowledge of how to make a new one.
Jacobsen offers few thoughts on how to improve our situation - that's one weakness in the book - but possibly additional research on blocking the weapons, improving defenses and maybe ultimately finding ways to disarm them could be helpful. Maybe, since you could never say can't-ever to technology.
In the meantime, here's a book with some solid motivation to work toward finding some answers, and avoiding the nobody-wins scenario that would be nuclear war.