It’s three o’clock in the morning and the flunkey appears, gripping a phone. Bad news, of course. Apparently, North Korea has launched a nuclear attack on the West. What to do next? Read a book. Or rather, speed-read since the countdown has already begun. Annie Jacobsen’s newly published, masterly work Nuclear War is what you need, prime minister. The publicity people are calling it a “compulsive non-fiction thriller”, but don’t let that put you off. Jacobsen draws on interviews with dozens of named experts and declassified documents to put together a credible protocol for, in the event of a nuclear attack, what would happen next.
Frightening fact one: to reach a North Korean target the Minutemen missiles would have to cross over Russian territory. What
