Review

Books

Culture

War & peace

6 August 2025

5 min read

Nuclear War A Scenario: the book that imagines the inconceivable

It's the most depressing book that you really need to read

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A nuclear explosion glows red and orange against the night sky.

A test explosion, 1956.

Nuclear War A Scenario (Torva, 2024) by Annie Jacobsen is about the most depressing book you could ever read and, perversely, all the more reason to read it. Collectively, the human race has buried its head in the sand over the existence, power and proliferation of nuclear weapons. We are understandably focussed on the lasting impacts of climate change; however, nuclear war promises planetary destruction and the risks surrounding it have grown, rather than lessened, since the end of the Cold War.

To help us focus on what we would rather not, Annie Jacobsen gives her book a plausible but hypothetical scenario. It starts with North Korea, for there we have an unbalanced, remote individual; an empathy free despot with unfettered power and unimaginable weapons at his disposal that now have the capacity to reach the east coast of the United States.

We do not learn his reasons for launching missiles against the US in the scenario and never would, were it to happen, because Armageddon takes only minutes to unfold. Jacobsen is deeply informed round nuclear war, having talked to many highly placed American officials. One recurring anxiety she meets is that the decision to launch nuclear missiles is in the hands of the President alone and the US still operates on the so-called Launch on Warning doctrine.

Launch on Warning means America will fire its nuclear weapons once its early warning sensor systems merely warn of an impending nuclear attack. These systems are sophisticated, but they can also be wrong, as the US discovered in 1979 when it briefly believed it was under attack from the Soviet Union. In Jacobsen’s scenario, the President has six minutes to decide what measures to take and has something approximating a menu to assist with this. Ronald Reagan observed:

Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to release Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?

The menu, a little like ordering pizza with preferred toppings, is supposed to help with that moment.

In Jacobsen’s scenario, US nuclear weapons are unleashed against North Korea but have to travel over Russia to get there. Russia’s early warning systems are less sophisticated and in the scenario these US missiles are believed to be an attack on Russia, not North Korea. This leads to Russia’s own uncompromising, near instantaneous response which leads to … well, you get the picture.

A one megaton thermonuclear weapon detonates at one hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit, which is four or five times hotter than the temperature at the centre of the sun and creates a fireball that expands at millions of miles an hour. This alone is unimaginable; replicating it hundreds of times over is impossible. The injuries sustained among those left; the loss of food, water, sanitation; the breakdown of law and order; the arrival of nuclear winter where temperatures plummet for decades without any infrastructure led Nikita Khrushchev to say: ‘the survivors will envy the dead’.

Mark Lynas, a writer who for years has been helping the world to understand the science of climate change has recently turned his focus on the nuclear threat in his book ‘Six Minutes to Winter’. He observes:

‘There’s no adaptation options for nuclear war. Nuclear winter will kill virtually the entire human population. And there’s nothing you can do to prepare, and there’s nothing you can do to adapt when it happens, because it happens over the space of hours. It is a vastly more catastrophic, existential risk than climate change.’

Reaching the end of human capacity is an unsettling experience. Solutionism is the Valley’s mantra: technology can solve every human problem, but binary thinking neglects the social, political and moral complexity of many issues and, in any case, catastrophic nuclear explosions are as likely to happen by accident as design - and could do at any time. It’s not that we need more time for AI to resolve this existential threat; it’s that it never will.

This is where the moral strength of faith traditions come into play as people embrace the strange hope of the powerless. Christian faith in particular cannot succumb to fatalism or the hacking of the book of Revelation to interpret the end of all things as code for nuclear war. God is creator and we are co-creators with him; we are not called to destruction when he has promised to renew the face of the earth through the resurrection of Christ.

There is something specific about our generation. For eighty years, since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have been the first generation with the capacity to destroy the whole world. Understandably, we do not want to think about this, but the fallout from this nuclear denial is that risks continue to multiply. More nations are thinking about developing nuclear weapons in an unstable world. In June 2025, the global nuclear watchdog, the IAEA said Iran was failing to meet its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in two decades and within days, Israel had launched missile strikes on Iranian nuclear sites – and many other targets – to set its nuclear programme back, followed in a significant escalation by US strikes. Nuclear weapons are a very present cause of insecurity, as the recent missile exchanges between India and Pakistan show so gravely.

Despots watched what happened to Muammar Gaddafi after he relinquished his designs on weapons of mass destruction following pressure from western powers and are unlikely to make the same mistake. No-one can be sure the current US administration will offer a nuclear umbrella to Europe, especially when the President’s instincts are not internationalist and his preoccupation is with a golden dome shielding continental America instead.

Almost no-one has agency in this, except for one vital piece of the puzzle: intercessory prayer, rooted in the promises of God. The ancient psalm writer prophesies:

He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;

He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;

He burns the shields with fire.

Be still, and know that I am God!

I am exalted among the nations,

I am exalted in the earth.

And something greater than the spear is among us today.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.