Facing Nuclear War | 6 April 2024 | P. Dutton has just published a startling book by Annie Jacobsen titled Nuclear War: A Scenario. The "scenario," as she describes it in an Author's Note, begins with a nuclear strike on the Pentagon, a "Bolt out of the Blue" that the U.S. Nuclear Command and Control System (NCCS) calls an "unwarned large [nuclear] attack." ...We learn that the heat from a 1-megaton thermonuclear fireball will ignite everything flammable extending out several miles around it, followed by a great firestorm that consumes everything in a "100-or-more-square-mile area." In addition to the nuclear fireball's blinding pulses of light, nuclear blast waves generate wind up to 300 mph--2--times greater than a category 5 hurricane. An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generated by the blast "obliterates all radio, internet, TV [and] cars electric ignition systems in a several-mile ring outside the blast." This is followed by a 7-10 year long nuclear winter where temperatures stay 40 degrees lower than normal. A 1-megaton (1,000 kilotons of TNT) thermonuclear weapon is sixty-six times more powerful than the 15-kilotons of TNT atomic bomb the U.S. Air Force dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.