This horrifying, unsettling book begins at 4:03 AM in the darkness of a North Korean autumn morning when the ‘mad king’ launches a Hwasong-17 ICBM with a nuclear warhead 100x the power of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.  It’s been 80 years since America ended WWII with one of only four Abombs in existence at that time. Since then nuclear arsenals have increased to thousands of warheads in possession of the U.S., Russia, North Korea, and six other nations. The assumption has been that mutual assured destruction would deter any nation for the use of these weapons. That assuption in this scenario has proven false.

With cold precision and mind-numbing acronyms and details, Jacobsen takes the reader through 350 pages of terror.  U.S. technology developed over the decades at a cost of trillions of dollars has detected the North Korean launch within a fraction of a second and incredibly sophisticated satellites and radar confirm the launch and identify Washington D.C. as the target, but there is nothing that can be done to stop the missle as we watch minute by minute until it destroys the Pentagon and every building and person in a nine mile radius.  A second N. Korean missile is launched from a submarine off the California coast immolating the Diable Canyon nuclear power plant and spreading radiation along hundreds of miles of the coast.

The U.S. military and government move swiftly in a coordinated and planned manner, but with this unprecedented action by the ‘mad king’, all the planning and hardening of command structures is in vain as first Russia and then NATO are inexorably drawn into the first and final nuclear war.  The critical element here is time.  The U.S. President has only 6 minutes from the earliest warning of a nuclear launch to decide how to respond.  If he launches, millions of people will die. If he doesn’t, he may lose the capacity to do so and many more millions of Americans may die.

The nearly two pages of acronyms used to refer to U.S. military and government entities involved in the chaos of the 24 minutes from the alert warning of the North Korean launch to the total destruction of Washington D.C. is a subtle indicator that ‘all the king’s men could not put Humpty together again.”

The final chapters describing the famine, disease, darkness, and end of civilization due to nuclear winter and the look 24,000 years into the future take us from the nail-biting, agonizing watch of the approach of Armageddon, to the reality of how a nuclear war would end.  WWIII lasts less than an hour and a half.  Millions have died.  Cities have vanished.  Radioactivity that will last hundreds of years overspreads the earth.  The sun is blocked out by the clouds of smoke and debris. There is no electricity, heat, food, shelter. As Kruschev famously stated, “The living will envy the dead.”  Quotes from Einstein, Carl Sagan, and others have warned that the use of nuclear weapons would likely end our world as we know it. Despite those warnings, nuclear weapons have increased in number and strength.  Jacobsen provides us with an ‘in your face’ of what we face as a result.

This is a tough, disconcerting, and finally important read.  Unlike the fiction of the end of the 20th C, don’t expect Ian Fleming’s James Bond, Robert Ludlum’s Bourne, or Daniel Silva’s Gidean Allon to bail us out.  One insane leader with the means to do so, can end our world later this morning.