I have always taken it as a definitional point of pride for Generation X that our childhood of the 1970s and 80s was the final one sentenced to live every day in fear of nuclear annihilation, which on some days seemed like a near certainty. We rejoiced as the Soviet Union fell just as we emerged into adulthood, like a graduation gift felt around the world: Congratulations, you made it. You have all outlived the thing trying to kill you and everyone you love. Fear no more! And since then, it has been the solemn burden of we Gen Xers to tell the generations after ours how lucky they have it, growing up without this terror.

But a thing I learned from Annie Jacobsen’s crushingly grim 2024 book Nuclear War is that my cohort can set this burden down. In the early 90s, the chances of nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union dropped to zero, sure, by dint of one of those nations ceasing to exist. But the thousands of nuclear weapons possessed by the Soviets did not vanish into fairy dust, and nor did the people who knew how they worked, nor the knowledge to produce more weapons like them. And so three decades later, to hear some experts tell it—the experts that Jacobsen interviews—we are closer to nuclear holocaust than ever before.

It seems plausible that our culture, kids included, simply cares less about nuclear war now. I don’t have any kids, so I’m not sure whether it is a common playground topic the way it was for my classmates. But with culture so fragmented into innumerable online shards, instead of bound together by a handful of shared television networks, I rather assume that young people today aren’t as obsessed with the topic as all of my friends and I were. So many other crises pull at modern kids’ attention all day long, and give them plenty of other reasons for nightmares.

Into this setting drops Nuclear War, and it wants to refresh the cultural focus around its title topic.

Jacobsen’s book carries the subtitle A Scenario, and it makes clear that it speculates one way that things could go down, if worse comes to worst. But the scenario is presented not as precognition but as framework to shock the reader into horror and hatred for nuclear weapons. I can envision its scenario presenting a terrible novelty for a younger reader, who had no idea that instantaneous, irrevocable, and extremely literal destruction of the world is one bad decision away, at every moment. And in the case of older readers like me, the book rattles us into dropping the misconceptions of safety that we’ve held all of our lives.

The most profound shock, delivered again and again through elapsed-time readouts in the title of each short chapter, is how fast everything happens. The total running time of the war in Jacobsen’s scenario, from North Korea firing a single ICBM at Washington to the US and Russia emptying out their full nuclear arsenals at one another, is barely over an hour. If you started a movie and set your phone to Do Not Disturb a minute before that first ICBM fired, human civilization would end before credits rolled. Which they wouldn’t, because an EMP burst probably wrecked your TV, especially if you were sitting literally anywhere in the continental United States. Also you’d probably be blind or dying of rapid-onset radiation sickness if you hadn’t already turned to ash, been impaled by glass, or crushed under rubble from any of the thousands of nuclear fireballs and pressure waves ravaging the entire northern hemisphere all at once. Or swept away by a flood from a dam that malfunctioned because of that same EMP burst. And so on.

It’s the speed that kills you, in nuclear war. Nobody has time to think about anything. Reagan famously lamented out loud how an American president would have only six minutes to decide how to respond to an incoming nuclear weapon, and that fact hasn’t changed today. Jacobsen’s scenario shows how, under this impossible timeline, the kinds of miscommunication found in any stressful situation can easily muddle even the most heroic attempts to avert a worst-case scenario. Once one person launches so much as a single weapon at a nuclear superpower for any reason at all—especially a nation with a hair-trigger “launch on warn” nuclear policy, such as the United States—every road leads to global annihilation, in the theory that this book adheres to.

Jacobsen uses the phrase “zeroed out” several times to summarize the effect of a general nuclear war, with ten thousand years of human progress reset in just a few minutes. The aftermath would not be a sexy Fallout land of high adventure where plucky survivors comb through the crumbling ruins of modern buildings seeking high-tech treasures. There’s nothing left. Every piece of standing human achievement from Stonehenge onwards is obliterated.

In the concluding chapter, Jabobsen spends time with contemporary archaeologists studying an intriguing site, an ancient earthwork containing manufactured objects and structures in a part of the world where nobody expected to find such things. But the objects are all shattered, their purposes frustratingly obscure. We can only guess as to the intentions of the people who made them. Jacobsen suggests that, 25,000 years after the last nuclear submarine launches its final MIRV and the earth has healed enough to support agriculture again, the distant descendants of modern humans—if there are any—would be lucky to find even this much trace of our own cultures.

I took a bunch of other notes about details I’ve had wrong my whole life: how ballistic missiles work in the first place, for instance, and why they’re essentially impossible to stop, once launched. (You can still try, in the same why that you can try to stop a bullet in flight by shooting it with another bullet. It has about the same chance of success.) But that’s not what the book’s about. I learned about Nuclear War from a Warren Ellis blog post, where he mentions that Denis Villeneuve has optioned the book for a film adaptation. “The book is a relentless horror and nobody will thank him for bringing that to cinematic life,” Ellis muses, and I don’t suppose I would either, but I’d watch it anyway.

This book hurt me, it shook me and slapped me across the face, and I needed the wake-up. So did my inner ten-year-old, with his memories, and his nightmares.

There’s a part where Jacobsen really twists the knife, having us watch as the animal residents of the Smithsonian Zoo—among the most innocent of all American immigrants—perish in confusion, pain, and flame in the first minutes of the conflict. If there is a movie made of this book, then I hope that scene is preserved, lingeringly. Let that be the image I carry with me from this experience. I don’t know yet how this book has changed the course of my life, and I can’t know if any of it ultimately matters. But let me press the image of those burning animals to my heart. Give me the scar.