****.5

During the cold war, the threat of nuclear war was ever-present, much like climate change is now, but more immediate and imminent. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fears diminished, although the nuclear weapons never went away. As Lynas clearly describes, they are essentially still on a hair trigger, with the president of the United States allowed only six minutes to decide whether to launch a civilization ending retaliation if an enemy attack is detected. A similar system is in place on the Russian side. This should be intensely alarming, regardless of who currently inhabits the White House or the Kremlin.

Lynas approaches the impact of a nuclear war from the perspective of a climate scientist. He details the devastation caused by the initial detonation, but that's fairly well known and was covered in the recent "Nuclear War: A Scenario" by Annie Jacobson (although overall this is a much better book, and now that it's out would recommend not bothering with that one). Where Lynas shines is his insight into what happens next, which should scare even the most well-prepped prepper. Using the modern tools and climate models, he shows how the resulting firestorms form, and in turn lead to a prolonged nuclear winter as a result of all the gunk thrown up into the upper atmosphere. The effect is chilling, both literally and metaphorically.

He then deviates and looks back at previous cold periods and extinction level events in earth's history. While interesting, these topics have been extensively covered elsewhere, and are only peripherally related to the topic of the book. I found it to be an unnecessary digression that distracted from the main point.

We then get a history of the development of nuclear weapons, and gory accounts of the devastation caused by their use in Japan and the many tests conducted in the 1940's-1960's. I learned almost nothing from these sections because there have been many dozens of books that have exhaustively delved into every imaginable detail, and again they were only marginally relevant to the point of the book, which is the current threat and what to do about it.

More pertinent was the listing of various near misses, demonstrating the very real risks, and how close we've been to catastrophe on multiple occasions. At this rate, it's only a matter of time until the worst case scenario happens. Which leads to the concluding chapters, which consist of a forceful manifesto for disarmament.

There are lots of great quotes in the book worth repeating, but here are a couple from the conclusion that stuck with me:
"This is not a zero-sum game, it is a zero-win game."
"Fatalism is not an option, unless you’re content for the outcome to be fatal."

I rounded my rating down because it's a bit of a chore to get through the middle part of the book, which is a shame because the beginning and end are so important, but the main points almost get lost in the shuffle. Still, a highly recommended read, especially for the younger generations who don't remember the existential dread that I grew up with in the 80's.

Nuclear war is … bad. That’s a premise on which most of us can agree. However, for the past eighty years, nuclear war has been possible and—at various times, including this past week as I write this review (looking at you, India and Pakistan)—more or less likely. In Six Minutes to Winter, Mark Lynas catalogues the potential scope and consequences of nuclear war—including the dreaded but much-misunderstood nuclear winter—and then makes a passionate plea for supporting the cause of nuclear disarmament. Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for the eARC in exchange for a review.

In the first chapters, Lynas basically games out what would happen if two countries attacked each other with nuclear missiles. He goes over the literal global implications, from the estimated death tolls around the world to the difficulty of avoiding retaliation if a system mistakes a malfunction for a real first strike. However, one important detail looms large in these chapters: the spectre of nuclear winter.

Lynas spends a lot of time on nuclear winter, and for good reason. Portrayed in numerous movies, TV shows, and books, this phenomenon has often been misunderstood or misexplained. To help his audience fully comprehend how devastating nuclear winter would be to human civilization and life as we know it, he takes us through a whistle-top tour of Earth’s biohistory. He covers previous mass extinctions and connects nuclear winter with climate change (which is really what it is a form of) to demonstrate that this is definitely something we do not want and could not, reasonably, expect to survive in any meaningful sense as a species of consequence.

From there, Lynas segues into showcasing more of the individual human toll of nuclear war. For this he leans on first- and secondhand interviews with survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He tells us their stories and emphasizes all the myriad ways nuclear strikes can not just kill people but cause lifelong and indeed intergenerational trauma.

Finally, the last part of the book becomes a manifesto: nuclear war must be prevented at all costs, and only we (Smokey the Bear says) can stop nuclear forest fires. Lynas is quite vehement in his rhetoric here, arguing that this is the overriding issue of the time and that nothing should be allowed to get in the way of a unified movement for disarmament. In that last, he’s taking shots at progressive moments that have become mired in infighting over things like terminology—Lynas blames both the woke and anti-woke crowds, seemingly equally, at derailing disarmament.

It took me quite a while to read Six Minutes to Winter—I actually started other books alongside it, something I tend to avoid. First, this is just a dismal subject, something Lynas acknowledges readily. No one wants to think about nuclear war because we all feel powerless to do something about it. Second, though, this book is dry. Like technical dry. Though Lynas gets pretty fired up towards the end—a welcome sight—the first two-thirds of the book are difficult to get through, not just because of the subject matter but also because of how it is presented.

I appreciate Lynas’s insistence that resistance is the most rational reaction to the prospect of nuclear war. I might even agree with it. Yet I don’t think he’s going to succeed in disarming the irrational part of us with that approach. In the same way that yelling at people to fight against oil companies because climate change is an existential threat isn’t going to motivate them, neither will talking about the rational need to reduce nuclear weapon stockpiles. I don’t pretend to have a solution (other than perhaps the very awful prospect of another nuclear bombing of civilians in our lifetime to shock people into activism—something I of course do not advocate for). But like, as much as I agree with Lynas and would happily sign a petition advocating for disarmament, I would be lying if I said he’s galvanized me into going to a protest or organizing a local anti-nuke chapter of my own. So if that is the bar for success, this book is a failure.

That’s harsh though. There is a lot to appreciate about Six Minutes to Winter. It is meticulously researched. It is interesting albeit depressing. I learned a lot from it that I didn’t already know, even having read books like the much-cited Command and Control by Eric Schlosser. Anyone who is interested in international politics, warfare, and weaponry would do well to read this book. I’m just not convinced it will change hearts as well as minds … and that is a shame.