The Hazard of Nukes

How the End Begins

West German demonstrators against NATO Pershing missiles, 1983

Alain Nogues / Sygma / Corbis

The Road to a Nuclear
World War III

by Ron Rosenbaum

Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $28

This is, at once, a very bad good book, and a very good bad book. Its conversational writing style—full of fragments, run-ons, pop-culture references, and silly asides—is unworthy of its serious subject matter. There are typos everywhere, suggesting a rush job. Several long passages are given over to word-for-word transcripts of interviews that could have benefited from editing.

Ron Rosenbaum also makes some elementary errors. For instance, he asserts that North Korea is capable of producing nuclear weapons with yields of one megaton or more. In fact, both North Korean nuclear devices tested so far were in the low kiloton range and probably “fizzled”—that is, failed to produce their anticipated yields, which were unquestionably far lower than a megaton. Reaching the latter requires mastery of thermonuclear fusion, and we have no reason to believe the North Koreans can manage it. He also repeats the common misconception that Israel can be destroyed by “one” nuclear bomb. Not to minimize the horror of such an event, but even if one assumes megaton-scale weapons in the hands of, say, Iran (an unlikely prospect), it would take several to destroy all of the main Israeli population centers in the “T” from Haifa to Ashkelon, Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—still not quite the whole country.