The Ritual and the Launch Code

On Nuclear Anxiety as Performance

1. The Stage

Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario reads like a Lars von Trier film — expertly crafted inevitability that carries you along in its shockwave while you simultaneously recognize the manipulation. Thirty minutes from first warning to civilizational rubble, told in real-time countdown format for maximum visceral impact. It's disaster tourism for people whose disasters remain largely hypothetical.

The book's audience isn't the folks organizing mutual aid networks or running community fridges. They have bigger fish to fry than hypothetical annihilation. Jacobsen writes for the luxury fear demographic: educated, suburban, secure enough to treat civilization collapse as intellectual exercise. People with enough bandwidth to appreciate the craft of narrative manipulation because they're not already living with daily infrastructure failures.

This is catastrophe awareness for me, but not for thee. The same readers who'll spend hours absorbing nuclear countdown scenarios often walk past homeless encampments without seeing them as evidence that civilization is already failing for some people. Nuclear anxiety becomes boutique apocalypticism — safely displaced in time (might happen) rather than the messy, ongoing, unequally distributed disasters happening right now.

The genre assumes an audience that needs to be introduced to the concept of systemic failure, when most people in 2025 are already living with some version of it. We've watched pandemics kill millions while governments flailed, climate disasters become annual events, infrastructure crumble in real time, democratic institutions nearly collapse from internal pressure. But nuclear disaster fiction still packages itself as revelation rather than redundancy.

2. The Rituals

Faced with genuinely uncontrollable threats, people create rituals that feel like resistance but function as therapy. The peace vigil, the commemorative art project, the symbolic protest — these serve important psychological and cultural functions while remaining strategically inert.

Consider the sincere activist making prints in Hiroshima this week, participating in peace protests with hibakusha survivors. The cultural work is meaningful: connecting with living memory, honoring victims, building community around shared values. But the implicit assumption that Putin or Kim Jong-un might adjust their nuclear calculations based on peace demonstration attendance is magical thinking of the highest order.

The nuclear anxiety industry has perfected this displacement. Think tanks, disaster fiction, peace movements, even academic analysis — they all offer the illusion of agency through consumption and cultural engagement. Read the right books, attend the right vigils, understand the right frameworks, and somehow you'll master the uncontrollable.

Hermann Kahn's "megadeaths" became not just policy abstractions but an entire cultural ecosystem selling the feeling that your engagement matters. The nuclear discourse doesn't just commodify fear; it commodifies the idea that consuming that fear constitutes meaningful action. Your anxiety becomes productive, your understanding becomes agency, your ritual becomes resistance.

But memory work is not resistance work. Both matter, but conflating them overstates individual agency in dangerous ways. The vigil honors the dead; it doesn't deter the living from creating more dead.

3. The Machinery

Nuclear decisions get made in sealed rooms by small groups of people operating under extreme time pressure, following protocols designed decades ago by other people who are now dead. The machinery was built to exclude public input, democratic deliberation, or moral reflection once certain tripwires activate.

When Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov sat in that bunker in 1983, watching screens that showed American ICBMs arcing toward Soviet soil, he had minutes to decide whether to report an attack that would trigger global nuclear response. No time for coalition-building, congressional debate, or consulting peace movement literature. Just a gut decision by one person that kept civilization spinning.

The command-and-control apparatus treats democratic accountability as a luxury it can't afford. Launch detection, threat assessment, response authorization — these happen on timescales measured in minutes, executed by officers who learned deterrence theory from textbooks rather than lived experience. The gap between democratic process and nuclear process is not a bug; it's a feature.

Current nuclear states include several autocracies completely insulated from public pressure, plus democracies where nuclear policy operates largely beyond electoral influence. When did a U.S. election last turn on nuclear weapons policy? Most Americans couldn't name our current targeting doctrine or warhead count. It's the ultimate expert-captured domain.

The traditional activist playbook — organize, protest, vote, write letters — assumes you're trying to influence leaders theoretically accountable to you. But Putin and Kim Jong-un don't read your op-eds or count your vigil attendance. Even democratic nuclear powers make these decisions through institutions designed to bypass normal political processes.

4. The Disconnect

The ritual continues anyway, because acknowledging powerlessness feels worse than performing agency. Peace activists write letters to autocrats. Scholars analyze deterrence theory as if understanding it grants control over it. Authors craft nuclear scenarios for audiences who mistake consumption for preparation.

This isn't cynical performance — the sincerity is real, the emotional investment genuine. But the gap between heartfelt cultural engagement and actual influence over nuclear policy is so vast it becomes almost tragic. The peace pilgrim returns from Hiroshima feeling like they've done something important about nuclear threats, while the submarines keep patrolling and the missiles slumber in their silos.

Jacobsen's book exemplifies this disconnect. She spends hundreds of pages demonstrating the mechanical inevitability of nuclear escalation, showing readers a process they have no meaningful control over, then pivots to vague calls for "awareness" and policy engagement. The manipulation is expert — you feel the countdown in your nervous system — but the suggested response remains ritualistic.

The nuclear anxiety genre serves people who need to feel informed and concerned about existential risks without confronting the existential risks already playing out in their immediate vicinity. It transforms powerlessness into the illusion of informed citizenship, helplessness into cultural sophistication.

Meanwhile, the people actually navigating systemic breakdown daily — through housing insecurity, medical debt, climate disasters — don't need hypothetical scenarios to understand how quickly everything can fall apart. They're not consuming nuclear disaster porn because they're living various forms of disaster reality.

5. The Reckoning

Maybe the most honest response to nuclear weapons is cynicism — not as nihilism, but as refusal to pretend that ritual equals resistance. The world might end in ways you can't prevent, through decisions made by people you'll never meet, using weapons deployed before you were born. You don't have to feel fine about that.

This isn't the stoic performance of Cold War masculinity or the optimistic activism of contemporary peace movements. It's permission to be honest about powerlessness without turning that honesty into another form of cultural work. Sometimes the most radical response to an impossible situation is simply acknowledging it's impossible.

The nuclear clock never stopped; it just got quieter while other crises got louder. Those Minuteman III missiles deployed in 1970 remain in their silos, still capable of ending civilization, maintained by crews who weren't born when the weapons were forged. The hardware outlasts the politics, the bureaucracies outlast the threats, and the procedures outlast the people who designed them.

You can still do mutual aid, still vote, still organize around things you can actually influence. But you don't have to carry the emotional weight of believing your personal political behavior could prevent nuclear war. The submarines will keep patrolling regardless of how many vigils you attend or books you read about megadeaths.

The peace movement offers false comfort through ritual engagement. The disaster porn industry offers false comfort through intellectual consumption. Maybe the more honest stance is offering no comfort at all — just clarity about where agency ends and acceptance begins.

It may be the end of the world as we know it. You don't feel fine about it. And that's okay.