ghost with books 👻📚 wants to read Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota, #4)
Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota, #4)
From the 2017 John W. Campbell Award Winner for Best Writer, Ada Palmer's Perhaps the Stars is the final book …
Whereas Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War is a primer on nuclear weapons and US nuclear policy with a fictional scenario used to illustrate how those nuclear weapons and policies could lead to the worst-possible outcome, this book is entirely a work of fiction and assumes that readers already have foundational knowledge about nuclear weapons and US nuclear policy. I wouldn't recommend this book to someone hoping to learn more about nuclear weapons and US nuclear policy—I would point those folks to Nuclear War and Command and Control, among other sources—but I would recommend this book to persons who enjoy military/political fiction.
I have just two complaints with this book:
First, it definitely reads like a [somewhat dry] novel rather than a Congressional commission report, as it proports to be.
Second, while the author was very careful to lay out a plausible scenario for the DPRK using nuclear weapons against the US and its allies—so much so that I felt that to be the raison d’être of this book—I felt that the US response to the DPRK's nuclear strikes stretched the very limits of believability. The scene with President Trump being mollified after the Navy officer runs out with the nuclear briefcase, in particular, seems utterly ridiculous to me. Combine Trump's ego with his volatility and the US's launch-on-warning posture, and I simply can't imagine a scenario in which the DPRK launches more than 50 nuclear missiles at US targets—including several on the US mainland—that doesn't result in nuclear retaliation.
I appreciate this book for its fast pace and the "it could happen" warning it relates, but it falls short both as a novel and as an educational resource.
