Analysis by Keith Rankin.
Role: Economic historian.
Keith Rankin, 23 September 2026 – I recently read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War; a Scenario (2024), and it’s a sobering reminder of what’s at stake when the world’s elites play existential geopolitical games.
What use is geopolitics? Is it just a super-elite sport? A form of evangelism? As one astute American geopolitician said around 1992, following the passing of the Soviet Union: “What does the preacher do when the Devil dies?” (Refer, The Real History of the Forever Wars, Neutrality Studies, YouTube, 20 September 2026.)
Whoops, some numpty dropped the ball!
What’s the chance that an elite rugby player will drop the ball in a high stakes’ game? One in ten maybe? Would anyone choose to play elite sport if they had a one-in-ten chance of (literally) eliminating themselves and their opponent? I guess the Roman gladiators took those kinds of chances; but they typically did not have the option to choose.
The Heuristic Scenario
A heuristic scenario of a cataclysm is one used for exploratory or teaching purposes; not necessarily the most likely version of such a disaster.
Jacobsen presents her scenario by positing an unhinged North Korean regime initiating what would become a 72-minute cataclysm, by striking with a double-nuclear-warhead both a nuclear power station in California, and the city of Washington DC. She never really suggests why North Korea might do this; but her aim was to show how events might unfold, following an event which represented a failure of ‘deterrence’.
And she aims to show that nobody can really defend a successful nuclear strike of this type; and that war-game game-theory suggests that, once started, humans (taken collectively) do not have the intellectual bandwidth to avoid nuclear escalation and hence annihilation. And she aims to show that a nuclear death is not a nice way to go; not ‘pretty’. (Around 200 years ago, some Romantics – participants in a philosophical tradition which emphasised aesthetics – thought that a death by tuberculosis could be ‘pretty’; ‘cults of privilege’ can have deeply problematic belief systems. Refer to ‘Tuberculosis in the Romantic Era of Consumption’, chapter 14 of Epidemics and Society from the Black Death to the Present, Frank Snowden, 2019.)
Questions which were not raised by Jacobsen
What if the Jacobsen-narrated warhead which struck the California nuclear power station was not a nuke, and if the one which targeted Washington missed and did not explode? Would a dead-hit by a non-nuke on a nuclear power station be considered a nuclear war? Would the nuclear-retaliation algorithms be activated? And is there any sense of the word ‘rational’ which could justify a fullscale ‘murder-suicide’ response to a small or large ‘first-strike’ nuclear attack?
Fitting Aotearoa New Zealand into Jacobsen’s picture
Jacobsen’s Nuclear War is very northern hemisphere centric. New Zealand gets a single mention near the end, with the underexamined assumption that New Zealand, Australia and Argentina would have a few survivors; survivors even after a holocaust in which the United States and Russia both ‘shoot their (nuclear) wad’. The scenario that all life might be extinguished was too much, even for Jacobsen; though she did compare her event to an extinction event like that which killed most of the dinosaurs.
The scenario harks back to one possible event in paleontological history. Indeed, there may well have been a human near-extinction event in the past, tens of thousands of years ago; such as a super-volcanic eruption which killed everybody not living in southern Africa.
What matters for New Zealand is to understand that there are mid-range nuclear war scenarios, short of a complete apocalypse, which might lead to between say one-quarter and three-quarters of humanity surviving a year after the last nuclear detonation. In some of those scenarios – especially some of possible asymmetric scenarios – New Zealand could be an early target; meaning that all New Zealanders would be among the ‘definitely dead’.
The best way for New Zealand to avoid such an asymmetric nuclear scenario would be for New Zealand to be – and to be seen to be – strictly neutral. Unarmed neutrality; meaning that New Zealand could be a threat to nobody. Security through peacemongering rather than the absurdity which is ‘security through war’. As such, New Zealand, while welcoming genuine tourists and seasonal workers, should be wary of hosting millionaire pre-refugees; people who seek to buy their way into New Zealand [exit] in preference to advocating peace to their own countries’ governments [voice]. (Note this: Real estate agents reveal how A-list celebrities buy property in New Zealand, Catherine Smith, New Zealand Herald, 22 Sep 2026. People famous-for-being-famous might attract the most media attention. There are others who compromise New Zealand’s security by using New Zealand as a bolthole to shelter themselves from the consequences of their own follies.)
What happens to New Zealand in a ‘limited’ nuclear war which only destroys half of humanity? That could mean zero war-related deaths in New Zealand.
And what is the probability of such a war occurring by the end of this decade? I would say that the probability of such a war is greater than one-percent. That’s the probability of a person’s town being hit by a one-in-one-hundred-year flood; and we know that there have been plenty of those events in New Zealand and elsewhere, in recent years.
Everyone should be making their own estimate. And the elites should be publicly discussing, justifying, and contesting their estimates. Not wishful estimates; rather, estimates based on realism.
The world situation is this. We currently have a nuclear super-power (Russia) at ‘fullscale’ war with a non-nuclear power. Most realists would argue that the non-nuclear power – Ukraine – is serving as a proxy of Nato, the world’s most assertive nuclear super-power. Rhetoric coming out of Europe is more bellicose than anything coming out of Russia. Non-nuclear Ukraine just last weekend attacked – and killed people in – the capital city of its nuclear-armed adversary.
Historical Precedent
I remember a similar situation, in October 1962. In that year, the Ukraine-equivalent country was Cuba; Cuba was hosting nuclear-capable missiles aimed at the United States, the world’s biggest nuclear power. At the time, almost everyone would have said that the odds were ten-percent (or higher) that there would be a world-ending nuclear conflagration. Maybe another ten-percent possibility that there would be a non-world-ending nuclear conflagration. Some would have argued that I am being conservative here.
That game of Russian roulette was averted then, thanks to the then relatively wise incumbents in the White House and the Kremlin. Cuba’s loose-cannon president and his 2IC – Fidel Castro, and Che Guevarra – were disappointed that Cuba did not get to fire some sort of salvo at the United States.
The odds of a nuclear war, soonish, may now be similar to what they were in 1962. We should be talking about it. And, just as when we talked about climate change, the talk needs to be about adaption as well as avoidance; about survival in a world in which there is sea-level rise or a nuclear fallout.
Could anyone imagine President Kennedy not ordering as escalatory response in 1962, if Castro (and, by inference, Khruschev) actually fired missiles at Washington? Well, we all saw the recent attack on Moscow; that’s all who still watch the news. If we think back to 1962, such an attack should have shortened the odds. The issue is not whether Vladimir Putin is a ‘bad guy’ or a ‘good guy’. The issue is what his response will be, ‘justified’ or not. The second issue is what will happen to Putin if his response is seen by powerful compatriots as ‘too weak’. We do know what happened to President Kennedy thirteen months after his response; a response which was considered by some domestic political adversaries to have been a ‘climb down’.
Could New Zealand face a post-nuclear famine?
Consider a scenario that, despite mass destruction in the northern hemisphere, the climate and radiation levels are relatively unchanged in New Zealand. New Zealand’s present economy is heavily predicated on trade with the northern hemisphere; undertaken by northern hemisphere ships using northern hemisphere fuel, and returning with northern hemisphere consumables and fertiliser.
Would Australia save New Zealand by sending wheat and rice as food aid? Maybe Australia, assuming it has also survived largely intact, will have other priorities?
New Zealand would have to shift rapidly into arable farming, away from export-oriented meat and milk. The price of potatoes would soar. People would be fighting to pay megabucks for produce for sale in farmers’ markets. Kiwis would be regretting the bulldozing of New Zealand’s best horticultural land for housing developments.
On Monday, RNZ ran this interview: Arable farmers ‘checked out’ as farm struggles continue, RNZ 21 September 2026. The process of replacing staple food production with export-oriented meat and milk products continues unabated. New Zealand’s ability to feed itself diminishes, as New Zealand pursues a self-unreliance strategy which fails to acknowledge the geographic isolation of this archipelago.
I’ll finish here by noting that two of the most famous historical examples of preventable famine occurred within the British Empire, and to two food-exporting nations: Ireland in the late 1840s, and India in the early 1940s. The capacity to export meat and milk and space technology is not the same as the capacity to pivot, quickly, to staple domestic production sufficient to keep 5.4 million people alive and healthy.
About the writer:
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.