Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen
What a ride this book was! I didn't know I was so interested in nuclear war. That came out wrong. I didn't know that the technical minutiae of how nuclear war would play out would be so enthralling. I physically could not put this book down.
This is a really well researched book. It lists upfront (something that's normally done in the back) the people that were interviewed which include former high level members of the US government, generals, weapons engineers, analysts, scientists, etc. The scenario is very well thought out and it shows the terrifying scale of destruction that can happen in an hour. Any hour.
I obviously knew of the destructive effects of nuclear weapons, but I wasn't ready to see the numbers and facts about them. I didn't know the difference between the 15 kiloton bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a 1 megaton thermonuclear monstrosity. I didn't know that at the peak of the Cold War the US had more than 30.000 nuclear weapons. I didn't know that the interceptor missiles the US have are essentially useless. I didn't know that the Russian missile detection system can mistake the Sun and some clouds for 100 missiles coming their way. I was shocked to learn that if the US wanted to attack say North Korea with ICBMs (the missiles in the silos), they would have to fly over Russian airspace and they would be indistinguishable from an attack to Russia.
This is a fascinating book. It's proof of how world-endingly stupid humanity can be and how ignorant we are (or made to be) about the state of the world we live in.
The Kathryn Bigelow film A House of Dynamite covers part of this book, obviously with less technical detail and more focus on characters, but spoiler alert doesn't deal with the consequences. This book is a great complement to it.
I don't know if this genre has a name, but I absolutely LOVE well-researched, speculative non-fiction.