Review of Six Minutes to Winter: Nuclear War and How to Avoid It by Mark Lynas

Nuclear war is … bad. That’s a premise on which most of us can agree. However, for the past eighty years, nuclear war has been possible and—at various times, including this past week as I write this review (looking at you, India and Pakistan)—more or less likely. In Six Minutes to Winter, Mark Lynas catalogues the potential scope and consequences of nuclear war—including the dreaded but much-misunderstood nuclear winter—and then makes a passionate plea for supporting the cause of nuclear disarmament. Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for the eARC in exchange for a review.

In the first chapters, Lynas basically games out what would happen if two countries attacked each other with nuclear missiles. He goes over the literal global implications, from the estimated death tolls around the world to the difficulty of avoiding retaliation if a system mistakes a malfunction for a real first strike. However, one important detail looms large in these chapters: the spectre of nuclear winter.

Lynas spends a lot of time on nuclear winter, and for good reason. Portrayed in numerous movies, TV shows, and books, this phenomenon has often been misunderstood or misexplained. To help his audience fully comprehend how devastating nuclear winter would be to human civilization and life as we know it, he takes us through a whistle-top tour of Earth’s biohistory. He covers previous mass extinctions and connects nuclear winter with climate change (which is really what it is a form of) to demonstrate that this is definitely something we do not want and could not, reasonably, expect to survive in any meaningful sense as a species of consequence.

From there, Lynas segues into showcasing more of the individual human toll of nuclear war. For this he leans on first- and secondhand interviews with survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He tells us their stories and emphasizes all the myriad ways nuclear strikes can not just kill people but cause lifelong and indeed intergenerational trauma.

Finally, the last part of the book becomes a manifesto: nuclear war must be prevented at all costs, and only we (Smokey the Bear says) can stop nuclear forest fires. Lynas is quite vehement in his rhetoric here, arguing that this is the overriding issue of the time and that nothing should be allowed to get in the way of a unified movement for disarmament. In that last, he’s taking shots at progressive moments that have become mired in infighting over things like terminology—Lynas blames both the woke and anti-woke crowds, seemingly equally, at derailing disarmament.

It took me quite a while to read Six Minutes to Winter—I actually started other books alongside it, something I tend to avoid. First, this is just a dismal subject, something Lynas acknowledges readily. No one wants to think about nuclear war because we all feel powerless to do something about it. Second, though, this book is dry. Like technical dry. Though Lynas gets pretty fired up towards the end—a welcome sight—the first two-thirds of the book are difficult to get through, not just because of the subject matter but also because of how it is presented.

I appreciate Lynas’s insistence that resistance is the most rational reaction to the prospect of nuclear war. I might even agree with it. Yet I don’t think he’s going to succeed in disarming the irrational part of us with that approach. In the same way that yelling at people to fight against oil companies because climate change is an existential threat isn’t going to motivate them, neither will talking about the rational need to reduce nuclear weapon stockpiles. I don’t pretend to have a solution (other than perhaps the very awful prospect of another nuclear bombing of civilians in our lifetime to shock people into activism—something I of course do not advocate for). But like, as much as I agree with Lynas and would happily sign a petition advocating for disarmament, I would be lying if I said he’s galvanized me into going to a protest or organizing a local anti-nuke chapter of my own. So if that is the bar for success, this book is a failure.

That’s harsh though. There is a lot to appreciate about Six Minutes to Winter. It is meticulously researched. It is interesting albeit depressing. I learned a lot from it that I didn’t already know, even having read books like the much-cited Command and Control by Eric Schlosser. Anyone who is interested in international politics, warfare, and weaponry would do well to read this book. I’m just not convinced it will change hearts as well as minds … and that is a shame.