My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the investigative reporter Annie Jacobsen, whose hair-raising new book Nuclear War: A Scenario imagines – minute by minute – what would unfold if the nuclear balloon went up. But rather than a work of fantasy, this is based on meticulously sourced reporting about the effects of nuclear weapons and the structures and policies that govern them. We all knew it would be bad but Jacobsen tells us just how bad, and how fast, and quite how little the people who push the button will actually know about what's going on.

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