Annie Jacobsen – Nuclear War

Would you even have time to duck and cover?

There is only one scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end the world as we know it in a matter of hours: nuclear war. And one of the triggers for that war would be a nuclear missile inbound toward the United States.

Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds’ notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have.

In her new book Nuclear War: A Scenario, Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made.

Join us as Jacobsen returns for a new Club program examining the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch.

Photo by Hilary Jones.

March 26, 2024

Speakers

Annie Jacobsen
Journalist; Author, Nuclear War: A Scenario; X @AnnieJacobsen

In Conversation with Quentin Hardy
Former Head of Editorial, Google Cloud

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Hello. Discussing the career of Robert Oppenheimer and the gathering of several hundred of the world’s most brilliant people at Los Alamos in the mid 1940s to develop the atomic bomb. The physicist Freeman Dyson described it as a Faustian bargain in which theoretical physicists were given the opportunity to make their ideas

And their theories into a concrete reality through the almost unlimited economic resources of the world’s greatest economic power. In exchange, they were compelled by this bargain to turn over their results to the world’s greatest military power, also supported by the US economy. As a result of that devil’s bargain, as we speak today,

Thousands of people are standing by to commit global genocide on command. That was our deal with the devil. We’ve been living with it for almost eight decades, 24, seven every minute, thousands of people standing by, committed to clear total nuclear warfare. If the necessity occurs. The prospect was

First among two nuclear powers and now among many, many nuclear belligerence, a number that seems to be growing inexorably. Now, most of us have some dim understanding of that destructive potential. We hear about the presidential football or the missile launch. With the missile launch codes or with the silos of devastating rockets

In North Dakota, across our prairies, plains and submarines flying nonstop under the water, seeking, protecting, deterring. What very few of us know is what an elaborate and terrifying system of global destruction the United States has built and improved upon for eight decades in nuclear war, a scenario annnie Jacobsen takes us through

This little known and critical system of deterrence and failing deterrence global annihilation. It is a shocking and fascinating read and upon publication, an essential text in any discussion of where this Faustian bargain has taken us and what the United States might do in the future.

Now, as you know, if you wish to present me with any questions to ask any during our talk, please submit them in the YouTube text chat during our talk and I’ll address them in due course. Annie Jacobsen Welcome to the Commonwealth Club. It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Well, let’s begin by talking a little bit. Why? What led you to this book and perhaps in particular the character of John, a tribal leader? So as a national security reporter and investigative journalist, I write about war and weapons, national security and the secrets. Six previous books.

Imagine the number of my sources, 100 per book. And how many of those individuals said to me with a kind of, you know, prideful chest swelling, my life’s work was dedicated to preventing nuclear World War three. And during the last administration, the fire and fury rhetoric of it

All, I got to thinking what would happen if deterrence failed? What would happen if prevention fail? And I took that question to the highest level, upper echelon national security sources that I had and others. And I asked them exactly that. And and that was the impetus for this book.

And of course, John Revelle was a rare individual, now deceased, who left behind a memoir that gave a tiny glimmer of what a nuclear war plan would actually be like, because those are jealously guarded secrets within the United States government.

And I was able to springboard that into a whole lot of other questions. And of course, in the present moment, it involves satellites and other players that Mr. Rebell never envisioned being part of the system. The system has grown and grown and grown.

You don’t take apart older parts, you just build up on them and you have while the warheads have cut down somewhat, but they’re still utterly lethal. Your your conclusion seems to be you’re flying one another one will get flung and the system will just almost feed on itself. Correct?

That was one of the first of many jaw dropping realizations reporting this book was that nuclear war is a system of systems. It is built upon this idea that deterrence will hold. And to have found, as I did, the deputy director general of STRATCOM

Saying to a group of sort of insiders on the record, you know, if deterrence fails, it all unravels. And that unraveling is what I portray in nuclear war scenario. It’s one by one by one. And I’m talking about seconds and minutes of action, not days and weeks.

That was really what got me immediately thinking about how to frame the book and how to report it as the ticking clock scenario that it is. As you know, it’s three acts in 72 minutes. It’s over. You went to the spoiler? Yes, But you know, we have to go, right.

Because it’s in the end, it’s in the intro. And that’s the shocking thing. Essentially, the aftermath is a nuclear winter and radioactive drift, but undoing perhaps 50,000 years of human civilization in. Yeah, 72 minutes. 72 minutes is sort of when all the last weapons land on the United States. Yes. And

Well, we’ll keep going. That’s where essentially that’s where recorded history ends. Yeah, right. There is no tech. There’s no telling how anything could happen after that, because as you say, even nuclear winter was only thought about 30 years after the fact. No one knows what the real knock on effect of several

Thermonuclear weapons going off at the same time might be. And yet you spend many pages on those effects, but far more on the bureaucracy itself. And you thank or acknowledge interviews with dozens, scores of people involved in the system are two questions. One, as best we understand it,

How many other countries have systems like this? Well, of course, as you said in your intro, this all began with two superpowers, the United States and then Soviet Russia. The system was set up to sort of have that both sides pointing their guns,

Pointing their missiles at one another with the idea of deterrence being don’t you dare launch or else we will all die. And that’s how we get mad, mutually assured destruction. But as you correctly point out, things have changed and there are now nine nuclear armed nations. That we know of. That well.

I would be relatively certain that that’s what it is right now. I mean, there are an enormous number of people, very capable people working on these issues in nonproliferation, keeping track of things. I always remember to mention the Federation of American Scientists. They have a team that puts together the nuclear notebook.

And so they keep track of the warheads, which because of treaties get reported. There is, of course, an exception, and the exception is North Korea, the incredibly dangerous nuclear armed nation. And that is, of course, why I chose to threaten North Korea into the scenario the way in which I did.

Yes. Are in the context of mutually assured destruction. It’s built on game theory and rational actors. And at this point, those systems don’t really hold because a game with nine different players and nine different agendas is problematic. And if one of them is a history of highly unpredictable behavior,

It’s hard to say that it is a very durable system. That’s right. I mean, it’s the mad King logic that really frightens most people in the U.S. nuclear command and control system and I was surprised just how forthcoming a number of individuals were with how tenuous the situation is with North Korea.

And I’m talking about former secretaries of defense by example. I’m talking about, you know, former FEMA directors who would be in charge of nuclear war should it happen. That is the protection planning of the population, which is another absurd concept we can get into.

I mean, it’s just one shocking situation after the next. I was I was rather shocked that you have this FEMA document that says you can protect your family from a nuclear explosion. And I looked it up. It was published in 2019. This isn’t some comical 1960s duck and cover fantasy. You’re absolutely right.

And if you look and of course, I reproduce that in the book because it contradicts itself in every measure. And that is one of the most horrifying things about nuclear war, is that there is no way to survive a nuclear war.

It it no matter how it starts, it only escalates toward nuclear Armageddon. And so all of the things that are said in that single sheet, you know, kind of a terror sheet of what to do in the event of a nuclear war are absurd because it could perhaps

Save you in one situation and kill you in another situation. You know, go into your basement or don’t go into your basement. Well, it depends where that blast is when you are in your basement. And these, of course, are the details that I take the reader through with,

I think horrific specificity, but important specificity, because the point of all this is to demonstrate that the time to have conversations about all of this is now, not later, later is too late. Well, as a reader, I can assure you, specific, horrific. You checked both boxes. Don’t worry. Let me ask you

As a reader, I’m with it for a few hours. As a writer, you’re with it for a year. What’s it like to be in this bureaucracy and spend 20 or 30 years inside planning or actually acting in nuclear war scenarios? What’s it like to spend your life dedicated to a group of missile

Silos or bases or hidden command centers across the American prairie? Well, I talked to a lot of people, as you know, and a lot of the missile leaders. Yes. But really, people that are in charge of the policy, people that are in charge of advising the president in the moments

After detection that a nuclear missile has come at the United States, because that really that’s really what we’re talking about here in this scenario. It’s the fact that an intercontinental ballistic missile and by the way, most people do not know this, an intercontinental ballistic missile, also known as an ICBM,

Takes just 30 minutes to get from one side of the world to the next. And so the clock begins ticking then. And the president must make a decision to counterattack with nuclear missiles just about to amplify. It’s a 30 minute trip, but an American satellite has registered it

Less than a second into its journey, setting in a concatenation across space and the American continent. You’re absolutely right. And so it’s like you reverse engineer from that concept of the 30 minute missile to realize this is why this is why the system is set up.

We have these incredible satellite systems in space called zippers, space based infrared satellite systems. They’re astonishing with their technology. Think about it. They can detect the hot rocket exhaust on an ICBM launch from any enemy armed nation within a fraction of a second. This is remarkable.

And this is so that the president can launch his counterattack in minutes afterward. And that’s where you begin to realize. I think certainly you asked me about the reporting of it. Right. You know, all of the people behind the scenes that are rehearsing this 24 seven 365 are acutely aware

That deterrence is terrific if it holds. Their job is relatively simple. It is just rehearsing what might happen. But if nuclear war begins, it becomes a sequence of events. A follows. B There is no divergent from that pathway to apocalypse, and that is what is so appalling

And remarkable and also worthy of everybody. Understand ending, particularly as we enter into this present time of nuclear saber rattling, which astonishes me every day. I was also seeking to understand this the mental state of the people who are in this. Are they proud? Are they terrified?

Do they feel like they’ve been in something kind of devilish and lunatic or something noble? All of the above. In my experience as a reporter, many of my sources are in their eighties and nineties. And this is because I believe that as one gets older, this is certainly been my experience

And you have been involved in a very long career that you just pointed to, and we’re talking about the emotional part of it here. And then I spoke of in my opening thoughts on this having to do with reflecting back

About where we are about a person in their eighties that has been dedicated to the national security apparatus their whole life who thought, we had it discovered when the wall went down. Right. And so to answer your question, I got very emotional. People. People were very emotional with me in speaking.

I mean, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta now, I think he’s 85. I mean, has dedicated his life to public service. Former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, now in his nineties. Both of these individuals said to me that they were that what I was doing was important to them.

Panetta even said the American public needs to know what an interesting idea that people have gone from. You know, we’ve got this covered. Trust us to wait a minute, wake up and pay attention. Something that’s got to change or something very bad will happen.

I mean, that is the shocking thing in some ways that people don’t know. They could to some extent. Do you think it’s just too horrific for most of us to contemplate or the the larger part of the government would prefer? We didn’t dwell on this. You know, that is a great question.

And I think it has to do with access and I think it has to do with like the word openness comes to mind or transparency or ease of understanding. Nuclear weapons have long been relegated to sort of the the fancy crowd with bow ties. You know, and I have interviewed many of them.

And I, you know, I wrote Nuclear War a scenario to read like fiction. It is nonfiction. It has been called dystopian nonfiction. I wanted it to be easy to read like all of my books I write for the layman. I write for the regular people.

It doesn’t mean I’m not read by the generals at the Pentagon or the very smart PhDs in the university. But really, my heart and soul is with the average person who wants to understand a little bit more, a little bit easier about these concepts, which can seem very intimidating. I spoke at the

Beginning about Los Alamos and the ironic nature of brilliant people being so caught up with their ideas that they’re perhaps not really thinking through the consequences of what permanently endowing a military with these might mean. And you you illustrate that very well on a kind of mass and bureaucratic basis

When you talk about some of the scenario planning, the 1960 prediction that 275 million people will be killed in the first hour across Russia in a nuclear strike and I’ll quote you, the Pentagon had paid 1300 people to compile a war plan that would kill one

Fifth of the people on Earth in a preemptive first strike. Does anybody involved in that process understand just how crazy all that is, or are they just caught up in the act of doing it? And we know from that section that you’re referring to, which I kind of give the reader the

How did we get here, you know, build up to that when the scenario begins in the first fraction of the second that the missile is detected. But to your point, I think that it’s important to know and to realize that once upon a time, not that long ago, in the 1950s,

The admirals and generals who were doing this planning the nuclear war plans, they believed that nuclear war could be fought and won. They would, of course, have the bunkers to go into, which we now know won’t even be able to withstand multiple warheads.

But at the time, there was this sort of mad, you know, sort of ignorance, solid, determined. It is true because I say so attitude by these generals and admirals. I certainly read between the lines when I read those declassified documents. And yet that’s the legacy we’re all left with. I mean, you know.

Like like any good consultant, they sell this illusion about certainty that, okay, 275 million people will die if you’re off by 2%, that’s five and a half million people. But what I mean, it truly is madness. And yet and yet. So now the policy is not fighting and winning nuclear war.

It’s don’t have a nuclear war no matter what. But as I begin to point out in the book, once the scenario really gets going, is that the world is just one misunderstanding, one technical mistake away from nuclear Armageddon, because once the missiles start flying and again, SecDef has confirmed this with me,

You know, no one is really thinking about what the other nuclear armed nations are thinking as America tries to defend ourselves in a nuclear counterattack against a rogue nation. And you have all kinds of technical, you know, problems revealed in my reporting that

I relay in the book that also really make your hair stand on it. I mean, one of them, for example, is, of course, the fact that Russia because Russia alleges to have all the same technology that America has. So Russia’s Tundra system is the name of its early warning space satellite system.

And multiple defense scientists, both in the United States and Russian born defense scientists told me and I reported in the book that the Tundra system is deeply flawed. The best worst example is that the system can mistake sunlight for hot rocket exhaust on a missile. And so the tundra system could see perceive

Sunlight as a launch and launch in response. Yes. And quality of communication varies and people trust different communication. That’s one of the interesting dimensions in your scenario is quite plausibly the Russians have a spy somewhere near a missile silo in Wyoming and he notifies Moscow a missile has left the silo.

They’re going to just act on that. They’re not going to listen to anything Washington is saying, most likely. But let’s move into the scenario, because part of what you describe is a very plausible communications breakdown talk. And let’s let’s move to the scenario and how it unfolds. Well, of course,

The detection of the nuclear missile is second number one. And things moved very quickly thereafter because, again, what most people don’t realize is that the data systems are so fast that they pump data from space to three command systems, command bunkers in the United States in seconds.

And these three bunkers are famously the one in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. It’s made many appearances in movies. There’s also one beneath the Pentagon. It’s called the National Military Command Center. And there is a third bunker beneath STRATCOM, U.S. Strategic Command, the most powerful nuclear agency that almost no one has heard of.

The way it was described to me about these three command bunkers was like this The Cheyenne Mountain complex is the brain, the national command center beneath the Pentagon is the beating heart of nuclear war, and STRATCOM is the muscle. And those three centers, the commanders, every in each of those facilities

Within minutes of detecting a nuclear launch now begins to categorize the missiles and the targets that would be in the continental United States and prepares to tell the president and that when the president begins to have to make a counterattack decision,

As I report in the book, in the book, and was also surprised to learn the president has a six minute window. And listeners may ask, well, how does she know all these things? Are these from Annie Jacobsen’s imagination. Everything is sourced in the book, too.

Like if you go into the notes, you can see where the information comes from. Sometimes I quote people directly, but for example, the six minute window to make a decision about launching nuclear Armageddon comes from Ronald Reagan’s memoir. And it’s 6 minutes in which, well, they find him wherever he might be.

In this case, he’s in the White House and not wherever else he might be. And he is hustled for one room to another. And he’s given the football and it’s go time and he’s trying to figure out what happens next. And meanwhile, the missile is flying. Take it from there.

Well, to report that part of the book, I wondered, well, what would happen with the president knowing about the Secret Service. But as I do, having written about the Secret Service and other books, and so I interviewed Secret Service agents, the director, a former director

Of the Secret Service, members of the CAT team, which is the counter assault team that would, you know, the the president’s paramilitary team to learn that while the military is now in this six minute window intent on getting launch orders from the president, the Secret Service

Team is intent on doing their job, which is very different. Their job is to save the life of the president of the United States, to protect his life no matter what. And so what they want to do is in conflict with what the military wants.

And I, you know, relay that in the book, how that would unfold. And ultimately Secret Service says they would win that debate. They would whisk the president off shore in a helicopter and take him off to the commands, to the bunker outside of Washington, DC,

Colloquially known as Raven Rock, but officially known as the alternate military National Military Command Center beneath the Pentagon, because almost everyone in Washington, DC knows Washington is a top target in what’s called a bolt out of the blue attack. And so all systems are set up to have an alternate

And alternate command center underneath the Raven Rock Bunker. Just for viewer contact. Just 6 minutes is about five times as long. We’ve been talking four or five times as long as that 6 minutes. It’s an exceptionally short amount of time. And yeah, let’s move to the targets, because you choose two very interesting

Targets here that have extremely different consequences. The targets that are attacked in the United States you’re referring to, correct? Yes. So we have the we have the one megaton thermonuclear bomb now heading toward Washington, D.C., in the beginning of the unfolding of the war that is immediately detected

And then we have a sneak attack by a submarine launched ballistic missile on the West coast of the United States. And I did this with very calculated reasons, having discussed the worst case scenarios with national security experts, sit around and worry about these things with good reason.

And of course, the technical aspects of it are all sourced through engineers and weapons designers. And we do know that North Korea does have this capability. I mean, some people say it might not be yet a something that could actually happen and others are convinced it could happen,

Meaning that North Korea could get a submarine up to the West Coast. By the way, Russia and China do regularly. And I show a document in the book that I found out about on a budget request for the Defense Department where they demonstrate exactly that.

And so the second target is a nuclear power plant in Los in California. And, you know, when I was writing the book, this was a hypothetical situation. It’s called Rule 42 of the Geneva Conventions, Article 15, which says you never strike a nuclear power plant in war

And so I was thinking about a rogue nation going way outside normative behavior in doing that. And then, of course, during the Ukraine war, when we began to see repeatedly Russia using, you know, regular kinetic weapons against the zapper and nuclear power plant, this fear moved from an imaginary

Hypothetical scenario to a very real threat. Yes, that was two years ago, not even. And that facility has lost power eight or nine times now due to, you know, warfare in the vicinity. And that kind of horror is something that the Japanese call the devil’s In-a-row, because they almost experienced it.

Ask for the title, which Fukushima. It’s six extremely fraught minutes, not not just inherently, but while it’s in flight, it’s unclear whether it will hit New York or Washington. And the president may need to leave. And now there’s this threat on Diablo Canyon in California.

What does the White House decide to do next and how does that go? And again, that was a really interesting series of reporting and a series of conversations that I did with sources to discern in the scenario what would happen. You know, there’s a quote from General Hayden,

Who was STRATCOM commander during the fire and fury rhetoric. Barbara Starr of CNN interviewed him and asked him what would happen. And he said, if you know, North Korea needs to know that if they send one nuclear missile, we send one. If they send two, we send two.

And I source that in the book. But taking this question to national security experts, including Bruce Blair, now deceased, but who is pretty much the world’s expert on the kind of command and control systems and responses, according to Blair, if North Korea launched one nuclear weapon at the United States,

The response would almost certainly be 82 nuclear weapons. In response, in order to take out North Korea’s nuclear command and control. And so that is what happens in this scenario. And then I explain how, you know, and again, another jaw dropping moment, learning in my reporting that America sends

ICBMs out of nuclear, you know, out of our in the Midwest that you referred to in the opening statement that make up 50 of those 82 warheads that will now target North Korea. But what I learned is ICE. American ICBMs do not have enough range to fly directly to North

Korea without overflying Russia. And that is a disaster waiting to happen. Imagine two nations just like in as much conflict as Russia and the United States are right now, and America, you know, wanting Russia to assume that 50 nuclear warheads

Are just going to fly over their country, they are not going to hit the country. That becomes an apocryphal situation, an apocalyptic situation. And and, of course, underneath this, there is still this engine of diplomacy slash bureaucracy. And it’s imperative that in this 6 minutes, in addition to authorizing a nuclear war,

Someone has to tell the Russians, hey, it’s not it’s not you. We’re just going for Pyongyang here. But how does that work out in your in your scenario? You know, another fantasy is that there are these communication systems that work flawlessly is just simply not true.

And the best example I could report was, you know, early on in the Ukraine Russia war, it was in November of 2022. Listeners may recall a what turned out to be an erroneous report of a Russian missile strike in Poland. And so that is a Nadeau Country. That is an Article five situation.

It’s very, very dead, you know, dangerous potential situation. Nonetheless, it took General Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, more than 36 hours to give a press conference, admitting that he had been yet unable to reach his Russian counterpart. Mark, when we consider that nuclear war happens in seconds and minutes,

The idea of 36 hours to get in touch with Russia, I mean, it’s been endgame by that. And in your context, this is while the president has realized they are targeting Washington and flees in the Marine helicopter for a supposed safe location. That’s right. Unfortunately. come on. We can’t give everything away. Okay.

Unfortunately, communications breakdown further. We’ll put it that way. I mean, and. At some point, the comedic the Russians do just jump in because it’s use them or lose them as far as they’re concerned. And that’s sort of a crazy sentence that exists in the nuclear command and control nomenclature.

Use them or lose them. Thank you for remembering that. Right. And here’s another one that sounds Orwellian. Escalate to de-escalate. I mean, what does that even mean or what the safe right. What that means, you know, kill to live. It is really an a cause. This is all happening so quickly that

Everything unravels exactly like that. STRATCOM commander said it would. And it is in addition to being a somewhat cockamamie system or a a more fragile system than many would like to admit. It is durable in many other ways. And one of our viewers asked earlier, what happens to submarines

With the weapons or the bunkers or the nuclear plane after the nuclear war begins to commence, even before they are in play on many levels as well? That’s right. I mean, the submarines that are not called the handmaidens of the apocalypse for nothing. The United States has 14 Ohio class

Nuclear armed nuclear powered submarines. And they’re technically what are called second strike, which means even if an enemy were to take out all of our missile silos, those submarines are undetectable. They are going around the oceans, not all 14 at the same time, but a good many of them.

And the shocking part is that they take just 45 minutes to launch from the presidential order. The ICBMs take even less 60 seconds. One of the common quips is they don’t call the Minuteman for nothing. But these submarines are have, you know, 90 some odd warheads on them.

And they can take out an entire nation. And so, you know, the idea of redundancy is a concept that is into nuclear command and control. But a synonym for that is is absurdity, because at a point to the listeners question, you know, what point is too much? Yes. The submarines would most likely

Continue to move around under the oceans after you know, the world has been in the highlighted. Going just as Russia and China are patrolling our coasts. They’re patrolling the coasts of those nations and many others. You spend a lot of time in the book talking about the realities of the blast,

The blast center, the fires, the radiation. And I think it would be useful to touch on that now, both on land in Washington, D.C., and then in the destructive power of a of a single submarine. What does one blast look like and how much firepower is there in in one of these?

Some you mentioned 14 warheads. What does that mean? You know, the centerpoint of a nuke thermonuclear weapon is 180 million degree blast of light. It is so incomprehensible that kind of temperature and everything incinerated. Everything is incinerated. People turn into combusting carbon with a one megaton thermonuclear bomb.

It’s that’s a full mile radius of fire. And I describe in the book what happens to people in the rings going out in sort of five or ten mile increments. And again, this is not any Jacobsen’s imagination. These are from these are sourced from Defense Department documents that have been compiled

Based on their facts, starting with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs in 1945 and then becoming, you know, expanded and elaborated during the fifties when the US was doing atmospheric West weapons testing, both in Nevada and in the Pacific Ocean, compiling nuclear effects on people and on things.

And to answer your question about power of the submarine, you know, the submarine has used to have 24 launch tubes, now it has 20. So you can think about these 20 Trident missiles. Each one is served. I mean, this is such nuclear geekdom, but it’s there in the book for everyone

To know about because your of dollars are paid for them over eight decades. And Merv stands for. Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle. And what that. Multiple. Multiple it means that you know it’s it’s so much technology and interestingly this technology is decades old, by the way, but a merged

Warhead was meant to sort of trick any interceptor missile that might try to take it out because the warhead releases and then the multiple warheads inside the nosecone release and are able to travel independently to these different targets. Let’s just cut to it. Not multiple warheads, multiple nuclear bombs.

That’s right. Okay. So that’s right. Not 20 tubes, 20 tubes in which there are each multiple nuclear bombs. How many nuclear bombs in total in a typical submarine? About 99 zero. Yeah. Each one probably more palatable than Hiroshima. my God. Each one.

I mean, you could really geek out on on the numbers, right? Because it changes. But like, let’s say, a 300 kiloton warhead or a 400 kiloton warhead, Hiroshima was 50 kilotons. Think about the degree of power that the order of magnitude on the. Okay, so

Cycling back to the book itself in this scenario, we counterattack on North Korea. The Russians let go their full fire and fury. do what we’re trained to do If the Russians attack. Correct. There is no stop. Nobody scales back at that point. Right?

There is no there is no rational system in which they go, Hold on, everybody. Just take a day. Right? They just go. And let’s stop for a minute to discuss, if we may, how such things are now. Right. Because again, as I mentioned, nuclear war plans are jealously guarded secrets.

I refer to a rare declassified wargame from 1983 called Proud Prophet, and I reprint a couple pages of the Proud Prophet War game in the book, and people might laugh or cry when they read it because they think they will realize this is what a redacted war game looks like.

I mean, it’s 95% black. There’s just a few words per page. But what the declassification of that war game did was allow a certain professor from Yale named Paul Bracken, who had participated in it, to speak generally about that war game without, you know, crossing his security, violating his security clearance.

And what he said was this. He said, no matter how nuclear war begins, whether it involves Naito or doesn’t involve Naito, whether it involves tactical weapons or doesn’t involve tactical weapons, if China gets involved or China doesn’t get involved, no matter what, it ends in total apocalypse. And that is most

Definitely something that people should take note of. Yes. Not to give too much away, but essentially the world ends. The world doesn’t end. And then we have nuclear winter. Well, that’s an interesting note, in fact, because the war is largely in the northern hemisphere, China may get involved in this.

It’s quite likely they might. But essentially India, Africa, South America, Australia, Pacific Islands, they’re not directly affected. It doesn’t really matter, does it. By the bombs? They’re not affected. Right. But what happens? There’s a secondary effect of nuclear. First, there’s the blast, first there’s the light,

Then there’s the blast, then there’s the wind and the, you know, destroying, you know, pushing several hundred mile an hour winds, just destroying everything, moving out from ground zero. And then there are what are called mega-fires. And the mega fires grow so strong.

And with hurricane force winds, they end up making their own weather. These are a hundred square mile areas of mega fire. And imagine that times 1000. And imagine that in the United States, in North Korea and in Russia. And then imagine £330 billion of soot being lofted into the troposphere,

Because that’s what climate modeling shows us will happen. And this goes back to the nuclear Winter theory that was originally written in 1983. The five authors, one of whom was famously Carl Sagan and Sagan’s young student at the time, Brian Toon. Now, Professor Toon

Was a source for me in the book, and we had some very interesting conversations about how initially in 1983, the Defense Department tried to make the claim that nuclear winter was Soviet propaganda, and they were very effective in doing that because all these decades later, people still ask that question.

You know, isn’t that Soviet propaganda? Well, it’s certainly not. And, you know, humble as they were, the original authors conceded that their analog climate modeling, 1983 computers were what they are today, that there were limitations to their project projections about how long nuclear winter would last.

They thought it would last a couple of year. Well, state of the art climate modeling today tells us nuclear winter would last between seven and ten years. And so to your point about the mid-latitudes, the breadbasket of the world, you know, from from Iowa to Ukraine, it becomes covered, though

Bodies of water become covered in large sheets of ice. I mean, there’s a temperature drop of 40 degrees. And so agriculture fails. And so, yes, to answer your question, you know, a lot of other nations are not involved in the nuclear war whatsoever. They had they didn’t start it.

They don’t have nuclear weapons. They weren’t involved. But this is where our calculations now tell us that 5 billion people will die. Yes. It’s it seems like I mean, you can forget about civilization surviving life will go on because life is extremely persistent. But humans would probably not be the dominant species again

For a very, very long. It’s absolutely right. And, you know, in my interviews with former FEMA director Craig Fugate, he we talked about how FEMA prepares for asteroid strikes. They prepare for nuclear war. These are called low probability, high consequence events. And so when you think about it, nuclear war

Is the only event other than an asteroid strike that could end the world could end civilization in a few hours. You really have to wonder why aren’t more people working to solve this problem? Because we really do exist on the razor’s edge right now.

Many people are interested in the writing of this book. Was there anything jaw dropping, shocking or surprising you learned that wasn’t in the book, but you can share now? We’ve destroyed the planet. What else you got? I mean, literally, I hope people read the book because

It’s like people who have read the book tell me, you know, I thought to myself, why did she wait? Dropped the jaw dropping bomb here. There’s still all these pages left and then they realize that’s just the beginning. You know, it’s one ridiculously impulsive. Well, true fact. After the next, we.

Didn’t even get into the electromagnetic pulses that knock out every hospital in the country. Then save it for later. Folks. Read the book. So. And you all. And another thing I’ll say about the reporting is that, you know, imagine the kind of heat this is.

This is I can say it’s not in the book. Imagine the kind of heat that I faced and I mean good heat from my editor, from fact checkers, from to really make sure and drill down on some of these situations, these hypothetical situations that A follows B, C happens.

That’s what was really alarming, to be able to multiple source things like an MP going off precisely what happens and to be able to cut through a lot of the report, the existing reporting that you can see once you really begin to drill

Down on the facts and go to the generals, get the exact quotes, you can see, my goodness, so much of this has not been reported. And I’m speaking about the MP in particular because, you know, different elements of the press would maybe see

One issue as, that’s what the Republicans are for or against. So we’re not going to report that. And then the other side says, that’s what the Liberals are for or against. So we’re not going to report on that. And people have not been reporting on these things to all of our peril

Because people need to know the facts based science behind some of these potential, you know, multiple catastrophes on top of one another. Another viewer asks now that the book is out, is there anything you would add or change? You’ve been talking about it. You’ve been doing a lot of interviews.

People ask you questions. What might you have done different in the book? If you could take it all back and start? Well, it’s only been out for a few hours, so break out really confident. You know, I what I reported is right there, front and center.

But that’s a terrific question because, you know, you want to you want to keep your ear to the ground for the for the future. Often when the paperback comes out, I end up writing a foreword or an afterword to Exam to examine exactly that. Excellent question.

Yes, I would be interested in what it’s like to be inside a silo. For how long is a rotation? How long do people work on those? Do people spend their lives on these hidden bases? Usually, in my experience, at least the ones I issued the missile years.

Yeah, it’s kind of like a not a great job. I mean, I you know, with all due respect to the people who do it for their whole lives, a lot the most of the people that I interviewed started out as a missile leader. And then, you know, for example, Colonel, not men,

Who I use as a source who is a native and a pilot, He started out there as a very young officer and then went on to become an F-16 pilot. Right. Yeah. It’s got to obey the rules. Got to be by the book. A lot of the equipment is aging.

Sounds kind of like a bureaucratic job, except for the nuclear war part. You know, someone asks, What about I? Do you see a guy coming into this system? And would that be a new unknown? Unknown. So many of the nuclear war, command and control systems are, you know, analog, right?

So, for example, all the missiles are and people are shocked when they hear that. Yeah. As you can read in the book, the sub launched ballistic missiles are guided not by the high technology but by star sighting the ancient form of navigation. And this is to keep them from being hacked.

I interviewed General two Hill, the former America’s first cyber chiefs during the Obama administration. And, you know, cyber certainly has an interesting role in our society in terms of threats, but it’s separate right now. It is distinctly the in a separate lane from nuclear command and control. So let’s turn to

What might be done, because you hint in various places in the book, it doesn’t have to be like this. Steps could be taken. What is the realistic other scenario in which we’re not looking at this scenario? The hopeful part of it, I think goes like this, right?

So when I was a young high school student, there was a television miniseries called the Day After, and it portrayed a fictional version of war, the nuclear war between the United States and then Soviet Russia. And you know, the ABC executives were encouraged

Not to air it because it was so horrific and they aired it anyways. And people got very upset. A hundred million people watched that miniseries. Me, but also a very important person, President Ronald Reagan. And he wrote in his memoirs in his journal as president that he was greatly depressed. His words

And remember before this, Reagan was all about, you know, nuclear supremacy. He believed in the arms race. He was part of it. And after seeing the day after, he came to a different conclusion, it’s called the Reagan reversal among insiders, he reached out to President Gorbachev

And through a series of communications and known as the record of Summit in Iceland, they agreed that nuclear war was madness. And because of their talks, the world went from the all time high of nuclear weapons was 70,000. In 1986, 70,000. Today we have 12,500.

And so you might say that’s 12,500 too many. But it’s certainly a step in the. Right course in the right direction. Absolutely. Unfortunately, it also gave us the concept of star Wars and a perfect shield against nuclear weapons several trillion dollars later or however much they’ve spent. How effective is that nuclear shield?

You know, the way I read that situation is Reagan really backed down off of that because of his his impact, because of how he felt after seeing the day after. At least that is the interpretation of if you look at the timeline, he was very pro SDI before that.

You know, the problem with trying to intercept nuclear missiles, whether it’s from the ground or from space, is that it doesn’t work. And we’re kind of out of times and we can’t get into it. But, you know, very early on in the scenario, I describe

What happens when one of our 44 interceptor missile tries to go up against an incoming missile and have a. Little extra time, what happens? Okay. Well, when you consider so, you know, I was at a dinner party with and I couple a year, two or three, four years ago,

And I mentioned that I was working on this book and someone said to me, Annie, we have interceptor missiles, the Iron Dome. And, you know, I didn’t want to tell them they were wrong. I figured I’m going to wait and let them read the book. But that is a fantasy.

We have 44 interceptor missiles. Russia alone has 1670 missiles on ready for launch status. We have approximately the same. We actually have a little bit more. And so how are 44 missiles? And by the way, they have a shoot down rate of between 40 and 50% only.

How are 44 missiles going to go up against the motherlode of a thousand or more nukes? We just got it. We just got a late Ed question that’s pertinent to this. Okay. In the case of a nuclear war, does every country with nuclear weapons launch, does China jump in? Does Britain jump in?

Does France jump in? Does India jump in? And that is the question that might have to be in nuclear war scenario part two. I mean, I don’t say that in jest because I think the real point that I was trying to make by ending at 74 minutes, 72 minutes plus, is that

And when all the electricity goes out from the nuclear EMV, you we will know how would you now. Right. It’s just darkness on every sense so it would be depends on how they game it. Pakistan and India are facing each other off and this has already happened. Who knows?

The commander of STRATCOM, the former commander of STRATCOM, when he met General Keeler, when he and I were discussing this, he’s and we were discussing Russia, Russia, U.S. and the nuclear arsenals that they had and were they to get into a conflict.

He said to me, and this is a quote, The world could end in the next couple of hours. Yes, absolutely. There might be some healing, but the damage would be earliest. Civilization, 5000 years, humans gaining speech, 50,000 years. You know, social interaction probably that long a period to heal from this. Correct.

Which is why I have a coda in the book that is 24,000 years later. You know, after doing these 24 minute acts. And, you know, there’s this incredible archeological site now, UNESCO’s site in southern Turkey called Go Back Alley Tap. And I interviewed one of the two architect archeologists who were there

That day in the night in 1993 when it was discovered. And it’s some 12,000 years ago. And it was a lost civilization until 1993. And it’s sort of re writing history’s timeline in terms of man, in terms of science, in terms of civilization, because it was a society of hunter gatherers.

And yet they built this incredible facility, if you will, kind of like a we don’t know if it was a temple. You can see photographs in the book. You can see them online go back later. But it really got me thinking, looking at those

Photographs, to your point about this idea that, you know, man has evolved over tens of thousands of years very rapidly recently, to the point where we have actually created a technology, a system of technology that can kill us in a murder of ours. And it reminded me of the Einstein quote

Where he was said to have been asked, you know, about nuclear war. And he said, I don’t know what weapons World War Three will be fought, but World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones. Absolutely. In our few minutes left, I wanted to ask you about the writing of this book.

You mentioned two or four years ago you were thinking about this and working on it. What’s it like to stay with a subject like this for so long? You know, I, I actually am really a believer in information is king. And so I have no problem looking into something deeply

And finding the details that I can, you know, report to the people, because I really believe in the sort of that Eisenhower quote, right. Like he’s so famous when he left his his final speech as president, where he refers to the military industrial complex. Right. But my more favorite part of that speech

Is what comes next, where he says that a knowledgeable citizenry can balance out all of that. And that’s always what I’m here for, is to become more aware and share what I learn. And that gives me a sense of hope and peacefulness.

I must ask, when you were last with us at the Commonwealth Club, you were here for your book, Surprise Kill Banish, which was roughly a story of America’s military assassins. It’s more than that, but you have a very interesting niche you’ve carved out for yourself. Did you always want to be

A writer of this sort? I did not intend. You know what comes to mind is the old saying of like, ride the horse in the direction it’s going. And that’s just. That is my journey, I suppose. I find myself interviewing really interesting people

Whose lives are very different than mine, whose cases are very different than mine. But nonetheless, we’re all Americans. Yes. And they. They work out and perform violence on behalf of their country. How do you feel about them as a group now?

Well, my job is is again, to report to report the facts to the people. And I do it. I my aim always is to do it in with the least opinion and the most sincere relaying of story. And that must be how I’m built, because that just seems

To be the easiest manner which to do in which to write. Because I listen to people’s story and I simply work to convey the information as it was told to me. Of course I come to my own conclusions about things, but I really much prefer

To write books that people from all sides of the all walks of Earth, of all sides of the isles, plural, you know, take away different things from my than I feel like I’ve done my job as a as a journalist. Well, you’ve certainly delivered it on this one. It’s extremely well reported.

It’s extremely authority native, it’s extremely readable. And I encourage everyone to pick up a copy of his new book at the local bookstore through the Commonwealth Club, Whatever gets it into your hands, because it is going to illuminate a very, very necessary part of our lives and perhaps to help

Take us in a more positive direction. Well, that’s all the time we have for today. If you’d like to watch more programs or support the Commonwealth Club’s efforts in making virtual in-person programing possible, please visit Commonwealth Club.org slash events. I’m Quentin Hardy. Thank you and take care, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.