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No matter how nuclear war begins, it ends in 72 minutes and 5 billion people would be dead. Do you think there will be a nuclear war? So, I've interviewed former secretaries of defense, the former nuclear
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subcommander, the Secret Service, and what I learned was, oh my god. Annie Jacobson, investigative researcher and writer who specializes in uncovering
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the world's biggest secrets. We are one misunderstanding away from nuclear apocalypse. And yet you have presidents
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threatening nuclear war. In fact, the president of the United States doesn't need to ask anyone to launch a nuclear
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missile. It makes me realize how important the decision to pick our leaders is. Nothing could be more important.
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Could you play out a scenario where nuclear war broke out? Yes. And I can describe in painstaking
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horrific detail precisely what happens. So, but after nuclear war, the survivors would be forced to live underground and
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envy the dead. Annie, is there anyone you interviewed that brought you to tears?
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Yes. I met a woman who is a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb. And I haven't written about this yet,
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but someone I interviewed and someone that meant a lot to me wired that nuclear weapon that was dropped on
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Nagasaki. Can you speak about the impact that it had on both those individuals? And it's horrifying. Congratulations, Dario gang. We've made some progress. 63% of you that listen to
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this podcast regularly don't subscribe, which is down from 69%. Our goal is 50%. So, if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted, if
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you like this channel, can you do me a quick favor and hit the subscribe button? It helps this channel more than you know. And the bigger the channel
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gets, as you've seen, the bigger the guests get. Thank you and enjoy this episode.
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[Music] Annie, you wrote this book about nuclear war and published it in March 2024. The timing of this book seems to be a
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little bit coincidental when I or not when I look at what's going on in the world at the moment. Why did you write a book about nuclear war and why did you write it now?
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As an investigative journalist before nuclear war, a scenario, I had written six previous books, all of which are about the military and intelligence
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organizations in the United States. DARPA, Area 51, always the Pentagon, the CIA. That's my that's my beat. And think
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about how many sources I have in each book. a hundred or more. How many covering all the wars by the way since
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World War II, all these intelligence and military programs uh intensely kinetic and think of how many people said to me with a kind of pride, I dedicated my
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life to preventing nuclear World War III. That's always the idea in the Defense Department and in the CIA. We
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are there to prevent nuclear war. And so during the previous administration, former President Trump, there was this presidential rhetoric going on. You may
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recall fire and fury. Trump and the president of North Korea, the leader of North Korea, threatening this kind of thing. And I like many I'm sure began to
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wonder my god what if deterrence another word for prevention fails and that is the question that I put to all of those sources in the book and that result is nuclear war a scenario.
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What was your intention? I wanted to show in horrific detail just how horrible, just how apocalyptic nuclear
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war will be. Because I think many people have forgotten or don't know to begin with the
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consequences of a nuclear exchange. As I show in the book, almost certainly if a nuclear exchange happens, and we're talking strategic ballistic missiles, it will not stop until the world ends. And
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we are talking about in seconds and minutes, not in days and weeks and months. That is astonishing. When did you start writing the book?
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When was the first word written? So, probably during COVID was the first word written. But keep in mind, my reporting on nuclear weapons goes back
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my entire career. My first book, Area 51, is about a a joint CIA air force base out there in the Nevada desert inside a secret test and training range
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where the United States government used to explode nuclear weapons, atmospheric nuclear weapons in the 50s. And so my when I was reporting Area 51, I inter I
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wound up quite literally I did not intend to, but I wound up interviewing the people who armed, wired, and fired those nuclear weapons, early Manhattan
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Project members, and they that was kind of my B story of Area 51. And what I learned was like, oh my god. And I was also surprised to learn that most people
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didn't even know we the American government set off a hundred some odd atmospheric nuclear weapons in the
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desert in Nevada testing them. So my reporting to answer that's a long- winded answer of I've been on this issue
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peripherally you know for years for more than a decade but the idea in this book the
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word one as you asked was like once I understood that nuclear war is a sequence it begins the first fraction of a second after detection then I could
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see clearly oh my god it's a ticking clock scenario because it just all happened so fast. I asked that again because so if you started writing the first word of the
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book on nuclear war in co sort of 2020 Mhm. 2020 roughly 2021 around there in 2021. Yeah. Since then, things have escalated around the world in terms of conflict in a way that I
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imagine you couldn't have forecasted. And even it's almost ironic that in the month that your book was published, Putin moved I think he moved nuclear
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weapons into Barus and the rhetoric and he started saying that he would use them. And if you look at the terminology
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him and his commanders are using towards the world, it seems like we're at a moment that I haven't seen in my
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lifetime where the subject of nuclear war seems to be more real than ever before.
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You're absolutely right. And that is astonishing because in 2021 when I began the interviews, people were forthcoming with me. You know, as you know from the list of
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sources, I've interviewed former secretaries of defense, former nuclear subcommander, you know, former Stratcom
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commander, former FEMA director, former cyber chief. And a lot of these individuals shared with me in 2021 this idea that wow the world has kind of
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forgotten that the nuclear threat is always there. And so over the course of reporting and writing, you're absolutely right that the geopolitical
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temperature of the world has escalated to a point that you have not seen in your lifetime and I haven't seen in my lifetime. setting the stage even more. We talked
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about how possible nuclear war is, but one thing I learned from reading your book, which actually surprised me, was
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that it doesn't take thousands of people to agree on a nuclear war for it to begin. In the case of the United States,
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it only takes one person to make that decision, which I find quite unnerving that there's one individual
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that could theoretically make the decision that would destroy the earth. You're absolutely right. And this kind of thing is surprising to almost everyone. One of the things that I
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strive to do in my reporting is take very complex science and technology military issues
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and simplify them down for the layman, just for the average Joe or the average Jane. And I do that by interviewing the really smart, really knowledgeable
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people on those subjects. I have two things going for me perhaps as an investigative journalist that help in conveying the story is that I'm not a scientist and so I can ask questions
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that the average person would ask like really try and help me understand this whatever this is and then also that I
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have a real interest in making what is conveyed to me make sense to other people in their lives. Right? So, and also perhaps make them realize I
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never even stopped to think about the fact how strange is it that the United States president, this is what you learn
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in the book and you're talking about the United States president has sole presidential authority to launch a
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nuclear war. What does that mean? It's exactly like it sounds. What's so interesting is a lot of this stuff, this
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nomenclature that gets thrown at you, if you just break it down, it's soul solo presidential. He's the pus authority. He doesn't have to ask anyone for
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permission. Not the sect staff, not the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, not the congress. I love the worried
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look on your face in this moment because it is once you know that you say, well, first you might Google, is it really true? And you will get, for
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example, on Reddit like that's not really true. you'll get like hundreds of thousands of people, you know, coming in
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with their opinions about how that's not really true. Well, it is really true. It's absolutely true. And in fact,
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during the former President Trump administration, Congress became so sort of I want to say
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motivated or alarmed by this issue, meaning they were being asked questions by the powers that be. Is this actually
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true that they released a report stating specifically and I quote in the book, "Yes, it is true. As commanderin-chief,
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the president has this sole authority. He doesn't need to ask anyone." And hopefully sort of my bringing sort of concepts like that to the four right
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away, the reader can then become engaged and they say, "Well, that's weird. Why?"
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And then I can give you a very simple answer without necessarily taking you through the whole history of
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presidential authority, but it has to do with the ticking clock of it. And I explained to you right away that a ballistic missile travels from one continent. It's called an ICBM. People
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have heard of that intercontinental ballistic missile. Again, exactly like it sounds. It can travel from one continent to the next in roughly 30
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minutes carrying a nuclear warhead to strike a target. Once you realize, wait a minute, there are only 30 minutes. This isn't like, hey guys, should we go have a war in Iraq? Let's discuss this.
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Let's debate this. Let's take it to the Congress. This is there is a ballistic missile, sir, coming at the United States and you must act. And that's why
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in the simplest layman's terms, sole presidential authority exists. So let's define then what these weapons are. We've many of us have seen that film Oppenheimer. We saw them out in the
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desert I think in New Mexico playing playing with all these weapons and eventually making this one bomb that they would then drop drop in Japan.
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The weapon we see in that film which was in the 194 made in the 1940s that ultimately led to the end of the war. Is
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that the same weapon that we're talking about today? No. Well, in in in sort of principle in
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Yes. meaning it's an atomic bomb, but there's two things that separate where we are now. One has to do with the size and the power of the bomb. So the the in
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1945 there were atomic bombs. Now there are thermonuclear bombs. So an atomic bomb is used inside a thermonuclear weapon as the trigger.
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Okay, it is a bomb inside a bomb. And the power of the thermonuclear bomb is so astonishingly, you know, destructive. You can read the details. I interviewed Richard Garwin
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who designed the first thermonuclear bomb for Edward Teller when he was 24 years old. I interview him, he's in his 90s. He explains to me and I explain to you what the power is behind that. But
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this so the atomic bomb and and it has to do with size. Like the old atomic bomb, the one that was dropped on
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Hiroshima was the size of a small elephant. Okay. 15 kilotons in a big giant elephantized bomb inside of an aircraft having to fly from Tinian Island to over
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Hiroshima where it drops in an aircraft. That all changed when we brought the Nazi scientists to us. Oh, let's have let's figure out how
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to do two things. Let's figure out how to create more powerful bombs. That's the result. The result is the
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thermonuclear bomb. And let's make them smaller. We can't load an elephant-sized
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weapon into the top of a ballistic missile. It needs to be smaller. And so so much of this buildup was about
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creating more powerful weapons to be smaller in size. And then you see the military-industrial
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complex. You you can imagine, and I do this as a history lesson in just a few short pages to try to bring readers up
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to speed without losing the drama of the narrative. And the result, so if you flash forward to where we are now, which is where we've been for a very long time, is a nuclear
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triad, just like it sounds, three parts. We have ICBMs, silos under the ground. So, those are weapons hidden in the ground. In the United States, there are 400 of them. There were more. Now, there are
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400. You can find out where they are on a map. They're in silos, underground silos across the Midwest and the West.
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Then we have our nuclear armed, nuclearpowered submarines that carry that same kind of concept of a ballistic missile with a warhead in its nose cone.
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We have those same systems on submarines and the technology behind it is astonishing. I take the reader through it fast from the experts who explain it to me in a digestible way. And those
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systems lurk around in the oceans all 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. They're called the handmaidadens
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of the apocalypse. They're almost impossible to find, right? They are impossible to find. the nuclear
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the former nuclear force subcommander um Admiral Connor had this great way of describing it to me when I said like how hard is it to find a sub he said Annie it's easier to find a grapefruit sized
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object in space than a nuclear sub under the sea and it's not just the United States that have these weapons which I think is important to say there's many people
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listening all around the world now who have these weapons in their country too. You list um several of those countries.
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I think it's nine countries in total that has nuclear weapons, right? One of those countries, I know we have them back in the UK.
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Yeah, there are nine nuclear armed nation. Also really interesting to think about that the whole sort of let's have
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a triad. Let's have all these weapons that we will you will have a concept of mutual assured destruction. So we will
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have these weapons but we will never use them because everyone would be destroyed. Those concepts go back to the
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50s when there were only two nuclear armed nations, the United States and Soviet Russia. So you know really making all of this more precarious talk looping
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back to your you know notion that like my god we are at this precipice of danger which we are is because there are nine nuclear armed nations many of which are in direct conflict with others or
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their neighbors and they are the US, Russia, China, the UK, France, India and Pakistan. Israel, North Korea
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and there's some threat that Iran are trying to absolutely I mean this is a very very very significant threat and you really have to look I
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think the book I stay away from the sort of geopolitical posturing or analysis or even um you
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know opinion about the political aspect ect of all of this, but I think readers get to take their away their and have because I have read a lot of the responses and had a lot of really
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interesting conversations since the book published a month ago. But yes, you can
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take away what you think about the fact what my god you put a tenth nuclear armed nation in here that is Iran. How
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more destabilizing is that going to be to safety and security? And when I look at the list of countries um you've written about that have these nuclear weapons, the US, Russia, they're
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both basically in proxy wars at the moment with obviously the the war going on in Ukraine. Think about Pakistan and
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India. Um, Israel and Iran, you know, they're both at conflict throwing different missiles at each other and drones at each other at the moment. Um, the UK and and France are obviously part
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of NATO. So, they're kind of sucked into the whole Russia, Ukraine, US conflict that's going on, that proxy war there.
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These countries right now, many of them, I think the majority of them are involved in a direct war or some form of
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proxy war as it is. And with many of these wars, it's hard to find the way that it ends, the way out, the kind of
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golden bridge, because Ukraine aren't going to relent. So, Russia aren't going to necessarily
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decide one day that they're going to lose the war. That would cause significant ramifications for Putin, his
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reputation, and Russia as a whole. The US can't let Ukraine lose for a variety of geopolitical reasons. And then at the
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same time, all of this conflict started in Israel following the the attack in Israel, which has sucked Iran in in much
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of that region. And it all seems like, you know, these are the countries right now that are involved in
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the conflict that is scaring many much much many of us um in a significant way. And if all these countries operate in a
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similar way where there's one individual that can make the decision to release those weapons,
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it is quite scary. The UN Secretary General said recently that we are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon.
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And so the scary part of it is that when you look at that sort of verbiage, right, when I talk about, you know, nuclear Armageddon, nuclear apocalypse,
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nuclear holocaust, those are words out of the mouths of some of these leaders. So there is a very clear notion that if nuclear war
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starts, it ends civilization. that is almost certainly known among the leaders. And yet you have people like the president of
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Russia and the president of the United States and the leader of North Korea throwing around threats and terms. You know, the leader of North Korea recently
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accused the United States of having a sinister intention of provoking nuclear war. I mean, that is a provocation. on top of a provocation, you know, embedded in. But to your point, what's the point
00:21:13
of being scared? Well, the point is to realize that passivity is not necessarily the answer. That your knowledge of this situation leads to
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change. That's just the that's just the history of of civilization. One of the things it did make me think when I realized that there's one individual in
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in the United States where we are now who can make that decision and that there's basically like someone following
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the president with a briefcase called the it's like the football or something. Yes. What is that football for people that
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don't know? Yeah. And so so now that people know about the football or they read it, you'll you'll see you can see in
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photographs of the president you will almost if he's in frame you'll see the mill aid. That's the military aid. an
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individual who is assigned to be with the president 247 365 and inside the football it's called the emergency satchel are two important things there's in
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instrumentation that allows the president to be identified as the president to the national military
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command center which is the nuclear bunker beneath the Pentagon okay so it's a it's a call and response authent
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authentication And then there is something called colloially the black book. And it was told to me the reason it's called the black book is because it involves so much death. And what the
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black book is is a list of nuclear strike options for the president to choose from. And so once the president is notified that a ballistic missile is
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coming at the United States and he has to make a decision about a counterattack,
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he must look quickly because as you learn in the book and as I learned from presidents uh there is a sixinute window
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of decisionmaking and so there's no time for a roundt discussion. There is a list of options that has been
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pre-prepared for the president to choose from. And I interviewed for the book someone who
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actually was responsible for some of those decisions in the 80s. And he described to me in appalling detail what it was like to have worked on this in
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the Pentagon, like worked out numerically different targets and why they would be targets in said strike XYZ or Q against said nation. and then later
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seeing the black book and realizing the like sort of transmutation of that information to what was described by the only mill aid who's ever gone on the
00:24:03
record speaking about this as essentially like a Denny's menu list of options. And so you understand that this list is so watered down into strike options and
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there is so little time that the president in essence has really no idea what he's striking and how many millions of people will be killed. When I hear that, it makes me realize
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how important the decision to pick our leaders is. Something I didn't realize before. Nothing could be more important. And yet
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I learned in the book, and I'm talking about from former secretaries of defense, people very close to the
00:24:45
president, that most presidents are illinformed about their role as commander-in-chief in a nuclear war. Because, and it was said to me, most don't want to know. And again, so this
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brings us back to that paradox of deterrence. The original question I asked in writing and reporting this
00:25:05
book, what if deterrence fails? Deterrence is this idea. We will have so many nuclear weapons pointed at the other side. They will have so many nuclear weapons pointed at us. No one
00:25:16
would be insane enough to let any of them loose. That's how we all stay safe. Another way of saying deterrence is more nuclear weapons make us more safe. You
00:25:28
can decide if you think that's a little Orwellian, but that is what exists. Okay. So with that in mind, we should really be doing mental checks on our
00:25:40
leaders every 3 months because we've all probably had an experience with someone
00:25:45
who's had a episode, you know, and I'll I'll leave it at episode because there's a variety of different types of episodes one can have. And I was thinking, well, if the
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president just has a bit of an episode and gets a little bit paranoid or, you know, sort of has a little bit of a
00:26:02
schizophrenic paranoia, which can happen to people for a variety of different unpredictable reasons, then
00:26:09
that president could potentially make a decision to end the planet. And there doesn't seem to be a
00:26:14
defense mechanism to stop him doing that or her doing that. You're reminding me of a famous story
00:26:19
when Nixon was president, and it was during the Watergate scandal. He probably knew the end of his presidency
00:26:26
was near and he was very drunk one night and he began to threaten or rather he just began to talk you know in in this sort of extremely verbose drunken manner about how he could end the world or kill
00:26:39
tens of millions of people with a push of a button. And his it is said that that Kissinger called up the military
00:26:47
and said if the president orders any kind of a nuclear strike talk to me first. really
00:26:54
and do you so do you think that would have happened? I mean we you know it's hard to know isn't it?
00:27:00
All of these stories unless they come out of the mouth of the individual who actually said that are in essence stories. So there's an element of truth to them for sure. Um you know the actual
00:27:14
command and control who's going to follow the rules. People ask me that question often and I took that exact
00:27:22
question like you know I think people have a naive that if you're in the nuclear command and control whether
00:27:28
you're a missile in a an underground silo or a submariner on a sub that you might when you get this command suddenly have this heart you know like in a Hollywood movie have this moment where
00:27:40
you say my goodness I'm going to save the planet rather than destroy it. I put that question to Dr. Glenn McDuff, the historian at the classified museum at
00:27:51
Los Alamos, the one you and I can't go see. Um, and I said, "Do you think that could happen?" And he said, "Annie, you have a better chance at winning Powerball
00:28:02
than betting on someone in the nuclear chain of command and control to defy orders." And I said, "Why?" and he said, "Well, you are trained to follow
00:28:15
orders." I spoke to a CIA agent or should I say a former CIA agent called Andrew
00:28:20
Bustamante. Might have seen him. He does some podcasts. And um after speaking to him, I I completely agree because as he
00:28:26
said, he was trained to basically he was selected and trained on the basis that he would follow orders in that moment. and they even do drills to make sure dummy drills to make sure that they're
00:28:37
prepared, I guess, psychologically to follow through on those instructions. It made me think as well that if if um what
00:28:44
if the president's dead, what if the president is hit by a nuclear weapon from another country and now they can no
00:28:51
longer make the decision? Is the decision deferred on to somebody else? Well, I take the reader through that
00:28:57
precisely because those are the kind of questions that I had to ask of my sources as I was reporting this. On the
00:29:04
one hand, as I was learning what happens in the seconds and minutes, you know, after a launch is detected, because we
00:29:10
have a satellite system that detects the launch of a nuclear weapon in under a fraction of a second,
00:29:16
but it's not always very trustworthy. This is why I'm concerned. The ours is very trustworthy as far as I understand. It's called CBERS. It's
00:29:22
built by Lockheed and it's astonishingly powerful. Other nations do not have that
00:29:27
same kind of technology because I was reading about the sort of historic um mistakes that were made. Sometimes people thought there was a a
00:29:33
nuclear bomb or a strike coming and it was actually just a bunch of swans. Absolutely. I was a little bit like
00:29:39
I mean these are these are you know this is the one miscalculation, one misunderstanding away from nuclear Armageddon.
00:29:45
What are those instances from history where the nuclear detection system was triggered and someone in some country
00:29:51
decided um not to follow through on a notification. I think the most interesting stories that I report come from the person who is an actual
00:30:02
firshand witness to it because what often happens is the telephone game, you know, whereby one person tells the story and then your imagin you add a detail. So I write about a couple of them in the
00:30:13
book, but one of them came to me firsthand and I'll share that with you which was former Secretary of Defense
00:30:19
Bill Perry and he was on the night watch during the Carter administration. He wasn't the secretary of defense yet. He had like the job before that, the director of research and engineering at
00:30:30
the Pentagon. But it was his his night watch informed the president job. And he was told by the National Military Command Center, which is the bunker beneath the Pentagon
00:30:42
that there were ballistic missiles on the way from Soviet Russia. This was confirmed by the nuclear bunker beneath Offet Air Force Base in
00:30:54
Nebraska, the Stratcom bunker. And not only were they intercontinental ballistic missiles flying at the United
00:31:01
States, but they were sublaunched ballistic missiles coming at the United States. And it was a massive motherload
00:31:09
of warheads. And Perry described to me, as I recount in the book, what that was like to try and process in your mind, oh my
00:31:21
god, I'm going to have to tell the president and going to have to and he is going to
00:31:27
have to make a counterattack. And within a matter of minutes, he got word that it was a mistake. And a mistake, you might ask, like a mistake?
00:31:40
How does a mistake happen? What he told me was that it was a VHS tape, a simulated war game, a simulated attack by the Soviet Union against the United
00:31:53
States. And the VHS tape had mistakenly been inserted into a machine in the nuclear bunker beneath the Pentagon. And because it is linked to Stratcom, it was
00:32:05
seen in both places. And Perry said to me, "It looked real because it was meant to look real."
00:32:16
There was a president you talk about that played a nuclear war game and discovered that there could be no winners. So, Proud Prophet
00:32:30
is one of the few a very rare declassified nuclear war game. People talk about, you know, jealously guarded secrets in the United States government. You can be sure that
00:32:42
anything having to do with nuclear war gaming is way up there in the top secrets along with what is actually in that black book. But the proud profit
00:32:54
war game was declassified. Reagan had ordered it. I don't believe he participated in it. His sect desk,
00:33:00
everybody in the command nuclear command and control participated it for 2 weeks in 1983.
00:33:06
And this is declassified. I reprint some of it in the book. And if you have a look at it, you might say to yourself,
00:33:14
well, what's the point of declassifying something that looks like this? It's just black. It's like there's a number
00:33:19
here and a word there and a page number. But mostly it's entirely redacted. And so what's the point of declassifying it? Well, for the public, something very
00:33:31
valuable came out of that, which is it allowed a certain civilian who was participating, a Yale professor named Paul Bracken, to actually speak about it
00:33:42
in a general way. He couldn't, you know, couldn't tell OPsac, but he could generally talk about it. And what he said in his own book was that no matter
00:33:53
how nuclear war begins, NATO's involved, NATO is not involved. China's involved,
00:33:58
China's no matter how it begins, it ends in nuclear Armageddon. And Bracken's words was that everyone left really depressed.
00:34:09
Nuclear Armageddon essentially means the world is destroyed. Nuclear Armageddon is the world is destroyed. And when you get to the end
00:34:15
of the book, which happens in 72 minutes, and that comes from something that former Stratcom director, General
00:34:23
Keeler, said to me when we were discussing and interviewing, and I said we I asked him about what could happen
00:34:29
if there was a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. And he said the world could end in the next
00:34:36
couple of hours. So from where we are now in this conversation to the end of this
00:34:41
conversation, if a nuclear war broke out and we were sat here, by the end of this conversation,
00:34:47
basically the entire world will be destroyed. And you and I wouldn't even know before the first missile hit. That was shocking
00:34:53
to me to have that confirmed in essence by uh Obama's FEMA director. So FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is the is the agency in the United States that's in charge of disasters,
00:35:06
right? So if there's a hurricane or a flood or an earthquake, FEMA steps in to help the people. They have something called population protection planning. Craig Fugate was Obama's FEMA director
00:35:18
for 8 years and he just covered an extraordinary amount of catastrophes in the United States. He was also responsible for planning for a nuclear war. He told me that they did that. He
00:35:28
also said, "We plan for asteroid strikes." These are called low probability high consequence events. But
00:35:36
what Fugate told me that was shocking is that there is no population protection planning in a nuclear war because everyone will be dead. And he explained to me that there's nothing that that the
00:35:49
that he could do as FEMA director. He would really be putting his efforts from this nuclear bunker where he would be
00:35:55
which is called Mount Weather. he would be putting his efforts on the continuity
00:36:01
of government issues, the continuity of like the government has what are called essential functions. So an you know as a nuclear war is happening the government
00:36:12
is trying to prepare to keep the government running which is a form of fantasy in itself and when you read Fugate's interviews with me he's just so
00:36:24
candid about how there is nothing anyone can do and you know what he told me was
00:36:30
so shocking I went back to him and said like I just want to really make sure these are your actual quotes that you
00:36:38
that that and he absolutely you know he was one of the first people to write an Amazon review of the book after it published here in the United States and I find that both terrifying but also
00:36:54
heartening for this reason is that a lot of these people who leave office because
00:36:59
my sources are all former and then the title they when they are in the command and control. They are very focused on doing their job. Hence what we spoke about earlier about like following
00:37:12
orders. They are civil servants. They are dedicated civil servants. They believe in national security. They
00:37:19
believe in, you know, the perseverance of government. And then they leave office and they are just regular people
00:37:26
again. And that's when the heart I think begins to lead. And particularly as people get older because I interview a lot of people in their 80s and 90s and
00:37:40
then they begin to think about what this means in terms of legacy. What is nuclear command and control really as buttoned up as this is might
00:37:53
be them talking you know as as I thought? And is it a good idea in a world that is
00:38:01
so rapidly changing both geopolitically and also in terms of technology? Was there one individual you met that comes to mind when I ask who the most
00:38:14
troubled person was in terms of the work they participated in or troubled in the context of
00:38:21
what they know and what it means for humanity and how they're grappling with that. the most concerned and sort of the
00:38:27
most activated by all means would be former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry. And he's now in his 90s and I I don't
00:38:34
believe he's doing interviews anymore. But it it's not surprising that Perry shared with me his intense worry about
00:38:43
all of this because he has been actively working on this and you know for at least 15 20 years and when I say this I mean bringing the information to the
00:38:57
public so that the public is aware. He wrote his own book with a colleague called The Button. And he has, you know,
00:39:04
really he did a podcast called At the Brink. And what's fascinating is Perry spent most of his life dedicated to what you might call the military-industrial
00:39:15
complex, right? to the research and development of weapon systems that I write about in my other books, the DARPA book in particular, because this is all
00:39:26
part and parcel to what we're talking about here, that you have this sort of industry, military, weapon system
00:39:34
industry that is in a constant state of forward movement. It's deeply tied to economics, to jobs, to prosperity. And so where does that take us? And and at
00:39:48
what point does it end? It was Eisenhower who said in his famous speech where the public really learned about
00:39:54
this so-called military-industrial complex because Eisenhower spoke of it in his farewell speech. But he also said
00:40:01
an important thing in the second half of that speech which doesn't get nearly as much airtime which is that a
00:40:08
knowledgeable and alert citizenry is how you balance sort of an idea of peace with an idea of defense. And I think what frightens both of us that we talked about in the beginning
00:40:21
here was that peace and defense are very different than constant states of war. 72 minutes. You you go through this in the book minute almost minute by minute
00:40:36
showing exactly what will happen. We know in those first couple of minutes there's a notification that there's a
00:40:41
you know a nuclear bomb coming in from somewhere. My question on that was and I was thinking about this earlier as we were talking about it. How does the
00:40:47
president know? How does the world leader of that country know, the prime minister of the UK, whoever it might be or Netanyahu or Putin know where that
00:40:56
nuclear bomb has come from? Because we talked about this sort of black black book of places, this menu that the
00:41:02
president has in that football that his aid is carrying around. How does he know which place to pick on
00:41:09
the menu to send a nuclear bomb back? Powerful distinction, right? This is not 911 where suddenly there are planes in
00:41:16
the trade center towers and you know, everyone is scrambling to say who did this and the CIA is saying this is al-Qaeda. It has the mark of but no one knows for sure. This is not that. This
00:41:29
is the fact that for 79 years, the United States has been building nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon systems, and also systems to detect other people's
00:41:40
nuclear weapons should they have them. But what if the submarines? Okay, so good point on the submarines,
00:41:46
which is but we have a set of satellites called sibers, which are parked. Now I'm
00:41:54
only t when you said what how would Netanyahu know how would the president of that is a different scenario.
00:42:02
What I am talking about is the US president because I have interviewed people in the US defense department and
00:42:10
the intelligence community and the defense department knows precisely where a weapon comes from within a second of launch because the cber satellites can measure the hot rocket exhaust. So you
00:42:23
imagine a rocket taking off, lots of fire beneath it. That is measured from 22,000 m up in geoscyn. I mean, that is just a technological astonishment.
00:42:34
And then there begins the data sent down to these various commands in the United
00:42:41
States, the aerospace data center, the space force, and they begin measuring the trajectory of the missile and
00:42:48
figuring out where it's going to go. like it's not going to Moscow and it's not going to Guam. Those would be opposite directions. Is it going to San
00:42:55
Francisco or is it going to the east coast? That is learned in 100 seconds approximately. Okay. Now, you are right. You cannot det you if some if a
00:43:07
submarine launches a ballistic missile, there's no way of knowing where that came from. Which is why in the scenario
00:43:13
I have that happen and it creates a whole other set of problems. What are those? I I mean I mean what is the answer to that? Cuz I was imagining if the cberous system sees a nuclear
00:43:24
bomb coming out of the Pacific Ocean. I mean that could be Rishi Sunnak. That could be that could be the UK firing one at America. It could be, you know, could
00:43:35
be anybody. You are absolutely right that there is no way of knowing. And in the scenario that I chose because I wanted to try to
00:43:41
take the reader through a logical sequence, if you could even call any of this logical because it's all, you know,
00:43:48
they call it MAD mutual assured destruction. It's really madness but you cannot know who launched that.
00:43:56
Uh so does we just go for our enemy in that situation. I mean do you know what I do?
00:44:03
You have a new task. You are going to write nuclear war an even worse scenario. Well because that's what you would do right if you're President Biden your aid turns to you and goes hi President
00:44:14
there's a nuclear bomb heading our way. I go I know who exactly who that who did that.
00:44:20
and you might start firing a couple of back back at just the people that you assume would do it and then they do the
00:44:26
same. Um, and the nuclear armed submarines that are owned by Russia and China regularly come within a couple hundred
00:44:40
miles of east co of each coast of the United States. And you can assume the same about England. And how do we know
00:44:47
this? Well, you can't see a submarine moving in real time, but you can track the submarine's movements after the fact, owing to a very complex system of
00:45:00
underwater surveillance systems that we have in place. And there's a map that appeared in a recent Defense Department budget request to Congress, which I
00:45:12
reproduce in the book, that shows just how close those submarines, those enemy submarines get to the coast. And that reduces the travel time of a ballistic
00:45:23
missile down to under 10 minutes. And so this idea that we really are living at the edge of apocalypse is not an exaggeration. The question is how would
00:45:35
this start? Why would this start? Again, read the scenario and you begin to realize this could start in or have a discussion with you and you this could start in so
00:45:49
many the training test tape. I mean, and the real takeaway is asking ourselves is
00:45:56
why do none of us know about this or most of us rather? There's so many ways this could start and one of them one of them obviously again has emerged front of mind for
00:46:07
society since you started writing the book which is artificial intelligence. Before I get to that though I really want to I really want to close off on
00:46:13
this 72 minutes. I understand the first couple of minutes there. Um what does the person listening to this need to know about what happens in the subsequence? What are 60 minutes?
00:46:25
There's a very fast process where the trajectory of the ballistic missile is being determined and we're talking in the first minutes of the sequence because everyone is getting ready to
00:46:37
tell the president because what they're going to tell the president is sir you need to choose a counterattack. That is
00:46:43
called get the blue clock running. Does the president not like get in some plane super quick?
00:46:48
So we'll get there in a second because that's where the that's a decision tree problem. So everyone is working on
00:46:54
figuring out the trajectory of the ballistic missile and there is the first confirmation when you see it and by the way a ballistic missile cannot be redirected or recalled cannot be. Now
00:47:08
ultimately the defense department will wait for second confirmation of that missile from a ground radar system. We
00:47:15
have them around the world. The one in the scenario that would see it is in Alaska. It has to be able to see and
00:47:22
confirm that missile is definitely coming this way. And that happens at around 8 or 9 minutes. And so the process in between them, everyone's getting ready to brief the president
00:47:34
about a counterattack. And so in the scenario, the president learns around 3 minutes and then they're waiting on the secondary confirmation. And in my interviews with the Secret Service, as I
00:47:46
was reporting the book, interesting things would happen. Exactly like your question, like wait a minute, what would
00:47:54
would the president be staying at the White House? So I, as the reporter, put that question to the former director of
00:47:59
the Secret Service who explains to me how there is a team called the counter assault team. Um, and that that is the sort of paramilitary organization of the
00:48:10
C of the Secret Service that's going to always be there to move the president really fast if need be. And in this situation, they make a decision, we're
00:48:22
moving him. If the target is Washington DC or anywhere on the east east coast for that matter, we cannot have the
00:48:28
president anywhere near ground zero. And their job that they are sworn to do is to protect the president. And so that then you're going to have a bit of a stalemate because the military command
00:48:41
wants the president on on comms to be able to give him counterstrike orders. that is what they want and they can only get those orders from the president. But
00:48:52
the Secret Service has a totally different agenda. And in my scenario, the Secret Service, considering they're
00:48:58
the only ones in the room that are armed, win. They take the president out and he flies out of Washington DC in Marine One. Marine One being the helicopter.
00:49:10
The helicopter that is that Yeah. You know, and then I learned even more interesting details like, okay, so in
00:49:16
the scenario, the likely situation is that the electromagnetic pulse will really threaten the the electronic
00:49:23
system in Marine 1 and it will be in deep danger of crashing. What is that for people that don't know? For people that don't know, an an
00:49:29
electromagnetic pulse is like a three pulsed sort of shock wave that essentially just zeros out electronics.
00:49:37
Imagine your house getting struck by lightning. a direct hit and no surge suppressor. I mean, it's just it's all the electronics go out and that will almost certainly happen. Marine One is
00:49:50
outfitted, retrofitted against EMP attack because they think about these things, but no one knows if it's going to really work. It's been tested in a chamber.
00:50:00
So, so what you're saying, sorry, just to be clear, is that whoever's attacking the United States or another country
00:50:06
would send an electronic pulse first. No, the pulse is part of the of the bomb. Okay?
00:50:12
It's it's a it's inherent in the nuclear explosion. Okay? And so even if even if you're getting
00:50:17
the president out, if he's 7 8 9 miles 10 miles out of ground zero, as they rush, because remember this is all happening in 30 minutes, under 30 minutes, as they rush to get him out of the White House, the EMP could seriously
00:50:31
damage the Marine One. So, the Secret Service people I interviewed explained to me that they would have a backup
00:50:37
plan, which would be to tandem jump the president out of the aircraft in a with with a parachute. They would strap the president onto them and jump out of the aircraft because at least there would be the the aircraft is going to crash if it
00:50:50
gets hit by the electromagnetic pulse. So, at least there's a better chance. Well, then you have to have the mill aid
00:50:56
has to have a parachute cuz he's got the black book and the dire the the special
00:51:01
agent in charge of the president is definitely going to go. So then I learned that this incredible detail that
00:51:07
there aren't parachutes in Marine 1. So they have to go to the White House office to get the parachutes. You know,
00:51:14
these kind of details, I believe, provide the reader with a number of things like the the astonishing
00:51:22
understanding of how many different scenarios are in play all the time, you know, being rehearsed so that we because we might have a nuclear war at the same
00:51:34
time that the messaging is we will never have a nuclear war. And then when you begin to look at all the competing
00:51:40
agendas that will happen, you you realize it's just chaos upon mayhem. What if the president dies in the strike and before we've made a counterattack
00:51:53
which is something that Stratcom thinks about and it's certainly why I have that in the scenario because if the president
00:51:59
is the only one that can order a count a counterattack that can launch nuclear weapons, what if he dies? And so I
00:52:05
learned in the reporting that if you're the president, let's say he even gives the order, okay, here's my counter
00:52:12
strike. I'm choosing this from the black book. The situ the command and control is set
00:52:18
up that if the president orders 82 nuclear weapons in response, you can't launch 83 nuclear weapons. It's 82 and 82 only. And then to do
00:52:28
another launch requires passwords. I mean, it requires so much bureaucracy. There's not time for that. And so, there's this almost unknown little detail inside of the nuclear
00:52:42
command and control apparatus called a universal unlock code, which I learned about in the book. And the eyebrow goes up for exactly that reason, as did mine when I Wait, what? And then you find out
00:52:54
that the president can release to the stratcom commander the universal unlock code which basically says, "Okay, you if I die, you
00:53:05
have permission to launch nuclear weapon number 83 or nuclear weapon number 5,000, you know, all the way up." And that
00:53:17
is a pretty shocking concept. the president responds to the nuclear attack, hits, I don't know, let's say they they
00:53:28
hit Russia, they send the submarines out to send the um ICBUM or whatever it's called to hit strike Russia. Russia have these submarines as well. They send more back.
00:53:42
What does what's the aftermath of nuclear, you know, that 72 that 72nd minute? because I imagine from the minute the president hears that um gets the notification that there are it's
00:53:54
been confirmed it's had the second confirmation he's going to make the decision to fire nuclear weapons back I
00:53:59
assume and then I mean from there it's just all fire as far as I'm concerned there's a concept called jamming the
00:54:06
president which is so the president learns in the scenario I write that North Korea has fired a ballistic
00:54:13
missile and then a second one comes in from a sub and hits a nuclear power plant in California. Why did you pick
00:54:18
North Korea? I picked North Korea because of my interviews with Richard Garwin, the designer of the nuclear thermonuclear
00:54:25
bomb, the first one which you designed for Teller. Because in our interviews, I asked him
00:54:31
what scared me most. Garwin also in his 90s has advised every president of the United States since Eisenhower. He was
00:54:38
an early founder of NRO. I mean, our one of our most classified agencies. His opinion matters. And while he didn't want to be specific, he gave me sort of
00:54:50
a very interesting almost poetic metaphor when he spoke of the mad king and the mad king with a nuclear arsenal. And he even uses that French phrase
00:55:03
deluge. This idea of like after me the flood. If I die, who cares? And I interpreted that
00:55:12
that Garwin was talking about North Korea because North Korea is the rogue nuclear armed nation that regularly sets
00:55:20
off ballistic missiles and doesn't tell anyone. There is an unspoken reality among the other nations that you inform
00:55:27
people when you're going to test an ICBM with a dummy warhead. Of course, North Korea doesn't adhere to that. So, you know, h when I interviewed people who are in those command and control
00:55:38
bunkers, those first 100 seconds we spoke of where the ballistic missile is on its way and and and all of that
00:55:45
command and control is focused on is this coming at us or is it as launching a space satellite or is it going into the Sea of Japan? That's what North Korea does. They don't announce those
00:55:56
tests. And so imagine the anxiety in those command bunkers every time they launch a ballistic missile. They have launched a more than 100 ballistic
00:56:08
missiles in an 18month period from like 2022 forward. Testing. Okay. Testing. So this is so dangerous and so rogue if there you know on the
00:56:19
one hand I say there are no rules to nuclear war but there are a few nuclear rules to nuclear deterrence like you
00:56:26
tell your neighbors and that's why I chose North Korea but just to finish that the sequence
00:56:33
the president launches 82 missiles at North Korea in a counterattack and that is and in the scenario that I write the failure here now becomes about
00:56:46
miscommunication a very important concept and also about technology not working and I source in the book precisely where this information comes from. So Russia
00:56:59
misinterprets our launching nuclear weapons at North Korea as being launched at Russia. Why? because actual fact our ICBMs do not
00:57:13
have enough range to travel to North Korea without overflying Russia. And so imagine in a climate like now
00:57:26
with hostilities as an all-time high, the Russian president just saying, "Okay, well maybe they're not coming for us." And nuclear policy, the policy of
00:57:37
deterrence is you launch if someone's launching at you. And so that is where you know in the second act of the book it's 24 minutes 24 minutes 24 minutes
00:57:48
endgame. Russia launches and Russia launches. You don't la if someone's attacking you with nuclear missiles. You
00:57:55
don't launch one or two back. That's mad king logic. You launch the motherload. And that's what I have Russia launch in this scenario. What do you mean mad king logic?
00:58:08
Well, mad king logic is why would you do that? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, in the book in the mad king logic of the book, the leader of North Korea who is nameless um launches a
00:58:22
nuclear weapon at the United States for reasons we don't know and we will never know because history will end. The
00:58:27
ability to write history ends in 72 minutes of the book. So we will never know why and that is the sort of you know question. Mad King
00:58:41
logic is very different than defense department logic or in many regards Russian nuclear command and control logic which I interview sort of the world's expert on those subjects to be
00:58:52
able to you know give readers quickly an idea of what that logic is and why it has held for 79 years. Can't we just shoot it out the sky?
00:59:06
That is the great fantasy that is a fallacy. Right. So, let's talk numbers for a second. America has 1,770 nuclear weapons on ready for launch
00:59:20
status. They're deployed. Okay? They can launch in seconds, minutes. Maybe some of the bombers take an hour or two. Russia has roughly the same 1,674.
00:59:33
That's the parity of the nuclear treaties. That says nothing of the thousands more that we each have in
00:59:38
reserve. But those are actual nuclear weapons that are pointed at one another, ready to go. Ready to go. Okay, so those
00:59:46
numbers, the US has an interceptor program to allegedly intercept a long range ballistic missile. I'm not talking about short range or even medium range. Long
00:59:59
range like that would come from Russia or North Korea. We have 44 interceptor missiles. Four of them are at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara. 40 of them are at Fort Gley in
01:00:14
Alaska. 44. So if Russia has 1,670 nuclear weapons, how are our 44 interceptors going to go up against
01:00:25
those? And that and that says nothing, by the way. And I get into this in sort of the little bit of the wonkiness
01:00:32
inside a nuclear warhead. Many of them are what are called MVED, which means they have multiple warheads inside of it. And so when the warhead unleashes, the multiple warheads go out
01:00:44
along with decoys so that if an interceptor missile is coming at it, it greatly reduces the chance that the interceptor will be able to shoot it out of the sky. The way that it was said to me was like this. an interceptor
01:00:56
missile, which is basically just like a small ICBM, right? It's a small rock. It's a rocket.
01:01:01
It is like trying to shoot a bullet with a bullet. That's a quote from the spokesperson of at the Pentagon. One of them is traveling at 14,000 mph,
01:01:15
the ballistic missile. 14,000 mph. The interceptor, the little kinetic vehicle inside of it that's going to hit the warhead hopefully is traveling at 20,000
01:01:28
miles an hour. That's where you get the trying to hit a bullet with a bullet. And by the way, this is all happening
01:01:34
500 miles up in space. Good luck. The success rate of our interceptor program is between 40 and 55%. That's on a good day where they're testing these things
01:01:46
and they go, "Hey, we're doing an interceptor test. It might be around there, right? That's called a curated test. That's not in the madness of the moment.
01:01:58
The bombs land. If I was a fly on the wall, not that there would be a war left, what would I what would I and I was looking at America or the UK after it had been strike struck by these
01:02:12
nuclear bombs by thousands of, you know, Russian or North Korean nuclear weapons. What would I see? What would the visuals
01:02:18
be in those minutes after the strike? I describe the first bomb in the scenario that strikes the Pentagon. It's a 1 megaton thermonuclear bomb in painstaking horrific detail. all sourced
01:02:30
from Defense Department documents, defense scientists who have worked for decades to describe precisely what
01:02:36
happens to things and to humans. And it's horrifying. But on top of the initial flash of thermonuclear light, which is 180 million degrees, which
01:02:46
catches everything on fire in a 9mm diameter radius. On top of the bulldozing effect of the wind and all the buildings coming down and more fires igniting more fires, on top of the
01:02:58
radiation poisoning people to death in minutes and hours and days and weeks if they happen to have survived. On top of all of that, each one of these fires creates a mega fire that is a hundred or
01:03:12
more square miles. And so essentially in essence, what do you see? Well, in the scenario at minute 72, a thousand Russian nuclear weapons land on the United States. And so it just becomes a
01:03:25
conflration of fire. It's just fire, fires burning, fires, 100, 200 square mile fires burning. And then we move into nuclear winter. And that's sort of
01:03:40
the day num malt of the book where I tell you about nuclear winter from the point of view of one of the original scientists who wrote that original nuclear winter paper with Carl Sean back
01:03:54
in 1983. And his name is Professor Brian June and he spent the decades since working with the state-of-the-art climate modeling systems that can now precisely tell us what nuclear winter
01:04:06
will look like. cuz I've always thought, you know what, nuclear war wouldn't be that bad if, you know, Russia launched a thousand of their nuclear bombs at the
01:04:12
United States and I was here in New York where I am now. I would die instantly. So, I wouldn't really know it had happened.
01:04:19
Is that true? I think you would want to die instantly. I mean there's a quote from Nikita Kruef
01:04:24
the former um premier of the Soviet Union and he said after nuclear war the survivors would envy the dead because there is right there is this
01:04:36
sense of if you survived I mean there is no more law and order there is no more rule of law there is no government Craig Fugate made that very clear the bunkers
01:04:50
that the people in the military command and control centers would be in, let's say, the secret bunkers, not the ones
01:04:56
that are targets that Russia's going to take out that I write about in the book. But the smaller ones, those are going to
01:05:02
only function for as long as there's gasoline to run the diesel and the diesel generators. And then those people
01:05:08
are going to have to come out. And who's left? It's man returning to the most primal, most violent state as people fight over the tiny resources that
01:05:22
remain. And by the way, they're all malnourished, everybody's sick, and most people have lost everything and everyone they know. How's that going to feel?
01:05:35
It's going to feel as you describe here on page 277. There are a thousand flashes of light
01:05:41
superheating the air in each ground. Zero to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. A thousand fireballs each more than a mile in diameter. A thousand steeply fronted blast waves.
01:05:53
A thousand walls of compressed air. A thousand American cities and towns where all where all engineered structures in five, six or seven miles radius change physical shapes collapse and burn. A
01:06:05
thousand cities and towns with molten asphalt streets. A thousand cities and towns with survivors impaled to death by
01:06:11
flying debris. A thousand cities and towns filled with tens of millions of dead people. With tens of millions of
01:06:17
unfortunate survivors suffering fatal thirdderee burns. People naked, tattered, bleeding, and suffocating.
01:06:24
People who don't look or act like people anymore. Across America and Europe, hundreds of millions of people are dead and dying while hundreds of military aircraft fly circles in the air until they until they
01:06:37
run out of fuel. I mean, that is that is some visual. How many people would be dead or dying do you think after those 72 minutes?
01:06:51
Hundreds of millions of people die in the fireballs. No question. But the number that I think is very interesting to think about comes from Professor Tune
01:07:04
and his team who wrote a paper for nature uh recently 2022 and sort of updated nuclear winter idea based around food and the number that they have is 5
01:07:18
billion people would be dead. The population of the planet currently is what 8 billion.
01:07:24
Yes. So there'd be three billion people still alive. Where shall I go to be one of the three billion? I was I was just in New Zealand and Australia.
01:07:35
That's exactly where you'd go. Although according to tune, those are the only places that could actually sustain
01:07:42
agriculture. I was there two weeks ago, not even two weeks ago. It was maybe 10 days ago. I
01:07:47
was in New Zealand and Australia and at that time I think Iran attacked Israel. Yes. I was kind of happy.
01:07:59
You were in the right place at the right time. I was kind of happy for where I was located. If I'm you know I was thinking
01:08:04
I actually remember talking to my friends and I pulled up a map and I was trying to see how far away I was from everything. I was thinking if cuz World
01:08:11
War II started trending on Twitter. I was thinking if if it does break out now, I think I'm probably pretty well
01:08:17
placed. Is that the place to be? That is that is according to Professor Tune. I mean, he was so generous with
01:08:22
me. He shared a lot of his slideshows that he has for his students and that is really pretty much what's left. I mean because most of the world is certainly the mid latitudes would be covered in
01:08:34
these you know sheets of ice the the freshwater bodies and places like Iowa and UK Ukraine would be would be just snow for 10 years and so agriculture
01:08:45
would fail and when agriculture fails people just die and on on top of that you have the radiation poisoning because the ozone layer will be so damaged and
01:08:58
destroyed that you can't be outside in the sunlight and so people will be forced to live underground and so you have to imagine
01:09:11
people living underground fighting for food everywhere except for in New Zealand and Australia. Um there was also
01:09:18
another interesting detail that that he shared with me that you know 66 million years ago an asteroid hit earth and wiped out the dinosaurs and something
01:09:31
like 70% of the known species and professor tune compared nuclear war to that situation and so when you really think about it and and again this was also echoed by
01:09:44
Craig Fugate FEMA's director. You think about it, there's nothing we can do about an asteroid, at least not right now. And yet, there
01:09:56
is something. Nuclear war is a man-made threat. And therefore, it has to be a man-made solution. What is the solution?
01:10:10
I really believe that people motivate other people. It's like a fundamental truth on the smallest scale and on the
01:10:17
biggest scale. And so there's one person who is incredibly powerful and that is the president of the United States. For
01:10:23
better or for worse, it's just the way it is. And so in the same way that the president has presidential sole
01:10:29
authority to start a nuclear war, the president also has a very powerful pen with which he can write executive
01:10:35
orders, an EO. And the story I tell on the hopeful note goes like this. When I was in high school in 1983, there was an ABC TV movie called The Day After.
01:10:48
And it showed a fictional war between the United States and then Soviet Russia. It was horrific and terrifying. Okay. 100 million Americans watched it.
01:11:01
A 100 millions Americans. It was like the third of a the population. And I think it was half the population
01:11:08
then. Um, President Reagan was one of those Americans. He had a private screening at Camp David. His adviserss told him not to watch it. He did watch
01:11:19
it. Before that, President Reagan was a hawk. He was pro- nuclear weapons. His position was the more nuclear weapons, the better. He was the one putting nuclear weapons in space with the Star
01:11:32
Wars program, the SDI program. Okay? He couldn't have been more pro- deterrence supremacy. He saw the day after and he changed his
01:11:45
position. He wrote in his White House journal that he became greatly depressed. his words
01:11:52
and he reached out to Gorbachoff and then they had a Rekavik summit, a summit in Iceland, Reagan and Gorbachoff and through communication, right? Through
01:12:06
both of them realizing this is madness, realizing what could happen, seeing the day after and realizing my god, this cannot happen. And they famously issued
01:12:17
a statement that said a nuc joint statement between the two of them and said a nuclear war cannot be won and
01:12:24
must never be fought. And the result of the Rekovik summit was that the world has gone from 70,000 nuclear warheads. That was the all-time high. 70,000
01:12:38
Why do you need 70,000 nuclear warheads? That's what there were in 1986. And now
01:12:46
here we are because of the reductions, because of the treaties, thanks to those two
01:12:52
12,500 approximately nuclear warheads. That is the movement in the right direction. And it came from a dramatic story being told
01:13:04
and it came from the president taking action because people would not stand for this anymore. There were massive protests. Do you believe we can ever get to zero? Honestly,
01:13:15
that is for the disarmament experts. I like to stay in my lane as a storyteller, as an investigative journalist. I like to give you the dramatic fast read and then pass the
01:13:29
baton to those who have been working on that issue for decades because boy are they qualified. I just had the great fortune of being invited to Brussels where I was part of a nuclear expo and
01:13:42
there were members of the European Parliament in the audience and I and and there were all these disarmament people
01:13:49
there and I learned a lot about all of these groups and they have the answer and they are the ones that should be asked that question and they are doing a lot to get us there.
01:14:01
From the moment you wrote the first word in this new book um nuclear war scenario
01:14:08
to when you finished the book, how did your feelings change about the subject matter?
01:14:18
It's interesting because you you write the this is just my experience as a journalist, but you you write the book and you're like any
01:14:29
professional person, you want to do a really good job at your job, right? So, so I was very focused on gathering the
01:14:37
facts and then relaying them in a readable way. You know, my husband Kevin always says like you got to write
01:14:43
something that someone can read on the beach or an airplane, right? Which is not necessarily conducive to like Nazi
01:14:49
scientists or the other things I've written about. But for this, it became clear to me nuclear launch to nuclear
01:14:55
winter fast. Have people read it fast because you want to grab their attention because I'm a mother, you know, I'm a hopeful person that believes that we do not have to live with this threat
01:15:07
overhead. And so my focus of the work was really on doing the best job I could to narrate the story. And I think you you take your hat off about
01:15:21
um maybe any more sort of emotional or sentimental feelings. You try to you try to push that into the pros I suppose. So maybe in subtext
01:15:33
there is a sense of urgency and and even fear but for me intellectually you know as an investigative journalist it was it
01:15:45
was just what's what's the next page going to read like but how do you feel about you know the nature of you it's interesting as well
01:15:51
because you when you think about the books you've written I I think how many have you written now six or seven seven
01:15:56
books in total the subject matter of your books are the basis of a lot of conspiracy theory,
01:16:03
if that makes sense. You know, you've written about Area 51 and this thing called Operation Paperclip and the Pentagon and and now nuclear bombs and
01:16:10
the CIA, all these kinds of things which are the basis of many of the conspiracy theories that I hear hear about. Um, so
01:16:16
you've you've got a very unique perspective on the world because you've had the privilege and the access of
01:16:22
interviewing some of the most interesting people that are closest to these very interesting subjects. What are some of the things that you've come
01:16:28
to learn that you once thought were just conspiracy theories? I mean, conspiracy theory is such a
01:16:35
loaded word and I think it's too bad that um it's used as a catchall to kind of dismiss uh a lot of curiosity because curiosity is important, right?
01:16:50
And curiosity leads toward reading. I mean, I couldn't be a bigger fan of reading or listening to p, you know,
01:16:55
educating yourself. I mean, things have really changed in terms of audio. Like, you can listen to a podcast and learn a
01:17:03
lot. You can listen to an audio book the same way that you used to have to read them. And and so to just call things
01:17:11
conspiracy theories, I find to be intellectually thin, right? It's just too easy. And it's also very self-righteous. And I think two things I always work to avoid
01:17:25
um is like kind of being a know-it-all. And I am around a lot of know-it-alls because
01:17:33
people who become experts in subjects um and maybe they don't get as much attention as they think they deserve
01:17:40
tend to become a little bit of self-righteous know-it-alls. And so I have to wind my way through that world because I'm always what interests me are
01:17:52
subjects that make me ask the question why, right? Like why does no one know about Area what why why is Area 51 so secret? I mean when I wrote the book Area 51, the word Area 51 was still
01:18:06
classified. You couldn't say it. I went to the CIA and I was told by my minder, if you say
01:18:13
a certain word and number, you will be asked to leave. It was classified. It only became unclassified when President Obama spoke about it publicly.
01:18:24
Oh, really? He just mentioned it and then it was unclassified. Right. And so to answer your question, um I find it really interesting tackling
01:18:38
subjects that are in the zeitgeist that people are interested in and then trying
01:18:43
to unpack the truths and the fictions. But is there something you heard about, you
01:18:49
heard a, you know, a whisper about and you thought that can't possibly be true and then after doing a little bit of
01:18:54
investigative researching and journalism, you discovered that it actually was true and you were blown away. And I say that in part because I
01:19:01
lived much of my life thinking that a lot of these subjects, era 51, the CIA, this idea that there's all these spies
01:19:07
and they're doing all of this stuff. And I thought a lot of it was just internet rumors and you know people who certain people who have you know
01:19:18
they have like the silver foil on their heads and they're just like whatever. And then I had the privilege of speaking
01:19:24
to some people on this podcast and just out there in the world who confirmed that a lot of the things I once thought were tinfoil hat stuff is actually true.
01:19:37
And once once you have the curtain pulled back, it kind of blows your mind open to what else could be true. And I'm I'm a person that kind of like needs evidence and logic. And I'm not going to
01:19:48
believe something because I saw it on like a Instagram post or a story or Telegram community, but my mind's been
01:19:54
blown especially over the last couple of years about how um how some of these things that people consider to be
01:19:59
conspiracy theories are actually very true. Have you had those moments in your career? Oh, absolutely. But I mean, you can
01:20:06
really drill down on this stuff and figure out the thematic element of what's going on and then the specifics. And I'll give you an example. Like in Area 51, I learned about something
01:20:16
called strategic deception, which is a CIA concept. Okay? And this plays into conspiracy theories. And when you come across something, maybe having this
01:20:31
information I'm about to tell you will help you go, okay, let me look at it in terms of these two lanes. So it goes
01:20:37
like this. The CIA had a was building spy planes out at Area 51. The U2 spy plane, which was going to spy on the Soviet Union in the 50s from above and figure out whether they were preparing
01:20:51
for nuclear war. And the plane was built at Area 51 because this no one could know about it. It flew at 70,000 ft. It was out of range of any surfaceto-air
01:21:01
missiles. Um I interviewed the first man who flew over the Soviet Union in a U2,
01:21:08
Hervey Stockman, and he took pictures with these massive CIA cameras that you know came back to the agency. It was wet film and allowed the CIA to understand
01:21:18
what was actually going on on the ground in Soviet Russia. who was photographing military bases. So this spy plane was
01:21:24
being built and it was so secret like only the president knew about it. At the same time nuclear weapons were being
01:21:30
exploded next door, right? So Area 51 and then over at Area 23 was where the the bombs were going off and there was a I was interviewing all the engineers who
01:21:43
were building the spy plane and Bob Murphy was one of the lead engineers and he told me this story about strategic
01:21:48
deception. So he and others would go to the ranch, that's what they called Area 51. Then they'd fly back to Burbank,
01:21:55
California, where they all lived for the weekends to be with their families. And they would take this shuttle back and
01:22:00
forth. And one day, um, they went to a big party the night before and Bob Murphy got drunk. He was not a guy who
01:22:07
gets drunk, but he got drunk. He missed the shuttle and he was like, "Oh my god,
01:22:13
I'm gonna lose my job. I'm in trouble." and he opens the door is how he described it to me to like you know go
01:22:18
out and deal with this and there's a FBI agent like about to knock on the door and they tell and the guy turns white as a ghost because Bob Murphy was supposed to be on that flight so he was on the
01:22:29
flight manifest and it crashed into Mount Charleston on the way there and everyone was dead. Okay, so that is just
01:22:37
a dramatic thing to begin with but here's how it ties up with strategic deception.
01:22:42
The CIA learns that its aircraft full of U2 engineers, P designers, all these incredibly important people on this top secret project are dead. They just
01:22:55
crashed into Mount Charleston. What are they going to do? How are they going to keep this secret? All the news
01:23:01
stations are racing up to the top of the mountain to try to get to the crash site. Oh my god, this is going to be the
01:23:09
project's going to be blown open. what are we going to do? So, they quickly rope off the areas. They do the damage
01:23:15
control to the best that they can, but they're spinning and I have all the declassified documents from that part of
01:23:21
it, learning how worried they are. There's no almost no doubt the project's going to be revealed. The YouTube
01:23:26
program is going to be no more because once the Soviets know about it, it's off. And instead, the press
01:23:35
comes up with a story. The press reports that it's all these atomic scientists working on this secret new weap. They just completely make this up in essence, right? It's this new weapons project and
01:23:47
that's what they're all doing. Who knows who put what bug in someone's ear? And so that's the story that comes out. And
01:23:54
the CIA is like perfect. And what the story explains that there are two kinds of strategic deception. There's cover. When you say, like Bob Murphy said to his wife, "I'm
01:24:07
just a engineer working out there on some television systems." That's cover. That was his cover. He didn't say, "I'm
01:24:13
working on the U2 spy plane." And then there's disinformation when the press reports that the crash was full of a bunch of atomic engineers
01:24:24
working on a secret weapons program. And those are both kinds of strategic deception. And so you begin to realize
01:24:31
that there is a purpose behind a lot of information coming out into the public and the CIA often uses that to his advantage. And so whenever a situation
01:24:43
happens, you have to say to yourself, is this really what happened or is it covering up something else? And then of
01:24:50
course you have to put your rational person hat on and you can't just imagine what the true story might be. You have to actually find it and report it. Does the CIA um or the I think in the UK
01:25:05
it's called MI5 or MI6. MI6 I think is the equivalent. Does MI6 all of these sort of special
01:25:10
secret service agencies around the world do they work with the media? That's a much that's a totally separate
01:25:17
podcast. We could talk forever because there's history of the CIA and I'm not an expert on foreign intelligence
01:25:24
agencies as much as I am on the United States, but by all means, there's a long history of the CIA working with uh
01:25:31
journalists, reporters, authors um to put information there. I mean, there's almost nothing that the CIA hasn't done to my eye. The question is, you know,
01:25:44
reporting it in the context of how that's happening. I write about in the Pentagon's brain if you want a little homework, you know, and you go into the back and in the index and look
01:25:57
up brainwashing and there's a long story uh where I talk to where I explain h exactly how this happened in the 50s with what ultimately
01:26:12
an element that became known as the MK Ultra program. Okay. So, like MK Ultra was a real program and it had a lot of
01:26:19
sinister components to it. Is it everything that you know certain groups of people that sometimes get called conspiracy theorists say that it was? No. But there are threads of truth in
01:26:32
it. And if you reverse engineer the brainwashing concept from the back, you will see what I'm talking about. And
01:26:39
it's I think it's a very interesting story because it actually involves the head of the CIA, a guy called Alan Dulles and his son who got brain damaged
01:26:47
in Korea whom I tracked down and interviewed for that book. Spoiler alert, what happens? Which part I mean which part of I'm so I'm so compelled by this the
01:27:00
whole idea of the CIA because we we had someone here recently talking we had Andrew here recently talking about what goes on at the CIA and I think um he one
01:27:08
of the things he said to me is that the role of the CIA has changed over time and once upon a time it was more capable
01:27:15
of doing more things. And by the way he described it sounded like the CIA has less powers and can do less of the
01:27:21
things that it's been accused of in the past. I think it's been accused of killing the president here by some
01:27:27
people or being involved in the assassination of one of the presidents here. Um, and does the CIA report
01:27:34
directly into the president? The CIA features in almost every one of my books. Um, the most sort of comprehensive look I did at the CIA was a book called
01:27:45
Surprise, Kill, Vanish, which is about the CIA's paramilitary. And once I reported that, I understood
01:27:52
that there are actually two very distinct components of the CIA. there's the sort of central intelligence agency,
01:27:59
the primary um human, it's called human intelligence and there's analysts and there's espionage and and then there's the paramilitary organization
01:28:11
which was set up in 1947 specifically to go against the Russian version of itself. sort of to do the darkest, dirtiest,
01:28:26
nastiest operations that we had to because the Russians were. And so, you know, the CIA is a is a is a giant organization with a lot of tentacles.
01:28:39
And I think it's important to speak, at least for me, having reported on many of
01:28:44
these different programs. You know, Area 51 covers the aerial espionage element of the CIA, the science and technology.
01:28:51
The CIA was responsible for putting the first satellite in space, the Corona program. Dr. Bud Won, who I interviewed for Area 51, remarkable
01:29:03
intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance programs. And then you have the paramilitary operators, the
01:29:08
trigger pullers, uh the snake eataters, the individuals who, you know, find, fix, and finish people. That's a euphemism. um the teams that do that, but I prefer
01:29:23
to speak very specifically on programs because I find it's the most it it's the most responsible or the most factual way for me to stick to a certain
01:29:36
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01:30:37
the the nuclear war subject, we talked a little bit about um another thing that has well we I kind of alluded to it that
01:30:42
has emerged since you started writing this book which is the conversation around artificial intelligence. And when I start thinking about how you overlay
01:30:49
that with this idea of nuclear war, it becomes even more um concerning because we're heading towards a world of what
01:30:56
they call artificial general intelligence where a lot of these systems will be making autonomous decisions. they'll be able to and a
01:31:03
couple of people that I've spoken to from deep mind or from um Google have talked to me about a world where this is
01:31:10
an extreme case but our elected leaders will be either AI themselves or being basically working in lock step with AI
01:31:17
and and then when you think about our nuclear weapon systems who is better to make that decision is it a Joe Biden
01:31:23
that's better to make a decision to launch a nuclear weapon or is it some kind of artificial intelligence that is
01:31:29
so advanced we might not even know what it's thinking or doing. Have you thought much about artificial intelligence since this
01:31:35
book came out and since you started writing? Absolutely. It's something I covered at length in the Pentagon's brain, which is
01:31:41
the book about DARPA. And I think that maybe I'll speak to an origin story here, right? Because I think of Shakespeare, it's like what is past is prologue. We can understand better the
01:31:53
question you raised, especially for younger people, like what is this going to look like in the future? Is a president really going to be working in
01:31:59
consort with AI? If we know, wait, how did this all begin? It somehow, at least to my eye, becomes easier to think about
01:32:12
these things in a grounded manner. And so, I'll throw this detail at you. In in reporting the Pentagon's brain, it was fascinating to learn that during World War II, computers were people.
01:32:28
A computer was someone who computed mathematical, you know, call trajectories, bomb explosions were all measured by people and pencils
01:32:43
and right. So then, and I love the smile because suddenly it all becomes easier. Then you have a guy called John vonoman,
01:32:49
the f the the Pentagon's brain. He was the first brain that the Pentagon really was interested in. And he created one of the first computers. You can't really
01:33:00
assign the first computer to anyone, but there was a computer that was doing calculations for called ENIAC. And
01:33:08
ultimately after the war, von Noman went to the Atomic Energy Commission, the most powerful organization in the world
01:33:14
at the moment, and said, "I want to build a computer that can actually think for itself that can he he's kind of the progenitor of this idea of software, not
01:33:25
just hardware." So for a long time, it was kind of Texas Instruments type computing, almost just like a giant
01:33:31
calculator. And Vonoyman wanted to put the brain inside the calculator and they gave him a lot of money to do it. And he did this in the basement of
01:33:44
Fooled Hall over at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. And it was giant vacuum tubes and he would do these
01:33:51
tests. And I describe this in the Pentagon's brain because it's really interesting to think this was only in
01:33:58
1945. There were vacuum tubes and you know cords and they had to worry about mice
01:34:04
eating cords. And John vonoyman was so brilliant and smart that his he could beat the computer initially. The his assistants would give him numerical calculations. He would do them in his
01:34:16
mind. The computer would be trying to do them. He would win. And then one day in
01:34:22
like I think it was 1946 or 1947 the computer beat him. That was the moment that vonoman realized computers are going to be computers just got smarter than me than
01:34:35
man. And then he began to develop and systems. The defense department began to put an extraordinary amount of money into computer systems. And if you really want to know where they took off because
01:34:48
this has to do with AI. This is man computer interface. The defense department hires a guy called Licklider to essentially shrink computers down
01:34:59
from the size of a house to the size of this room and think of what they are now.
01:35:05
So the defense department has always led with artificial intelligence which is computerbased
01:35:11
and when you can see that origin story you can begin to understand where we're going. and AI had to have these military
01:35:19
the the benefits of these military systems to develop, right? Like nanotechnology. Things had to start becoming smaller. And that all happens in that book, you
01:35:33
know, not all of it, but in other words, you can you can learn in a sort of poetic manner the trajectory of
01:35:40
computers and where they began not so long ago and where we are now. And it was in 1983 that DARPA, that organization, decided that the battle
01:35:53
place, the battlefield is no place for humans. That was a statement of its first robotic AI program. I went on chat PT um a couple of months ago and I asked
01:36:03
it I said could you play out a scenario where the world ends because an artificial intelligence basically gets
01:36:09
leaked out of its out of the computer that it was um born out born on and it the scenario that it played out involved nuclear war because halfway I think it was in step three or four it says that
01:36:22
the AI basically takes control of the nuclear warheads or at least some of them and then it
01:36:29
kind of launches them other countries and hearing Chachi PT say that and and it and in step three or
01:36:40
four use nuclear weapons as a way to kind of make the world extinct it it felt plausible.
01:36:46
Okay, so I'm going to push back against that and which is by no means right. I'm not but we're just having a like sort of
01:36:52
theoretical conversation here. Chat GPT is gathering its information, right? So my I would argue that Chhat GP
01:36:59
has got a lot of information from the Terminator movie. Yeah. Okay. There is that in the zeitgeist of
01:37:04
what happens. Then I want you to consider that the communication systems in nuclear command and control which is actually nuclear command control and communication. The the ability to for
01:37:19
NC3 to communicate with the actual weapons is so profoundly classified that I don't have access to it. But I'm going
01:37:25
to give this to you as an idea. What I do know and learned reporting nuclear war scenario was a fascinating detail
01:37:32
that stands as an analogy at least for me, which is how analog our ballistic missile systems are because of the exact fear that you
01:37:43
describe or that and that chat GPT described back at you. And will they stay that way forever? Probably not. But are they that way right now? From what I
01:37:54
understand, yes. Our submarine launched ballistic missiles that that are just so
01:38:02
the technology behind them and I I delineate it for the reader. You it's it's astonishing that you can launch a
01:38:08
missile from underwater. It can breach the surface. It's after burners take off and then it begins its trajectory, you know, boost phase, midcourse phase,
01:38:21
terminal phase hits the target. This is incredible. And how does it get there? You might ask, I asked. It gets there by star sighting.
01:38:34
Oh, really? So, you realize there's this little panel that opens up in the ballistic
01:38:40
missile. And there are other ways that it's navigating, but the primary mean of navigation is star sighting, right? I mean, you just have to really stop and go, oh my. First of all, it's actually a
01:38:52
really interesting concept that the most advanced potentially civilization ending
01:38:59
ballistic missile is guiding itself to its target by this ancient concept like that. Our huntergather ancestors used which is looking at the stars.
01:39:12
It's looking at the stars and then navigating using them. And that's meant to be a defense against a system, an enemy
01:39:25
taking control of your nuclear weapons. The the issue we have is that there's potentially nine or 10 different nuclear powers and they don't all have the same system. So if a if we get to the point
01:39:36
of AGI which a lot of people almost see as the um singularity almost you can't see past that moment where there is a
01:39:43
new being amongst us that is capable of thinking faster and more expansively and
01:39:48
more intelligently than humans. It knows things we don't. I think it might look at our systems as child's play. Maybe not our systems but
01:39:56
maybe it'll look at North Korea's systems as child's play. It might be able to put that VCR into the system and play out the nucleus simulation that
01:40:02
tricks those people into believing they're being attacked in that. Yes. And so, which is maybe time for the answer to
01:40:10
your question of should we be at zero, right? Yeah. So what you have presented which would be the whole point of somebody like me writing a book that somebody like you would read of a younger generation and begin having
01:40:22
these conversations with their colleagues and their thought leaders and the people that could maybe influence
01:40:29
public policy and saying well that would be a very good reason to have zero nuclear weapons or you know everybody
01:40:35
gets 10. I'm making that up. But right because if you have 12,500 nuclear weapons, it's better than 70,000, but there's way too many for an artificially
01:40:48
intelligent, you know, trigger scenario like you're talking about. Are you optimistic? optimistic about I I am
01:41:01
I mean I am an optimistic person by nature and so do you think there will be a nuclear war
01:41:08
in the course of humanity? I wrote this book as the optimistic, hopeful person that's saying, "Read this
01:41:23
and realize that a man-made problem has a man-made solution." Earlier you talked about there being high consequence and low probability, but the more the years tick on, that
01:41:36
probability increases by nature of there being this mad king that might at some point. So, you know,
01:41:41
and that's what I think. So, I was asking myself eventually if we if we play this forward, I don't know, a
01:41:46
thousand years, what what is most likely to cause the end of humanity? Is it a mad king somewhere who doesn't want that, you know, he realizes that he's going to either die, he's got cancer, he
01:41:58
realizes that, you know, he's got some sickness and he doesn't really want the his son to take power. He starts getting
01:42:04
a bit agitated. Maybe he has some kind of psychosis, schizophrenia, I don't know. decides to in his dying days to
01:42:11
let a couple of these things fly. Is that eventually going to happen? The laws of probability, the laws of
01:42:16
averages say that the longer we're here, the longer we have these weapons, the higher the probability.
01:42:23
I mean, I leave that to people like you to think about and talk about because I do and I am fascinated that I find that
01:42:30
people of your generation ask that question a lot more than perhaps people of my generation and
01:42:36
older. Like that was not a mindset that people necessarily had and talked about and I think that
01:42:42
has to do with the confluence of events that you talk about. First of all, people are have access to information in
01:42:49
a manner they didn't you know 30 40 years ago or it took a lot more effort and also that there are these incredible new threats that you're talking about that are that you cannot overlook and so
01:43:01
you would think that it's time to kind of and I'm not a polyiana but you have to move away from seeing everyone and
01:43:08
everything as an enemy and moving toward it's fine to have adversaries having opponents is you know very sportsmen have opponents, right? But everyone
01:43:20
being an enemy and having, you know, wars escalating around the world, it seems as
01:43:28
if what you are saying is there has to be a fundamental shift in what people are considering important. But war has always existed and it's existed as long as humans have. So it
01:43:40
makes me think that war is just part of humans trying to coexist and all of the things that are hardwired into us, our search for status and ego and reproduction and resources and survival
01:43:52
result in war like they result in recessions. So I read a lot about the origin of war like there it's a debate no one you know but it is discussed and the anthropologists I think have the
01:44:03
most interesting sort of thoughtful concepts around it which I'll share with you which is this because yes
01:44:09
technically meant there has always been war and that one of the debates is you know did war begin with civilization or
01:44:15
were hunter gatherers waring but more interesting to that I think is about the anthropologists who studied in the 60s the hunter gatherer tribes like in the
01:44:25
Amazon when there were still access to them and they were sort of, you know, they were unaffected by civilization at
01:44:32
all and they could look at how they perceived enemies. And an interesting idea came out of that which makes me think about optimists versus pessimists, right? or or rather those who trust
01:44:46
versus those who are suspicious. That and that no matter if a hunter is out hunting in a that's part of a hunter
01:44:53
gatherer tribal environment and he comes across another person. Obviously there could be that person is either threatening or that person is someone to team up with against the
01:45:05
greater threat. And the anthropologists do not know why it is that some people interpret this person with suspicion and then might kill him and others would
01:45:18
interpret that person as a teammate. And so if we don't know how human, you know, is it genetics, like how do people either fall on one of those two sides?
01:45:32
But what we do know is that people can learn to think differently. You talk with half your guests on the podcast about this. People can be trained, not,
01:45:44
you know, propagandized, but people can learn to think differently. So if you're me who is a hopeful person and wants to
01:45:52
see the positive side of even my dark reporting because that's a better choice for me and for my family. I train myself to find if you will the silver lining or
01:46:07
rather if that's too polyiananish to find the way in which how do I look at the person coming at me as someone who
01:46:14
could be on my team or even an an opponent but not an enemy that I would have to kill. What's the most interesting thing that you've written about that we haven't discussed
01:46:25
of all and I don't just mean in the nuclear war I mean in all these books. I mean, I'm particularly fascinated by DARPA because I think in a lot of the
01:46:31
world, especially in Europe, in the UK, we we don't even know what DARPA means. So, you it was interesting reading about
01:46:37
the existence of that. But in all these books, what is the most interesting thing, the most resonant thing when you
01:46:42
talk about your work to people? Maybe that surprised you. I mean, every single one of my books is
01:46:50
powerfully important to me, not just because of the information there, but because of the people I met along the way. And I really could not si, you
01:46:58
know, put one over the other because that would be like favoring a child. And I mean that literally, you know, that
01:47:04
sometimes when I prepare to do a podcast, I read my own books and I and I'm really it for me it's the it's the
01:47:12
it's the sum total of these incredibly fascinating people I have had the incredible fortune of interviewing and also how fate and circumstance always
01:47:24
seems to play a role in all of their lives. And that's maybe the theme that I take away from all of this as opposed to
01:47:31
the specific shocking thing because remember that many of the people that I interview because they're war fighters
01:47:38
or intelligence agency people, many of their friends have died. Is there anyone you interviewed that brought you to tears when you were interviewing them? Oh, absolutely. I can't I can't even I
01:47:49
can't even say it now because I might Yeah. I'm going to ask you for the example.
01:47:54
You want the example? I'll tell you right now. That's a hard one. Um, so I was just in
01:48:08
I was just in uh Brussels, I told you, at the nuclear convention and and I met a woman who was one year and 10 months when the bomb was dropped on
01:48:21
Nagasaki. So, she's a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb, right? And I met her. I brought her a signed copy of my book, right? I mean, you just
01:48:33
think about being a victim of that. And also, I learned so much about the stigma
01:48:40
that followed the survivors of the atomic bombs of Hiroshima Nagasaki. stigma because they were perceived as sort of
01:48:51
tainted people, tainted humans, and there was this deep fear of the legacy of radiation. And I met her and I expected to just be so
01:49:03
composed, but in talking to her, I got very emotional kind of, you know, because you can't avoid that. And part of the reason why I got so emotional was
01:49:14
that, and I haven't written about this yet, but I will, is that someone I interviewed and someone that meant a lot to me and that I have written about a lot wired that nuclear weapon
01:49:27
that was dropped on Nagasaki. And so when you think about it, and there's little old me, the reporter,
01:49:39
who fate and circumstance put in Brussels last week at a nuke expo, you couldn't make that up if you were me, you know, even a year ago, let alone 10
01:49:49
years ago, let alone when I was a child. And here I am. And one hand of my reporting goes to that source that worked with me for a very long time, whose story I haven't written yet, who
01:50:03
wired the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. And my other hand goes to someone who was there.
01:50:15
That that wells you up because it's the human condition. Can you speak to this impact that that had on both those individuals?
01:50:32
So, starting with if we start with the individual who was involved in wiring that bomb. Mhm.
01:50:44
So, and I know less about her than I know about him. Right. and I've reached out to her and we will do interviews now. Okay. So, but for him
01:50:57
it impacted his whole life and he became a member of the Manhattan Project and he
01:51:02
became uniquely tied into the nuclear weapons industry. So, these kind of long arcs of history are so deeply interesting to me,
01:51:14
especially as I get older. you move from um the intensity of specific missions that people were on, of specific operations they ran. And you begin to
01:51:29
look at a human over the course of their life and what that means because ultimately that's the most interesting storytelling of all. It's the most interesting conversation
01:51:42
you and I can have. and and you have to get a little bit older to know that, you
01:51:48
know, but sometimes when I'm interviewing people who are in their 80s and 90s and I see them looking at me and
01:51:54
I like especially going back 15 years ago when I started reporting all this and I could see I can you know they're
01:52:00
old and they're like earlo sag and they have you know incredible wrinkles and the course of their lives what they have done and they're all involved in these top formerly top secret programs
01:52:13
And I can I can I sense them looking at me with this sense of their own legacy that they are like I'm telling her my story and then I'm going to be gone. And that's really that's powerful.
01:52:30
It's a lot of trust as well, isn't it? It it is that's the role of the reporter. you you work at least my job as an investigative journalist is like
01:52:43
you know I want people to trust me that I am getting the in their information down on the public record and that has a lot to do with why you know people say how did you get so many people to talk
01:52:55
to you about nuclear weapons right so to loop this back to nuclear war scenario I
01:53:01
know I'm doing my job at least it feels like I'm doing my job properly or earnestly
01:53:07
that I can in the same week last week have two people that are 100% part of the military-industrial complex working for the Space Force in Los Angeles, you
01:53:20
know, at a Space Force convention, come to my house for dinner, have a conversation with my family,
01:53:26
including my young son who's closer to your age, and then the week before have been with peace activists addressing members of the European Parliament. I have my lane, but yet all
01:53:39
of these people are around me. They might not think they can get along, but they probably can. And if I'm the middle of the road of all of that, that
01:53:53
is important to me as an investigative journalist and but also like as an American citizen as and as I said earlier as a as a mother.
01:54:03
That individual that wired that that bomb took part in the Manhattan Project was involved in dropping the bomb on the
01:54:09
lady that you met recently. How do they feel about that now in hindsight with with their age and as
01:54:16
they look back? He has died. Oh, okay. He has died. Um, how did he feel about it?
01:54:22
There were other things that bothered him more, which is the great conundrum of using your own eyes to
01:54:36
perceive another person. And it's why I have not written that book yet because it is still very confusing and there is a lot of mysterious elements of it. Sometimes when people are involved in
01:54:47
really classified programs, you have to spend a lot of time to uh dig and uncover and discover. It's a long process. Um and he was involved in
01:55:02
some other programs that he had more intense thoughts about. And that alone is enough to I mean the look on your face is the look on my face
01:55:15
interviewing him. A happy man. Absolutely. Absolutely. Regret. Yes. Most definitely. Almost everyone that I end up spending hours and hours and hours with that I would travel with.
01:55:27
And you know another person that comes to mind was Billy Wall in the Surprise Kill Vanish book. Sort of the longest
01:55:32
serving singleton for the US government as a paramilitary operator. The saying goes, "Billywah killed more people than cancer." Okay. We traveled to Hanoi together. We
01:55:44
traveled to Havana together. Um, I spent a lot of time with him. Uh, they were, you know, both of these men were probably the two most powerful sources I worked with in my life in their 80s and
01:55:56
90s. Both happy men. Billy was more complex than happy, you know. um you work hard to kind of get at the
01:56:11
to get at the character of someone and you you you you try the best to represent them. But I mean, you know,
01:56:17
Billy had so many people um he was involved in so many missions with so many people that died that I don't know
01:56:24
if happiness is he certainly wasn't an he certainly wasn't sour, but uh he had a lot of anger about a lot of things. And then the lady, she was one and a half years old when the bomb was
01:56:36
dropped. She survived as a baby. Her family, did they survive? Yes. And it was it's fascinating. Um
01:56:43
uh I'm not saying her name because I don't I I don't have quite her permission yet. Right. So, but um
01:56:48
although she is a public figure, but she didn't know about her story until she got older because it was kept hidden from her, which is so these layers upon layers about what we know about our own
01:57:03
selves. You've made me think of which is you balance that out with qu what you know about your own self versus what how easy it is to to judge someone else or perceive someone else.
01:57:17
And I think those two journeys in life are interwoven always like our own journey for self-discovery, right? In a way, you're on that with your podcast. I'm guessing you probably learn as much
01:57:29
about yourself um as you do about others. I know I do. I'm usually in your seat.
01:57:34
Um and there's no camera running. It's just a pen. And so I can learn so much from people about how they speak, why they speak, what they say to me. I don't
01:57:46
want this on the record. I want you to know this about me because it's important, but I don't want it publicly
01:57:52
known. And I honor that because in a way being a journalist is being a a trusted
01:57:59
source that someone can share information with within a context that the person i.e. me knows the
01:58:07
groundwork about. Many people's grandchildren's grandchildren don't they don't know what
01:58:13
grandpa did and they might not know for decades. I had a guy show up at one of my book signings at the LA Times Festival of Bull of Books just last
01:58:24
Sunday and he had, you know, a binder and he said, "After you're done signing, would you mind looking at this binder and interpreting it for me?" And of course I did, you know, and his
01:58:37
grandfather was a seriously high ranking person working on nuclear sublaunched ballistic missiles in the early days of what was called the Polaris experiment. And he had all these documents and no
01:58:50
one in his family cared about it. He had ID badges and letters and pictures with
01:58:55
the president and picture and I could say to him, "Oh yes, this is the," you know, I could give him some context and
01:59:00
his wife was there and you know, it was just like it's a great example of how we
01:59:06
sometimes have a desire to know about our own selves and our own legacy. Where did we come from? And then grandpa has
01:59:14
passed. And so my job is like getting grandpa's story on the record. that conversation you had um since the
01:59:21
book had come out with the lady you met in Brussels, did it change how you viewed your your
01:59:26
book and the work you've done here in writing this? Did it add an element? Oh, it most certainly enhanced and added
01:59:34
and particularly that emotional one that you saw for me when I think about that, you know. Um
01:59:40
and I immediately had a long conversation with my husband about it when when I got home, right? because I
01:59:45
use sounding boards to understand how I even really feel about things. But I already had a context to know about
01:59:52
survivors having read a lot of accounts from survivors to report the book and I mention some of them. Satsuko Thurlo was a
02:00:06
survivor of Hiroshima and has given a lot of incredible public statements on the record to the United Nations and elsewhere. And I quote her in my book to narrate the part of the story where we
02:00:18
learn about the bomb dropping on Hiroshima. And then I read a lot of the ancillary material about that so I can
02:00:25
understand more and try and a lot of work as a journalist you're just at least if you write narrative non-fiction as I do you're really trying to imagine
02:00:37
the situation but then you meet someone and it all becomes real and that's where the this comes in
02:00:42
because it's not just words on the paper it hasn't been when they say a survivor
02:00:49
what What how do you categorize or define a survivor of a nuclear bomb? I'm there's a word in Japanese and I don't want to get it wrong and it's something like hibaka, right? So,
02:01:03
forgive me for not having that word, but um that is an actual term that is used by anyone who lived through the atomic bombings in
02:01:18
August of 1945 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, if you lived through it, you are in that category of people. And most of the
02:01:30
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so in other words now uh this was you know 79 years ago. So most of the survivors you can just think about the ages of the people
02:01:44
involved. Suko Thurlo is 90. You know, she's she's won she was a recipient of the who I who I write about. Um she was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in
02:01:57
2017 with a group of physicians, Dr. Carlos Omana and others whom I met in Brussels that are all part of these organizations working to reduce nuclear
02:02:09
weapons down to zero. Right? They are against nuclear war and their organizations work diligently to bring the information to the four and to
02:02:22
affect change at a geopolitical level like the United Nations. That conversation you have with your husband when you get home that day after meeting her.
02:02:33
What can you tell me about that conversation? It's probably like you have with your I
02:02:38
mean my husband and I have been married a very long time so he knows everything. Um there's also a joke that he has
02:02:46
what's called spouse privilege which he does right you can tell your spouse anything legally.
02:02:53
But no those conversations are priceless. Those are the conversations that allow me to try and peel back one
02:03:01
layer of what the next book is going to be and what the next book aims to do because I am always working on the next book. I am one of those people who loves writing and so and I also love evolving
02:03:17
as a writer. So you want to get better in terms of the small mistakes you make and you want to get better in terms of
02:03:23
the the intentions that you might have thematically about conveying it. And so thank you for pointing out to me and I mean this sincerely is that what you helped me realize is that the next book
02:03:36
is trying will try to move more toward those themes of cause that was him and effect that was her. this idea that there are always consequences
02:03:49
and very real people on both sides that you know one could class as both victims
02:03:56
and innocent at the same time I guess of just a horrific situation. Absolutely. I'm really intrigued now by this idea that you almost have to embody two roles. You're a human being,
02:04:08
but at the same time you've got a job to do here and you've got a mission. And when you meet that person who is who is a survivor of a nuclear attack, those
02:04:19
lines can understandably become at least in your head, the wall can drop between the two. And as you you touched your
02:04:26
heart, you referred to your head, which I think is typically when you're talking about your journalistic hat, but then we
02:04:31
all have hearts as well, thank God. Um, you come home and I know the conversations I have with my partner. I
02:04:38
guess I'm assuming you know the conversation you have with your husband there is about
02:04:43
the complexity of the emotions you feel upon meeting that person. Absolutely. And what you do with that and what that means and you want to be
02:04:49
able to have those conversations so that you can I think have both of those bring both of those components into your into your work. I
02:05:01
mean, maybe with the exception being the military or the CIA, the two organizations I write about, you know,
02:05:08
Billy W can't bring his heart into the mission when he is assigned to go XYZ, you know, find, fix, and finish someone. They're not allowed to tell their their partners, are they, in the CIA? No. From what I told you
02:05:19
and and so so what we that aren't in the military or the intelligence community have that luxury. Is it a luxury? I don't know. But it's a necessity for me.
02:05:31
What if you couldn't? I wouldn't be myself. I wouldn't I wouldn't choose that. I could never be
02:05:37
in the military. I could never be in the agency because I I think you are asked to wear a hat that removes your heart. And that's not possible for somebody
02:05:50
like me. I mean, we just figure out our strengths and our weaknesses. Um, and society needs all of those people. By
02:05:56
the way, that is what a democracy is. It is made up of all kinds of people. I'm all for that. It's why I have so many friends and colleagues from different worlds on different sides of the aisle.
02:06:09
They just make me think more interesting things about the world in which we all live. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing
02:06:22
who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you was written in Europe when we're over in our
02:06:28
studio there. It is, what is the last thing you changed your mind about? Well, I'll just it comes this comes to mind only because it's apppropo to what we've been talking about and it has to
02:06:44
do with reporting, not my personal life, which is maybe more interesting to people. Um,
02:06:52
I always strive to interview people and ask them questions even if they're hard,
02:06:57
even if I have a preconception that maybe they are the sort of bad guy, shall we say, or the, you know,
02:07:04
perpetrator, the what? The perpetrator of some something, not necessarily the, but just that like I I might not my brain
02:07:10
might not think I agree with what they did or the project they were on. And there was a general that I was trying to
02:07:16
interview for the Pentagon's brain. And he had he was kind of the creator behind
02:07:22
what's called the soldier super suit. Okay? And that's a totally different subject. But that these idea to make
02:07:27
super soldiers, okay? Off of this idea of the this concept called the weakling on the battlefield that humans feel fear and get fatigued and those are not good things for soldiers. And so there are
02:07:39
all these programs to try and enhance our top tier military fighters to become super soldiers. This is a fact. And this one general was part of that program.
02:07:50
And I had reached out to him and asked him to interview with me. And I get it. Lots of people say and you know I'm going to pass. I don't want to interview. That's fine. But he ignored me and I felt slighted. And so I'm
02:08:02
telling on myself here from your view. And so when I was writing my narrative of the super soldier, he essentially was
02:08:10
kind of cast as the bad guy. And then I was in the editorial phase of the book and I got an email from him and he said, "I'm so sorry I didn't get back to you.
02:08:22
My wife had cancer." And I What a valuable lesson. What a valuable lesson. and we did two interviews and I told my editor I have
02:08:36
to rewrite that chapter and I did. I mean that story speaks to a lot of the subjects we've spoken about today which is when we see someone as different when
02:08:49
we see them as aliens, adversaries, enemies, opponents, we are much more likely to treat them as such. But in
02:08:57
reality, it often turns out that we're all very much the same, struggling with the same things, with the same worries,
02:09:04
anxieties, concerns, apprehensions. And it's just sometimes when there's a bridge built in the case of that email,
02:09:11
that we realize that we're not enemies after all, and that we don't need to be at war, whether that's with words or
02:09:17
whether it's with nuclear weapons. And when you see that fellow hunter on the path, they might not be the enemy. They might
02:09:30
be someone to work with. It's very good of you to admit that, Annie, because what you're actually
02:09:36
admitting is that you're a human being because we all do that kind of thing. When we see someone as an adversary, I
02:09:41
think, as you say, it's feels like it's hardwired into us in some way. But also within that story, we learn to um to try
02:09:47
and find or make the bridge ourselves, which in the world we live in now with social media and stuff is doesn't seem
02:09:52
to be um easy or obvious for people with all of this polarization and such. And maybe if the you know, if the US could make a bridge with some of these foreign adversaries, we wouldn't be talking
02:10:04
about nuclear war in your book nuclear war scenario. Thank you so much for writing this book because I'm a big
02:10:11
believer and a big um advocate of confronting the realities honestly and openly regardless of how uncomfortable
02:10:17
it is because if we don't I think it actually increases the probability of us finding ourselves in a 72hour scenario as you write about in the book and I the same 72 minutes
02:10:28
72 minutes Jesus Christ 72 hours did I say 72 hours yes we all make Freudians okay I wish it
02:10:35
was 72 well no actually don't I'd ra it was going to happen. I'd rather it just happened in the blink of an eye. But um but no, I think it's it's so so important to write. A lot of people will
02:10:45
be scared. A lot of people have chosen not to even click on this conversation because they're scared of the subject matter. But I I think it's leaning in
02:10:51
that helps us to um resolve and find solutions and start the conversation. And I know lots of people listen to
02:10:57
this. You never know like that um like that documentary or movie you talked about earlier who's listening and the
02:11:03
powers that they have and the decisions that they can make to change things or to create one of those bridges to to
02:11:08
sort of denuclearize the world and that's the work you're doing. So I think it's very very important work and I'm
02:11:13
glad that you've um committed your brilliance to doing it. So thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
02:11:21
[Music] Heat. Heat. N. [Music]