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 sub commander, the secret service.
And what I learned was, oh my god.
Annie Jacobson, investigative researcher and writer who specializes in uncovering the world's biggest secrets.
We are one misunderstanding away from nuclear apocalypse.
And yet you have presidents threatening nuclear war.
In fact, the president of the United States doesn't need to ask anyone to launch a nuclear missile.
It makes me realize how important the decision to pick our leaders is.
Nothing could be more important.
Could you play out a scenario where nuclear war broke out?
Yes. And I can describe in painstaking, horrific detail precisely what happens.
So, but after nuclear war, the survivors would be forced to live underground and envy the dead.
Annie, is there anyone you interviewed that brought you to tears?
Yes, I met a woman who is a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb.
And I haven't written about this yet.
But someone I interviewed and someone that meant a lot to me wired that nuclear weapon that was dropped on Nagasaki.
Can you speak about the impact that it had on both those individuals?
And it's horrifying.
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Annie, you wrote this book about nuclear war and published it in March, 2024.
The timing of this book seems to be a 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?
As an investigative journalist before nuclear war, a scenario, I had written six previous books, all of which are about the military and intelligence organizations in the United States, DARPA, Area 51, always the Pentagon, the CIA.
That's my, that's my beat.
And think about how many sources I have in each book, a hundred or more, how many, covering all the wars, by the way, since World War II, all these intelligence and military programs, intensely kinetic.
And think of how many people said to me with a kind of pride, I dedicated my life to preventing nuclear World War III.
That's always the idea in the Defense Department and in the CIA.
We are there to prevent nuclear war.
And so during the previous administration, former President Trump, there was this presidential rhetoric going on, you may 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 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.
What was your intention?
I wanted to show in horrific detail just how horrible, just how apocalyptic nuclear war will be, because I think many people have forgotten or don't know to begin with the 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 we're talking about in seconds and minutes, not in days and weeks and months.
That is astonishing.
When did you start writing the book?
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 my entire career.
My first book, area 51, is about a joint CIA Air Force base out there in the Nevada desert inside a secret test and training range where the United States government used to explode nuclear weapons.
Atmospheric nuclear weapons in the 50s.
And so when I was reporting area 51, I 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 project members.
And 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 didn't even know we, the American government, set off 100 some odd atmospheric nuclear weapons in the desert in Nevada testing them.
So my reporting to answer that's a long winded answer of, I've been on this issue peripherally, you know, for years for more than a decade.
But the idea in this book, the word won, 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 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 book on nuclear war in COVID, sort of 2020, 20, 20, roughly, 2021?
Around there. 2021.
Since then, things have escalated around the world in terms of conflict in a way that I 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 weapons into Belarus.
And the rhetoric, he started saying that he would use them and if you look at the terminology him and his commanders are using towards the world, it seems like we're at a moment that I haven't seen in my lifetime, where the subject of nuclear war seems to be more real than ever before.
You're absolutely right.
And that is astonishing because in 2021, when I began the interviews, people were forthcoming with me.
As you know, from the list of sources, I've interviewed former secretaries of defense, former nuclear sub commander, former STRATCOM 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 forgotten that the nuclear threat is always there.
And so over the course of reporting and writing, you're absolutely right that the geopolitical 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 about how possible nuclear war is.
But one thing I learned from reading your book, which actually surprised me, was 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, it only takes one person to make that decision, which I found quite unnerving that there's one individual 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 strive to do in my reporting is take very complex science and technology military issues 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 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 that the average person would ask, like really try and help me understand this, whatever this is.
And then also that I 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 never even stop to think about the fact.
How strange is it that the United States president, this is what you learn in the book and you're talking about the United States president has sole presidential authority to launch a nuclear war.
What does that mean?
It's exactly like it sounds.
What's so interesting is a lot of this stuff, this nomenclature that gets thrown at you.
If you just break it down, it's sole, solo, presidential.
He's the POTUS authority.
He doesn't have to ask anyone for permission, not the sec def, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the Congress.
I love the worried 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 example, on Reddit, like that's not really true.
You'll get like hundreds of thousands of people, you know, coming in with their opinions about how that's not really true.
Well, it is really true.
It's absolutely true.
And in fact, during the former President Trump administration, Congress became so sort of I want to say motivated or alarmed by this issue, meaning they were being asked questions by the powers that be.
Is this actually true that they released a report stating specifically, and I quote in the book.
Yes, it is true. As commander in chief, 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 for right away, the reader can then become engaged and they say, well, that's weird.
Why? And then I can give you a very simple answer without necessarily taking you through the whole history of 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 have heard of that intercontinental ballistic missile.
Again, exactly like it sounds.
It can travel from one continent to the next in roughly 30 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.
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 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 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.
The weapon we see in that film, which was in the 1940s, made in the 1940s that ultimately led to the end of the war.
Is that the same weapon that we're talking about today?
No. Well, in sort of principle, 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 in 1945, there were atomic bombs.
Now there are thermonuclear bombs.
So an atomic bomb is used inside a thermonuclear weapon as the trigger.
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, 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 this so the atomic bomb and it has to do with size, like the old atomic bomb, the one that was dropped on Hiroshima was the size of a small elephant.
Okay, 15 kilotons in a big, giant elephant sized bomb inside of an aircraft having to fly from Tinian Island to over 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 to do two things.
Let's figure out how to create more powerful bombs.
That's the result. The result is the thermonuclear bomb.
And let's make them smaller.
We can't load an elephant sized weapon into the top of a ballistic missile.
It needs to be smaller.
And so so much of this buildup was about creating more powerful weapons to be smaller in size.
And then you see the military industrial complex.
You can imagine and I do this as a history lesson in just a few short pages to try to bring readers up to speed without losing the drama of the narrative.
And the results if you flash forward to where we are now, which is where we've been for a very long time, is a nuclear 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 400.
You can find out where they are on a map.
They're in silos, underground silos across the Midwest and the West.
Then we have our nuclear armed nuclear powered submarines that carry that same kind of concept of a ballistic missile with a warhead in its nose cone.
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 systems lurk around in the oceans all 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
They're called the handmaidens of the apocalypse.
They're almost impossible to find, right?
They are impossible to find.
The former nuclear force sub commander, Admiral Connor, had this great way of describing it to me.
And I said, like, how hard is it to find a sub?
He said, Annie, it's easier to find a grapefruit sized 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 listening all around the world now who have these weapons in their country, too.
You list several of those countries.
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.
Yeah. There are nine nuclear armed nations.
Also really interesting to think about that the whole sort of, let's have a triad, let's have all these weapons that we will have a concept of mutual assured destruction.
So we will have these weapons, but we will never use them because everyone would be destroyed.
Those concepts go back to the fifties 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 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 their neighbors.
And they are the US, Russia, China, the UK, France, India and Pakistan, Israel, North Korea.
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 think the book, I stay away from the sort of geopolitical posturing or analysis or even, you know, opinion about the political aspect of all of this.
But I think readers get to take their away there and have, because I have read a lot of the responses and had a lot of really interesting conversation since the book published a month ago.
But yes, you can take away what you think about the fact, what, my God, you put a tenth nuclear armed nation in here.
That is Iran. How more destabilizing is that going to be to safety and security?
And when I look at the list of countries you've written about that have these nuclear weapons, the US, Russia, they're both basically in proxy wars at the moment with obviously the war going on in Ukraine.
Think about Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran.
You know, they're both at conflict throwing different missiles at each other and drones at each other at the moment.
The UK and France are obviously part of NATO, so they're kind of sucked into the whole Russia, Ukraine, US conflict that's going on, that proxy war there.
These countries right now, many of them, I think the majority of them are involved in a direct war or some form of 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 golden bridge because Ukraine aren't going to relent.
So Russia aren't going to necessarily decide one day that they're going to lose the war.
That would cause significant ramifications for Putin, his reputation in Russia as a whole, that US can't let Ukraine lose for a variety of geopolitical reasons.
And then at the same time, all this conflict started in Israel following the attack in Israel, which is sucked to Iran and in much of that region.
It all seems like, you know, these are the countries right now that are involved in the conflict that is scaring many of us in a significant way.
And if all these countries operate in a similar way where there's one individual that can make the decision to release those weapons, it is quite scary.
The UN Secretary General said recently that we are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon.
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, 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 starts, it ends civilization.
That is almost certainly known among the leaders.
And yet you have people like the president of 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 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 of being scared?
Well, the point is to realize that passivity is not necessarily the answer.
That your knowledge of this situation leads to change.
That's just the history of civilization.
One of the things that it did make me think when I realized that there's one individual in the United States where we are now who can make that decision and that there's basically like someone following the president with a briefcase called the football or something.
What is that football for people that don't know?
Yeah. And so so now that people know about the football or where they read it, you'll you'll see you can see in photographs of the president.
You will almost if he's in frame, you'll see the mill aid.
That's the military aid, an individual who is assigned to be with the president 24 7 365.
And inside the football, it's called the emergency satchel are two important things.
There's instrumentation that allows the president to be identified as the president to the National Military Command Center, which is the nuclear bunker beneath the Pentagon.
Okay, so it's a it's a call and response, authentic authentication.
And then there is something called colloquially 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 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 coming at the United States, and he has to make a decision about a counter attack, he must look quickly because, as you learn in the book, and as I learned from presidents, there is a six minute window of decision making.
And so there's no time for a roundtable discussion.
There is a list of options that has been pre prepared for the president to choose from.
And I interviewed for the book, someone who 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 the Pentagon like worked out numerically different targets and why they would be targets in said strike x, y, z or q against said nation.
And then later seeing the black book and realizing the like sort of transmutation of that information to what was described by the only mill aide who's ever gone on the 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 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 how important the decision to pick our leaders is something I didn't realize before.
Nothing could be more important.
And yet I learned in the book, and I'm talking about from former secretaries of defense, people very close to the president, that most presidents are ill informed 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 brings us back to that paradox of deterrence, the original question I asked in writing and reporting this 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 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 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 leaders every three months, because we've all probably had an experience with someone who's had a episode, you know, and 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 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 schizophrenic paranoia, which can happen to people for a variety of different unpredictable reasons, then that president could potentially make a decision to
end the planet. And there doesn't seem to be a defense mechanism to stop him doing that or her doing that.
You're reminding me of a famous story when Nixon was president and it was during the Watergate scandal, he probably knew the end of his presidency was near.
And he was very drunk one night, and he began to threaten or rather he just began to talk, you know, in a sort of extremely verbose drunken manner about how he could end the world or kill tens of millions of people with the push of a button.
And his it is said that Kissinger called up the military and said, if the president orders any kind of a nuclear strike, talk to me first.
Really? And you said you think that would have happened?
I mean, we, you know, it's hard to know, isn't it?
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.
You know, the actual command and control who's going to follow the rules.
People ask me that question often.
And I took that exact question like, you know, I think people have a naivete that if you're in the nuclear command and control, whether you're a missile, you're in an underground silo or a submarine or 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 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 Los Alamos, the one you and I can't go see.
And I said, do you think that could happen?
And he said, Annie, you have a better chance at winning Powerball 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 orders.
I spoke to a CIA agent or shall I say a former CIA agent called Andrew Bustamante might have seen him.
He does some podcasts.
And after speaking to him, I completely agree because as he 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 prepared, I guess, psychologically to follow through on these instructions.
It made me think as well that if if what if the president's dead?
What if the president is hit by a nuclear weapon from another country and now they can no longer make the decision?
Is the decision deferred on to somebody else?
Well, I take the reader through that precisely because those are the kind of questions that I had to ask of my sources as I was reporting this.
On the one hand, as I was learning what happens in the seconds and minutes, you know, after a launch is detected because we have a satellite system that detects the launch of a nuclear weapon in under a fraction of a second.
But it's not always very trustworthy.
This is one. The hours is very trustworthy.
As far as I understand, it's called Sibbers.
It's built by Lockheed and it's astonishingly powerful.
Other nations do not have that same kind of technology because I was reading about the sort of historic mistakes that were made.
Sometimes people thought there was a nuclear bomb or a strike coming in.
It was actually just a bunch of swans.
Absolutely. I was a little bit like, you know, these are these are, you know, this is the one miscalculation, one misunderstanding away from nuclear arm again.
Well, what are those instances from history where the nuclear detection system was triggered and someone in some country decided not to follow through on a notification?
I think the most interesting stories that I report come from the person who is an actual firsthand witness to it because what often happens is the telephone game, you know, whereby one person tells the story and then you're imagining you out of detail.
So I write about a couple of them in the book.
But one of them came to me firsthand.
And I'll share that with you, which was former Secretary of Defense 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 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, that there were ballistic missiles on the way from Soviet Russia.
This was confirmed by the nuclear bunker beneath Offit Air Force Base in Nebraska, the Stratcom bunker.
And not only were they intercontinental ballistic missiles flying at the United States, but they were sub launched ballistic missiles coming at the United States.
And it was a massive mother lode 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 God, I'm going to have to tell the president and going to have to and he is going to have to make a counter attack.
And within a matter of minutes, he got word that it was a mistake and a mistake.
You might ask like a mistake.
How does the 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 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 seen in both places.
And Perry said to me, it looked real because it was meant to look real.
There was a president you talk about that played a nuclear war game and discovered that there could be no winners.
So proud profit 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 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 war game was declassified.
Reagan had ordered it.
I don't believe he participated in it.
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, well, what's the point of declassifying something that looks like this?
It's just black. It's like there's a number 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 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 in a general way.
He couldn't, you know, couldn't tell OpSec, but he could generally talk about it.
And what he said in his own book was that no matter how nuclear war begins, NATO is involved, NATO is not involved.
China is involved. China is no matter how it begins.
It ends in nuclear Armageddon.
And Bracken's words was that everyone left really depressed.
Nuclear Armageddon essentially means the world is destroyed.
Nuclear Armageddon is the world is destroyed.
And when you get to the end of the book, which happens in 72 minutes and that comes from something that former STRATCOM director, General Keeler, said to me when we were discussing and interviewing.
And I said, I asked him about what could happen if there was a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States.
And he said the world could end in the next couple of hours.
So from where we are now in this conversation to the end of this conversation, if a nuclear war broke out and we were sat here by the end of this conversation, basically the entire world will be destroyed.
And you and I wouldn't even know before the first missile hit.
That was shocking to me to have that confirmed in essence by Obama's FEMA director.
So FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is the agency in the United States that's in charge of disasters, 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 for eight 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 also said we plan for asteroid strikes.
These are called low probability, high consequence events.
But 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 he could do as FEMA director.
He would really be putting his efforts from this nuclear bunker where he would be, which is called Mount Weather.
He would be putting his efforts on the continuity of government issues, the continuity of like the government has what are called essential functions.
So as a nuclear war is happening, the government 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 candid about how there is nothing anyone can do.
And, you know, what he told me was so shocking.
I went back to him and said, like, I just want to really make sure these are your actual quotes that you that that.
And he absolutely, you know, he was one of the first people to write an Amazon review of the book after a published here in the United States.
And I find that both terrifying, but also heartening for this reason is that a lot of these people who leave office because 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 orders.
They are civil servants.
They are dedicated civil servants.
They believe in national security.
They believe in, you know, the presence of government.
And then they leave office and they're just regular people 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 eighties and nineties and 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 might be them talking, you know, as I thought.
And is it a good idea in a world that is 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 troubled person was in terms of the work they participated in or troubled in the context of what they know and what it means for humanity and how they're grappling with that?
The most concerned and sort of the most activated by all means would be former secretary of defense, Bill Perry, and he's now in his nineties and I don't believe he's doing interviews anymore.
But it's not surprising that Perry shared with me his intense worry about 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 public so that the public is aware.
Perry wrote his own book with a colleague called The Button and he has, you know, 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 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 part and parcel to what we're talking
about here. That you have this sort of industry, military weapon system 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 at what point does it end?
It was Eisenhower who said in his famous speech where the public really learned about this so -called military industrial complex, because Eisenhower spoke of it in his farewell speech.
But he also said an important thing in the second half of that speech, which doesn't get nearly as much air time, which is that a 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 here was that peace and defense are very different than constant states of war.
Seventy two minutes.
You go through this in the almost minute by minute, showing exactly what will happen.
We know in this first couple of minutes there's a notification that there's a nuclear bomb coming in from somewhere.
My question on that was, and I was thinking about this earlier as we're talking about it, how does the 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 nuclear bomb has come from?
Because we talked about this sort of black book of places, this menu, that the president has in that football that his aide is carrying around.
How does he know which place to pick on the menu to send a nuclear bomb back?
Powerful distinction, right?
This is not 9 -11, where suddenly there are planes in 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 Markov, but no one knows for sure.
This is not that. This is the fact that for 79 years the United States has been building nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons systems, and also systems to detect other people's nuclear weapons should they have them.
But what if the submarines?
Okay, so good point on the submarines, which is, but we have a set of satellites called SIBRS, which are parked.
Now I'm only talking, when you said what, how would Netanyahu know, how would the president of Russia?
That is a different scenario.
What I am talking about is the US president.
Because I have interviewed people in the US Defense Department and the intelligence community.
And the Defense Department knows precisely where a weapon comes from within a second of launch, because the SIBRS satellites can measure the hot rocket exhaust.
So you imagine a rocket taking off, lots of fire beneath it.
That is measured from 22 ,000 miles up in Geosync.
I mean, that is just a technological astonishment.
And then there begins the data sent down to these various commands in the United States, the Aerospace Data Center, the Space Force, and they begin measuring the trajectory of the missile and 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 Francisco or is it going to the East Coast?
That is learned in 100 seconds, approximately.
Okay. Now you are right, you cannot.
If a submarine launches a ballistic missile, there is no way of knowing where that came from, which is why in the scenario I have that happen.
And it creates a whole other set of problems.
I mean, what is the answer to that?
Because I was imagining if the SIBRS system sees a nuclear bomb coming out of the Pacific Ocean, I mean, that could be Rishi Sunak.
That could be the UK firing one at America.
It could 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 take the reader through a logical sequence, if you could even call any of this logical because it's all, you know, they call it mad, mutual assured destruction.
It's really madness.
But you cannot know who launched that.
So does we just go for our enemy in that situation?
I mean, do you know what I mean?
Because that's what I do.
Now you have a new task.
You are going to write nuclear war, an even worse scenario.
Because that's what you would do, right?
If you're President Biden, your aide turns to you and goes, hi, president, there's a nuclear bomb heading our way.
I go, I know who exactly who that who did that.
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 same.
The nuclear armed submarines that are owned by Russia and China regularly come within a couple hundred miles of east of each coast of the United States.
And you can assume the same about England.
And how do we know 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 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 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 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 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 go, this could start in so many different, the training test tape.
I mean, and the real takeaway is asking ourselves is, 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 society since you started writing the book, which is artificial intelligence.
Before I get to that, though, I really want to close off on this 72 minutes.
I understand the first couple of minutes there.
What does the person listening to this need to know about what happens in the subsequent sort of 60 minutes?
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 tell the president because what they're going to tell the president is, sir, you need to choose a counter attack.
That is called get the blue clock running.
Does the president not like getting some plane super quick?
So we'll get there in a second.
That's the decision tree problem.
So everyone is working on 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, ultimately, the Defense Department will wait for second confirmation of that missile from a ground radar system.
We 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 confirm that missile is definitely coming this way.
And that happens at around eight or nine minutes.
And so the process in between them, everyone's getting ready to brief the president about a counter attack.
And so in the scenario, the president learns around three minutes, and then they're waiting on the secondary confirmation.
And in my interviews with the Secret Service, as I was reporting the book, interesting things would happen exactly like your question, like, wait a minute.
What would the president be staying at the White House?
So I, as the reporter, put that question to the former director of the Secret Service, who explains to me how there is a team called the counter assault team.
And that is the sort of paramilitary organization 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 moving him.
If the target is Washington, D .C., or anywhere on the East Coast, for that matter, we cannot have the president anywhere near ground zero.
And their job that they are sworn to do is to protect the president.
And so then you're going to have a bit of a stalemate because the military command wants the president on comms to be able to give him counter strike orders.
That is what they want.
And they can only get those orders from the president.
But the Secret Service has a totally different agenda.
And in my scenario, the Secret Service, considering they're the only ones in the room that are armed, when they take the president out, and he flies out of Washington, D .C.
in Marine One. Marine One being the helicopter.
And then I learned even more interesting details like, okay, so in the scenario, the likely situation is that the electromagnetic pulse will really threaten the electronic system in Marine One, 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 electromagnetic pulse is like a three -pulsed sort of shockwave that essentially just zeros out electronics.
Imagine your house getting struck by lightning, a direct hit, and no surge suppressor.
I mean, it's all the electronics go out.
And that will almost certainly happen.
Marine One is 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.
So what you're saying, sorry, just to be clear, is that whoever's attacking the United States or another country would send an electronic pulse first?
No, the pulse is part of the bomb.
It's inherent in the nuclear explosion.
And so even if you're getting the president out, if he's seven, eight, nine miles, ten 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 damage the Marine One.
So the Secret Service people I interviewed explained to me that they would have a backup plan, which would be to tandem jump the president out of the aircraft with a parachute.
They would strap the president onto them and jump out of the aircraft, because at least the aircraft is going to crash if it gets hit by the electromagnetic pulse.
So at least there's a better chance.
Well, then you have to have the – the mill aide has to have a parachute, because he's got the black book.
And the special agent in charge of the president is definitely going to go.
So then I learned that this incredible detail, that there aren't parachutes in Marine One.
So they have to go to the White House office to get the parachutes.
You know, these kind of details, I believe, provide the reader with a number of things.
Like, the astonishing 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 time that the messaging is, we will never have a nuclear war.
And then when you begin to look at all the competing agendas that will happen, you realize it's just chaos upon mayhem.
What if the president dies in the strike?
And before we've made a counterattack?
Which is something that Stratcom thinks about, and it's certainly why I have that in the scenario.
Because if the president is the only one that can order a counterattack, that can launch nuclear weapons, what if he dies?
And so I learned in the reporting that if you're the president, let's say he even gives the order, okay, here's my counterstrike, I'm choosing this from the black book.
The command and control is set 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 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 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 that the president can release to the Stratcom commander the universal unlock code, which basically says, okay, you – if I die, you have permission to launch nuclear weapon number 83 or nuclear weapon number 5000, you know, all the way up.
And that is a pretty shocking concept.
The president responds to a nuclear attack, hits, I don't know, let's say they hit Russia.
They send the submarines out to send the ICBUMs or whatever it's called to hit strike Russia.
Russia have these submarines as well.
They send more back.
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, gets the notification that there are – it's been confirmed, it's had the second confirmation.
He's going to make the decision to fire nuclear weapons back, I assume.
And then from there, it's just all fire, as far as I'm concerned.
There's a concept called jamming the president, which is – so the president learns in the scenario I write that North Korea has fired a ballistic missile.
And then a second one comes in from a sub and hits a nuclear power plant in California.
Why did you pick North Korea?
I picked North Korea because of my interviews with Richard Garwin, the designer of the nuclear – thermonuclear bomb, the first one, which he designed for Teller.
Because in our interviews, I asked him what scared me most.
Garwin, also in his 90s, has advised every president of the United States since Eisenhower.
He was an early founder of NRO, I mean, one of our most classified agencies.
His opinion matters.
And while he didn't want to be specific, he gave me sort of a very interesting, almost poetic metaphor when he spoke of the Mad King.
And the Mad King with the nuclear arsenal.
And he even used that French phrase, a premoi le déluge, this idea of, like, after me, the flood.
If I die, who cares?
And I interpreted that, that Garwin was talking about North Korea, because North Korea is the rogue nuclear -armed nation that regularly sets off ballistic missiles and doesn't tell anyone.
There is an unspoken reality among the other nations that you inform 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, when I interviewed people who are in those command -and -control bunkers, those first hundred seconds we spoke of where the ballistic missile is on its way, and all of that command -and -control is focused on, is this coming at us?
Or is it launching a space satellite?
Or is it going into the Sea of Japan?
That's what North Korea does.
They don't announce those tests.
And so imagine the anxiety in those command bunkers every time they launch a ballistic missile.
They have launched more than a hundred ballistic missiles in an 18 -month period from, like, 2022 forward.
Okay, testing. So this is so dangerous and so rogue if there, you know, on the one hand, I say there are no rules to nuclear war, but there are a few nuclear rules to nuclear deterrence, like you tell your neighbors.
And that's why I chose North Korea.
But just to finish that, the sequence, the president launches 82 missiles at North Korea in a counterattack.
And in the scenario that I write, the failure now becomes about 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 misinterprets our launching nuclear weapons at North Korea as being launched at Russia.
Why? Because, actual fact, our ICBMs do not have enough range to travel to North Korea without overflying Russia.
And so imagine in a climate like now, 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 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, endgame.
Russia launches. And Russia launches, you don't launch, if someone's attacking you with nuclear missiles, you 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?
Well, Mad King logic is, why would you do that?
Okay. So in the Mad King logic of the book, the leader of North Korea, who is nameless, launches a nuclear weapon at the United States for reasons we don't know.
And we will never know because history will end.
The 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 logic is very different than Defense Department logic or in many regards, Russian nuclear command and control logic, which I interviewed sort of the world's expert on those subjects to be 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 out the sky?
That is the great fantasy that is a fallacy, right?
So let's talk numbers for a second.
America has 1770 nuclear weapons on ready for launch 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 1674.
That's the parody of the nuclear treaties.
That says nothing of the thousands more that we each have in reserve.
But those are actual nuclear weapons that are pointed at one another, ready to go, ready to go.
Okay. So those 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 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 Greeley in Alaska.
44. So if Russia has 1670 nuclear weapons, how are our 44 interceptors going to go up against those?
And that says nothing, by the way, and I get into this in sort of the little bit of the wonkiness inside a nuclear warhead.
Many of them are what are called merved, which means they have multiple warheads inside of it.
And so when the warhead unleashes, the multiple warheads go out 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 missile, which is basically just like a small ICBM, right?
It's a small rock. It's a rocket.
It is like trying to shoot a bullet with a bullet.
That's a quote from the spokesperson at the Pentagon.
One of them is traveling at 14 ,000 miles an hour, the ballistic missile, 14 ,000 miles an hour.
The interceptor, the little kinetic vehicle inside of it that's going to hit the warhead, hopefully, is traveling at 20 ,000 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 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 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.
The bombs land. If I was a fly on the wall, not that there would be a wall left, what would I...
And I was looking at America or the UK after it had been strike struck by these nuclear bombs by thousands of, you know, Russian or North Korean nuclear weapons.
What would I see? What would the visuals be in those minutes after the strike?
I describe the first bomb in the scenario that strikes the Pentagon.
It's a one megaton thermonuclear bomb in painstaking, horrific detail, all sourced from Defense Department documents.
Defense scientists who have worked for decades to describe precisely what 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 catches everything on fire in a nine mile 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 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 megafire that is a hundred or 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 conflagration of fire.
It's just fire, fires burning, fires, hundred, two hundred square mile fires burning.
And then we move into nuclear winter.
And that's sort of the denouement 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 Sagan back in 1983.
And his name is Professor Brian June.
And he spent the decade since working with the state of the art climate modeling systems that can now precisely tell us what nuclear winter will look like.
Because I've always thought, you know what, nuclear war wouldn't be that bad if Russia launched a thousand of their nuclear bombs at the United States.
And I was here in New York where I am now.
I would die instantly.
So I wouldn't really know it happened.
Is that true? I think you would want to die instantly.
I mean, there's a quote from Nikita Khrushchev, the former premier of the Soviet Union.
And he said, after nuclear war, the survivors would envy the dead.
Because there is this 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 that the people in the military command and control centers would be in, let's say, the secret bunkers, not the ones that are targets that Russia is going to take out, that I write about in the book, but the smaller ones.
Those are going to only function for as long as there is gasoline to run the diesel generators.
And then those people 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 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?
It's going to feel as you describe here on page 277.
There are a thousand flashes of light super heating 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.
A thousand walls of compressed air.
A thousand American cities and towns where all engineered structures in five, six or seven miles radius change physical shapes collapse and burn.
A thousand cities and towns with molten asphalt streets.
A thousand cities and towns with survivors impaled to death by flying debris.
A thousand cities and towns filled with tens of millions of dead people.
With tens of millions of unfortunate survivors suffering fatal third degree burns.
People naked, tattered, bleeding and suffocating.
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 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?
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 Toon and his team who wrote a paper for Nature recently 2022 and sort of updated nuclear winter idea based around food.
And the number that they have is five billion people would be dead.
The population of the planet currently is what eight billion?
Yes. So there'd be three billion people still alive.
Where shall I go to be one of the three billion?
I was just in New Zealand and Australia.
That's exactly where you'd go.
According to Toon those are the only places that could actually sustain agriculture.
I was there two weeks ago, not even two weeks ago.
It was maybe 10 days ago.
I was in New Zealand and Australia.
And at that time I think Iran attacked Israel.
I was kind of happy.
You were in the right place at the right time.
I was kind of happy for where I was located.
I actually remember talking to my friends and I pulled up a map.
I was trying to see how far away I was from everything.
Because World War Three started trending on Twitter.
I was thinking if it does break out now, I think I'm probably pretty well placed.
Is that the place to be?
That is. That is according to Professor Toon.
I mean, he was so generous with 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 these, you know, sheets of ice.
The freshwater bodies and places like Iowa and Ukraine would be would be just snow for 10 years.
And so agriculture would fail.
And when agriculture fails, people just die.
And on top of that, you have the radiation poisoning because the ozone layer will be so damaged and destroyed that you can't be outside in the sunlight.
And so people be forced to live underground.
And so you have to imagine people living underground, fighting for food everywhere except for a New Zealand and Australia.
There was also 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 like 70 % of the known species.
And Professor Toon compared nuclear war to that situation.
And so when you really think about it, and again, this was also echoed by 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 is something nuclear war is a man made threat.
And therefore, it has to be a man made solution.
What is the solution?
I really believe that people motivate other people.
It's like a fundamental truth on the smallest scale and on the biggest scale.
And so there's one person who is incredibly powerful.
And that is the President of the United States, for better or for worse, it's just the way it is.
And so in the same way that the President has presidential sole authority to start a nuclear war, the President also has a very powerful pen with which he can write executive orders and 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, 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.
100 millions Americans.
It was like the third of the population.
And I think it was half the population then.
President Reagan was one of those Americans.
He had a private screening at Camp David.
His advisors told him not to watch it.
He did watch 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 Wars program, the SDI program.
Okay. He couldn't have been more pro deterrence supremacy.
He saw The Day After, and he changed his position.
He wrote in his White House Journal that he became greatly depressed, his words.
And he reached out to Gorbachev, and then they had a Reykjavik summit, a summit in Iceland, Reagan and Gorbachev.
And through communication, right?
Through 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 a statement that said, the joint statement between the two of them said, a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
And the result of the Reykjavik summit was that the world has gone from 70 ,000 nuclear warheads.
That was the all time high.
70 ,000. Why do you need 70 ,000 nuclear warheads?
That's what there were in 1986.
And now, here we are, because of the reductions, because of the treaties, thanks to those two, 12 ,500 approximately nuclear warheads.
That is the movement in the right direction.
And it came from a dramatic story being told.
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?
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 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 there were members of the European Parliament in the audience.
And there were all these disarmament people 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.
From the moment you wrote the first word in this new book, Nuclear War Scenario, to when you finished the book, how did your feelings change about the subject matter?
It's interesting because you write—this is just my experience as a journalist—but you write the book, and you're like any professional person, you want to do a really good job at your job.
So I was very focused on gathering the facts and then relaying them in a readable way.
My husband, Kevin, always says, you got to write something that someone can read on the beach or an airplane, which is not necessarily conducive to Nazi scientists or the other things I've written about.
But for this, it became clear to me, nuclear launch to nuclear winter fast.
Have people read it fast because you want to grab their attention because I'm a mother, I'm a hopeful person that believes that we do not have to live with this threat 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 take your hat off about maybe any more sort of emotional or sentimental feelings.
You try to push that into the prose, I suppose.
So maybe in subtext, there is a sense of urgency and even fear.
But for me, intellectually, as an investigative journalist, it was just, what's the next page going to be like?
But how do you feel about the nature?
It's interesting as well because when you think about the books you've written, have you written six or seven books in total?
The subject matter of your books are all the basis of a lot of conspiracy theory, if that makes sense.
You've written about era 51 and this thing called Operation Paperclip and the Pentagon and our nuclear bombs and the CIA, all these kinds of things, which are the basis of many of the conspiracy theories that I hear about.
So you've got a very unique perspective on the world because you've had the privilege and the access of 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 to learn that you once thought were just conspiracy theories?
I mean, things have really changed in terms of audio.
Like, you can listen to a podcast and learn a lot.
You can listen to an audio book the same way that you used to have to read them.
And so to just call things 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.
Is like kind of being a know -it -all.
And I am around a lot of know -it -alls because people who become experts in subjects and maybe they don't get as much attention as they think they deserve 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 subjects that make me ask the question, why?
Like, why does no one know about Area 51?
Why is Area 51 so secret?
I mean, when I wrote the book Area 51, the word Area 51 was still classified.
You couldn't say it.
I went to the CIA, and I was told by my minder, if you say 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.
Oh, really? He just mentioned it, and then it was unclassified, right?
And so to answer your question, I find it really interesting, tackling subjects that are in the zeitgeist, and then trying to unpack the truths and the fictions.
But is there something you heard about, you heard a whisper about, and you thought that can't possibly be true?
And then after doing a little bit of investigative researching and journalism, you discovered that it actually was true and you were blown away.
And I say that in part because I lived much of my life thinking that a lot of these subjects, Area 51, the CIA, this idea that there's all these spies and they're doing all of this stuff, and I thought a lot of it was just internet rumors and certain people who have the silver foil on their heads and they're
just like whatever.
And then I had the privilege of speaking 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.
And once you have the curtain pulled back, it kind of blows your mind open to what else could be true.
And I'm a person that kind of needs evidence and logic, and I'm not going to believe something because I saw it on an Instagram post or a story or a telegram community.
But my mind's been blown, especially over the last couple of years, about how some of these things that people consider to be conspiracy theories are actually very true.
Have you had those moments in your career?
Oh, absolutely. But I mean, you can 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 called strategic deception, which is a CIA concept.
Okay. And this plays into conspiracy theories.
And when you come across something, maybe having this 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 like this.
The CIA had was building spy planes out at Area 51.
The U -2 spy plane, which was going to spy on the Soviet Union in the 50s from above and figure out whether they were preparing for nuclear war.
And the plane was built at Area 51 because no one could know about it.
It flew at 70 ,000 feet.
It was out of range of any surface -to -air missiles.
I interviewed the first man who flew over the Soviet Union in a U -2 Harvey Stockman, and he took pictures with these massive CIA cameras that came back to the agency.
It was wet film and allowed the CIA to understand what was actually going on on the ground in Soviet Russia.
It was photographing military bases.
So this spy plane was being built, and it was so secret like only the president knew about it.
At the same time, nuclear weapons were being exploded next door, right?
So Area 51 and then over at Area 23 was where the bombs were going off.
And I was interviewing all the engineers who were building this spy plane, and Bob Murphy was one of the lead engineers, and he told me this story about strategic deception.
So he and others would go to the ranch.
That's what they called Area 51.
Then they'd fly back to Burbank, California, where they all lived, for the weekends to be with their families, and they would take the shuttle back and forth.
And one day, they went to a big party the night before, and Bob Murphy got drunk.
He was not a guy who gets drunk, but he got drunk.
He missed the shuttle.
And he was like, oh my god, I'm going to lose my job.
I'm in trouble. And he opens the doors how he described it to me to go out and deal with this.
And there's an FBI agent about to knock on the door.
And the guy turns white as a ghost, because Bob Murphy was supposed to be on that flight, so he was on the flight manifest, and it crashed into Mount Charleston on the way there, and everyone was dead.
So that is a dramatic thing to begin with, but here's how it ties up with strategic deception.
The CIA learns that it's aircraft full of U2 engineers, designers, all these incredibly important people on this top -secret project are dead.
They just crashed into Mount Charleston.
What are they going to do?
How are they going to keep this secret?
All the news 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 project's going to be blown open.
What are we going to do?
So they quickly rope off the areas, they do the damage control to the best that they can.
But they're spinning, and I have all the declassified documents from that part of it, learning how worried they are.
There's almost no doubt the project's going to be revealed.
The program is going to be no more, because once the Soviets know about it, it's off.
And instead, the press comes up with a story.
The press reports that it's all these atomic scientists working on this secret new weapon.
They just completely make this up, in essence, right?
It's this new weapons project, and 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 the CIA is like, perfect.
And 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 just an engineer working out there on some television systems.
That's cover. That was his cover.
He didn't say, I'm working on the U -2 spy plan.
And then there's disinformation, when the press reports that the crash was full of a bunch of atomic engineers working on a secret weapons program.
And those are both kinds of strategic deception.
And so you begin to realize that there is a purpose behind a lot of information coming out into the public.
And the CIA often uses that to its advantage.
And so whenever a situation happens, you have to say to yourself, is this really what happened?
Or is it covering up something else?
And then of 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 or the, I think in the UK it's called MI -501, MI -6, MI -6 I think is the equivalent.
Does MI -6, all of these sort of special secret service agencies around the world, do they work with the media?
That's a much, that's a totally separate podcast we could talk forever because there's history of the CIA.
And I'm not an expert on foreign intelligence agencies as much as I am on the United States.
But by all means, there's a long history of the CIA working with journalists, reporters, authors, to put information there.
I mean, there's almost nothing that the CIA hasn't done to my eye.
The question is, you know, 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 up brainwashing.
And there's a long story where I talk to, where I explain exactly how this happened in the fifties with what ultimately an element that became known as the MKUltra program.
Okay. So like MKUltra was a real program, and it had a lot of 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 it.
And if you reverse engineer the brainwashing concept from the back, you will see what I'm talking about.
And I think it's a very interesting story because it actually involves the head of the CIA guy called Alan Dulles.
And his son, who got brain damaged in Korea, whom I tracked down and interviewed for that book.
Spoiler alert. What happens?
Which part? I mean, which part?
I'm so compelled by the whole idea of the CIA because we had someone here recently talking.
We had Andrew here recently talking about what goes on in the CIA.
And I think he wanted 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 of doing more things.
And by the way, he described it sounded like the CIA has less powers and can do less of the things that it's been accused of in the past.
I think it's been accused of killing the president here by some people or being involved in the assassination of one of the presidents here.
And does the CIA report directly into the president?
The CIA features in almost every one of my books.
The most sort of comprehensive look I did at the CIA was a book called Surprise Kill Vanish, which is about the CIA's paramilitary.
And once I reported that, I understood that there are actually two very distinct components of the CIA.
There's the sort of Central Intelligence Agency, the primary human, it's called human intelligence, and there's analysts and there's espionage.
And then there's the paramilitary organization, which was set up in 1947 specifically to go against the Russian version of itself.
Sort of to do the darkest, dirtiest, nastiest operations that we had to because the Russians were.
And so, you know, the CIA is a giant organization with a lot of tentacles.
And I think it's important to speak, at least for me, having reported on many of these different programs.
You know, Area 51 covers the aerial espionage element of the CIA, the science and technology.
The CIA was responsible for putting the first satellite in space, the corona program.
Dr. Bud Whelon, who I interviewed for Area 51, remarkable intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance programs.
And then you have the paramilitary operators, the trigger pullers, the snake eaters, the individuals who, you know, find, fix and finish people.
That's a euphemism.
The teams that do that.
But I prefer to speak very specifically on programs because I find it's the most, it's the most responsible or the most factual way for me to stick to a certain lane of the agency because it is so vast.
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On the nuclear war subject, we talked a little bit about another thing that has, well, we kind of alluded to it, that has emerged since you started writing this book, which is a conversation around artificial intelligence.
And when I start thinking about how you overlay that with this idea of nuclear war, it becomes even more concerning because we're heading towards a world of what they call artificial general intelligence, where a lot of these systems will be making autonomous decisions.
A couple of people that I've spoken to from DeepMind or from Google have talked to me about a world where, this is an extreme case, but our elected leaders will be either AI themselves or being basically working in lockstep with AI.
And then when you think about our nuclear weapon systems, who is better to make that decision?
Is it a Joe Biden that's better to make a decision to launch a nuclear weapon, or is it some kind of artificial intelligence that is so advanced?
We might not even know what it's thinking or doing.
Have you thought much about artificial intelligence since this book came out and since you started writing?
Absolutely. It's something I covered at length in the Pentagon's brain, which is 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 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 consort with AI?
If we know, wait, how did this all begin?
It somehow, at least to my eye, becomes easier to think about these things in a grounded manner.
And so I'll throw this detail at you.
In reporting the Pentagon's brain, it was fascinating to learn that during World War Two, computers were people.
A computer was someone who computed mathematical, you know, trajectories, bomb explosions were all measured by people and pencils.
And I love the smile because suddenly it all becomes easier.
Then you have a guy called John von Neumann, 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 assign the first computer to anyone, but there was a computer that was doing calculations called ENIAC.
And ultimately, after the war, von Neumann went to the Atomic Energy Commission, the most powerful organization in the world at the moment, and said, I want to build a computer that can actually think for itself.
He's kind of the progenitor of this idea of software, not just hardware.
So for a long time, it was kind of Texas Instruments -type computing, almost just like a giant calculator.
And von Neumann 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 Fooled Hall over at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.
And it was giant vacuum tubes.
And he would do these tests.
And I describe this in the Pentagon's brain, because it's really interesting to think this was only in 1945.
There were vacuum tubes and cords.
And they had to worry about mice eating cords.
And John von Neumann was so brilliant and smart that he could beat the computer initially.
His assistants would give him numerical calculations.
He would do them in his mind.
The computer would be trying to do them.
He would win. And then one day, I think it was 1946 or 1947, the computer beat him.
That was the moment that von Neumann realized computers just got smarter than me, than 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 this has to do with AI, this is man computer interface.
The Defense Department hires a guy called Licklider to essentially shrink computers down from the size of a house to the size of this room and think of what they are now.
So the Defense Department has always led with artificial intelligence, which is computer based.
And when you can see that origin story, you can begin to understand where we're going.
And AI had to have these military, 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 know, not all of it, but in other words, you can learn in a sort of poetic manner, the trajectory of 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 battlefield is no place for humans.
That was a statement of its first robotic AI program.
I went on chat GPT a couple of months ago and I asked it, I said, could you play out a scenario where the world ends?
Because artificial intelligence basically gets leaked out of the computer that it was born on.
And the scenario that it played out involved nuclear war.
Because halfway, I think it was in step three or four, it says that the AI basically takes control of the nuclear warheads, or at least some of them.
And then it kind of launches them at other countries.
And hearing chat GPT say that.
And in step three or four, use nuclear weapons as a way to kind of make the world extinct.
It felt plausible. Okay.
So I'm going to push back against that, which is by no means right.
I'm not right. But we're just having a sort of theoretical conversation here.
Chat GPT is gathering its information, right?
So I would argue that chat GPT has got a lot of information from the Terminator movie.
Yeah. Okay. There is that in the zeitgeist of 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 ability for NC3 to communicate with the actual weapons is so profoundly classified.
That I don't have access to it.
But I'm going to give this to you as an idea.
What I do know and learned reporting nuclear war scenario is a fascinating detail 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 described 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 understand?
Yes. Our submarine launched ballistic missiles that are just so the technology behind them.
And I delineate it for the reader.
It's astonishing that you can launch a missile from underwater.
It can breach the surface.
It's after burners take off.
And then it begins its trajectory.
You know, boost phase mid course phase 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.
So you realize there's this little panel that opens up in the ballistic missile.
And there are other ways that it's navigating.
But the primary mean of navigation is star sighting.
I mean, you just have to really stop and go, Oh, first of all, it's actually really interesting concept that the most advanced potentially civilization ending ballistic missile is guiding itself to its target by this ancient concept, like that our hunter gather ancestors used, which is looking at the stars.
It's looking at the stars and then navigating using them.
And that's meant to be a defense against a system, an enemy taking control of your nuclear weapons.
The issue we have is that there's potentially nine or 10 different nuclear powers, and they don't all have the same systems.
So if we get to the point of AGI, which a lot of people almost see as the singularity almost you can't see past that moment where there is a new being amongst us that is capable of thinking faster and more expansively and more intelligently than humans and those things we don't, I think it might look
at our systems as child's play, as maybe not our systems, but maybe look at North Korea systems as child's play, it might be able to put that VCR into the system and play out the nucleus simulation that tricks those people into leaving there being attacked.
Which is maybe time for the answer to your question of should we be at zero, right?
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 these conversations with their colleagues and their thought leaders and the people that could maybe influence public policy and saying,
well, that would be a very good reason to have zero nuclear weapons or, you know, everybody 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 intelligent, you know, trigger scenario like you're talking about.
Are you optimistic?
Optimistic about I am.
I mean, I am an optimistic person by nature.
And so do you think there will be a nuclear war in the course of humanity?
I wrote this book as the optimistic, hopeful person that's saying read this and realize that a manmade problem has a manmade solution.
And earlier you talked about there being high consequence and low probability, but the more the years tick on, that probability increases by nature of there being this Mad King.
Absolutely. So, you know, and that's what I think.
So I was asking myself, eventually, if we if we play this forward, I don't know, a 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 realizes that, you know, he's got some sickness and he doesn't really want his son to take power.
He starts getting a bit agitated.
Maybe he has some kind of psychosis, schizophrenia, I don't know, decides to in his dying days to let a couple of these things fly.
Is that eventually going to happen?
The laws of probability, the laws of averages say that the longer we're here, the longer we have these weapons, the higher the probability.
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 people of your generation.
Ask that question a lot more than perhaps people of my generation and older, like that was not a mindset that people necessarily hadn't talked about.
And I think that has to do with the confluence of events that you talk about.
First of all, people who have access to information in 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 you cannot overlook.
And so you would think that it's time to kind of, and I'm not a Pollyanna, but you have to move away from seeing everyone and everything as an enemy.
And moving toward it's fine to have adversaries.
Having opponents is, you know, sportsmen have opponents, right?
But everyone being an enemy and having, you know, wars escalating around the world, it seems as 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 makes me think that war is just part of humans trying to coexist.
And all of the things that are hardwired into us are such for status and ego and reproduction and resources and survival result in war, like they result in recessions.
So I read a lot about the origin of war, like it's a debate, no one, you know, but it is discussed.
And the anthropologists, I think, have the most interesting sort of thoughtful concepts around it, which I'll share with you, which is this.
Because yes, technically there has always been war.
And one of the debates is, you know, did war begin with civilization or were hunter -gatherers warring?
But more interesting to that, I think, is about the anthropologists who studied in the 60s, the hunter -gatherer tribes, in the Amazon when there were still access to them.
And they were sort of, you know, they were unaffected by civilization at 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?
Sort of, or rather those who trust versus those who are suspicious, that no matter if a hunter is out hunting, you know, that's part of a hunter -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 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 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?
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, you know, propagandized, but people can learn to think differently.
So if you're me, who is a hopeful person and wants to 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 rather, if that's too Pollyannish, to find the way in which how do I look at the person coming at me as someone who could be on my team or even 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?
And I don't just mean in No New Kill War, I mean in all these books.
I mean, I'm particularly fascinated by DARPA because I think in a lot of the world, especially in Europe, in the UK, we don't even know what DARPA means.
So it was interesting reading about the existence of that.
But in all these books, what is the most interesting thing, the most resonant thing when you talk about your work to people?
Maybe that surprised you?
I mean, every single one of my books is 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 put one over the other because that would be like favoring a child.
And I mean that literally.
Sometimes when I prepare to do a podcast, I read my own books.
And I'm really, for me 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 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 this specific shocking thing.
Because remember that many of the people that I interview because they're war fighters 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?
Absolutely. I can't even say it now because I might.
Yeah. I'm gonna ask you for the example.
You want the example?
I'll tell you right now.
It's a hard one. So I was just in.
I was just in 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 Nagasaki.
So she's a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb.
And I met her, I brought her a signed copy of my book, right?
I mean, you just think about being a victim of that.
And also, I learned so much about the stigma that followed the survivors of the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The stigma because they were perceived as sort of 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 composed.
But in talking to her, I got very emotional because you can't avoid that.
And part of the reason why I got so emotional was 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 that was dropped on Nagasaki.
And so when you think about it, and there's little old me, the reporter 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 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 wired the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.
And my other hand goes to someone who was there.
That, that wells you up because it's the human condition.
Can you speak to this impact that, that had on both those individuals?
So starting with, if we start with the individual who was involved in wiring that bomb.
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, it impacted his whole life.
And he became a member of the Manhattan Project and he became uniquely tied into the nuclear weapons industry.
So these kind of long arcs of history are so deeply interesting to me, especially as I get older.
You move from the intensity of specific missions that people were on, of specific operations they ran, and you begin to 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 you and I can have.
And you have to get a little bit older to know that, you know?
But sometimes when I'm interviewing people who are in their 80s and 90s and I see them looking at me, and I, like, especially going back 15 years ago when I started reporting all this.
And I could see, you know, they're old, and they're like earlobe 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.
And 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 I'm going to be gone.
And that's really, that's powerful.
It's a lot of trust as well, isn't it?
It is. That's the role of the reporter.
You work, at least my job as an investigative journalist is like, you know, I want people to trust me that I am getting 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 to you about nuclear weapons, right?
So to loop this back to nuclear war scenario.
I know I'm doing my job, at least it feels like I'm doing my job properly or earnestly 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 know, at a Space Force convention, come to my house for dinner, have a conversation with my family, 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 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 is important to me as an investigative journalist, but also like as an American citizen, and as I said earlier, as a mother.
That individual that wired that bomb, Tiptook Part of the Manhattan Project, was involved in dropping the bomb on the lady that you met recently.
How do they feel about that now in hindsight with their age and as they look back?
He has died. Oh, okay.
He has died. How did he feel about it?
There were other things that bothered him more, which is the great conundrum of using your own eyes to 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.
And sometimes when people are involved in really classified programs, you have to spend a lot of time to dig and uncover and discover it's a long process.
And he was involved in 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 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 and, you know, another person that comes to mind was Billy Waugh on the Surprise Kill Vanish book.
Sort of the longest serving singleton for the US government as a paramilitary operator.
The saying goes, Billy Waugh killed more people than cancer.
Okay? We travel to Hanoi together.
We travel to Havana together.
I spent a lot of time with him.
Both of these men were probably the two most powerful sources I worked with in my life in their 80s and 90s.
Both happy men? Billy was more complex than happy, you know?
You work hard to kind of get at the character of someone, and you try the best to represent them.
But, I mean, you know, Billy had so many people.
He was involved in so many missions with so many people that died that I don't know of happiness.
He certainly wasn't sour, but 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 dropped.
She survived as a baby.
Her family, did they survive?
Yes, and it's fascinating.
I'm not saying her name because I don't have quite her permission yet, right?
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.
So these layers upon layers about what we know about our own selves you've made me think of.
Which is you balance that out with what you know about your own self versus how easy it is to judge someone else or perceive someone else.
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 about yourself as you do about others.
I know I do. I'm usually in your scene, and there's no camera runnings.
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 want this on the record.
I want you to know this about me because it's important, but I don't want it publicly known.
And I honor that because in a way being a journalist is being a trusted source that someone can share information with within a context that the person, and I .E.
me, knows the groundwork about many people's grandchildren's grandchildren.
Don't they don't know what grandpa did, and they might not know for decades.
I had a guy show up at one of my book signings at the L .A.
Times Festival of Bull of Books just last 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 grandfather was a seriously high -ranking person working on nuclear sub -launched ballistic missiles in the early days of what was called the Polaris Experiment.
And he had all these documents, and no one in his family cared about it.
He had I .D. badges and letters and pictures with the president and pictures.
And I could say to him, oh, yes, this is, you know, I could give him some contacts.
And his wife was there.
And, you know, it was just like it's a great example of how we sometimes have a desire to know about our own selves, our own legacy.
Where did we come from?
And then grandpa has passed.
And so my job is like getting grandpa's story on the record.
That conversation you had since the book had come out with the lady you met in Brussels.
Did it change how you viewed your book and the work you've done here in writing this?
Did it add an element?
Oh, it most certainly enhanced and added.
And particularly that emotional one that you saw for me when I think about that, you know.
And I immediately had a long conversation with my husband about it when I got home, right?
Because I used sounding boards to understand how I even really feel about things.
But I already had a context to know about survivors, having read a lot of accounts from survivors to report the book.
And I mentioned some of them.
Satsuko Thurlow was a 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 learn about the bomb dropping on Hiroshima.
And then I read a lot of the ancillary material about that so I can understand more.
And try and a lot of work as a journalist, you're just at least if you write narrative nonfiction as I do, you're really trying to imagine the situation.
But then you meet someone and it all becomes real.
And that's where the this comes in, because it's not just words on the paper.
It hasn't been. When they say a survivor, how do you categorize or define a survivor of a nuclear bomb?
There's a word in Japanese and I don't want to get it wrong and it's something like hibakusha, right?
So forgive me for not having that word.
But that is an actual term that is used by anyone who lived through the atomic bombings in August of 1945 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So if you lived through it, you are in that category of people.
If you were there. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And so in other words, now this was, you know, 79 years ago, so most of the survivors, you can just think about the ages of the people involved.
So, Suko Thurlow is 90.
You know, she's one.
She was a recipient of the who I who I write about.
She was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 with a group of physicians, Dr.
Carlos Omona and others whom I met in Brussels that are all part of these organizations working to reduce nuclear weapons down to zero.
Right. They are against nuclear war and their organizations work diligently to bring the information to the fore and to 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.
What can you tell me about that conversation?
It's probably like you have with your I mean, my husband and I have been married a very long time, so he knows everything.
There's also a joke that he has what's called Sprouse Privilege, which he does.
Right. You can tell your spouse anything legally.
But no, those conversations are priceless.
Those are the conversations that allow me to try and peel back one 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 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 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 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.
And very real people on both sides that, you know, one could class as both victims and innocent at the same time, I guess.
I've 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, 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 was a survivor of a nuclear attack, those lines can understandably become at least in your head.
The wall can drop between the two.
And as you touched your heart, you referred to your head, which I think is typically when you're talking about your journalistic hat.
But then we all have hearts as well.
Thank God you come home.
And I know the conversations I have with my partner.
I guess I'm assuming the conversation you have with your husband now is about 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 able to have those conversations so that you can, I think, have both of those, bring both of those components into your work.
I mean, maybe with the exception being the military or the CIA, the two organizations I write about, you know, Billy Waugh 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 that their partners are they in the CIA?
No. 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.
What if you couldn't?
I wouldn't be myself.
I wouldn't. I wouldn't choose that.
I could never be in the military.
I could never be in the agency because I think you are asked to wear a hat that removes your heart.
And that's not possible for somebody like me.
I mean, we just figure out our strengths and our weaknesses.
And society needs all of those people, by 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.
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 who they're leaving it for.
And the question that's been left for you was written in Europe when we were over in our studio then.
It is, what is the last thing you changed your mind about?
Well, this comes to mind only because it's apropos to what we've been talking about.
And it has to do with reporting, not my personal life, which is maybe more interesting to people.
I always strive to interview people and ask them questions, even if they're hard, even if I have a preconception that maybe they are the sort of bad guy, shall we say, or the, you know, the what?
Something not necessarily the bad, but just that like, I might not, my brain 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 interview for the Pentagon's brain.
And he had, he was kind of the creator behind what's called the soldier's super suit.
Okay. And that's a totally different subject, but then these ideas to make 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 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.
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, that's fine.
But he ignored me and I felt slighted.
And so I'm telling him myself here from your view.
And so when I was writing my narrative of the super soldier, he essentially was 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.
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 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 is different when we see them as aliens, adversaries, enemies, opponents.
We are much more likely to treat them as such.
But in reality, it often turns out that we're all very much the same, struggling with the same things, with the same worries, anxieties, concerns, apprehensions.
And it's just sometimes when there's a bridge built in the case of that email 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 whether it's with nuclear weapons.
And when you see that fellow hunter on the path, they might not be the enemy.
They might be someone to work with.
It's very good of you to admit that, Annie, because what you're actually admitting is that you're a human being, because we all do that kind of thing.
When we see someone as an adversary, I think, as you say, it feels like it's hardwired into us in some way, but also within that story, we learn to try and find or make the bridge ourselves, which in the world we live in now, a social media and stuff is doesn't seem to be easy or obvious for people
with all this polarisation and such.
And maybe if the US could make a bridge with some of these foreign adversaries, we wouldn't be talking about nuclear war in your book, Nuclear War Scenario.
Thank you so much for writing this book, because I'm a big believer and a big advocate of confronting the realities, honestly and openly, regardless of how uncomfortable it is.
Because if we don't, I think it actually increases the probability of us finding ourselves in a 72 hour scenario, as you write about in the book.
72 minutes! Did I say 72 hours?
We all make Freudian slips.
I wish it was 72. Well, no, I actually don't.
If it was going to happen, I'd rather it just happened in the blink of an eye.
But no, I think it's so important to write.
A lot of people will be scared.
A lot of people would choose not to even click on this conversation because they're scared of the subject matter.
But I think it's leaning in that helps us to resolve and find solutions to start the conversation.
And I know lots of people listen to this.
You never know like that, like that documentary movie you talked about earlier, who's listening and the powers that they have and the decisions that they can make to change things or to create one of those bridges to sort of denuclearise the world.
And that's the work you're doing.
So I think it's very, very important work.
It's very important for your brilliance to doing it.
So thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
