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0:01:05 I find it disturbingly easy to imagine all the ways the world could end.
0:01:11 You, dear listener, probably know this already since we’ve done our fair share of dystopian shows.
0:01:18 On a long enough timeline, we’re all dead anyway, so that discovery was aliens destroying us.
0:01:24 AI will either destroy humanity or create utopia.
0:01:29 So in other words, everything is on fire.
0:01:31 Everything is on fire, yeah.
0:01:33 But one thing we’ve never really discussed, not in any serious way, at least, is nuclear war.
0:01:44 Which is surprising because this scenario is near the top of basically every list of existential threats.
0:01:52 And that’s why I want to know more about it.
0:01:55 And the public deserves to know more about it.
0:01:58 So I jumped at the opportunity to invite someone on the show who’s done the work and truly understands what we’re facing here.
0:02:06 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:02:16 [Music]
0:02:28 Today’s guest is Annie Jacobson.
0:02:31 She’s a phenomenal reporter and the author of a bracing new book called “Nuclear War,” a scenario.
0:02:40 I read a lot of books for this show, and I have to say,
0:02:45 this one stuck with me longer than any I can recall.
0:02:50 It’s a book that clearly wants to startle the reader, and it succeeds.
0:02:57 Jacobson walks you through all the ways a nuclear catastrophe might unfold.
0:03:04 She gives a play-by-play breakdown of the terrifying choreography that could unfold in the minutes immediately after a nuclear missile launch.
0:03:15 If you read this book or listen to this conversation, you’ll walk away with a much clearer picture of what a nuclear war would actually look like,
0:03:25 and how perilously close we are to that reality.
0:03:29 [Music]
0:03:36 Annie Jacobson, welcome to the show.
0:03:38 Thank you for having me.
0:03:40 So I’m just going to ask you, why did you write a book like this?
0:03:45 My intention was to demonstrate in appalling detail just how horrific nuclear war would be.
0:03:57 So that dot, dot, dot, and I have a feeling that’s going to be what we’re going to be talking about today.
0:04:04 Yeah, well, mission accomplished on that front.
0:04:08 We’ll get into it, but the reporting in this and the color and the vividness of your descriptions are quite terrifying,
0:04:17 but they’re terrifying because they’re done so well.
0:04:19 That’s going to become apparent as we move our way through this conversation.
0:04:23 I mean, is it a working assumption of yours that this is an issue that’s not taken seriously enough by the general public?
0:04:34 Most certainly, and that is echoed by the reaction I’ve been getting,
0:04:40 not just from people around the world who are astonished after reading my book that they knew none of it,
0:04:47 and yet in some manner how easy it is to digest and understand after reading my book, another intention.
0:04:54 But then there’s also the calls I’ve been getting from former lawmakers, from former congresspeople,
0:05:02 from former nuclear command and control people, all saying, “Wow, this is a significant demonstration of how horrific nuclear war would be.”
0:05:15 Can you describe America’s nuclear triad so that listeners have a snapshot of the world destroying power we’re currently wielding?
0:05:29 How many bombs do we have and what are the differences between them?
0:05:33 I mean, most of the stuff in the nuclear nomenclature seems so intimidating, and yet it’s actually almost exactly as it sounds.
0:05:41 Like triad means three.
0:05:43 The nuclear triad involves three nuclear weapon systems.
0:05:48 There are the ICBMs, Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.
0:05:52 They sit in silos.
0:05:55 They are land launch, one part of the triad.
0:05:58 Second part of the triad are the bombers.
0:06:01 We have 66 nuclear capable bombers, B-52s and B-2 stealth bombers.
0:06:08 They carry gravity bombs.
0:06:10 And then we have the nuclear-armed nuclear-powered submarines.
0:06:17 They carry sub-launched ballistic missiles, SLBMs.
0:06:22 And those are the three choices that the President of the United States has when he is asked to launch a counterattack.
0:06:32 He can choose from one or all of the weapon systems of the U.S. nuclear triad.
0:06:38 Do we know how many bombs we currently have?
0:06:41 Is that public?
0:06:42 We absolutely do, thanks to people like Hans Christensen and his team at the Federation of American Scientists who keep track of all the warheads.
0:06:53 So right now, America and Russia have each approximately 5,000 nuclear warheads.
0:07:02 5,000.
0:07:04 Of that 5,000, I’m going to give you the number in a moment of what are ready to launch.
0:07:10 And the reason why I’m emphasizing this is because ready to launch means they can be launched in as little as 60 seconds after the President’s command.
0:07:24 And up to a few minutes, most of them, some of them on the bombers might take an hour or so to load.
0:07:31 So those ready for launch numbers, I hope you’re sitting down.
0:07:35 The United States has 1,770.
0:07:41 Russia has 1,674.
0:07:45 That is enough to destroy the world.
0:07:48 What is the country that has the next largest arsenal?
0:07:51 China.
0:07:52 Last year, China had 400 nuclear weapons.
0:07:56 Now they have 500.
0:07:58 That is a lot of new nuclear weapons in one year.
0:08:02 The Defense Department recently calculated they believe that China will have as many as 1,500 by the end of the decade.
0:08:13 Okay.
0:08:14 And are there still nine nuclear powers?
0:08:17 Is that correct?
0:08:18 There are.
0:08:19 And so Pakistan and India, for listeners, each have approximately 163 nuclear weapons each.
0:08:28 North Korea, CIA estimates they have 50, but some of the NGOs that track this stuff believe North Korea has as many as 130.
0:08:38 Israel is believed to have about 90 very secret nuclear program, hard to discern.
0:08:45 UK has about 225 warheads on stockpile. France, 290. And that makes up nine nuclear armed nations with what are understood to be approximately 12,500 nuclear weapons.
0:09:03 I want to do my best in this conversation to not take anything for granted.
0:09:10 And for me, that means being as specific and concrete as possible about the stakes.
0:09:18 So when we talk about the power of these weapons, we all know it’s immense, but I suspect the image most of us still have is the image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
0:09:33 But that was a very long time ago.
0:09:36 And the bombs America dropped then were what, 15 and 20 kilotons, something like that, right?
0:09:43 How much more powerful are the thermonuclear weapons we’re talking about now?
0:09:51 To give you an idea of a thermonuclear weapon.
0:09:56 I went to one of the ultimate sources, a nuclear weapons engineer named Richard Garwin, probably the most famous nuclear weapons engineer, physicist, presidential advisor, still alive.
0:10:12 Garwin drew the plans for the very first thermonuclear weapon. Its codename was Ivy Mike. It’s on the cover of my book.
0:10:23 It was 10.4 megatons.
0:10:27 So consider that the 15 kiloton Hiroshima bomb that you referenced and then think about 10.4 megatons. It is about 1000 Hiroshima sized bombs detonating at the same time from the same center point.
0:10:46 Garwin explained it to me in the simplest of terms when he asked me to visualize this fact.
0:10:53 A thermonuclear weapon uses an atomic bomb as its fuse inside of the weapon.
0:11:02 Wow.
0:11:05 I want you to paint the picture as you do in the opening pages of the book where you imagine a nuke is dropped on the Pentagon in Washington DC. Tell me what happens the second after a bomb is dropped in a place like DC or New York City?
0:11:23 So with a one megaton bomb on Washington DC and that is called a bolt out of the blue attack. That is what people in Washington fear most. That was said to me by an assistant secretary of defense.
0:11:37 And what happens in the very first millisecond is that this thermonuclear flash expands into a ball of fire that is one mile of pure fire.
0:11:52 It’s 19 football fields of fire. And then you have to imagine that the fireballs edges they compress into this what is called a steeply fronted blast wave.
0:12:06 So you have this dense wall of air pushing out mowing down everything in its path three miles out and I’m talking everything in every direction because it is accompanied by several hundred mile an hour winds.
0:12:23 You know it’s like Washington DC just got hit by an asteroid and the accompanying wave when you think about this initial nine mile diameter ring.
0:12:35 Imagine every single engineered structure I’m talking buildings bridges changing physical shape and collapsing.
0:12:44 We haven’t even spoken of what happens with that thermonuclear flash that sets everything on fire. It melts lead steel.
0:12:54 I mean titanium you’re talking about streets nine miles out transforming into molten asphalt lava people kind of getting sucked into this.
0:13:06 The details are so horrific and I also think it’s important to keep in mind these are not details from Annie Jacobson’s imagination.
0:13:15 These are sourced from Defense Department documents because the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department have been keeping track of what nuclear bombs do to people and to things.
0:13:31 Ever since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of nineteen forty five.
0:13:36 You can’t find a vision of hell and any religious text that can even approach the horror of this scenario in my opinion.
0:13:45 You know it’s interesting that you say that because the religious tax and I often look at the paintings that portray hell and their narrative and their evocative.
0:13:58 They’re not specific and scientific and when you read in the book things like at precisely what distance pine needles will ignite from line of sight nuclear flash.
0:14:14 And you realize that that is something that has been measured by the Defense Department because when we were setting off these thermonuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands.
0:14:25 We were measuring all of this in terms of distance in terms of atmosphere we were sending animals up in planes we were tying animals to ships.
0:14:37 This is like horrific details a lot of which I left out so that readers didn’t get essentially beyond grossed out.
0:14:45 But I worked to include enough detail that the readers could have their own imaginations and their own narrative thoughts about this kind of horror or as you say hell.
0:15:04 You know working in tandem with some of these scientific facts.
0:15:10 In service of more detail in that giant mushroom cloud that’s the image everyone has of a atomic bomb.
0:15:19 If I understand the physics of this at all and I don’t but if I understand what people who do understand it told you everything around that blast gets sucked up into this giant mushroom cloud.
0:15:33 So in the case of an actual bomb in a populated area what gets sucked up into that cloud are thousands of people and I guess all the rest of the non human debris in the area which would be basically everything.
0:15:49 It’s not thousands of people.
0:15:52 It’s hundreds of thousands of people.
0:15:55 It’s upwards of a million people if you’re talking about a one megaton thermonuclear bomb and when you can try and wrap your head around that.
0:16:07 I think that it takes your heart and soul to an entirely different area of being perhaps that you’ve never even been.
0:16:18 This was certainly my experience reporting this book when when Ted Postel the MIT professor emeritus was describing to me how humans turn into combusting carbon and then they become sucked up in that cloud.
0:16:31 And this is a man who’s been writing about the medical effects of thermonuclear weapons.
0:16:37 You begin to realize the depth of the horror.
0:16:42 I want to talk about a nuclear winter for a minute or what you call day zero in the book.
0:16:48 What does that look like how cold would it be how dark one of the big premises of the book was to take readers from nuclear launch to nuclear winter.
0:16:59 And the nuclear launch up to day zero as you say takes place over this horrifying 72 minute period.
0:17:14 And you know that is enough to shock anyone that as stratcom commander general Keeler said to me in an interview when we were talking about a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States.
0:17:26 Yes Annie the world could end in the next couple of hours.
0:17:29 And so nuclear winter begins in essence after the bomb stop falling stop exploding.
0:17:38 There is a process of mega fires.
0:17:41 So the area around every nuclear detonation is going to ultimately result in what is known now as a mega fire.
0:17:49 You’re talking about a hundred two hundred three hundred square miles of fire per bomb where everything in that area is burning until it doesn’t exist anymore.
0:18:03 This is because of course there are no first responders anymore.
0:18:07 There are no fire trucks.
0:18:09 There’s no way to put anything out.
0:18:11 And so with all of these explosions so it gets lofted into the troposphere three hundred and thirty billion pounds of so it would be lofted into the air.
0:18:28 And that is enough soot to block out 70% of the sun.
0:18:33 What happens when that much sun gets blocked out is a dramatic temperature plunge.
0:18:39 It’s up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit certainly in the mid latitudes.
0:18:45 The areas for example from Iowa to Ukraine that whole band of the mid latitudes the bodies of water in those areas become frozen over in sheets of ice.
0:18:56 With that temperature drop you have the death of agriculture.
0:19:01 And that is why nuclear winter after nuclear war will result in what is now estimated to be five billion dead.
0:19:13 And that model you just mentioned if I remember also estimated that in places like Iowa and Ukraine temperatures basically wouldn’t go above freezing for something like six years at least.
0:19:29 That’s right.
0:19:30 And I mean that you know sometimes that the details become so overwhelming they’re almost hard to keep track of and other details you simply can never forget.
0:19:40 At least that’s the case with me as a reporter.
0:19:43 And when I was reading Carl Sagan he was one of the original five authors of the nuclear winter theory.
0:19:50 And Carl Sagan wrote about how after these bodies of water that would get frozen over for as you say seven years after the thawing out of that the dead people who had been frozen in the nuclear winter.
0:20:11 Then you have to start considering the pathogens and the plague.
0:20:17 And so just when you thought you couldn’t imagine more horror.
0:20:22 Now you have to learn about the details of nuclear winter.
0:20:25 And I think the best quote for all of this was spoken by Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier during the Kennedy administration and the two of them talked a lot about nuclear war with deep horror.
0:20:37 And it was Khrushchev who said after a nuclear war the survivors would envy the dead.
0:20:46 Yeah, that sounds about right.
0:20:52 When we get back from the break what safeguards are in place to prevent a nuclear catastrophe.
0:20:57 And are they enough?
0:20:59 Stay with us.
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0:24:48 I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the ways we might stumble into this nightmare scenario and the protocols in place should we get there.
0:25:01 First of all, let me just ask you this. Are you confident, should the public be confident that there are enough checks and guardrails in place to ensure that we’ll avoid a nuclear exchange if it’s at all possible?
0:25:19 Let me answer that question with a quote from the present day Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres. He said, “The world is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”
0:25:39 What does that mean, really?
0:25:41 What it means is exactly what he said, that we could just have a mishap. We could have a mishap would be a misinterpretation.
0:25:51 A miscalculation would be one nuclear armed nation thinking another nuclear armed nation was doing something that maybe it wasn’t even doing.
0:26:03 And this gets us into some of the crazy policies that exist on the books, things like launch on warning, whereby once the United States learns that it is being attacked by an ICBM or a sublaunched ballistic missile, which, by the way, cannot be redirected or recalled,
0:26:23 and takes 30 minutes approximately for an ICBM to get from one continent to the other. For a sublaunched missile, it’s under 10.
0:26:32 So the US policy of launch on warning means that the president then has six minutes to decide not if he should respond, but how he should respond with nuclear weapons.
0:26:46 That’s what Guterres is speaking of, I believe, when he talks about a miscalculation.
0:26:52 I mean, how much room is there really for human agency in these command and control protocols? I mean, you always hear people say in presidential elections, do we really trust that guy with the nukes?
0:27:09 But is that the right way to think about this? I mean, if the president has six minutes to make a decision, I guess it is.
0:27:16 You’re raising an existential question that everyone should be raising, I believe, because we have been living in what some call a 79-year experiment.
0:27:28 Yes, you could say deterrence has held all these years. Never mind the fact that there used to be two nuclear-armed nations, and there are now nine. Never mind the fact that you have new technology factors coming into the mix.
0:27:43 Never mind the fact that nuclear-saber rattling has suddenly become acceptable among world leaders. This is astonishing. If you look at history, this was never part of the rhetoric, particularly out of the mouth of a US president, as happened with the former President Trump.
0:28:02 When I began reporting this book, the fundamental question that I was trying to answer was not, “Isn’t deterrence great?” but rather, “What if deterrence fails?”
0:28:18 The Defense Department predicated its nuclear arsenal on this idea that deterrence will hold. That is the fundamental. It’s written everywhere. Deterrence will hold.
0:28:29 Well, I also found a discussion with the Deputy General of STRATCOM talking to his colleagues, not in a classified setting, but in a somewhat rarefied setting. And what he said was this, “If deterrence fails, it all unravels.”
0:28:49 That word “unravel” is at the heart of the question that you asked me and that we’re discussing. What if it all unravels?
0:28:59 Yeah, it is. There are a lot of jarring, bracing anecdotes and quotes in the book, and many of them are bouncing around in my head as we speak. I recall, I think it was former CIA director Michael Hayden told you explicitly that this process is designed for speed and decisiveness.
0:29:24 It is not designed to debate the decision. On some level, I get that, but Jesus, the automaticity of the process is more than a little terrifying to me.
0:29:39 You better believe it, and Hayden actually told that to members of Congress. So these are big, bold statements on the record. These are not the words of somebody at a dinner party pontificating. This is like official language answering the United States Congress.
0:30:01 And by the way, I believe that with the rhetoric from the former President Donald Trump about the fire and fury days with North Korea, it worried Congress to such a degree that they issued a number of reports that drilled down on a couple concepts that the public was not clear on.
0:30:28 And even you could do a Google search and very easily get the wrong information. I’m talking about from top media places, and one of them had to do with what’s called sole presidential authority.
0:30:40 So when Trump was, you know, saying, I have a bigger button and that kind of rhetoric, which is so unpresidential. I’m not politicizing that. I’m talking about a POTUS should never be threatening anything about weapons of mass destruction, period.
0:30:57 It’s incredibly undemocratic. But the upside of that, if you will, was Congress releasing a couple reports, making clear that the President of the United States does have what is called sole presidential authority.
0:31:13 And what that means is that he needs to ask permission of no one to launch a nuclear war, not the Secretary of Defense, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and not Congress.
0:31:27 Yeah, that’s not very reassuring either. You write something near the end of the book. What if the Secretary of Defense, who’s the acting president in this hypothetical situation, what if this person has a crisis of conscious debate, as you put it?
0:31:43 And wonders, is there really any point in firing these bombs, these missiles and wiping out the other half of humanity? And it’s pretty clear that there really isn’t any room for that, because the whole logic of deterrence is predicated on the absolute promise that the process is fixed and automatic.
0:32:03 That’s what makes it deterrent. But then again, it imprisons the actors in this process that they don’t really have any control over, which, again, is terrifying.
0:32:13 Let me add something, because Dr. Glenn McDuff of the Los Alamos Laboratory, who is both a nuclear weapons engineer who worked on the Star Wars program during the Reagan administration, and has served as the historian at the classified library at the lab.
0:32:33 I asked him, “Do you think anyone would defy orders?” And he said, “Annie, you have a better chance at winning Powerball.”
0:32:41 Yeah, I think that’s right. And I guess we’re talking about the potential for miscalculations and that sort of thing. And I realize North Korea is a bit of an outlier here, so we can set them aside for a minute. Beyond them, is there clear and open communication among the other nuclear powers in an effort to avoid miscalculations?
0:33:06 What a great question. And I did not know the answer to that question when I began reporting the book. So most people have absolutely no idea. What I learned was really fascinating and terrifying on this issue.
0:33:21 So one of the things I write about is sort of nuclear war has all these rules, except there are no rules once the missiles start flying. But one of the very important rules to essentially make sure that deterrence holds to safeguard the entire world from miscalculation is the simple fact that some of the treaties that have been laid down,
0:33:48 many of which are now in jeopardy of not existing anymore, say that it is incredibly important to notify other nuclear-armed nations of your tests when you’re testing a delivery system like an ICBM.
0:34:05 And so I noticed during the Ukraine war, which began after I was already writing the book, and really put a monkey wrench in terms of like threat levels, meaning a lot of my sources before were like, people have forgotten about nuclear threats, and then suddenly the Ukraine war in Putin is talking about it.
0:34:24 But announcements are made between nuclear-armed nations. Oh, we’re doing an ICBM test. Now, this may be from State Department to State Department. It may be through more covert channels or less rather intelligence community channels.
0:34:39 And nonetheless, these tests are announced. During the Ukrainian war, the United States canceled one of its ICBM tests, so as not to get into a situation where there was some kind of misunderstanding when the threat level was so high.
0:34:57 What I learned is that there is the outlier in North Korea, and that North Korea not only doesn’t announce its missile tests, but that in this 18-month period where I was heavily reporting the book, North Korea launched over 100 missiles, not announced.
0:35:19 Now, when you consider the first 150 seconds after a ballistic missile launch, after our satellite system identifies the launch, the entire nuclear command control system in the United States is on alert determining the trajectory of that missile.
0:35:38 And when you realize the intensity of those first 150 seconds and you interview people who have actually sat through these, and then you have to balance that out, that North Korea alone put the U.S. command and control through 100 some-odd alerts in a 18-month period where they didn’t know if the missile was coming to the United States or was simply going into the sea of Japan or into space for a satellite launch.
0:36:04 Then you go, “Wow, that is incredibly reckless.”
0:36:09 Well, I’ll just say this.
0:36:11 Anyone listening can think whatever they want about Donald Trump or Putin.
0:36:17 I have a fair amount of contempt for both of them for different reasons.
0:36:21 But I don’t think, and I emphasize this is just my opinion, my feeling, I don’t think either of them are truly nihilistic enough to start a mutually annihilating war.
0:36:37 But North Korea, that feels like a different story to me just because it is such a black box.
0:36:48 And what I can imagine rather easily is maybe Putin doing something like using tactical nukes in Ukraine, for instance.
0:37:00 And those are not mega bombs, but how easily could a decision to do something like that use a tactical nuk, especially if it’s in a NATO country?
0:37:08 How easily could that kickstart a sequence of events that leads to Armageddon?
0:37:14 And that doesn’t seem that implausible to me.
0:37:17 And to that end, I do break up the scenario with these little vignettes that are essentially history lessons.
0:37:24 And to your point, one of the history lessons, I discuss a rare declassified war game, because of course they’re so jealously guarded.
0:37:35 But one was declassified about 10 years ago, and it is called proud profit.
0:37:41 And in that nuclear war game, we learn no matter how nuclear war begins, whether NATO is involved, whether China is involved.
0:37:53 No matter how it begins, it ends in total nuclear Armageddon.
0:37:59 And Bracken said everyone at that war game, and we’re talking secretaries of defense on down, everyone left “greatly depressed.”
0:38:08 Is there some near future where, in order to further reinforce the automaticity of this process, we just have AI controlling the whole thing from start to finish,
0:38:22 in which case, I guess then we’d have to worry about AI launching a damn nuke on its own?
0:38:27 I can’t imagine a worse nightmare scenario of bringing AI, what I call, more machine learning technology into the mix of decisions.
0:38:35 I mean, there is an incredible amount of machine learning that is built into the system.
0:38:39 For example, the satellite detects the launch, and then that data is processed in space.
0:38:45 We’re talking about one-tenth of the way to the moon is where a geosync satellite sits.
0:38:51 And imagine that data is then being processed and streamlined down to the nuclear command and control bunkers in the United States.
0:38:59 This is happening in seconds.
0:39:01 This is an astonishing degree of machine learning.
0:39:04 But the idea of putting an air quotes “AI” into the mix on the human decision-making level or identifying level,
0:39:12 I mean, that just seems like a recipe for disaster and is a reason why so many of the systems within the triad are still analog.
0:39:23 They are not digital.
0:39:25 In other words, they continue to be similar systems to that when they were invented decades ago so that they can’t be hacked.
0:39:33 No, I mean, I recall from the book, I mean, in the event that the president gets that alarm,
0:39:38 and there’s six minutes to make a decision about how we’re going to respond and which weapons we’re going to deploy,
0:39:44 the military representative carrying the nuclear football gives the president what is basically a laminated restaurant menu
0:39:51 from which to choose how he’s going to blow up the world.
0:39:54 You’re absolutely right.
0:39:55 And in my reporting, I learned more about the black book than I ever wanted to know.
0:40:03 That is that Denny’s restaurant menu concept that you referred to, which prior to my book,
0:40:09 I believe was one of the only original reporting situations on what is actually inside that football.
0:40:17 The president’s satchel that follows him 24/7, 365.
0:40:21 And we learn also that the black book contains the quick version of the president’s counter strike options in the event that the United States has an incoming ballistic missile targeting it.
0:40:37 And that black book, it was told to me again by Glenn McDuff at the Los Alamos Lab.
0:40:45 He said the reason it’s called the black book is because it involves so much death.
0:40:50 I have some vague recollection of a famous story about a Russian submarine captain during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
0:40:59 And the story goes that the Americans were aware of the sub off our coast.
0:41:06 We confronted them and we were deploying underwater charges around the sub in order to force them to surface.
0:41:16 But we didn’t know they had nukes on that sub and they were cut off from Moscow.
0:41:24 They weren’t communicating anymore with Moscow and they had the authority to launch independently.
0:41:30 The people on board thought they were being attacked.
0:41:33 And this blown submarine captain basically just refused to authorize the launch when the other two people who have to, they all have to have a consensus and I guess turn their metaphorical keys at the same time or maybe literal keys at the same time.
0:41:47 He said no.
0:41:48 And that was basically the only thing that prevented a potential nuclear Armageddon scenario.
0:41:54 I mean, is that the closest we’ve come that you know of to nuclear war?
0:41:58 Just hearing that from you is just, again, it sort of sends…
0:42:02 Crazy.
0:42:03 Chills up the spine because…
0:42:05 Just one guy.
0:42:06 One guy.
0:42:07 And it is absolutely an accurate story and there are six or eight or ten of those stories that have been described by insiders that now exist on the public record.
0:42:20 But those are only the ones that are on the public record.
0:42:23 And just last month, David Hoffman, a reporter who has covered this issue, he reported on a new set of documents that even added more color to some of the stories that are known on the record and also a lot of documentation that suggested that there are a lot more that we don’t know about.
0:42:45 But the most terrifying one that I heard came to me firsthand from former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry.
0:42:54 And I always like to relay the firsthand stories because, you know, even after all these decades, I still got the sense when Bill Perry was telling me that story of how terrified he was in that moment and almost still was decades later.
0:43:10 And the story that Perry was involved in is also another famous on the record one.
0:43:15 It was 1979.
0:43:16 Carter was president.
0:43:17 He was on the night watch, essentially, that it would be his job if there was a nuclear launch against the United States to tell the president.
0:43:26 And he got the call.
0:43:28 And it came from the National Military Command Center beneath the Pentagon.
0:43:34 And not only that, it was being verified from the StratCom nuclear bunker, which is the bunker beneath Offit Air Force Base in Nebraska.
0:43:45 And both of these command and control centers were reporting that there was more than 1000 ICBMs and sub-launched ballistic missiles coming at the United States.
0:44:01 And as Perry was thinking through how he was going to wake up the president and tell him that he needed to order a counter nuclear strike, he got another phone call saying it was an error.
0:44:16 And the error was that a VHS tape had been inserted into a system underneath the Pentagon that was actually a training tape, a simulated war game.
0:44:31 And what Perry said to me was it looked real because it was designed to look real as a simulation.
0:44:37 I laughed because I don’t know what else to do. And again, just in case anyone isn’t shitting their pants already, another horrifying tidbit from the book.
0:44:48 Someone told you, I forget who, that it’s actually harder to locate one of these nuclear submarines in the ocean than it is to find a grapefruit sized object in outer space.
0:45:02 And I guess I got to file that one under not reassuring along with many other things.
0:45:07 And I’m so glad you remembered that detail which came from Michael Conner, retired commander of the United States nuclear submarine forces.
0:45:17 And the point of that is to demonstrate that that is why nuclear armed nuclear power submarines are often called the handmaidens of the apocalypse.
0:45:31 Because they’re unlocatable and they can sneak up within a couple hundred miles of a coast.
0:45:39 And I’m talking about our nuclear armed sub and also those of Russia and China.
0:45:45 They can sneak up within a couple hundred miles of a sub and no one knows they’re there.
0:45:51 And these nukes that are fired by subs, they cannot, and I want to emphasize this, they cannot be recalled or redirected, correct?
0:46:02 That’s right. And that is the same with the ICBMs.
0:46:05 OK, that’s true of all. OK.
0:46:07 The airplanes can be recalled. Those airplanes take hours to get to their target.
0:46:13 We keep B2s in Guam to get to North Korea, to get to Russia.
0:46:18 You’re talking about several hours long trip and you’re talking about refueling.
0:46:23 As it was said to me, the nuclear war is going to be over by the time they get to their target.
0:46:29 And they’re certainly not going to be able to refuel so they’re suicide missions.
0:46:33 Is something like an anti-nuke iron dome a possibility?
0:46:38 Because if it was, that sure would be a game changer, wouldn’t it?
0:46:42 That is a very important question heightened by the fact that the recent ballistic missile attack by Iran against Israel that was successfully thwarted by an iron dome situation,
0:46:57 and also including the US Aegis system, which is an anti-missile system on Navy vessels.
0:47:04 The success of that could very easily lead a lot of people to say, hey, what we need is an iron dome.
0:47:10 But the short answer is this, short-range ballistic missiles, even medium-range ballistic missiles,
0:47:18 are an entirely different kettle of fish when you are talking about shooting them down than a long-range ballistic missile.
0:47:28 And so to shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile is almost impossible.
0:47:36 The missile defense agency that has spent billions of dollars trying to do this for the US said it’s like trying to shoot a bullet with a bullet.
0:47:47 They’re still trying, by the way. We have 44 interceptor missiles.
0:47:51 So just imagine those 44 interceptor missiles going up against over a thousand incoming Russian long-range ballistic missiles.
0:48:01 Yeah, it’s throwing a pebble at a tsunami.
0:48:03 And the numbers just simply don’t add up. And if you look at the costs, you realize, oh my God, you could spend all the money in the world,
0:48:11 and you wouldn’t have enough interceptor missiles to try and defend against the potential missiles coming in.
0:48:24 After one more short break, does anyone really believe that a nuclear war is winnable? Stay with us.
0:48:39 So you’ve arrived. You head to the Brasserie, then the terrace. Cocktail? Don’t mind if I do. You raise your glass to another guest because you both know the holidays just beginning.
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0:50:11 Of all the serious people you spoke to in the course of this reporting, and you spoke to a lot,
0:50:26 what was the most sobering thing you heard?
0:50:29 All of it. For example, when Hans Christensen explained to me that one of the major existential terrors in all of this is that the U.S. Minuteman ICBMs do not have enough range.
0:50:45 If they’re going to target North Korea, they have to fly over Russia. Let me repeat that. They have to fly over Russia.
0:50:55 Well, that’s crazy. If you’re the Russian president, you’re supposed to just know that? What if you can’t get the president on the phone?
0:51:05 The two presidents haven’t spoken in years, as far as I understand, Biden and Putin.
0:51:10 So nuclear weapons are flying, and you see your radar see U.S. ICBMs coming at North Korea, but they have to fly over Russia.
0:51:21 How would you know they’re not coming for you? You wouldn’t. And that seemed so unbelievable that I had to confirm that fact with former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta,
0:51:33 who not only confirmed it with me, but discussed with me that it’s a major problem.
0:51:40 And he also said once the nuclear missiles are flying, not a lot of thought goes into what other people are thinking.
0:51:50 Did anyone, literally anyone you spoke to, believe that a nuclear war is winnable in any meaningful sense?
0:52:00 Boy, is that an important question. Everyone that I interviewed who is a former, dot, dot, dot, right?
0:52:10 Former sector, former nuclear sub force commander, former director of FEMA, former U.S. cyber chief.
0:52:17 Any of these individuals confirmed with me time and time again the fundamental former stratcom commander that, you know, nuclear war is unwinnable.
0:52:28 The quote from Reagan and Gorbachev, the jointly issued statement after the Reykjavik summit, “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
0:52:38 That has been reiterated to me by people who have worked in nuclear command and control.
0:52:45 Interestingly, a lot of the pushback, a lot of the sort of what I would say insanity comes from maybe more the pundits with PhDs.
0:52:58 The people who are maybe even paid by NGOs to analyze this, that have a horse in the race of the defense contracting world, the nuclear arms race world of it all.
0:53:11 They always tend to sort of land it on deterrence, which is so that they are not caught saying, “Oh yeah, we could win a nuclear war,” because that would just be a ridiculous premise.
0:53:24 But the suggestion is deterrence is the best thing, therefore we have to have deterrence.
0:53:30 And you have to say we would win because we have deterrence, therefore we have to be able to win.
0:53:35 And so you can see that crazy loop, the idea that more nuclear weapons make us more safe.
0:53:43 It is kind of our welling, isn’t it?
0:53:45 In order to survive, we have to kill everyone.
0:53:48 It’s saying peace is war.
0:53:50 I think a lot about that Einstein quote that I think he referenced where he says, “I don’t know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but I know World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
0:54:03 And I guess that kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
0:54:06 And what a great quote, because I think it really echoes this idea, particularly coming from Einstein, where you’re thinking about, my God, the human race.
0:54:18 You’re thinking about our past and what would be our legacy.
0:54:23 And I’m thinking specifically about man’s ability to use tools and how quickly we’ve advanced over, let’s say, 12,000 years.
0:54:34 This idea that we use science and technology to our advantage, and it also is entwined with war.
0:54:41 And so when I hear that quote, I think of Einstein saying, all of this is a cautionary tale.
0:54:51 All of this must make man think of his own legacy, and that is the future.
0:54:59 Not just the future of an individual, but the future of mankind.
0:55:03 A world without nukes is an ideal world, but that’s not the world we have, obviously.
0:55:09 And I don’t think it’s a world we’re going to get.
0:55:12 So where does that leave us?
0:55:14 What’s the sanest, safest path forward?
0:55:18 Perhaps the most important question and a great way to kind of end this terrifying discussion we’ve been having that probably leaves people just wanting to go put their head under their pillow,
0:55:30 which is one of the problems endemic in all of this.
0:55:33 But the ray of hope comes, I think, from exactly the question you’ve raised.
0:55:39 There is a possibility of disarmament, a movement toward it.
0:55:45 And let me give you an actual real world example.
0:55:47 It’s called the Reagan reversal.
0:55:49 So when I was in high school in 1983, there was an ABC television film called The Day After.
0:55:57 And it was a fictional scenario of nuclear war between the US and Russia.
0:56:02 And it was horrifying.
0:56:05 100 million Americans watched it.
0:56:09 A very important American was among those 100 million, President Ronald Reagan.
0:56:15 Before seeing that film, Reagan was a nuclear hawk.
0:56:18 He believed in nuclear supremacy.
0:56:20 He believed the more nuclear weapons, the better.
0:56:23 He was the one that was thinking about putting a nuclear weapon defense system in space.
0:56:29 And after Reagan saw the day after, he wrote in his White House Journal that he became depressed.
0:56:37 But his depression led him to reach out to Gorbachev.
0:56:41 And Gorbachev had been seen as an enemy.
0:56:44 And instead, suddenly Gorbachev was an adversary.
0:56:48 And the two men began talking.
0:56:50 It led to the Reykjavik summit.
0:56:52 And that is why the world number of warheads has been reduced from 70,000 to the 12,500 approximate that we have today.
0:57:04 So there is a possibility to move in that direction.
0:57:08 What I would hope that my book does would have an effect on readers where they realize it is not just futile to want to move in the direction of less nuclear weapons.
0:57:20 Because in the world we are in right now, people are starting to have this idea that maybe we need more nuclear weapons because things are getting more dangerous.
0:57:30 Well, I wouldn’t call it beach reading material.
0:57:34 And I don’t think I’m going to read it a second time.
0:57:37 But I’m damn glad I read it once.
0:57:41 I think this is a book that, as I said earlier, is phenomenally reported.
0:57:46 It’s a book that I think every informed, engaged citizen of the world really ought to read, and that this should be part of our political consciousness in a way it hasn’t been up to this point.
0:57:58 Thank you so much for that lovely compliment about the book.
0:58:02 And I sure hope it has an effect intended, which is to get more people thinking about an issue that affects all of us.
0:58:14 Once again, the book is called Nuclear War, a Scenario.
0:58:18 Annie Jacobson, this was a needed education.
0:58:22 Thank you.
0:58:23 Thank you for having me.
0:58:25 [Music]
0:58:40 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd, fact-checked by Colleen Barrett, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:58:54 If you have any thoughts about anything you heard or anything I said or she said or could have said, anything I could have done better, please, as always, let me know.
0:59:04 Shoot me an email, tell me what you think.
0:59:06 You can drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:59:10 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe.
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0:01:05 I find it disturbingly easy to imagine all the ways the world could end.
0:01:11 You, dear listener, probably know this already since we’ve done our fair share of dystopian shows.
0:01:18 On a long enough timeline, we’re all dead anyway, so that discovery was aliens destroying us.
0:01:24 AI will either destroy humanity or create utopia.
0:01:29 So in other words, everything is on fire.
0:01:31 Everything is on fire, yeah.
0:01:33 But one thing we’ve never really discussed, not in any serious way, at least, is nuclear war.
0:01:44 Which is surprising because this scenario is near the top of basically every list of existential threats.
0:01:52 And that’s why I want to know more about it.
0:01:55 And the public deserves to know more about it.
0:01:58 So I jumped at the opportunity to invite someone on the show who’s done the work and truly understands what we’re facing here.
0:02:06 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:02:16 [Music]
0:02:28 Today’s guest is Annie Jacobson.
0:02:31 She’s a phenomenal reporter and the author of a bracing new book called “Nuclear War,” a scenario.
0:02:40 I read a lot of books for this show, and I have to say,
0:02:45 this one stuck with me longer than any I can recall.
0:02:50 It’s a book that clearly wants to startle the reader, and it succeeds.
0:02:57 Jacobson walks you through all the ways a nuclear catastrophe might unfold.
0:03:04 She gives a play-by-play breakdown of the terrifying choreography that could unfold in the minutes immediately after a nuclear missile launch.
0:03:15 If you read this book or listen to this conversation, you’ll walk away with a much clearer picture of what a nuclear war would actually look like,
0:03:25 and how perilously close we are to that reality.
0:03:29 [Music]
0:03:36 Annie Jacobson, welcome to the show.
0:03:38 Thank you for having me.
0:03:40 So I’m just going to ask you, why did you write a book like this?
0:03:45 My intention was to demonstrate in appalling detail just how horrific nuclear war would be.
0:03:57 So that dot, dot, dot, and I have a feeling that’s going to be what we’re going to be talking about today.
0:04:04 Yeah, well, mission accomplished on that front.
0:04:08 We’ll get into it, but the reporting in this and the color and the vividness of your descriptions are quite terrifying,
0:04:17 but they’re terrifying because they’re done so well.
0:04:19 That’s going to become apparent as we move our way through this conversation.
0:04:23 I mean, is it a working assumption of yours that this is an issue that’s not taken seriously enough by the general public?
0:04:34 Most certainly, and that is echoed by the reaction I’ve been getting,
0:04:40 not just from people around the world who are astonished after reading my book that they knew none of it,
0:04:47 and yet in some manner how easy it is to digest and understand after reading my book, another intention.
0:04:54 But then there’s also the calls I’ve been getting from former lawmakers, from former congresspeople,
0:05:02 from former nuclear command and control people, all saying, “Wow, this is a significant demonstration of how horrific nuclear war would be.”
0:05:15 Can you describe America’s nuclear triad so that listeners have a snapshot of the world destroying power we’re currently wielding?
0:05:29 How many bombs do we have and what are the differences between them?
0:05:33 I mean, most of the stuff in the nuclear nomenclature seems so intimidating, and yet it’s actually almost exactly as it sounds.
0:05:41 Like triad means three.
0:05:43 The nuclear triad involves three nuclear weapon systems.
0:05:48 There are the ICBMs, Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.
0:05:52 They sit in silos.
0:05:55 They are land launch, one part of the triad.
0:05:58 Second part of the triad are the bombers.
0:06:01 We have 66 nuclear capable bombers, B-52s and B-2 stealth bombers.
0:06:08 They carry gravity bombs.
0:06:10 And then we have the nuclear-armed nuclear-powered submarines.
0:06:17 They carry sub-launched ballistic missiles, SLBMs.
0:06:22 And those are the three choices that the President of the United States has when he is asked to launch a counterattack.
0:06:32 He can choose from one or all of the weapon systems of the U.S. nuclear triad.
0:06:38 Do we know how many bombs we currently have?
0:06:41 Is that public?
0:06:42 We absolutely do, thanks to people like Hans Christensen and his team at the Federation of American Scientists who keep track of all the warheads.
0:06:53 So right now, America and Russia have each approximately 5,000 nuclear warheads.
0:07:02 5,000.
0:07:04 Of that 5,000, I’m going to give you the number in a moment of what are ready to launch.
0:07:10 And the reason why I’m emphasizing this is because ready to launch means they can be launched in as little as 60 seconds after the President’s command.
0:07:24 And up to a few minutes, most of them, some of them on the bombers might take an hour or so to load.
0:07:31 So those ready for launch numbers, I hope you’re sitting down.
0:07:35 The United States has 1,770.
0:07:41 Russia has 1,674.
0:07:45 That is enough to destroy the world.
0:07:48 What is the country that has the next largest arsenal?
0:07:51 China.
0:07:52 Last year, China had 400 nuclear weapons.
0:07:56 Now they have 500.
0:07:58 That is a lot of new nuclear weapons in one year.
0:08:02 The Defense Department recently calculated they believe that China will have as many as 1,500 by the end of the decade.
0:08:13 Okay.
0:08:14 And are there still nine nuclear powers?
0:08:17 Is that correct?
0:08:18 There are.
0:08:19 And so Pakistan and India, for listeners, each have approximately 163 nuclear weapons each.
0:08:28 North Korea, CIA estimates they have 50, but some of the NGOs that track this stuff believe North Korea has as many as 130.
0:08:38 Israel is believed to have about 90 very secret nuclear program, hard to discern.
0:08:45 UK has about 225 warheads on stockpile. France, 290. And that makes up nine nuclear armed nations with what are understood to be approximately 12,500 nuclear weapons.
0:09:03 I want to do my best in this conversation to not take anything for granted.
0:09:10 And for me, that means being as specific and concrete as possible about the stakes.
0:09:18 So when we talk about the power of these weapons, we all know it’s immense, but I suspect the image most of us still have is the image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
0:09:33 But that was a very long time ago.
0:09:36 And the bombs America dropped then were what, 15 and 20 kilotons, something like that, right?
0:09:43 How much more powerful are the thermonuclear weapons we’re talking about now?
0:09:51 To give you an idea of a thermonuclear weapon.
0:09:56 I went to one of the ultimate sources, a nuclear weapons engineer named Richard Garwin, probably the most famous nuclear weapons engineer, physicist, presidential advisor, still alive.
0:10:12 Garwin drew the plans for the very first thermonuclear weapon. Its codename was Ivy Mike. It’s on the cover of my book.
0:10:23 It was 10.4 megatons.
0:10:27 So consider that the 15 kiloton Hiroshima bomb that you referenced and then think about 10.4 megatons. It is about 1000 Hiroshima sized bombs detonating at the same time from the same center point.
0:10:46 Garwin explained it to me in the simplest of terms when he asked me to visualize this fact.
0:10:53 A thermonuclear weapon uses an atomic bomb as its fuse inside of the weapon.
0:11:02 Wow.
0:11:05 I want you to paint the picture as you do in the opening pages of the book where you imagine a nuke is dropped on the Pentagon in Washington DC. Tell me what happens the second after a bomb is dropped in a place like DC or New York City?
0:11:23 So with a one megaton bomb on Washington DC and that is called a bolt out of the blue attack. That is what people in Washington fear most. That was said to me by an assistant secretary of defense.
0:11:37 And what happens in the very first millisecond is that this thermonuclear flash expands into a ball of fire that is one mile of pure fire.
0:11:52 It’s 19 football fields of fire. And then you have to imagine that the fireballs edges they compress into this what is called a steeply fronted blast wave.
0:12:06 So you have this dense wall of air pushing out mowing down everything in its path three miles out and I’m talking everything in every direction because it is accompanied by several hundred mile an hour winds.
0:12:23 You know it’s like Washington DC just got hit by an asteroid and the accompanying wave when you think about this initial nine mile diameter ring.
0:12:35 Imagine every single engineered structure I’m talking buildings bridges changing physical shape and collapsing.
0:12:44 We haven’t even spoken of what happens with that thermonuclear flash that sets everything on fire. It melts lead steel.
0:12:54 I mean titanium you’re talking about streets nine miles out transforming into molten asphalt lava people kind of getting sucked into this.
0:13:06 The details are so horrific and I also think it’s important to keep in mind these are not details from Annie Jacobson’s imagination.
0:13:15 These are sourced from Defense Department documents because the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department have been keeping track of what nuclear bombs do to people and to things.
0:13:31 Ever since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of nineteen forty five.
0:13:36 You can’t find a vision of hell and any religious text that can even approach the horror of this scenario in my opinion.
0:13:45 You know it’s interesting that you say that because the religious tax and I often look at the paintings that portray hell and their narrative and their evocative.
0:13:58 They’re not specific and scientific and when you read in the book things like at precisely what distance pine needles will ignite from line of sight nuclear flash.
0:14:14 And you realize that that is something that has been measured by the Defense Department because when we were setting off these thermonuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands.
0:14:25 We were measuring all of this in terms of distance in terms of atmosphere we were sending animals up in planes we were tying animals to ships.
0:14:37 This is like horrific details a lot of which I left out so that readers didn’t get essentially beyond grossed out.
0:14:45 But I worked to include enough detail that the readers could have their own imaginations and their own narrative thoughts about this kind of horror or as you say hell.
0:15:04 You know working in tandem with some of these scientific facts.
0:15:10 In service of more detail in that giant mushroom cloud that’s the image everyone has of a atomic bomb.
0:15:19 If I understand the physics of this at all and I don’t but if I understand what people who do understand it told you everything around that blast gets sucked up into this giant mushroom cloud.
0:15:33 So in the case of an actual bomb in a populated area what gets sucked up into that cloud are thousands of people and I guess all the rest of the non human debris in the area which would be basically everything.
0:15:49 It’s not thousands of people.
0:15:52 It’s hundreds of thousands of people.
0:15:55 It’s upwards of a million people if you’re talking about a one megaton thermonuclear bomb and when you can try and wrap your head around that.
0:16:07 I think that it takes your heart and soul to an entirely different area of being perhaps that you’ve never even been.
0:16:18 This was certainly my experience reporting this book when when Ted Postel the MIT professor emeritus was describing to me how humans turn into combusting carbon and then they become sucked up in that cloud.
0:16:31 And this is a man who’s been writing about the medical effects of thermonuclear weapons.
0:16:37 You begin to realize the depth of the horror.
0:16:42 I want to talk about a nuclear winter for a minute or what you call day zero in the book.
0:16:48 What does that look like how cold would it be how dark one of the big premises of the book was to take readers from nuclear launch to nuclear winter.
0:16:59 And the nuclear launch up to day zero as you say takes place over this horrifying 72 minute period.
0:17:14 And you know that is enough to shock anyone that as stratcom commander general Keeler said to me in an interview when we were talking about a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States.
0:17:26 Yes Annie the world could end in the next couple of hours.
0:17:29 And so nuclear winter begins in essence after the bomb stop falling stop exploding.
0:17:38 There is a process of mega fires.
0:17:41 So the area around every nuclear detonation is going to ultimately result in what is known now as a mega fire.
0:17:49 You’re talking about a hundred two hundred three hundred square miles of fire per bomb where everything in that area is burning until it doesn’t exist anymore.
0:18:03 This is because of course there are no first responders anymore.
0:18:07 There are no fire trucks.
0:18:09 There’s no way to put anything out.
0:18:11 And so with all of these explosions so it gets lofted into the troposphere three hundred and thirty billion pounds of so it would be lofted into the air.
0:18:28 And that is enough soot to block out 70% of the sun.
0:18:33 What happens when that much sun gets blocked out is a dramatic temperature plunge.
0:18:39 It’s up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit certainly in the mid latitudes.
0:18:45 The areas for example from Iowa to Ukraine that whole band of the mid latitudes the bodies of water in those areas become frozen over in sheets of ice.
0:18:56 With that temperature drop you have the death of agriculture.
0:19:01 And that is why nuclear winter after nuclear war will result in what is now estimated to be five billion dead.
0:19:13 And that model you just mentioned if I remember also estimated that in places like Iowa and Ukraine temperatures basically wouldn’t go above freezing for something like six years at least.
0:19:29 That’s right.
0:19:30 And I mean that you know sometimes that the details become so overwhelming they’re almost hard to keep track of and other details you simply can never forget.
0:19:40 At least that’s the case with me as a reporter.
0:19:43 And when I was reading Carl Sagan he was one of the original five authors of the nuclear winter theory.
0:19:50 And Carl Sagan wrote about how after these bodies of water that would get frozen over for as you say seven years after the thawing out of that the dead people who had been frozen in the nuclear winter.
0:20:11 Then you have to start considering the pathogens and the plague.
0:20:17 And so just when you thought you couldn’t imagine more horror.
0:20:22 Now you have to learn about the details of nuclear winter.
0:20:25 And I think the best quote for all of this was spoken by Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier during the Kennedy administration and the two of them talked a lot about nuclear war with deep horror.
0:20:37 And it was Khrushchev who said after a nuclear war the survivors would envy the dead.
0:20:46 Yeah, that sounds about right.
0:20:52 When we get back from the break what safeguards are in place to prevent a nuclear catastrophe.
0:20:57 And are they enough?
0:20:59 Stay with us.
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0:24:48 I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the ways we might stumble into this nightmare scenario and the protocols in place should we get there.
0:25:01 First of all, let me just ask you this. Are you confident, should the public be confident that there are enough checks and guardrails in place to ensure that we’ll avoid a nuclear exchange if it’s at all possible?
0:25:19 Let me answer that question with a quote from the present day Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres. He said, “The world is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”
0:25:39 What does that mean, really?
0:25:41 What it means is exactly what he said, that we could just have a mishap. We could have a mishap would be a misinterpretation.
0:25:51 A miscalculation would be one nuclear armed nation thinking another nuclear armed nation was doing something that maybe it wasn’t even doing.
0:26:03 And this gets us into some of the crazy policies that exist on the books, things like launch on warning, whereby once the United States learns that it is being attacked by an ICBM or a sublaunched ballistic missile, which, by the way, cannot be redirected or recalled,
0:26:23 and takes 30 minutes approximately for an ICBM to get from one continent to the other. For a sublaunched missile, it’s under 10.
0:26:32 So the US policy of launch on warning means that the president then has six minutes to decide not if he should respond, but how he should respond with nuclear weapons.
0:26:46 That’s what Guterres is speaking of, I believe, when he talks about a miscalculation.
0:26:52 I mean, how much room is there really for human agency in these command and control protocols? I mean, you always hear people say in presidential elections, do we really trust that guy with the nukes?
0:27:09 But is that the right way to think about this? I mean, if the president has six minutes to make a decision, I guess it is.
0:27:16 You’re raising an existential question that everyone should be raising, I believe, because we have been living in what some call a 79-year experiment.
0:27:28 Yes, you could say deterrence has held all these years. Never mind the fact that there used to be two nuclear-armed nations, and there are now nine. Never mind the fact that you have new technology factors coming into the mix.
0:27:43 Never mind the fact that nuclear-saber rattling has suddenly become acceptable among world leaders. This is astonishing. If you look at history, this was never part of the rhetoric, particularly out of the mouth of a US president, as happened with the former President Trump.
0:28:02 When I began reporting this book, the fundamental question that I was trying to answer was not, “Isn’t deterrence great?” but rather, “What if deterrence fails?”
0:28:18 The Defense Department predicated its nuclear arsenal on this idea that deterrence will hold. That is the fundamental. It’s written everywhere. Deterrence will hold.
0:28:29 Well, I also found a discussion with the Deputy General of STRATCOM talking to his colleagues, not in a classified setting, but in a somewhat rarefied setting. And what he said was this, “If deterrence fails, it all unravels.”
0:28:49 That word “unravel” is at the heart of the question that you asked me and that we’re discussing. What if it all unravels?
0:28:59 Yeah, it is. There are a lot of jarring, bracing anecdotes and quotes in the book, and many of them are bouncing around in my head as we speak. I recall, I think it was former CIA director Michael Hayden told you explicitly that this process is designed for speed and decisiveness.
0:29:24 It is not designed to debate the decision. On some level, I get that, but Jesus, the automaticity of the process is more than a little terrifying to me.
0:29:39 You better believe it, and Hayden actually told that to members of Congress. So these are big, bold statements on the record. These are not the words of somebody at a dinner party pontificating. This is like official language answering the United States Congress.
0:30:01 And by the way, I believe that with the rhetoric from the former President Donald Trump about the fire and fury days with North Korea, it worried Congress to such a degree that they issued a number of reports that drilled down on a couple concepts that the public was not clear on.
0:30:28 And even you could do a Google search and very easily get the wrong information. I’m talking about from top media places, and one of them had to do with what’s called sole presidential authority.
0:30:40 So when Trump was, you know, saying, I have a bigger button and that kind of rhetoric, which is so unpresidential. I’m not politicizing that. I’m talking about a POTUS should never be threatening anything about weapons of mass destruction, period.
0:30:57 It’s incredibly undemocratic. But the upside of that, if you will, was Congress releasing a couple reports, making clear that the President of the United States does have what is called sole presidential authority.
0:31:13 And what that means is that he needs to ask permission of no one to launch a nuclear war, not the Secretary of Defense, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and not Congress.
0:31:27 Yeah, that’s not very reassuring either. You write something near the end of the book. What if the Secretary of Defense, who’s the acting president in this hypothetical situation, what if this person has a crisis of conscious debate, as you put it?
0:31:43 And wonders, is there really any point in firing these bombs, these missiles and wiping out the other half of humanity? And it’s pretty clear that there really isn’t any room for that, because the whole logic of deterrence is predicated on the absolute promise that the process is fixed and automatic.
0:32:03 That’s what makes it deterrent. But then again, it imprisons the actors in this process that they don’t really have any control over, which, again, is terrifying.
0:32:13 Let me add something, because Dr. Glenn McDuff of the Los Alamos Laboratory, who is both a nuclear weapons engineer who worked on the Star Wars program during the Reagan administration, and has served as the historian at the classified library at the lab.
0:32:33 I asked him, “Do you think anyone would defy orders?” And he said, “Annie, you have a better chance at winning Powerball.”
0:32:41 Yeah, I think that’s right. And I guess we’re talking about the potential for miscalculations and that sort of thing. And I realize North Korea is a bit of an outlier here, so we can set them aside for a minute. Beyond them, is there clear and open communication among the other nuclear powers in an effort to avoid miscalculations?
0:33:06 What a great question. And I did not know the answer to that question when I began reporting the book. So most people have absolutely no idea. What I learned was really fascinating and terrifying on this issue.
0:33:21 So one of the things I write about is sort of nuclear war has all these rules, except there are no rules once the missiles start flying. But one of the very important rules to essentially make sure that deterrence holds to safeguard the entire world from miscalculation is the simple fact that some of the treaties that have been laid down,
0:33:48 many of which are now in jeopardy of not existing anymore, say that it is incredibly important to notify other nuclear-armed nations of your tests when you’re testing a delivery system like an ICBM.
0:34:05 And so I noticed during the Ukraine war, which began after I was already writing the book, and really put a monkey wrench in terms of like threat levels, meaning a lot of my sources before were like, people have forgotten about nuclear threats, and then suddenly the Ukraine war in Putin is talking about it.
0:34:24 But announcements are made between nuclear-armed nations. Oh, we’re doing an ICBM test. Now, this may be from State Department to State Department. It may be through more covert channels or less rather intelligence community channels.
0:34:39 And nonetheless, these tests are announced. During the Ukrainian war, the United States canceled one of its ICBM tests, so as not to get into a situation where there was some kind of misunderstanding when the threat level was so high.
0:34:57 What I learned is that there is the outlier in North Korea, and that North Korea not only doesn’t announce its missile tests, but that in this 18-month period where I was heavily reporting the book, North Korea launched over 100 missiles, not announced.
0:35:19 Now, when you consider the first 150 seconds after a ballistic missile launch, after our satellite system identifies the launch, the entire nuclear command control system in the United States is on alert determining the trajectory of that missile.
0:35:38 And when you realize the intensity of those first 150 seconds and you interview people who have actually sat through these, and then you have to balance that out, that North Korea alone put the U.S. command and control through 100 some-odd alerts in a 18-month period where they didn’t know if the missile was coming to the United States or was simply going into the sea of Japan or into space for a satellite launch.
0:36:04 Then you go, “Wow, that is incredibly reckless.”
0:36:09 Well, I’ll just say this.
0:36:11 Anyone listening can think whatever they want about Donald Trump or Putin.
0:36:17 I have a fair amount of contempt for both of them for different reasons.
0:36:21 But I don’t think, and I emphasize this is just my opinion, my feeling, I don’t think either of them are truly nihilistic enough to start a mutually annihilating war.
0:36:37 But North Korea, that feels like a different story to me just because it is such a black box.
0:36:48 And what I can imagine rather easily is maybe Putin doing something like using tactical nukes in Ukraine, for instance.
0:37:00 And those are not mega bombs, but how easily could a decision to do something like that use a tactical nuk, especially if it’s in a NATO country?
0:37:08 How easily could that kickstart a sequence of events that leads to Armageddon?
0:37:14 And that doesn’t seem that implausible to me.
0:37:17 And to that end, I do break up the scenario with these little vignettes that are essentially history lessons.
0:37:24 And to your point, one of the history lessons, I discuss a rare declassified war game, because of course they’re so jealously guarded.
0:37:35 But one was declassified about 10 years ago, and it is called proud profit.
0:37:41 And in that nuclear war game, we learn no matter how nuclear war begins, whether NATO is involved, whether China is involved.
0:37:53 No matter how it begins, it ends in total nuclear Armageddon.
0:37:59 And Bracken said everyone at that war game, and we’re talking secretaries of defense on down, everyone left “greatly depressed.”
0:38:08 Is there some near future where, in order to further reinforce the automaticity of this process, we just have AI controlling the whole thing from start to finish,
0:38:22 in which case, I guess then we’d have to worry about AI launching a damn nuke on its own?
0:38:27 I can’t imagine a worse nightmare scenario of bringing AI, what I call, more machine learning technology into the mix of decisions.
0:38:35 I mean, there is an incredible amount of machine learning that is built into the system.
0:38:39 For example, the satellite detects the launch, and then that data is processed in space.
0:38:45 We’re talking about one-tenth of the way to the moon is where a geosync satellite sits.
0:38:51 And imagine that data is then being processed and streamlined down to the nuclear command and control bunkers in the United States.
0:38:59 This is happening in seconds.
0:39:01 This is an astonishing degree of machine learning.
0:39:04 But the idea of putting an air quotes “AI” into the mix on the human decision-making level or identifying level,
0:39:12 I mean, that just seems like a recipe for disaster and is a reason why so many of the systems within the triad are still analog.
0:39:23 They are not digital.
0:39:25 In other words, they continue to be similar systems to that when they were invented decades ago so that they can’t be hacked.
0:39:33 No, I mean, I recall from the book, I mean, in the event that the president gets that alarm,
0:39:38 and there’s six minutes to make a decision about how we’re going to respond and which weapons we’re going to deploy,
0:39:44 the military representative carrying the nuclear football gives the president what is basically a laminated restaurant menu
0:39:51 from which to choose how he’s going to blow up the world.
0:39:54 You’re absolutely right.
0:39:55 And in my reporting, I learned more about the black book than I ever wanted to know.
0:40:03 That is that Denny’s restaurant menu concept that you referred to, which prior to my book,
0:40:09 I believe was one of the only original reporting situations on what is actually inside that football.
0:40:17 The president’s satchel that follows him 24/7, 365.
0:40:21 And we learn also that the black book contains the quick version of the president’s counter strike options in the event that the United States has an incoming ballistic missile targeting it.
0:40:37 And that black book, it was told to me again by Glenn McDuff at the Los Alamos Lab.
0:40:45 He said the reason it’s called the black book is because it involves so much death.
0:40:50 I have some vague recollection of a famous story about a Russian submarine captain during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
0:40:59 And the story goes that the Americans were aware of the sub off our coast.
0:41:06 We confronted them and we were deploying underwater charges around the sub in order to force them to surface.
0:41:16 But we didn’t know they had nukes on that sub and they were cut off from Moscow.
0:41:24 They weren’t communicating anymore with Moscow and they had the authority to launch independently.
0:41:30 The people on board thought they were being attacked.
0:41:33 And this blown submarine captain basically just refused to authorize the launch when the other two people who have to, they all have to have a consensus and I guess turn their metaphorical keys at the same time or maybe literal keys at the same time.
0:41:47 He said no.
0:41:48 And that was basically the only thing that prevented a potential nuclear Armageddon scenario.
0:41:54 I mean, is that the closest we’ve come that you know of to nuclear war?
0:41:58 Just hearing that from you is just, again, it sort of sends…
0:42:02 Crazy.
0:42:03 Chills up the spine because…
0:42:05 Just one guy.
0:42:06 One guy.
0:42:07 And it is absolutely an accurate story and there are six or eight or ten of those stories that have been described by insiders that now exist on the public record.
0:42:20 But those are only the ones that are on the public record.
0:42:23 And just last month, David Hoffman, a reporter who has covered this issue, he reported on a new set of documents that even added more color to some of the stories that are known on the record and also a lot of documentation that suggested that there are a lot more that we don’t know about.
0:42:45 But the most terrifying one that I heard came to me firsthand from former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry.
0:42:54 And I always like to relay the firsthand stories because, you know, even after all these decades, I still got the sense when Bill Perry was telling me that story of how terrified he was in that moment and almost still was decades later.
0:43:10 And the story that Perry was involved in is also another famous on the record one.
0:43:15 It was 1979.
0:43:16 Carter was president.
0:43:17 He was on the night watch, essentially, that it would be his job if there was a nuclear launch against the United States to tell the president.
0:43:26 And he got the call.
0:43:28 And it came from the National Military Command Center beneath the Pentagon.
0:43:34 And not only that, it was being verified from the StratCom nuclear bunker, which is the bunker beneath Offit Air Force Base in Nebraska.
0:43:45 And both of these command and control centers were reporting that there was more than 1000 ICBMs and sub-launched ballistic missiles coming at the United States.
0:44:01 And as Perry was thinking through how he was going to wake up the president and tell him that he needed to order a counter nuclear strike, he got another phone call saying it was an error.
0:44:16 And the error was that a VHS tape had been inserted into a system underneath the Pentagon that was actually a training tape, a simulated war game.
0:44:31 And what Perry said to me was it looked real because it was designed to look real as a simulation.
0:44:37 I laughed because I don’t know what else to do. And again, just in case anyone isn’t shitting their pants already, another horrifying tidbit from the book.
0:44:48 Someone told you, I forget who, that it’s actually harder to locate one of these nuclear submarines in the ocean than it is to find a grapefruit sized object in outer space.
0:45:02 And I guess I got to file that one under not reassuring along with many other things.
0:45:07 And I’m so glad you remembered that detail which came from Michael Conner, retired commander of the United States nuclear submarine forces.
0:45:17 And the point of that is to demonstrate that that is why nuclear armed nuclear power submarines are often called the handmaidens of the apocalypse.
0:45:31 Because they’re unlocatable and they can sneak up within a couple hundred miles of a coast.
0:45:39 And I’m talking about our nuclear armed sub and also those of Russia and China.
0:45:45 They can sneak up within a couple hundred miles of a sub and no one knows they’re there.
0:45:51 And these nukes that are fired by subs, they cannot, and I want to emphasize this, they cannot be recalled or redirected, correct?
0:46:02 That’s right. And that is the same with the ICBMs.
0:46:05 OK, that’s true of all. OK.
0:46:07 The airplanes can be recalled. Those airplanes take hours to get to their target.
0:46:13 We keep B2s in Guam to get to North Korea, to get to Russia.
0:46:18 You’re talking about several hours long trip and you’re talking about refueling.
0:46:23 As it was said to me, the nuclear war is going to be over by the time they get to their target.
0:46:29 And they’re certainly not going to be able to refuel so they’re suicide missions.
0:46:33 Is something like an anti-nuke iron dome a possibility?
0:46:38 Because if it was, that sure would be a game changer, wouldn’t it?
0:46:42 That is a very important question heightened by the fact that the recent ballistic missile attack by Iran against Israel that was successfully thwarted by an iron dome situation,
0:46:57 and also including the US Aegis system, which is an anti-missile system on Navy vessels.
0:47:04 The success of that could very easily lead a lot of people to say, hey, what we need is an iron dome.
0:47:10 But the short answer is this, short-range ballistic missiles, even medium-range ballistic missiles,
0:47:18 are an entirely different kettle of fish when you are talking about shooting them down than a long-range ballistic missile.
0:47:28 And so to shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile is almost impossible.
0:47:36 The missile defense agency that has spent billions of dollars trying to do this for the US said it’s like trying to shoot a bullet with a bullet.
0:47:47 They’re still trying, by the way. We have 44 interceptor missiles.
0:47:51 So just imagine those 44 interceptor missiles going up against over a thousand incoming Russian long-range ballistic missiles.
0:48:01 Yeah, it’s throwing a pebble at a tsunami.
0:48:03 And the numbers just simply don’t add up. And if you look at the costs, you realize, oh my God, you could spend all the money in the world,
0:48:11 and you wouldn’t have enough interceptor missiles to try and defend against the potential missiles coming in.
0:48:24 After one more short break, does anyone really believe that a nuclear war is winnable? Stay with us.
0:48:39 So you’ve arrived. You head to the Brasserie, then the terrace. Cocktail? Don’t mind if I do. You raise your glass to another guest because you both know the holidays just beginning.
0:48:54 And you’re only in Terminal 3.
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0:50:11 Of all the serious people you spoke to in the course of this reporting, and you spoke to a lot,
0:50:26 what was the most sobering thing you heard?
0:50:29 All of it. For example, when Hans Christensen explained to me that one of the major existential terrors in all of this is that the U.S. Minuteman ICBMs do not have enough range.
0:50:45 If they’re going to target North Korea, they have to fly over Russia. Let me repeat that. They have to fly over Russia.
0:50:55 Well, that’s crazy. If you’re the Russian president, you’re supposed to just know that? What if you can’t get the president on the phone?
0:51:05 The two presidents haven’t spoken in years, as far as I understand, Biden and Putin.
0:51:10 So nuclear weapons are flying, and you see your radar see U.S. ICBMs coming at North Korea, but they have to fly over Russia.
0:51:21 How would you know they’re not coming for you? You wouldn’t. And that seemed so unbelievable that I had to confirm that fact with former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta,
0:51:33 who not only confirmed it with me, but discussed with me that it’s a major problem.
0:51:40 And he also said once the nuclear missiles are flying, not a lot of thought goes into what other people are thinking.
0:51:50 Did anyone, literally anyone you spoke to, believe that a nuclear war is winnable in any meaningful sense?
0:52:00 Boy, is that an important question. Everyone that I interviewed who is a former, dot, dot, dot, right?
0:52:10 Former sector, former nuclear sub force commander, former director of FEMA, former U.S. cyber chief.
0:52:17 Any of these individuals confirmed with me time and time again the fundamental former stratcom commander that, you know, nuclear war is unwinnable.
0:52:28 The quote from Reagan and Gorbachev, the jointly issued statement after the Reykjavik summit, “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
0:52:38 That has been reiterated to me by people who have worked in nuclear command and control.
0:52:45 Interestingly, a lot of the pushback, a lot of the sort of what I would say insanity comes from maybe more the pundits with PhDs.
0:52:58 The people who are maybe even paid by NGOs to analyze this, that have a horse in the race of the defense contracting world, the nuclear arms race world of it all.
0:53:11 They always tend to sort of land it on deterrence, which is so that they are not caught saying, “Oh yeah, we could win a nuclear war,” because that would just be a ridiculous premise.
0:53:24 But the suggestion is deterrence is the best thing, therefore we have to have deterrence.
0:53:30 And you have to say we would win because we have deterrence, therefore we have to be able to win.
0:53:35 And so you can see that crazy loop, the idea that more nuclear weapons make us more safe.
0:53:43 It is kind of our welling, isn’t it?
0:53:45 In order to survive, we have to kill everyone.
0:53:48 It’s saying peace is war.
0:53:50 I think a lot about that Einstein quote that I think he referenced where he says, “I don’t know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but I know World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
0:54:03 And I guess that kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
0:54:06 And what a great quote, because I think it really echoes this idea, particularly coming from Einstein, where you’re thinking about, my God, the human race.
0:54:18 You’re thinking about our past and what would be our legacy.
0:54:23 And I’m thinking specifically about man’s ability to use tools and how quickly we’ve advanced over, let’s say, 12,000 years.
0:54:34 This idea that we use science and technology to our advantage, and it also is entwined with war.
0:54:41 And so when I hear that quote, I think of Einstein saying, all of this is a cautionary tale.
0:54:51 All of this must make man think of his own legacy, and that is the future.
0:54:59 Not just the future of an individual, but the future of mankind.
0:55:03 A world without nukes is an ideal world, but that’s not the world we have, obviously.
0:55:09 And I don’t think it’s a world we’re going to get.
0:55:12 So where does that leave us?
0:55:14 What’s the sanest, safest path forward?
0:55:18 Perhaps the most important question and a great way to kind of end this terrifying discussion we’ve been having that probably leaves people just wanting to go put their head under their pillow,
0:55:30 which is one of the problems endemic in all of this.
0:55:33 But the ray of hope comes, I think, from exactly the question you’ve raised.
0:55:39 There is a possibility of disarmament, a movement toward it.
0:55:45 And let me give you an actual real world example.
0:55:47 It’s called the Reagan reversal.
0:55:49 So when I was in high school in 1983, there was an ABC television film called The Day After.
0:55:57 And it was a fictional scenario of nuclear war between the US and Russia.
0:56:02 And it was horrifying.
0:56:05 100 million Americans watched it.
0:56:09 A very important American was among those 100 million, President Ronald Reagan.
0:56:15 Before seeing that film, Reagan was a nuclear hawk.
0:56:18 He believed in nuclear supremacy.
0:56:20 He believed the more nuclear weapons, the better.
0:56:23 He was the one that was thinking about putting a nuclear weapon defense system in space.
0:56:29 And after Reagan saw the day after, he wrote in his White House Journal that he became depressed.
0:56:37 But his depression led him to reach out to Gorbachev.
0:56:41 And Gorbachev had been seen as an enemy.
0:56:44 And instead, suddenly Gorbachev was an adversary.
0:56:48 And the two men began talking.
0:56:50 It led to the Reykjavik summit.
0:56:52 And that is why the world number of warheads has been reduced from 70,000 to the 12,500 approximate that we have today.
0:57:04 So there is a possibility to move in that direction.
0:57:08 What I would hope that my book does would have an effect on readers where they realize it is not just futile to want to move in the direction of less nuclear weapons.
0:57:20 Because in the world we are in right now, people are starting to have this idea that maybe we need more nuclear weapons because things are getting more dangerous.
0:57:30 Well, I wouldn’t call it beach reading material.
0:57:34 And I don’t think I’m going to read it a second time.
0:57:37 But I’m damn glad I read it once.
0:57:41 I think this is a book that, as I said earlier, is phenomenally reported.
0:57:46 It’s a book that I think every informed, engaged citizen of the world really ought to read, and that this should be part of our political consciousness in a way it hasn’t been up to this point.
0:57:58 Thank you so much for that lovely compliment about the book.
0:58:02 And I sure hope it has an effect intended, which is to get more people thinking about an issue that affects all of us.
0:58:14 Once again, the book is called Nuclear War, a Scenario.
0:58:18 Annie Jacobson, this was a needed education.
0:58:22 Thank you.
0:58:23 Thank you for having me.
0:58:25 [Music]
0:58:40 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd, fact-checked by Colleen Barrett, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:58:54 If you have any thoughts about anything you heard or anything I said or she said or could have said, anything I could have done better, please, as always, let me know.
0:59:04 Shoot me an email, tell me what you think.
0:59:06 You can drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
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A mile of pure fire. A flash that melts everything — titanium, steel, lead, people. A blast that mows down every structure in its path, 3 miles out in every direction. Journalist Annie Jacobsen spent years interviewing scientists, high-ranking military officials, politicians, and other experts to find out how a nuclear attack would be triggered, the devastation it would cause, the ruptures it would create in the social fabric, and how likely it is to happen today. She wrote about all of this in her new book Nuclear War: A Scenario. Jacobsen spends the hour clearly laying out the horrifying yet captivating specifics for Sean, and the prospects for avoiding catastrophe.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Annie Jacobsen. Her book is Nuclear War: A Scenario
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