A Comprehensive Breakdown Of Nuclear War Threats - Annie Jacobsen

Annie Jacobsen is a journalist, investigative reporter and an author. The threat of nuclear war has loomed for over half a century now. But the question remains - just how close to nuclear armageddon are we and what would happen if the world went into a nuclear war. Expect to learn how many nukes there are in the world right now, the most likely steps to an accidental nuclear war, what happens when a country fires the first nuke, which cities are the most likely targets of a nuclear strike, what the most powerful bomb in history was, how many people would die in a nuclear war between the US and Russia, how likely a nuclear war is in our future and much more... - 00:00 How Many Nukes Exist? 04:42 Where America’s Nukes Are 09:33 Russian & Chinese Submarines Near America 12:40 What Happens When a Nuke is Fired? 21:24 How American Nuclear Silos Work 25:12 Can We Intercept All Kinds of Missiles? 28:38 Most Likely American Targets 34:55 The Different Types of Bombs Today 41:20 What Happens When Thermo-Nuclear Bombs Drop? 51:23 The Closest We Ever Came to Nuclear War 59:08 Is De-Escalation a Realistic Goal? 1:02:35 Where to Find Annie - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  How many nukes are in existence right now?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  12,500 approximately.

• 0:09Chris Williamson?

  And where does that number come from? How do we know that that's the number?

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there are nine nuclear armed nations. And the way we know the specifics of them is thanks to a group here in the United States called the Federation of American Scientists. They have a organization within that called the Nuclear Notebook Group, led by a guy called Hans Christiansen, and they do all the counting for us. The one variable would be North Korea, because they don't have any form of transparency. And so it's guessing when it comes to what we think North Korea has.

• 0:48Chris Williamson?

  Who are the nine?

• 0:50Speaker 01

  The nine are the obvious Russia, America, UK, France, India, Pakistan,

• 1:01Speaker 01

  China, North Korea, Israel.

• 1:05Chris Williamson?

  Australia, no?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 1:08Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:11Chris Williamson?

  How do we know that countries aren't giving a United States organization purposefully under-reported numbers to make us think that they've got fewer, that they've gotten rid of it, that they've de-escalated, when in fact they've got loads?

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Well, some of the treaties, which are like being threatened right now, ask for transparency and also inspection. And so, like, for example, people go to Russia on our side and vice versa. Things can get held up when there's direct conflicts right now, like right now. But it's amazing, you know, in my book, I I take the readers from nuclear launch to nuclear winter, and I have these little sort of nerdish history breaks where I give you some of the details like this. But mostly, I stay out of the policy, both behind nuclear nonproliferation, and also the policies that could lead to nuclear war. Because I really

• 2:16Speaker 01

  want the readers to know, like, this is what happens. And the things you're asking me are super important, because they have to do with sort of preventative ideas. You know, this idea that if we are more transparent with one another, and I'm talking about the nuclear armed nations, there's going to be communication on some level.

• 2:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder, I wonder if it's true. I wonder if 12,500 is the actual number. Um, you know, it would make complete sense. Here we do a cyber subterfuge and and hacking of chips and getting it like the most obvious, like the original psyop conspiracy, lying, like, why not just lie about it? Uh, hide them, put them in a place that it's not like treaties. And I don't know, when it comes to nuclear war or the potential destruction of your of your country, something tells me there's a lot of incentives to not be super transparent.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  I'll give you an example. North Korea, the CIA will tell you that North Korea has 50 nuclear weapons. But some private organizations, some NGOs, non-governmental organizations, will tell you that number is as high as 130. So that gives you an example of like, how how accurate that number may or may not be.

• 3:34Chris Williamson?

  Seventy thousand was the number we were at when we peaked?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  That's right, 1986.

• 3:41Chris Williamson?

  Right. What happened to, do you deconstruct a bomb? Do you do you sell it for parts? Do you keep the depleted uranium core to make a nuclear reactor? What do you do?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. I mean, what a great question, and what an interesting concept of where does all that? Nuclear material go. Um, there's a plant in Texas called Pantex and that's where they do that. And it is so profoundly classified and not a lot of people know about it. And it's almost certainly on, you know, everybody's nuclear strike target list. Because can you imagine the mayhem that would ensue if you struck that? There's just so many precariously dangerous situations. It feels like any site that has to do with anything that touches a nuclear weapon

• 4:37Speaker 01

  becomes, you know, radioactive, like literally and figuratively.

• 4:42Chris Williamson?

  Where are most of America's nukes? Are they on land? Are they at sea? Have we got any that are in space?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Okay, so I map out the triad. America has what's called the triad. And what a great place to begin because it's like so much of what I try to do in this book is demystify, you know? It's often said here in America that the, the nuclear weapons belong to the, to the nuclear priesthood, the PhD priesthood, right? And there's kind of a, an almost, it seems like a foolhardy attempt to keep the layman out, to keep regular people like you and me from really knowing these things. But interestingly, when you look at them, they're very simple. Um, and because America is a democracy, a lot of our information is transparent. So for example, the Defense Department puts out a very thick monograph, which almost

• 5:32Speaker 01

  no one reads, I have read, you can read, which tells you exactly these numbers and it explains what is called the nuclear triad. And it's such an interesting place to start. And you realize actually things are easier than you think. Nuclear triad, oh, three, okay? So we have silos, underground silos, we have a submarine force, and then we have a bomber force. And the silos, there are 400 of them across America. And believe it or not, every single one of them is targetable. Every single one of them you can locate. It used to be on an old map, now it's GPS. Then the submarines are just crazy to learn about.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  I mean, they are called the handmaidens of the apocalypse with good reason. There are fourteen of them. They're nuclear armed, nuclear powered submarines. Satellites can't see them. They just cruise around underwater like loaded with nuclear weapons. Each one has as many as ninety. And that's enough to take out like not a city, like not a continent, but arguably civilization, because ninety nuclear weapons almost certainly sets off nuclear World War III. One does, right? Okay, so then the last part of the triad is the bomber force. We have sixty six bombers. Those are the B twos that are very famous that looks like a flying wing.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  And then the old school B fifty twos and those drop gravity bombs. The interesting spooky thing about that third part of the triad is that it's the only part of the triad, the nuclear triad that can be recalled. So it's almost certainly what the president sends first. In other words, the ICBMs, the ballistic missiles that launch out of the silos and the sub-launched ballistic missiles in the submarines, once they are launched, they cannot be redirected or recalled. And so once they launch, that is end game.

• 7:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's scary. That being said, something tells me that using the B fifty twos and the B twos, you've got to ready the pilots. I have to presume that you basically have a twenty four seven crew of nuclear missile carrying plane pilots permanently on base twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. An alarm goes off and they are in the planes, the planes are fueled, they're on the ground, they're ready to go, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, how long is it going to take a plane to get from wherever it is to Moscow to be able to, because you've got to be over the top of the target? If you're using gravity, you've got to be over the top of the target.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Well, you're absolutely right, and that's why the bombers get sent first, but they almost will have no role. And I interviewed pilots who are, who, you know, fly these aircraft and who have trained for this, as you said, constantly through across all the decades that they have been in existence. And yet, they almost certainly don't play a role because by the time they would get to a target, for example, we keep be the B two bomber very close to Pyongyang, right? For this reason, but very close means a five hour flight. And when you're talking about nuclear war happening in seconds and minutes,

• 9:02Speaker 01

  not days, not hours and weeks, or hours and days. You know, one pilot said to me, the chances are you would, you would get there after the war has commenced. And you would have no way to refuel in air because so many of these aircraft need that capacity. So you're refueling capacity. Yes, it is. They are all suicides mission. I mean, nuclear war is one big giant suicide.

• 9:33Chris Williamson?

  You said, I, I, I saw you write about how Russian and Chinese submarines regularly sneak up to within a couple of hundred miles of the United States coasts.

• 9:45Chris Williamson?

  What was that thing about something to do with the grapefruit on the moon?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Okay, so the Michael Connor, Admiral Connor, the, the former commander of America's Nuclear Submarine Force, not somebody who usually goes on the record or talks to journalists. He shared with me this stunning analogy, which is that it's harder to find a submarine under the sea than it is to find a grapefruit sized object in space. So that's how stealthy submarines are. And yes, thank you for noticing that detail in the book because I was shocked to come across in a Defense Department budget request of all things.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  A map, a sonar map, demonstrating the pathways of Soviet, or sorry Freudian slip there, of Russian and Chinese submarines coming up along America's coast, just a few hundred miles out. And that is enough to keep you up at night if all of the rest of it isn't.

• 10:56Chris Williamson?

  What are the most likely steps to a mistaken nuclear war, in your opinion?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Well, you know, missed it, right? So there's this famous quote, which I use,

• 11:08Speaker 01

  whereby the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, says, "We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear apocalypse." And so, there is a lot of room for error, right? Where you're, you know, there's a lot of room for mistakes. But there's also a lot of room for the madman scenario. And that's what I use in the book, whereby a nuclear armed nation makes a rogue launch against the United States for reasons that we never know. That remains unanswered, because the world ends before anyone gets that answer.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  But it is, according to sources I interviewed, a plausible scenario, you know, a nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal. So be it a mistake, be it a misunderstanding, be it a madman, we are really on the brink of catastrophe here, which is like, I think, the calling, you know, the sort of clarion call to have all of us talking about this. Thank you for having me on your show, because your show is, you know, listened to by all kinds of people, not just policy wonks and people that seem to be obsessed with the sort of geopolitical maneuvers of everyone. Nuclear war, you know, it's important to all of us.

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's not going to discriminate whether you're a policy wonk or a Defense Department person. Everybody's going to feel the impact. Okay, so someone fires a nuke.

• 12:44Chris Williamson?

  What happens from there? Take us through the timeline from button of first nuke gets pushed. Let's say that it's from North Korea and it's going to be aimed at the US.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this is like, this is that second by second telling, the ticking clock scenario that as I was reporting the book initially, wasn't sure how I was going to actually like tell the story. And then, once I began to really learn the specifics of this, it became only the ticking clock scenario, because as you say, it's a sequence. It just happens. Once nuclear launch happens, it all goes from there. And so the way it begins, interestingly, is in space. And that is because the United States has spent trillions of dollars over the past decades

• 13:38Speaker 01

  being aware of when anyone launches a ballistic missile, when anyone launches a missile at all.

• 13:45Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, hang on. What's a ballistic missile? What's a, give me the hierarchy?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  So, and it's a great question, because you know, we hear a lot about strategic weapons versus tactical weapons, right? So tactical nukes, that's what you hear Vladimir Putin threatening now, when he's talking about using a tactical nuke. That's a battlefield nuke. America doesn't even keep them. We did in the Cold War, but realized what a ridiculously bad idea it is, because it means you might actually use them on the battlefield. You know, you're just going upping the scale. You go from the mother of all bombs to the nuclear tactical weapon. A ballistic missile is a warhead loaded on a rocket that can travel, it's called an

• 14:32Speaker 01

  ICBM, Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, so that it can travel from one continent to the other. And it uses, you know, gravity in as much that it has three phases. Okay, that's what it takes thirty minutes, three phases. Boost phase, five minutes. Mid course phase, twenty minutes. Terminal phase, one hundred seconds. That's from a launch pad in Russia. Twenty six minutes, forty seconds. From Pyongyang, it's thirty three minutes. I mean, I geek out on the details and have like, you know, professors of math mathematics at a MIT do the math for me because you want to show how precise this all is,

• 15:14Speaker 01

  how specific the details are that the Defense Department works on. And so the satellite systems in space, it's called CIBRs. Again, and now, you know, everything's in an acronym. Space Based Infrared Satellite System. CIBRs. A constellation of satellites in geosync, meaning it can park above an enemy nation and watch for the hot rocket exhaust on a ballistic missile launch, which it can see in less than a fraction of a cent of a second. I mean, the, when you really think about that this all begins in the first fraction of a second,

• 15:56Speaker 01

  you understand the depth and scope of what exists behind the veil of the possibility of nuclear warfare.

• 16:06Chris Williamson?

  What happened, so a microsecond after the exhaust flares go off and it's not even left the ground yet, satellite detects it, presumably sends that to the US. What is the sequence of events that occurs from a Defense Department's presidential perspective?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Yep, and it all happens super fast. So literally within seconds, that data in space goes to the command centers. I was amazed to learn that it goes immediately to three command centers. And, and again, it, it becomes like very visual when you realize how simple this all is. The data goes to, you know, Cheyenne Mountain. We know about this from movies. It's in, you know, it's like the, the nuclear bunker in Colorado beneath the mountain. It's real. It's one of three. The other one is beneath the Pentagon. It's called the National Military Command Center. And the third nuclear bunker is beneath Stratcom, U.S. Strategic Command. That's in Nebraska.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  And the way it was explained to me that like made it really easy to understand. Cheyenne Mountain is like the brain. The Pentagon is the beating heart of nuclear war. And the bunker beneath Omaha, Nebraska, is the muscle. And those three command centers with their partners in the Space Force and at various different command centers, centers begin to interpret this data. And so it takes only 150 seconds from launch for the machines, people call them AI, I call them, you know, machine learning, to start calculating, is that missile headed toward Moscow or Honolulu?

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Is the missile headed toward San Francisco? Or is it headed toward the East Coast? And 150 seconds later, that information becomes clear. And by then, can you imagine what has been going on in those three command centers? And all the hundreds of thousands of people that are working on this issue, again, behind the veil 24/7, 365. And so it becomes simply a matter of minutes before the President of the United States is notified about all this. And that comes to me directly from two former Secretaries of Defense here in the, in the U.S. who are saying, this is how it works.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Letting the President know that very soon, he's going to have to make a decision about counterattack, about how to respond. And that sets in motion this crazy policy called launch on warning, which requires the President of the United States to launch nuclear weapons in response to a rogue attack. It's called a bolt out of the blue attack. Before nuclear weapons actually hit the United States. Said differently, we don't wait to absorb a nuclear blow. We launch. And that has to do with what we just talked about, the nuclear silos.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  The theory is that whoever's launching at the United States will try and take out the nuclear silos. So we can't respond. So therefore, we must respond, which gets you into this. Sort of Orwellian understanding of how Orwellian all of this is. And by the way, now I've only taken you through the first few minutes.

• 19:36Chris Williamson?

  Okay. The language that you used there, you said that the president will have to make a decision and that it is kind of the president's duty to do this launch on warning. But all of that stops at the glass floor that is the president's right finger or him saying yes, or in the affirmative type thing. It seems to me like there is still a human decision element of this in the US.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  So it sounds like what you're saying is that you believe that perhaps the president would choose not to launch nuclear weapons.

• 20:17Chris Williamson?

  That it's not a completely automated system, absolutely outside of the bounds of of human decision, that there is still a point at which, and maybe 999 times out of 1,000, the president would hit the button.

• 20:34Chris Williamson?

  But that there is still this kind of like arbitrary odd integration of the president into the system.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, it is not what is called an executive order. The launch on warning is policy. It's not an executive order. And it is the president's decision and only the president's decision. Yeah. So if you had an incredibly tempered, incredibly peaceful, incredibly fill in the blank president who just simply was unwilling to launch nuclear weapons, you are absolutely right. Interestingly, you're the only person who has who has posed this.

• 21:16Chris Williamson?

  It's the Brit. It's the totally war-cooked Brit in me that doesn't want to have a nuclear winter. So I had a guy called Andrew Bustamante on the show, who's ex CIA. His first job was as a nuclear silo operative.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:33Chris Williamson?

  So he was. He was one of the two guys with the keys. I'm going to guess that you have worked out about every hour, roundabout on the hour or so, alarm goes off, keys go in, code gets put in, they have no. Can you just run us through, because that was one of my favorite stories that he taught me about how like willing dissenters and and and stuff, basically because of the network of the 400 silos and they're linked and you don't know if yours is actually going or not. Can you just explain kind of how all of that works?

• 22:02Speaker 01

  I'm sure, I mean, listen, I'm a journalist and the first hand witness is always better than the second hand storyteller, which is me. So I'm sure that his account of it is riveting and I will watch it. I have spoken to missiliars who describe exactly that. And yes, there are protocols in place so that they don't make an error, so that a missilear can can't go rogue and decide to do something. But what there isn't in place is a system in between the president and the missilear. So in other words, once the president says, once the president gives the launch order, the the sequence begins.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  There's no dissent, there's no room for dissent. And I asked the the Los Alamos classified historian Glenn Macduff a variation on your question to me. Like what, you know, would we, could we see someone refuse, whether it's even anyone below the president? Let's say even the stratcom commander or down to the missilear. And he said to me, Annie, I would recommend you'd have better chances winning the Powerball.

• 23:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Than to have someone in the nuclear command and control apparatus defy authority.

• 23:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so what I learned from Andrew upon issuing of, in fact, before we get to issuing.

• 23:32Chris Williamson?

  400 missile silos ish around the US. In each of those, at all times, there are two operatives with keys around their neck. They have alarms that go off, firing alarms that go off where they have to. Keys go in, code gets input, they press a button. That happens about 24 times a day. They have no idea whether that is a false alarm or a real, real world like activity. Also, if only one of the 400 puts the code in and turns the key, all of them fire because they're networked together.

• 24:15Chris Williamson?

  So you need, you would need to have 399 and then one more willing dissenters. You also have the peer pressure of the other person with the key. You also have this sort of trained, almost like a Pavlovian response where we've continued to do this. We continue to do this, but one day you could get the alarm, come through, you know, another day at work, put the code in, turn the key and then hear and go, oh, fuck. You have no idea what you're aiming at. You have no idea why it's been fired. You're just there to do that thing. And that, that to me, this sort of distributed system, if anyone fires, then all of them fire. You only need the code to go in into one of these silos.

• 24:58Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, I think the, the Powerball analogy probably, probably stands up.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Those are some pretty incredible details. I'm going to have to drill down on those because I'm not familiar with them, but that is kind of shocking.

• 25:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Once you launch, you can't recall, is it possible to intercept a nuke as it's coming towards us? I've heard about hypersonic missiles. They sound faster than ICBMs. Can we fire a thing at their thing and knock it out the sky?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Interestingly, an ICBM is hypersonic, right? So all of this business of hypersonic is just, in my opinion, great advertisement for the military industrial complex to have new weapons. No one I know thinks hypersonic missiles have really much, are going to change much of anything in terms of defense. They're certainly going to spend a lot more money for taxpayers. What is interesting that you pointed out is about the myths behind the interceptor program. I myself was at a dinner party when I was reporting this book, seated next to a very knowledgeable person, who when I said, you know, I'm writing da, da, da, he said, oh, Annie, you know, we have an interceptor program for that. And I didn't want to correct him.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  There has to be a female version of the mansplaining concept. I haven't figured it out yet, but I didn't want to correct him. I figured I'll just give him a copy of my book. Because that is absolute fantasy. You know, this idea that America's interceptor system is anything like, for example, Israel's Iron Dome is just simply not true. We have 44 interceptor missiles total. Four of them are at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara. Forty of them are in Alaska. And they too are like ballistic missiles, okay?

• 26:53Speaker 01

  So imagine Russia's 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons, ready to launch in seconds or minutes, coming at the United States, up against 44 interceptor missiles. How's that going to work out?

• 27:10Chris Williamson?

  Presumably, the interceptor missiles aren't under the same restriction and jurisdiction that the nuclear disarmament slowly winding down your thing consists of. So if that's the case, why not just have like? A million of them. Is it costly? Is it hard to make?

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Well, you're absolutely right. And inside of them, the vehicle that takes out the nuclear warhead, by the way, is just a kinetic, there's no, there's no explosives in it. It's simply hitting, it's an, it's an object called an exo atmospheric kill vehicle. How's that for a mouthful? Okay? And that is just simply going to collide with the nuclear warhead, one hopes. One of them, by the way, is going 14,000 miles an hour. The other one's going 20,000 miles an hour. This is taking place 500 miles in space. Okay? So even the Missile Defense Agency, the spokesperson there said, yes, it is like taking out a bullet with a bullet.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  That's their quote, okay? And the success rate is between 40 and 55%. So to answer your question, does it really make sense for anyone to have, you know, thousands of these on ready for launch status? To maybe strike incoming, it's madness, all of it. It's insane. And there has to be a better solution than more weapons.

• 28:38Chris Williamson?

  What do you think would be the most likely targets in the US? Is it, take us through, triage the, the, the targets?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  And this you're talking about for an enemy to attack us?

• 28:51Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Well, by all means, the Pentagon is the first and primary target. And almost everyone who I interviewed for the book, said to me that it's the bolt out of the blue attack against Washington DC that Washington DC fears most. That has to do with the fact that it's not just that it would decapitate leadership and kill, let's say, 2 million people if you had a one megaton thermonuclear bomb, as I do in my scenario. But then you're setting off a catastrophe of problems having to do with what's called continuity of government.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  This idea that the United States government must continue functioning no matter what. Imagine, you know, DC being decapitated. And so there's this incredible scramble that I write about in, in the scenario of, you know, who's in charge? And getting the commander in chief out of Washington DC. That you know, the targets are everyone. It was said to me this way by Professor Brian Toon, who's one of the original five authors of the nuclear winter theory. He said, if you live in a major city or a minor city, if you live near an airport, if there's an industrial base in your city,

• 30:16Speaker 01

  just about any city in America up to, let's say, the top 800 of them, you have a nuclear weapon pointed at you. And that's enough to keep you up at night. And again, the same goes for anyone in a enemy or an adversary of the United States that is also nuclear armed. They too have a nuclear weapon, Toon said, pointed at them. But of course, what he really meant is targetable to them because the nuclear weapons are actually left, targeted out at sea in case there was a rogue launch,

• 30:58Speaker 01

  which I found like one of the only comforting details in all of this. And when those keys get turned, that's when the codes, the actual, you know, coordinates are put into play.

• 31:12Chris Williamson?

  What is the protocol? The president is chilling in the White House, answering emails on the phone. Mr. President, this missile is coming toward us. Have you got any idea what the process from there is?

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Well, I do because I interviewed many people around the president that would be confronted with trying to, you know, make decisions about what happens next. So surely you would have his military advisors at US Strategic Command and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff trying to get a launch order in response from him, the counterattack order. And that is something called jamming the president. And that is well known and that is confirmed by almost all military sources, that they are very aware of the launch on warning protocols, the policy. And that's what they need from the president because the launch order can come from him and only from him.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  But the most interesting sort of counter argument to that that would be the primary event happening came to me from the Secret Service. From the president has a paramilitary team that is with him all the time. This is not very well known. It's called the counter assault team. And they shadow him everywhere and they are responsible, certainly in an event like this, for making sure that he is whisked out of Washington DC to safety. That would be on the command of the of the person in charge of the president's detail, the special agent in charge, also known as the SAC.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  And I interviewed Lou Merlede, who is the head of the Secret Service, sorry, the director of the Secret Service. And before that, he had been the SAC for President Clinton. And he explained to me that most certainly, the Secret Service would be completely at odds with Stratcom in that moment because they would want to move the president to Raven Rock, which is, again, that sometimes mythical, you know, command bunker outside Washington DC that is very real and is actually called officially the alternate National Military Command Center. Because it is where anyone left living, who should have been at the Pentagon, would now go in the event of nuclear war.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  It's about 70 miles outside of DC and it's a quick helicopter ride if you can get there before the EMP pulse takes the helicopter out.

• 33:46Chris Williamson?

  Are there any bunkers that can survive modern nuclear warheads?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Almost none. And certainly not the ones that were built in the 1950s. You know, the Raven Rock bunker, the Stratcom bunker, they were like the specs, and again, this is what's transparent, this is what is known on the record, but they were built to withstand a one megaton thermonuclear weapon. But almost certainly, they would be targeted by 10 or 100.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Smaller sized nuclear weapons, which, you know, as I really nerd out in the latter part of the book where these bunkers get destroyed, you learn that they, nothing can survive being hit by multiple nuclear bombs because the energy is spread out so, you know, in such a manner that they just simply can't survive. And we haven't even begun to talk about the problem of losing electricity because people forget that all bunkers run on generators and eventually if there's no electricity, there's no way to pump fuel.

• 34:54Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about the different types and sizes of bombs that have been developed. You know, Oppenheimer just came out and we got to see this very impressive, very scary explosion go on. And yet, compared with what we have now, that's like, it's like puny. It's like a stick of dynamite.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Atomic bombs are so different than thermonuclear weapons. And again, you know, what a great question because so many people don't know this. The nuclear priesthood has kind of, you know, kept, kept these kind of layman's details, I think, out of public discourse. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, for example, was 15 kilotons. Nagasaki was 20 kilotons. A thermonuclear weapon, like the one that's on the cover of my book, that is a photograph of the Ivy Mike thermonuclear device, which was the first ever exploded

• 35:54Speaker 01

  thermonuclear weapon. It was designed by Richard Garwin, who I interviewed for the book. He was 24 years old when he drew the plans. He's now 95. That weapon, he explained to me, was 10.4 megatons. It exploded with the power of almost 1,000 Hiroshima bombs, exploding at the same time from one center point of power. It is so massive. It is five miles of fire.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  And that says nothing of the blast and the destruction that pushes out like a bulldozer in rings. At one point, the Russians had a 50-megaton weapon.

• 36:47Chris Williamson?

  Was that the Tsar bomber?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Yes, it was. And you can look at those images online and just be absolutely terrified.

• 36:58Chris Williamson?

  Is this, what's the difference between an atomic bomb, hydrogen bomb, thermonuclear warhead, what's what?

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I'm so glad you're asking these questions because these are like what keep people from, you know, wanting to have this discussion. A hydrogen bomb is a synonym for a thermonuclear bomb, same thing. Atomic bomb is the, were the early fission bombs. And the thermonuclear and the hydrogen, same thing, are, use fusion. So the way that Richard Garwin explained it to me, and again, the smartest people in the room can explain things to a child because that's how smart they are and that's how easy it should be. And what Garwin said to me was, Annie, keep in mind that a thermonuclear bomb uses an

• 37:46Speaker 01

  atomic bomb inside the weapon as a fuse. That gives you an idea of how much power is involved.

• 37:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's the striking pin. The thing that previously was the most destructive bomb ever dropped on a city is the thing that starts the thing that explodes.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  You're absolutely right.

• 38:05Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so you mentioned about this sort of five-mile radius. Let's say that, oh, actually, that's a question. Are these, whatever they're called, above ground, mid-air? Are they, do they deploy in the air? Do they hit the ground?

• 38:18Speaker 01

  So they can deploy either place.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  The way to kill the most people, and that's a quote from John von Neumann, who was working on this issue with Oppenheimer, when they were deciding the dynamics of where to detonate or explode the bomb, the Hiroshima bomb, the original bomb. Von Neumann, the mathematician, figured out that you would kill the most people if it was 1,900 feet above the target. Again, what a gruesome and macabre fact. And interestingly, von Neumann was given the Medal of Honor, or I might be getting the title of the medal wrong, but some extraordinary prestigious medal from the president himself for having figured that out,

• 39:08Speaker 01

  which is sort of horrific when you really think about that. But that is a very specific issue about killing people, because of course, this is a weapon of mass genocide. And if you explode it higher up, the blast will kill more people. But if a bomb is exploded on the ground, you have a whole different horrific set of consequential deaths. And that has to do with radiation poisoning. Because when the bomb explodes on the ground, think about all the dirt, the earth, that is blasted up. All of that is now irradiated.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  And all of that dirt is going to fall back down to earth, irradiated, versus the detonation that occurs above the earth will essentially disperse into the atmosphere and be taken away by the winds, which is why people can walk around Hiroshima today. It's why you can go to the Nevada test site.

• 40:17Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. So if the Hiroshima bomb hadn't, I didn't know that it was an above 1,900 feet thing. If that had exploded by hitting the pavement, Hiroshima would be uninhabitable for 2,000 years.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Well, not uninhabitable, but it would have a different, the radiation would have a longer shelf life, right? Well, like, like, I've been out to the Nevada test site where a very famous

• 40:47Speaker 01

  test was conducted in the 60s.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  And it left behind what is called the Sedan Crater. It's such a massive crater that it can be seen from outer space. And I walked, walked around nearby, and so that was, what, 50 years ago? And it's no longer, you know, you can stay there for a little bit of time. But you're absolutely right that there are these radically different degrees of radiation poisonings of earth and air dependent on atmosphere.

• 41:20Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so a standard megaton thermonuclear warhead goes off 1,900 feet above a city. What happens directly below it, five miles out, 25 miles out, 100 miles out? Talk me through that.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  In the book, I use the one megaton thermonuclear bomb on the Pentagon detonating above, you know, around a thousand, a thousand feet above. And the reason why I do that is, again, because I can give the effects to the reader, not from Annie Jacobsen's imagination, but rather from absolute, specific details sourced from Defense Department documents called The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, originally called Army Manual 50. Because defense scientists have spent all these decades since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and then through our own atmospheric testing in the Marshall Islands in the 50s,

• 42:20Speaker 01

  the defense scientists have been documenting with great detail what nuclear weapons do to people and things in blast areas going out. And so to begin with, you have this thermonuclear flash of light that is 180 million degrees at its center point. It's almost impossible for the human mind to comprehend that kind of power. It's equivalent to about four times the center of the Earth's sun. And so it sets, it just in a flash, sets things alight going nine, 10 miles out.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  I mean, the Defense Department knows in inches where pine needles will catch on fire versus the upholstery in car seats. And then, of course, so you have the initial fireball. A one megaton thermonuclear weapon has one mile of fire. Pure fire. That's 19 football fields. Everything is dead. Everything, there is nothing, no cellular life exists. And outside of that, you have, you know, you, you wish that you were at the center point because outside in the next ring going out, you have, you know, melted steel.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  You have streets turning into molten lava. Like you have people absorbing into things. You have permanent structures changing shape and collapsing. Then you have this bulldozer-like blast that moves out. You have winds of 200, 300, 400 miles an hour. A hurricane level wind is 90 miles an hour, by the way.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Everyone's on fire. Third degree burns on people that aren't. Buildings collapsing. I mean, shall I go on and horrify listeners? This is, okay, so how about this? As it was explained to me by a nuclear engineer who studies this, you also have the issue of that mush, you know, when you've seen an atomic explosion, perhaps on YouTube, right? From some of the early tests that were done in the 50s. You see the mushroom stem and you see the mushroom cloud. Well, the mushroom stem creates a sucking motion of everything on the, and it's down on the, on the land below it.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  So you have people, telephone poles, cars, people that have turned into combusting carbon being sucked up in a reverse sucking motion into that stem.

• 45:06Chris Williamson?

  Well, you've seen, if, if you watch the archive footage of, of, you know, a, a house that they've built out in the Nevada desert or whatever, you see things go.

• 45:17Chris Williamson?

  And then go back the other way, this sort of this, and presumably that's the sucking motion.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  You're absolutely right. That is exactly what that is. And so, and then the most haunting detail of all is when you look at that mushroom cloud now, that you can see on YouTube, you realize inside of that would be the remains of people, the remains of civilization. Those bombs were exploded out in the Marshall Islands on atolls with no one around. But you can imagine what would be in that cloud stem and the cloud cap if it were detonated over a city.

• 46:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, wow. I mean, that's pretty.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  And that's just one. That's just one. You know, in the scenario that I propose, there's more 1,000 or more that strike the United States when it's end game, 72 minutes in. And the same is over in Russia. And so that begins nuclear winter, which I'm probably jumping to too fast because we haven't even.

• 46:25Chris Williamson?

  Tell us about nuclear winter.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Well, you know, and I jumped there because you can, it was interesting writing and reporting this book. And it's been interesting, the book has only been out for a few days, but hearing people's reaction because most people read it in one night, I'm told, right? Because, or one day, because they can't stop reading. And it is written that way because in the most dramatic, human storytelling, you know, possible manner, I think you are like, what happens? And yet you know what happens.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  But what happens at the end of a nuclear war is nuclear winter. And that is because after you get through the fireballs that we were just discussing, the blast, the radiation poisoning.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  You have situations where every single one of those ground zeros becomes a mega fire. So because that tremendous X-ray flash of light that was 180 million degrees set everything on fire, those fires create more fires. I mean, just imagine all the electricity, all the electric lines whipping and that are starting new fires everywhere. It's like thousands of matches, just fire after fire after fire. Each ground zero will be between 100 and 200 square miles of fire as it continues to burn.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  And so multiply that by 1,000, by 2,000 around the globe. And what happens is you have 330 billion pounds of soot lofted into the troposphere. And that is, again, not from my imagination. That is from state of the art climate modeling done by Professor Brian Toon, one of the original authors of the nuclear winter theory, along with Carl Sagan. Toon has stayed on this issue all these decades since. And the climate modeling today shows us that nuclear winter, the predictions from the 80s, when the theory first came to be, those were nothing compared to the truth of it.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  That the sun will be blocked out by 70% or more from all that soot in the troposphere. And that the sun will be blocked out in that manner for between seven to 10 years.

• 49:04Chris Williamson?

  Is that globally? That doesn't stay locally?

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Globally, because the wind moves. And so nations that had nothing to do with this nuclear war will be profoundly affected. And what Toon explained to me is that around the Earth, temperatures will fall as much as 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Large bodies of water in the mid-latitudes, in places like Iowa and Ukraine, the bread baskets of the world. The large bodies of water there will be frozen over under sheets of ice for seven or eight or nine years. And so agriculture will fail. And when agriculture fails, people starve to death. And that is why the number is now estimated to be five billion people dead after a nuclear exchange.

• 50:06Chris Williamson?

  Is that all 12,500 nukes? Is that 2,000 of them? What's the number that you need to have launched to hit 5 billion?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  In the scenario, it's just a couple thousand. In the scenario, I don't involve yet the other nuclear armed nations. And I did that on purpose because I was really trying to demonstrate that after 72 minutes in the scenario, as it was explained to me and sort of, you know, fact-checked by the sources that I was using and others. You, once you lose electricity, then you have no ability to record history for the future. And so we never know if the other nuclear armed nations get involved. So to answer your question, we don't know about the remainder of the nuclear weapons. And we don't know about the thousands that were in storage. All it takes

• 51:02Speaker 01

  is the amount of nuclear weapons that are on ready-for-launch status right now.

• 51:09Chris Williamson?

  Five billion people die in a war between the United States and Russia?

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Set off by a rogue, nuclear, nihilistic madman on a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack.

• 51:23Chris Williamson?

  There's been a number of close calls in history, some famous ones, a guy in a submarine, foil in the air, the wrong VHS tape being put in. What was the closest that we came to nuclear war in the past, in your opinion?

• 51:40Speaker 01

  I believe that it's the nuclear test tape that you refer to. And the reason for that, so just for your listeners, it was 1979. And this story came to me from a first hand witness, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry himself. He was on the night watch that night, the nuclear night watch. And he received word that the Russians had launched ballistic missiles at the United States, both land-launched ICBMs and sub-launched SLBMs. So this looked like a massive, you know, first and second strike attack. And the information

• 52:22Speaker 01

  came from both the nuclear bunker beneath the Pentagon and the nuclear bunker beneath Stratcom. And so that idea, which we didn't get into, but I take the readers through in the book, that you can have the early warning launch, the early warning of a nuclear launch, and that is when the president gets advised. But then there has to be secondary confirmation, right? So this 1979 error you're talking about was moving towards secondary confirmation because there is already two bunkers confirming. When suddenly someone realized that it was

• 53:02Speaker 01

  actually a VHS training tape, a war game training tape that had been inserted into one of the machines at one of those bunkers. And as Bill Perry said to me, it looked real because it was meant to look real.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  And so what was particularly shocking to me about that and why I, as a journalist, work with sources to help me tell the story and convey the drama is because when Bill Perry was telling me that story, it had been, you know, forty some odd years since it had happened. And I could hear it in his voice, the terror and the almost trauma of thinking that he was the person who was going to have to wake up the president and tell him that he was going to have to launch a nuclear counterattack.

• 54:06Chris Williamson?

  Well, who starts one of these wars, given that it's pretty obvious how it ends? Like, who in their right mind, like, it's not just you. You're a very good journalist and writer, but, you know, there's hundreds of people in every government around the world that's done the war games, that's played out the five billion people and the nuclear winter and the, you know, the pine trees on fire. Why would anyone start this, given what happens?

• 54:34Speaker 01

  And for that, I looked to my discussions with Richard Garwin, who designed the Ivy Mike thermonuclear weapon, who has been advising presidents about nuclear weapons since the 1950s, who arguably knows more about nuclear weapons and nuclear policy than anyone on this earth. And it was Garwin who said to me when I was discussing scenarios with him, because I made every, I made it very clear to all of my sources what I was doing. And I asked all of them if I was fear mongering. And not one of them said I was. You know, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said, Annie, I agree with what you're doing. The people need to know.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  But it was Garwin who, when I asked him, what is the most dangerous scenario that you could think of, kind of like you're asking me, you know, what kind of a crazy person would do this? We have leaders that know. And he said that his fear was one nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal is all it takes to start a nuclear war.

• 55:43Chris Williamson?

  What does that mean? Who is that?

• 55:44Speaker 01

  I would think that is the leader of North Korea today. And I believe that's who Garwin was referring to. And the reason for that is, and the reason that we're singularly, the reason that we're sort of using that individual is because North Korea is the only nuclear armed nation that doesn't play by the rules. I mean, let's put rules in air quotes, right? But there are some rules of nuclear war, one of which is you tell people when you're going to launch nuclear weapons. And all of the non-nuclear armed

• 56:26Speaker 01

  nations do that. And when I'm saying nuclear weapons, I mean, when you're going to launch an ICBM test, because you have to test your weapon systems to make sure they work. And so all nations warn one another. This is something I just learned in the book about North Korea, by the way, when I was reporting it, that, for example, during the Ukraine war, Russia didn't, they canceled a pre, a test that they had already had on the books. They canceled it. The United States did the same. Because no one wants to start a nuclear war by accident, particularly in times of great hostility, as is the world right now.

• 57:03Chris Williamson?

  Because it would be potentially mistaken by another country as, oh, this might be coming for Moscow, or this might be coming for Washington. What they don't know is it's going to land in the middle of the North Atlantic and it's just a test.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely right. I mean, we talked about that earlier with 150 second window between if you're, if you know, or maybe it's going straight up into space to deliver a satellite. So North Korea, I learned from the North Korea experts here in the United States, does not announce any of its missile tests. And since January of 22, they have launched 100 missiles, unannounced. Now, I have spoken to the individuals who have to run these systems, are in these bunkers. Do you know what, imagine what must go on in those first 150 seconds every time North Korea launches?

• 58:01Chris Williamson?

  That's happened, that's happened once a week for the last two years.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  It's happened 100 times. So I guess since 2022, right? Um, that is reckless. And that is why North, in my scenario, North Korea launches the bolt out of the blue attack, because they are not playing by the rules. They, to them, the rules don't exist. I asked one of the experts, why do they do that? To show that they have power, to demonstrate that they are outside the norm, to demonstrate that they are menacing and will do what it is they choose to do.

• 58:42Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, it's so infantile. It's so juvenile. You think about North Korea, it's such a like stupid, petty, like idiotic system, so immature. Uh, I, I mean, yeah, it's, it's just as well that the citizens of that country don't know just how stupid the people that are running it are. Because if they did, I think they'd be even more ashamed of the country that they live in. But, okay, so moving forward, what do you want to have happen? Have you, have you considered what a safer world would look like? Is de-escalation realistic? We went from 70,000 to 12,500, reported. Should we continue to dial that

• 59:24Chris Williamson?

  down? Is there more policy that needs to be in place? What do you want to have happen in future?

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Well, that's the Reagan reversal that we touched upon a little bit earlier, right? I mean, you think about me as a high school student, watching The Day After, the ABC mini-series, a fictitional story of war between Russia and America, a nuclear war between those two countries. Terrifying, horrifying, 100 million people watched it. But so did one very important American, Ronald Reagan. And he wrote in his presidential memoirs that he was greatly depressed after watching that.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  And he, as a result, because you're too young to remember, but Ronald Reagan was a hawk. He was pro-nuclear weapons. He was working on SDI, also known as Star Wars, to put nuclear weapons in space. He believed in American supremacy through American nuclear power, nuclear might. And after watching The Day After, he changed his mind. And that famously is known among DC insiders as the Reagan reversal. And that is why the world went from 70,000 nuclear warheads to the 12,500 we have today,

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  because he reached out to Gorbachev to communicate. And so that's the answer to your question, I believe, is called communication. It's called, it doesn't make any sense to have such animosity, to have such enmity toward, you know, anyone really, but certainly not your nuclear armed adversaries. Because what is really...

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  The worst case scenario as a result of all that, well, read nuclear war scenario and you will see. And so, sure, people may say, oh, Annie, it's pansyish of you. It's so naive to think that communication can get us out of the tree. But I believe that to be true. I really believe that if a, if a, if a subject as significant as, you know, human existence is discussed openly among people, then ultimately that issue rises to the top and you start having people in positions of power, like

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Gorbachev and Reagan once were, to make changes.

• 1:02:11Chris Williamson?

  Is it possible to still watch that series that you're talking about? Is that on YouTube or anywhere?

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can see it on YouTube, absolutely. The Day After.

• 1:02:20Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  And by the way, after the Reykjavik summit, the Reagan White House called the filmmakers and said, you guys had something to do with this.

• 1:02:32Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Annie Jacobsen, ladies and gentlemen. Annie, it's a macabre, apocalyptic, but pretty important, I think. I'm a massive, I have for a very long time had a big concern about existential risks and the fact that nuclear war isn't a classic existential risk, permanent unrecoverable collapse, it's miserable and no one wants to go through that. And war is, can be done in a way which is a lot more targeted. So I really appreciate all of the work that you've done. The book's fantastic. Where should people go? They want to check out more of the things that you do online?

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  My books are sold everywhere and I read the audio of my audiobooks, which I'm told makes it a little bit easier.

• 1:03:20Chris Williamson?

  Well, you've got a fantastic voice. So yeah, I imagine it does. I really appreciate you. I can't wait to see what you do next. Thank you for joining.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

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