#120 Annie Jacobsen - Nuclear Armageddon in 2024

Annie Jacobsen is a New York Times bestselling author, Pulitzer Prize finalist and Princeton graduate. Jacobsen’s works have received rave reviews by outlets like The Washington Post, USA Today, The Boston Globe and Vanity Fair. Her career spans numerous media formats, including writing and producing TV series like Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and serving as a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Her newest book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, has risen to critical acclaim and brought Jacobsen to the Shawn Ryan Show to discuss war, weapons, government secrecy, and national security. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://helixsleep.com/srs https://shopify.com/shawn https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://drinkhoist.com - USE CODE "SHAWN" https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Annie Jacobsen Links: Website - https://anniejacobsen.com Book - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/748264/nuclear-war-by-annie-jacobsen LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/annie-jacobsen-20147b7 X - https://x.com/AnnieJacobsen FB - https://www.facebook.com/AnnieJacobsenAuthor IG - https://www.instagram.com/anniejacobsenbooks Contact - https://anniejacobsen.com/contact Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Mr. President? My company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 0:46Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 1:04Shawn Ryan?

  Annie Jacobsen, welcome to the show.

• 1:08Speaker 05

  It's delightful to be here. Thank you for having me.

• 1:10Shawn Ryan?

  I have been looking forward to this for so long. We had to postpone it because you went and spoke at the EU Parliament?

• 1:19Speaker 05

  I spoke in Brussels to members of the EU Parliament in the audience, yes.

• 1:24Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I think it was well worth the wait. And actually, I think it worked out better. You know that we rescheduled for later because now we have more to talk about.

• 1:33Speaker 05

  We do. We have no shortage of things to talk about.

• 1:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we could probably go on for days here. But everybody starts off with an introduction. So let me know if I'm missing anything. But Annie Jacobsen, American investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and New York Times bestselling author. You're an author of seven books and best known for your book so far, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. You just released your seventh book called Nuclear War: A Scenario. Write and produces television programs, including Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan.

• 2:17Shawn Ryan?

  Your books have been named Best of the Year and Most Anticipated by outlets, including The Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Apple, and Amazon. You're a Princeton graduate and captain of the Women's Varsity Ice Hockey Team, as we spoke about earlier. And you're a wife and the mother of two sons.

• 2:38Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:39Shawn Ryan?

  Am I missing anything?

• 2:41Speaker 05

  That's about it.

• 2:42Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we've got a lot to dive into. I want to focus mostly on your new book, Nuclear War. But we have, we've got to knock a couple of things out before we get into the weeds. So I have a Patreon account. There are top supporters that have been with us since the beginning. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them, and neither would you. And so, one of the perks that I offer them is I get to ask a question to each guest. And so, today's question is, with today's attitude towards fake news, do you think we will ever gain public knowledge of the topics covered by your books?

• 3:25Speaker 05

  What a great opener question. I think of the idea of fake news, as air quotes, entwined with the idea of strategic deception. And that is something I have written about in many of my books. No doubt, we will cover this. But an interesting question there, because what I, the takeaway that I see is like, how much should we trust what we are being told? And that is certainly why I write books, is to sort of uncover these long-held secrets and bring them into the light of day.

• 4:05Speaker 05

  And so, to answer the question specifically, I think you want to go to as many sources as possible. It's why I read. All sides of the aisle. I will read international papers. I will watch different programs that people might otherwise think are in opposition of one another. Read things on the internet. Listen to the podcasts. And then come to your own opinion about things.

• 4:32Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's interesting. Well, one, how much should we trust? I would love to talk to you about that. But, you know, I try to do that. And I try to read both sides of the aisle. Do you get a lot of flak for that?

• 4:46Speaker 05

  I used to, but I don't anymore because I think that's very much part of my reporting style. I, no one knows how I vote. No one needs to know how I vote. Um, I write about POTUS in all of my books, President of the United States. And so that keeps me in the middle. And it also allows me to have incredible conversations with all kinds of people. And that, I think, keeps me comfortable with what I'm learning because I'm learning how to make my own judgments about things. And I think America's getting savvy to that as well.

• 5:26Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's great to hear because I do that. I think people probably know which way I vote, but I don't, I don't like to make it a point of any of my discussions. I don't, I like to hear both sides. And sometimes when I'm, especially when I'm critical to my own side, man, I really get a lot of flak. But, you know, I think that's part of the problem that we're facing in the country right now is people have become, and I've talked about this several times. I think people have become,

• 6:00Shawn Ryan?

  they're not tied to their own ideas, values and beliefs anymore. They're tied to their political candidate and party. And, you know, when you do that, you're only getting what that side wants you to hear, whether you like it or not, you know? And so it's just, it's refreshing to hear somebody that.

• 6:26Shawn Ryan?

  That listens or pays attention to both sides and gives a, you know, a bipartisan take on whatever you're reporting on. So, thank you for doing that.

• 6:39Speaker 05

  Well, also what comes to mind is there's, people talk a lot about tribalism, right? Like, and there's tribe, and then there's tribal, you wanna have a tribe. You wanna have people that you know have your back. And usually those people, the tribe, the true tribe, right? They actually are perfectly fine with you having opinions. At least, this is my take. My tribe is, oh, Annie with her opinion about that, or Annie with her interest in that. They're fine with it. You know, they might not like that, or do that, or think that. But that's the tribe. Tribalism is like, that's where I think it becomes a little bit dangerous and fraught.

• 7:21Speaker 05

  Because then you're supposed to adopt, really, a party line. You have to have an opinion about this. Because, and that, that just puts you in a really awkward position. Because I think naturally, we're all such creatures of multiple, you know, multiple ideas and multiple ways and directions in which we wanna head. And it doesn't have, they don't have to be mutually exclusive.

• 7:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's

• 7:51Shawn Ryan?

  weird times we're in, right?

• 7:54Speaker 05

  Well, there are weird times, but you know, I am a historian also. And so, all of my books cover, you know, going back national security issues to World War II. And we've always, we, if we're talking about Americans, have always been tribal. Have always had weird times. So, I'm not as pessimistic about how terrible the times are right now. Because I've read so much history about how terrible the times have always been.

• 8:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 8:24Speaker 05

  It's kinda how you wanna see it.

• 8:25Shawn Ryan?

  Do you find it, do you find times today different than some of the stuff that you've studied in the past?

• 8:31Speaker 05

  I, I am, well, one thing about me is I'm always looking for the similarities.

• 8:39Speaker 05

  And then understanding the differences. But I find thing, I'm an optimist at heart. Even though I write about these incredibly dark grim topics. I think that like I'm a pragmatist, right? Like know the facts, don't be afraid of them. But the optimism of it all comes from being able to see, certainly as I get older and I write more books and I learn more things and I interview more interesting people. Oh, we are more similar than different, both as people and also culturally through his, like through the different decades and generations of modern America.

• 9:23Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you're saying, how much you brought up, how much should we trust? How much? How do we even know what to trust anymore?

• 9:33Speaker 05

  Well, I look at things specifically head on. So I'm, it would be, I would be better to your listeners and my readers to deal with like specifics than big generalizations. I can certainly make big generalizations about what I think about war and weapons and US national security and secrets, because that is what I write about. But in terms of operations, the specificity is important. It's like, wait, is Area 51 really that? Were the Nazi scientists really that? Is the DARPA program about bio hybrids really that? You know, I can speak to them specifically because I think that, again, I'm going to

• 10:17Speaker 05

  give you the information that I know and then people can decide what they think. Because the takeaway is incredibly, can, want me to give you an example?

• 10:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, please.

• 10:27Speaker 05

  So this is the best example I can think of of point of view. When I wrote a book called Operation Paperclip, which is about the Nazi scientist who came to America. To build our weapons programs after World War II. So they were former Nazis.

• 10:45Speaker 05

  And this book, published in 2013, 2014, back in a time when a journalist like me could actually appear on Fox News and CNN on the same night. You almost can't do that anymore.

• 10:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 11:00Speaker 05

  Right? They just don't. The royal they don't let you. But you could then. And I would go on to the, let's just call them the conservative and the liberal, right? So I'd go on to a conservative organization's media program, and they would say, "Oh, my God, Annie Jacobsen, thank you so much for writing Operation Paperclip. I mean, you showed us that these guys were these terrible Nazis. They were odious, et cetera, et cetera. But, man, did we need them to come to the United States or otherwise we'd all be speaking Russian now. So thank you for writing this book." Okay? Then I would go over to the really liberal stations, maybe even the Holocaust museum-type scenarios. And they would say to me,

• 11:44Speaker 05

  "Oh, my God, Annie Jacobsen, thank you so much for writing this book, Operation Paperclip. You showed us in no uncertain terms. These horrible, evil, criminal minds should have been hung at Nuremberg. They never should have come here. You make that so clear. Thank you so much for writing this book."

• 12:04Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 12:06Speaker 05

  You take away, they read the same book. They're, they took away a point of view based on the same set of facts. And so when I can understand that about people, and there's no, I suppose one group isn't right and one group isn't wrong. And when you can look at it like that, and maybe this also comes into play of you being, we talked about this earlier, like, when you're a new parent versus my kids are college-aged, right? The wisdom that comes with parenting, I believe, if you want to be an optimist, is that you learn how to help your children understand that different points of view are fine.

• 12:51Speaker 05

  Same sets of facts.

• 12:55Shawn Ryan?

  That's great advice. That's great advice.

• 12:57Speaker 05

  Parent to parent.

• 12:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, thank you, thank you. But, um, we want to talk about, actually, I forgot something. I almost, sometimes I forget. Not very often, but everybody's, everybody starts off with a gift.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 13:13Shawn Ryan?

  There you go.

• 13:17Speaker 05

  Performing, performance enhancing gummy bears?

• 13:20Shawn Ryan?

  Gummy bears.

• 13:21Speaker 05

  Are these legal?

• 13:22Shawn Ryan?

  They're not performance, they're legal in all 50 states.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Amazing.

• 13:25Shawn Ryan?

  They're definitely legal in California. So, so you're cleared hot to bring them back. It's just candy.

• 13:31Speaker 05

  Amazing. The TSA will not, you know, pull me over.

• 13:34Shawn Ryan?

  They might try to steal them, but uh...

• 13:35Speaker 05

  They'd be like, wow, that's Sean Ryan.

• 13:37Shawn Ryan?

  That's right, that's right.

• 13:39Speaker 05

  Great, fantastic.

• 13:40Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome.

• 13:41Speaker 05

  Amazing. Keep going?

• 13:44Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, no, that's good.

• 13:45Speaker 05

  Oh, no, this is very important.

• 13:47Shawn Ryan?

  Some stickers, yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 05

  Put it on my car.

• 13:50Shawn Ryan?

  There, there you go.

• 13:53Speaker 05

  With my Mammoth Mountain sticker.

• 13:54Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 13:55Speaker 05

  And the Sean Ryan show.

• 13:56Shawn Ryan?

  There you go, there you go.

• 13:58Speaker 05

  I had a Mac V Sog sticker on my car for a while.

• 14:01Shawn Ryan?

  Did you really?

• 14:02Speaker 05

  I did, and it, I got some hogs, yeah.

• 14:05Shawn Ryan?

  That's a, I've never even seen a Mac V's, a Mac uh...

• 14:08Speaker 05

  I'm gonna send you one, thank you so much.

• 14:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, sticker it.

• 14:10Speaker 05

  And here's, here's something for you.

• 14:13Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 14:15Speaker 05

  That's a, that's a Billy Waw coin, and um, we'll get, I'm sure we'll get into surprise, kill, vanish after nuclear war, but they kind of entwine, all my books entwine, but Billy Waw's perhaps the most legendary CIA operator singleton in the agency's history.

• 14:35Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 14:36Speaker 05

  Began his operations when Eisenhower was president.

• 14:38Shawn Ryan?

  That's incredible, thank you.

• 14:40Speaker 05

  Just died, yeah.

• 14:42Shawn Ryan?

  He just died, when did he die?

• 14:44Speaker 05

  He died April a year ago.

• 14:46Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:47Shawn Ryan?

  So, yeah, so a year exact almost, wow. Well, thank you very much. I can't wait to speak about him in a little bit. But, um, nuclear war. So your new book is about a nuclear war scenario, and, you know, you talk to all these...

• 15:10Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you get access to people that nobody really gets access to. I've read that Leon Panetta. How are you getting access to former SecDef, former Director of CIA, and all the rest of his resume, which I'm not, I could go on here. But people don't get access to figures like that. How are you gaining access to former directors?

• 15:37Speaker 05

  What's the saying? The harder I work, the luckier I get. There's that part of it. This is not my first rodeo, so seven books. I do find that when I reach out to people to ask them if I can interview them and I, you know, say my creds, sometimes they say, oh, I'm familiar with your work. I've read, and they name a book.

• 16:03Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 16:03Speaker 05

  So that helps. But I think in principle, the greatest contribution that I can put on the table, and it's perhaps why some of these really, you know, significant people, and when I say that, like, they have a lot of information to share that is powerful and that the public benefits from knowing, like Panetta. It's that objectivity card that I have, which I believe is so important. I'm trained as an old-school journalist. You are here to report the news down the middle of the aisle. You should not have an opinion. Okay, when you write long-form books, maybe at the end,

• 16:46Speaker 05

  you kind of give your opinion a little bit, or you might suggest it so that there's something to think about for the reader. But for the most part, tell the, you know, relay the facts. I mean, the origins of journalism come from this idea that anyone, a high school student, should be able to understand what you're writing about. And I, that's how I write, you know? I write for the regular, old people. I know I'm read by the generals and admirals of the Pentagon, because they tell me so. But I just write for regular people.

• 17:18Shawn Ryan?

  Nice, nice. You had an interesting fact here.

• 17:24Shawn Ryan?

  I want to just kick it off with this. A full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and Russia will likely kill some 5 billion people. Can you?

• 17:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:36Shawn Ryan?

  How did you come up with 5 billion? And what does that scenario look like?

• 17:40Speaker 05

  And, and keep in mind, nuclear war scenario is a non-fiction book. It presents a hypothetical situation in the future that is based on fact. So the 5 billion figure, for example, is not my fact. That is a fact from Professor Brian Toon and a group of scientists that he led, reporting on this subject for decades in their newest paper for Nature magazine, Nature Food, actually, based on climate modeling systems of what would happen after nuclear winter. And so the book takes you from nuclear launch to nuclear winter.

• 18:20Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 18:20Speaker 05

  5 billion people are dead after nuclear winter. But a key haunting line that was said to me that really allowed me to see the book clearly, because when you're, you know, writing books as a process, you're reporting, you're interviewing people, you're figuring out how your chapters are going to lay out. When I did an interview with the former STRATCOM commander, General Keeler, and we were discussing what a nuclear exchange between Russia and America would look like, and he said to me, "The world could end in the next couple of hours."

• 18:57Shawn Ryan?

  What is STRATCOM?

• 18:58Speaker 05

  Okay. Great question. And how great that we don't need to know everything. That's how, right? Strategic command is the most important combatant command. You know combatant commands. There are what, 11 now, right?

• 19:15Speaker 05

  It's the most important combatant command that almost nobody has ever heard of outside of strategic command, outside of the military structure. It is the commander of strategic command is in charge of the nukes. He's in charge of them. He's the steward of them. There's a hundred and fifty thousand employees beneath him, in his chain of command. The president, when the president needs to launch nuclear weapons, he communicates with the STRATCOM commander. That's how important the STRATCOM commander is.

• 19:50Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. And you got access to him?

• 19:53Speaker 05

  I did.

• 19:53Shawn Ryan?

  And you guys had a discussion about this?

• 19:55Speaker 05

  We did.

• 19:56Shawn Ryan?

  How did that start?

• 20:00Speaker 05

  You know, Dear General Keeler.

• 20:03Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, the actual discussion?

• 20:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. Oh, the actual discussion with his

• 20:10Speaker 05

  origins, like very much, it's what I relate to about your podcast, like his origins, like, how did you wind up the commander of STRATCOM, right? And like, he wanted to be a musician. You know? So it's like, there's this idea that you wind up STRATCOM commander, and then you begin with people's origin stories and how, and how they are as a person. And, you know, I recall him telling me about how he was tending his garden before our interview. Now, this is not all in the book, because unlike a podcast, I interview people for a certain amount of time, and then I kind of condense down what

• 20:53Speaker 05

  is, I'm going to say about them, because I'm driving the narrative for the reader. But the discussions, I think, begin with human questions, and then you can get to

• 21:10Speaker 05

  what's important and what you're after. And, and, and also, like you, I'm, I'm very transparent about what I'm after, right? So I, I do not like the idea of gotcha journalism. I think it is incredibly unhelpful. I think it's at the verge of dangerous. Whenever I read a piece in the, in any of the legacy media that like, sort of, is a hit piece against someone, I cringe. I think of that person, you know, opening up themselves to a reporter, and then being, you know.

• 21:47Speaker 05

  Presented in a way that perhaps they certainly didn't intend.

• 21:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 21:52Speaker 05

  I think that is, I cringe, and I, and I actually feel for the journalist who's stuck doing that, you know, because I think that it just takes you down a, a real, a real path of mistrust and suspicion. Anyways, I'm digressing. I tell my sources right up front what I'm doing. I told every single one of them, I am writing this book called Nuclear War: A Scenario, you know, and I also asked them, is this fear mongering? Because that was the, the question in my own mind that led a lot of the reporting. Shaun, what happens in this book is like, everybody dies, and they die in the most horrific ways. I described to you in appalling detail what happens to humans, you know, in a nuclear flash. I wanted

• 22:36Speaker 05

  people to know how horrific this concept is, and I told my sources that. And they were forthcoming with me, which says so much about nuclear weapons.

• 22:48Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. What, how did, I mean, where did the interest in this come from? Are you worried about a nuclear war?

• 22:56Speaker 05

  I am now. Um, I mean, all of my books touch upon nuclear weapons because they all cover American history since World War II. And in every one of my books, so imagine a hundred plus sources for each book. How many of those people told me with deep pride, Annie, I did what I did to prevent nuclear World War III, right? So a lot of our really dark, dirty operat-, even the CIA's most dastardly, sort of dark-hearted operations,

• 23:41Speaker 05

  you could say, in the 50s and 60s, people I interviewed who worked on those. Or the very non-kinetic operations, like in Area 51, which deals with reconnaissance missions, you know, spying on the Soviet Union to try and find out what's really going on there instead of speculating. All of these people, a majority of them, said to me, I did what I did to prevent nuclear World War III. And so, in the previous administration, former President Trump with the rhetoric about, you know, fire and fury against the North Korean leader. I found that like shocking and rather un-presidential. Right? Because there had been a precedent not to threaten people with nuclear weapons. It's dangerous. It really is.

• 24:24Speaker 05

  That's not an opinion, that's a fact.

• 24:29Speaker 05

  I, like many people, began to wonder, what if deterrence fails? Deterrence, just another synonym for prevention. What if it fails? Because all of nuclear warfighting, deterrence is predicated on this psychological phenomenon. You who are so interested in the mind, right? It is a psychological phenomenon. Deterrence will hold. Deterrence will hold. Deterrence will hold. And then you have a quote from a deputy director at Stratcom saying, "If deterrence fails, it all unravels."

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, theHouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what...

• 25:57Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 26:08Speaker 05

  That unraveling is this book?

• 26:10Shawn Ryan?

  Well, it must be a very realistic scenario if you're speaking... How do I say this? To... You're speaking in Brussels and there happen to be members of the EU Parliament listening. So, let's go over the scenario. What do you think would trigger this?

• 26:31Speaker 05

  A nuclear war could be triggered by any nuclear launch at the United States. Period, right? So there are now nine nuclear armed nations. In my scenario, I chose a rogue launch from a ballistic missile, an intercontinental ballistic missile. Just like it sounds, it can travel from one continent to the other. That's an ICBM. In 30 minutes, launch to target. 30 minutes.

• 27:04Shawn Ryan?

  That's the farthest target.

• 27:06Speaker 05

  30 minutes. 33 minutes is actually from Pyongyang. 26 minutes and 40 seconds from Moscow to to the East Coast. This is specificity. It doesn't change. All the new weapon systems, that doesn't change. That is what it was when they were invented. This is just basic physics. It goes, you know, up and over the earth and down. Okay? And so then, once you know that, wait, that's all it takes? This is not a 9/11 scenario where, you know, someone whispers in the president's ears, "Sir, the planes have hit the buildings." It's not that. If you're me, reporting this, suddenly you learn that the United States has not only spent trillions of dollars

• 27:49Speaker 05

  creating this vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, but defense systems to, you know, to survey other nations. So we have a system of satellites in space, in Geosync, one tenth of the weight of the moon. A satellite the size of a school bus, parked over North Korea, watching, watching, watching, watching. So when launch happens, we see it in under one second. That's why my scenario goes by seconds and minutes. It's 72 minutes, this book.

• 28:26Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 28:27Speaker 05

  Three acts, 72 minutes. 24 minutes, 24 minutes, 24 minutes. Then you got the setup at the beginning and nuclear winter at the end.

• 28:36Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Real quick before, so here's what I'd like to do is dive into the scenario and then talk about some of the defenses that we have. Talk about what maybe you weren't, maybe your sources weren't able to tell you. You know, I'd like to go maybe a little more into the scenario. But real quick, who are the nine nations?

• 29:00Speaker 05

  US, Russia, China, UK, France, Pakistan, India, Israel, North Korea.

• 29:14Shawn Ryan?

  Iran's not on there yet.

• 29:16Speaker 05

  Iran is not on there yet.

• 29:17Shawn Ryan?

  Iran on. Good for us. But who would you, out of those nations, who would you be the most concerned about? Give me your top three.

• 29:26Speaker 05

  North Korea.

• 29:27Shawn Ryan?

  North Korea.

• 29:27Speaker 05

  North Korea. And that's how I begin this scenario. It's a launch from North Korea.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  One of the most interesting people I interviewed for this book, okay? This, on the cover here, is a thermonuclear bomb called Ivy Mike. This is the first thermonuclear bomb ever exploded in 1952 in the Marshall Islands. It was a test, okay? Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. This is 10.4 megatons.

• 30:00Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 30:01Speaker 05

  Okay? Think about that scale. This weapon takes a nuclear, an atomic bomb acts as its triggering mechanism inside the bomb.

• 30:11Speaker 05

  Okay? I interviewed the man who drew the plans for this bomb.

• 30:17Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 30:18Speaker 05

  Ninety-three now. Richard Garwin. Talk about classified. His information was so classified, it was all, no one knew he even drew the plans to the bomb. He was 24 years old when he drew them.

• 30:32Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious? Does he regret drawing them?

• 30:36Speaker 05

  I asked him that question. I said, "Do you wish that you hadn't drawn the plans for the thermonuclear bomb?" And he said to me, after a long pause, "I wish they couldn't have been drawn."

• 30:54Speaker 05

  Wow. I mean, we could do a whole podcast on what that might mean. Yeah. Right? Does it mean Russia would have drawn them anyways? Does it mean, right? But interviewing Garwin, who advised every president since then on nuclear weapons. You asked about why North Korea is like the most dangerous. Garwin, so sharp, you know, in his, we did all these Zooms during COVID. And he presented, when I asked him, what's the, what's the biggest threat? He said, a madman, sort of mad king logic is what he called it.

• 31:38Speaker 05

  A madman with a nuclear arsenal. And he said this French term, which is called, après moi, le déluge. After me, the flood. Okay? Right? Which is like, if you have a mad king leader, who doesn't care what happens, you know? Let it all flood. That's what Garwin told me he was most afraid of. And so that made me interpret that he was speaking about North Korea. Wow. Because North Korea does not play by the rules. I mean, it's very tricky. We could, you know, rules of nuclear warfare, rules of nuclear testing.

• 32:21Speaker 05

  We all armed, nuclear armed nations, inform their adversaries of their nuclear tests, like informally, formally, through, you know, different ways. But not North Korea. They, they just launch. And when you learn, what I have learned, and you can learn from me in this book, what happens inside nuclear command and control, inside those nuclear bunkers at the Pentagon, beneath Stratcom in Cheyenne Mountain, the first 150 seconds after a ballistic missile launches, when the satellite in space sees the launch, it sees the hot rocket exhaust from its incredible sensor,

• 33:04Speaker 05

  one tenth of the way to the moon, sees it. For the next 150 seconds, US Nuclear Command and Control, all those assigned to the job, are trying to figure out where that ballistic missile is going. It's like.

• 33:23Shawn Ryan?

  I'm glad you brought that up because that's what I was gonna ask. So the satellites advanced enough to pick up on the trajectory and where it's headed? And how fast?

• 33:33Speaker 05

  So in seconds, the data goes to the satellite. And then it's relayed to command centers in the United States. There's a facility called the Aerospace Data Facility in Colorado. That was only declassified, its existence was only declassified in 2008. Okay? And that facility, then, and others NSA, you know, there's numerous intelligence agencies, military intelligence agencies that are, then in processing that data, this is happening in seconds. And interpreting the trajectory of the missile launch.

• 34:13Speaker 05

  So I show a map in the book that Garwin, from the, and Professor Emeritus at MIT, Ted Postle drew. And then let me, you know, render and put in the book. That shows, so you can see a missile launching, it's a map. And then it shows the missile. And it shows their co-centric rings. It's like at 10 seconds, this is where it might be going. At 20, so Guam is in one direction. Moscow is in that direction. And then you realize if it's going in that direction, San Francisco, East Coast, Hawaii. Okay? So as the seconds tick away, the data is determining where that is headed.

• 34:53Shawn Ryan?

  So this is almost like a, it's like one of hurricanes inbound, except a lot faster. It narrows in, narrows in, narrows in, narrows in.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  And, and by 150 seconds, Stratcom, or, you know, the Peterson Air Force Base, the Space Force, the Aerospace Data Center, they know this ballistic missile is headed toward the United States. 150 seconds. Normally, what North Korea does is send the satellite, it's, they're sending it up to space to drop a satellite, so that's one different trajectory. Or they launch into the Sea of Japan.

• 35:34Speaker 05

  So within seconds, the facilities know it's going into the Sea of Japan. Everybody can relax now. But in my scenario, at 150 seconds, boom, oh my God, it's coming to the east coast of the United States. And that is when everything kicks off because the next step is to inform the president. Now, there must be a secondary confirmation of that nuclear missile on its way to the United States before the president launches a counterattack. That secondary confirmation takes eight and nine minutes. These are like nerd things that I figured out in the book and present them to you,

• 36:14Speaker 05

  hopefully, in this incredibly dramatic manner that you realize, oh, my God. Once a ballistic missile launch happens, nuclear war begins. Because a ballistic missile cannot be redirected or recalled.

• 36:31Shawn Ryan?

  None of them, not even our own.

• 36:34Speaker 05

  None, none. And once President Reagan, okay, I mean, the lack of information the president has about nuclear war is astonishing.

• 36:47Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 36:48Speaker 05

  President Ra-- and by the way, they have presidential sole authority. So only the president can launch nuclear war. Only the president. He doesn't ask permission of anyone, not his SecDef, not his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the Congress, certainly not the Congress. This is all happening in six minutes. President's in charge and presidents, most presidents, Leon Panetta confirmed this with me. He was the White House Chief of Staff under Clinton, right? And he said that many presidents just don't want to know. Because that, again, the paradox of nuclear war, deterrence will hold.

• 37:24Shawn Ryan?

  Don't want to know what?

• 37:26Speaker 05

  They don't want to know about nuclear war.

• 37:32Shawn Ryan?

  That's frightening.

• 37:34Speaker 05

  So Reagan mistakenly said during a press conference, and I think it was 1983, that our submarine-launched ballistic missiles can be recalled. They can't.

• 37:46Speaker 05

  He's the commander in chief.

• 37:47Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 37:48Speaker 05

  He didn't know.

• 37:50Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think it's possible that

• 37:54Shawn Ryan?

  technology, we have technology to recall them, but they're not declassifying it?

• 38:00Speaker 05

  It's impossible.

• 38:03Speaker 05

  But I love the astonishment with which people

• 38:09Speaker 05

  express themselves when they learn these details because it is astonishing. And I had that same experience, even knowing what I know. I know so many other things about nuclear weapons from different points of view, having written a number of books that deal with people who dealt with nuclear weapons. But I never knew the command and control, ticking clock scenario hypothetically in the future, until reporting this book. And I was shocked at everything I learned.

• 38:42Speaker 05

  Shocked at everything I learned. And it's such bait, from, wait a minute, they really can't be redirected or recalled? Nope.

• 38:50Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. I did not know that. I did not know that. So you're saying within six minutes of

• 39:00Shawn Ryan?

  something being launched towards us, we're going to

• 39:03Speaker 05

  We have, right.

• 39:04Shawn Ryan?

  We make a decision whether we're responding and sending one at them or not?

• 39:09Speaker 05

  Yes. So think about it this way. When the nuclear, if it just takes approximately 30 minutes, the concept that has been put into play over decades of strategy of how to fight a nuclear war is that

• 39:27Speaker 05

  the president must make a counterattack decision.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  Before those nukes land.

• 39:37Speaker 05

  So this is all gonna happen without the public ever having any idea.

• 39:39Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 39:40Speaker 05

  Okay. The reason is because no one ever thought of having a nuclear war where there's like one nuclear missile. The rogue launch off of Garwin's worry is how my scenario starts. And then you see all these things go wrong. The warfighting concepts of nuclear war were built with like Russia's gonna send a thousand missiles.

• 40:07Speaker 05

  The mother load, it's often called. And so a strategy kicks in called use them or lose them. Very simple to understand, right?

• 40:16Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 40:17Speaker 05

  If we don't use them, we're gonna lose them to the Russian incoming missiles. And so that's why the president is positioned to make a counter-strike within a window of time before the missiles hit.

• 40:39Shawn Ryan?

  So basically, so if they have six minutes, why is the number six minutes?

• 40:43Speaker 05

  So, okay, thirty minutes is the is the nuclear launch gets detected in, let's say, a hundred and fifty seconds.

• 40:52Shawn Ryan?

  So we got two and a half minutes gone all radically.

• 40:54Speaker 05

  Right, gone. Everybody's now getting ready to prepare the president. At the same time, the long-range ground radar systems that are gonna give that secondary confirmation, which exist in multiple places around the world, I write about them quickly in the book. In this scenario, if the missile's coming from North Korea, it's gonna be the ground station in Alaska. They have this massive radar of a picture of it in the book. It's like five stories tall. It's just sitting there waiting to see over the horizon. That will happen at eight or nine minutes. In the meantime, they have to get ready to brief the president. People I have interviewed had to brief the president when we had false alarms, okay? So it's like really this intense

• 41:36Speaker 05

  You know, suddenly, everything is moved. The decision tree unfolds in this radical way. And while the individual leaders, the STRATCOM commander, the SecDef, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are getting ready to brief the president, they're waiting on the secondary confirmation. But once the president is told, so there is a, it's called the red, the red clock is running. And that clock in the Strategic Command Headquarters has sick, you know, is ticking down until the missile's gonna strike. The, in this case, Washington DC. Now they have to get the blue clock running. The blue clock is the counterattack. Okay? So you send General Hiten, the former, another former STRATCOM commander,

• 42:19Speaker 05

  during the fire and fury rhetoric of Trump, did an interview with Barbara Starr from CNN. And she asked him directly about this. Like, what do we do if they launch at us? And Hiten said, "If they launch one missile, we launch one. If they launch two, we launch two." But if you dig a little bit deeper, as I did, and it's all sourced in the book. When you're reading, you, if you ever wonder, "How does, how does she know this?" You can go to the back and you can see the notes of the documents where it comes from. So the deep digger, the deeper digging revealed that if North Korea launches one missile at us, we're gonna launch 82 in response.

• 42:59Shawn Ryan?

  82?

• 42:59Speaker 05

  82.

• 43:00Shawn Ryan?

  I mean,

• 43:06Shawn Ryan?

  seems a little excessive, uh, you know.

• 43:10Speaker 05

  It's called escalate to de-escalate.

• 43:12Shawn Ryan?

  When you look at the size of Korea? But, um, I mean, would it take, how many, how many missiles would it take to just completely obliterate Korea?

• 43:22Speaker 05

  82.

• 43:23Shawn Ryan?

  It would take 80, it would actually take 82 missiles?

• 43:26Speaker 05

  No, no, you're absolutely right. But there is a sense of overkill, literally and figuratively. And you know this from your operating days, that like, you know, it's called, it's like, "Go big or go home." I mean, the idea, there's a concept with the president that was explained to me by one of President Obama's national security advisers named John Wolfsthal, who sat in the room with the president when this was being negotiated, okay? So there's a policy in the United States called "launch on warning", and this exists, okay? Which, this is the, this is the idea, this is the president has the authority that if the missiles are coming, he launches.

• 44:05Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 44:06Speaker 05

  We launch on warning, we do not wait until we are hit. And Wolfsthal explained to me that what that has to do with, is what's called a damage, damage limitation responsibility, okay? Everything has like a term that is difficult to come out of the mouth, that's why they have acronyms for them.

• 44:28Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 44:29Speaker 05

  But, this is pointing to your "why do we have to launch 82?" question. So, the president now has a responsibility to limit further damage. That's what his military is telling him. So, a strike with a one-megaton thermonuclear weapon against Washington DC that I described, it kills 2 million people, Sean.

• 44:51Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 44:53Speaker 05

  That, never mind that the things are about to really take off. It destroys the beating heart of American governance. That is like, the response is 82 nuclear weapons. The damage limitation responsibility. Because all the military stratcom is thinking at that point is, you're gonna let another nuke come in? And so the 82, we learn from those, the scientists and the analysts who have spent a lot of time looking at this, is how to limit the damage. 82 nuclear weapons could possibly take out, not just like turn the entire country

• 45:35Speaker 05

  into a furnace, but obliterate their nuclear command and control, their ability to launch more nuclear weapons, that's why that is set up that way.

• 45:44Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I would think 82 nuclear missiles would...

• 45:50Shawn Ryan?

  I would think the flash alone would be enough to wipe out the entire country.

• 45:55Speaker 05

  It would kill tens of millions of people, not a question. But that, and, and the book was read after it was written, before it went into production and publication, by many of my sources, and by people who actually were not my sources, but who ran these scenarios for NORAD. Generals, I'm talking about.

• 46:21Speaker 05

  People who were not in the book, so they didn't have a horse in the race, that they could say to me, "You're wrong about this, this is too..." And there were some tweaks that I did, but that was not one of them. No one said, "That's too many, we wouldn't do that."

• 46:37Shawn Ryan?

  How mu- how mu- do you have any idea how many nuclear weapons we have? How many?

• 46:43Speaker 05

  So, on ready-for-launch status, meaning they're forward-deployed, meaning they can be launched in seconds or minutes from the president's order. Seconds or minutes. We have 1,770. The numbers change a little bit every year. Russia has 1,674.

• 47:15Speaker 05

  That says nothing about the thousands more in storage that we have ready to, you know, that would, could be pulled out. So we have approximately 5,000 each. "Why do we need that many nuclear weapons?" You must be asking yourself.

• 47:29Shawn Ryan?

  We need that many because they have that many. And they need that many because we have that many.

• 47:35Speaker 05

  And guess how, guess how, guess what the number was at the all-time high? Which was in 1986.

• 47:45Shawn Ryan?

  Ten thousand.

• 47:46Speaker 05

  Seventy thousand.

• 47:47Shawn Ryan?

  Seventy thousand? Wow.

• 47:53Speaker 05

  And so, the setup of the book, it's like fifty pages or something, it's like how we got here. I explain how America sort of had this insane buildup of nuclear weapons during the 1950s. There was one point in 1957, this bomb went off in 1952, and the military industrial complex just went ba ba ba boom. All right? At one point, we were building, on average, five nuclear weapons a day. A day.

• 48:30Speaker 05

  And then you're building the weapon, that's just the bombs, the warheads. You're building weapon systems, because we have a triad. We don't just have the ICBMs in the silos in the ground. We have nuclear armed, nuclear powered submarines, outfitted with submarine-launched ballistic missiles. And then we also have the bombers, so we have a triad.

• 48:55Speaker 05

  But during the Cold War, we had, you know, we were shooting tactical nuclear weapons out of cannons. Billy Wall was halo jumping a hand-carried portable nuclear weapon out of an airplane in case we needed to use it on the battlefield.

• 49:12Shawn Ryan?

  How do you, I mean, I know you don't like to give your opinion, and if you don't want to, that's okay. How do you feel about having, one thou, what did you say, one thousand one hundred and six?

• 49:22Speaker 05

  Seven, one thousand seven hundred and seventy, us.

• 49:24Shawn Ryan?

  One thousand seven hundred and seventy. How do you, do you think we need that?

• 49:27Speaker 05

  I mean, that's an opinion, I think, that I own, which is absolutely not. I mean, look, my lane is, as an investigative journalist, relaying, you know, reporting the facts, doing the interviews and setting them down on the record. But of course, you get to have an opinion at some point.

• 49:46Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:47Speaker 05

  Certainly when ti, like, times have changed. We are, back in the original buildup, it was us and Russia, and then China in the early 60s. Now there are nine nuclear armed nations, many of which are in direct conflict with one another. All of the new technology, artificial intelligence, you know, this is crazy. It's like the United Nations Secretary General. Recently said, "We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon." Uh huh. And he said, "We must reverse course." And we must. So I was in Brussels, talking about my book, because people were interested in it. What I learned is because they said to me,

• 50:32Speaker 05

  "And these are disarmament groups." Right? That they, and they said to me, "Your book condenses, in a really dramatic, terrifying way, what we have been trying to convey to world leaders for decades. With a lot of information, you just, shh. And what we're trying to convey is, this is madness." So, the progress is that we've gone from 70,000 nuclear warheads, to there are a total of approximately 12,500 today, amongst the nuclear, nine nuclear armed nations. The disarmament people will tell you, "That's 12,500 too many." Uh huh. The United Nations recently created a treaty called, I'm gonna mess this up,

• 51:17Speaker 05

  the international, the I P T N W. The International Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. And their idea is that gradually, nations should begin to reduce their arsenals down to zero. Gradually. And so, the opinion I would have, which seems like a responsible journalist, that sounds like a really good idea. And the word gradual is important. Because, okay, so we've been talking about the horrors of nuclear war, but you can also talk to proponents of deterrence, as I do, who will tell you,

• 52:01Speaker 05

  "We must have a nuclear arsenal, because the bad guys do." Uh huh.

• 52:07Shawn Ryan?

  That's where I would fall.

• 52:10Speaker 05

  Right? And by the way, that's the easier...

• 52:15Speaker 05

  It really is the easier, quicker conclusion.

• 52:19Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I feel like... I... It would be great if there were no nuclear weapons. However, you know, we don't play nicely with one another, right? And so, I think the... I mean, how... I'm just gonna go off on a tangent here and say that the only way... Look, if I were president or

• 52:41Shawn Ryan?

  in charge of this country, the only way I would even consider eliminating our nuclear weapons is if we had a defense capability that was able to eliminate a nuclear... Any nuclear weapon on the way here.

• 52:54Speaker 05

  Well, yes, the idea is absolutely that the disarmament idea isn't, "Oh, we should give up all of our nuclear weapons and then just believe that North Korea and Russia and China and Iran..." Or, you know, Iran doesn't have the weapon yet. All of these other countries will just give up their capability. That would be madness. But the disarmament that... When we went from 70,000 down to 12,500, Russia reduced their arsenal, you know, alongside of us. So, reduction is possible.

• 53:24Shawn Ryan?

  Did we really reduce... Did we really reduce the arsenal, though? Or have we developed better... Maybe not... Maybe "better" is the wrong word. Have we developed more powerful and more devastating nuclear missiles? To where we don't need 70,000? Maybe... Maybe... I'm pulling numbers out of nowhere right now. But, just for example, maybe... Maybe one of today's nuclear warheads is equivalent to 100 back in 1950s.

• 54:00Speaker 05

  Except for that's not the way it is.

• 54:03Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 54:04Speaker 05

  Which is so interesting because you and I both know the weapon systems that are... You know, the kinetic weapon systems that are used by the military in ground wars or air wars have been advancing like nobody's business as technology has been advancing. The nuclear weapons are essentially the same. There not much has changed. We haven't built any new nuclear weapons since Clinton was president because he signed a treaty prohibiting that. And Russia complied. So allegedly, we do not build any new nuclear weapons. It would be a massive violation of a treaty.

• 54:47Speaker 05

  All of our nuclear weapons are decades old, which is a whole other debate because now the Defense Department has just asked for, I don't, I think it's $900 billion, to upgrade the arsenal. Because it is old. And the ICBMs are old. So this is a, it's like a, you're suddenly down the rabbit hole and going, wait a minute, how did I wind up here? But the number of nuclear warheads is simply the number of nuclear warheads. What's, what's, another grim consideration is that dismantling a nuclear warhead is also a dirty process.

• 55:30Speaker 05

  And there's a plant in Texas that does this, which itself is like a major target because it has all the dismantled plutonium and uranium cores.

• 55:43Speaker 05

  So the eyes can glaze over with like, isn't it just easier to have an arsenal of nuclear weapons that's on, that's the same size as ours? Which is why I point to the people like ICANN, like the Arms Control Association, who actively work on these disarmament issues with the United Nations. And the point of a book like mine is to make it digestible for the average person to understand that like, this many nuclear weapons is madness. An accident or a miscalculation could lead to a nuclear war. And it's only going to end one way. Almost no one disagrees with that.

• 56:27Speaker 05

  Once nuclear war starts, it ends in Armageddon. And I, the scenario takes you through what happens and then the mistakes that happen because of technology holes.

• 56:41Shawn Ryan?

  What has been upgraded? It must be the transportation of the warhead. That has to have been upgraded by this point.

• 56:47Speaker 05

  No.

• 56:48Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 56:49Speaker 05

  I mean, a ballistic missile is... Okay, so here's how a ballistic missile works. Ready? Because this helped me to understand it. Shall I give you the like 30-second version?

• 56:56Shawn Ryan?

  Please, let's do it.

• 56:57Speaker 05

  Okay. So it happens in... You can just imagine it going from like there, over to that continent, to that continent. And there's a little diagram in the book. By the way, the way I know this is because the first director of DARPA... Are you familiar with DARPA?

• 57:16Shawn Ryan?

  I am.

• 57:17Speaker 05

  Okay. DARPA is created in 1957-58.

• 57:20Shawn Ryan?

  I can't remember what it stands for, but basically DARPA is our advanced weapons.

• 57:25Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 57:26Shawn Ryan?

  It's our advanced technology weapons, correct?

• 57:27Speaker 05

  Defense, Advanced Research Projects.

• 57:31Shawn Ryan?

  There we go.

• 57:32Speaker 05

  Agency. Another mouthful, DARPA. Okay? It began in 1957 after the Russians launched Sputnik. We got caught by scientific military surprise. That was like a bad thing. Herb York becomes its first science director. And he wanted to know... Because the reason Sputnik was... The reason Sputnik was so threatening. It was a satellite, the Russian satellite, the first one orbiting Earth. The reason it was threatening was because it takes a rocket to get a satellite into space. And if you can put a rocket... If you can put a satellite in space, pretty soon you can put a nuclear warhead on that rocket and hit the United States. That was 1957. That's where everything changed.

• 58:16Speaker 05

  And so Herb York wanted to know in seconds and minutes how long it took for that ICBM to get to the United States. So he hired this really... The smartest guys in the room, the Jason scientists, about which there are extraordinary many conspiracy theories.

• 58:35Speaker 05

  I interviewed a number of them, including its founder, for the DARPA book. So York, and I learned this because I went and looked in the archives at a library in San Diego. Because I couldn't get the Defense Department to tell me the answer. Go to York's papers where a lot of, you know, if you go to the scientists' papers, you find a lot of secrets. And sure enough, there's this, you know, process, York asking the Jason scientists. There's all these incredibly cool documents about it. Figure out, tell me how many seconds and minutes it takes. Because you forget that people don't know until they know. You know, you can be the smartest guy in the room and you don't know how a ballistic missile works until someone tells you.

• 59:19Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 59:20Speaker 05

  Okay, so they tell York, here's how it works. Three phases, boost phase, the rocket ignites, you can imagine that. Fire, missile goes up, five minutes. Five minutes of fire, launching the missile. That's when the satellite can see it, the satellite sees the fire. Okay? Then it burns out. Then it has a 20-minute mid-course phase where it's just moving with the rotation of the Earth. 500 miles above the Earth. And then it has 100 seconds of terminal phase. A good term for it.

• 1:00:03Speaker 05

  Terminal phase is the last 100 seconds. The warhead, which has been traveling because everything else burns away. The nuclear warhead, or plural warheads, because there might be multiple of them, is now going to re-enter the atmosphere in 100 seconds and detonate on target. That's it. That's it, it's so simple. And once you understand that, certainly for me as a reporter, then you can kind of understand, oh, that's how an ICBM works. So there's no upgrading to do.

• 1:00:35Speaker 05

  Right, you can maybe make the rocket motor more powerful. But.

• 1:00:41Shawn Ryan?

  That's, I guess that's kind of what I'm getting at. I mean, we just, I can't remember who developed it, but we just saw the new, maybe it was in, within the past year, the hypersonic missile. Who, do you remember who?

• 1:00:54Speaker 05

  It's probably Lockheed's Falcon program.

• 1:00:56Shawn Ryan?

  I thought it was.

• 1:00:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I thought it was another country, but that's kind of what I was, what I was leaning towards is, you know, maybe a little more stealthy, faster, less than 30 minutes. I don't know. This isn't, you know.

• 1:01:10Speaker 05

  I mean, but again, that, my job as a reporter is exactly, is exactly to take those questions, demystify them, right? And definitely not take the approach of like, you know, you don't know, which so many, so much of society kind of, I think, functions that way and prohibits people from asking really basic questions.

• 1:01:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 05

  There's no such thing as a dumb question.

• 1:01:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Speaker 05

  Okay, because then, once you know it, you know it. But, but like hypersonic, people talk about hyper, we have hypersonics. Well, a hypersonic goes approximately Mach 5, okay? Ballistic missiles go Mach 20.

• 1:01:50Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:50Speaker 05

  Okay, so the ballistic missile is such a, it's just like ending, it's such a doomsday machine. You can have hypersonics, this is, you know, this is like warfare that is non-nuclear. Nuclear war is in a case by itself, which is why we're at this incredibly threatening moment right now, because nuclear war is coming out of the, or nuclear weapons, the use of nuclear weapons is coming out of the mouth of world leaders.

• 1:02:24Speaker 05

  And the nuclear war used to be the red line in the sand.

• 1:02:29Speaker 05

  And yes, if someone decides to marry a nuclear warhead onto a hypersonic missile, you know, a hypersonic missile will take an hour where an ICBM will take 30 minutes. But it's mixing, as soon as you're talking about tactical nuclear weapons, it's just the worst possible scenario. Because I know, I can tell you from looking at one of the only declassified nuclear war games called Proud Prophet, and I write about it in the book, and I show you what a declassified paper looks like. No matter, that war game showed us, two weeks in 1983, ordered by President Reagan,

• 1:03:13Speaker 05

  it showed us that no matter how nuclear war begins, it ends in nuclear Armageddon. Everybody in nuclear command and control knows that. Everyone knows that there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war.

• 1:03:35Shawn Ryan?

  That's terrifying.

• 1:03:38Speaker 05

  It can sometimes feel like TMI, right? That it's almost easier to just not know. And also, like a lot of the warfighting concepts you have on these walls, right? Which involve humans are so much easier in a way to think about, to talk about, to discuss, to wonder about. Nuclear weapons are so abstract. There's no battle for Chicago, battle for New York. It's just, it's just literally push-button warfare.

• 1:04:14Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:04:16Speaker 05

  Why do we, why do, why is that okay?

• 1:04:21Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I don't think it's a...

• 1:04:25Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think it's okay. I think, I personally feel like it's a necessity that we have to have it because our adversaries have it. Unless we have some type of defense system that can disarm, destroy whatever nuclear warhead is headed our way before it reaches destination. Do we have that capability?

• 1:04:50Speaker 05

  So now it gets really depressing when I tell you about the interceptor missile capability. Because you will hear people say, "Oh, we have like a iron dome." You know, we both read the news and we saw what happened when Iran lobbed missiles, including ballistic missiles, at Israel. And they were intercepted, right? Those are short-range and medium-range missiles.

• 1:05:19Speaker 05

  Totally different story than trying to shoot down a long-range ballistic missile, also called a strategic missile. That, what I told you about, that 30-minute arc. 500 miles up in space. You're trying to shoot that down. That's where interceptor phase happens.

• 1:05:37Shawn Ryan?

  Don't we have some sort of space weapon that could initiate that instead of shooting up at it?

• 1:05:45Speaker 05

  We do not. We have 44 land-based interceptor missiles. Forty-four. People have asked me, like, "Maybe we have a secret arsenal." We do not.

• 1:05:58Shawn Ryan?

  Well, how can you be so sure?

• 1:06:04Speaker 05

  You know, maybe Secretary Panetta is lying to me.

• 1:06:06Shawn Ryan?

  He, hey.

• 1:06:08Speaker 05

  I don't think so. We have, I mean, we have 44 interceptor missiles. Russia has 1,670.

• 1:06:16Shawn Ryan?

  That's why I'm saying it doesn't even make sense. It doesn't even make sense why we would only have 44 when the adversaries' arsenals are so much bigger than 44.

• 1:06:27Speaker 05

  Well, it might have to do with this, okay? When you can look at the numbers and the cost of the program which I tell you about, the interceptor missiles. Now, the success rate on those interceptor missiles, of which we have 44, is between 40 and 55%.

• 1:06:45Speaker 05

  The success rate. And right now, that program is on strategic pause, which is a euphemism for, "Oh shit."

• 1:06:53Shawn Ryan?

  So we could take 22?

• 1:06:55Speaker 05

  If, because inside the warhead-

• 1:06:56Shawn Ryan?

  Best-case scenario.

• 1:06:57Speaker 05

  Best-case scenario. Inside the warhead is almost certainly decoys that are meant to confuse... So here's how the interceptor system works. It's basically a mini-version of that giant rocket that is the ICBM. And inside of its nose cone, it has the aptly-named exo-atmospheric kill vehicle. That's what it's called. It's a 140-pound... It's not a warhead, because it doesn't have any explosives in it. It's just an object. A 140-pound object. That is going... So the interceptor missile fires up. It's communicating with its ground... with its sensor systems that's guiding it.

• 1:07:42Speaker 05

  And it's going to now try and hit the missile, the warhead, moving through mid-course phase at 14,000 miles an hour, 500 miles up in space. It's gonna try to hit it. That... The exo-atmospheric kill vehicle is going at 20,000 miles an hour. The Missile Defense Agency spokesperson says, "Yes, it's like hitting a bullet with a bullet."

• 1:08:14Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Damn near impossible. And there's no spatial technology. Wow.

• 1:08:25Speaker 05

  It's illegal to put nuclear weapons in space, as per the treaties. As it should be. And I'm not... There's one spoiler alert I'm not gonna give away, but in the third act of the book, North Korea unleashes a nuclear warhead it has flying in space, already in space, disguised as a satellite. A technology that is actually capable and that North Korea has expressed intention of having. Whether it really has it, we don't know. And that...

• 1:09:04Speaker 05

  unleashes a new kind of mayhem. I'm gonna make you read the book to learn it out. But just when you thought it was bad, it gets really bad. So you definitely don't want nuclear weapons in space.

• 1:09:14Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. I didn't necessarily mean nuclear weapons. I meant something to disable a nuclear weapon that is in mid-flight in space, like maybe a laser, some sort of, some sort of new technology that we don't know yet. But in this, you know, back to the, you had mentioned a war game. I think that the Reagan administration had put together. So just for the, I want to dive into that. And so just for the audience, a war game is basically a made up scenario, but a realistic scenario that they put. And it kind of shows the probability of what the outcome would look like. And so they do this with all kinds, a lot of countries do this.

• 1:09:56Shawn Ryan?

  And, and this is, we do this with a multitude of scenarios, cyber attacks, nuclear warfare, and I mean, regular, regular warfare. So what did the, what did the Reagan administration uncover with that war game?

• 1:10:10Speaker 05

  The Proud Prophet.

• 1:10:13Speaker 05

  So also, they do hundreds of these a year. Like if you read Stratcom, you know, discussions with Congress, as I do, you can interpret how many of these nuclear war game, how many of these war games are going on?

• 1:10:29Speaker 05

  Nuclear war games, because Stratcom wouldn't be doing other operations. So there's, there's, they're happening all the time and they, and they're incredibly classified, meaning we just, they don't get declassified. But this one Proud Prophet 83 war game got declassified, nuclear war game got declassified. And I show you in the book, it's literally all blacked out. It's redacted. You've seen documents like that. It's just all black. There's maybe like one word, you know, aftermath or, you know, buildup, right? Everything else. And so you might say, well, what's the point of releasing this? How can we get any information? It's all redacted.

• 1:11:10Speaker 05

  We get the information from a civilian scientist, professor, who was on that war game named Paul Bracken. He's a professor at Yale now.

• 1:11:20Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:22Speaker 05

  And once it was declassified like 10 years ago, it allowed Bracken to speak about it generally. Before that, he couldn't say anything. You know about, you know, your, the classification requirements. But then suddenly, because it was declassified, he could speak about it in a general manner. And he wrote in his own book, what I just conveyed to you, that no matter how nuclear war... So there was a two-week-long program, the SecDAF, like the highest-ranking people in military nuclear command and control, got together and gamed out these different scenarios, according to Professor Bracken. They, you know, NATO was involved, NATO wasn't involved.

• 1:12:05Speaker 05

  Tactical weapons are involved, tactical weapons not. China gets involved. And what Bracken said was, no matter how nuclear war begins, it only ends in nuclear Armageddon. And his exact words was that everyone left the war game very depressed. And so I think I pull the veil back on some of this that... And it's almost like a little bit of our experience communicate. The nuclear war conundrum is so complex and tightly wound. It was, it began with the generals and the admirals of the Pentagon in the 1950s,

• 1:12:48Speaker 05

  working from an idea that nuclear war could be fought and won, which itself is insane. The original nuclear war plan against the Soviet Union that I write about in the book was going to kill 600 million people.

• 1:13:04Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:13:05Speaker 05

  600 million people. How can you have a plan like that and not call it mass extermination? That's how it began. That was a long time ago. The Soviets were the big bad threat. No one's doubting that. It's different, it's a different world that we live in now. Why do we have... Why have we not acknowledged that what began as madness...

• 1:13:35Speaker 05

  Will likely end in madness unless all of these issues are addressed.

• 1:13:45Shawn Ryan?

  Money.

• 1:13:47Speaker 05

  You mean, there's more money to build more weapons?

• 1:13:52Shawn Ryan?

  I think we're I think we're at a new crossroads.

• 1:14:00Shawn Ryan?

  That's completely different, but maybe has some similarities with AI.

• 1:14:03Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:14:04Shawn Ryan?

  Do you?

• 1:14:06Speaker 05

  Keep going. I'm interested what you have to say.

• 1:14:08Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, there's a lot of fear of what AI could develop into and basically, you know, gets to the point where it makes humanity completely irrelevant. And so

• 1:14:20Shawn Ryan?

  it's, it's, it's, it's a dangerous game we're playing. I don't think anybody really knows the extent of what we might experience if this keeps, keeps on, you know, with the brain chips, with it, with everything. And so it's another, it's

• 1:14:37Shawn Ryan?

  once it's out of the bag, it's not going back in. And I feel like that's where we're at with AI is where we were with nuclear war.

• 1:14:45Speaker 05

  It's the Pandora's box idea.

• 1:14:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:14:48Speaker 05

  Which kind of begs the question, okay, so how about doing something about it? And I know we all have busy lives and that is part of the, you know, no one can stop what they're doing and suddenly become an expert on existential threats per se. So we talk about it and we, you know, pontificate what can be done. But we should remember that there are powers that be that are paid to deal with these issues in our own government. And also the days are over where you could just trust

• 1:15:28Speaker 05

  the government.

• 1:15:30Speaker 05

  To be doing the, how do I say that?

• 1:15:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I know where you're going. We should be able to trust the government to have our, to be doing things in our best interest.

• 1:15:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, right, like if you watch the propaganda films of the 50s having to do with nuclear war, right? I mean, and you see like a housewife with a tiny waist and, you know, curlers maybe even making pancakes and then like a siren goes off and then Jimmy, come quick. And they, they duck and cover and that's going to protect you against a nuclear bomb. And everybody went, okay. I mean, those days are over, but then you kind of, I think the point you're raising is what kind of like version of that are we dealing with today?

• 1:16:21Shawn Ryan?

  I, I think it's AI. I mean, it's happening right now, you know? Xi Jinping in China says the first, the first country that masters AI will achieve global domination. And so now you have, now you have all these people over here that are worried about, I mean, I'm conflicted. What do you do? China's not going to stop.

• 1:16:46Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:16:47Shawn Ryan?

  They're not going to stop. And so if we stop, then we put ourselves at a disadvantage. But if none of us stop, we put the entire human species at a, at a, at the risk of becoming irrelevant, you know? And, and does that make sense?

• 1:17:06Speaker 05

  Of course it makes sense and it's absolutely on point. And, you know, you can also throw into that mix biology because, okay, so here's how I would tie that together, right? Because you have biological warfare threats that become more threatening, more existentially threatening with the introduction of AI. I believe perhaps more so than with the nuclear weapons, right? One of the areas, I'm going to try to hold this thought together, but it, it ties. So you might say, you might say nuclear weapons could, you know, AI could get hold of nuclear

• 1:17:50Speaker 05

  weapons. Well, maybe, and this is where I'm either.

• 1:17:56Speaker 05

  Informed or inaccurate, I don't know, okay?

• 1:18:02Speaker 05

  What I do know is that, from interviewing people in Cyber Command, is that our nuclear weapons are surprisingly analog, meaning they are not digital. Okay, so for example, I learned in reporting the book that our sub-launched ballistic missiles guide to the targets by star sighting, Sean. A little panel opens,

• 1:18:29Speaker 05

  and they use the stars to guide to the target. There are other systems in place, and this stuff is very classified. But what is leading is like this ancient technology that like our hunter-gatherer ancestors used, okay?

• 1:18:44Speaker 05

  So, nuclear weapons, because they happened before the advent of the digital age, there has been a concerted effort to make sure they remain analog so that they can't be hacked.

• 1:18:58Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:18:58Speaker 05

  Okay? And these are assurances that I have gotten from Cyber Command. You're just taking somebody at their word at that point because the documentation is not declassified.

• 1:19:10Speaker 05

  So, hold that thought. Then you have this idea that biological weapons used to exist. We used to have, we had a program about biological weapons. I wrote about it. We hired the Nazi scientists. They built up our biological warfare program. And we used to have an arsenal. And then Nixon made them illegal. So, all of the biological weapons were destroyed. We found out Russia was cheating and they'd, I mean, rat hole upon rat hole.

• 1:19:45Speaker 05

  So, biological weapons are no more, which exist, sort of that's the reason that nuclear disarmament people say we don't need a nuclear arsenal to keep us safe because we were able to say, "We don't need biological weapons to keep us safe." Biological weapons have become taboo. We need, so the disarmament people will say nuclear weapons should be taboo. Now you take AI, okay? What you're saying, which is really significant to think about is how does AI fit into the mix? If there is indeed a giant gap on purpose between AI being able to access nuclear weapons because it has grown up with that,

• 1:20:30Speaker 05

  that is one lane of security, shall we say. But with the biological issues, that is far more dangerous to my eye because they didn't grow up together. And AI has the capacity to make biological weapons and chemical weapons on paper. Does that make sense? Because a lot of AI is pulling from information in the public domain. And so far, no student in a basement that we know of has made a nuclear weapon. Think about that.

• 1:21:15Speaker 05

  It remains this jealously guarded recipe. Pakistan got the bomb because they stole the info. Most people get the bomb because they steal it. But biology, we have biological, synthetic biological situations being made by, you know, students in high school because of AI. Because what you can program AI, make me a chemical weapon. That, to me, is a majorly existential threat. But again, we don't have the language yet, just as layman or with a little bit of knowledge,

• 1:21:59Speaker 05

  to understand what AI is really capable of. And so you're bringing up the question, should we trust the same people that said like, duck and cover and you'll be safe? That's what you're saying. And that's a very important question.

• 1:22:13Shawn Ryan?

  I would say probably not. We should probably not trust them. I mean, I don't, you know, I don't know. Once again, this is like the disarming of the nukes. I mean, what do we, what do we do? We can, do we, I mean, what is your opinion? What do we do?

• 1:22:30Speaker 05

  About the nukes or about AI?

• 1:22:31Shawn Ryan?

  With AI.

• 1:22:34Speaker 05

  I mean, I always start by looking at the opinions of people I respect.

• 1:22:43Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:44Speaker 05

  And then I start to kind of

• 1:22:48Speaker 05

  gather more information, like, why did they wind up with their opinion? And so one person that comes to mind when I was stuck, when I was looking at early AI, because a lot of the early AI comes from DARPA. And they have, DARPA has always had this idea. So also, I think it's important to make a distinction, at least to my eye, between,

• 1:23:15Speaker 05

  or I do when I think about it, AI, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

• 1:23:21Speaker 05

  If your, machine learning is making computers a lot smarter. Artificial intelligence is actually trying to figure out how to make a machine think. For that, I visited, I went to Los Alamos when I was reporting the Pentagon's brain, and visited a DARPA scientist who had a grant to try and create, you know, a brain, in essence. And he was using the computer that used to have all the nuclear codes on it. It was really interesting. But he explained to me, his name was Dr. Carrot, Garrett Kenyon. And he gave me this analogy where he said, we're so far out from brain, from computers being able to think. And I said, try and just give me an average Jane or Joe way to understand this.

• 1:24:03Speaker 05

  And he said, okay, think about the facial recognition software on your iPhone. Right? Very basic thing, you and I, that is machine learning.

• 1:24:16Speaker 05

  So he said, have your iPhone look at you. And then try to have it look at you further away. And with a baseball cap or sunglasses. Right, so you're kind of making it harder for the machine to know it's you. Now, this interview we did, by the way, was like eight years ago. And things have changed a lot in a frightening manner. Then he said to me. The iPhone could definitely not recognize me across a football field. Walking with a baseball cap on. He said, my daughter, on the other hand, who was, I think, something like eight years old at the time. He said, my daughter knows who I am.

• 1:25:00Speaker 05

  Across a football field, walking with a baseball cap.

• 1:25:03Shawn Ryan?

  Good point.

• 1:25:04Speaker 05

  And begins running toward me. That is human intelligence.

• 1:25:12Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, do you think, I think, I think we've. I mean, look, now China supposedly has camera systems. I don't know what you'd call them. I guess they wouldn't be facial recognition. They would just be.

• 1:25:28Speaker 05

  They are facial recognition, yes.

• 1:25:29Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I guess what I'm saying is it can pick up how you walk.

• 1:25:33Speaker 05

  Gate recognition.

• 1:25:34Shawn Ryan?

  And so people are putting rocks in their shoes so that they walk different.

• 1:25:41Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:25:41Shawn Ryan?

  Did you know?

• 1:25:42Speaker 05

  I did not know the, the, the way to spoof that.

• 1:25:46Shawn Ryan?

  They're putting rocks in their shoes so that they walk different. So that the, the, the technology doesn't pick up how they actually walk.

• 1:25:54Speaker 05

  Yep. And they can now have systems that can read your heartbeat.

• 1:26:02Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:26:04Speaker 05

  So this gets into tricky. My opinion on this, or rather, my lots of facts, you know, opinion. Gets into a tricky area here because I speak often about the military industrial complex. Not in, and I want to preface this, what I'm about to say about China and all that, right? Which is not in a, what might be called a conspiratorial way, per se. Like the military industrial complex. Literally as a fact based military industrial complex.

• 1:26:39Speaker 05

  And it is real. And it is also provides a lot of jobs for a lot of people. I often think about this. So the military industrial complex as a term comes from Eisenhower's farewell speech. Okay. And that's very well known. But less known is what Eisenhower said as a follow up to that in that same speech, which is interestingly something I tell my sources as a principal I work from. Would they let me interview them? And most of them say yes on that, on those grounds, which is this, that the way in which

• 1:27:19Speaker 05

  America can function as a sort of peaceful nation and a democratic nation and a nation that is strong, that has a strong defense is through an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, which is exactly what we've been talking about this whole time, which is in a way the question for the original listener asked, right? So what Eisenhower was saying to us is be alert and be knowledgeable. And so I think it's always good to temper that. Like if you say, I'm being alert and I'm being knowledgeable in sort of like a nerdy way, then you can, I can differentiate my, like my pontificating about what does that

• 1:28:04Speaker 05

  mean? And I can see my sort of more paranoid brain thinking thing. And it just is, it balances things out. But on the concept of the military industrial complex, specifically in China surveillance, I want to say this, which is that one way of looking at that, which I would look at, because I've done quite a bit of reporting on it, is that it's that problem of the chicken or egg scenario, that when the United States creates a radical new technology that it's using for its own defense, China follows suit, Russia follows suits. And nowhere is that more specific and more obvious, if you really think about it, than

• 1:28:46Speaker 05

  what the United States did during the war on terror, what the government did during the war on terror. And that is create these biometric surveillance systems, which you know to go after bad guys. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, fingerprint technology. Find the bomber, not the bomb. A great idea. If you're just gonna take out, if you're gonna go after the bomb, you're just gonna be, think about, that's what your teams were doing. But as soon as you can go after the bomber, you're cutting off the head of the snake. But the biometric surveillance system got out of control before you knew it, perhaps because of the military industrial complex.

• 1:29:29Speaker 05

  The Pentagon had decided, well, let's just get biometrics on everybody. So it went from, do you know about this? A little bit? It went, I'll keep it short, because it can be like too much of a rabbit hole. But it went from finding the fingerprints on the bomber to let's get fingerprints on every single person in Iraq. Eighty-five percent of the population was the goal. And then they did that in Afghanistan. These are facts. This is like David Petraeus fact, okay? And so, the idea was we're gonna have this colossal database of everybody, which used to be considered an FBI criminal concept. We're just gonna have this on everybody, and then that way, we're gonna know if you're a bad guy or a good guy. And it got totally out of control, and it happened too fast.

• 1:30:13Speaker 05

  And there was so much money being made, that it just became a deluge of systems. And China copied that. China did not have that system of systems until we introduced it to them. And because China is great at stealing our intellectual property, that is precisely what happened. And then China, because it's a communist country, and it does not have any of the same rules to abide by, just went berserk with it and said, we're gonna now do, they have a system called physicals for all. Physicals for all, what a great euphemism. What it means is we're gonna get your DNA. And that's what they are in the process of doing.

• 1:30:54Speaker 05

  Having DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, gate monitor of everybody. So it's becoming a massive police state, if it wasn't already. It is now, it's a technology-based police state. But remember, my point in that would be, the Defense Department set that up, you could say, to happen.

• 1:31:23Speaker 05

  Or is that military industrial complex?

• 1:31:27Shawn Ryan?

  It's a good point I've not thought of.

• 1:31:30Shawn Ryan?

  It's a great point.

• 1:31:33Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think?

• 1:31:35Speaker 05

  I think it's the Eisenhower quote, like, an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, right? And also a little bit if you pick your battles. Because you can become subsumed with, "This is just a horrible..." You know, you could really...

• 1:31:53Speaker 05

  And you want to enjoy your life and be a good parent and write your books or do your podcasts. So... And then I look to history to say, "Okay, oh, that's right, this has always been going on."

• 1:32:06Speaker 05

  I do believe money... Money needs to be spent to keep the economy going. But there could be a restructuring of the military industrial complex.

• 1:32:19Speaker 05

  In a manner that suits the livelihood and the future.

• 1:32:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I agree with you on that. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, I'd like to see what it looks like here in the US if we do endure a nuclear attack.

• 1:32:43Speaker 05

  Mmm.

• 1:32:45Speaker 05

  It's not pretty.

• 1:32:49Speaker 00

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• 1:33:18Speaker 01

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• 1:33:39Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

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  I'm not the first then.

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• 1:33:54Speaker 00

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• 1:34:28Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Annie, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to dive into what it would look like if we do get hit. I just, I just looked back at my notes, though, and I just want to cover one more thing. Back to the, back to the six minutes for the president to make a decision.

• 1:34:47Shawn Ryan?

  Don't you, have you talked? How do I put this? I would think that a lot of these decisions have already been predetermined. If there's only nine nations, us included, so eight other ones, and then I can't remember how many are our allies. I know Russia, China, Korea. Is there another one that's?

• 1:35:08Speaker 05

  Pakistan.

• 1:35:09Shawn Ryan?

  Pakistan.

• 1:35:09Speaker 05

  Questionable, yeah.

• 1:35:10Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Definitely questionable, but, um, but, uh...

• 1:35:14Speaker 05

  You who've been there, right?

• 1:35:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So...

• 1:35:19Shawn Ryan?

  So I would think we would definitely have a lot of predetermined decisions made if one of those four countries launched towards us. So, so the reason I'm bringing this up is for the audience more to, to, at least I, I would think that there would be contingency plan after contingency plan after contingency plan, um, what were to happen if one of those countries launched a nuclear weapon towards us. And so that, I, I think it's important to know that the president isn't just making a, going through a, a raw decision process from... From beginning to end in six minutes on what he's gonna do.

• 1:36:04Shawn Ryan?

  Would you agree with that?

• 1:36:05Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Okay, great. So, let's talk about the football.

• 1:36:08Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:36:09Speaker 05

  Because there is not time. You're absolutely right, for the SecDef to say, "Okay, sir, we think there's no time for that." You're talking about a six-minute window. I mean, that's like making a pot of coffee. Okay? That is a tiny amount of time. And so, the football, do you know what the football is?

• 1:36:29Shawn Ryan?

  I do.

• 1:36:30Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:36:30Shawn Ryan?

  Do you want to describe it?

• 1:36:31Speaker 05

  The football is the emergen-- also known as the emergency satchel. It's this leather bag that is always with the president. Any photograph you look at the president, if you can see around him, you will see the mil-aid, the military aide, who is the person assigned to carry the football. 24/7, 365 with the president. It is always with the president. Lou Merleady, the former director of the Secret Service, told me a great story about the football when I said, "Is it really always with the president?" He said, "It is always with the president." He was, before he was Director of Secret Service, he was the head of President Clinton's detail.

• 1:37:11Speaker 05

  And he told me about going to Syria with Clinton to see President Assad, the current president's father. And that they got into the elevator and, you know, one of Assad's guys was like, "No." Like about the mil-aid. And Lou said it was like a standoff. There was no way they were gonna let the president ride in the elevator without the football. That's how significant it is. It is with him all the time. Inside the football are two key items. One is an ability for the president's identity to be confirmed with and by those in the nuclear bunker beneath the Pentagon,

• 1:37:56Speaker 05

  which is called the National Military Command Center. So, the president has like a card, a laminated card inside his wallet, known as the biscuit. It has information on it, which matches up to the information in the football that is literally a call and response. It is a verbal call and response. This is not digital. This is not biometric. It's old school. And the other important item in the football is the black book.

• 1:38:28Speaker 05

  That's not its official name, but that's what it's called. And the classified historian at Los Alamos told me that the reason it's called The Black Book is because it involves so much depth. The Black Book is another jealously guarded secret. What is in The Black Book? Almost no one that has seen the contents of it has spoken of it. Once, a mil aid referred to the content in an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, described the contents of The Black Book. And he described it like a Denny's menu, which gets us to how does the president choose his targets?

• 1:39:12Speaker 05

  So the countries that are perceived as enemies, nuclear armed enemies, who might launch at us, are broken down into this Denny's menu type document with options for the president to choose from in that six minute window, really fast.

• 1:39:34Speaker 05

  I interviewed for the book one person who has actually seen the contents of The Black Book. His name is Ted Postle, and he's the one with Richard Garwin, who drew the map for me about the launch of the missile. And Postle, in the 80s, was the chief advisor to the Navy about nuclear missiles. That was his job in the 80s. And so he worked on some of the statistics, the information about potential targets. But what he told me was this very frightening story about The Black Book, which gets to your question about the president making a decision.

• 1:40:16Speaker 05

  He said, "They would work on all these different scenarios. Kind of, let's consider the 82 missile scenario we're talking about. Why you would get to that, how you would get to that, how you would determine where the CIA thinks North Korea's nuclear command and control centers may be." Operative word thinks, we have no real intelligence on them.

• 1:40:39Speaker 05

  And then Postle told me, and of course, North Korea wasn't involved in the eighties because they didn't have nuclear weapons yet. But Postle told me that he had another experience, which was another day he was at the Pentagon, and he became privy to the Black Book, kind of like by accident. It was out. And he looked at it. And what freaked him out, his words, was that he said the difference between what they had been working on with these very precise calculations about why different targets should be chosen and what resulted were almost not recognizable. And he couldn't-

• 1:41:22Shawn Ryan?

  Can you say that again? I'm sorry.

• 1:41:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. Okay, so like they nerded out, like you can imagine guys with pencils and rulers and going, what are the targets in said enemy nation? What are the, where are their nuclear command and control facilities that we would want to take out in a nuclear strike? That's what the, you know, their big industries, that, their bunkers, their version of the Stratcom bunker, their version of the Pentagon. They had, they kind of nerd out around all the details to get down, pare down what the targets are and how many bombs you're going to put on a target because you never put just one. You know this from ground warfare, right?

• 1:42:05Speaker 05

  So, but what Postle said is when he went over to the Pentagon and was looking at the Black Book, the Denny's menu, if you will, that he was shocked. He actually said he was freaked out at the disconnect between them. In other words, they had just been reduced to option A and a, you know, there was not information, the President wouldn't realize you're striking a city that's going to kill 15 million people.

• 1:42:38Shawn Ryan?

  It's a playbook.

• 1:42:41Speaker 05

  And I got the sense it's numerical or alphanumeric. Again, that's classified information. But that's the sense I got. It's like A three twenty four B. I'm using that kind of as an analogy, but maybe even literally. So in other words, that is what they're not. The president doesn't go, OK, I'm gonna hit. And they're not cities with humans.

• 1:43:05Shawn Ryan?

  It's a look, I don't know anything about nuclear warfare. That's I'm a ground guy. That's it. I don't do nuclear strategy or anything like that. But I will say that

• 1:43:20Shawn Ryan?

  combat, planning, strategy, contingencies is very much like a football game. You call a play.

• 1:43:31Shawn Ryan?

  And no, nobody that has not been briefed understands what that play is. So if it's a, if it's a, a, a, did you say numeric or?

• 1:43:43Speaker 05

  Alpha numeric.

• 1:43:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so, so if it's alpha five two, then they go to the everybody, everybody who is read in knows what alpha five two is in that scenario. That, that scenario plays out and, and does that make sense?

• 1:44:02Speaker 05

  Absolutely, I agree with, I think that's the best analogy I've heard from what I understand.

• 1:44:10Speaker 05

  Now, I could be wrong because I haven't had anyone who's seen the contents of the black book tell me precisely they've only spoken in metaphor because they can't. And very, very few people have seen it.

• 1:44:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so it would be, I mean, I would imagine it would be very similar to a, to, to a quarterback. When he calls a play, everybody on that team knows exactly what's going to happen, where they're gonna go, what they're gonna do, what route they're gonna run, where the ball's gonna land, you know, and that's, and so in the black book, on the Denny's menu, if he calls, you know, alpha two six, all the key players know what's gonna be struck, what's, you know, where they're gonna be, how long it's gonna take to get there, what countries are gonna, all of that is already, it's already been predetermined. It's a predetermined playbook of.

• 1:45:07Shawn Ryan?

  Of possible scenarios.

• 1:45:08Speaker 05

  And, and you're exactly, probably right, right? And so then imagine this. The president says, well, what is Alpha 52, whatever the thing? And now you, the six-minute window, the clock is ticking. Inside Stratcom, the bunker beneath Offutt Air Force Base, which is one of three, of the three nuclear bunkers that are central to this, in this moment in time as this is happening. There's one in Cheyenne Mountain, there's one beneath Offutt Out Air Force Base, and there's one at the Pentagon. And the president, wherever he may be, is trying to discern this black book.

• 1:45:49Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:45:50Speaker 05

  And he's being advised. So at Stratcom, there is an identical black book. It's in a safe. It gets, the safe gets open, the black book gets taken out. They're identical so that they know exactly they're talking about the same thing. There is a target officer who will, who's prepared to brief if the president has any questions. And there's also a weather officer that's going to tell him how many people are going to die, maybe if there's time and if he asks that question, from the radioactive fallout in co-centric circles going out from ground zero. Each ground zero.

• 1:46:22Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:46:23Speaker 05

  But again, how much time do you have in a six-minute window? And imagine what's going through the president's mind. In the scenario that I write, I have the president ask a number of key questions, which were, which I learned, questions I learned from interviewing people, that they are worried the president, or that they think the president might ask. Like, I'll give you an example of a key question the president, in my scenario, asked. How do we know there's a nuclear warhead in the nose coming in that ballistic missile? And you know what the answer is?

• 1:47:00Shawn Ryan?

  They don't.

• 1:47:04Speaker 05

  And then the next answer is, you know, where the president might then wonder, perhaps someone is, you know, tricking me into starting a nuclear war. And the answer is, no one sends a ballistic missile unless they know we are going to send the motherload in response.

• 1:47:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:21Speaker 05

  Which is, brings us back to the paradox or the catch 22 of deterrence. So you could use this as an argument, which is why no one would be insane enough to ever launch a nuclear missile at the United States, because they would be obliterated. Or you can use the argument that that's ridiculous. How can more nuclear weapons make us more safe?

• 1:47:47Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, we shouldn't be so, we shouldn't put so much weight on that. I mean, we're just going down to a lower level. I mean, look at suicide bombers. They're ever, they had no problem recruiting suicide bombers, you know, in the global war on terrorism. And so all you would need is somebody with that mindset to get into government and become a world leader. I mean, not an easy task, but not impossible.

• 1:48:16Speaker 05

  Not impossible. And in 2024, certainly more likely than in 1952.

• 1:48:23Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh. On top of that, going back to the, the decision making of the president, I mean, I'm sure he would have, if it happened, I'm sure he would have advisors that would say something along the lines of, this is what, this is what's happening right now. These are our top three, these are our top three actions that we have recommended that you take. Here they are.

• 1:48:47Speaker 05

  And that is the job of the advisors.

• 1:48:48Shawn Ryan?

  Which one would you like us to do? You know, and so he's not, he's not reading the whole Denny's menu.

• 1:48:57Speaker 05

  You're absolutely right. And so you also have to imagine what would be going through the president's mind, who, from what I understand, has not thought this through, has not been part of these, you know, war gaming scenarios, has been concerned with other issues, both domestic and abroad. Suddenly new to this, you know, asking questions like, is this a test? And his advisers, knowing it is not a test, and his advisers being much more aware of how this is going to end, meaning, you know, having war gamed these situations out. But then you can learn about a concept, as I did,

• 1:49:41Speaker 05

  which is something called jamming the president, which is what is understood would happen at a moment like this, whereby the military advisers, almost universally, would be advising him to escalate, to de-escalate, to hit them with an extraordinary amount of force. And that is a natural military mindset, particularly if you are attacked, you know this, right? And so, in the scenario that I report, that's where things go awry because of some technological holes in the system. And that is why Russia gets involved.

• 1:50:21Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Well, let's get into this scenario. What does it look like if we're hit?

• 1:50:29Speaker 05

  A nuclear bomb explodes with a flash of light, of X-ray light, that is so powerful and hot, it is impossible to comprehend. It is 180 million degrees. That's the temperature at the center of the sun times five.

• 1:50:57Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 1:50:57Speaker 05

  Times five.

• 1:51:01Speaker 05

  And so the thermonuclear flash sets everything on fire. Depending on the size of the bomb, in the scenario that I write, it's three miles out.

• 1:51:15Shawn Ryan?

  Is that a fact? Is that the biggest?

• 1:51:17Speaker 05

  Yes. That's not the biggest bomb, but that is a fact. And so, by the way, like, when I write about these horrific details about what happens to people in third-degree burns and wind ripping skin off people's faces, you know, nine miles out, limbs being ripped off, you know, the sucking motion that happens, the blast wave that's like a bulldozer, the buildings that come down. When I write all those details, those are not out of any Jacobsen's imagination. Those are sourced from a primary document called "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons", which is a 600 and some odd page book. It's also called Army Pamphlet Number 50-9, if I'm remembering correctly.

• 1:52:00Speaker 05

  And that began with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The effects of nuclear weapons on buildings and people. And as the tests were done, we conducted atmospheric tests in the Pacific and also in Nevada at the test site. As the tests were done, defense scientists were constantly measuring the effects that nuclear weapons have on things and people. And the people substitutes were animals. And they measured these with a specificity that's just stunning. And that's a polite word for gruesome.

• 1:52:44Speaker 05

  And I use those details in the book, and I source them again in notes. So, you know, then you get to learn as a reader, oh, wait a minute. How does the Pentagon know that a pine needle will catch on fire? Six miles out from ground zero. You know, spontaneously combust and start more fires. Oh, because these have been studied.

• 1:53:06Shawn Ryan?

  Six miles out. So what, so does that mean the, the blast radius of the flash can, can be up to six miles?

• 1:53:15Speaker 05

  The bla, the, people can go blind up to 50 miles out if they're looking in the direction of the bomb.

• 1:53:21Shawn Ryan?

  Fifty miles?

• 1:53:22Speaker 05

  Five oh. And the way we know, you know, the Defense Department would put rabbits in cages and fly them, you know, 50 miles out from this bomb and put their, you know, it's very clockwork orange.

• 1:53:33Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:53:34Speaker 05

  To determine the effects on the retina. Um, a one megaton bomb that I have hit the Pentagon, and I, I use the Pentagon as a target, by the way, again, that's not just because it's my imagination, but because many people that I interviewed told me that a bolt out of the blue attack against Washington is what Washington fears most. And so a one megaton bomb that detonates over the Pentagon creates a ball of fire, pure fire, that is 5,700 feet in diameter. That's a little over a mile. Again, like the specificity of these numbers are from defense scientists. A ball of fire.

• 1:54:17Speaker 05

  So nothing remains. Not a cricket, not a, no, no cellular life in that. And then you have this blast wave. It's called a steeply fronted blast wave. And it pushes out and it bulldozes down, metaphorically, every, all physical bridges go down, you know? Um, stone splits apart. Steel, lead melts. 10 miles out, streets become like molten lava.

• 1:54:55Speaker 05

  So if you survive, you're suddenly, you know, sucked into a lava street. Um, third degree burns on everyone. Anyone in a subway is going to die, if they're, you know, 10 miles out, they're going to die of asphyxiation.

• 1:55:12Shawn Ryan?

  So 10 mile, would 10 miles be the?

• 1:55:19Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk immediate death.

• 1:55:20Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:55:22Shawn Ryan?

  Ten miles?

• 1:55:23Speaker 05

  Well, there's, there's rate, there's like, three rings that I write about.

• 1:55:26Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:55:27Speaker 05

  Specifically, you know, in their diameters. And they go out up to the Washington DC Zoo is kind of the edge, where all the animals, you know, have their skin hanging off of them. Sorry. It's dark, it's true.

• 1:55:41Speaker 05

  And so then you have to think about, you know, you have all these people dead, all these people now with, that are far out, as far as 10 miles out with third degree burns, fourth degree burns. Did you even know there was such a thing as a fourth degree burns?

• 1:55:57Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:55:57Speaker 05

  Third degree burns require a specialized bed. There are like 10 in Washington, then they've now all been obliterated in this scenario. People die of, you know, blood loss. Imagine the projectiles from this. There are several hundred mile an hour winds accompanying that steeply fronted blast wave.

• 1:56:20Speaker 05

  The buildings topple over and become rubble. We haven't even spoken in the back that no first responder can go in there for 72 hours. By then, the world's over. The situation, I write in appalling detail because I want you to see how horrific. You would hope you were inside the fireball. Because the further are out you're, the worse it is. When you think about this, the mushroom cloud that we've all seen, right? That mushroom stem and the cloud is made up of the remnants of people who have turned into combusting carbon.

• 1:57:02Speaker 05

  That is the detrius of civilization.

• 1:57:08Speaker 05

  That's just one nuclear bomb.

• 1:57:12Speaker 05

  So people get to see that every nuclear weapon is really a mass extinction weapon. Because when you consider the black, you know, we're talking about the ring out 10, shall we say 10, 10 miles out. What will then, because all these fires have started now from the flash, the situation becomes a mesocyclone of fire, is how it's described. There, in a matter of minutes or hours, there will be a 100-mile radius of fire

• 1:57:55Speaker 05

  burning, because there's no first responders in a nuclear attack. I learned this from Obama's FEMA director, a guy called Craig Fugate, who did all these on-the-record interviews with me and described to me how horrific a nuclear war. He was so candid, I went back, "Are you sure you said this, this, this, and this?" It's quoted in the book, you know, that he said FEMA does something called "population protection planning." So earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, when these happen FEMA's at the ready

• 1:58:37Speaker 05

  to help the people, population protection planning. And Fugate said to me, "After a nuclear strike, there is no population protection planning because everyone will be dead. You're on your own." I said, "What do you suggest people do?" And he said, "Hope that you stocked Pedialyte and don't forget your morals." That kind of candor from that level of an individual made me realize people leave office and become civilians again, become parents again and grandparents, I estimate,

• 1:59:19Speaker 05

  and they suddenly realize like, "Nuclear war is insane. We cannot have a nuclear war."

• 1:59:25Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 1:59:29Shawn Ryan?

  What do you, have you talked to any of your sources about likely targets other than DC?

• 1:59:35Speaker 05

  Every, every city in America is a target. Every airport in America is a target. Every industrial base in America is a target. Maybe not for the rogue launch that happens in my scenario in the beginning, but as I describe in the book, a series of events happen. Shall I jump forward to like what really goes wrong?

• 2:00:00Shawn Ryan?

  Sure.

• 2:00:01Speaker 05

  Okay, so we have a really great satellite system. Russia does not. They pretend they do. Theirs is called Tundra. I told you ours can measure, you know, inches from 22,000 miles up. Theirs pretends to. Their system is so flawed that it sees clouds and sunlight as exhaust, as fire sometimes. Now, I sourced this not just from American experts,

• 2:00:40Speaker 05

  but from people who are experts on Russian nuclear command and control, including a guy called Pavel Podvig, who studied in Moscow, who's the liaison to the UN for Russian nuclear forces. So he would be prone to giving you a different opinion maybe than, and he even conceded that the Tundra system is deeply flawed. And so Russia can't see, Russia could easily misinterpret what it is seeing happening. We're talking about once the missiles start flying. Once America, the American president learns that he has to make a counterattack.

• 2:01:24Speaker 05

  And our missiles are now flying. And as Leon Panetta said to me, you're right. No one thinks about mad chemistry, mutual assured destruction chemistry, once the missiles are flying. And that's where the mistakes happen. So in the scenario, a very serious flaw arises, which is that US ICBMs do not have enough range. If we are sending ICBMs at North Korea, they have to fly over Russia. An actual fact, confirmed by Panetta, by the way. They have to fly over Russia. Think about the state of affairs between Russia and the United States right now.

• 2:02:06Speaker 05

  I don't believe the two presidents have spoken in years. During the war, General Milley couldn't get his... In the early days of the war, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley couldn't get his Russian counterpart on the phone when there was an errant, erroneously reported missile attack against Poland. Couldn't get him on the phone. Imagine a scenario where nuclear missiles are flying and Russia sees missiles coming. It would interpret at themselves. Not... even if you could get the president on the phone and say, "Trust us, they're going to go over you, not at you."

• 2:02:50Speaker 05

  And so Russia makes a decision to launch. And when Russia launches, it sends a thousand nuclear weapons.

• 2:02:58Shawn Ryan?

  Does that mean North Korea's nuclear weapons would also have to fly over Russia?

• 2:03:04Speaker 05

  North Korea's nuclear weapons fly over Russia and China. But they do not have the same technology that we have, according to my understanding of the technology, to see neither China nor Russia, to see in real time the way that we see in real time any ballistic missile launch anywhere on the globe.

• 2:03:31Shawn Ryan?

  Only reason I'm bringing that up is context.

• 2:03:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:34Shawn Ryan?

  Because...

• 2:03:38Shawn Ryan?

  If they do have somewhat of a capability and North Korea launches a nuke at the US and it does have to fly over China and Russia, at least in our response, they would have some context and they could go, "Okay, we did just see one, we just saw one fly this way, now we're gonna see one head west," you know, and so it wouldn't be 100% in the blind.

• 2:04:05Speaker 05

  Which is a could, that is a possibility.

• 2:04:11Shawn Ryan?

  Now, with that being said, you're also, you know, there would have to be some type of communications and if we don't have communications and we can't, we can't even get our counterpart on the phone, then...

• 2:04:25Speaker 05

  And here's the fundamental problem with that in terms of long thinking, which is that America's first nuclear war plan against Russia was a preemptive nuclear strike, okay, a preemptive nuclear strike. Russia has been paranoid ever since, maybe with good reason, because this is how an origin story, that we would do a preemptive nuclear strike. I have heard some leading experts on Putin, including Fiona Hill, who advised multiple

• 2:05:04Speaker 05

  presidents, so she's completely nonpartisan, talk about how the invasion of Iraq profoundly impacted Putin's thinking about the United States, about regime change, about a preemptive attack, and how dangerous that is. So it's not just long history that someone might be thinking of, it's short history, more immediate history. And so...

• 2:05:36Speaker 05

  Another example of how paranoid Russia has been for decades is its system that it created called the Dead Hand. Okay? It's the literal name of it is perimeter. It was this perimeter system, Dead Hand, was originally reported by a Washington Post reporter named David Hoffman, like in 1999, when he first learned about it, right after the wall had gone down, before we were back to this nuclear threat posturing. But the way the Dead Hand works is like this. Russia was so paranoid that the United States was going to launch a preemptive nuclear attack against it during the Cold War, that it created a Dead Hand system. What is that? It's kind of like it sounds.

• 2:06:21Speaker 05

  They created a system whereby ground sensors would be able to determine nuclear weapons hitting, nuclear bombs hitting the Russian soil. And if they weren't hearing from the nuclear command and control, so the idea being that the nuclear command and control had been taken out in this preemptive nuclear strike, the Dead Hand system would launch all of Russia's remaining nuclear weapons, which were like 30,000 at the time, okay? Would launch all of them without even needing a hand to push the button, hence the name The Dead Hand.

• 2:07:04Speaker 05

  So it set up a system to launch no matter what, even if we're all dead. And the idea behind it is kind of part of deterrence, like, don't you dare launch at us, or even our own Dead Hand will get you. And so when you think about that, you realize there's a long history of suspicion in Russia. And even more terrifying is I have heard in defense circles, and I haven't been able to confirm it, but I have heard that even now, the US Defense Department is thinking of creating some kind of a Dead Hand equivalent, because allegedly Russia never got rid of

• 2:07:49Speaker 05

  that system. That's where AI would become a real problem.

• 2:07:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's a great point. That is a great point.

• 2:07:58Speaker 05

  The dead AI hand.

• 2:08:02Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's a great point. Let's, let's keep what the, let's go back into what life looks like.

• 2:08:09Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:08:09Shawn Ryan?

  So we, it sounds like, excuse me if I'm mistaken. It sounds like immediate devastation is about 10-mile radius. 100 miles, you're gonna feel effects.

• 2:08:22Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:08:27Shawn Ryan?

  What happens after that?

• 2:08:29Speaker 05

  So in the scenario, I have the president making this decision.

• 2:08:38Speaker 05

  The, you know, the six-minute window is upon him. They're waiting for minute eight, nine, to have the secondary ground confirmation from the, from the ground radar systems. That happens. Sir, it's confirmed the ICBM is coming to Washington. Then I have a situation unfold between the Secret Service and Nuclear Command and Control, based on interviews I did with Secret Service. Once I realized, wait a minute, the Secret Service's job is to protect the president. As soon as the Secret Service learns that, the special agent in charge, the SAC, in charge of the president, learns that there's a missile coming at Washington, he's moving the president. Period. Non-negotiable.

• 2:09:22Speaker 05

  The Secret Service has a Element, a CAT team, counter-assault team. They're kind of like the president's version of Ground Branch, in essence. A lot of guys go back and forth. So the counter-assault team gets called in by the SAC. Within the counter-assault team, there's an even tinier group called the Element. An Element is a three-man team. A three-man team is now gonna move the president on Air Force One, out of the White Hall, out of the White House, back off. So it's a standoff. Who do you think's gonna win? Who has better equipment?

• 2:09:58Shawn Ryan?

  We do.

• 2:10:00Speaker 05

  The CAT team wins. They move the president, much to the chagrin of the Stratcom commander and everybody else who wants that order. While they are moving the president, and there's a problem, because I learned that...

• 2:10:16Speaker 05

  Getting a little into the weeds here, but I'm good. The, there's an EMP which will happen with any nuclear. You're familiar with that. Marine One is EMP-proof. For listeners, it's an electromagnetic pulse that could very easily fry the electronic system on Marine One, causing it to crash. So the SAC needs to make sure there are parachutes that they can tandem-jump the president. They're not in Marine One, a detail I learned. They probably are now, but they weren't then. So the element has to swing by the White House office, grab the parachutes. They need one for the middle aide, one for the guy who's gonna jump the president, and one for the SAC. They get them, they get into Marine One.

• 2:11:01Speaker 05

  It's a, while that is happening, I have in the scenario, a second ballistic missile strikes a nuclear power plant in California. A sub-launched ballistic missile. Now, I had Ted Postle, I'm pointing to this, and Richard Garwin, discuss with me whether or not it was plausible, whether or not North Korea can actually get a submarine up to the west coast of the United States, because we know China and Russia can. That's a fact, you learn that later in the book. Can North Korea? Ted Postle believes that they can. Garwin says he doesn't think they can yet.

• 2:11:45Speaker 05

  I wanted to have that kind of a debate available for readers to think about. You just don't know until you know. I take you through the technology of why Postle thinks it's possible. They launch, the North Korean sub-launched ballistic missile fires from a couple hundred miles off the west coast. That takes less than 10 minutes. It's like six minutes or something. While the president is deciding whether or not he's gonna give this counter-launch, and the Secret Service is moving him.

• 2:12:24Speaker 05

  The power plant is hit. And when the nuclear, the reason I chose the nuclear power plant to be hit is because it's the, it's what's called the devil's scenario. It's worse, it's the worst of the worst, worst-case scenario. And I won't get too into the reader, into the weeds about what happens.

• 2:12:44Shawn Ryan?

  Why not?

• 2:12:48Speaker 05

  I want you to read the book.

• 2:12:49Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, good.

• 2:12:50Speaker 05

  But, no, I shouldn't say it like that. I say, what I mean is, the details, you, if you're me, you almost can't like tell the details in like a 30-second version because it's so profound, what happens. And it's so terrifying. And people would say that, that they would never do that. Well, there's actually a rule. It's called Rule 42 in the International Committee for the Red Cross that says you will nev, you must never strike a nu, a nuclear power plant. That's even with kinetic weapons. We're not talking about nuclear weapons. And so when I was doing this scenario, people, you know, that were sort of mentors, are you sure you want to do that? I mean, that's against the rules. It was like, well, that's the point.

• 2:13:35Speaker 05

  There are no rules if you're gonna play nuclear war. And then, this is before the Ukraine war unfolded. And so when Russia, Russia has now exploded weapons around the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in Ukraine eight or nine times. They have been on backup generator. That's one step away from losing power. That's one step away from a nuclear core materials meltdown. If you strike a nuclear power plant directly with a nuclear weapon, you will have a nuclear core materials meltdown. The land will be uninhabited all the way to Colorado.

• 2:14:13Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 2:14:16Speaker 05

  Fact-checked with Los Alamos.

• 2:14:18Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:14:19Speaker 05

  That's why I don't want to give it away. I want you to have that experience, Sean, where you read it and you're just like, how is this possible? And hopefully, the only reason you're stopping to read is to go back into the notes to check, is this really true?

• 2:14:32Shawn Ryan?

  So that's like a third of the country?

• 2:14:36Speaker 05

  Rendered uninhabitable.

• 2:14:39Speaker 05

  And so that's why the president agrees in the logic of this scenario to the 82 nuclear warhead counterattack. Because he learns from his SecDef, we just got hit in a nuclear power plant in California. He's going to send the motherload. And that's what he does. And that is why things go awry, is that decision to send 82. So perhaps the only way this scenario might have unfolded differently, and I did this discussion with former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, because we talked about this a lot, because he thinks about this a lot. He's now in his 90s, and he stopped doing interviews.

• 2:15:23Speaker 05

  But during COVID, he and I did a number of Zooms going through these scenarios. And he, he shared with me that, you know, perhaps a certain kind of president might wait to see the outcome after, might not instill the launch on morning policy. Might wait. But once you see a catastrophic attack, you just, the emotions take over, and it's revenge.

• 2:16:03Shawn Ryan?

  What does the middle of the country look like?

• 2:16:06Speaker 05

  When, so 50 some odd minutes later, when Russia launches, okay? So because the president makes the decision to launch the 82, as the weapons fly, he launches 50 ICBMs and 32 SLBMs. The 50 can be launched in 60 seconds. That's how long it takes to launch an ICBM once the president gives the command. The joke is, those missiles are called Minutemen because of the Revolutionary War. But the joke in Washington is they don't call them Minutemen for nothing because they take 60 seconds to launch. Sub-launched ballistic missiles take 14 minutes from the time the commander in chief gives that order.

• 2:16:51Speaker 05

  The sub has to get into position. It's a little bit more complicated, 14 minutes. And so as the clock is ticking...

• 2:17:01Speaker 05

  Russian early warning systems now move into place. And the Russian early warning systems see the ballistic missiles coming over the pole and interpret them as coming for them. And then there are other, you know, and I went through experts that are, know all about the Russian early warning systems to take the reader through how this happens. And then you go into the command bunker where the Russian president is with his advisors, who are all almost certainly hawks, who are all almost certainly extremely suspicious of the United States.

• 2:17:46Speaker 05

  And they advise him. And so a thousand nuclear warheads get launched at the United States. So when you ask what happens to the middle of the country, think of a thousand targets. I have a map drawn based on Defense Department targets, DOE, you know, different documents that have been released over the years, leaked, guesstimated.

• 2:18:12Shawn Ryan?

  The whole country is obliterated.

• 2:18:14Speaker 05

  And then you have a hundred to three hundred square mile ring of fire, a mega fire that's now producing its own weather. You have a thousand of them. People die from radi, you know, blast. They die from, you know, objects flying through the air. They die from immediate radiation poisoning. And they die from fire, a thousand times. And then, and we talk about the survivors.

• 2:18:50Shawn Ryan?

  Have you looked at what immediate radiation poisoning looks like?

• 2:18:54Speaker 05

  For that, I tell the story of, and again, this stuff is like, Okay, how do you get, how do you, where is that information? Well, I found that information. There was a guy called Louis Slotin, who was an original Manhattan Project member. And his death was declassified by Los Alamos. The doctors report on his death, after he died of radiation poisoning. And I sourced that precisely. Throughout the book, as the, you know, it's a ticking time clock scenario. But I stop and give you little history lessons at moments where you might ask, like you just asked me that question. I give the reader, what does radiation poisoning look like? And I tell the story of Louis Slotin.

• 2:19:38Speaker 05

  He was, he was a member of the Manhattan Project. And after the war was over, he was like, I don't want to keep making nuclear bombs. I'm out. And they were like, okay, that's fine. But you have to train the next guy. And so at Los Alamos, they went out into this little site, kind of outside of the lab in the forest. The building's still there. It's a historical building now. And Slotin was training the next guy how to like work with the plutonium core, uranium core, like this is the center of the bomb. And they were doing this experiment that was so dangerous, it was called, "Tickling the Dragon's Tail." And Slotin is working on this and, and it drops.

• 2:20:21Speaker 05

  And so everybody takes off. And Slotin, what happens to him is like documented in seconds. He dies eight or nine days later. This had been classified for a very long time, but it's been declassified. And you can, you just learn what happens to his body. I mean, you know, where the, the hands blow up, the skin, you know, essentially peels off. I mean, it just is so grotesque. Do you really want me to describe it?

• 2:20:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:20:55Speaker 05

  I mean, they tried everything, like blood transfusions and, you know, your body swells up.

• 2:21:04Speaker 05

  They're debriding his hands, they're putting Vaseline on them. His insides begin to... The radiation ruins the lining on your organs. And so you essentially just become like... It almost reminded me of... I read a description once of what happens to an Ebola patient.

• 2:21:28Speaker 05

  It's like that, like you're... The lining sloughs away and so your organs start to merge and you just have sepsis. And then you get gangrene. And then you die. And when they cut you open, you're just like soup inside.

• 2:21:43Shawn Ryan?

  It's like a blender.

• 2:21:48Speaker 05

  It's a horrific way to die. That's acute radiation poisoning. The really sinister thing about radiation poisoning is how... First of all, it's invisible, you know? It's not like a burn. And the degrees of radiation poisoning are not necessarily dependent on proximity to the bomb. And of course, if you're really close, you know, sayonara. But you can have acute radiation poisoning far away from... One of the things about the nuclear power plant exploding that's just so crazy is that it's not just the nuclear core materials meltdown of the actual nuclear reactor.

• 2:22:33Speaker 05

  It's that every nuclear facility has spent fuel rods. Those are the rods that used to power the nuclear generator. They're in cooling pools right nearby. And they're incredibly radioactive. And when those blast apart, the pieces of the spent fuel rods become entrained in the cloud. So in that mushroom stem, you have all this radioactive material that's like the size of a marble or a pencil. That's how it was described to me. And it goes up in the cloud and then it moves and then it's dropped.

• 2:23:11Speaker 05

  One of those drops near you.

• 2:23:15Speaker 05

  You have Louis Slotin-type poisoning.

• 2:23:17Shawn Ryan?

  Man, man.

• 2:23:22Shawn Ryan?

  Where would the survivors be?

• 2:23:25Speaker 05

  So, are you familiar at all with the nuclear winter theory?

• 2:23:28Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:23:29Speaker 05

  Okay, so nuclear winter theory was originally written in 1983. Do you know, have you heard of Carl Sagan?

• 2:23:38Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:23:38Speaker 05

  Carl Sagan was an astrophysicist who like became very famous in the 80s, 70s and 80s, and then he died tragically of cancer. But he, he became a real proponent, an anti-nuclear weapons proponent.

• 2:23:54Speaker 05

  And he and his stu-, and a number of people, wrote this theory called nuclear winter, where they climbed, they modeled out what would happen after the fires stopped burning. So, you have all these fires, and again, we're just talking about the thousand in the United States. The US launched, in my scenario, a thousand at Russia. Because we don't just go, you know, okay, we're gonna, we're all gonna die, so we're just gonna let all of you guys live. We launch. And for reasons why, I take you through that. So you have, you know, 2,000, 3,000 nuclear weapons that have gone off.

• 2:24:35Speaker 05

  And the modeling on that suggests that after all the fires stopped burning, and this is state-of-the-art climate modeling, updated since the 1983 nuclear winter theory. So this is still the nuclear winter theory, but now with the technology, instead of scientists like doing, you know, calculations on paper with old computers, these are like really advanced computer systems confirming all of this. The fires will loft into the air 330 billion pounds of soot.

• 2:25:12Speaker 05

  Goes up into the troposphere and blocks out the sun. Seventy percent of the sun's rays disappear. And so hence nuclear winter. Suddenly, in places like across the mid latitudes of the globe, you have all bodies of water, freshwater bodies, become ice. The ice at the Arctic Circle doubles. You have a temperature drop around the Earth between 27 and 40 degrees.

• 2:25:49Shawn Ryan?

  Whoa, wow.

• 2:25:52Speaker 05

  Places like Iowa and Ukraine, bread baskets of the world, they become frozen for eight, nine, 10 years. Agriculture fails. So now you have people, any survivors, who are, you know, malnourished, suffering from radiation poisoning. Everyone who they know is dead, fighting over a tiny amount of resources. When the sun returns, you think, "The sun's back out, but the ozone layer has been destroyed. So the sun will give you radiation poisoning. So people have to live underground."

• 2:26:37Speaker 05

  And this interesting detail I found that was shared with me was that like the small-bodied animals, the sort of insects, they can bounce back faster and they will reproduce faster than large-bodied animals like you and me. And so you have pathogens, you have plague, you have like all these horrific, you know, plagues that come with insects and abundance of insects. Never mind all the 5 billion people who died. I mean, at some point, their bodies thaw out. Think about that. That's like dark beyond dark.

• 2:27:18Speaker 05

  One of the original authors of the nuclear winter theory is a guy called Professor Brian Toon. And I interviewed him for the book. He's been on this issue since he was Carl Sagan's student in 1983, when he was one of the original five authors. And he took me through all of this, you know, and he said to me, "Annie, 66 million years ago, an asteroid struck the planet, killed the dinosaurs, and 70% of the species that we know of." He said, "Nuclear war would not be unlike that." So you have to ask yourself, you know, there's nothing we can do about an asteroid strike,

• 2:27:59Speaker 05

  but there is something we can do about nuclear war.

• 2:28:11Shawn Ryan?

  This isn't a nation-ending event. This is a...

• 2:28:15Speaker 05

  It's a civilization-ending event. Civilization meaning civilized man.

• 2:28:21Shawn Ryan?

  It's over.

• 2:28:23Speaker 05

  Einstein was asked if he had, like, about what weapons he thought World War III would be fought with. And his response is said to have been, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

• 2:28:48Speaker 05

  So after a nuclear war, man returns to his hunter-gatherer state. And the philosophical question I find so interesting to think about is like, here we are, humans, who have moved in the past 12,000 years from hunter-gatherers to like, "Look at us, podcasts, microphones. I flew here. There's a probe on Mars."

• 2:29:20Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think I'm gonna go down a rabbit hole? And you can entertain it or not. But have you looked at any of the... Have you looked at anybody like...

• 2:29:36Shawn Ryan?

  I don't want to mention any names. Have you looked at anybody or looked into kind of the cataclysm type stuff? And how civilization just restarts over and over and over again? You have? What do you think of that?

• 2:29:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, we started out this conference, I'll read, I read all things.

• 2:29:54Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that this has happened before?

• 2:29:57Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't know, but sometimes I try to counter what could be perceived as conspiracy, conspiratorial thinking, shall we say, with maybe a more bookish, you know, concept, which is actually the same thing, right? So let me go back at you with this, that there's, there was a paper written by like two nerds, and I say that, love, like two guys with probably, they probably have like five PhDs. And you can Google it, it's called the Solurian Concept. And I think they took the name off of a Doctor Who character, if I'm not mistaken. And an interesting thing to think about is, in my experience, digressing for a second

• 2:30:40Speaker 05

  before, a lot of times, like, super intelligent PhD people, Nobel laureates, science geniuses, they read science fiction. They like to think about the very concepts that you just suggested. And when you think about it, that's where a lot of DARPA concepts come from, you know? You could say Jules Verne, you know, thought about the submarine before, right? So the Solurian Concept were these two PhD people imagining if this, if what you propose is true, that there had been advanced civilizations before.

• 2:31:24Speaker 05

  How would we, present day man, see it in the geological record? Which is actually a really brilliant thought. Not talking about like ancient archaeology, that's like, that you're talking about, you know, 12,000 years ago. They're talking about a million years ago, two million years ago, or beyond.

• 2:31:47Speaker 05

  And the only way to to know about that would be to look in the geological record. And I think that is really interesting to think about two things. One, like, that's where it would be. And two, that all kinds of people wonder that. And why wouldn't you wonder that? It's a little bit like wondering, are we alone?

• 2:32:12Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:32:13Speaker 05

  I sometimes think of geology and ask, you know, people look up to the cosmos and get really inspired. I often look, I look at the ground. I can drive and through the Sierra Nevadas and look at the mountains and have that same thought. Like, whoa, what was here before? Like, a long time before.

• 2:32:36Shawn Ryan?

  Reason I'm asking is, have you, I think it's Turkey. There's all these underground. They're like underground cities, you know? And I believe it's Turkey, they have. I wish I had more facts on this. I didn't think we were gonna go here. But, um, I mean, it seems like hundreds of thousands of people could could live in these underground cities. They never end, they never find the end of them. And nobody knows why they were built. And then you're saying the only way you could survive is underground.

• 2:33:13Speaker 05

  Yes, I I know that site. I mean, it's very, very interesting. And I love thinking about those exact questions that you raise. In in the end of nuclear war scenario, I take the reader to a different ancient site in Turkey. Because Turkey's like, super interesting. They seem to have these incredibly old sites that are almost now newly becoming, not necessarily discovered, but becoming sort of more, people are aware of them. And I learned that that has to do with a bias from the archaeological world that used to look down on Turkey, like Greece and Rome or everything but Turkey. It's a backwater, ignore it. So I write about Gobekli Tepe.

• 2:33:59Speaker 05

  Which is a site in Turkey that is the oldest known civilization to date. Like, before it was found in the mid 90s by an archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt, and I interviewed the young student who was with him. Schmidt died, but I interviewed Michael Morse about finding this site. Okay, because before this site was found, there was, the archaeologists all had one idea about man. They had this idea that, about civilization, rather, that man were hunter-gatherers, primitives, and then suddenly, man figured out how to domesticate animals,

• 2:34:44Speaker 05

  and agriculture evolved and led to civilization. By civilization, that means groups of people doing things together. A team. Uh huh. Well, Gobekli Tepe was unearthed, and there's, I have pictures of it in the book. It's, it was a site with, it's like co-centric circles, almost like a stadium, an ancient stadium, massive, with giant 20-foot-tall carved stone pillars,

• 2:35:22Speaker 05

  covered with non-domesticated animals, by the way, cranes, ebus, foxes. They were hunter-gatherers. They had not domesticated animals yet, as far as we can tell, certainly, given the age of everything there. But they were smart enough to create architectural plans. You can't build something like that with like a group of, you know, hunter-gatherers. You have to really have a team. So it's upended the way that archaeologists get to think about man and about the birth of civilization. And it's super interesting. And what interests me in terms of this book is exactly on the question

• 2:36:06Speaker 05

  that you're interested in, and so am I, which is like, well, it's like a twofold question. One, what was going on before? Okay, and two, why is it that we, the royal we, a group of people, like, get to decide this is what it was, and this is how it is, and it's just gonna be that way because we tell you so?

• 2:36:26Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:36:27Speaker 05

  And you have to balance that out with like, some crazy idea that I might have, you know, out on a hike. But it is worth thinking about. And I think that it opens the mind up to a lot more wonder and also a lot more flexibility.

• 2:36:49Shawn Ryan?

  It makes you think. It definitely makes you think. And, you know, it's,

• 2:36:59Shawn Ryan?

  we're kind of off on a tangent now, but I mean, I just, how was, how, how were we not aware of this stuff before?

• 2:37:07Speaker 05

  The existence of these incredible sites in Turkey?

• 2:37:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Or, or any of them?

• 2:37:13Speaker 05

  Or any, during COVID, I went down an archaeological rabbit hole. Because, right? And like, I bought a bunch of books on eBay. Because here's the thing, if you read the original books, or rather, you, you go back in time and you read books that were printed then, you can get a really interesting, different sense on what historians say about it. And so, I read all these books. Archaeology only really began in sort of the late 1800s. And I, and I have these books, like what people were actually saying at the time about the sites they were uncovering, the goods which they stole, which are now, you know, in the Louvre and the British Museum and everywhere.

• 2:37:57Speaker 05

  And it was, that's where I got that, I kind of figured out that it had to do with a group of people at the time who were the leading experts, the British and the French, deciding, this is important, we're gonna study this, and we're gonna ignore the rest of it. And that's why Turkey got ignored for a long time.

• 2:38:19Speaker 05

  Up until like the 1950s.

• 2:38:23Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Interesting, interesting stuff, you know, it's, it's, I'd never really, I've watched a couple documentaries on it. And, you know, the, the, the, the commonality between all of them is what, what were these people hiding from? Why were they going underground? I mean, thousands and it could, it could hold thousands and thousands of people. And if I remember correctly, I mean, there's, there's,

• 2:38:54Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know if plumbing is the right word, but I mean, they have plumbing, they have, they had everything, you know, it was, it was capable of holding. And I never, it never occurred to me to think that it could be, maybe possibly,

• 2:39:12Shawn Ryan?

  excuse me, some type of nuclear fallout shelter.

• 2:39:17Speaker 05

  And it's, I mean, almost certainly it had to do with warfare.

• 2:39:22Speaker 05

  That you would create, I think it's called Darian Kirk. Is that right?

• 2:39:27Shawn Ryan?

  Darian, man, I don't know, I don't know.

• 2:39:30Speaker 05

  I mean, almost certainly it has to do with defense. But to create that much of a system underground

• 2:39:44Speaker 05

  begs many, many, many questions. And

• 2:39:49Speaker 05

  I think that that's also like why that idea of science fiction

• 2:39:57Speaker 05

  is so interesting. Here's a quote from DARPA that the DARPA director said when I was reporting that book, which is, "Here at DARPA, we're where science fiction becomes science fact." Right? So you're making me think.

• 2:40:17Speaker 05

  That site is like a perfect place for like a science fiction novel. Or dot, dot, dot.

• 2:40:26Speaker 05

  Because then when you begin to look at it and archaeologists are studying it, you realize there is scientific fact here. And how do you reverse engineer the truth about that? What it is?

• 2:40:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:37Speaker 05

  I think only with people having eyes on it. Which is why I think you and I both appreciate all these different ideas that people bring to the table. You don't have to agree with all of them, but they certainly, anything that gets my mind going, I consider of value.

• 2:40:55Shawn Ryan?

  Me too, me too. It kind of, it kind of, I don't understand people to just shut it off. You know, it's like we were talking about at the beginning. They're, they're, they

• 2:41:09Shawn Ryan?

  people get too into

• 2:41:13Shawn Ryan?

  political figures, their side of things. It's, it's, it's, people are just too one sided. And I don't know, I don't know why there are not more critical thinkers. But, um, but, uh, I love talking to you about this stuff, by the way. This is great conversation.

• 2:41:32Speaker 05

  You know, this is what it makes me think about, and I'm really going to go on a tangent here. It makes me think about what hill do you want to die on? Right? So, so can I tangent here?

• 2:41:42Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:41:43Speaker 05

  So I personally think the more

• 2:41:49Speaker 05

  different kinds of people you can talk to, the more interesting ideas you can hold in your brain, the more flexible you can be in your thinking. And then

• 2:42:02Speaker 05

  the more amicable you are, right? So the more, the more, more welcoming you are to different kinds of people. And so you just said like, what hill, what hill are you going to die on? Right? What, why do people get so set in their ways? And I'm just jumping tangent here, but at the hotel where I'm staying, here I am in Tennessee. I haven't been here since I was 20 years old. And I'm, I look at the geology a lot of places. And outside the window of the hotel, there's like, I didn't realize Tennessee had so many hills. Okay? And

• 2:42:38Speaker 05

  That concept, I immediately had this flashback to Billy Waugh. Okay, because the concept of what hill are you gonna die on comes from Vietnam. At least according to Waugh. Did you know this?

• 2:42:50Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't.

• 2:42:51Speaker 05

  Okay, and I didn't either until he told me, but I went with Billy Waugh back to Vietnam. We were gonna go to Caeson. I want, do you know about Caeson?

• 2:43:00Shawn Ryan?

  I don't.

• 2:43:01Speaker 05

  Okay, Caeson is like, it's like the equivalent of Fallujah.

• 2:43:05Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:05Speaker 05

  In the Vietnam War. I mean, it was, it was the, it was, the, the fight for Caeson as a marine base was just, it's astounding how important that place was because it was the closest to North Vietnam. And what happened there and the books that have, it's just so tragic to me that it's like completely lost to history, but it was this incredibly important base. All kinds of Americans died there. Billy Waugh and I went back there because that's where his, he was with a unit called MACV SOG, which is kind of the precursor to ground branch, really. It was Special Activities Division.

• 2:43:45Speaker 05

  And they had a base underground, a base beneath the base, surrounded by concertina wild. That's how classified MACV SOG missions were because they were the cross-border missions into Laos. And we go back to Caeson and we were in a little hotel, just like, like not that far from the hotel I'm staying in. And there I am, standing with Billy Waugh, looking out the window at these hills, not unlike the hills in Tennessee. And that's when he explained to me, you know where the expression, what hill are you gonna die on comes from?

• 2:44:22Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:44:23Speaker 05

  And he, I'm like, no, tell me. And that hill, and now if you look up anything about Vietnam, and for your older listeners, they're sitting there going, uh huh, uh huh. I mean, the expression, let's take that hill. And it's so powerful and so important and so tragic at the same time, because that is what was being done. All these American boys, these young soldiers, Billy was an old soldier. I mean, by then, he was, Billy was different. He was the guy who raised his hand and said, send me, you know. But so many of these young kids that were sent to war died taking the hill.

• 2:45:05Speaker 05

  It was like the defense department was like, "We need that hill." And in Kason, you could see them out the window. You could just see the hills. And it makes, and then I think, when I was studying the War on Terror and writing about it, you know, and I think about that with like, the people I've interviewed who so many of their friends died, you know, essentially taking a hill, not a hill, but figuratively.

• 2:45:29Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:45:29Speaker 05

  And then here we are talking about the same idea, which is like, "What hill are you gonna die on?" You know? "Why is it so important to be right about an idea which you only know some of?"

• 2:45:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. Let's take another break. When we come back, I'd like to talk a little bit about global strategy with nuclear warfare. Sound good?

• 2:46:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, anything you want.

• 2:46:04Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:46:46Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:47:00Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:47:42Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:48:26Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Annie, we're back from the break. We're going to get into some world strategy when it comes to nuclear warfare. So we've kind of talked about if North Korea sends nuclear warheads to the US, US returns, they have to fly over Russia, Russia fires on us, pretty much automatically, it sounds like. What about the other, what, six nations that have this type of capability? What are they going to do?

• 2:49:01Speaker 05

  So, the scenario I write takes place in 72 minutes. When the EMP nuclear weapon goes off earlier than that, that was there all along, launched into space by North Korea disguised as a radio satellite, it takes out the entire grid. That's what an EMP...

• 2:49:25Speaker 05

  Exploded 300 miles over the center of the country would do. It's just a massive failure of, it's a colossal failure of everything electric. And so, in essence, the ability to understand what anyone is doing outside what you can physically see disappears. So for that reason,

• 2:49:51Speaker 05

  we, that's where the scenario ends, other than nuclear winter. Meaning, what did China do? What did India and Pakistan do? I don't know. But it was done specifically for that idea that continues to interest me is, how did man become civilized?

• 2:50:13Speaker 05

  How did we go from, how did we figure out how to write? You know, we only know so much about history. Back to where people started writing it down. It's just guesswork before then. Archaeological interpretation. So man, you know, 5,000 B.C. figures out how to write. That wasn't that, so we've had a 7,000 year run of history.

• 2:50:40Speaker 05

  And once all electronics cease, in the world in which we live today, just the information goes. All, everything on your computer is gone. Who writes longhand anymore besides me and a couple of others?

• 2:50:57Shawn Ryan?

  Not very many people.

• 2:50:58Speaker 05

  Not very many people.

• 2:51:01Speaker 05

  So it's the end of civilization. It's the end of history, meaning the ability to report what happened.

• 2:51:10Speaker 05

  That's for that same reason, I don't get into the geopolitics in my book, in the scenario of why it happens. Many books have been written about that. The geopolitical maneuvering, China, the long game, that, you know, the great powers, all of that. That's been written by many people and it's very interesting to think about. But it's not part of this book. This book is, here's what happens once the missile launches.

• 2:51:37Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:51:39Shawn Ryan?

  Did any of your sources start to tangent into that by chance?

• 2:51:45Speaker 05

  Interestingly, not.

• 2:51:46Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 2:51:47Speaker 05

  Interestingly, not. No, I mean, we just kept the focus. You only have so much time with a source, you know, and you might want to just pull them back in. There were, there were reasons to think about that in terms of, my other books, for sure. Usually, it's about how did we deter the Soviet Union, right? The whole, the CIA's paramilitary, which you know about from direct personal experience, was set up to counter the vicious activities of the Soviet Union as if they were trying, whatever they were doing, it was trying to weaken the United States and then attack us with nuclear weapons. So I've, I've looked at it from all these different angles.

• 2:52:28Speaker 05

  But in, in this book, it's just game on, then what happens?

• 2:52:34Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. And you, you picked, you picked North Korea because?

• 2:52:42Speaker 05

  Because Garland made me think about this idea of a mad king, the sort of madman with a nuclear arsenal, which, I mean, I think your reference to suicide bombers is, and it's a reason why most people in the West would tell you that Iran should not, never have a nuclear bomb. I mean, the fundamentals of their, of their governance is, you know, religion-based, and their ideas about the, the end of the world are frightening. I mean, they are very apocalyptic.

• 2:53:27Speaker 05

  They are very apocalyptic in their thinking. Like, the apocalypse is fine. That's not someone you want with a nuclear arsenal.

• 2:53:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, no kidding.

• 2:53:39Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know how many, how many nuclear warheads the, the other six countries have? How many does India have?

• 2:53:47Speaker 05

  And, and also just to, just to like shout out to anyone who wants to nerd out on this is that there's an organization led by a guy called Hans Christiansen. He writes the Nuclear Notebook with a team of people. Matt Corda, Ileana Reynolds. And that's inside the Federation of American Scientists. And they keep track of the nuclear warheads to the best of their ability, based on what is transparent. That's why they change every year. So they write these long monographs, which are profoundly important to people like me.

• 2:54:30Speaker 05

  Who has what, where, what we know about them and why. Really important to understand the system of systems we're up against. So my information comes from them. And so China, last year was reported to have 400 nuclear weapons. This year they have 500. That is deeply concerning. The Defense Department believes that in the next 10 years, China will have 1,500. That's deeply concerning. Russia is not building new nuclear weapons allegedly. Neither are we.

• 2:55:12Speaker 05

  India and Pakistan are said to have, or understood to have about 165, I think it is each. But when you really drill down on it, you realize that we don't really know. The transparency from them is limited. And how much intelligence the agency has on it is anyone's guess.

• 2:55:38Shawn Ryan?

  What about our allies? What about UK and France?

• 2:55:42Speaker 05

  UK, I believe, has about 200. And I'm forgetting the exact number of France right now. But the UK is interesting because they have reduced their weapons systems down to only submarines.

• 2:55:59Speaker 05

  Which is really interesting. A lot of disarmament advocates believe that the United States, for safety and security reasons, should get rid of the ICBMs. That they're just too dangerous. That the nuclear armed, nuclear powered submarines, they have enough capacity to end civilization in a single submarine. We have 14 of them.

• 2:56:24Speaker 05

  So why do you need all of the other equipment? Well, you can get into that whole deterrent spin. But that is a legitimate point, that the ICBMs are dangerous. The ICBMs are the one also that could be misinterpreted as coming over the pole. You know, the sub-launched ballistic missiles can land on a target in under 10 minutes. There's a document that I located in a budget request from the Pentagon, asking for more money from Congress. And one of the reasons they ask for more money has to do with the threats from the submarines that are owned by China and Russia.

• 2:57:08Speaker 05

  And I had never seen this map before. And I reprinted in the book so that people do not take my word for it. They're like, can say, "Holy wow." You can't tell where a submarine is moving in real time. They're stealthy. As Admiral Connor told me, he was the former commander of the nuclear subforces for the United States. He said to me, "Annie, it's easier to find a grapefruit-sized object in space than it is to find a nuclear submarine under the sea."

• 2:57:43Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 2:57:44Speaker 05

  That's how stealthy. That's from the man who ran the program. Okay? So these are not called "handmaidens of the apocalypse" for nothing.

• 2:57:57Speaker 05

  They can really do everything that you would never want to have happen. So why do we need the ICBMs? Why do we need the bombers? The bombers aren't even going to get to the targets in time. I learned from the bomber pilots. They have a multi-hour trip. The whole scenario ends in 72 minutes.

• 2:58:19Speaker 05

  That, you could say, has to do with posturing, has to do with the perception of deterrence, and has to do with the military-industrial complex.

• 2:58:29Speaker 05

  Which is, I'm not talking about fighter jets for conventional warfare. I'm just talking about the B-52s and the B-2s that carry our 66 nuclear-capable bombers. And they're very threatening, you know? Whenever we want North Korea to know we mean business, we do like drills over the Korean Peninsula.

• 2:58:51Speaker 05

  I mean, is that agitating? Or is it?

• 2:58:56Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 2:59:01Shawn Ryan?

  I think it just, it lets them know we're watching. And we've got our eye on them.

• 2:59:08Shawn Ryan?

  Could be taken as a threat, but...

• 2:59:11Shawn Ryan?

  And it probably is. But I don't, I mean...

• 2:59:16Speaker 05

  The leader of North Korea recently said, "America has a sinister intention to provoke nuclear war."

• 2:59:25Speaker 05

  When I hear or read that, and then I think about the UN Secretary General saying, "We're one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear arm." Again, it's the word "miscalculation" that troubles me. That's what the scenario is built upon. Because the miscalculation can't be undone in the same way that the ballistic missile can't be recalled. Once it sparks, it's fire and dry grass.

• 2:59:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:58Shawn Ryan?

  Man, it's, uh... I would love to dive into it. I don't know how it would go, but I would love to. I mean, especially with, with BRICS. Are you familiar with BRICS? Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. It's a, it's basically, it's like the counterpart to NATO. And...

• 3:00:24Shawn Ryan?

  India, Russia, China. They're all in there, you know? And, uh...

• 3:00:34Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like a nuclear attack would be...

• 3:00:44Shawn Ryan?

  Could turn into an alliance against us. Instead of just one country and then a misunderstanding. You know, I feel like China would probably be in there as well.

• 3:00:57Speaker 05

  One of the...

• 3:00:59Shawn Ryan?

  And Pakistan.

• 3:01:00Speaker 05

  One of the more, sort of, keeps you up at night things to consider is that... And again, this is just from interviews I did where we did kind of discuss the geopolitical ideas about things, is that Russia has thought about nuclear weapons for a long time. Their command and control has been in place since 1949, when they got the bomb. The countries that have newer nuclear weapons do not have that same long lens of history. And if you also consider

• 3:01:41Speaker 05

  what I was told about the knowledge depth of the American president on nuclear war, should it happen? And you consider if that's the same for the leaders of some of these other nuclear armed nations that are, you know, not reliable. Then you have another problem where you have somebody actually thinking, like you just said, like a nuclear war, a nuclear strike could... instead of realizing you can't ever have a nuclear war because it would end in Armageddon. Now, before the Ukraine war, I would have told you that the president of Russia knew that and would never threaten that way.

• 3:02:25Speaker 05

  So the nuclear threats coming from Putin are so alarming to someone like me.

• 3:02:33Speaker 05

  But then again, they began with the US president, former president, Trump, talking that way with North... So we're into a dangerous rhetoric that didn't exist.

• 3:02:47Speaker 05

  Ten years ago.

• 3:02:47Shawn Ryan?

  So the US set the precedent.

• 3:02:50Speaker 05

  I believe so.

• 3:02:50Shawn Ryan?

  To bring up nuclear war.

• 3:02:51Speaker 05

  I believe so.

• 3:02:52Shawn Ryan?

  And now, now it's spreading.

• 3:02:55Speaker 05

  Now it's spreading. And nuclear threats, nuclear saber rattling, is so dangerous because it somehow minimizes, or rather, it maximizes the possibility that, eh, right? And that people are talking about tactical nuclear weapons. I mean, shall I like, give you like the, do you know the difference between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons to listeners?

• 3:03:25Shawn Ryan?

  Go ahead.

• 3:03:27Speaker 05

  Should I? I mean, in a nutshell, a tactical nuclear weapon is a battlefield weapon. It's just a bigger bomb. But not just, because it's nuclear. We, in the Cold War, we were building tactical weapons like they were going out of style. And we've pulled back entirely from that to only having this leading concept of strategic nu— strategic nuclear weapons is like a euphemism for ballistic missiles. And then our bombers carry, you know, gravity bombs. But the tactical nuclear weapons that Putin keeps threatening potential use of, or that he moved into Belarus recently,

• 3:04:10Speaker 05

  that's like such a, that's like moving the red line in the sand to a dramatic new position, which is saying, this could be a possibility. And I can only imagine what the National Security Council must be going, the gymnastics they must be doing to try to figure out how to position themselves against this kind of rhetoric.

• 3:04:38Shawn Ryan?

  Scary, scary stuff. Scary stuff. Another tangent.

• 3:04:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:04:43Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think, why do you think we are seeing so much UFO activity around nuclear sites?

• 3:04:54Speaker 05

  Well, I was gonna say, what I was gonna say is we're on such a dark topic. Maybe we should talk about UFOs.

• 3:05:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, right.

• 3:05:03Speaker 05

  Which is, which may answer that question. I mean—

• 3:05:11Speaker 05

  How do I answer this in an interesting, informative way? I mean, I love narrative. I love stories. I love storytelling. I love talking. It's how people tell each other stories to communicate. You have to have an interesting story to be able to grab somebody's attention and talk about them. And UFOs are so interesting, the idea that these spaceships would carry people from outer space to us. What could be more interesting than that?

• 3:05:50Speaker 05

  So the idea of UFOs, to my eye, has been around forever, as long as man has been writing history, or before he was writing history. When I was writing the book Phenomena, I interviewed Jacques Vallée, who is perhaps the world's leading ufologist. And he wrote this amazing book, which I have a copy of, like a hardcover book with beautiful illustrations in it, that takes the reader through some of the oldest images in art history.

• 3:06:27Speaker 05

  And Jacques has curated them all to show UFOs, the idea of UFOs, throughout recorded history. It's always been there. The nuclear thing is interesting. I do know that a theory has developed, a narrative around this idea that, you know, aliens or people from outer space were somehow concerned that we invented this weapon that could end civilization and they therefore came to aid, or help, or make themselves noticed. I mean, it's an interesting narrative. It is an interesting narrative.

• 3:07:12Speaker 05

  All different kinds of people have different things to add to that narrative, including Jacques Vallée, including Hal Puthoff, including a lot of these people who are leaders in that. In the field, my lens of UFOs comes from, very specifically from sources I have worked with, who have a different take on that, who, who see that as part of a strategic deception campaign. Should I give you a little more detail? Yes, please. So, the early book I wrote, the first book I wrote, Area 51, is about a CIA

• 3:07:53Speaker 05

  base in the middle of the Nevada desert, inside the Nevada test and training range where we set off nuclear weapons. Did you know this? I did. Okay. A lot, I mean, people know that now, and it's great. And then, that base is inside an even bigger test and training range where pilots fly, out of Nellis. But in the 50s, Area 51 was specifically set up by the CIA to develop the U-2 spy plane, which was this high-flying aircraft, 70,000 feet up, it flew. I mean, in 1950, that is just, nothing short of a miracle. It was out of the range of Russian surface-to-air missiles.

• 3:08:36Speaker 05

  For Area 51, I got to interview the guys who built that airplane, from scratch, literally. It did not come with a manual. They built it. I interviewed the pilots who flew it, flew it over the Soviet Union, flew it over, you know, all kinds of places. And it was so secret, that Eisenhower knew about it, the director of the CIA, and the guys at Area 51, working on it. That's it. That's it. It was like, as, because it needed to be secret, because if the Russians knew about it, they'd shoot it down, which they ended up doing, with Gary Powers, in 1960. So, the CIA knew it was inevitable that it would get shot down, but they were just playing

• 3:09:19Speaker 05

  with fire, until it did. And, but the point of all this is when, when that was flying, it was mistaken for a UFO. Think about something flying 70,000 feet up, people didn't know, airplanes fly at 25,000 feet-ish.

• 3:09:38Speaker 05

  Imagine you're somebody that looks up and also the U2 has these incredibly long wings. So it just looks like a flying cross. And the reflection of it, um, it looks like a UFO because it's not where it's supposed to be.

• 3:09:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, could you even see it 70,000 feet?

• 3:09:56Speaker 05

  You could. And people did.

• 3:09:58Shawn Ryan?

  You could tell it was a cross?

• 3:09:59Speaker 05

  Well, it just, they didn't know what it was.

• 3:10:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:02Speaker 05

  But the CIA learned about that and it was like an, oh shit, moment. You know, our project's going to become busted open, the public's going to know about it. And people started writing to their congressman, I have seen these letters, declassified from the CIA. You know, um, we're really concerned there's a UFO over their state. And then the CIA decided to use this as part of a strategic deception campaign. Well, let's goose this idea that there are UFOs. Because it's going to hide its cover for the, for the actual U2. Does that mean that every UFO, or every UFO sighting is a U2? Of course not.

• 3:10:42Speaker 05

  But when you look at that as a fact, it becomes interesting in the, in the narrative. When the CIA, when the CIA built the follow-on plane, which was called the A-12 Oxcart. So, did you ever see any of the X-Men movies?

• 3:10:56Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:10:57Speaker 05

  Okay, so you know that plane they fly?

• 3:10:58Shawn Ryan?

  I do.

• 3:10:59Speaker 05

  Right, so that's the SR-71.

• 3:11:01Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:11:01Speaker 05

  That's the Air Force version of it, it's a two-seater. The CIA precursor plane, which was totally secret, not declassified till, I don't know, 20, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. It was a one-seater, it had a CIA pilot in it. They flew it out at Area 51. Uh, it went Mach 3 something in 1960. 2,300 miles an hour at 90,000 feet.

• 3:11:30Speaker 05

  Okay, in 1960, think of what a refrigerator looked like in 1960. Okay, so this was like technology that no one could even comprehend. And they had to keep it secret. And in my interviews with Colonel Slater, who was in charge of the whole program, he took me through the exact details of like people seeing the plane, even in a commercial airplane. The example he gave me was a group of people in a, I think it was an American Airlines flight, saw the OX cart as it was coming down from 90,000 feet to try to land at Area 51. And they, and they, they saw it.

• 3:12:05Speaker 05

  And they all thought they saw UFOs. And Slater told me the story and showed me some documentation of the FBI meeting the plane in Los Angeles when it landed, saying like, "You did not see a UFO. You must sign this disclosure paper, saying you will never share that you saw a UFO."

• 3:12:27Speaker 05

  So it built this mystique in, I mean, if you, if, if the FBI shows up and said, "You did not see that UFO."

• 3:12:36Shawn Ryan?

  Who were they doing this to?

• 3:12:38Speaker 05

  The civilians on the American airline.

• 3:12:41Speaker 05

  They had them all signed. So the point of this is the CIA would use the sort of mythology of a UFO in its, to help cover the programs that it's trying to hide.

• 3:12:54Shawn Ryan?

  So was the FBI in on it?

• 3:12:57Speaker 05

  The FBI was only, the FBI did not know. Good question. The FBI did not know about the A-12 OX cart. The FBI was told, "Make all those people sign those nondisclosures and tell them they didn't see a UFO."

• 3:13:11Speaker 05

  So then you have all these FBI agents now who are prone to thinking, "That was a UFO." Again, does it mean all UFO sightings are the A-12 OX cart, which doesn't fly anymore? Of course not.

• 3:13:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:24Speaker 05

  But if you have that information, I think you can think more on balance. For me.

• 3:13:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, and the deception that the government's capable of.

• 3:13:34Speaker 05

  And does. And also, when you're talking about aircraft and airspace, it's very difficult for me to accept that our sacredly guarded airspace is regularly intruded by craft that somebody at the Defense Department doesn't know what it is. I just have trouble believing that, knowing, having written the books that I've written about high-performance aircraft.

• 3:14:04Speaker 05

  But I don't even bother getting into this argument with, it's not an argument, but this discussion with the people who really believe,

• 3:14:15Speaker 05

  you know, that these are UAPs, the new term which I'm fascinated by.

• 3:14:22Shawn Ryan?

  Have you, have you looked into Skinwalker Ranch at all by chance?

• 3:14:26Speaker 05

  I mean, I've interviewed all the guys who are at Skinwalker. Not all of them, but many of them. This is before, not the current situation, but this is when Bigelow owned it. And the original, original team that was there, that claimed to have seen the portals and the werewolves and the, and by the way, these are PhDs with DARPA contracts telling me all this. It's just hard for my brain to conceptualize that, other than their perception. Which is what we were talking about at break.

• 3:15:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yep, yep, yep. With that being said, now, you know, now they see all these radiation spikes, right as these UAPs, UFOs, these phenomenons happen. Have you looked into that at all?

• 3:15:17Speaker 05

  Well, I haven't, because I would say, my first thing would be like, who's they? And where are these radiation spike documents coming from? So when I, in other words, when I worked with all the Bigelow, the people that were at the Skinwalker Ranch when it was Bigelow, it was always an internal situation, and it was the documents are Bigelow's and you can't look at them because they're in his possession. So it seemed like a closed loop. But I do want to say, and we were talking about this at break, that the analogy that I think of that, of all of this, so that it's clear that I'm not just dismissively Self-righteous, which I would never want to be. I'm much more curious than that. But the analogy I used was what I told you about hearing things, right?

• 3:16:00Speaker 05

  Like, because I believe this is an issue of perception. What you can see. You know, you think of some people being colorblind. What I see is so different than what they see. Then I think of, as I told you before, like, sometimes, you know, we, you have like, you hear a high pitched frequency and maybe it's because you were listening to your ear pods too long, or you were, you know, in an airplane. And so you suddenly say to someone, "Do you hear that?" Because it's, you know, you hear, you actually hear something.

• 3:16:33Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 3:16:34Speaker 05

  Is that in your brain? Is that in your perception? Is that in the environment? Perhaps when people see UAPs, they are seeing them and others aren't. For me, that's my current position on how I think about that.

• 3:16:56Shawn Ryan?

  So are you, are you saying it originates in the mind?

• 3:17:01Speaker 05

  I don't, I do not have the answer. I'm just curious about what it might be. Because, and I'm also, the reason why it's really interesting is millions of people are interested in this. You, we talked about this before. It's, I mean, who wants to talk about nuclear holocaust? When you can talk about possible aliens among us. Right?

• 3:17:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:17:31Speaker 05

  But they don't have to cancel one another out.

• 3:17:34Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's an, it's interesting, what I'm, I mean, it's interesting because now even a lot of what astrophysicists are starting to say that the, you know, the expansive universe and

• 3:17:47Shawn Ryan?

  no matter how far out we look.

• 3:17:53Shawn Ryan?

  Something will be there.

• 3:17:54Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:17:55Shawn Ryan?

  And, and I think what they're alluding to is that our minds are creating the unseeable universe.

• 3:18:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, you had said when we were discussing earlier, like, is it also have something to do with

• 3:18:13Speaker 05

  people's perception of religion or spirituality? And what comes to mind on that is one of my favorite thinkers, Carl Jung. Have you ever read any Jung?

• 3:18:21Shawn Ryan?

  I haven't.

• 3:18:22Speaker 05

  Oh, my goodness. I mean, he was just a, he was so interested in consciousness and, and in, he's almost the, like, the, I don't want to say the inventor, but he did a lot of work on archetypes, what archetypes mean. You know, the wizard, the priest, the king, the queen, the witch, archetypes of humans and symbols. And he wrote all about this. He wrote a book on UFOs and that they, that UFOs were the product, the modern day UFOs were the product of people's fear of nuclear annihilation. Very interesting book.

• 3:19:05Speaker 05

  But Jung and Pauli, a Nobel laureate, I'm forgetting his first name. They were friends and they would have a lot of discussions about the phenomena of UFOs. And I write about this in my phenomena book because Pauli had this crazy quality about him that he would go, walk into places and somehow disturb the electronics. Okay, so he was like a Nobel laureate physicist.

• 3:19:38Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:19:39Speaker 05

  But the cameras would shut off. Things would fall over. This is documented.

• 3:19:44Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 3:19:46Speaker 05

  Read, read the book. You'll love this part of it. And he couldn't explain why. But it was known and notable. And so he had some kind of different energy going on, or however you want to interpret it. But this led to these discussions between Jung and Pauli about whether or not ESP was real. Because of course ESP, extrasensory perception, and UFOs often get linked together. And their takeaway, one of their takeaways was that whenever you're talking about it or thinking about it, you have to think about the age that you are in when you are thinking about it having to do with technology.

• 3:20:30Speaker 05

  So again, diluting that down, it's almost like my takeaway is they were saying, there's the narrative of it, and then there's the technology that exists in the present day. And then you can begin to maybe think more deeply about the whole issue.

• 3:20:52Speaker 05

  Without getting the answer.

• 3:20:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Fascinating stuff. Let's get back to nukes. So when you went to Brussels, I would like to talk about your discussions there and how you came up, how you came up on their radar.

• 3:21:11Shawn Ryan?

  Actually, let me, let's go further. Who were you? What was this event that you were speaking at?

• 3:21:19Speaker 05

  It was a nuclear expo put together in Brussels. The host was the ICRC, the International Committee for the Red Cross, the Norwegian Red Cross, the Belgian Red Cross, and the Norwegian People's AIDS. There were many doctors, physicians, who were there as well. Because the emphasis of the symposium was on what nuclear weapons do to the human body.

• 3:21:51Speaker 05

  How horrific of a weapon it is, not just to warfighters, who are, you know, sign up for war or are drafted into war, who are fighting a war, hopefully away from the civilian population. But rather, that nuclear weapons kill millions of civilians indiscriminately. And their job, these organizations, these aid organizations, is to put the emphasis on that so that they can have more people interested and kind of open the pathway to why regular people like you and me should be thinking about nuclear weapons. And it shouldn't just be left to the military or the geopolitical thinkers.

• 3:22:35Speaker 05

  And because it's in Brussels, the members of the European Parliament were invited. And I took questions from some of them. Some of us, many of us did. So these organizations have been hard at work for decades on this issue. And they don't want it to go away.

• 3:22:54Shawn Ryan?

  What were some of the most relevant questions, in your opinion, that you were asked?

• 3:23:00Speaker 05

  I mean, it was a day-long, you know, there were panels. There were, I was the keynote speaker. It was an incredible honor. The other main speaker was an 80-year-old woman who was a hubakusha. I'm not saying the word right, but that is a survivor of, if you're a survivor of the Nagasaki or the Hiroshima bombing.

• 3:23:22Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:23:22Speaker 05

  She was 80 years old. And she was one year and 10 months old when Nagasaki destroyed her city. And she survived.

• 3:23:31Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:23:33Speaker 05

  So that gives you some context of who I was with. But back up for a second, because you asked me how I wound up there, because this might be interesting. I was, the book published in the end of March. And I was doing a book event at a bookstore in Washington, DC called Politics and Prose. And normally, authors just sign books and you maybe give a little talk. But for this event, I had asked two colleagues to participate. One was John Wolfthol, who was the National Security Advisor to President Obama. And the other was Lieutenant General Charles Moore, who just retired as the Deputy Commander of Cyber Command.

• 3:24:14Speaker 05

  And before that, he was in the Pentagon, running the J3, maybe it was the J2, you know, so, reporting directly to the Joint Chiefs. And before that, he was running nuclear war scenarios for NORAD. And so, you could say that Obama's, you know, just National Security Advisor, was on the side of kind of disarmament. And you could say that General Moore was on the side of military nuclear command and control, because that's the truth. So these are maybe even two people that don't normally have a conversation with one another.

• 3:24:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:53Speaker 05

  They might consider themselves on different sides of the aisle. But again, one of my great, hopefully the good kind of pride of my reporting, is that I talk to both sides, I talk to everybody. And in fact, want them at my book signings to have a conversation. And we had this profound conversation. It was so excellent. It's on tape. And the audience was filled, I mean, there was standing room only. And there were two really interesting people in that audience. I mean, everybody was interesting. All the questions were interesting. But the director of Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory was in, the current director was in the audience.

• 3:25:33Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 3:25:34Speaker 05

  And he came up to me afterwards and asked me if I would speak at the lab. And I said, of course. And he said, many people at the lab, designing the, you know, nuclear future, don't know what's in my book. They're under-five-year employees at the lab. I mean, that's astonishing. Super grateful for his candor about that. And another person that was in the audience was with NTI, which is a disarmament group that is affiliated with the Nuke Expo. And I think between the two of them, that's how I wound up at the Nuke Expo. So you just show up and do your book signings, and you never know what can come of it.

• 3:26:19Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow. When are you going to speak at Los Alamos?

• 3:26:23Speaker 05

  It hasn't been arranged yet, but I'm really intrigued by that. And, you know, here's another thing. I know you're not a big fan of Hollywood necessarily, right? I will convert you yet.

• 3:26:37Speaker 05

  I know you trained Keanu shooting for John Wick, so that's another story. Then we roll reversal and I ask you questions. So films Hollywood, the Oppenheimer movie, which you may or may not have seen. It was such a billion-dollar success around the world. And from what I understand from my sources at Los Alamos, it profoundly impacted Los Alamos. Meaning, I've been reporting on nuclear weapons for, what, 15 years now? And Los Alamos has always been like this with me. I've been there, I've been to their library, their archives. But they'd always been like this. As if the journalist is somehow the opponent.

• 3:27:22Speaker 05

  As if Joe or Jane Public is somehow the opponent. And Oppenheimer seems to have shifted that. Suddenly, Los Alamos, at least the historian there, Glenn McDuff, shared with me, has gotten, like, softer. They were inundated with questions about the lab after the Oppenheimer film by regular people wanting to know things. And they responded with a kind of openness and transparency that if you're a journalist, you think is a great thing. And I think that effect may have also carried up to the top. And that's why the director was at my book signing. As opposed to...

• 3:28:05Shawn Ryan?

  I'm excited for you. That's gonna be really cool.

• 3:28:09Speaker 05

  We're kind of all on the same page when you really think about it. Like, no one should be for nuclear war. The question is, should no one be for nuclear weapons?

• 3:28:26Shawn Ryan?

  What are some questions I should be asking you that I haven't asked yet?

• 3:28:35Speaker 05

  I mean, I think it's just so interesting that we get to have a conversation when we kind of go back and forth and down the rabbit holes. Because I think that's where the more interesting thoughts happen, you know? And also the takeaways, you know? Sometimes you go away from a conversation a little bit changed about an idea, or excited to explore a new idea, you know? I also think it's interesting that we have probably a number of colleagues in common, but since those worlds are classified, I only know their code names and you only know their code names.

• 3:29:16Shawn Ryan?

  Different code names.

• 3:29:18Speaker 05

  And they're different.

• 3:29:19Shawn Ryan?

  You might know their real name, I might know the code name. I might know the real name.

• 3:29:22Speaker 05

  Or vice versa.

• 3:29:23Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, yeah, that's a, that's just a part of living in that world, you know? It's, um, it gets a little confusing.

• 3:29:32Speaker 05

  But how do you, this is back to the Eisenhower question. I mean, what is your take on how you balance, you know, liberty and defense? And if you parse out liberty, you want security, you want times of peace, you don't want war. You know, I often think about the president's options, you know? He has diplomacy, that's his first option. He has war. And then the third option is covert action, which you were involved in, which I've written about. So the idea would be, you know, to be living in a permanent state of diplomacy. But that's not practical.

• 3:30:17Shawn Ryan?

  Uh-uh.

• 3:30:18Speaker 05

  How, how do you think one balances liberty and security?

• 3:30:27Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's a tough, tough question. But, I mean, I think it's definitely, constantly has to evolve because we gain enemies, we lose enemies, we gain allies, we lose allies. We, I mean, we, just as America, we have so many targets on our back. And we have so many enemies throughout the world, which, with a lot of them, I can't even blame them.

• 3:31:08Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I, on the show, we, you know, I talked to you this morning and we told you how this podcast kind of started and it was all former colleagues. And we dissect, I'm getting off on a tangent here, but we dissect, you know, are we the bad guys in some of these scenarios? And, you know, after, after 20-plus years of, you know, this generation's war, the GWAT, should we have been in Iraq? How would we have acted if, if, if we were invaded by a country? Would we have fought against the invading country?

• 3:31:52Shawn Ryan?

  And, and, you know, it opens up a really interesting discussion because a lot of people think that we, maybe, maybe we're not the good guys in all of these conflicts. And, but, back to your question, security, diplomacy, I mean, you, in my opinion, you have to take into account that we have a lot of enemies, whether we created them, whether they just hate us. That doesn't, that's another discussion, but...

• 3:32:30Shawn Ryan?

  With as much as we have going on, we have the world currency. We, I mean, we, we, we are the superpower. And I don't, as much as I would love to say, yep, we should all, we should get rid of our nuclear warheads, strive more towards peace. I just, I don't think that's a viable option because we're the world's superpower. We have a lot of targets on our back and, and we have to, we have to be able to show force.

• 3:33:09Shawn Ryan?

  We have to have people know, you know, somewhat what our capabilities might be. And that there will be repercussions if, if they launch anything at us. And as far as balancing that, man, it's, I don't know. I haven't thought about that.

• 3:33:33Speaker 05

  I, it's, when you say we have a lot of targets on our back, you know, it sends like a shiver up the spine because it's absolutely true. And when, just when you're thinking diplomacy is everything, you must always couple that with we are a target and there are enemies out there. I wonder, perhaps more than any other book I've written, this book has made me wonder about POTUS as a concept, not political, not him or him, as a concept, the president of the United States.

• 3:34:15Speaker 05

  Because an interesting thing happens when many presidents, this is, this speaks to your point of like, could we ever get rid of nukes? I don't know. And then we think of the deterrence gone. Many presidents go into office, and I mean many, like almost all the modern off, the modern presidents, learning a little bit about nuclear weapons before their debrief, their presidential debrief. And then you hear them say things like, I'm going to get rid of the launch on warning policy. It's inexcusably dangerous. So you, they hear things as a civilian.

• 3:34:54Speaker 05

  And then a mysterious thing happens. They get into office and they learn something

• 3:35:03Speaker 05

  that then you never hear from that. You never hear talk of that again. And I want to know what it is they hear.

• 3:35:14Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm. That's a great point. I mean.

• 3:35:21Speaker 05

  I sometimes feel like it's a metaphor for that has to do with the immigration crisis. Right. And again, not to politicize it, but like, I mean, let's just say a baseline that everyone could agree that illegal immigration is a bad thing because it's illegal and we are a nation of laws and you want to have rule of law. So that's all that, right? But as a concept, you hear the same thing. You hear presidents have really big ideas about immigration. And then, and they say certain things, they espouse certain things. I mean, president-elect or, you know, running for office candidates. And then they learn something and you never hear from it again.

• 3:36:04Speaker 05

  And I know that that has changed a little bit in the past few years because immigration has become a different issue. But you get the analogy, like, what is it that POTUS learns that we, the people, don't get to know about these issues on completely opposite size of the existential threat margin? Maybe or may, right? But kind of exist as equal threats.

• 3:36:39Speaker 05

  What do they learn and why can't we know that?

• 3:36:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, what information are they getting that that that changes their mind? Maybe it's not information, maybe it's money.

• 3:36:53Speaker 05

  And I have that same thought, meaning whatever information they're giving, they're getting is perhaps a moneyed piece of information. Meaning, a lot of money has gone into telling the president that, whatever that is.

• 3:37:10Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, back to, sorry.

• 3:37:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:37:13Shawn Ryan?

  I got this security versus diplomacy running through my mind. I mean, I think we kinda, I kinda talked about it a little bit at the beginning. And I think if you want to, because essentially, we're talking about no nukes worldwide.

• 3:37:29Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:37:30Shawn Ryan?

  Starting here.

• 3:37:31Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:37:34Shawn Ryan?

  I think the,

• 3:37:39Shawn Ryan?

  the only way I could see that happening is by influencing the military industrial complex companies with money to develop better defense systems, to develop the next generation weapon, maybe that is AI, I don't know. But, but you have to have something that defeats nuclear capabilities and/or something that's more powerful than a nuke to add to your arsenal. That doesn't necessarily need to be mass destruction. Maybe it's, I mean, it's, it's, I don't know what's possible. I'm not a physicist and I'm not an inventor.

• 3:38:22Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe we could get our buddy Chris Beck on here and he'll tell us. But, but you know, maybe it's, maybe it's some type of a laser weapon from space. Maybe, who knows? You know, but I think that's the only viable way that we could, we could essentially get rid of our nuclear program is, is by better, better defense systems that's, that, that is proven to work and a more capable weapon system that is, that, that.

• 3:38:54Shawn Ryan?

  You know, the

• 3:38:55Speaker 05

  And so what's interesting and problematic is at the end of that statement, which you just when you're thinking, that sounds, then you realize, wait a minute, now I'm caught in the nuclear deter, now I'm caught in the military industrial complex loop and the deterrence loop, which seems to be a moneyed, again, a loop that's of an empire of money, an empire of industry wants to exist as a paradox. The directed, the laser weapons, by the way, are a massive program at the Defense Department. They're called directed energy weapons.

• 3:39:32Speaker 05

  And when I was asking about that, like, why, what makes them more powerful? And I got a great answer, so I'm just going to share it with you because it's like, it seems so hard to comprehend sometimes, like laser weapons. But it was the inventor of the laser who shared this with me, Charles Towns, who died at the age of 99 and gave me his last interview at like age 97. Still clear as a bell. And speed. So a laser moves at the speed of light. So that even shortens the 33 minute ballistic window. You could have a laser weapon on the moon. And you're talking about less than a second.

• 3:40:17Speaker 05

  So, but then you have the problem, oh, laser weapons aren't any kind of solution for anything having to do with no nukes. It's just a whole different set of weapons for the military industrial complex to promote and build and then watch the other side promote and build. And so you have to have new systems. It's the self licking ice cream cone, as they call it at DARPA.

• 3:40:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:40:43Speaker 05

  So the no nukes idea, I really do think exists.

• 3:40:49Speaker 05

  And I'll end with, you know, I want to get this in because I was influenced by the nuke expo. I was influenced by meeting the physicians against nuclear weapons, by meeting people who survived an atomic bomb, and by hearing them talk about how this is possible to reduce nuclear weapons. And they use the word taboo. And they, and I thought that was interesting, me who loves narrative. It just, the simple, oh, right, biological weapons have become taboo. No one sits around and says like, our arsenal of bubonic plague weapons is better than your arsenal. And we need some more, and we need to update them,

• 3:41:34Speaker 05

  and we need better delivery systems, and faster. No one says that. They say, my God, a bubonic plague weapon? Are you insane? And what the doctors and the humanitarians are attempting to do, which is a very noble effort, is put taboo on nuclear weapons. Demonstrate how horrific they are to people. And then begin the reduction from all the nations. And they can say, ideally to zero. Perhaps the pragmatist would say, at some point, you, okay, maybe everybody keeps a few. Is the world going to end with a few

• 3:42:19Speaker 05

  nuclear weapons? Well, certainly not with the same assurity than with thousands of them.

• 3:42:26Shawn Ryan?

  How do you do that? How do you put, how do you label them taboo?

• 3:42:31Speaker 05

  How do you label them taboo?

• 3:42:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. How do you start that?

• 3:42:35Speaker 05

  I mean, listen, it was a great honor to have some of these people say to me, great job, thank you for writing the book. You just condensed down and made our job a little bit easier. Which is not what I intended. Me who was worried about fear mongering in air quotes, why I asked all of my sources. I mean, this book is frightening. People read it, the Amazon reviews are like, oh, my God, I read it in one sitting because I had to know how it end, how it ended. But then...

• 3:43:12Speaker 05

  On this idea of taboo, and so at the at the convention, I met a doctor named Dr. Carlos Umana.

• 3:43:20Speaker 05

  And he is part of the international, he's a part of a group of physicians that are working to get rid of nuclear weapons. And he himself was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. And he said to me that he and his colleagues were going to meet the Pope on May 10. And he asked me if I would inscribe a copy of Nuclear War: A Scenario for the Pope as a gift. So the Pope could read it. And in a condensed manner, understand what nuclear weapons do to people.

• 3:44:03Speaker 05

  And writing that out was pretty cool.

• 3:44:05Shawn Ryan?

  That is, that's incredible.

• 3:44:09Speaker 05

  So you don't know what will happen on your journey in life. If you just keep showing up.

• 3:44:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, no kidding. Well, wow, wow, is it, has that happened?

• 3:44:20Speaker 05

  May 10, they meet with him, but I did write the inscription, you know, to His Holiness, comma, Pope Francis.

• 3:44:31Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man, that is so cool. Congratulations.

• 3:44:35Speaker 05

  That's, you know, I had to Google that.

• 3:44:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:38Speaker 05

  What do you, how do you?

• 3:44:41Speaker 05

  Right? You can't know everything. I didn't know how to address the Pope.

• 3:44:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, wow, that is, uh, that's really cool. That is, that is, uh, that's something. Congratulations. That is

• 3:44:57Shawn Ryan?

  very cool.

• 3:45:00Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Annie, this is, uh, this has been a fascinating discussion. And, um, we were gonna dive into some more topics, but off camera,

• 3:45:12Shawn Ryan?

  I had expressed how much I love talking to you and how much I'm have, how I love this conversation. And I don't think it would do this interview justice to Try to compile some of your other work into this episode. And so we'll keep it at Nuclear War with a little bit of UFO stuff. And I can't wait to have you back.

• 3:45:37Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 3:45:38Shawn Ryan?

  Looking forward to that. So it was an honor to have you here.

• 3:45:41Speaker 05

  It was an honor to be here.

• 3:45:42Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 3:45:43Speaker 05

  What a show you have, and congratulations to you on the massive viewership, listenership, getting the word out, helping people to realize we're all so much more alike than different.

• 3:45:57Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. That means a lot. And so I can't wait to see you again. Your book, all your social, everything will be linked in the description. So everybody go buy Nuclear War: A Scenario. And Annie, I love this conversation. I love talking to you, and I can't wait to see you again.

• 3:46:16Speaker 05

  Thank you so much.