Most Replayed Moment: Here's What Happens When A Nuclear Bomb Drops! These Countries Will Be Safe!

Annie Jacobsen is an investigative journalist and bestselling author known for deep reporting on national security, military strategy, and the real-world mechanics of catastrophe. In today’s Moments episode, she breaks down, in sourced detail, what nuclear war would actually look like - minute by minute - after the first weapon hits. Annie also discusses why nuclear war isn’t inevitable - and how leadership, public pressure, and policy decisions can move the world away from escalation. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/o5WB6zSFTZb Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/CrgvazVFTZb Watch the Episodes On YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Annie Jacobsen: https://www.anniejacobsen.com/

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

• 0:04Steven Bartlett?

  If I was a fly on the wall, not that there would be a wall left, what would I, and I was looking at America or the UK after it had been struck by these nuclear bombs by thousands of Russian or North Korean nuclear weapons. What would I see, what would the visuals be in those minutes after the strike?

• 0:23Annie Jacobsen?

  I describe the first bomb in the scenario that strikes the Pentagon. It's a one-megaton thermonuclear bomb in painstaking horrific detail, all sourced from Defense Department documents, defense scientists who have worked for decades to describe precisely what happens to things and to humans, and it's horrifying. But on top of the initial flash of thermonuclear light, which is 180 million degrees, which catches everything on fire in a nine-mile diameter radius, on top of the bulldozing effect of the wind and all the buildings coming down, and more fires igniting more fires, on top of the radiation poisoning people to death in minutes and hours and days and weeks, if they happen to have survived,

• 1:08Annie Jacobsen?

  on top of all of that, each one of these fires creates a mega-fire that is 100 or more square miles. And so essentially, in essence, what do you see? Well, in the scenario at minute 72, 1,000 Russian nuclear weapons land on the United States. And so it just becomes a conflagration of fire. It's just fire, fires burning, fires, 100, 200 square mile fires burning. And then we move into nuclear winter. And that's sort of the denouement of the book, where I tell you about nuclear winter from the point of view of one of the original scientists

• 1:53Annie Jacobsen?

  who wrote that original nuclear winter paper with Carl Sagan back in 1983. And his name is Professor Brian June. And he's spent the decades since working with the state-of-the-art climate modeling systems that can now precisely tell us what nuclear winter will look like.

• 2:10Steven Bartlett?

  Because I've always thought, you know what? Nuclear war wouldn't be that bad if Russia launched 1,000 of their nuclear bombs at the United States and I was here in New York where I am now. I would die instantly, so I wouldn't really know what had happened. Is that true?

• 2:23Annie Jacobsen?

  I think you would want to die instantly. I mean, there's a quote from Nikita Khrushchev, the former premier of the Soviet Union, and he said, "After nuclear war, the survivors would envy the dead." Because there is, right? There is this sense of, if you survived, I mean, there is no more law and order. There is no more rule of law. There is no government. Craig Fugate made that very clear. The bunkers that the people in the military command and control centers would be in, let's say, the secret bunkers, not the ones that are targets that Russia's going to take out, that I write about in the book, but the smaller ones, those are going to only function for as long as there's gasoline

• 3:07Annie Jacobsen?

  to run the diesel and the diesel generators. And then those people are going to have to come out. And who's left? It's man returning to the most primal, most violent state as people fight over the tiny resources that remain. And by the way, they're all malnourished. Everybody's sick. And most people have lost everything and everyone they know. How's that going to feel?

• 3:38Steven Bartlett?

  It's going to feel, as you described, here on page 277. There are a thousand flashes of light superheating the air in each ground zero to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. A thousand fireballs, each more than a mile in diameter. A thousand steeply-fronted blast waves. A thousand walls of compressed air. A thousand American cities and towns where all engineered structures in five, six, or seven miles radius change physical shapes, collapse, and burn. A thousand cities and towns with molten asphalt streets. A thousand cities and towns with survivors impaled to death by flying debris. A thousand cities and towns filled with tens of millions of dead people, with tens of millions of unfortunate survivors suffering fatal third-degree burns.

• 4:23Steven Bartlett?

  People naked, tattered, bleeding, and suffocating. People who don't look or act like people anymore.

• 4:33Steven Bartlett?

  Across America and Europe, hundreds of millions of people are dead and dying, while hundreds of military aircraft fly circles in the air until they run out of fuel. I mean, that is some visual. How many people would be dead or dying, do you think, after those 72 minutes?

• 4:54Annie Jacobsen?

  Hundreds of millions of people die in the fireballs, no question. But the number that I think is very interesting to think about comes from Professor Toon and his team, who wrote a paper for Nature recently, 2022, and sort of updated nuclear winter idea based around food. And the number that they have is 5 billion people would be dead.

• 5:25Steven Bartlett?

  The population of the planet currently is, what, 8 billion?

• 5:27Annie Jacobsen?

  Yes.

• 5:28Steven Bartlett?

  So there'd be 3 billion people still alive.

• 5:32Steven Bartlett?

  Where shall I go to be one of the 3 billion? I was just in New Zealand and Australia.

• 5:38Annie Jacobsen?

  That's exactly where you'd go. Although, according to Toon, those are the only places that could actually sustain agriculture.

• 5:47Steven Bartlett?

  I was there two weeks ago, not even two weeks ago, it was maybe 10 days ago. I was in New Zealand and Australia. And at that time, I think Iran attacked Israel.

• 5:57Annie Jacobsen?

  Right, yes.

• 6:01Steven Bartlett?

  I was kind of happy.

• 6:02Annie Jacobsen?

  You were in the right place at the right time.

• 6:04Steven Bartlett?

  I was kind of happy for where I was located. And I was thinking, I actually remember talking to my friends and I pulled up a map. I was trying to see how far away I was from everything. I was thinking if, because World War III started trending on Twitter, I was thinking if it does break out now, I think I'm probably pretty well placed. Is that the place to be?

• 6:21Annie Jacobsen?

  That is, that is, according to Professor Toon. I mean, he was so generous with me. He shared a lot of his slide shows that he has for his students. And that is really pretty much what's left. I mean, because most of the world is, certainly the mid-latitudes would be covered in these, you know, sheets of ice, the freshwater bodies.

• 6:42Annie Jacobsen?

  Places like Iowa and Ukraine would be just snow for 10 years. And so agriculture would fail. And when agriculture fails, people just die. And on top of that, you have the radiation poisoning. Because the ozone layer will be so damaged and destroyed that you can't be outside in the sunlight. And so people will be forced to live underground. And so you have to imagine people living underground, fighting for food, everywhere except for in New Zealand and Australia. There was also another interesting detail that he shared with me.

• 7:24Annie Jacobsen?

  That, you know, 66 million years ago, an asteroid hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs and something like 70% of the known species. And Professor Toon compared nuclear war to that situation. And so when you really think about it, and again, this was also echoed by Craig Fugate, FEMA's director. You think about it, there's nothing we can do about an asteroid. At least not right now. And yet there is something. Nuclear war is a man-made threat.

• 8:05Annie Jacobsen?

  And therefore, it has to be a man-made solution.

• 8:10Steven Bartlett?

  What is the solution?

• 8:13Annie Jacobsen?

  I really believe that people motivate other people. It's like a fundamental truth, on the smallest scale and on the biggest scale. And so there's one person who is incredibly powerful, and that is the President of the United States. For better or for worse, it's just the way it is. And so in the same way that the President has presidential sole authority to start a nuclear war, the President also has a very powerful pen with which he can write executive orders, an EO. And the story I tell on the hopeful note goes like this. When I was in high school in 1983, there was an ABC TV movie called The Day After. And it showed a fictional war between the United States and then Soviet Russia.

• 8:58Annie Jacobsen?

  It was horrific and terrifying, okay? 100 million Americans watched it. 100 millions of Americans. It was like the third of the population. And I think it was half the population then. President Reagan was one of those Americans. He had a private screening at Camp David. His advisers told him not to watch it. He did watch it. Before that, President Reagan was a hawk. He was pro-nuclear weapons. His position was the more nuclear weapons, the better. He was the one putting nuclear weapons in space with the Star Wars program, the SDI program, okay?

• 9:38Annie Jacobsen?

  He couldn't have been more pro-deterrence supremacy. He saw the day after, and he changed his position. He wrote in his White House Journal that he became greatly depressed. His words. And he reached out to Gorbachev. And then they had a Reykjavik summit, a summit in Iceland, Reagan and Gorbachev. And through communication, right? Through both of them realizing this is madness, realizing what could happen, seeing the day after and realizing, my God, this cannot happen. And they famously issued a statement that said, a joint statement between the two

• 10:22Annie Jacobsen?

  of them, that said, "A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." And the result of the Reykjavik summit was that the world has gone from 70,000 nuclear warheads. That was the all-time high. Seventy thousand. Why do you need 70,000 nuclear warheads? That's what there were in 1986. And now, here we are, because of the reductions, because of the treaties, thanks to those two, 12,500 approximately nuclear warheads. That is the movement in the right direction. And it came from a dramatic story being told.

• 11:07Annie Jacobsen?

  And it came from the president taking action because people would not stand for this anymore. There were massive protests.

• 11:16Steven Bartlett?

  Do you believe we can ever get to zero?

• 11:18Annie Jacobsen?

  That is for the disarmament experts. I like to stay in my lane as a storyteller, as an investigative journalist. I like to give you the dramatic, fast read. And then pass the baton to those who have been working on that issue for decades. Because, boy, are they qualified. I just had the great fortune of being invited to Brussels, where I was part of a nuclear expo. And there were members of the European Parliament in the audience. And I, and there were all these disarmament people there. And I learned a lot about all of these groups. And they have the answer. And they are the ones that should be asked that question. And they are doing a lot to get us there.

• 12:04Steven Bartlett?

  I went on ChatGPT a couple of months ago. And I asked it, I said, could you play out a scenario where the world ends? Because an artificial intelligence basically gets leaked out of its, out of the computer that it was born out, born on. And the scenario that it played out involved nuclear war. Because halfway, I think it was in step three or four, it says that the AI basically takes control of the nuclear warheads, or at least some of them. And then it kind of launches them at other countries. And hearing ChatGPT say that, and it, and in step three or four, use nuclear weapons

• 12:46Steven Bartlett?

  as a way to kind of make the world extinct, it felt plausible.

• 12:50Annie Jacobsen?

  Okay, so I'm going to push back against that, which is by no means right. I'm not right, but we're just having a like sort of theoretical conversation here. ChatGPT is gathering its information, right? So I would argue that ChatGPT has got a lot of information from the Terminator movie.

• 13:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 13:05Annie Jacobsen?

  Okay, there is that in the zeitgeist of what happens. Then I want you to consider that the communication systems in nuclear command and control, which is actually nuclear command, control and communication, the, the ability for NC3 to communicate with the actual weapons is so profoundly classified that I don't have access to it. But I'm going to give this to you as an idea. What I do know and learned reporting nuclear war scenario is a fascinating detail that stands as an analogy, at least for me, which is how analog our ballistic missile systems are because of the exact

• 13:46Annie Jacobsen?

  Fear that you describe or that and that Chat G P T described back at you. And will they stay that way forever? Probably not, but are they that way right now? From what I understand, yes. Our submarine launched ballistic missiles that that are just so the technology behind them, and I delineate it for the reader. You it's it's astonishing that you can launch a missile from underwater. It can breach the surface. Its afterburners take off and then it begins its trajectory. You know, boost phase, mid course phase, terminal phase, hits the target. This is incredible. And how does it get there?

• 14:31Annie Jacobsen?

  You might ask. I asked. It gets there by star sighting.

• 14:38Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really?

• 14:40Annie Jacobsen?

  So you realize there's this little panel that opens up in the ballistic missile. And there are other ways that it's navigating. But the primary mean of navigation is star sighting. Right? I mean, you just have to really stop and go, oh, my. First of all, it's actually a really interesting concept that the most advanced, potentially civilization ending ballistic missile is guiding itself to its target by this ancient concept like that our hunter gather ancestors used, which is looking at the stars.

• 15:16Steven Bartlett?

  It's looking at the stars and then navigating using them.

• 15:22Annie Jacobsen?

  And that's meant to be a defense against a system, an enemy taking control of your nuclear weapons.

• 15:32Steven Bartlett?

  The issue we have is that there's potentially nine or 10 different nuclear powers, and they don't all have the same system. So if a if we get to the point of A G I, which a lot of people almost see as the singularity, almost you can't see past that moment where there is a new being amongst us that is capable of. Thinking faster and more expansively and more intelligently than humans and those things we don't. I think it might look at our systems as child's play. Maybe not our systems, but maybe it'll look at North Korea's systems as child's play. It might be able to put that VCR into the system and play out the nuclear simulation that tricks those people into believing they're being attacked.

• 16:09Annie Jacobsen?

  Yes. Which is maybe time for the answer to your question of should we be at zero, right?

• 16:17Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 16:18Annie Jacobsen?

  So what you have presented, which would be the whole point of somebody like me writing a book that somebody like you would read of a younger generation and begin having these conversations with their colleagues and their thought leaders and the people that could maybe influence public policy and saying, well, that would be a very good reason to have zero nuclear weapons. Or, you know, everybody gets 10. I'm making that up. But, right?

• 16:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:43Annie Jacobsen?

  Because if you have 12,500 nuclear weapons, it's better than 70,000, but it's way too many for an artificially intelligent, you know, trigger scenario like you're talking about.

• 16:56Steven Bartlett?

  Are you optimistic?

• 16:59Annie Jacobsen?

  Optimistic about?

• 17:02Steven Bartlett?

  The future.

• 17:03Annie Jacobsen?

  I mean, I am an optimistic person by nature and so...

• 17:09Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think there will be a nuclear war in the course of humanity?

• 17:14Annie Jacobsen?

  I wrote this book as the optimistic, hopeful person that's saying, read this and realize that a man-made problem has a man-made solution.

• 17:34Steven Bartlett?

  Earlier you talked about there being high consequence and low probability, but the more the years tick on, that probability increases by nature of there being this mad king that might at some point. So, you know, and that's what I think. So I was asking myself, eventually, if we play this forward, I don't know, a thousand years, what is most likely to cause the end of humanity? Is it a mad king somewhere who doesn't want that, you know, he realizes that he's going to either die, he's got cancer, he realizes that, you know, he's got some sickness and he doesn't really want his son to take power, he starts getting a bit agitated, maybe he has some kind of psychosis, schizophrenia, I don't know, decides to, in his dying days, to let a couple of these things fly. Is that...

• 18:18Steven Bartlett?

  Eventually going to happen, the laws of probability, the laws of averages say that the longer we're here, the longer we have these weapons, the higher the probability.

• 18:27Annie Jacobsen?

  I mean, I leave that to people like you to think about and talk about because I do, and I am fascinated that I find that people of your generation ask that question a lot more than perhaps people of my generation and older. Like, that was not a mindset that people necessarily hadn't talked about. And I think that has to do with the confluence of events that you talk about. First of all, people have access to information in a manner they didn't, you know, 30, 40 years ago, or it took a lot more effort. And also, that there are these incredible new threats that you're talking about that are, that you cannot overlook. And so you would think that it's time to kind of, and I'm not a Pollyanna,

• 19:08Annie Jacobsen?

  but you have to move away from seeing everyone and everything as an enemy, and moving toward, it's fine to have adversaries. Having opponents is, you know, sportsmen have opponents, right? But everyone being an enemy and having, you know, wars escalating around the world, it seems as if what you are saying is there has to be a fundamental shift in what people are considering important.

• 19:40Steven Bartlett?

  But war has always existed, and it's existed as long as humans have. So it makes me think that war is just part of humans trying to coexist. And all of the things that are hardwired into us are such for status and ego and reproduction and resources and survival result in war, like they result in recessions.

• 19:59Annie Jacobsen?

  So I read a lot about the origin of war. Like, it's a debate. No one, you know, but it is discussed. And the anthropologists, I think, have the most interesting. Sort of thoughtful concepts around it, which I'll share with you, which is this. Because, yes, technically there has always been war. And then one of the debates is, you know, did war begin with civilization? Or were hunter gatherers warring? But more interesting to that, I think, is about the anthropologists who studied in the 60s, the hunter gatherer tribes, like in the Amazon, when there were still access to them. And they were sort of, you know, they were unaffected by civilization at all. And they could look at how they perceived enemies.

• 20:41Annie Jacobsen?

  And an interesting idea came out of that, which makes me think about optimists versus pessimists, right? Or rather, those who trust versus those who are suspicious. That no matter if a hunter is out hunting, that's part of a hunter gatherer tribal environment, and he comes across another person. Obviously, that person is either threatening, or that person is someone to team up with against the greater threat. And the anthropologists do not know why it is that some people interpret this person with suspicion and then might kill him. And others would interpret that person as a teammate.

• 21:26Annie Jacobsen?

  And so if we don't know how human, you know, is it genetics? Like, how do people either fall on one of those two sides? But what we do know is that people can learn to think differently. You talk with half your guests on the podcast about this. People can be trained, not, you know, propagandized, but people can learn to think differently. So if you're me, who is a hopeful person and wants to see the positive side of even my dark reporting, because that's a better choice for me and for my family. I train myself to find, if you will, the silver lining.

• 22:10Annie Jacobsen?

  Or rather, if that's too Pollyannaish, to find the way in which, how do I look at the person coming at me as someone who could be on my team? Or even an opponent, but not an enemy that I would have to kill.

• 22:26Steven Bartlett?

  What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.