3 Takeaways - Close Calls: The Terrifying Threat of Nuclear War (#210)

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

How would a nuclear war start and unfold? How close are we to thermonuclear annihilation? Annie Jacobsen, a weapons expert and Pulitzer Prize finalist, knows. Here, using insider information, she dramatically outlines how close we’ve come to Armageddon, what nuclear winter would entail, and much more. Don’t miss this chilling but necessary episode.

Many believe that nuclear war is no longer a threat, but people in the know believe otherwise. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry said, and I quote, We are closer to having a nuclear war happen even by accident than we were during the Cold War, unquote. How could our nuclear guardrails fail? And what would happen in those terrifying moments when the U.S. detects and responds to an inbound nuclear missile? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better.

Today, I'm excited to be with Annie Jacobson. Annie is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author. She writes about war, weapons, government secrecy, and national security. Her books have variously been named Best Book of the Year and Most Anticipated by the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Boston Globe. For her most recent book, which is wonderful, scary but wonderful, Nuclear War, Annie interviewed hundreds of civilian and military experts, including former secretaries of defense, a former STRATCOM commander, the nuclear physicist who designed the world's first hydrogen bomb, and many other military and civilian experts. She also studied recently declassified documents. What she found shocked even her.

I'm looking forward to finding out how nuclear guardrails could fail and what happens in the moments when the U.S. detects and responds to an inbound nuclear missile. Welcome, Annie, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today. Thank you so much for having me. It is my pleasure. How did you get interested in war, weapons, government, secrecy, and national security? I am one of those people who was born knowing I was meant to be a writer. And so it took me a while, but when I finally found my

beat, if you will, war and weapons and national security and secrets, I felt like I was home. And my writing career really took off from that moment forward when I became a reporter writing about these subjects. Nothing can be more dramatic in my understanding and now opinion. Can you talk about nuclear war and some of the near misses we've had? I was surprised that there have been so many and so many different kinds of near misses. Everything that I learned when I was reporting this book shocked me. I'm not kidding when I say that. And I write about a lot of really shocking things. But nuclear war, in particular, to your question, like, wow, we have had all these close calls. When you really drill down on those individual close calls, each one of them is terrifying. There's been about, let's say, a dozen reported on the record.

So imagine how many haven't been reported. And they seem to me at least crazy that we've mistaken a flock of swans for an incoming ballistic missile, that a simulation tape was mistakenly inserted into a NORAD computer, and analysts thought the U goes on. Now, what is the best way I can represent that to listeners is in the simple analogy of the fact of the ICBM, which is ICBM, like so much in nuclear command and control, sounds really threatening when I say intercontinental ballistic missile. And yet it's really simple. It's a ballistic missile that travels from one continent to another carrying a nuclear warhead. When you consider that an ICBM takes only approximately 30 minutes to get from the launch pad on one side of the world to any target in in the United States, and you consider that an ICBM cannot be redirected or recalled once launched, you can immediately, I think, lean forward and realize, my God, the stakes here

are insane. Just two years ago, in 2022, a Russian missile was incorrectly reported to have struck NATO territory in Poland. What happened? Lots of things happened. But what happened to my eye that was particularly frightening was what didn't happen. That turned out to be a false alarm. And because many of your listeners are very savvy, I'm sure they know that an attack on Poland, a NATO country, would mean an attack on all of NATO and could trigger events that we don't even want to comprehend and think about and we all know could possibly trigger a nuclear exchange.

But what didn't happen was immediate communication between the United States and Russia. That's what didn't happen. And the reason we know that didn't happen is because General Milley, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took to the airwave some, oh, I think it was 36 hours later to say that he had not yet been able to reach his Russian counterpart. Now, that is astonishing because as you learn very quickly in nuclear war scenario, nuclear war happens in seconds and minutes, not in hours and days. That is so horrifying. Let's step back for a little more perspective about how many nuclear bombs do the big three countries, which is to say the US, China and Russia have, and what is their destructive potential? So a key number for people to really realize is there are approximately 12,500, maybe 12,300 nuclear weapons in total from the nuclear armed nations.

And that is an extraordinary amount of potential near misses. The U.S. and Russia each individually have about 5,000. China had 410, and remember these numbers change every year, and thank goodness for the Federation of American Scientists, the nuclear notebook people who keep track of these to the best of their ability every year. China's 410 has gone up to 500 in a single year by Defense Department estimates, and could escalate to 1,500 over the next decade. So you can see when you think about these numbers, what is at stake. But let me present you with what I think is an even more terrifying number. And it has to do with the number of nuclear weapons that are on ready for launch status. Another concept that most laymen don't know, but should know. And when I say ready for launch, again, it's exactly like it sounds. These are weapons that are ready to be launched in as little as 60 seconds and usually just a few minutes, maybe up to an hour or so for some of the aircraft involved. And the number on the Russian side is about the same.

It's like 1,674 parity between nations. But when you think of that many ready for launch city destroyers and as an aggregate, you can understand this is why the stakes are so extraordinary. We've talked about the U.S., China and Russia, but there are also other countries that have nuclear weapons. Which other countries have them now or are believed to have them? The nine nuclear armed nations, U.S., Russia, China, U.K., France, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. I mean, you're shaking your head, and so am I, because an important point I think you're touching upon here is that when this all began, and the nuclear buildup, the arms race began during the Cold War, there were really just two nuclear armed nations, the U.S. and the USSR. And so the fundamental premise guiding nuclear war is deterrence. It's this idea that one nation would not dare attack another nation because everyone knows that everyone would die. That is the concept called

mutual assured destruction, which has been shorthanded to mad. But when you consider two opposing forces staring one another down, if you will, within kind of a nuclear duel, don't you dare do this. That's one, you know, one idea of deterrence. But now that there are nine nuclear armed nations, and if Iran gets the bomb, and the State Department has said that it's just weeks away at this point, the capability at least, then you have to consider 10. And if you consider 10, then you immediately have to wonder what happens next. Because as people begin to join the nuclear armed nations who don't play by any kind of air quotes, rules, things become increasingly unstable.

It's so terrifying. Can you explain the U.S. policy of launch on warning? Launch on warning. Again, exactly like it sounds. If the United States learns or is warned of an incoming nuclear missile, which we learn from our satellite systems in space, able to see this information in the first second after launch. Once the United States learns that, and once secondary confirmation takes place by a ground radar system, that happens after about eight or nine minutes, then the policy is such that the President of the United States

is asked to make a nuclear counterattack against that nation that was crazy enough to launch against the United States. That is the fundamental premise of mutual assured destruction. And as soon as the president is briefed on what is happening, he has only six minutes to decide which nuclear weapons to launch in response. Is that right? That's right. If you hear casually, oh, you know, the president has six minutes to decide, you realize, my God, that comes from President Ronald Reagan in his memoirs talking about the madness involved in mad. how anyone could possibly make a decision that would affect billions of people around the globe in a six minute window. And that question remains with us today. Is there involvement, Annie, of the Secretary of Defense or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the line of command to launch nuclear weapons?

Very interesting question you ask. And one would hope this was not a decision that would just rest on one man, one singular individual called POTUS, President of the United States. But in fact, it does. The Secretary of Defense is only there to offer advice. But the decision comes down to the president and the president alone. That is what he gets to do, which, you know, that alone should frighten people. How can you have a decision that's going to ultimately affect billions of people in the hands of one single person? And yet that's where we are. If nuclear armed missiles were fired at

the United States, does the United States have enough interceptor missiles to protect the country? So the short answer is no. And yet you have all kinds of people discussing right now because of various things in the news, including Trump's words spoken at the Republican National Convention recently about the Iron Dome, which is Israel's umbrella defense system that is very capable at shooting down short range and even medium range missiles, including ballistic missiles. But intercontinental ballistic missiles are in a class of themselves, and they cannot easily be intercepted. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, when they're in mid-course phase, they are flying at between 500 and 700 miles above the Earth.

So just think about where that is. Separate from the fact that the United States has a total of 44 interceptor missiles, and Russia, for example, has 1,674 ICBMs, how would 44 interceptors go up against 1,000 or more missiles? You also have the fact that the interceptors have only an approximate 50% success rate. So the Missile Defense Agency made a great point from their spokesman. They said, it's like shooting a bullet with a bullet, which it is. Because imagine the interceptor missile trying to take out an incoming warhead that's 500 miles above the earth traveling at Mach 23. It's an incredible feat to accomplish.

And it can't be done with any kind of certainty. And it certainly can't be done with thousands of missiles coming in. And so there is no magical Iron Dome. There is no magical system of intercepting ICBMs. The solution to all of this must lie in communication, in diplomacy. Nuclear submarines are some of the most formidable nuclear weapons. Why are they so dangerous? They don't call them the handmaidens of the apocalypse for nothing. They're nuclear armed, nuclear powered. They can remain under the sea, hidden from view. The way that an admiral, a former commander of the nuclear sub forces described to me how hard it is to locate a nuclear armed submarine. He said, Annie, it's easier to locate a grapefruit sized object in space than a nuclear armed,

nuclear powered submarine. Wow. Wow. The United States Defense Department does nuclear war gaming scenarios. What are those war game scenarios show? How do they end? hundreds and hundreds of them. And when you think on balance that only a few of them have ever been declassified, you can imagine the kind of secrecy that is involved, how jealously guarded those wargaming secrets are. There's one that was declassified that I know of called Proud Prophet. And interestingly, it came from 1983 during the Reagan administration. In declassifying that, it allowed one of its participants, a Yale professor named Paul Bracken, to actually speak about his experience working on the Pr prophet war game scenario in 1983. And what he tells us is frightening. He says that no matter how nuclear war begins, whether NATO's involved, whether NATO's not involved, if China's involved or not, no matter how it begins, it always ends in nuclear Armageddon. It is so scary. Annie, can you describe very briefly what that looks like,

what nuclear winter means, what happens to agriculture, animals, and where or if people would be able to live on Earth? Nuclear winter is, of course, the theory that first came to be in 1983, a paper that was written by Carl Sagan. And what happens in a nuclear winter in brief is that after the fireballs all set massive hundred mile areas on fire, and you have these mega storms of fire across America and elsewhere in the world, all of that soot gets lofted into the atmosphere. It's an estimated 330 billion pounds of soot after a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia, which is what ends up happening, spoiler alert, in nuclear war scenario. And as a result, agriculture will fail because without sunlight, nothing can grow. You're talking about seven or eight, maybe even 10 years new climate models show there will

be 70% reduction in sun. And so without the warming rays of the sun, crops fail. And without crops, agriculture fails. And without agriculture, people die. You're talking about large portions, large bodies of water all across the mid-latitudes, from Iowa to Ukraine, the breadbaskets of the world being frozen over under sheets of ice. And so just as Carl Sagan warned us all those decades ago, nuclear winter means those remaining, and nuclear winter will probably kill 5 billion people, and those remaining will revert to a hunter-gatherer state. It is almost unimaginable. You know what it reminds me of is this quote by Nikita Khrushchev, where he said, after a nuclear war, the survivors will envy the

dead. Who or what do you see as the real enemy? I borrow a quote from Carl Sagan himself, who asked that question and came to the conclusion that the real enemy is not necessarily Russia or China or Iran or the United States or any of us. The real enemy are the nuclear weapons. Annie, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? The first most certainly is knowledge is power. Be aware, learn about things, read books. My second takeaway would be most definitely stay curious. I ask a ton of questions and I find that people who are curious tend to be far less furious. One of the reasons why I know I am successful and I am grateful for being successful is because I am not afraid to ask questions. I often am interviewing the smartest people in the world, and I simply don't know going into it what they are talking about. And if I don't ask or don't even interrupt and say, excuse me, naive person question,

please explain, that person may not know I don't know, and therefore I would lose out on this entire opportunity to really understand something. And then my final thought would be always think about legacy. Think about what you leave behind. I'm not talking about things. I'm talking about ideas. Consider what you leave in your wake. Annie, thank you for this critical knowledge that you're sharing with everybody. Thank you for all your wonderful research and your books. Thanks so much for having me.

If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, Thanks so much for having me. where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.