Factually! with Adam Conover - What Nuclear War Would Actually Look Like with Annie Jacobsen

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

For decades, the threat of total nuclear annihilation cast a long shadow on everyday life. Nowadays, it almost seems like an old-fashioned kind of fear. Unfortunately, the possibility of human civilization ending at the touch of a button is more real than we think. Journalist Annie Jacobsen’s book NUCLEAR WAR: A Scenario outlines an excruciating and fascinating play-by-play of how the world as we know it could go up in smoke. Find Annie's book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. New Year, same extra value meals at McDonald's. Now get a savory sausage-mic muffin with egg, plus hash browns, and a small coffee for just $5. For limited time only, prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California, and for delivery. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me on the show again.

You know, there are a lot of crises in the world right now. In fact, there are so many potential. Zooms staring us in the face, whether it's the rise of fascism, climate change, or, yes, AI, that you might not want to think about another one. But, you know what, let's do one anyway. Let's take a little break from all those other nightmare scenarios and talk about a fun one. That's right. This week we're talking about nuclear war. And I know that might seem like your mom and dad's crisis about the end of the world.

Oh, you had to do drills in elementary school? Oh, boo-hoo. That's old news, Mom. The Cold War is over. That can't happen today. Right? Right? Well, I don't know if you've noticed lately, but a lot of shit we thought could never happen has happened in the last couple years.

And we need to consider how brittle the system is that we have in place to deal with these weapons. Weapons that can literally end human civilization in ours. And consider this. Nine countries have nuclear weapons right now. And let me list some of the people who are in sole unilateral charge of those nuclear. We got Donald J. Trump. We got Vladimir Putin, a fellow named Benjamin Netanyahu, and, oh, don't forget about Kim Jong-un, not a super stable bunch who have their fingers poised over the button. And, you know, I'm not sure we can totally depend on the UK Prime Minister,

Kier Starmer, if he's even real. That name seems really made up to me to de-escalate things, okay? So look, you can decide how seriously you want to take all of this, whether you think of the threat of nuclear war as a fun but unlikely science fiction story or a chillingly probable portent of the future. But either way, you have to acknowledge that there are thousands of nuclear weapons on the planet today and they are armed to go off in a tightly choreographed dance of annihilation at a moment's notice. This is one of the most frightening facts about human civilization. And as a result, we each of us needs to understand exactly how a nuclear. nuclear war might play out.

And at the very least, it'll be a distraction from all the other crises we've been talking about for the past couple months. So, to talk on the show about nuclear war today, we have an absolutely incredible guest. Before we get to her, I just want to remind you that if you want to support the show and all of the chilling and occasionally entertaining episodes we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Con. Over five bucks a month, gets you every episode of the show, ad free. We'd also love to have you as a part of our online community.

And of course, if you want to come see me do stand-up comedy on the road, coming up soon. I'm going to be in Louisville, Kentucky, Houston, Texas, San Francisco, California, other tour dates coming up as well. Head to Adamconover.com.com. If you want to laugh a little bit before you inevitably die in an atomic fireball. And now, please help me welcome today's guest. Her name is Annie Jacobson. She's a journalist, and she's the author of the book, Nuclear War, A Scenario. Please welcome Annie Jacobson.

Annie, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me here. So look, there's a lot of problems in the world right now. There's a lot of crises that people are worried about. Why is nuclear war one that should concern us right at this moment? Well, I wrote a book about nuclear war because I wanted to show people in sort of appalling detail of precisely what would happen in a full-scale nuclear exchange. And that is what I did. Whether you want to think about it now, tomorrow, or yesterday, the threat is there and it's not going away anytime soon. To me, it's a threat that I often think of as being the kind of thing that my parents would have worried about, right? The duck and cover drills or whatever crawling under the desk, that kind of thing. You know, the nuclear countdown clock, I think of as being, I know,

I know they still do it and I know they're constantly adjusting the hands on the countdown clock. But, you know, it seemed like the kind of thing that people were worried about in the 60s and 70s, along with like overpopulation and, you know, other such past concerns and just hasn't been in the public mind as much. Is it as present of a danger as it ever has been? Well, you've hit the nail on the head of what is so intense about the subject. And like many people, their parents are now in a different generation where they're grandparents were the ones doing duck and cover drills. And often, you know, so the book, published a year and a half ago, and I do book signing still, and younger people come up to me

and sort of whisper, I didn't know we still had a nuclear arsenal. And they're not alone. So you're not alone. Shall we start with some numbers? Yeah, sure. So I'll tell you exactly what we're talking about. So there are 12,300 nuclear warheads on the planet today. And if you recall one of them took out Hiroshima and another one took out Nagasaki. And those were far less powerful than the ones that we currently have, right? Not even in the same wheelhouse in terms of size. Absolutely right about that. So 12,300. You also should know that the amount of weapons that are on nuclear launch, launch on

ready for launch status, that means they can go in as little as 60 seconds. So I'm going to let you guess how many you think are ready to go. Of the 1,200 or so? Okay, so let's break that time. America and Russia have about 5,000 each. So we, like, that's that. That was actually exactly as many as I was going to guess. I was going to guess 1,000 of the 1,200 is between the U.S. and Russia. So 5,000 and 5,000 is U.S. and Russia. And of those, 1,770 numbers change a little bit every year, but you get the idea. On ready for launch status in the United States, same as Russia. Meaning, imagine that nuclear exchange. Because when we really get into it, which I do in the book, and by the way, I take the readers through a nuclear scenario under a ticking clock time.

frame because nuclear war unfolds in seconds and minutes, not in days and weeks like people. There's no battle for New York. There's no battle for Los Angeles. It's nuclear Armageddon. Yeah. And that has to do with the timing of everything, which is, I think, what people, what readers have found most astonishing about the book, because like you, people come into it completely naive as to the reality of kind of what is history. behind the veil. Well, I've been aware that this is, you know, that we have those weapons, that they're armed in such a manner. But, you know, we have had them for decades. War has not broken out, I assume, because of the deterrent strategy that we've maintained. But, yeah, so it's the sort of risk that, you know, periodically every couple of years I'll read an article such as, you know, that making the argument that you've laid out.

But it's like the daily presence of the threat has kind of like receded from view because, I don't know, is the geopolitically, it seems like nobody particularly wants to do it, right? So like how likely is that to hold, I guess, is the question? So one of the things I wanted to do in the book is avoid all of those kinds of discussions. Because to me, really, that's exactly why no one cares about nuclear war. It's exactly why no one cares about, but no one sees it as a threat because they say, oh my God, my grandfather arguing about, you know, geopolitics and China's going to, and now it's come to China's going to take Taiwan or right.

And that's never going to happen. And that's why we have deterrence. And that, to me, is far less interesting than what actually happens when it happens. when it happens. And that's why it's called nuclear war a scenario. And it's also not called nuclear war the only scenario,

right? So let me back up for a minute. At the front of the book, I list all the people that I interviewed to report the book. Not something an author normally does when they're writing nonfiction. Usually your sources are at the back. I've written

six books prior to this and all the sources are always at the back. But right off, I wanted you to see who I spoke to. Secretaries of Defense, commander of the nuclear subforce, the man who drew the plans for the first thermonuclear bomb, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? Top tier presidential advisors. And I asked them to take me through the scenario precisely because so many people live in this world that you earnestly exist in, which is like, we got our backs covered. And what I was shocked by as a reporter, and this is going back to before the war in Ukraine when I began reporting the book, was that not only did they not say the

normal like any, you know, we can't talk about that, that's, you know, or didn't want to or avoided the subject. They said, people have forgotten about nuclear war and spoke to me on this subject. And so then the Russia invaded Ukraine, then the geopolitical, politics you refer to all changed and there was suddenly like a ooh and then things got worse and the book the real reporting began and we are where we are now but so that i don't digress this this interview was the most impactful to me and maybe can kick us off with what we really can talk about here which is what happens which is that i did an interview with the former commander of stratcom you know what stratcom is

you and most other people, okay? It's U.S. Strategic Command. That's the steward of all nuclear weapons. And General Keeler is not, these guys do not normally talk to reporters, but again, we're in COVID. Things are kind of muted. And I asked General Keeler what would happen in a full scale nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia. He said to me, Annie, the world could end in the next couple of hours. And that's what we call a reporter's aha moment. You realize that's the end of your book. It's also the end of civilization. How do we get?

What? What could this general possibly be talking about? He's the steward of all the nuclear weapons. Well, sorry, that to me is what I grew up knowing. That's in Dr. Strangelove, right? It's like the end of the movie. It's like the most, it's the thing that we all know about nuclear weapons is that as soon as one fires. I mean, let's walk through the scenarios since that's what you're interested in.

But yeah, I guess why is that surprising? Because that to me is the part that I knew. Why is it surprising that the world ends? Yeah. I mean, that's like, that's what I'm coming in knowing. Yes. So what I try to do as a reporter is make subject. that seem very distanced, interesting to people, right?

So I would ask exactly those kind of questions. Like, why do I need to worry about this? This is in the reporting. And then, so, for example, I bet it's pretty shocking to learn that we have, we, the United States, has a policy called sole presidential authority. Mm-hmm. Right?

It's exactly like it sounds. the president of the United States makes a decision to launch nuclear weapons. No one else. He doesn't ask the sect-def, doesn't ask the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, doesn't ask the Congress, the president can launch nuclear weapons.

And you might say, in a democracy, well, how could that possibly be possible? Well, there isn't enough time. And then you begin to realize, aha, it's the time issue that is so terrifying. it is the it is not a you know the u.s military moving into the middle east to then you know assault Iraq this is going to happen in seconds and minutes because of the ballistic missiles

and then you begin to drill down on the weaponry and understand what we're up against so okay yeah I mean that was also like something that I was aware of that there was sole presidential authority so But the reason for that is because of the speed of the missiles and how quickly. So, well, walk us through the scenario. Like, how would such a war begin? Okay. So let another guess, right? Because this, and this stuff surprises almost everyone.

Like, how long do you think it takes for a ballistic missile to get from Pyongyang to Washington, D.C.? A couple minutes? 33 minutes. Okay. So then you find out a ballistic missile cannot be redirected or recalled. Cannot be redirected or not. So you suddenly realize the ballistic missile leaves Pyongyang and is on its way here and it's going to be here in 33 minutes.

And then you realize, well, nuclear war is not about suddenly waking up and finding out that a bomb went off in, you know, landed somewhere because the Defense Department has a system, a satellite system that can detect the launch of a ballistic missile in a fraction of a second. And so nuclear war begins in that moment of the detection. And now you have 33 minutes until that bomb will land in Washington, D.C. And that's the ticking time, that's the sort of ticking time clock that I think makes nuclear war suddenly realistic to anyone because they realize there is no, there is no deterrent. Once deterrence fails, it's over. Well, yeah, that's the strange thing about the deterrent system of like preventing the war

is that it seems like it would be very brittle and yet it's held for a long time. And that's, to me, always been the question I've been curious about. I mean, like, for years it was, oh, we have to stop North Korea from getting a nuclear weapon. We have to stop North Korea from getting a nuclear weapon. And then they got one and they have one. And then, well, what's changed? You know, like that that's the odd thing about it is that there seems to be like a very strong pressure against using the weapons that despite all the crazy geopolitics, despite the fact that these weapons are under the sole authority of the craziest men in the world of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin.

Modi, Kim Jong-un. And, you know, in the case of India and Pakistan, these countries are like avowed current enemies that are right next to each other. And yet they don't use the weapons. And I guess I'm curious why that question is, you said that's an uninteresting question to you. Well, it's not really a question.

It's just a platitude at this point to me. Like deterrence will hold. Deterance will hold. Oh, yeah. I don't think that that's necessarily the case, but that's what I'm interested in talking about. When I was reporting the book, Strattcom had pinned to its Twitter feed, deterrence will hold. Okay. So that is the position of the defense department.

Deterance will hold. Then you look behind the veil and you find, if you're me, the lieutenant general Thomas Busier of Strattcom, saying to a group of generals, deterrence will hold, but if it doesn't, it all unravels. His word unravels. And that word is haunting to a reporter like me. You have the defense department saying this is going to work, guys, but be, you know, amongst their friends. If it doesn't. Yeah.

And then we're big expletive. Yeah. And so... You can swear on the show. It is... It is... The concept of unraveling was what I was after and why I wrote the book the way I did. I mean, the book is written, you know, second one, second two, second three.

Because what I found super interesting that you go, okay, second one, now we know it's coming. But then what? And then you realize this trillion. dollar system has been set up. You know, the next thing that happens is the space force is, you know, taking the data streams and determining precisely the direction in which that missile is coming. And then you learn it's only four minutes before the Defense Department knows, oh, it's not going to Guam or Hawaii or Russia. It's coming to the United States, the continental United States. And then another 30 seconds,

It's coming to the East Coast. And then you see the system move. And then you see the missile systems. We have a interceptor system. Now we're going to try to shoot it down. I tell you why that doesn't work. You know, it's like, da-na, it's a shark in the water. Why don't the interceptors work?

Because I've heard of them, obviously. But, yeah, what doesn't work about them? So the inters, well, for starters, the numbers are really disturbing. Okay. So we just talked about the 1,700 and some odd ready for launch nuclear warheads that we have. Russia has about the same. There are a grand total of 44 interceptor missiles. So just do the map.

Okay. 44. And people have asked me, well, maybe we have secret missiles. We don't, you know, right? Maybe, you know. And then when you really look at it, because this. these figures are transparent from the Defense Department. Each interceptor missile has a success rate of about 40 to 50, 55%.

And that's a curated test. That's when, so we have 44 missiles, 40 are in Alaska, four are in Santa Barbara. And we test them by firing them off to the Marshall Islands to the Reagan test site. We have a facility there. And, you know, I've interviewed the guys that work on the test. and they're kind of like, pss, we're having a missile come, you know. So imagine that kind of a organized event.

Well, how do they like, who do they say pst? Well, okay, so in other words, we're talking about the success rate of the interceptor missiles, because this is up for debate where people say, these things are terrific, they're going to shoot anything down, even though there's 44 of them. Okay. But statistically, their success rate is to about 50%, which is why that program is sort of on strategic pause.

That's what it's called, which means it's not happening because it's a big waste of money because it doesn't work. And the curated test part of it is that the way we test them to get, oh, they work half the time is that we fire off an ICBM from Santa Barbara.

I mean, sorry, a interceptor missile, which is basically like a small, you know, ICBM. We fire it off, headed toward the Marshall Islands, to do an interceptor test where, you know, that's going to, be received. And when I say,

because you think the Defense Department doesn't tell the guys at the other end we're doing a test. I see. They're giving them advance notice. That's what you meant. Yeah. And in fact, that we know they give them advanced notice

because everybody gets advanced notice whenever there's an ICBM test. Everybody, except North Korea. So they've never been tested under like live fire of like if a missile was detected and they had to jump into action, like that has never been gone through. Then you would have an actual nuclear explosion, so that would be a real problem. Right? Yeah, yeah.

But also, okay, so in the scenario that I take the reader through, I use as a scenario a single ICBM sent from Pyongyang at Washington, D.C. Okay? It's called a bolt out of the blue attack. And that's what I take the reader through. One ICBM fires off and is on its way to Washington, D.C. And I show you what happens in those 33 minutes. I show you what happens when it lands.

And then I tell you what happens after that, right? And that's the horrifying part. Yeah. People say, well, why did you choose North Korea and why one bolt out of the blue? Why not Russia? And that is, you know, when I was interviewing all these different individuals, I learned that what Washington is most afraid of is what's called a bolt out of the blue attack, which is just a launch of an ICBM for reasons that no one really understands or ever will know about

because it will lead to a full-scale nuclear exchange. You know, why did it happen? Was someone insane? Was it a miscalculation? Was it a mistake? That's the fear. Well, that seems like when you remember that there can be error in, any of these systems that someone can simply make a mistake or, I mean, the case of North Korea,

who knows what would control, you know, what systems would be controlling the launches or, or et cetera. That is what I think makes it the most frightening that, you know, if you accept the logic of deterrence, fine. And again, to me, it has always seemed really brittle. Obviously, I'm as skeptical of it as you are. But that assumes that everyone's behaving rationally and that anything that happens is the result of someone's rational decision. It might not be. There might be a short somewhere or something

or whatever. Something is misinterpreted by one party or the other and a launch is done in response, right? Absolutely. That's called a miscalculation or misinformation, you know, anything could happen. And many people with much more, you know, experience and understanding and war gaming than you or I. one learns as they go through this, that is what everyone at the Pentagon knows and is afraid of because one miscalculation, one misunderstanding, could lead to all of this. Makes sense that that would be what they're the most afraid of

because anything predictable or rational, they can come up with a game theoretical response or deterrence to, but it's a completely random, inexplicable, it's the freak occurrence that is the one thing they can't plan for. You're absolutely right. And of course, the stakes are so high, like literally, they couldn't be higher. Folks, this episode is brought to you by Alma. You know, a year from today, who do you want to be? What version of yourself would you like to meet? Would it be one that feels less anxious or feels more like yourself? Maybe your relationship is stronger or the grief that you might be carrying

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So walk us through it a little bit. The missile is fired at D.C. What happens when it lands in D.C. Because it cannot be recalled and it can't be intercepted reliably. Yes. So what's really sort of alarming to most people when they learn is that the United States also has a policy. We have a launch on warning policy. And that is also exactly like it sounds.

Launch on warning. Meaning, we do not wait, we, the United States, don't wait to absorb a nuclear blow if a ballistic missile is coming at the United States. We launch on warning. And that is part of nuclear policy. It's part of deterrence. What's crazy. You know, you have to have this really beefy posture behind it. Otherwise, it wouldn't work.

And so at the president is notified around eight or nine minutes that this ICBM is in fact coming toward the East Coast. The interceptor missiles are trying to shoot it down. They're going to fail. Even a single one for interceptors try to intercept it and they fail. Technically, I take the readers through why that's plausible. And now the president has to make a decision. he has to make a decision to counterattack. And this is where people, again, say that can't be plausible.

Like there has to be an ability, well, I interviewed two secretaries of defense, Leon Panetta and Bill Perry, both of whom took me through that. That is what we do. We do not wait. And so the president now, that's why the president always has with him the nuclear football, inside of which are the counterattack plans. And the president has a six-minute window at this point to decide not if to attack, but with what to attack, how many nuclear missiles to attack with. And that's where I get into, again, based on the interviews, because America has a nuclear triad.

So we have ICBMs hidden in silos in the ground across the Midwest and the West. We have the bombers, which are the B-52s and the B-2s. And then we have the submarines. And that's the triad. And so the president will, as we understand it, choose like a selection among those in case one system doesn't work. And that is the counterattack against North Korea in the scenario I write. And so what was interesting is, do you remember the fire and fury sort of the rhetoric back and forth between Trump and

the supreme leader of North Korea during his first administration. Do you remember that? Well, the stratcom commander at the time, General Heighton, made a public statement, which is a little unusual for a stratcom commander. But he went on CNN and he said, North Korea needs to know if they attack us with a nuclear weapon, if they send one, we'll send one. If they send two, we'll send two. That's like what Heighton said, General Heighton. Well, that's not, I learned. that's actually not what happens. They send one. We send 82.

We send 82. Why would he say one for one then? You would think that the logic of deterrence would, you'd want your opponent to think that you're going to respond overwhelmingly. I mean, maybe people would be shocked just like you were when I told you that, which like, they send one, we're going to turn your country into a parking lot or into a, you know, into a fireplace. because that's what happens. So you asked what happens. Well, I take the reader through the details. You know, what happens to people, places, and things when a nuclear bomb, nuclear missile strikes?

It's not from Annie Jacobson's imagination. It's from Defense Department, an atomic energy commission now called the Department of Energy, manuals. Because in the 50s, we were setting off nuclear bombs. And while we didn't know what they did to people, we had things like pigs standing in. I mean, this is the grotesque sort of horrifying details that I literally take you through in the book where people are like, how could that possibly be? But again, going back to the original question, why did you write this book? I really thought it was valuable for people to understand what would happen if deterrence fails. And I mean, what does happen? Again, that missile hits D.C. What does that look like in

America? So the missile that I have in a scenario hit D.C. is a one megaton thermonuclear weapon. And the thermo, the bomb that hit Nagasaki, for example, or that hit Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. Richard Garwin, who designed that weapon for Edward Teller, was in his late 90s when I was reporting the book, and I interviewed him at length. He explained to me what a thermonuclear weapon is. It uses the equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb as its fuse. It's a weapon in, that weapon is in. inside the thermal. Imagine the power. And so I show readers how they're these concentric circles like the target is the Pentagon. And when a one megaton nuclear warhead hits the Pentagon,

there is a ball of fire that is a mile in diameter. It's like 5,730 feet because of course it is, because, of course, the Defense Department has it all measured out. It's 19 football fields of fire. And then out of that comes this blast wave that is several hundred mile an hour winds. Hurricane, like Gale Force winds is like 90 miles an hour. Imagine three, four, 500 mile an hour winds. It mows everything down going out nine miles,

turning all of those buildings into rubble. I mean, never mind, like, you know, steel and titanium melt. The streets out nine miles where the zoo is in Washington, D.C., become sort of like molten, you know, asphalt. People get sucked into it. I mean, the destruction is so outrageous, one to two million people die. People are blinded. Anyone looking at the bomb 25 miles out, because, you know, comes blinded, looking in that direction, right? So the horror and the mayhem, you know,

learning the details of the mushroom cloud, we've all seen sort of like maybe even in Hollywood movies in mushroom cloud, right? You know what I'm talking about the stem? Yeah, Oppenheimer a couple years ago, yeah. And again, that was an atomic bomb, but the stem of the mushroom cloud creates a sucking motion that is several hundred miles an hour. It's like ripping, you know, trees out of the earth and pulling it up. The mushroom cap is all the debris of the people and the buildings. Wow. I mean, it's this kind of minute detail that I think makes you stop and say, you know, oh, my God.

So it's deterrence or that. And that's the first bomb. Because all of this leads to a full-scale nuclear exchange. Yeah. And so, Pyongyang fires one missile. We fire 82. We fire 82. Which incinerates, it sounds like that would cover more than just North Korea itself.

Like, it's not that large. Not that large of a country into 82 thermonuclear weapons is like, just seems like that's. Seems excessive. It seems excessive. It seems excessive. I mean, not to joke, but obviously that is excessive, but that's what the Defense Department would do because the goal is called escalate to de-escalate. I mean, nuclear nomenclature is filled with these kind of, you know, catch-22 type

sayings that you really have to wrap your head around, but that's exactly the point. The entire nuclear command and control system in Pyongyang needs to be. be taken out according to Defense Department mindset so that they don't launch another nuclear weapon. But by the way, by that time, they already have, right? But you know, it's interesting because you said something

like, okay, so they fire and then we fire. It all a lot happens before that. So imagine 33 minutes has to come from their ICBM to hit DC. We have launched

before that weapon hits. And I learned something that's sort of like the authors, you know, the point in storytelling, which is called the All Is Lost moment, you know, where like it's literally like it sounds all is lost. So I learned that the ICBMs that we have in the Middle West, in the silos, to get to Pyongyang,

they have to fly over Russia. And I learned this detail, and I realized, what, how could that possibly be? Because in a nuclear war, if you are the Russian command and control, Russia has all the same systems, not quite as technically advanced as we do, but essentially the same.

So where we spoke earlier how we can see the launch of the nuclear missile from Pyongyang, Russia can see our launches. So they don't have, our missiles do not have enough reach to get to Pyongyang without overflying Russia.

Imagine in the middle of this kind of a situation what the Russian president's response is going to be. I mean, even if our president could get on the phone, and say, okay, listen, don't worry about it. They're actually going to go over you.

They're not coming for you. Yeah. Russia's going to take our word for it. When I was reporting this book, President Biden had not spoken to Putin in years. Yeah. And so it seems like such a detail that maybe couldn't be true. I asked former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta if it was true.

And not only did he say it was true, he said, it's a real problem. Yeah, it does seem like it's a little bit of a problem. I can also imagine, I mean, there's what, six or seven other nuclear-equipped countries that would presumably notice an exchange and might have a response one way or the other, right? I could imagine it growing really quickly. Well, interestingly, we don't know a lot about other countries' nuclear command and control systems, which we can get into why we don't know that in a minute. But just to make, because the real issue is Russia, right? So Russia thinks we're coming for them, and they have to make a decision to launch.

And they have launch on morning now as a policy as well. And so Russia launches, and that's where you get the full-scale nuclear exchange. Because nuclear exchanges are not, nuclear launches are not set up for like a tiny launch when you're talking about Russia and the United States. Unlike one to 82, Russia is going to send all of, them. One thousand six hundred. And then we, guess what our response is? All of them as well. We send all of them. And one of the most astonishing interviews I did was at that point in the narrative, I was, as I was reporting this, thought, well, what would happen? Because you can

sort of imagine through your reader and think, someone's going to ask me, like I would ask is, what if the president says, you know, I'm, or whoever is in charge at this point, maybe we shouldn't kill everyone on the other side. And so I put that question to another former Secretary of Defense, Bill Perry. And he told me that he would be overridden if he had made that call. And that is because of deterrence. Like, sorry, the Secretary of Defense would have been overridden if he had said, let's not do this? Corrections.

Secretary of Defense acting as commander in chief, at that point in the narrative. Because, because, you know, so in other words, with even more power than the Secretary of Defense, the president can do whatever he or she wants. But what I, you know, as we go through second by second minute by minute, as I'm writing the scenario, I had another, okay, so we're going to back up on the timeline to like minute 20, right? So president makes his counterattack. 82 missiles are going to go at Pyongyang. I got to thinking when I was reporting this book, wait a minute.

The president is being, you know, it's called jamming the president. He's got stratcom on comms. He's got the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He's got the sect-deaf. They're all saying, sir, make the counter attack. What are we going to do?

Yeah. And I'm thinking to myself, he's in Washington, D.C. I know from reporting another book, several other books, and having experience with Secret Service, the Secret Service, this point in a scenario is going to say, we're moving the president. So I called up Lou

Merletti, a source of mine who's a former director of the Secret Service, and a founding member of the cat team, which is the paramilitary team that is with the president in a moment like this. And I said, Lou, what would happen? Am I right that like they're going to move the president? He said, absolutely they are. So then you imagine the standoff. Stratcom saying, we need the order from the president. We need the order from the president. And the Secret Service saying, we're out of here. Well, who do you think is going to win? Who is armed in that scenario, the Secret Service, right? Yeah. So they leave with the president. And because the weapon is incoming at that point, and because I have everything down to the seconds and minutes, we realize in going through the

scenario that the president is going to get out in time. And that helicopter, Marine One, is going to go down, or at least this is the way the Secret Service is thinking, there's a chance that helicopter is going down in what's called the EMP strike, which is the electromagnetic pulse that accompanies the bomb, even if he's seven miles out of D.C.

And so the Secret Service has to prepare to parachute jump the president out of the crashing helicopter. Okay, cool. Okay. All right.

This is what happens. Welcome to nuclear war scenario. Yeah, yeah. You know? And this is, so I say, Lou, take me through that. And Lou says, well, Annie, there's a problem. Not what you want to hear. You know.

And he explains to me that, okay, so who has to get parachuted out? First of all, the president cannot parachute himself out. He doesn't have any military training. So he's going to have to get tandem jumped by one of the operators. And the mill aid is going to have to go out, the guy with the football. and the special agent in charge of the president is not going to leave the president alone. So you need four parachutes at least. And there's not that many in Marine Juan.

What a detail to learn. So they have to swing by the executive office in the White House to get another pair. I mean. They have parachutes in the executive office in the White House? In the Secret Service's executive office in the White House. So they grab, they get the stash. And then that takes another, you know, they're now down by another minute, which is. And so in the scenario I write, spoiler alert, the Marine one crashes, the president's missing, and we move into the line of succession, which is a very important detail in a nuclear war.

Presidents missing who's in charge. The vice president is missing. Then we go through the, and in the scenario that I report, the secretary of defense has made a decision. This is based on one of the sect thefts that I interviewed saying, I would make a decision as Bill Perry talking, he said, if there's an incoming nuclear missile, I and the vice chairman would leave on a helicopter for Raven Rock, knowing that we might have to take control of the line of succession

because everyone in Washington is going to be dead. Yeah. And so that's how I got that information. And then it really becomes fascinating because you realize these are the kind of details that these presidential advisors know and rehearse. Yeah. And here you and I are sitting here going, oh, yeah, that's our grandparents' problem. Well, what's, but the scenario that you walked us through of, you know, the missile exchange is also the thing that our grandparents knew.

Like that was, you know, again, mutually assured destruction. Again, it's the plot of, you know, Dr. Strange love of a movie I've seen two or two or something. three times. And so I guess what I'm, what I'm interested in is, A, what if anything has changed about that calculus and B, why hasn't anything changed about it? I mean, to put it this way, like what you're describing the, the, you know, overwhelming response is it's game theory to a certain extent, right? It's like, I want to deter someone from doing this, so I have to have a response that's so

large that they will never, there will never be an advantage in them doing so, right? And so you get to this sort of like abstract level of game theory, right? But we have now, we're now, have now been living for decades for over half a century in a world where we have all of these weapons. We know that they're on a hair trigger. Everybody has been worried about it. And you would think, again, from that same abstract, you know, Rand Corporation, you know, defense department long range planning level, hey, it's maybe bad.

This is a bad strategic state of affairs, right? It's an uncomfortable equilibrium, right, that might not last forever and that the results of it toppling would be disastrous. And yet we're still locked into it. So, like, what are the forces that are stopping us from, you know, long-term disarming, I guess? I know that nuclear disarmament was a goal for decades, but obviously wasn't completed. I mean, you've hit the nail on the head with the precise conundrum that is at issue here. And by the way, none of the weapon systems have changed since. So it's been since 1949 when the Soviets got the bomb that essentially deterrence has held.

But it's also interesting to think about that first decade or so. The plan wasn't deterrence. The plan was to fight and win nuclear war. And I take the reader through a very quick history lesson about what it was like and how we got here. And you learn, like, this is actually what the generals thought could be done. We could win a nuclear war. And then it was only when, as you correctly point out, the kind of ran strategists, the game theorist got involved and said, this is bananas.

This is, you can't fight and win a nuclear war. We're all going to die. It's why once upon a time we had bunkers and sort of that civil defense program that doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. Why doesn't exist? Because you can't win a nuclear war. Yeah. So we went from we're going to fight and win to like, ooh, whoops, we can't fight and win.

So let's create a new thing, which is deterrence. So that in and of itself is really precarious. But yes, it has held for all these decades. But what if it doesn't? What if it doesn't? And think of for how long it was just the U.S. and the USSR. And now you have nine nuclear-armed nations. Yeah.

But yet the Defense Department's Stretcom, their official position, is that deterrence will hold? It has to be because what else are you going to do? Yeah. Right. Now here's one tiny glimmer of hope, right, in this very grim, which to your point, and you are absolutely right, that we did have to have. a moment when disarmament happened. And that is, believe it or not, thanks to Ronald Reagan. Okay? And this is the one positive story out of all of this, which is that Reagan was a nuclear

hawk. So he completely believed more nuclear weapons made America more safe. And, you know, in 1986, there was 70,000 nuclear weapons. Think about that. Now there's 12,000. 300. Okay. That's a very substantial reduction. Yes, this is huge and this is because of Reagan. So Reagan is there. Nuclear Hawk. There's a movie on television called an ABC TV movie called The Day After about a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. His chief of staff said, sir, you shouldn't watch it. He watched it anyways. I think I've heard this story actually and it changed the way he thought about it. And, you know, I didn't report this story in the book because I couldn't get a firsthand witness. I'd only read about it reported.

And I try to always work with somebody who was in the room telling me this so that I can say, you know, it's not the telephone game. But after the book published, Newt Gingrich, of all people, called me up and had a conversation with me about this. And I asked him, and he said, yes, it's absolutely true. So what happened? He's the one who said, the chief of staff said, sir, don't watch that. Right. So Reagan watches it. He writes in his White House journal that he became depressed. Oh, yeah. All the deaths from AIDS, he didn't bum him out. But, you know, yeah, a TV movie made him kind of sad, huh? Well, a TV movie with, you know, half the world dead.

Yeah. Made him depressed his actual words. And that caused him to reach out to Gorbachev. and because the two of them communicated Rekovic and then the different treaties that were put in place, the world went from 70,000 nuclear weapons to the 12,300 that we have today. So there's no doubt that disarmament can happen and should happen. But all of these treaties are now in flux. All of the superpowers are budding heads. You know, everything comes to an end. The treaties that are in existence in February of next year, that will be the final pulling out unless something is done. Oh, the treaties expire next year? Yes. And I can imagine that if you're disarming and you've got, you know, way more weapons than you've, than you need by a factor of 10.

Well, getting rid of the first nine-tenths of them pretty easy. But when you're down to the very last bomb, like the U.S. has one and Russia has one. And like, all right, well, let's get rid of them. Both of them are going to be thinking, well, I should keep one. because they're probably going to keep one. Like it's that last little bit that where you get probably back to the bad part of the prisoner's dilemma, right? Where they both are having to be suspicious of each other like that last bit of cooperation. Yes.

And when you reference the prisoner's dilemma, of course, what we're really talking about at that at the heart of the matter there is distrust. Yeah. And that's hard not to, it's hard to trust or hard and it's easier to distrust. But the ideal that you're speaking of really is that global zero, right? So many of the colleagues that I've met along the way, having reported this book, you know, the book published a year and a half ago, I've spoken at the UN. I was asked to come to the Vatican to talk to the Pope's science advisors, you know, people are really trying to move toward disarmament again in earnest. And many of these individuals believe in what's called global zero, that you just want to get down to no nuclear weapons. on the planet. Others have what they would call a more practical approach, which is you have a

few, right? I mean, but the direction should be in that direction, not more. And what you're seeing now, when you're seeing Russia with these new hypersonics and missile developments, that kind of nuclear proliferation is what I would hope. People who would read the book would say, wait a minute, that actually, actually nuclear, more nuclear weapons do not make us more safe. It makes the whole world walking much closer to that razor's edge. Yeah. It seems like in a way the pendulum, at least in some people's minds are swinging back in that direction, right, in terms of preparation. Yes, it is.

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L.A. had a campaign for Vision Zero to have zero traffic fatalities in the city. And it was sort of like a goal up on the wall. No one thought we would hit it, nor did he end up actually trying very hard. He gave up on it pretty quick. But, you know, it's sort of a, that's what it reminds me of is like, Okay, well, that's our hope, that's our wish, that's what we'll work towards. But, you know, the flip side of it is it can seem a little bit naive and that the, you know, is it more practical to say, look, we have these things. We're never going to get there and we therefore have to live in a world in which they are there. Is there some other strategy, some other mitigation other than global zero, which seems impossible, or, extraordinarily difficult for the reasons we discussed, or deterrence, which seems brittle and

like it can't last forever, is there any third path at all strategically? Well, the treaty right now at the UN is called the TPNW, so it's the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. And I think that that's the most viable path because they're angling for that global zero. But in the meantime, you're garnering all this support for other nations to make nuclear weapons kind of the sort of pariah of, you know, weaponry. And I think that's the, that is where things, because the alternative is when you're seeing the geopolitical stakes of the past year, as I've been talking about this book, suddenly for the first time in history, you have South Korea talking about, well, maybe we, Germany, saying maybe we should get a

nuclear weapon. France talking about sharing their nuclear weapons with NATO. The whole, whole world is changing on the access of seeing nuclear weapons as, you know, keeping the bad guys out. And I think it's easy to think of that if you want to take that approach. But if you understand the stakes involved, if we move from nine nuclear armed nations to 10 and more than that, you are then talking about moving toward that miscalculation, that mistake that could, lead to the full-scale nuclear exchange. And then there's the problem of, you know, even if you can get these like major nations to agree that they're, that you're a pariah for having them or for contemplating using them, I mean, the reason North Korea wanted a nuke, I believe, was because, well, this is the

ultimate way you protect yourself. This is the ultimate way you sort of become a factor on the world stage. You can't be ignored. You can't be disrespect, right? Because you've got, you've got the biggest gun it's possible to have. You know, Iran's wanted a nuclear weapon for years, obviously. It seems like that sort of attraction of, you know, a state like that to wanting to build a nuclear weapon would never go away, even if you were able to eliminate all of them. And knowing that the largest, most powerful countries like the United States would never willingly give them all up because, well, you can't be the United States and have North Korea have a weapon and you don't. Yeah, the more you think through it and go down the rabbit hole, the more it seems like impossible to be in a world other than we are,

other than the one that we're in when it comes to nuclear weapons. Or you just have to say it has to all change. Yes. I mean, you mentioned North Korea. I mean, North Korea is such an enigma. And their desire for the nuclear bomb is built into the current Supreme Leader's grandfather, his work. Right. So they in the 60s were using Soviet engineers to build what is now the most complex underground bunker system anywhere on the planet as far as the CIA knows.

And the details which I garnered from some of the North Korea experts are astonishing like, you know, bunkers with like sort of marble, marble, you know, roads in them. I mean, who knows if this is even true, but this is what defectors say. And this is all built into this idea that North Korea believed. The North Korean regime believed that the only way it could survive was first to be able to go underground and then to develop their own nuclear program, which they have. One of the craziest details I learned was that the current leader has with him, and again, this is like reportedly a, drilling device so that when he goes into his, like imagine a bulldozer with a long drill on it, so that the CIA is unable to know the exit of his bunker. Wow.

So that he can make an exit wherever he chooses. In his bunker, there's a drill. He always has a drill with him wherever he is in the bunker, which, but the fact that this is known, and again, maybe it's not, maybe it's made up, maybe it's propaganda. there's no way of fact-checking something like that. Yeah. You know, but those are the kind of details I found outrageous when I was reporting the book. And I was really trying to learn about North Korea.

And then, of course, when Trump, you know, the bombing of the Iranian nuclear program, all I could think of in that situation was going back to the Clinton administration, Clinton had considered bombing North Korea's nuclear program so that they didn't develop the bomb. Bombing it with nuclear weapons or with conventional. With conventional weapons, always, always. We can't cross that red line, you know, right? But the same as Trump did. But Clinton was considering that very seriously, but was advised against it because the whole world would have, you know, gone crazy.

That was the idea, like going crazy, meaning you can't do that, it's too aggressive. And so, North Korea got nuclear weapons and now look at them. Now they have strategic thermonuclear ballistic missiles that could strike the United States in 33 minutes. And that is why, from my understanding of the sources I have in Washington, D.C., you know, the current president just made the decision unilaterally to bomb Iran. Wow. So given like the case that you've laid out, it seems to me very reasonable that people would not want to think about this. That in fact, and I don't just mean the, I don't even just mean the public. I mean like the leaders of the nations.

Like it seemed like the best thing to do would be to forget that you have them, right? keep them on the shelf. It's like, you know, beyond deterrence, it's like, hey, we've all got, you know, we've all got our giant weapons. And so we all know we can't use them. And so we won't. And it is striking that, you know, the U.S. and Russia have been in this conflict over Ukraine, you know, we got as heated as we've ever gotten with Russia in decades during the Biden administration. But I don't believe there was any over talk of using nuclear weapons even as a threat, like, or a reminder. It's just, hey, we're going to. We're going to go at it, but we're going to do it through proxies. We're going to do it through conventional weapons, all these other ways. Is that something that you ever see changing? Meaning the, okay, so a couple thoughts on that. Please. So you said, like, it's maybe even easier to not think about it.

That's absolutely true for we civilians, right? The strategic logic pushes you away from thinking of it. And for most people, for most people, is exactly why I wanted to write the book. And as I said in the beginning, why pre-Ukraine Russia war, some of the presidential advisors, and these are old school Cold War warriors, men in their 80s and 90s, said to me, yes, Annie, we will talk to you because people do need to know about nuclear war, right? So that point is well taken that you're making there. And I was even surprised because for the most part throughout modern America,

American history, presidential advisors do not talk about any of the things that are in my book. So what changed? Well, this idea that the public has forgotten. And now, of course, that's changed back. But to your point, I wondered the same as you. Well, what do the actual, how much emphasis, how much wargaming is going on? So not a question you can find out. There's a There's a third act climax here. So hang on. Okay. So I'm trying to find out how many war games do we do a year.

One has been declassified from 1983 from the Reagan era called Proud Profit. I write about it in the book. I print a page and it's entirely redacted, meaning it's just black. You see one word. It says a scenario. The rest of it is black and then there's a page number. Is that where the subtitle of your book came from? A scenario, right?

So you say to yourself, why am I reading? this, why is this here? Well, because that war game was declassified, it allowed people who were participating in it to talk about it to a reporter like me in a very general way without defying their security clearance. If it's classified, you can't talk at all. And so I was able to get a lot of information. People could talk generally. It was like, hey, there's this blacked out sheet of paper somewhere. Now you can talk about the existence of the piece of paper at least. Yes. And then, But Paul Bracken was a Yale professor. He is a Yale professor now, and he was at that war game in the 80s.

And he said that everyone left, he said, what we learned in that war game was no matter how nuclear war begins, it only ends one way. It doesn't matter if NATO is involved. China's involved. Doesn't matter. It always ends in nuclear Armageddon. That's what Bracken said. And that is shocking and that is terrifying. And that is why it's all kept secret.

And, you know, war planners rehearse these things far more than you ever want to know about. Because it is a possibility. And that is frightening. And you don't think. So I'm just coming back again to like the logic of the entire thing, right? Because if we know that, let's presume that. Russia knows that in France and, you know, most of the rest of them. And so, you know, it's a weapon that you have and you know you can never use.

So the two questions that raises for me are, A, then the only way they get used at all is an accident of some kind or someone being insane. And unfortunately, we have enough insane people running various countries. But you really don't think that in that scenario, the one missile is launched, right? And the people in charge of the country say, well, we know that if we do the next thing, you know, 10 million people are about to die in D.C., right? But, you know, it's that or a couple hundred million across the world, including many more in the United States. And you don't think, like, a finger ever hesitates over the button.

Like, I know, I know their plans say, we must immediately. But it's also the president's call, you know, I have to imagine anybody would, Like there is a countervailing logic, right, that that is pressuring them to never use or barely even speak of these weapons when it comes to actual strategic considerations. So that that never rears its head again in the actual scenario. You mean the idea that the president or that someone in the nuclear command and control would just defy orders and not launch? Yeah, or that... Okay, so I took that exact question that you asked to Dr. Glenn McDuff, a nuclear weapons designer at Los Alamos, and the classified historian of the... The historian of the classified museum there.

So he knows a lot about, you know, the history of all of this. And I said to him exactly that. Like, what are the chances that someone would say, I'm not doing this? and he said, Annie, you'd have a better chance at winning Powerball. And I said, why? And he said, because people in the nuclear command and control chain of command rise to the position of presidential advisor from doing their job, which is following orders. Yeah. I understand all those people.

I'm thinking of the people who are the decision maker. Like, let's imagine it's Joe Biden because Donald Trump, we all, you know, believe to be more chaotic, right? But Joe Biden is about as doveish a president as has been around in my lifetime. Just, you know, I always got the sense he had a real discomfort with people dying, right? With military conflict of any kind, he just didn't like it. He was like against the Obama surge and stuff like that. And so is there no chance that, you know, his finger hesitates? Or he says, I know where this.

goes because he's, you know, been in government long enough or, or that there's some other strategic consideration. Because, again, the knowledge of mutually assured destruction is shaping their actions now, right? It very strongly. And so I guess it's a little hard for me to believe that as soon as the missile is launched, maybe it's not hard for me to believe, but I'm hoping. Yeah.

Right. That, like, some of that logic would still exist after the missile is launched. and it isn't just a completely mechanistic set of, you know, an assembly line decision making, right? You have identified the one pause, right, which is the president, because we spoke earlier of sole presidential authority. You're absolutely right. Since the president of the United States is the person and the only person, the commander in chief, that can make that decision. yes, the president and only the president could be sitting in his office with a nuclear weapon on its way, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying you need to launch, sir, with the sectef saying you need, with the STRATCOM commander saying this is protocol, this is what we do. And yes, he could choose not to. Absolutely. But everything after that is following orders.

and command and control. But here's a hokey. And he's going to have Secretary of Defense types in Yonazir to hit the body. I mean, just because that's policy. But now here's another thought. I was shocked when Leon Panetta said to me

that most U.S. presidents come into office unaware of their role in a nuclear war. Now, Panetta was chief of White House chief of staff before he was SACDF and he was the head of the CIA. He has an extraordinary lineage of experience with presidents. For him to say that was astonishing.

And he wasn't throwing the president under the bus, by the way, per se, any of the presidents. He was simply saying presidents have so much to deal with. The last thing they do is like, so tell me about nuclear war if it happens. Right. And, you know, that may have changed in the current climate that we are in. But up until 2024 when the book published, anyone I had interviewed said confirmed, yes, the presidents really are unaware in terms of the tactical steps of nuclear war, particularly how fast it happens, that they have a six minute window to make a decision. And the way we know about that six minute window, by the way, which is shocking. Because only one president has ever spoken on it. that was Reagan in his, again, in his memoir, he refers to the six-minute window. And he says, and I'm paraphrasing him in the book, it's an exact quote. He says, like, six minutes to decide to unleash nuclear Armageddon. It's insane. Yeah. It's madness. Longer than I, or that's less

time than I take to order an entree. A coffee pot. That's what I did. I thought, how long is it? You know, one, like, turn the coffee pot on. That's it. Yeah. And that is the decision you have to make. And so you have identified the moment in time where it all hinges. But once that decision is made and once one nuclear one or 82 or some other number is launched in a counterattack, then it's, you could say it's game on or it's game over. Look, nuclear weaponry has famously only been used in World War II against Japan. just an idle question I've often had while falling asleep is I wonder if there'll be a nuclear weapon used in war or hostility in my lifetime. I'll hopefully be alive another 50 years or so if I'm lucky. How likely do you think it is?

So staying away from that only because like I literally don't know. But what I will tell you is this is that it's only all or nothing. So that's why I have to believe the eternal optimist than I am the mother of two, that it will, you know, I have to tell you nuclear war does not have to happen. And I will end with telling you about nuclear winter. You know about nuclear winter? Oh, yeah. You know, and by the way, many of the same people that said to me, pts, I didn't know we actually had nuclear weapons. You know, no shade on them.

Many people don't really realize that this is, our arsenals are what they are, that they even exist to the do. degree. Many people said to me, I thought nuclear winter was like, you know, disbunked or debunked or, you know, nuclear winter is real. Nuclear winter, Carl Sagan and five scientists wrote about nuclear winter in 1983. And yes, the Defense Department said it was communist propaganda, knowing full well it wasn't. The idea of nuclear winter is that once these, we spoke earlier about the one thermonuclear bomb going off in Washington, D.C. I didn't tell you about the fires that ensue. I just told you about the bomb going off and the blast and the immediate casualties and deaths and destruction. But that turns into a tornado of fire that becomes one to 300 miles radius.

Think about that. That's from the Defense Department itself. Now multiply that radius of fire times a thousand in the United States or 1600 and then around the world where all the other bombs go off. That results. So the nuclear winter theory, Professor Brian Toon, one of the original authors, is still alive. And I interviewed from the book. He's been working on this theory, refining it using the computational science that we have now to really drill down on what it means. And what it means now is it's actually worse than was originally speculated in 1983. They thought nuclear winter would last for a year. It will last for 10 years. The idea, the factual computational ideas, all those fires burning, all the cities burning, the forest burning, the pyro toxins, 330 billion pounds of soot. gets lofted into the atmosphere and blocks out the sun's warming race.

And without the sun, you have nuclear winter. Agriculture fails. People starve. So you go from several hundreds of millions of people dying in the nuclear exchange to having something that's estimated to be 5 billion people dead from the nuclear winter. from starvation. So that, I believe, is the ultimate, okay, this is an all or nothing scenario. We cannot have a nuclear exchange ever.

And the more people that know that, the better. What about just setting aside America and Russia, because we understand how that works strategically. India and Pakistan both have nukes, correct? And they have their own hostilities and their own foreign policy and their own decades. of having built up those hostilities and smaller arsenals, I would assume. What about that kind of conflict? Great and important question.

Nuclear, I mean, Pakistan and India have approximately 165 nuclear weapons each. That's what is understood by the Federation of American Scientists who keeps track of all of this, okay? So you might think, well, that's a tiny, you know, that number, or we're not going to have nuclear winter.

Professor Tune and his, colleagues used those arsenals and the exchange that you reference in a paper, which is noted in the book. And you can see we would have what is essentially a mini nuclear winter. Thank you very much, a mini ice age. So, you know, you- So maybe those two countries mutually annihilate. Let's assume that the U.S. and Russia say, okay, that's not our problem and don't fire anything off. Obviously, countless millions of people die, but then there's also an effect on the rest of the planet from nuclear winter. We all share the same sun. Yeah. And so the tune and the colleagues took that amount of soot from the 165, the exchange of 165 on each side and used computational

systems to figure out what that would look like, which is different than 1,000 or something. 1600 on each side, but it is still enough to cause a small nuclear, nuclear winter for less amount of time than 10 years. I mean, the 10-year nuclear winter, you're talking about the planet's temperature going down as much as 40 degrees in places. You're talking about large bodies of water from Iowa to Ukraine freezing over. Wow. And so this kind of horror show, I think is where the real deterrence lies. The deterrence that leads to disarmament, that leads deterrence not in the sort of classical pentagonian way,

but deterrence like prevent, we have to prevent nuclear war from ever happening. And that in a very human way is about, okay, let's back way off of these numbers. Yeah. Because these numbers are what are so dangerous. And then you can get back down into the friendly, I'm not, that you referenced, I'm not sure that I trust you. I don't make to make light of this situation, but, you know, somebody has to because it's pretty dire, right?

So then you can get toward the, okay, let's go down to where we each, we can't live without our nuclear weapons. We can have a couple. Yeah. This is what I always come to when I talk to someone like you who's thought about a huge global problem. reminds me of when I talk to people who have really studied climate change very deeply. Both of those, you know, nuclear war and climate change are human-created problems. And the problem seems to be with them that the problem we have created seems like it might outstrip our ability to address the problem because of how much collective action it requires. And so sometimes you'll talk to people who study climate change.

They're, oh, it's such an opportunity. the problem is so big that we'll now have to solve it or we'll all die. And to me it begs the question like, well, what if we can't actually? What if the human species capacity for cooperation on that scale or just the political institutions that we have? What if their capacity for cooperation on that scale is actually outstripped by the problem? And this strikes me as at least so far as having been the same problem that like all these generals on, but I'm sure there are plenty of of Russians who know this as well, that this is the only logical, real thing is for deterrence to push us towards disarmament.

That is where the game theory logic should inevitably lead you, and yet we have not been able to get there. So do you think that on the biggest scale getting to zero is something that is within the capacity of, you know, the human political systems that we live within? It has to be. But you're making me think of a quote by Einstein. Okay. Okay.

Which is, which when you speak to the issue of like, how can humans be so brilliant, you know, you're talking about a man-made problem. Mm-hmm. And suggesting, I think, that there has to be a man-made solution, which I totally agree with. And that's the Einstein part of it, which is like, how can humans with all of our brilliance that have created all this technology, not solve it. And when Einstein was asked what he thought world, what weapons he thought World War III would be fought with,

his response, and I'm paraphrasing, was that he didn't know what weapons World War III would be fought with, but he knew World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones. So if we don't find, a human solution, a man-made solution to our man-made problem, we're going to wind up like our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Yeah, I believe it. And I think the question of whether we can is this is kind of the biggest question of

humanity because it's certainly, you know, there are people who create problems in their lives that they themselves are not able to solve and, you know, die of drug addiction or something like that despite their best effort. You know, sometimes people's problems outstrip their abilities to solve them. And it's, and we just say, oh, that's a tragedy. And we move on. And, you know, I think the question for humanity is, is our, is our story going to be a tragic one like that? And I don't know. I mean, you say it has to be. And I think a lot of times we have, we're like, well, we just have to have hope. We just have to have faith. We'll figure it out, you know. And oh, things have gotten better over the last couple hundred years for the most part.

So we'll keep moving in that direction. And like, we'll get. it, you know? Well, like, we might not. Well, we, we absolutely might not, which is what, you know, it brings us back to why I wrote the book. Because I think by drawing the, certainly the defense department, the people who are aware of nuclear weapons, they know how bad it would all be. And I think it's in the public being reminded. Because, you know, in the 80s, people were protesting in Central Park, in Hyde Park. Yeah. I mean, Reagan and Gorbachev didn't do what they did. without the people demanding it, right?

So it is, and I was reminded that by many of the people, the colleagues that I've met along the way, working on this book, since it's published, speaking to people, because they remind me, Annie, the public has the push, the pressure on the presidents. They do what the public demands. Yes, Reagan was depressed when he saw the movie, but the public was furious.

Well, and Trump watches a lot of TV. Maybe there's another movie to be made. But, yeah, your point that, like, the politicians do live atop public sentiment. Absolutely, they do. So is your hope in writing the book, because I was wondering, hey, you know, we want to alert the public to climate change. Maybe people can get an electric car and pressure their representatives. Is that something people can do here? I was a little skeptical.

But you're reminding me that there was a huge anti-nuclear movement. 30, 40 odd years ago, and it's, there isn't one today. Like, it's not, it's not a pressing issue that people are, are currently protesting about. Although I do, I do think that sentiment is growing because I think people have begun to realize the dangers involved. You know, the, Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Gutierrez, recently said, were one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon, we must come back from the brink. I think there's a growing sentiment

and an undercurrent that things are too dangerous with this kind of ratcheting up, of aggression happening all across the world. As you pointed out, you've got nuclear-armed nations in conflict with their neighbors and other nuclear-armed nations. Yeah. This is dangerous.

Yeah. So what we need is, like we need for so many things, a mass movement of the public to put globally to put pressure on the leaders to say, hey, this is crazy. We got to do something differently. And it's frustrating to think that, again, this is literally the plot of, you know, Dr. Strangelove a movie from the 60s, right? About how insane this logic is about what would happen meant to inspire the public, at least partially, to step up and, you know, make dementia. man's that it end and we're still in the same position but uh uh it sounds like your book is a good reminder that we can't give up the fight yeah well thank you so much for coming on i really appreciate it thank you so much for having me what a great conversation well thank you once again to

annie for coming on the show i thought we got to a really interesting place in that conversation uh i want to thank her for being on and i want to thank you for listening and especially our patreon supporters for supporting the show and just to remind you if you don't donate at the $15 a month level, I would read your name in the credits and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues. This week, we want to thank Yuri Lowenthal, Adam P., James Forshler, Arros Harmon, Callan, and Hey, look, a distraction. If you'd like me to read your name or silly username at the end of the show, once again,

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Everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum podcast. Hi, I'm Drew Offalo. And I'm Jason Offiwalo. And we host the HeadGum podcast, Two Idiot Girls. Each episode, we're discussing plenty of topics that you would be giggling at

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