Piers Morgan Uncensored - Annie Jacobsen: Closer Than Ever To Nuclear War?

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Following Friday's deadly attack on the Crocus Hall in Moscow, Russian state media is firmly blaming Ukraine and the West. Attention is now turning to how Putin will respond. Does this attack on Russia make the world an even more dangerous place? To discuss this and more I'm joined by Annie Jacobsen, investigative journalist and author of the new book, Nuclear War, A Scenario.  YouTube: @PiersMorganUncensored X: @PiersUncensored TikTok: @piersmorganuncensored Insta: @piersmorganuncensored Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vladimir Putin commands the world's biggest nuclear arsenal and stakes his authoritarian grip on providing strength and security. So the massive terrorist gun attack at a Moscow concert hall on Friday killing more than 130 people is the Kremlin's worst nightmare. ISIS-Ks claimed responsibility. Russia, without any evidence, says Ukraine played a part in the attack. Two of the four suspects pretty guilty after they were allegedly tortured by Russian security services. one reportedly receives electric shocks to his denitals. Another was allegedly forced to eat his own ear. Well, attention is now turning to how Putin will respond. Does his attack on Russia make the world an even more dangerous place?

To discuss this and more, I'm joined by Annie Jacobson, investigative journalist and author of the new book, A Nuclear War, A Scenario. Well, it's a scenario, Annie Jacobson, that we're all beginning to have to get our heads round, isn't it? Because the saber rattling from Putin before this about using nuclear weapons was getting louder and louder. I can't imagine it will get any less loud following a terror attack of this magnitude.

First of all, welcome to uncensored. Let me just say that from us top. Great to have you. Thank you. What's your take on this terror attack? We hadn't heard much from ISIS for quite a while. Why have they targeted Russia? How damaging is this to Putin?

I mean, it is an interesting concept we're dealing with right now. And when I think of Putin, I think of the fact that he is the longest serving Russian president since Joseph Stalin. And so everything that happens in his orbit is about power. I mean, to come out of the gate and blame, you know, your sort of obvious adversary Ukraine for something that the rest of the world clearly thinks is ISIS puts him at odds with a lot of people. Yeah. And there's no evidence for that at all. In fact, ISIS have brazenly claimed all credit for it and released videos rather like Hamas did on October the 7th,

glorifying what they did. So this idea that somehow this is all part of a Zelensky plot is clearly for the birds. Turning to Putin and his power, we just had another pretty much the personification of a rigged election. He's not going to lose as long as he's in power any of these elections. What do you make of his constant threat? to the West about potentially utilizing his nuclear armory?

I mean, the saber rattling coming out of his mouth is astonishing to me. You know, I just wrote a book on nuclear war. I give you a fact-based scenario. And when I began writing that book several years ago, with my research going back a decade, I had no idea that we would be looking at this kind of everyday threats. day threats. Look, Putin said on the record that he was not joking about using weapons of mass destruction. It's so alarming. It's frightening to everyone involved. How likely is it that we could

see nuclear conflict? I mean, look, the whole of the Department of Defense's position on nuclear weapons, on nuclear war is something called deterrence, right? And also known as prevention. this idea that you can have enough nuclear weapons pointed at the other side and everyone agrees never to use them. And so entering into this domain as we are now, where you have, you know, nuclear-armed nations threatening one another with nuclear weapons, it just, it changes the atmosphere that has been in place for decades. And it makes the world on the razor's edge.

I mean, you know, the Secretary General of the United Nations said recently that we're just one miscalculation or one misunderstanding away from total Armageddon. Because don't forget, there's no such thing as a limited nuclear war. That is an oft-repeated phrase in Washington. It only ends in nuclear holocaust. So if somebody does make a miscalculation or does that quite deliberately because they've gone mad or whatever, the reason may be, then it would be Armageddon. That's right. I mean, that is the end game. And so, you know, one of the things that I was really fascinated when I was reporting the book, I came across one of these declassified nuclear

war games that the Pentagon declassified recently, and it goes back to 1983. But of course, the nuclear war plans, by the way, were like the most jealously guarded secrets. in the US government. And when you look at what a declassified war game looks like, by the way, I reprint a page in the book. It's like 95% redacted, right? So you say to yourself, what's the point of releasing it? Well, in that situation, it allowed a certain individual,

a Yale professor named Paul Bracken, to talk about the war plan without the war games, without breaking his security clearance. And what he told us answers your question, which is that, yes, no matter how nuclear war begins, it only ends in Armageddon. The proud profit war game showed like different scenarios, which I found fascinating, to learn about sort of obliquely,

that, for example, like if NATO were to get involved or if NATO doesn't get involved, if China got involved, if China didn't, no matter what, it only ends one. way, end game, end of civilization. And I think that's enough to like terrify everyone on this planet into realizing nuclear saber rattling is a very bad idea. And in terms of the technical capacities of the various superpowers, how many nuclear weapons does America have? How many does Russia have? How many does China have? And of those weapons, how many are currently able to be used?

Right. I mean, great questions. And again, these were, as I was reporting the book, these were like shocking jaw-dropping revelations that I was going through learning one after the next. And by the way, these are not declassified. The Federation of American scientists here in America keeps track of the warheads that are what are called forward deployed, that can be launched in seconds and minutes. And of course, they change every year by like a few numbers. But the United States, States has 1,770 forward-deployed nuclear weapons ready for launch. Russia has essentially the same, that's the parity thanks to the treaty, so they have 1,660. China last year had 410, this year they have 500. The Defense Department recently announced that they believe China will have as many as 1,500 nuclear warheads ready for launch in the next day. decade. So you can see this kind of madness is just escalating and getting to this point where, you know, when you consider that we have nine nuclear-armed nations now, the idea of two

superpowers locked, you know, with their sabres pointed at one another, is no longer that situation. Things are getting really unstable. And we know, obviously, from the beginning of the end of World War II about the nuclear weapons that were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How does the power of these ready to be deployed nukes right now compare to those bombs that were dropped? I mean, orders of magnitude. So to report the book, I interviewed sort of top-tier upper echelon national security advisors to the president.

former secretaries of defense, weapons engineers. One of the most stunning series of interviews I did was with Richard Garwin. And that name might not be familiar to viewers. He is the man who drew the architectural plans for the first thermonuclear weapons. So everyone thinks of Edward Teller as the inventor of the thermonuclear bomb, which he was.

But he couldn't figure out a way to actually make it explode. Garwin did that as a young man in 1952. And Garwin explained to me, I asked Garwin the same question that you're asking me is like, how do bombs differ? Because sort of the smartest people in the room tend to be able to really simplify things. And Garwin simplified it for me like this. He said that a thermonuclear bomb uses an atomic bomb as the fuse. And so that gives you an idea.

The Ivy Mike bomb, the first one that Garwin drew that exploded with 10 megatons of power, was approximately 1,000 Hiroshima bombs going off simultaneously from a single center point. I mean, think about that in terms of power. And how many of, say, America and Russia's current deployable nuclear weapons, would have that kind of power? Almost all of them. I mean, I really source the sizes of the weapons and the warheads. And, you know, there are some ballistic missiles that are called mirved.

It means they have multiple warheads that can release. I mean, the sort of mayhem and madness of nuclear weapons is both specific and general in my book, meaning, you know, I try to give the readers this sort of really specific sense of urgency. And then if you want to nerd out on the numbers you're asking, you can look in the back of the book to read all these specific statistics. And again, these are kept track of very meticulously by organizations that are working to sort of make nuclear weapons, make the facts and figures about all of this very much on the record. so it's just a matter of getting people to actually care about these things, be interested in them. And as a storyteller, for me, it was like, show the people in the most horrific detail possible, fact-based detail,

just how horrific a nuclear war would be so that something can be done about all of this. I mean, is the reason why you are convinced if it started that would be the end? Simply because if you think about what you've just been telling me, me if Russia or the United States or China was to let off one of their nuclear weapons and it had the power of a thousand Hiroshima's just imagining the devastation that that would cause would compel any country on the receiving end to unleash their own immediately. There would be no hesitation they couldn't be for risk of more coming and therefore you get the you get the firefight, but not involving normal weaponry, involving weaponry that can devastate,

presumably miles and miles and miles and miles of cities in a flash. That's right. And also the policies in place that, again, are all open-sourced on the record, and also the timing of the events is really what is most shocking, right? So unlike a terrorist attack, which you see today, people wait, they respond, they decide how. to respond. They have sort of meetings, what should we do. That's not how nuclear war works. Nuclear war works in seconds and minutes, not in days and weeks. And, you know, again, I take the reader through the technical aspects of this because they're really stunning to know. We have a policy called launch on warning here in the United States. And what that means

is the moment that the president is told that a nuclear missile is on the way to be of the United States, he immediately chooses a nuclear counterattack. And as a former Secretary of Defense told me, that is policy, we do not wait, period. So there's no question of a sitting president of the United States mulling over what the response should be. It's automatic. It's automatic, which is why the common phrase in Washington is there's no such thing as a limited nuclear war. It really, And then when you couple that with the idea of what's called sole presidential authority. So in the United States, we also have a policy that the president of the United States

launches the counterattack. He doesn't ask permission of anyone, not the Secretary of Defense, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and certainly not the Congress. And so you begin to see, hopefully I demonstrate to readers, like, whoa, this is all all set up for mass extinction events. I mean, it's sort of fascinating and terrifying exactly as you articulated at the start of this. I'm just trying to get my head around the reality

of who starts one of these wars, knowing how it ends. Unless you're talking about a complete idiot or a lunatic in charge of a country that has these weapons. And I don't think at the moment, I don't see any of the leaders of Russia, China or America, qualifying as either an idiot or a complete lunacy. But in Putin's case, he's clearly shown himself to be an aggressive warmonger with the invasion of Ukraine. He's saber-rattled more than I can remember any world leader doing about his nuclear capability. Is it possible? Is it feasible that he would see any logical

reason to start one, knowing surely how it would end? In other words, are his threats hollow for that reason? Well, I would certainly hope they're hollow. But the problem is, you know, you have him speaking on the record about the possibility of nuclear use. And so, and again, what he's talking about are tactical nuclear weapons, at least as far as we can discern. And what is that, Annie, just to be clear, what is a tactical nuclear weapon? Yeah. Yeah. So tactical nuclear weapons are essentially just like armor, you know, bigger bombs on the battlefield,

versus the sort of euphemism of strategic nuclear weapons, which means ballistic missiles. So a ballistic missile gets from continent to continent in about 30 minutes. That's why we have the launch on warning policy. And so deterrence is essentially set up with this idea of ballistic missiles aimed at one another, across the country, you know, across the world. Tactical nuclear weapons is essentially the fear that that is what Putin is considering using in Ukraine. And again, no matter what way you think about nuclear weapons, we know from these declassified

scenarios and from all of my interviews with countless people who have been responsible for these plans and advising the president across decades, that no matter how it starts, it ends. So to your point, like, yes, he's threatening tactical nuclear weapons, but any nuclear weapon is a really bad idea. Was it a great shame for the people of Ukraine that they gave up voluntarily their nuclear capability? I mean, do you think that Putin would have ever thought about invading Crimea, let alone larger swathes of Ukraine two years ago?

So the historian in me takes a little bit of a different approach there. I interviewed former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, who was responsible for a lot of the sort of nonproliferation when the wall came down. And Ukraine had nuclear weapons positioned on their soil, but they would never have really been able to use them. The command and control of those weapons was always in Moscow. And so what would they do with nuclear weapons that they couldn't launch? I'm not sure. But, you know, it is interesting to think about. It's frightening to think about.

I think that's where my mind goes toward, let's listen to the people who are very skilled at these non-proliferation ideas and these organizations that are dedicated to that. Because you basically want to have sort of we as the people of the earth want to have less nuclear weapons and certainly less nuclear armed nations. We've had incidences over the past decades of very near misses in terms of mistakes being made and so on. Given the unbelievable power of the modern-day nuclear weapon, just immeasurably more powerful than anything the world has seen actually used, what is the danger of a simple human error unleashing one of these things and it being irrevocable? Yeah. I mean, there have been five or six miscalculations near nuclear misses on the record that we know about.

And I write about some of them very briefly in the book. You know, it's just shocking to think that you could come close to nuclear war, come really close. And again, that has to do with the seconds and hours in which things unfold. Again, it was Secretary of former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, who told me the most haunting specific example of that because he was involved in it. And as an investigative journalist who writes books, I really get a lot of value out of listening to people who are at the center of the event, talk about it. Because I'm always interested in like that human feeling behind it. And when Perry was describing to me what it was like back in 1979, he was the deputy secretary, deputy secretary director of research and engineering at the Pentagon. And he was the night watch guy that got this message, you know, the nuclear night watch guy. He got the message from both the bunker beneath the Pentagon and the stratcom bunker beneath

off at Air Force Base in Nebraska, both of them saying that the Russians had launched ballistic missiles, something like a thousand of them at the United States, from submarines and from silos. And so Perry described it going through his mind for a few minutes how he was going to brief the president that he needed to launch a counterattack. And it was just a few seconds later that he was notified that, are you ready for this? It was a training tape, like a VHS tape that had been mistakenly inserted into a machine beneath the Pentagon. Oh, God. You see, so my, look, obviously I'm horrified by that little detail, but also what safeguards are in place today to not let that happen again, given how close that must have been to unleashing the war that you believe, and I can understand why you do, would end everything.

I mean, nothing hit me harder in reporting and writing this book that the nuclear command and control system in the United States is a system. And what that means is it's a system of machines, people and machines. And all machines break. And when you think about that, that idea of, you know, that we really are one misunderstanding. one miscalculation, one technical error away from nuclear Armageddon. That is astonishing. Well, it's horrifying, isn't it? Tell me about the, because I know you talk about this in your book, the sheer power of one of these new nuclear weapons.

I mean, what would it be like to be underneath one of these things when it landed? Yeah. I mean, that's why I begin the book with a one-megatone thermonuclear bomb striking the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. And that's because everyone in Washington, D.C. is terrified of what's called a bolt out of the blue attack. And that's an unwarned nuclear attack against Washington. And to your point, like, I think people, after reading the book, would certainly hope they were at the center point when a nuclear weapon were a nuclear weapon to strike. Because you would just turn into combusting carbon and it would be a lot easier than what happens to the individuals outside Ground Zero, right? So Ground Zero is a one-mile diameter ring of fire.

It obliterates everything in that ring. And then you have the rings going out where you have, you know, the most horrific things happening as, you know, engineered structures change shapes and sort of concrete blasts apart and the streets turn into molten lava. The descriptions, by the way, come not from Annie Jacobson's imagination, but rather from Defense Department documents. because defense scientists have been studying the effects of nuclear weapons on people and on things since the end of World War II. And what about the sort of fabled winter that comes after a nuclear explosion? How does that manifest itself? What would that be like to live through? So just to be clear, that is not a fable.

nuclear winter is an absolute phenomenon. And when it was first written about in 1983, the five authors, one of whom was Carl Sagan, the famous American scientist, you know, this idea that the soot rising up from the megafires after the nuclear explosions would blot out the sun and create a nuclear winter was initially discounted by the Defense Department as Soviet propaganda. And the authors of that nuclear winter theory, one of whom I interview at great length for my book, Professor Brian Toon, he was Carl Sagan's student at the time, you know, he was explaining to me that those authors humble as they were, sort of conceded that their

modeling capabilities were limited. Of course, in 1983, you didn't have the computer systems that you have now. But since then, Tune and others have been dedicated to really drilling down on the nuclear winter theory using state-of-the-art computers. And what they have found is that actually what they initially reported was nothing compared to what nuclear winter would really be like. And this is, again, based on computer models today. So you're talking about parts of the earth dropping 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Sorry, I don't have the Celsius. And you're talking about the mid-latitudes being under all the freshwater bodies, being under sheets of ice.

And so you'd have agriculture fail. Without agriculture, people starve to death. And this is where really that idea, a quote from Nikita Khrushchev, where, he said, after a nuclear war, the survivors would envy the dead. Wow. Yeah. I remember that quote. It's a very forbidding quote when you have talked to someone like you for half an hour, Annie, I've got to say.

Is it true that there are nuclear bunkers for the great and good, the powerful, which would withstand a nuclear war, a proper all out one? Or would everything just go? So that, I would borrow your word, fable, right? That is a fantasy, you know. Even the stratcom bunker isn't going to survive. Even the Raven Rock bunker, which is officially called the alternate National Military Command Center bunker, that wouldn't survive. You know, I did an interview with the former FEMA director.

That's the agency in the United States that's in charge of population protection planning after, let's say, earthquakes, fires, flood. Well, they're also in charge of planning for a nuclear war. And Craig Fugate, I interviewed, he was the FEMA director for eight years here. I've interviewed him. I mean, what he said, you've interviewed him. Several times. Actually, when I was at CNN during natural disasters, he'd always be up, yeah.

Okay, well, you have to get him on your show to tell your audience about nuclear war. because what he said shocked me. I even went back to him and said, like, are you sure that you actually said all this on the record? You know, he described nuclear war as what is called a low probability, high consequence event. And he likened it to an asteroid strike. And by the way, FEMA prepares for asteroid strikes and they prepare for nuclear war. And what he told me was that, you know, there would be no protection plan. of the people, because after a nuclear war, everyone would be dead.

And then he described to me as FEMA director how he would have to deal with this kind of thing from a bunker, you know, where he would be whisked away to a place called Mount Weather. And he was describing to me how he would have to like disassociate himself from the horror because he knew there would be nothing that FEMA could do for anyone. after a nuclear war. And it would really be about, and here's his quote, self-survive. Incredible. Did you watch Oppenheimer?

Mm-hmm. I did. I did. I did. And I was really, you know, I'm a big fan of films. I'm a big fan of storytelling in general. And I think that any amount of, you know, manner in which you can get people to become interested in a subject matter, where you can kind of reduce or get rid of this idea of like, oh, that's a subject

that you aren't equipped to know about, which is kind of a common thread when it comes to, you know, a lot of people with PhDs, shall we say. And so if you can bring the story to the people, then I feel like there's hope. I once interviewed Professor Stephen Hawking shortly before he died, turned out to be his last television interview. And I asked him, you know, actually he thought the biggest threat to mankind was artificial intelligence if it learned how to self-design. Of course, the first thing that AA might do, if it does learn to self-design, is unleash nuclear weapons to kill all the dismal inferior humans. So I think he probably was morphing the two things together. But I said to him, if you knew it was your last day on Earth and you were about to,

everyone was about to die, how would you spend it? And he said he would be with his family, drinking champagne in the sunshine listening to Wagner. And so, Annie, after this apocalyptic interview, I just want to ask you, if you knew the nuclear Armageddon was coming, how would you spend your last day? Okay, so not to deflect the question, but I am a little more hopeful than that, right?

Because even though I wrote this book, which is just terrifying, I believe there actually is hope. And I'm going to reference here, what I call the Reagan reversal. Okay. When I was a young high school student in 1983, there was an ABC miniseries called The Day After.

And it was so controversial and so scary and so doom and gloom that the ABC executives were actually encouraged not to air it. But they did. And 100 million Americans watched the day after, including a very important American named President Reagan. And he even wrote in his journal, his presidential journal that he became greatly depressed watching it. But here's the hopeful part. He reached out to his Russian counterpart, Gorbachev. They had communications that led to the Reykavik summit. And as a result, the world went from the all-time high. There were 70,000 nuclear weapons on the planet. And now, today,

they're around 12,500. You could say that's 12,500 too many, but it is progress. If you're wrong with your hope and the apocalyptic nature of your book comes to fruition, I just repeat my question. You've got a few hours, Annie. How are you going to spend it? I'd get in the car and go skiing. Any particular slopes?

Yeah, I'd go to Mammoth where, you know, right, I live in L.A. and Mammoth Mountain has amazing skiing, and I go there all the time, and, you know, Mother Nature. That sounds a pretty good way to end your life. Let's hope it ever happens. And it's been a fascinating conversation about a subject, I think, that we all think we know about. But really, without reading your book and talking to you,

I feel like I was not even at first base of knowledge about the reality of a nuclear war. And let's just hope and pray. We never ever have to see it. In fact, if we did, well, this would be a superfluous conversation because we wouldn't be here to discuss it. Annie Jenkinson, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.