The Jordan Harbinger Show - 970: Annie Jacobsen | The Nuts and Bolts of Nuclear Annihilation

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

Are you afraid of the possibility of nuclear war? Chances are good you're not scared enough. Journalist Annie Jacobsen is here to change all that! What We Discuss with Annie Jacobsen: What checks and balances keep us safe from nuclear attacks — and prevent such attacks from being initiated accidentally? Why nuclear war preparedness and response plans are woefully inadequate under even the mildest potential scenarios. The mechanics and strategies of nuclear warfare and the fantasy of space-based defense systems. The terrifying concept of nuclear EMPs and their consequences. The chilling reality of nuclear winter and its aftermath on those unlucky enough to survive the first blasts. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/970 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to checkout is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. He explained to me how FEMA is the organization that plans for low probability but like seriously high catastrophe events. He said to me, Annie, we plan for asteroids. There's nothing that FEMA can do

if a nuclear war happens. He said to me, there's no population protection planning, that's what they call it, in a bolt out of the blue attack, a nuclear attack, because everyone will be dead. Welcome to the show.

I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the story of secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become

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And if you're new to the, show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do. I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiations, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation and cyber warfare, crime and cults and more, and I'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, my guest Annie Jacobson and I are talking about nuclear war.

What happens when those missiles launch? How do they work? How do we detect them? Can we defend ourselves? What happens when a warhead detonates? Who survives? What is the government's plan for those survivors? There's a lot in this episode, and I think it's absolutely fascinating.

Even if you're not into military or warfare-type stuff, I just still think this is a really good conversation with somebody who knows a whole lot about nuclear war. In fact, after listening to this, you might actually wish you knew just a little bit less about nuclear conflict, but I recommend you stick with us here in any case. And here we go with Annie Jacobson. I have to tell you, I'm way more scared of nuclear conflict than I was before reading this book.

And I know that that's maybe like partly but also not your intent. I don't know. Was that partly your intent? Because it worked if it was. But I loved it. I thought it was so interesting. I mean, the fundamental premise of the book is to demonstrate in appalling detail about just how terrifying nuclear war would be.

I guess I thought I had, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, I thought we had way more checks and balances and defense mechanisms. And like, your book was like, actually, and we'll get into all this. But it's like, actually, if one person gets really suicidal or homicidal, there's nothing pretty much anyone can do about it. And if there's like a weird accident because somebody had a miscalibrated instrument, we're just all dead or wishing we were dead. I mean, you would think in a democracy, you would have, like you said, more checks and balances, but not only that, the thing that shocks me always is that the fundamental premise behind nuclear war is that it's sole presidential authority.

And I think that early concept, if you can get that across to people, and of course they stop and say, wait, wait, what does that even mean sole presidential authority? Well, what it means is that the President of the United States has the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons 24-7, 365 days a year. He needs to ask no one, not the Secretary of Defense, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the Congress. And when you consider that that fundamental is part of our democracy, it really kind of puts you on your heels. And then you begin to learn in the course of the book about all of the other insane situations which occur in seconds and minutes, not hours, were nuclear war to become a reality. And that is terrifying. Yeah, I like the way you handled that in the book. It was like there's time stamps.

And it does a good, the book, you in the book do a good job of illustrating that this is so fast, right? It's like two minutes and 45 seconds. Radar picks up the missile launch headed towards Washington, and then, you know, dot, dot, dot, three minutes post detonation. Everything from Bethesda to Roanoke, Virginia is ash. There's no cellular life left in this double-digit mile radius anymore.

And there won't be for like a long time. And it's like, wow, in just minutes. All these, someone's making dinner and then the next, like everybody that they know and every place they go to and is vapor. or a hole or a little bit of both, I guess. Yeah. I mean, there's a reason why I began the book

with what is known as a bolt out of the blue attack. And that is because that's what everyone in D.C. fears. And again, I was told this by, you know, the powers that be, the people that are in the upper echelons of the national security system, of the nuclear war command and control system, that there would be a bolt out of the blue attack, meaning kind of like a preemptive nuclear strike.

And as you say, it takes out a city. And then you have to begin to wrap your mind around the fact that like, oh, wow, of course, a nuclear weapon is a weapon system that is designed to take out a city. It's not designed to take out a person or a battalion or even a military facility, but rather a city. It is a weapon of mass. Destruction, yes, but it's also a weapon of mass extermination. This might seem like a little bit of a dumb question because nuclear explosions.

Yeah, they're kind of big. But I'll ask anyway, why can't there be a small scale, relatively small scale nuclear war? Like, I know it's horrifying to think about, but what if North Korea launches something and it hits San Diego? And then it's like, whoa, wait, okay. We hit Pyongyang and a bunch of other places and it's like, well, they can't hit us back. and we got to pick up the pieces of San Diego, and it's a national tragedy, and we remember it for 100 years. But the world still continues essentially like it was before. Well, you've hit upon the kind of enigmatic principle of nuclear war and nuclear weapons themselves.

And that begins with this theoretical concept of deterrence, right? So we're not supposed to have a nuclear war, right? So if we do, then we're going to talk in a second about what would happen. But first, I think it's great for listeners to realize that the whole premise of nuclear weapons and nuclear systems is it's all predicated on this concept of deterrence. And it sounds like a fancy word. Okay, really simple. It comes from the word to deter, to prevent. Allegedly, all these nuclear weapons, there are 12,500 nuclear weapons in the world ready to be used, nine nuclear armed nations.

Let's talk about Russia and America for a minute, about what weapons are deployed, deployed, meaning ready to launch in seconds or minutes. The U.S. has 1,770. Russia has 1,674, ready to be deployed in seconds or minutes. Okay, so think of those arsenals pointed at one another as they are. Now, imagine the idea that they must never be used. That's why we have the concept of mad, mutual assured destruction. No one will ever use them because if they did, it would mean everyone would die. by the way, we're going to just have them all pointed at each other in case we need to use them,

which is a sort of enigmatic roundabout way to answer your question, which is no one's going to go, oh, wow, someone used a nuclear weapon for the first time in 79 years. So let's just use one. There's no precedent for nuclear weapons. May there never be a precedent for nuclear weapons outside of, you know, the end of World War II at Hiroshima Nagasaki. And so this kind of pressure cooker idea of all these nuclear weapons are there, but they will never be used under any circumstances except for if they are. And that's why I went to dozens of highly placed former presidential advisors, nuclear weapons designers, scientists, airmen, soldiers, you know, nuclear bomber pilots to give me the skinny on what would happen if one were to be

used, like you said. It's not just going to be, let's wait and see. It's just not what that is going to be. How do we know that? Well, a few nuclear war games have been declassified. And from those declassified documents, we can see this shocking truth that the Pentagon knows that no matter how nuclear war begins, it ends in apocalyptic scale, Armageddon. that is how it ends. You mentioned in the book that something like 2 billion people would die as a result of this, and we know this because the U.S. has been planning for this general nuclear war. And spoiler, everyone listening to this is not going to make it, right?

Just statistically speaking, if you don't live in the middle of nowhere and you live in a nuclear-armed nation, and even if you do, you're probably going to die. That's just kind of it. I don't even know how it's it. That's it. You're right. I mean, think about what you just said. Billions of people would die, right?

And the timing on this book is so crazy because when I began working on it during COVID and I began to interview some of these old timers who were cold warriors, right, like former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, who, you know, people in their late 80s, early 90s who dedicated their whole lives to preventing nuclear war. And for a while there, sort of in the 90s, felt maybe even the early 2000s, felt as if, oh, wow, we did it. We're not going to ever have a nuclear war. And now here we are again with this kind of saber-rattling

and real serious, threatening talk of possible nuclear use. And these cold warriors, the octogenarians, the men in their 90s, you know, were the first people that told me, any billions of people will die if we have a nuclear war. It sounds so hyperbolic and inflammatory. And that's, you know, not just, you know, pardon the poetics, old men dying and fearing, you know, what's beyond. That's like, when I began to gather that information,

it was like, whoa. And then I took that information from those interviews, from people that are highly respected in the national security world. and I took those numbers and statistics and concepts and ideas and war plans to the younger generations. And bit by bit, I began piecing together this shocking, terrifying scenario based on all these interviews with all of these people from various generations now, saying to me, yep, yep, that is not hyperbole. That is how it ends.

Your scenario in the book, and by the way, if people by the books, please use the links in the show notes. It does support the show. The scenario in the book is, I'm going to overuse the word terrifying in this episode, but that's just the way it is, right? Because you can't kind of, two billion people sounds hyperbolic, it's not, it's the reality. So saying that all this is terrifying is pretty accurate. The first three seconds of a nuclear explosion, I think, is one thing that you kind of really zoom in on in the book. And it's very gross what happens to human bodies.

Are you comfortable getting into that a little bit? Because I feel like people should know this. We should actually be more afraid of nuclear weapons than most of us probably are. You know, I'm so glad you brought that up because, again, it sounds like some kind of a horror book or horror film what I'm describing. And as I make very clear in the narrative and then specifically clear in my notes, of course, there's 100 pages of notes at the end of the book like all my books, the facts about what happens to humans and what happens to things. you know, during a nuclear explosion and then in the seconds and minutes and hours after is all factually sourced from Defense Department documents

because the Defense Department has spent decades. First learning when we were exploding nuclear weapons in the atmosphere in the 1950s and early 1960s, measuring and chronicling the effects of nuclear weapons. blast, the effects of radiation, the effects of the horror that ensues. And I describe that in very specific detail for a very specific reason to scare you because we should all be scared of nuclear war. I mean, one of the questions I asked every one of my sources was, is this fear-mongering, writing an actual scenario of what will happen? And every single one of them

said to me, no. We have to be afraid. We have to. And so many, otherwise we're not going to take the measures necessary to avoid this kind of stuff. And the first three seconds, I mean, it's just like the, I'll of course leave it to folks to read the book, but I mean, skin sloughing off, people's eyes being burned, survivors being trapped in various different really horrifying ways.

And that's if you don't die. Like, there's that quote from, is it Brezhnev, who said the living will envy the day? It's really obvious when you read the book that you really want to go first if this is happening. You do not want to be 150 miles away with your skin sloughing off, blind, and not able to get food, water, communicate with anybody, and have your kids disintegrating in your arms. You don't want that. And, you know, I don't dwell on that, right? As you know, from reading the book in advance, and thank you for reading it so closely. this is something that is horrifying in great detail.

I mean, the Defense Department spent time figuring out about how far out, and I'm talking about how many miles out, things like pine needles will catch on fire from a nuclear explosion. And this is just from the x-ray light, right? And this is the kind of stuff that really makes your mind go, holy shit. Like, I don't know what's crazier, that they actually know these facts or that now, I'm just learning them. But wait a minute. A upholstery inside of an automobile will spontaneously combust, you know, six or seven miles out from the nuclear grounds. What? And I had to relay those

details to the readers because it really does something to your brain because you say like, okay, not only is this objectively horrifying, because again, we're reading it, you know, from the comfort of not being in the middle of a nuclear war, right? But then you stop and say, wait, why do we know all this? And then you footnote it and you're like, oh, page 97 of this Defense Department manual, right? And then you say, but wait a minute, if the insiders know this is how all these hundreds of millions of people are going to die, right? Because the billion figures start to happen later with the mass megafires and with the nuclear winter, which we can talk about later. But if the Defense Department knows this is how tens of millions of people die in the first few minutes,

wait, what? Why isn't anyone doing anything about this? Okay, now there are lots of groups, nonproliferation groups that have dedicated their lives to trying to bring an end to this sort of nuclear weapons bonanza that seems to be existing. But the average Joe or Jane, me or you, doesn't know about any of this, or at least didn't. I certainly didn't in such detail until I wrote this book. And that, I think, is the point and the power of all of this. It's like, understand about this, know about this. Look at it.

Face it. And then join a conversation. And then what? Dot, dot, dot. How many nukes did we have at an all-time high? You said we have 12,500 something globally now. There's this comedy bit from the 90s where this comedian says something like, we have enough nukes to destroy the world 50 times over. Why bother after you've destroyed the world

once? Why do you need to keep leaning into this? And I'm paraphrasing, but it's a valid question. You know, if you've got so many, why? Why do we need all of them? I mean, you know, tens and thousands of nuclear weapons. I mean, at one point we had 60,000 nuclear weapons between the superpowers. And I take the reader in the beginning when I say, like, I ask the question, you know, how did we get here? And try to do it. really quickly through numbers, you know, because of course there's so much history there, which is super interesting and people can get into, you know, if they become interested in it. But I really just tried to sort of somewhat poetically, if you will, take the reader through

the buildup in a couple of pages and demonstrate that we went from, you know, right after World War II, there was like a couple atomic bombs. And then you see year by year how the buildup happens until the all-time. high in 1983. You can't really wrap your head around that and then kind of get to realize that the equation, the bottom line, has to do with the military industrial complex or what I call the defense contractor complex, right? The idea that these weapon systems are really tied in with the economics of every country, certainly every nuclear-powered country, certainly America. I mean, those are other conversations. Those are offshoot conversations that I hope would

happen from people reading this book, first and foremost, when they get it from the book in this incredibly narrative form. Just like, tick, talk, tick, talk, here's what happens. Here's what happens in the first second. Here's what happens in the second second. And as you know, 72 minutes later, it's end game and then we move into nuclear war. Most nuclear launches are announced. Why is that? This is part of, I guess, deterrence, right? But I always found that funny, of course, until I read the book, I was like, why are you telling us you're going to launch the thing? Wouldn't it be more impactful if you just surprised us? In North Korea, took my advice, which is not great, right?

But the idea that we tell each other we're going to do this 2020 hindsight after reading your book, probably a really good idea. Oh, absolutely. And I mean, as a reporter who has written six previous books on, you know, military and intelligence programs, the kind of basic facts that I learned exactly like what you're talking about were astonishing to me that I didn't know, but are really super valuable to have in one's brain. And I hope that people get those things as takeaways. And obviously, you're pointing out, thank you very much, that that was actually an effective thing to realize, okay, so what is an ICBM, essentially,

what you're asking? Like an intercontinental ballistic missile. And that is a weapon, it's a giant rocket with a nuclear weapon in its nose cone. And that is how a nuclear warhead is able to get, from one country, let's say a launch pad in Russia, to another country, you know, Washington, D.C., in my book, in basically 30 minutes. Wow. Right? 30 minutes. It's actually 26 minutes and 40 seconds from Russia. It's 33 minutes from North Korea.

You get the idea. I had all of this sourced from either Defense Department documents or Ted Postal Professor Emeritus at MIT, ballistic missile expert doing the math for me, right? and you've got ballistic missiles. So that's how fast nuclear war happens. So when you think about the fact that we have ICBM tests going on, as you said, which of course most people don't know why should they. They're busy doing other things. But now that you've read my book, you're suddenly probably like,

notice in the newspaper, North Korea is conducting, or rather conducted an ICBM test. And you go, oh, right? Right. And I found out reporting the book, yes, all the other nuclear armed nations notify one another when they are conducting tests. Because as was said to me time and time again by numerous people, no one wants to start a nuclear war by accident. Right. And then I find out from one of the world's experts on North Korean missiles that North Korea is the only nuclear superpower that doesn't announce its tests.

Why, I asked. well, it wants to look tough. Whoa, right? So imagine the eyes on the Korean peninsula. Imagine the Defense Department's eyes on that peninsula to watch in seconds when there is a launch, what happens next in those first few seconds. This kind of stuff I found astonishing as a reporter,

then you ask the question, why do we have to know in seconds? Well, because with, Within a few seconds, the U.S. Defense Department's satellites in space that are parked in geosynchronous orbit over the Korean Peninsula watching for these nuclear launches, for these ICBM launches, needs to know right away, needs to be able to determine machine learning, AI, you know, which direction that missile is heading. Right. Is it heading over the Sea of Japan or is it heading toward us? Imagine, and for people who don't know, geosynchronous orbit means the satellite essentially follows the piece of land that's under it. So it doesn't just go around the world at its own speed.

It goes around the world only over the U.S. so that it can provide telecommunication services from AT&T or whatever. That's what geosynchronous means. So that is quite amazing. I would imagine Russia does a test. They say, hey, they pick up whatever red phone that I'm imagining, right? And they say, hey, this is a missile. It's going to burn up over the desert.

in Kazakhstan or Tajikistan, it's not headed towards you. Here's the projected trajectory that we're going to give it, give or take, X, whatever. And we're watching to make sure that they're not lying. And then they're not lying and it burns up and we're like, congratulations, I guess. And we go on with our lives, right? But North Korea just says, good morning. This thing is in the air. And all these alarms must go off in every country in the world that has enough surveillance

to keep their eye on this thing. and then minutes later after we notify NATO countries and stuff, they're all probably on high alert and or have jets in the air because you just don't know where this thing's going to land. Japan has a bad day every single time because everybody gets woken up possibly for the last time until they find out it's just going to crash harmlessly in the sea of Japan.

Absolutely. And I may now have ruined many of your morning coffees because you will now understand these things when you read about them. It's not just, oh, yeah, yeah, another North Korean missile test. You think, oh, my God, somebody at Cheyenne Mountain or at No Rad headquarters had a really bad warning, you know, trying to track this thing for the first few seconds into the first throughout what's called boost phase of the missile, the first five minutes to really determine where it is. And as I write in the book, while the rest of us are sleeping or going about our days, that's happening. And then as I show in the book, oh, my God, what would happen were the nuclear command and control structure in the United States to figure out one of those ICBM tests isn't a test. It's actually headed for the United States. What happens next? And at that point, you're basically in, you know, minute three of the scenario. And then you begin to realize there is no

going back from this. And I hope for the readers, that's where the terror starts to tick in because you realize, oh my God, an ICBM cannot be recalled, cannot be redirected. And what happens in the next few minutes is just stunning. Like the fact that the president of the United States is going to be notified of all of this within another TikTok, TikTok, TikTok, tick tock, minute or so around minute five and then have to make a decision about not if to launch in reality. response, but how to launch in response. Is there somebody sitting outside the president's room while he sleeps with a nuclear football? Because that guy can't be far away, right? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And I interviewed numerous Secret Service people who work on this issue, including a former director of the Secret Service himself. And to be taken through in detail of what happens with that nuclear football. I mean, I hope that people are as uncomfortable reading it as I was learning about it and reporting it and writing it because it's called the football. People have heard, you know, it's the case that goes around with the president and every now and then it appears in, you know, a USA Today newspaper photograph and it's circled like the football, right? But that's for real. Metaphorically, it's the button. It's not a button. But inside of it is the information and all the protocols and steps that allow the president to launch nuclear war.

Do we know what's in there? I mean, there's a computer in there. Yes. But how does it communicate with other things? Satellite. So the interviews on the football were super interesting. I bet. I mean, inside of the football is something called the Black Book.

That's its nickname, right? It's called Presidential Emergency Action Directives. There's a number of different names for what's in there. All of them are classified. The black book is not classified because it's like a term of art. I interviewed for the book a number of people who have read those documents. They don't talk about it. Only once that I'm aware of did an actual mill aid.

That's the short term for military aid, who's the guy who carries it. And he's with the president. It's obviously shift rotation, but that's with the president at all times and the vice president. And I take the reader through it. You know, what's inside of that? but the one guy who spoke about it on the record described the black book essentially like a Denny's menu, right? Like that you look at this card in the same way that you would choose. Like I'll have the hamburger with extra cheese and maybe some lettuce and pickles and I.

The president looks at this card when he is told, okay, country X, Y, or Z has launched at us. Now you have to respond. And he chooses as if it were a menu. what weapon systems to use out of the nuclear triad, which targets to hit. And he's also briefed on how many people will die. I found that incredibly interesting. That is interesting. So it's so almost what is it, flippant.

It's like, well, I'll take the submarine in the Arctic Circle. I want a couple of missile silos in Wyoming. And what the hey, let's launch some stuff out of Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. It'll get there sooner. it's almost like ordering appetizers and wondering if you're still going to be hungry enough for the rest of the meal. And then it's like, oh, that's going to be 350 million Russian citizens and probably a few people in Soviet satellite or a former Soviet satellite states that are near the detonations of these certain things. And he's just got to pull the trigger on that,

no pun intended. And it's so straight, it's got to be so weird for somebody like that to make a decision. And I assume there's somebody with him that knows a lot about this because doesn't the president have a lot on his mind? He's probably the least informed person on all of this nuclear stuff of his immediate circle, right? You're absolutely right about that. Okay, so let's talk about the bunkers for a second. In that moment, you said, like, who is informing him? So there are three nuclear command and control bunkers. One is famously in Cheyenne Mountain, okay, in Colorado. And then there is another one underneath the Pentagon, which is called the National Military Command Center, okay? And then there is a, so the president, if he's in the White House, let's say, he would be

getting that information from his advisors at the Pentagon in the bunker beneath the Pentagon, the no rad people in Cheyenne Mountain, and then also strategic command, which most people have never heard of. U.S. Strategic Command has a bunker, the global operations center bunker beneath Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. And the way it was described to me is, you know, Cheyenne Mountain is the brain, the Pentagon is the heart, and stratcom is the muscle, okay? And then the president has to make this decision. And so he's getting advice from his SACDF and his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are probably at this point in the bunker beneath the Pentagon. He's getting advised from No Rad about a lot of the SIG-In situations.

And in Colorado is where you have Space Force. It's where you have the NRO, giving that, you know, all the early warning data is coming in from there. And then Stratcom is on the line because it is Stratcom that receives the order about how to launch and directs that order. And so you asked about what other information he's getting. on top of the casualties that he's briefed on quickly about how many people will die, I found it just eerily shocking that there's also a weather officer there in the Stratcom bunker.

And again, these guys rehearsed for this 24-7 in case it happens in any moment. And the weather officer tells the president how many people will die from radiation poisoning in the days, weeks, and months that follow based on the weather of the day. Wow. And when you hear a detail like that, you're like, oh, my God, this is a system of systems

about what happens if hundreds of millions, soon to be billions of people are about to die. Oh, my God. How can this be true? You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Annie Jacobson. We'll be right back.

back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, it is because of the circle of people that I know like and trust. I don't like the word network, but there's nothing else I can really say about it, right? I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at six minute networking.com. I know that networking is a gross kind of cringy word. This is a super easy down-to-earth, no awkward strategy, no cheesy tactic kind of way to make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, and a better peer. In just a few minutes a day, it's not a whole lot of homework or anything like that. many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course.

So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company. You can find the course always for free at six-minute networking.com. Now, back to Annie Jacobson. I wonder if they make the calculations in advance. It seems like they would. So does the weather officer wake up? So he wakes up and goes, ooh, it's pretty windy over there in Vladivostok.

If we were to hit that with a 40-kilat-n nuclear weapon, it would blow that way at da-da-da. Okay, wow, we're adding an additional 50 million deaths today if we launch. Anyway, I'm going to have the sausage egg and cheese on an English muffin. Like, that's a weird morning. Not for that guy, but generally. Absolutely. And, you know, when you talk about technology, what's interesting is many of these weapon systems have not changed. Okay.

And there's reasons for that, you know, like most ballistic missiles are not wired. They are as they were back in the analog days. And that's kind of good because no one can hack something that isn't wired. But what you're talking about now, these statistics have been so modernized with AI, with what I call machine learning, because it's really more, you know, algorithms are able to do the job of the weather officer with even more precision because they can precisely tell you what's happening. You know, they can forecast weather in a way that didn't exist decades ago. Wow. So big takeaway from the early part of the book is there's no way to. win a nuclear war because it just happens too darn fast. And that was the first sort of big, scary takeaway, knowing the president has six minutes to decide how to respond, which is not a long time when you're talking about hearing the weather officers report and then getting the

recommendations on what to launch and where. I mean, that's all included in that six minutes. It's not like he has six minutes to go outside and take a quick walk around the block and decide how to respond. This is like all encompassing six minutes, give or take. And, you know, I was trying to figure out, okay, how long is six minutes? And I was like timing a commercial at the Super Bowl or, you know, this kind of thing and thinking, what hits home the most that's six minutes? And it's basically, for me, who loves coffee, it's making a pot of coffee and waiting for it to be. That is six minutes. That's how much time the president has. And people say to me, Annie, how do you know it's six minutes? And okay, it's six or so minutes. But like, for example, and again, just

sharing with listeners about how I reported this book based on facts. In President Reagan's memoir, he talks about the six-minute window. He describes it as irrational. He says something, I quote him actually in the book, but it's like, how could anyone decide how to unleash Armageddon in six minutes? I mean, he uses those words, and that is the truth. And again, this six-minute window, not to mention the fact, In my interviews with Secret Service people, it was shocking to realize, like, then they have their own issues.

Once they learn that this is happening, that nuclear war is happening, that there is a missile coming at the United States, the Secret Service's job is to protect the president because simultaneous to nuclear war planning, as you mentioned in the opener, that we've spent all these decades planning for a nuclear war, hoping we don't have one, but planning nonetheless. the same time, there are all these protocols in place to keep government functioning in the event of a nuclear war. So suddenly that's what the Secret Service is thinking about because they need the president to be the commander in chief. And so the Secret Service is massively moving to get the president out of the bunker, the Piaq underneath the White House, out onto the lawn and into Marine One so that they can get him to Raven Rock, which is the alternate. command center of the Pentagon, trying to get him there so that he can continue to lead the nation. And that's where even more chaos is likely to ensue as I write in the book, because you have

these competing interests. Stratcom wants orders from the president, launch orders. Secret Service wants the president out of the White House. We haven't even begun to talk about FEMA, whose job it is to plan for nuclear war and then essentially deal with the population. you know, once the nuclear war happens. I don't even want to begin to tell you about that because it'll really ruin both of our days. Yeah, I know. I have a note on it for later in the show,

but the spoiler is, FEMA's job is just to be like, hey, everybody, there was a nuclear war. You should probably, I don't know, drink some water and, like, save some water and maybe save some food. Anyway, we're out of here, probably going to be dead tomorrow.

Good luck, and you never hear from them again. That's it. That's pretty much all. Craig Fugate, who was Obama's FEMA director across most of that administration, you know, just gave me some really remarkable interviews. He explained to me how FEMA is the organization that plans for low probability but like seriously high catastrophe events. He said to me, Annie, we plan for asteroids. And it's Fugate who told me that there's nothing that FEMA can do if a nuclear war happens. he said to me, there's no population protection planning, that's what they call it,

in a bolt out of the blue attack, a nuclear attack, because everyone will be dead. And that frankness shocked me. And I went back to him, you know, like, wow, that's a really powerful thing that you said. And he didn't say like, oh, I didn't mean to say that. Or, oh, you misheard me. He said, yep. Yeah. If an asteroid hits and takes out the tri-state area, the rest of the electrical

grid will be around, we'll still be able to communicate. I mean, it'll be a massive, massive disaster. But most of us will hopefully survive. There's going to be big problems. We can sort of overcome it. FEMA will try and maintain order around that area. But yeah, in a nuclear situation, it's like, good luck surviving is kind of all they can really do. If they can even notify everybody about what happened, that's all they're really going to do. And that's really, really scary. There's a policy that's making this whole, all, dare I say, more likely and more dangerous, called launch on warning. Tell us about that. What is this? Launch on warning is exactly like it sounds, right? So we've now talked about how when a ballistic

missile is launched at the United States, the satellite systems in place, the Department of Defense's very technically advanced satellite systems detect that launch within a few, within a fraction of a second initially. And then this process begins to determine where it is if it's coming at us. Then there has to be a secondary radar system, a ground-based radar system. In most cases, or at least in my scenario, it would be the one in Alaska, sees it coming in, okay? Once that second confirmation happens at around eight or nine minutes, the president needs to launch, right? because we have a policy that you're asking about, launch on warning.

And some people say, oh, we don't really have that policy. Well, Secretary of Defense, William Perry, set the record straight for the book. He said, Annie, we have a launch on warning policy, period. Once we learn of an incoming nuclear attack, we launch in response, we do not wait. And the reason is, is there's this colloquialism called use them or lose them, which is insane. Yeah. But all of nuclear war is insane.

And that's this idea that if we don't want, because America has a nuclear triad. We have the ICBMs on the ground. We have submarines at sea. And we have the bombers, the nuclear bombers. And the ICBMs on the ground, there are 400 of them across, you know, the sort of Midwestern area.

You can find out the exact location of any of them on Google. You could find them on a map before Google existed, but they are known. They're in silos underneath the ground. And so those are going to launch immediately in a nuclear war because of the use-em-or-lose-em concept that that's what's going to be targeted by an incoming nuclear strike after a place like Washington, D.C. to take out leadership. then the attacker is going to take out the nuclear weapon systems and, you know, render the United States unable to win a nuclear war. I mean, these are the kind of, you know, mocky nations behind the scenes that war planners have gone through for decades in order to strengthen America's position.

And, you know, we could get into this for days. And I think this is where a lot of listeners, their eyes start to glaze over when they have. have to hear about the nuclear triad because it's just confounding. It makes sense, though, right? So we sense a nuclear missile coming in. We have to launch these 400 land-based ICBMs that can't move that are being targeted by the enemy ostensibly at some time. And yes, they'd have to hit 400 sites at once to take them all out, which is probably not happening. But, you know, why risk it? They're already launching a nuke at us. So this is why we can't stop a nuclear war, right? Because not only are these non-recallable, but there's 400. So where are they going into every military site,

major city, known enemy silo that hasn't launched yet, that's already located by our intelligence agencies, which is probably like close to all of them. And maybe even they're being aimed at mobile launchers we see parked somewhere. Who knows? Because they can't drive fast enough to get out of the range of the nuclear of the ICBM that we're launching, even if they move right now, if we're launching right away. So that's why it's just sort of one domino pushes all this stuff over and it just becomes really apparent when you start to read things about like these massive missile fields and in Wyoming or whatever. You didn't go see any of that stuff, did you? I did not. I did not. But in my interview with former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta,

who was also the director of the CIA and he was also White House Chief of Staff through different administration. So his experience and perceptions and analysis of all this was like profound. And he said to me that like even as CIA director, he had no idea about the degree of responsibility that weighs on his shoulder as the Secretary of Defense. And by the way, the Secretary of Defense is the one that the president is going to look to for advice. What do I do? Right. Even though he doesn't have to ask his permission. You can almost be certain unless you have a madman in the White House, he's going to ask the sectaff, what do I do? And so for that reason, to answer your question, Panetta told me that he went to these missile silos that were just really took home for him visually, how much all of this

sits at the razor's edge and how little information the average person knows about any of this. And he really encouraged me in my process here writing this book, Nuclear War, Us scenario, because he said, Annie, the people should know. I want to clarify one thing because you said an interesting thing about the 400 missiles in response, right? So the launch on warning policy, and you can find this, there's a great interview, by the way, which a CNN reporter named Barbara Starr did with Stratcom General Heighton, right? And not a lot of Stratcom directors go on the record talking about this. Yeah.

But Heighton did with Barbara Star, and it's an incredible interview. You can YouTube it. She gives him a lot of really tough questions, and he says it was at the time of the Fire and Fury sort of Trump, you know, North Korea posturing. And Heighton tells her, we need North Korea to know. I'm paraphrasing him, but like, if they launch one, we launch one. If they launch two, we launch two, right? So you hear that.

I see. And then you also can read, and I can. quote them analysts like Bruce Blair, a former ICBM, you know, Missler himself with the Air Force when he was younger and then he became a powerful spokesman all about nuclear weapons. And he wrote lots of really interesting papers. And his theory was if North Korea were to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States, which I use in the scenario, the response would be 82 nuclear weapons. That makes more sense to me. United States. Yes. So they launch one. We launch 82. He demonstrates in his powerful paper,

which I footnote, why it would be 82. And I used those 82 targets in the example, in the scenario that I write. But then a lot of really, you know, calamitous things happen because I learned in the process of reporting this book very serious national security flaws that exist. that could draw Russia into the conflict. And that's the real threat. You know, North Korea has between 50 and, let's say, 130 nuclear weapons. It depends who you ask. The Defense Department puts the number at around 30 or 50.

Analysts, like from Rand, for example, put it as high as possibly 130. So is that going to end the world? Who knows? But Russia's that I spoke of earlier, those 1,674 ready to launch weapons, that's the big fear. And if Russia gets drawn into the conflict, then it's endgame. Then you're talking about the billions. And that's what I write in the scenario, because Secretary Panetta and others told me about some of these very serious flaws that could result in a full-scale nuclear war. We'll get to some of those in a second because I'm, of course, curious.

But when North Korea was launching ICBMs, I was like, eh, whatever. This is just like tough guy talk from a backwater dictator who happens to have developed this. And it seems like now North Korea likely bought an ICBM engine that was stolen from Russia or stolen from the Soviet Union and shaved decades of development time off. So special thanks to whoever sold that thing. And it's also confirmed that warheads from those ICBMs, even from North Korea, will be largely successful in hitting the United States.

It's just not that hard. It's harder to intercept them or interdict them than it is to get them to launch. So that's not great. And the fact that they were able to get their hands on this engine actually also does not bode well for keeping nukes out of the hands of insane theocratic Ayatollas in Iran either. So that's not very comforting. And you mentioned the interceptor program, right, which is probably a good time to talk about that nightmare, right?

Because people have an idea. an incorrect idea that America has this, you know, shield, shall we say, right? If you look at like war fighting as a metaphor, right, it's always sword and shield, you know, and you go back to cavemen, sword and shield, right? Well, ICBM is a big giant sword. So what's the shield? Well, the shield, many people will tell you, oh, we have an interceptor program, interceptor meaning we have missiles that will intercept their missiles,

kind of like Israel's Iron Dome we've been seeing. Well, that's just simply not true, okay? I'll just give you the numbers. You don't have to guess because you read the book already, right? Okay. So we have 44 interceptor missiles. 44. How is that going to work against Russia's 1,674 incoming missiles?

We have 44 interceptor missiles with a success rate of like, around 50% or less, okay? And not to mention the fact that if you really start to nerd out about warheads, as I do a little bit in the book, but again, read my notes, go to some of the sources that I went to to really, if you really want to understand about the geeky stuff. You know, nuclear warheads in the nose cone of a missile, there's often decoys, hundreds of decoys.

So how's that interceptor missile with its one single, weapon inside of it, which is called an exo-atmospheric kill vehicle. It's real name, right? That's what's supposed to knock the warhead out of space. One system's moving at 14,000 miles an hour, the other system's moving at 20,000 miles an hour. Even a defense department official called this akin to trying to shoot a bullet with a bullet. And then you have the fact that the warhead can release 100 decoys to try to mess up the exoatmos kill vehicle as if it's a brain from taking out the real warhead. So the chances are so slim. I guess we can only hope that we have many, many tricks up our sleeve that are still classified. You know, and the idea that pops into my head first is lasers, but like, I don't know, really.

Wasn't that sort of what we lied and told the Soviets we had back in the 80s that bankrupted them is the Star Wars laser program? That is fantasy. And to do that, you also have to start putting nuclear weapons in space or weapon systems in space. And that becomes its own nightmare because this is all about distrust and mistrust. The only solution is communication. There are many people that have been working on nuclear non-proliferation. And my God, we've gotten the numbers down from 60,000 to 12,000, okay? But you can't solve this unsolvable problem of what if we have a nuclear war, with more weapons. You just simply can't. At a point, the world has to realize it's just unsustainable. And also, I think a takeaway of the book is you realize that a lot of this began when there were

just two superpowers. It's a heck of a lot easier to try and control, air quotes, you know, two warring powers than nine, right? There are nine nuclear-armed nations and more trying to get into the game. And so the idea about communication is what's so important. Astonishing fact when I was reporting the book, the Ukraine War begins, and I was shocked when, I don't know if you remember, but a Russian missile was erroneously reported

as having struck something in Poland, a NATO country, right? Wow. Okay. And so that, because of Article 5, could have been a NATO response, disaster, right? But more at issue for me in the middle of reporting this book at the time was like hearing a press conference

that then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff General Millie gave the day after, like a day and a half later, and he said that he wasn't able to reach his Russian counterpoint on the phone yet. Okay? And so when you said, oh, well, earlier in our discussion,

discussion, you said, oh, well, we'll just pick up the red phone. Like, that red phone is a fantasy. If General Millie can't get in touch with his Russian counterpart, when there's a possibility that a Russian missile hit something in a NATO country, oh, my God, right? That was something like 36 hours after the fact. So communication, communication, communication. If anyone were to ask me, well, what's the big takeaway of your book? Like, what positive thing can I leave on? Now that I just read, you know, nuclear winter and everyone dead and the only people left

a hunter gatherers, right? Communication. It's so basic. We do it in our families. Why wouldn't you want to do it on the world stage? Now that we're closer to having an accidental nuclear war than we were during the Cold War with the whole multipolar world thing going on, it seems like all of this is just more and more and more important.

And, you know, looking at the capabilities of some of these weapon systems. One paraphrase line from the book is that it's easier to find a grapefruit-sized object in space than a submarine at sea. So we're not going to find all of Russia's submarines. They're certainly not going to find all of our submarines. And the bad news is it really does sound like a crazy dictator who doesn't care about himself anymore could basically end the world. Kim Jong-un, maybe he's not as crazy, but a dying Putin on the verge of a coup or a defeat in Ukraine or escalates something and ends up miscalculating again, you know, that he could pull the trigger on this. And it's just, again, once the cat's out of the bag, there's nothing we can do.

I think you hit the nail on the head there. I mean, one of the most profound set of interviews I did for this book was with Richard Garwin. And if most people aren't familiar with him, Richard Garwin's now 93. He drew the plans to the first third. thermonuclear weapon, okay? Everyone knows Edward Teller is the father of the hydrogen bomb. Richard Garwin, he was 24 years old at the time, drew the actual plans. Teller could imagine it theoretically, but he couldn't draw something to make it work. That was Richard Garwin.

He gave me a number of interviews for this book over Zoom during COVID. Remarkable. And he's the one that raised that very idea you just mentioned with me. that helped shape the way I unfolded the scenario. Because he said to me, Annie, all it takes is one madman with a nuclear weapon. And he said that what he was worried about was this concept of, after me, the deluge, which in French is, you know, after me the flood. It's a Napoleonic phrase.

And it just essentially means like, eh, you know, if I'm gone, who cares? And that is terrifying and coming from a luminary like Richard Garwin, who arguably knows more about nuclear weapons and nuclear threats and has been advising the Pentagon and the CIA. He was a founder of NRO. He's significantly afraid of that situation certainly means the rest of us should be too. In brief, what happens in Russia when the USA

gets hit by, say, North Korea, because it sounds from the book like Russian early warning technology is not that great, not as good as ours. They don't have what we have. They don't have look down technology if you want to tell us briefly what that means so they can sort of mistake clouds for missile plumes or sunlight for fire. And it's like, should we give them what we have so that doesn't happen? But then also no, because then it affects deterrence. It's all just sort of a catch-22. And you're talking about the Russians' tundra satellite system. Okay? So our system, the Defense Department system, is called Sibbers,

and that stands for space-based infrared system. And it's a constellation of satellites in geosync. That's like 22,000 miles up, one-tenth of the way to the moon. Think about these school bus-sized satellite systems. Incredibly advanced. They're built by Lockheed. and they are so precise. You know, they can see a golf ball from space, basically, right?

I mean, they have these capabilities that are astonishing. They can see the hot rocket exhaust on a launching ICBM in a fraction of a second and begin to track it with help from the Space Force and NRO and other organizations in America. Well, the system you're talking about the Russian system, because Russia and America, you know, we always have to have things on, you know, parody, right? So they have what's called tundra. And what I learned from various experts who confirmed all this in fact is that the tundra system is really lame, okay? It doesn't work. It does not have

that look down capability. So it can't look exactly down. So it has to kind of have a sideways look. And what happens? It can easily mistake sunlight for fire. It can't properly interpret clouds. And so you can have misreadings. And that is a disaster because as a number of experts described to me in the scenario and I relay is, you can have, okay, so going back to the scenario whereby bolt out of the blue attack from North Korea, which is what I propose in the book, and then 80 nuclear warhead response, okay? Now you've got, okay, say half of them are missiles from the ICBMs and half of them are going to end up coming from submarines. So there's 40 or 50 of them that launch out of Wyoming going toward North Korea. Tundra looks at this and missees the number of missiles. That's problem number one.

Problem number two is the fact, and this is where I couldn't believe it when I first learned this fact, that U.S. ICBMs do not have enough range to get to North Korea without flying directly over Russia. That was mind-blowing. I was like, how did you not see that this would be an issue, folks? I mean, I remember when I was like double-triple, quadruple fact-checking that, right? Because it came to me from Hans Christensen, who's probably the world's expert on nuclear weapons numbers. Inside of the Federation of American Scientists, he writes something called the Nuclear Notebook with colleagues. Anyone who wants to geek out should go directly there. Christiansen is like the world's expert in this kind of thing. But even coming from him, I was like, is that really possible? It's like a direct quote from him. And so I took the question to former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. And he said, you know, we were talking about it as like this kind of hole in the national security system. And he said, yes, the whole. It's very problematic.

Yeah. Yeah, because we can't just call and be like, okay, so listen, we're launching nuclear missiles and they're headed right at you, but hold on, hold on. They're going to go over you guys and hit Kim Jong-un. Are you in? Exactly. I mean, how could you possibly have a system? And that this is a fact is shocking. And furthermore, what we were just talking about with General Millie, there you are again with your, I wish your idea that there's this red phone you could just pick up and call were true. Oh, trust us. But what about the fact that Millie couldn't get his Russian counterport on the phone for 36 hours. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Annie Jacobson.

We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our sponsors. All of the deals, the discount codes, the ways to support the show are all searchable and clickable over at the website, jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you're not sure if we have a sponsor for XYZ thing you're thinking about buying, shoot me an email. Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com.

I am more than happy to surface the code for you if we have one. Yes, it's that important. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Annie Jacobson. We don't trust each other. Putin lies about this. The U.S. is lying about mass, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Putin's lying about invading Ukraine,

and we're lying about helping him. I mean, he's not going to be like, oh, you're just going to fly a couple ICBMs over Vladivostok and a couple of other cities in order to hit North Korea. Well, I didn't really like those guys. anyways, let me know when you want to play golf. No, they're just going to launch stuff back at us, assuming we're striking them. That's the logical thing to do if you're a nuclear power with nukes flying at you.

It takes my breath away hearing you talk about it, and I wrote it. Yeah, regurgitating your stuff to you. No, because, and this is why nuclear war scenario unfolds the way it does. This is like, okay, fact one leads to fact two, leads to terrifying whole, right? and then you are able to see as you read along. Like, this is just one bad situation becoming worse. What do you make of Putin saying or implying in the U.S. intelligence agencies sort of reading and that they might detonate nukes in space?

I think it's U.S. intelligence that says this, I don't think Putin's on record at all with this. As you know from reading my book, it's what happens in Act 3 of my book. not in a million years did I think in 2024, right before the book publishes, this would be a news story, right? Because, yes, the capability exists. It has existed. It has existed for decades.

But, you know, it's just so apocalyptic. It's such a bad place to go that the discussion about what we're talking about here is called a nuclear EMP, or a super EMP. It's an electromagnetic pulse, right? So if you detonate a nuclear weapon 300 miles above the middle of the United States, let's say Nebraska, right?

And this is direct from DITRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. It's, you know, born of the Manhattan Project. And DITRA is in charge of countering nuclear weapons. Their chief scientist, Steve Wax, has said, you know, yes, if a nuclear weapon, A small nuclear weapon, by the way, is detonated 300 miles up over the United States. It will take out the entire grid in the United States.

What he said actually was that the electromagnetic pulse would if affect the contiguous landmass of the United States, right? So from coast to coast would be effective. And I describe in length in the book what this would mean. what a nuclear weapon exploded in space, what would happen? And it's just beyond horrifying. And again, fact-checking this part of it, even, you know, really getting like, wait a minute, oh my God, is this even possible? Because this subject, when it has come up decades ago,

it was essentially like two groups of people fighting over the reality of this. The more conservative people that are often called hawks, shall we say, saying, this is an incredible threat. And this is right sort of in the early 2000s after 9-11, you know, really concerned about nuclear EMP, the threat, because it was like, oh, the terrorists are going to get one. And then the more liberal thinkers pushed back against this idea saying, this is all just a plan by the hawks to get more money. Well, whatever you think about the arguments, the facts are real. And that's what I present in the book. And that's what I went to the experts with.

Richard Garwin. Again, Richard Garwin wrote the first paper on nuclear EMP in 1954. It's still classified. Gregory General Tohill, he was in the Obama administration. He was America's first cyber chief. He wrote one of these papers. It's still classified. But they both told me about what actually would happen factually were this EMP.

It's also called a super EMP, were to be detonated over the United States. And I'm not going to do the spoiler alert there because I think, Jordan, you and I both know. It's almost worse. It actually is worse than, you know, being incinerated by a nuclear weapon because you're not going to remember any of that, right? But what happens when all the power goes out all at once and all the train stop moving and the floodgates open literally because the dam controls no longer work?

And all train traffic goes awry and elevators fall and airplanes fall out of the sky. And every infrastructure that is running, on a computer goes haywire. That's really a nightmare beyond a nightmare. Right. Yeah, no phones, no internet, no water, no electricity, of course, new communication. What does it do? Does it just make transistors not work? Is that how it kind of works? Does it just fry those things? I mean, in my discussion with Garwin, it was just very interesting because, okay, so imagine, I mean, and I also find it interesting that the smartest people in the world can just make things so

simple. It's usually kind of the person with like the PhD sort of. This is my bias that's like trying to lecture you, all this will happen. And then like the Richard Garwins of the world will just say like you have to imagine a new lightning strike. If a lightning struck your computer, that's it. Just a direct strike on your computer. So an EMP, the electromagnetic pulse, it's a three-phased pulse, and it essentially just zaps out. It passes through all of the surge suppressors, all the industrial size surge suppressors that exist, as if they weren't even there. Wow. So it's actually high voltage, not just like a magnetic thing that scrambles semiconductors? It's an electromagnetic pulse, a shockwave that essentially shorts out everything all at once,

and then there's a cascading effect. which is how the calamity occurs. And so it's essentially just like it's a giant blackout. That's not repairable. It's not like you can just pop the fuse back in, right? This is like fried. And this is the whole continental U.S. Maso menos, I guess. And that's just if one goes off over, what was it, Omaha? Was that the area? Over Nebraska is what DITRA, how they had described it. And the thing is is that that weapon, you know, can essentially, the fears inside the government that I report on, And again, from one faction of the government, there was an EMP commission that had been set up, and I interviewed the chief scientist. The head of the commission was a guy called Dr. Peter Pry, and he had been at the CIA on the Russia desk. And then he became the head of the EMP commission.

And I interviewed him, and then he died. He was elderly. But his position was very clear that this was an actual existential threat. And he kind of led the charge, and there have been a number of very serious people. papers written on this. What is this about North Korea than possibly having an EMP satellite weapon that can target the USA? How likely is that? Because that is really extra, extra scary, because that's a country where they're kind of like, yeah, we don't have electricity even outside the Capitol at all. And inside the Capitol, it's like five hours a day, give or take how much coal

we have that day. They would love to send the United States back into the pre-industrial age, so to speak. This is why I use this narrative in nuclear war a scenario because it's a very real fear for some in the United States government. And again, others will say that's fear-mongering,

but let it be known that the capability exists and it has existed for a number of years. The North Koreans launched a satellite in 2016, KMS4, it means Bright Star 4.

And they said that it was a payload. It was a communication satellite. That's all it was. Right? And of course, you don't know what's in someone's satellite. You can't. Is it a reconnaissance satellite? Is it a communication satellite? Is there a nuclear weapon inside? Well, the capability on that satellite was about 400 pounds, right? Which is enough for a small nuclear weapon. So in other words, the payload inside that satellite, which is going around the Earth, not in geosync, it's not parked. It's kind of on a orbit moving around at, lo and behold, right around 300 miles up. And the fear among many was that it could contain a nuclear weapon, a small nuclear weapon,

which then once it got into position over the United States, if it were detonated, it would be what they called electric Armageddon, what the EMP commissioned it. So the technology is there, the capability is there. North Korea has shown that it has the capability to do that. And the final kind of like knife in the side is that right after North Korea launched the KMS3 satellite in 2016, they released a paper that they said was about how important it was to have the nuclear might of the nuclear EMP. And so that was kind of the icing on the cake that no. one was giving North Korea a capability that they themselves hadn't publicly stated they were going

after. And this technology, by the way, Russia has had since, you know, the Cold War. It exists. And it's fascinating. I think, you know, I stay away from all politics in the book. Yeah. Because no one should be for or against nuclear war, right? So that anyone politicizes these issues for me is just cringe, literally, because that should not be the point. The point should be the science and the fact and the capability and the lack of communication. The fact that this has come up now may or may not be political. The capability has always been there. The destruction from Nukes, from EMP, it's just so horrific. And I want to say you do a really good job in the book describing it without being crass. And that's got to be a difficult line to walk, I would imagine, because you

want it to be appalling and disgusting, but not like, wow, did she need to really do that? Like, you kind of right, thread that needle really well. Thank you. It's hard to describe zoo animals being caught in a nuclear blast and people throwing themselves into bodies of water instinctually because they're on fire and they're melting without sounding a little bit sick like I just did, probably. Well, I'm interrupting for a second because what I tried to do is, not trying to do, what I did do, is pull any scene I was writing from a factual text, right?

So, for example, animals caught in a nuclear Holocaust and bodies floating in a river in nuclear Holocaust is sourced directly from survivor accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And when you read those accounts, which you can, I source them all in my footnotes, you're like, oh my God, you know, people jumping into the river because their burns aren't such that they're going to die, and they jump into the river and they realize they're floating down the river

with a bunch of dead burned bodies. That's, as you would say, very close to crass, but it's also factual and it's also really powerful because it happened and it could happen. You mentioned in the book that a lot of people would die of things like radiation poisoning and disease, and the description of that is, quite gross as well. Like your blood won't coagulate, your intestines rupture, and you're

essentially poisoned by the gut contents that you have? That was gnarly. Again, sourced from facts. There was a guy called Louis Sloaton, and this is like right after the end of the war. He was a Manhattan Project scientist, and he was fed up with war, you know, after the war ended. And it was 1946 and he's like, I'm done, I'm out of here. I don't want to be at Manhattan Project anymore. And they said, that's fine, but you have to train others. And so they were at this secret site outside of the Los Alamos Laboratory. By the way, the Los Alamos Laboratory was extraordinarily helpful with me. They gave me documents, photos, answered questions, really a sort of degree of transparency there that was pretty intense. And they helped me with a Slotin situation. So

Sloaten was asked to train his replacements. And so he was in this secret site, Omega, and I say secret, because it was kind of like off-site in case any accident happened. And they were doing this experiment called Tickling the Dragons Tale, where they were kind of moving around this plutonium sphere, and it dropped. And Sloan was hit by this dose of radiation that would kill him nine days later. The declassified account, it's classified for a very long,

long time. The declassified account of his hospital stay and then his autopsy is shocking. And I relay that in the book to show you this is what's going to happen. It's a little bit like the show Chernobyl, where the guy, the firefighter, is in that plastic sheet hospital bed. And I mean, it's worse because you're really describing it as opposed to us just seeing a burned guy in a hospital bed. But it's, that's kind of what that guy was going through right in the show Chernobyl. on HBO, if you all have seen that, it's just really, really horrific. And that would happen to possibly hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, not just a couple of folks in a lab or that went to go fight a fire in a nuclear reactor. And that's part of what makes it so horrible,

is the scale of the thing. I know we're running a little bit short on time. I would love, we covered a little bit about the United States system here, and we touched in other countries. What really kind of freaked me out was Russia's dead hand system. This seems like it could go really, really, really wrong. And that speaks to the real problem here behind all of this, and you and I have touched upon this, which is paranoia. It's the old paranoia will destroy you, right? And the counterbalance to paranoia is communication.

The positive outcome of any of this is like get the leaders to communicate with one another because paranoia leads in a really bad direction. And the dead hand, which you're referring to, which is also called the perimeter system, is built on the foundations of paranoia. The Soviet government was completely paranoid. Not entirely without reason when it comes to nuclear sable rattling. You know, the United States definitely had its part

in building up this narrative of like, we're going to get you if. But the Soviet Union was terrified. We know this from declassified documents of what was called a first strike, that the United States government would preemptively strike Russia to try to take out nuclear command and control,

the Soviet nuclear command and control. And as a result, they created something called the dead hand. And that was this idea that if nuclear command and control were to be knocked out and the Russians couldn't get at their buttons, essentially, they couldn't get at their launch controls. They created a system. And again, this is reported by a Washington Post reporter named David Hoffman. He wrote a brilliant book called The Dead Hand.

And, you know, what is actually? known is really interesting versus a lot of what is thought to be known. But the thinking to be known part of it comes down to that the Russians created the dead hand, which was essentially a AI system before AI, right? They were using sensor technology to be able to, apparently they built a mechanized system that were the system to stop receiving verbal commands from nuclear command and control, stop receiving commands from humans. The system would be able to detect from seismic sensors, nuclear bombs going off around Soviet Russia, and in response, launch all remaining Russian nuclear weapons without a human hand. Hence the dead hand. It just seems like the worst idea. Like, we can only hope

that they got rid of that, right? When the Soviet Union fell, they don't even necessarily control all of those facilities anymore. I mean, that is just terrifying, that somebody could be digging somewhere and it's like, oh, we're just going to launch all these because this this wire got hit by an excavator. I don't know. Even worse, and I did not report this in the book, because I couldn't get anyone to confirm it on the record with me. But there are now rumors that America, the Defense Department, is considering its own dead hand type system so that, you know, we let the Russians know,

hey, we have it too. Oh, my gosh. You got to wonder who's crazy enough to do it, but, I mean, North Korea has all those tunnels, right? The leaders can survive maybe for decades underground if needed. You've got to hope they don't really want to do that. But we don't really know the state of mind

of a lot of these people at any given moment. You have that Mad King hypothesis. right, where the north hits us and then attacks the south. I mean, it just seems unlikely, but again, we're relying on somebody being a rational actor that is not backed into a corner. And the worst attacks in history that happen are surprise attacks. Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor, 9-11.

And so, again, this builds up this kind of chicken and egg scenario. Like you have the Defense Department. We need stronger deterrence. You know, we're about to revamp. We can't build new nuclear weapons. per se, but on the table right now is the new building of the upgraded nuclear weapon systems to the tune of, you know, trillion dollars. And this idea that chicken or egg, you know, we have to stay strong is really something that I think is worth American citizens thinking about, being

aware about, knowing about. Congress takes action based on what they're constitutions. are rattling, you know, them to do. If no one's paying attention to nuclear weapons, you can be sure the Defense Department still is. Let's leave on a high note. Just kidding. Tell me about nuclear winter. Tell me about that.

Speaking of happy, cheerful topics, this is probably the worst thing. This is why you want to die first, right? I mean, nuclear winter, again, a series of incredible interviews with Professor Brian Toon. He is one of the five original authors of the nuclear winter theory, which was published in the early 1980s. And one of the other five authors besides Tune was Carl Sagan, who was Tune's professor. And Professor Tune has been working on this issue ever since.

And cutting right to the quick of it, like a lot of people are like, nuclear winter, wasn't that, you know, whatever word they want to use. And the answer is no, right? So initially, the Defense Department came out with this response of like, that's Soviet propaganda. And it wasn't. It's very real. It's very terrible. It's like what happens is the nuclear blast themselves do all this kind of damage to humans and infrastructure that we spoke of earlier. But on top of that, then what happens, which is even worse and kills more people, are the mega fires that ensue. And those megafires loft soot into the air to the tune of billions of pounds of sun. Okay? It's measured in like teragrams of soot. And that blots out the sun. And without the sun, there's no agriculture. And things freeze over. You know, bodies of water across America are covered in thick sheets of ice. originally the nuclear winter calculations based on kind of like pen, pencil, and calculator

was that nuclear winter, the sun would be gone, 70% of the sun's rays would be gone for a year. Now, state-of-the-art climate modeling and computers as we have them, it demonstrates that it's actually a lot worse than was predicted in the 80s. Brian Toon was telling me that nuclear winter will likely last for 10 years. and places like Iowa and Ukraine, he used as an example, agricultural bread baskets, will be frozen over for 10 years. There will be snow and ice. So without agriculture, people starve to death.

And I won't give you all the details, but of course, once the sun finally returns, the ozone layer has been so damaged that the sun is just poisoning everyone who survived with radiation. and there are plagues and there are pathogens, and what can really survive are the small-bodied animals like insects, and the bigger-bodied animals like humans begin to go extinct. And so Carl Sagan brought up that idea in the 80s

when nuclear winter first became a thing, that the only people left will be those who have these incredible prepper skills, which is not a lot of people. That's if you didn't die in the nuclear holocaust. and you didn't freeze today. So there's the pleasant ending. Right. So you end up with these people who live in a bunker for 10 years if they didn't die of something like a blast, but then they have to survive the other survivors trying

to find them. They have to survive diseases, which they can't really necessarily control. And just your own body breaking down. Like what happens if you have a heart attack in that bunker? Because, I don't know, you're not moving around enough or you're stressed, right? Like, no one's coming to help you. There's no medical. And at that point, even if you make it through all that, then what?

You come out and you've got this like locust-infested, literally a post-apocalyptic hellscape that you're living in. You're getting too much UV. I mean, it's like, why? Why? That's why I was saying before, did researching this, initially I was like, did researching this make you want to become a doomsday prepper? I mean, I'm personally in camp, kill me first, right?

So I don't have to deal with everything after the fact. That's where I'm at. Yeah. Well, Professor Tune left me with this really spooky thought, which, is he likened the situation of nuclear war to the asteroid that struck Earth and killed all the dinosaurs 66 million years ago when 70% of the species died, including all the dinosaurs. But the difference is we can't control an asteroid. But my God, you know, nuclear war doesn't have to happen. But the way things are going right now, the clock seems to be ticking toward this very very, very important.

very sober, very serious threat getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think, I hope people read the book and join this conversation while we can still have it. Did you have a moment researching this book where you were like, I kind of wish I didn't know all of this. It's liberated me from feeling like I need to prep for this event because, again, I'm in camp kill me first. But that's, otherwise, I'm like, huh, I kind of slept better before I knew most of this stuff. What about you? I mean, I've written previously six books on military and intelligence programs, and a lot of times, if you learn as much as I have from really interesting sources as I have, the mind can say, yeah, you know, defense is good. We need to be strong. That's how you deal with

the bullies in the world, because I think that's a lot of the narrative we hear. But writing and reporting this book actually had the opposite effect on me. It's really about communicate. The only solution is communication. The only solution is diplomacy. And if I at all felt a little bit of trepidation that I might be sounding a little soft or polyana-ish for saying that, that's now gone. That's now gone. Because more weapons, more nuclear weapons are not going to alleviate this threat. It's communication. It's diplomacy. You might not like the guy on the other side of the world with his saber, but it's not worth going to war over it. Thank you very much for doing the show.

The book was fascinating. We'll have to have you back. Now I have to go by all of your previous books and then interview you about them years later. I don't know if you're willing to do that, but, you know, try my hand. Absolutely. It's a pleasure talking to you. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show

with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North on who he sees as America's number one adversary today and why. Nicaraguan resistance starting in 1980, growing all over the place. They were cut off by the Congress of the United States in 1984 with what was called the Boland Amendment. No funds made available by this Act, which was the National Defense Authorization Act,

may be used for the purposes or which would have the effect of conducting military or paramilitary action against the government of Nicaragua. So the CIA was taken out of the business. They turned to me and said, find a way to support them. One of the lawyers for the hearing said to me, the day you got fired at the White House had to be the worst day of your life.

I said, no, no, sir. Worst days in my life for where Marines died in my arms. For more on how Oliver North makes decisions in high pressure situations and what it's like to dodge an assassination attempt, check out episode 503 on the Jordan Harbinger show. Sorry, folks, for my voice. I am getting over. Speaking of voices, her voice is incredible. Get the audiobook just to listen to that for a few hours. I'll tell you, how do we detect launches? We never really got into this. There are satellites that can detect plumes. We have radar.

We have seismic detectors for underground detonations. There's really kind of a robust infrastructure for looking at missile launches, really amazing technology. Also, there are old Russian spies near all of our launch sites here in the United States, at least all the ones that they can find, right? And their job is just to report by phone if things launch. That's kind of an amazing thing to find out, right? There's some old guy, Cold War relic, who lives near a field in white. Wyoming and his whole job is just to make a phone call to somebody if things launch from his

backyard, knowing that he's definitely going to die in the next few minutes. That's just wild to me. We can't really see North Korean missiles, by the way. There's a lot in the book that explains kind of why, but the way that we are trying to track these missiles is 24-7 Reaper drone surveillance. They can take out a missile within 240 seconds. I don't mean they can always take out a missile within 240 seconds. I guess I mean they are able to, if at all, they have to do it within 240 seconds.

Why is that window so small? Well, because after that, the missile with the warhead attached is in space. The engine goes cold and there's nothing you can do at that point, which is kind of terrifying, actually. There's scenarios in the book that are just straight out of a 90s action movie. The president has to be strapped to other staff and tandem jumped out of Marine One because the EMP is going to crash the aircraft. It's just absolutely wild. So much can go wrong.

Even with the best of plans, there's just tons and tons and tons and tons that can go wrong here. Something that stuck with me after reading the book as well, what happens after a nuclear blast. We didn't really get into the gory detail here on the show,

but pretty much all metals melt. No life is left whatsoever. Nothing's cellular anyway. So no animals, no ladybugs, no nothing. The streets literally melt into molten asphalt. And the people that are luckiest, they die first instantaneously. there's a quote again from a Russian prime minister back in the day talking about how the survivors of a nuclear war will envy the dead.

Imagine what happens to you if it's hot enough that the streets turn to asphalt, but you're in an air-conditioned car for at least a few minutes. I mean, it's just, you know, like you're going to have a bad time. And if you're on the edge of that and your skin falls off or you just go blind and some of your skin falls off, I mean, it just gets grosser kind of the further away you get from things. You want that missile to knock you right at the front door. right at the epicenter of that sucker. You do not want to be on the outskirts of a nuclear blast. Goes without saying that hundreds of thousands or even millions more will die of sickness or injuries suffered during a nuclear blast. There's something like a hundred million people dead in the first few hours of a nuclear conflict. Almost everybody dies. Again, not just because the

missiles incinerate them, but because the rest of the people, even if you're super far away, they starve to death. They get weird diseases. The supply chain, of course, is stops. There's no electricity. there's no purified water. I mean, it's just a whole thing. You basically don't want to survive this. I don't know about all y'all, but after this book, I will say, I want to die early in the game if we face a nuclear conflict. I'm the opposite of a prepper.

If I was on the fence before, now I'm like, nope, don't prep me. Just I'm opting out. And by the way, this sort of simulation about what happens in a nuclear conflagration, this is not a one random worst case scenario. The war games for nuclear war all end similarly. The death count, other power. or maybe they don't, but it's really no better when you run the numbers somewhere else. So this isn't like, oh, let's take the most horrifying worst case scenario and run it.

This is kind of a typical outcome. And by the way, we've already had a few close calls with nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. There's one in particular, the story of Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who saw his early warning system showing that the U.S. had launched about a half dozen nuclear ICBMs at the Soviet Union. So instead of reporting that incident up the chain, he just said, I'm going to say this is a false alarm. And that turned out to be true. It wasn't just his gut. He was trained to see that the United States would launch like a zillion missiles if it was going to be a surprise attack at the first salvo and he only saw five or six. And he said, that doesn't look right. And who knows what

else was going on, but he essentially saved the world from an all-out nuclear conflict between the United States and the USSR because it was indeed a false alarm. It turned out that the satellite somehow had thought that sunlight in a certain type of cloud over North Dakota was a plume from an ICBM. Whoops. Of course, he was not rewarded at all for this by the USSR and was essentially demoted. The UN and other international organizations here in the United States as well have given him awards. Classic somehow, though, saves the world and his bosses are annoyed about it because they were embarrassed. All things Annie Jacobson will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com or just as the AI chatbot also on the website. Transcripts are in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes,

ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. We've also got the newsletter where every week the team and I dig into an older episode of the show and dissect the lessons and takeaway. So, hey, if you want to know what to listen to next, you're a fan of the show, definitely go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash news and sign up for that. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at six-minute networking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram or LinkedIn. You can always connect with me there. I love hearing from you.

This show is created an association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Milio Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who's interested in, I don't know, end of the world, nuclear war, military stuff. Definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time,

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