The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Annie Jacobsen

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

Many of you will have been waiting for this podcast after my brief review of Annie Jacobsen’s new book Nuclear War: A Scenario on Critical Mass. I took advantage of our discussion to flesh out some of the harrowing details of her remarkable fictional account of a plausible 72 minutes which began with the launch of a single nuclear missile from North Korea and concludes effectively with the end of modern civilization on the planet. As I indicated in my review, as former Chair of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for over a decade, the horrors of nuclear war were well-known to me, but the realization of how quickly a scenario such as Jacobsen envisages might actually play out was something I had never really imagined. Jacobsen is no stranger to thinking about defense issues and has penned numerous books on defense-related issues, including a history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. She is also a seasoned fiction writer for television, penning three episodes of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. Her new book combines her interest in nuclear war related issues, and interviews with a host of military officials involved in nuclear war planning over the past five decades, with her skill in framing a tense dramatic narrative. The result is compelling. I know from experience that most people would rather avoid thinking about the threat of nuclear war. But it is only by confronting it directly that the public might have a possibility of at least slowing the military juggernaut, powered by a combination of a huge bureaucracy that works effectively to maintain its existence, and a cold war mentality the drives efforts to continue to grow and modernize our nuclear weapons establishment—all the while in spite of the fact that everyone who has seriously thought about nuclear war knows it is unwinnable. As Einstein, who helped found the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors said over 60 years ago, with the creation of Nuclear Weapons “Everything has changed, save the way we think”. My hope is that discussions like this one may help us change even that. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, I'm Lawrence Krause, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. Annie Jacobson is an established journalist who's written about war, weapons, security, and secrets for much of her life, and a variety of books, including a pool surprise finalist book, which was written about DARPA, called An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's top secret military research agency. In addition to her journalism writing, she's actually involved in, in fiction writing on related subjects and has written episodes of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, for example, the TV series that's on now. And she's combined her journalistic counts and her fiction writing counts

into a new and gripping book called Nuclear War A Scenario, which describes in harrowing detail how the launch of a single nuclear weapon, in this case by North Korea, cascades into a nuclear war, which essentially ends modern civilization in a time that takes less time than the length of our podcast. And the fact that the world could end so quickly is remarkable.

Now one can argue whether one accepts every bit of the plausibility of the scenario she describes, but each aspect of it is based on a lot of research on her part And the reality that both the United States and Russia, for example, have over a thousand weapons on hair trigger alert status, ready to launch with the slightest confirmation that there may be incoming missiles. It's a harrowing scenario and one that should remind us that we do live on the brink. As many of you know, I was chairman of the board of sponsors of the Bolney Atomic Scientists for many years, and that sets the doomsday clock, and this is an issue that resonated with me.

and I found her discussion to be a remarkable exposition of literally the many different threats that come from nuclear weapons and from a world that relies on them and in particular a world right now in which diplomacy and treaties that might limit nuclear weapons are lacking. I think the book is important for people to read and Congress people to read as well. and I hope your discussion, even if you don't read the book, will at least illuminate for you and change your perspective and help you realize that we need to do something, I think, about nuclear weapons. It's a remarkable story, and it was a very enlightening discussion

with this journalist and writer. Whether you watch the episode or listen to it, I hope you'll consider supporting the Origins Project Foundation that produces the podcast. You can watch it, add-free, on our cruise. Critical Mass Substack site by subscribing to that site, or you can watch it later on on our YouTube channel, our Origins Podcasts YouTube channel, which you can subscribe to, or you can watch it, you can listen to it on any podcast listening site. Whether you watch it or listening to it,

I think you'll find this episode will change your perspective of our current world and open your eyes to some realities that many of us would rather not think about. One of the purposes of the Origins podcast, of course, is to do just that, is to change our perspective. And I think this podcast does it with journalist Annie Jacobson. With no further ado, here's the podcast. Annie Jacobson, I'm so excited to have you here. It's, it's, ever since I heard about your book and then, in fact, got it and have read it in detail and marked it up. Well, I guess, I don't know whether looking forward to is the right way to say it, but it's great to have you here, and it's an amazing story. So thanks for coming.

Thank you so much for having me on. Now, I want to preface this. The podcast isn't about me, but I just want to put in perspective my reaction to your book, because I should make it clear, and it may not be clear for you. So for a decade, I was chairman of the board of sponsors of the boldly atomic scientists, and I helped unveil the doomsday clock every year for a decade. That meant, in the context of that, that meant sitting down for at least a weekend, a few months before, with a series of experts talking about Doomsday seriously. It was always a depressing time, but nevertheless, one that was awakening. And of course, and at the same time, as a physicist, I've actually worked and know a lot of the people that are mentioned in your book.

And then I even go back further to 1980, back in California when I helped work on a nuclear weapons freeze when I was a, a student from from IT. I went up to California and we worked, I presented lectures from the, what was then the Union of Concerned Scientists about the dangers of nuclear war with a simulated nuclear war. So I've thought about this a lot. But having said that, I don't think anything prepared me for the immediate and stark grim realities in your, in your book, a nuclear war scenario. It is, it is the most masterly discussion of one scenario. And what's the, It's in a human context, an immediate context, things that people tend to glaze people, people's minds glaze over because the numbers just seemed so daunting.

So even though my mind was prepared, I don't think it was adequately prepared. And your book I read in two sittings because it was so intense. The most striking reality is that nuclear war, a full-scale nuclear war, which could end the world, will take less time. in our podcast. When you think about that, and that's probably one of the earliest things that you said in your book, and I think you said that was one of the things that got you thinking about this book. So I want to start for the first few minutes talking about how you got to where you are, if you don't mind. You're a journalist. You actually went to Princeton, right? Did you study,

what did you study there? English literature. English literature. Okay, good preparation for being a a journalist. Did you, did you have the idea of being a writer and journalist in mind at the time, or is that just of interest to you? I went to boarding school at age 15 with a typewriter. There I am dating myself. And I have written every day of every year ever since. Okay. That makes that clear. But interestingly enough, you describe yourself as a sort of a national security kind of reporter. So, and that involves technology, which is one of the reasons Zoppa, you say I've been interested and involved in it for some time as a physicist. Where did your interest in national security and technology come on?

As an English major in Princeton, you might not have even had to take a science course. That's not true. We have to take, but, but, you know, and thank you for having me on and thank you for that generous introduction about my book. That's very meaningful to me. And my takeaway from that is that what you're saying, that you as a man of science, very literate in that world felt compelled to read on by Maya Khill, which is in essence a layman's account. That's what journalists are. And so that's a really clear and important point to me in all

of my work. So quickly answering the science question at Princeton, of course I'm not a scientist. I have a terrible math brain. I mean, I am terrible at math. But that's what makes me good at relaying for average people the simplest truth about, you know, almost looking at math as poetry. And I have interviewed Nobel laureates among them Charles Towns. No. Who explains me in the simplest terms, poetic terms, what science really is. And then I pass that on to readers.

And then people who have been perhaps made to feel less than in this world of rarefied esoteric military science. Those people get to say, wow, I can think about this too. That's my goal. And thank you for that introduction, because that's in essence what you said. Yeah. And well, and if it wasn't known before, that's my goal. As a scientist, much of my career has been spending with the public as well with my books and other activities. And the goal is to try and reach people in a way that they can understand. And in fact, I've interacted with journalists. and we talked about before that we'd actually interact and we remembered some time ago when you were asking me, we can't remember what, but I've spent a lot of my life because of my public writing talking to journalists.

And I do think that it's incredibly important that journalists, most of whom don't have a science background, and are reporting on this, that it's important that they translate. And it's important for people like me and talking normally in being interviewed by people like you to translate into terms that you can then, use because if if if someone with a albeit educated english major background from princeton if you can't describe it then then how's anyone going to be able to describe it in a way that people get to and you're right i think uh i think that you definitely succeeded in this book because i did choose to read through it completely instead of skimming it um because it is so gripping it's not your first book on national security issues you written a bunch area 51 and i was trying to think if that was the

reason because of my book, The Physics and Star Trek, you know, you've written about Area 51 and also DARPA, which is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which at various times I've marginally been involved in. What led you from sort of thinking about DARPA and the kind of exotic programs that the military actually funds, some of which are insane, to get to this, which is equally insane, but unfortunately, a central part of our national policy. How did that transition happen. So nuclear war scenario is my seventh book. And the previous six all dealt with military and intelligence programs. So I've written about the CIA, the Pentagon, DARPA, Area 51, Nazi scientists, you know, all the war. I've interviewed people that have been in all the war since

including World War II. And every set of sources, there's always a major player, you know, Dr. Bud Weelan, the first director of science and technology for the CIA comes to mind, specifically, telling me, Annie, I dedicated my life to preventing nuclear World War III. He was talking about the satellite, the Corona program, America's first satellite program, reconnaissance satellites, spy satellite, but others. You know, every one of these people has somewhere in their storytelling to me that sense. of I did what I did to prevent the ultimate war. And so that certainly gets you thinking, you know, if you're a thinker, whether you're thinking mathematically or poetically, wait a minute. Okay, what's the mirror of that?

Deterance fails. Then what happens? Then what happens? And that is what this book demonstrates in, I wanted to show to readers in appalling detail. how horrific nuclear war would be. Because as you mentioned, you in the 1980s, you know, with the nuclear freeze and whatnot, that was decades ago. Where has this subject gone? That's a real question. That's right. And you'd think the horrors have been known to some people for a long time. And if anything, as we'll talk about, things have just gotten worse. And that, and the one lesson,

the lesson that should come out of this book, but the lesson that experts have undoubtedly told you, and I know you quote them, the central premise of everyone who's thought about nuclear war in any detail is that two things. Once a nuclear war starts, it won't stop, and no one wins. The notion and that scary notion that's happening nowadays is that it is being promulgated, at least in some of the media,

that nuclear war in one form or another is winnable, is tremendously dangerous because, as we'll talk about from the scenario you described, which is just one of many possible scenarios that might happen, the result is a loss for everyone. In fact, deterrence, which you point out at the beginning, is that rationale for building up these ridiculously mind-boggling large arsenals of nuclear weapons has been a deterrence, and the idea is something called mutually assured destruction. Which is really just madness. I mean, exactly. It's madness. It is madness. But what is remarkable is that that's the flip side of deterrence. If deterrence depends on madness, then the minute deterrence fails, we have mutually assured destruction. And that other part of it, the consequence doesn't seem to ring so heavily that you're willing to risk the future of life on this planet so that you can deter the possible use of nuclear weapons. And you do that by building up nuclear weapons. Anyway, we'll talk about that, the lunacy of that of that. in a bit. After we talk about your specific example, I want to come back and talk about how we got to where we are and how the scenario in your book that describes literally the end of the world

takes place in 72 minutes. So less than the time, a little about the time between now and the end of this podcast. Think about this. From the beginning, just the beginning impling of something happening to essentially over 600 million people and more being being killed, probably two billion being killed, 72 minutes. Five billion people. Ultimately, ultimately in the long world. But in the first 72 minutes, probably over a billion people killed.

72 minutes, less than an hour. And so your book begins with a scenario, and it begins in one second. Well, it begins at zero seconds with the launch of an ICBM from North Korea. And what's interesting, one of the things that's interesting then in that, in that of your book is that you talk about the time it takes from the time that ICBM has launched to the time that the U.S. national security agencies and ultimately the president learn about it. It's a period of seconds at the most minutes before the president learns about it. You talk about within the first, I think, within the first 20 seconds, there are recognitions

from long way from Colorado, from our satellites, and that information goes to. the National Military Command Center and NORAD, and ultimately at 30 seconds of Shayan Mountain. Do you want to talk a little bit about that process of recognizing what happened when North Korea sent that weapon in this imaginary scenario? And again, this is just such a fascinating concept that we spoke about a moment ago,

which is how a person myself can know a lot about nuclear weapons I've interviewed Manhattan Project scientists and then begin reporting this book and learn a whole new set of information about the first few seconds upon detection of launch. I think this is fascinating. I also think it's fascinating that you have like a whole subset of people who know all of this inside and out and then people who know nothing. And what, again, my goal is to kind of bring them together in this understanding.

So to learn that the United States Defense Department has a satellite system called Sibbers, space-based infrared satellite. I call it the Paul, the 21st century Paul reveal, rear, right? Like, the missile is coming. And that this system built by log heat is so technologically advanced, it can detect the hot rocket exhaust on an ICBM launch in under one second. If you just pause for a minute and think about that, that is remarkable and should grab your attention, that we are are capable of, and of course, then in essence what I'm doing is setting up, like, which is the theme of the book, and Einstein spoke of, like, man is so brilliant. We have separated

ourselves out from apes by being able to do things. Oh, my God, put a satellite system, one tenth of the weight of the moon that can measure something in, you know, you're nodding, right? Yeah. And then you get reminded, oh, but this is to detect the ballistic missile that will end civilization. It's such, if I could swear, I would say it's a mind, you know what, right? Yeah, yeah. Because it really is. And it is madness.

And so, and that, and by the way, now we're just talking about the first second. Exactly. The first seconds. You know, normally, I mean, if this was, you know, in a TV show, these things would take minutes or whatever. And the point is that within 60 seconds, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, Com Commander, and perhaps you should explain the Strattcom business, and Second, wants to talk directly to the President of the United States. And within two minutes, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff already ushered into a Pentagon bunker. This is two minutes.

You know, this is people that were, you'd think were having a coffee break and might have had to go to the bathroom or something. Within two minutes, they need to be down in a bunker. You should, because we'll talk about Strattcom in a second. So why do you explain what that is? So U.S. Strategic Command is probably the most important military organization that no one's ever heard of, except for the 150,000 employees who are directly report to the Stratcom. Again, this theme of like people know nothing and yet other people know everything. It is a system of systems that we are talking about here when we're talking about nuclear command and control. And Stratcom is incredibly important because as you learn very quickly in the book, when I tell you very quickly, because my goal is to move the reader through what's happening, that there is a concept in American nuclear command and control called presidential sole authority. And it means the president has the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. He does not need the permission of anyone, not the

secta, not the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, not Congress. And that during the Trump's fire and fury days, people doubted that. You can Google right now. You know, is it really really true and you will get hundreds of thousands of people saying that's not really true. You and I both know it is true. It is true. And I, you know, and I lectured and wrote about it in Washington and other places for years. And it really wasn't until Trump being president. People started to suddenly worry about it. Well, actually, I want to talk about that in a little more detail later because it is one of the many, it's understandable, but at the same time crazy. Much like much of nuclear weapons planning is all about. It's the sheer speed requirement.

with which decisions need to be made, means you foregole any other kind of rational logic about how you would operate any kind of war or even disagreement. Absolutely. But let's tell readers about Stratcom, because it is important, right? So very quickly, I digressed, is that Stratcom is this military agency that is in charge of the nukes. And so the Strattcom commander has this direct line, in essence, literally and figuratively, with the President of the United States, once the seconds and minutes clock begins ticking.

Because the president must make this decision, yes, his SACDF and his chairman are going to advise him of what to do. Get into that later. But ultimately, he has to give the order to the Strattcom commander. And that Strattcom commander is more than likely in a bunker beneath Offutt Air Force Base in the middle of the country in Omaha, Nebraska. And that is the bunker that is, in essence, the muscle. And that's the way it was described to me. And maybe readers can just get right into this by realizing there's essentially the bunker under the Pentagon. There's the bunker inside Cheyenne Mountain.

And then there's the bunker beneath Offutt Air Force Base. The Pentagon has been called the beating heart of nuclear war. Stratcom is the muscle. Cheyenne Mountain is the brain. Again, the poetics of it all. Now you can see what we're dealing with. Okay. And we'll also talk about one other place, CIDAR, when we get there. But we'll get there, in fact, in just a few minutes. So the president has formed within three minutes. But here, let's come, let's step back. This is one of the asides that I want to take to point out why all of this has to happen so fast. Why Strathcom has to know within 60 seconds, why the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of Joint Chief Staff have to be assembled within two. minutes and why the president has to be informed by three minutes. So an ICBM, and in fact, I used to know Herb York, physicists. As I say, I know and have worked with a lot of people in your book. That's so interesting you met in Herb York. That's very cool. And I'm old, so I'm able to say that.

And I think he was the first one to calculate that how long we take for an ICBM from Russia to hit the United States. And it was 26 minutes and 40 seconds. So from the time now, this one is launched in North Korea, and I think it was Ted Posto, though I also know, who calculated that from North Korea would take 33 minutes. I think he was the one. I'm going to share that with listeners, because I think it's interesting. And, you know, your podcast is about origin stories, right? So how do we get to where we are and how do you make this stuff relatable to regular people? And for me, when I was writing an earlier book, DARPA, that's what Herb York was the first chief scientist of DARPA, which is a fascinating job for him.

And we're talking about the late 1950s after Sputnik when the Pentagon decided it needed its own R&D agency that was more powerful than any other R&D agency in the world for military science. We could not get beaten by the Russians again. And so one of the first things that York did was contact the adjacent scientists to say, how many seconds and minutes does it take for a nuclear weapon to get from a launch pad in Soviet Russia to Washington, D.C., or to the East Coast? And he had them calculate that number precisely, which I also think people should be fascinating. That hasn't changed. Like, all the technology in the world has changed. That has not changed.

26 minutes, 40 seconds. And in York's document, it's written as 1,600 seconds. Beckins, yeah. Which is just a chilling number. And he, in that document, which I found in his papers in the library in San Diego, where they're all kept, because the Defense Department wouldn't answer that question for me, by the way. Yeah. And there it was in Herbs' papers. And that again planted a seed for this book.

But it was, as you say, Ted Postal who pointed out, okay, geography from Pyongyang is a little different. So it's 33 minutes. But that is why to your question, all of this must happen so fast. Because once the ICBM is launched, and again, here's a fact that I know you know and I know, but I also know most humans do not know this, that once an ICBM has been launched, it cannot be redirected or recalled. I mean, what an astonishing figure. And when you have so many of these nuclear pundits and national security aficionados, you know, talking about this, they leave out the most critical, to me, the most critical details to average people like that fact.

And now people can understand, oh, my God, I get it. That's why this is all going to take place so fast. Because that's why the DOD has a system in space to detect the launch after one second because there are only 30, 26 to 33 minutes end game. And then you begin to understand why this madness makes sense except for its madness. Exactly. Now, in fact, you point out that not only did many people think it could be recalled, and I think a variety of writers have talked about that,

but it was amusing is that actually Ronald Reagan once said in a speech that they could be recalled, whether he knew it or not, he said it incorrectly. So even the president of the United States at that time was either, well, either was playing a game or himself did not realize they couldn't be recalled. And I would assume that he did not know, right? He was referring to a sub-launched ballistic missile. And I think that is profoundly important because it speaks to this idea that the commander-in-chief himself is not aware of the ins and outs. of nuclear war should it happen because they function mostly from the assumption that deterrence will hold. And absolutely, and they haven't been, they haven't been schooled. You talk about

William Perry, again, another colleague of mine and he and I have had long discussions, both before and and together on the boldly atomic scientists, but he's a remarkable man. But I think he pointed out that people should realize that all of the people involved in this book, RATCOM, the Secretary of Defense, certainly the chairman of joint seats of staff, these people have been trained and all of the people that work in Offset Base and Shine Mountain, they've been trained their whole lives on how to deal with this. The president hasn't. And for most presidents, or many presidents, they probably don't want to think about it.

But they're the ones who are going to have to make the decisions in the first 26 minutes. In fact, as we point out in six minutes, which we'll get to. And they haven't been trained. And a lot of them have not, you know, they haven't even thought deeply enough about this. but they have six or eight minutes to think about it before they decide how the world is going to end. And by the way, I will add something maybe useful for you and may certainly since this is sometimes this is about science in a way. One of the reasons that the time has not changed since Herb York and the Jason's calculations may be done by Freeman Dyson and others is simply because

Newton could have done the calculation. A ballistic missile is ballistic because the minute it stops firing, it follows a trajectory determined by the laws of physics that Newton developed. And nothing is changed in the laws of physics at Newton. So it's all determined by fundamental physics that doesn't change. There's no way it's going to be lengthened and no way it's going to be shortened. If you want to send a ballistic missile, something that you shoot it off, you speed it up, and then you stop the engines turn off, the laws of physics determine that it takes 26 minutes. And that's why the laws of physics say, you know, when the first, when Sputnik first went around the earth,

it was 90 minutes. It's still 90 minutes today because that's determined by the laws of physics. Exactly. Precisely. And yet the rest of the world has changed so dramatically. And we now have since then, and that is precisely the point of why this book, I believe, is profoundly important for people to read in 2024 because the rest of the world has changed. There are nine nuclear armed nations. There is AI. We can go on and on and on. And the physics of an unrecallable ballistic missile have not changed. And more will they ever. And there are many more threats we may get to. But, okay, so that's the first aside. The second aside is one of the reasons the president needs to react besides the 26 or 30 minutes is a policy, which again is crazy, but almost understandable. And again, I've written about it and actually been involved in trying to change it. But it's a policy that we have a policy of launch on warning.

In fact, there's two policies. We won't talk about this, but another policy the United States has had, which most people don't realize, is that we have never renounced the first use of nuclear weapons. We have never said we won't be the first ones to use nuclear weapons. And each time we try and get a president to make that policy, they won't do it. But this policy of launch on warning is if there's evidence and a signal of a nuclear attack, this nation has a policy of launching a response in principle before any body. bomb explodes on the continental United States. That means you have, therefore, the time, less than 26 minutes, because you have to, the president has to make a decision, and then that decision has to be relayed to the people are going to do it. So in principle, that means the president has about

six minutes to make that decision. And something that you point out, Reagan pointed out and said, you know, how can anyone make a decision in six minutes? Now, every president, and you point this out, Two. Every president, essentially almost every president, has said when they're running for president, that that's a crazy policy and it needs to be changed. The idea that we have over a thousand, and this is over a thousand nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert, on launch on warning status in this country, something that George Bush said, he was crazy. Obama was crazy. And here, again, I'll insert myself, I was on Obama's science policy team when he was running for president, the first time around 2008. And one of the things that we were so excited about was that we would get him to change the policy because it was crazy. He became president, it didn't change. We won't even talk about Trump.

In Biden, it hasn't changed. It's still this crazy policy. And maybe you can talk a little bit about it as well. But clearly it's the timing aspect, the idea that a preemptive first strike could in principle remove our ability to fight a nuclear war. and therefore we have to launch before the first right hits, basically is the idea. Two thoughts on that. I mean, the policy has been called, quote, inexcusably dangerous.

And that is the simplest term of exactly what it is. It is. Why the president has not changed it. Any president remains a mystery. It's a question I've been asked in almost all of my interviews. Did I have any idea why? And the answer is absolutely, no, I do not. Let's ask the president.

I mean that literally, like the people should ask the president, every president, why does this policy not get changed? And of course, it's not set in stone. It's not like, you know, but it's a policy. Yeah. And it's there for use. But I also want to add one thing to the numbers because you said we have over a thousand nuclear weapons on ready for launch status. Let me just give a real specific number here because it's important, right? The United States presently has 1,770 nuclear weapons forward deployed.

And what that means is they can be launched in seconds and minutes. Okay. Russia, because of parity, has about the same amount, 1,674. Now, those numbers change by a few every year. and thanks to your colleagues at the Federation of American Scientists, led by Hans Christensen, they are keeping track of this math. This is the one who lets the rest of us know every year. Yeah.

Exactly. And this is a profoundly important job because it allows for one tiny degree of transparency. And it should allow people to enter into the conversation and go, wait a minute, I may not be a, you know, PhD in math, but I know what 1,770 nuclear warheads means. It means nuclear Armageddon. Yes, absolutely. And then when you learn that these, the ICBMs launch in approximately 60 seconds, you know, and as Bruce Blair told us, they don't call the minute men for nothing.

Okay? Yeah, yeah. Then you have to stop, you know, as many people are busy doing their laundry or making dinner or going about their lives, hopefully we'll stop and say, oh, wait a minute, I'm sorry, did I just hear that correctly? Did I just hear that correctly? Yes, you did. And that is undeniable. And so in a world where people are worried about all kinds of things, one question that's been lobbed at me is, don't we have enough to worry about? Well, I would argue a lot of those other things are not as important to worry about. When you should know, as Professor Brian Toon told me, that if you are in any city in America, not just New York City or Los Angeles, any city with any kind of an industrial base. there is a nuclear weapon pointed at you.

Exactly. When you look at the map of targets, you know, with the idea of 1,000 or 1700, and you're right, 1674 for the Russia, and you think about all the places in the United States. And we'll talk about that later. I mean, how that number came about. What's kind of ridiculous is that number of 1770, 6074 came about after decades of negotiations as the number came down. Yes. And both countries agreed, although the United States may and Russia both. may have decided to

to depart from that treaty to reduce the number. Get it, to reduce the number. That's what's so crazy. To only 1,700 missiles when each one, each of those weapons is between 10 and 100 times more powerful than the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima. And most people know none of this, none of this. That's right.

And we have to, and the idea is to make these things clear because this is crazy. us people, more people say it's crazy, it's going to remain the same. We've seen, in fact, I can tell you for certain that Obama was, before he became president, was clearly briefed on why this was crazy. Okay, so why do you, I'm going to, okay, great, I'm going to ask you, why is the answer? In my opinion, it's because generals have been trained to fight nuclear war, and that's, and that's, that's what they think about. And the rest of it doesn't matter. And in order to be able to fight a nuclear war, you have to be able to launch on warning. And he gets a bite from every general.

And ultimately, I think the president, you know, presidents have assumed that these generals and with a lot of pressure must know what they're talking about. I think that has to be the reason. And I would probably agree with you there. And if you are the commander in chief and you want to be a team player and you're entering into office and, you know, in the spirit of democracy, you want to, you can't know everything and you want to trust the people that are in positions of authority and are advising you, you are going to trust them. And I agree with you. And so the only way to unwind that, and remember, I'm not saying the generals or the bad guys. I interview general, right? I'm just simply saying the system is become this impenetrable fortress that has lost its mind. Or you could

say it's always lost this point. But to your interesting point about how we have made progress, and I think it's important at this point in our discussion to interject here that these are not, we're not just like two doomsday people like this, you know, like griping about how bad it is. We are first pointing out that progress can be made because to your point, once upon a time in 1986, there were 70,000 nuclear warhead, 70,000. And the numbers that we mentioned, 1,700 on one side, 16, 74 on the other, those, by the way, there's still thousands more on each arsenal in reserve. At least 5,000 in each arsenal. Absolutely. And so then, you know, you, now you're going back

and oh, my God, right, but these numbers are important because what it's demonstrating is that progress moves, you must move forward in your progress. You can't move backwards. And now with the threat of both Russia and the United States withdrawing from these incredibly profoundly important treaties that reduced the threat, that is not a direction that any sane human being should be for. Exactly. And the insanity, what happens is insanity becomes legitimized in a way that's, you know, by haphazard, by, you know, accident here and there and then escalation. And I should say, by the way, I mean, one of the eyes. every year when we unveil the doomsday clock, I would get questions for journalists. This is just a public relation stunt. And I would say one day a year, we get a chance for journalists around the world to cover this

and address this existential threat to humanity. And so that was the reason I got involved in both and ultimately became the chair of that, is that by speaking out, it's the only way ultimately that people become aware of this and maybe speak out enough to produce some sanity. You know, in terms of this, in terms of this escalation, which you can kind of, and maybe we'll get there, we'll see, we're taking longer than I wanted to get. And what's rather interesting is our discussions are already taking us to the point

where in your book, almost hundreds of millions of people were even killed because we've been going for about 45 minutes already. And around the 45-minute bark is when a full retaliatory attack from Russia has occurred. Maybe we'll get there. escalation and mutually sure destruction in some sense are based on a kind of game theory argument. I was just talking to my friend of the economist Jeffrey Sachs about this, that the prisoner's dilemma, which you may be aware of, the prisoner's dilemma and nuclear weapons, the whole motivation is each individual, if they don't talk to the other individual, even though it's

beneficial for both individuals to do the right thing. In the absence of communication, it's beneficial for each individual to do the wrong thing. And with the case of mutual destruction, if you don't trust your adversary, then it's beneficial for you to say they're going to try and destroy me and I have to ensure that I'm going to destroy them. In spite of the fact that for both Russia and the U.S. objectively, the best thing to do is to ensure that we don't destroy the world. But with this prisoner's dilemma argument where the two sides don't talk to each other and don't trust each other, there's a motivation to continue to escalate. And the solution to that, by way is just diplomacy. One of the reasons why it's incredibly important to have your book and these

discussions now is we are at a time, probably the first time since I've been at least involved in this in marginally or directly in one way or another in the last 40 years where there are no discussions. There is no diplomacy. The U.S. and Russia are not essentially, I mean, some back channels perhaps, but essentially not talking about this. And that makes it even scarier. Looks like you want to say. So I do because I think the prisoner's dilemma is important. And I think that you need to keep in mind, or rather I would say, part of an interesting argument about talking

about this or rather discussion, is that the prisoner's dilemma to my understanding was developed by those two guys at Rand, specifically for John von Neumann. They wanted to impress him, okay? Now, von Neumann, who I write about at length in the Pentagon's brain, because he

was the original Pentagon's brain. As you know, that's why you were hired him. Yeah, well, he was the, yeah, he's a remarkable. And so, when you look at When you look at Von Neumann and you think about his first work in the 20s and people aren't familiar with him, you know, he was a polymath. He was brilliant. He was his own professors were afraid of him, okay? Literally. You know, his theory was all based on games. He was very interesting, almost obsessed with games. But what you also have to keep in mind is, I believe, is von Neumann's personality. He believed man was inherently aggressive, that man was inherently, you might even say evil, that man. could and would try and destroy his opponent. Now, that's perfectly fine to have as one man's opinion, but I believe that is fundamentally dangerous to predicate

and an entire nuclear command and control on. And if it was done that way in the 1950s, which we know it was, it's fair. It may be time to unwind that. And it may be time to think more like Carl Sagan, who said in the end of his book, the cold and the dark. Hang on. Maybe it's not that the enemy is Russia. The enemy is China. The enemy is Iran. The enemy is North Korea. Maybe the enemy is the nuclear weapons. I think that's the last sentence, two sentences

of your book. In fact, Carl's point is exactly that. And I think we could have a digression on Norman who was a remarkable. I think his viewpoint, much like unfortunately a person, well, I don't know Unfortunately, another person who's viewed as evil, one of the people who was involved in getting Oppenheimer removed from his security status and other physicists. We're both from Hungary, Hungary, and, you know, their experience of communism in Hungary might have led them to that kind of pessimistic. I'm not saying on balance that you don't need a hawk. Of course you do. No, no, exactly. But you can't predicate your whole command and control on it. And that we both know that nuclear war was originally designed to be fought and won.

I mean, think about the insanity of that. And the legacy of that remains today. And your point where you said, no one is talking to each other is exactly my point. And I'm hardly a Pauliana. And I'm sure you're not either. I understand and respect people on both sides of the aisles and their opinions. But in the same way that we have, hopefully, we in America can move off of this crazed political hatred for one another and move towards. seeing people as opponents or adversaries as opposed to enemies.

It certainly should be. And by the way, speaking of Pollyanna, that was another point I was going to make. I think one of the reasons why particularly the Democratic presidents didn't change policy launch on warning is that one of their public weaknesses is the sense that they may be soft on defense the nation. And therefore, they are obliged to not appear to be soft. And I think that's an unfortunate aspect. It's easier for them to feel that if they take a rational policy but it can be criticized by Hawks,

that they'll be criticized as being soft on defense. And that's a, that's a sore point for them. But any case, let's move on. Three minutes, go back to the story. But our aside is a useful one, because these issues of what I think it's important for people to think about it one way or another. So three minutes, the president is informed and basically told three minutes and 15 seconds would be precise in your scenario and told that he more or less has to be. six minutes to deliberate in order to be able to launch before, before an attack occurs. Now, one of the next big fallacies, and again, something I've personally spent a lot of time writing about it, is this fallacy that we have a missile defense system in this country.

I remember, in fact, George Bush arguing at the time, and I debated his science advisor at a public meeting the American Physical Society, said, we have, you know, we can, we can, we have a system that will, that will 90% efficient to be able to, to shoot down the directions when in fact, no such system existed. And I've argued, by the way, that the most efficient missile defense system, saved the $176 billion we might have spent so far on it or something like that. Just say we have it, because it's just as useful as a system that doesn't work that we spend money on. So in this, in this, in your scenario, one of the 40, we have 44 working, quote unquote, anti-ballistic missile defense interceptors that have failed in testing, even in carefully, carefully controlled situations.

And why don't you talk about that a little bit? And then I'll add on it for something. So in your scenario, one of these, or two of these are aimed at this missile from North Korea. and they fail, and it's not surprising. So why don't you talk a little bit about your experience for that? And budding in for a moment just to current events, because, of course, what just happened in Israel with the Iranian ballistic missiles coming in and their successful defense through Iron Dome and Arrow 3,

now you have a million people on Reddit, like, this is what we need in the United States, the Iron Dome. And please read the book and just understand how different they are. And that, yes, if you, you know, short-range ballistic missiles are very different than the long-range strategic missiles that we're talking about. And it's important. The long-range ones are going 15,000 miles an hour.

And in order to be stopped, they have to be hit by something that's traveling at 15,000 miles an hour. And the analogy that's even used for a long time is a bullet with a bullet, but bullets are traveling much slower. And, of course, and the other key aspect there is that, well, why don't you go on and I'll add something. I want to let you talk. And also, you know, one of the generals who ran these scenarios for NORAD read that precise section of the book. I had people read the book, both that were sources for me and then also people who were not sources. So they had no horse in the race, right? They could literally just correct me where I was wrong.

And it was a general who pointed out the added that, no, we wouldn't just fire one ballistic, one interceptor missile. it would probably, I think I had two originally, and he said it would be four, right? Okay. And he also explained to me, and there's that line in there which is called the shoot, look, shoot whereby you have to realize that these missiles, there's not enough time for them to literally. It's, again, poetics. Like they can't, you can't shoot a missile, then stop and see, hmm, did we make contact? And then, okay, let's try again.

It has to be fast. So you just wasted four interceptor missiles, four of 44. on one incoming word. And no one told me it was unrealistic that it wasn't shot down. And that should scare everyone. We can't even shoot down the ones we send it ourselves. We have a less than 50% success rate

in carefully staged tests. Moreover, none of those tests involved decoys. And the point is, a $5 decoy, you put $105 decoys in a missile and release them around the thing. And that multi, multi-billion dollar, interceptor isn't going to be able to tell the difference. And they have not minutes or hours, but seconds.

Exactly. Or less than a second. And let's drill down for listeners in plain English what the curated test means, right? So what we're talking about is when you practice an ICBM desk, you got the guys at Vandenberg going to shoot off an ICBM, headed toward, let's say, the Reagan test site in the Marshall Islands, and they go like, hey, guys, we're doing a missile test. Or maybe they go, shh, don't tell anyone. But we're just keep your eye out on your radar scope at 310 tomorrow.

But I didn't tell you, right? I mean, we're joking, not joking. And then the ICBM has launched because the point is it's a mis. It's an interceptor test. And then what happens factually because they have to report to Congress to account for the billions and billions of taxpayer dollars? The success rate is an abysmal 40 to 55 percent. Of the time. Even in those curated tests without realistic, realistic conditions.

And no decoys. There may be bad weather and no decoys. And moreover, as you may remember, and I think you may have mentioned this book, which really it was so typical. Once the system started failing, they stopped testing it. Exactly. Because better not to report failures and say you have a system that works. And that's, again, an insult.

to the security, safety, and health of the people of the world. It's used like nomenclature like strategic pause, right? Yeah, yeah. And then, lo and behold, you find out recently, oh, we actually have a whole new multi-billion dollar program that's definitely going to work, Mr. and Mrs. taxpayer. And that's where we are. And we are, and as you point out,

$176 billion and counting spent on the system that really no proof that it'll work at all in every bit of proof that it won't, because in fact, the other thing that's been pointed out, I think it was Dick Garwin and first pointed out to me, but it's pretty clear. Okay, so say you have a 90% likelihood of shooting a missile down, 90%. Well, you have to do, if you were going to send five missiles, and then you're likely one of them is going to get through.

And it costs a fraction of the cost to produce a new missile compared to to produce a new interceptor and a system that works. So the logic and the dollars and everything, the logistics is always in, favor of, in this case, the aggressor. And so every, there's no logic that you can think of because all you're doing is encouraging an aggressor to launch five missiles instead of, even if you have a system that works, they want to watch five missiles for every missile that they want to get through instead of one. That gives them a motivation to build a bigger arsenal. Absolutely. And then you can look at a system like the Aegis system, which I write about in the book, which is on the Navy

destroyers that can really handle the shorter and middle range ballistic missiles. And this is what was used in Iran. And yes. And as I write in the book, it has an 85% success rate. And what we know factually right now, the whole story isn't told, but that the Navy Aegis system shot down three of the Iranian ballistic missiles, but we don't know how many it missed, right? So instead, you have a public, oh my God, the interceptor system works. And therefore, what we should do is have Aegis systems lining up and down the California coast and the East Coast. And then you sort of You and I both shake our heads and say, my God, they're missing the, not they. Let's not blame they.

But what is happening is what has been happening for 79 years, which is where the idea really is boiling down to the madness of mad, which is more nuclear weapons make us more safe. And that sounds like something out of Orwell to me. Absolutely. And in fact, regarding those Aegis systems, the other calculation, I think it was done by Postal, again by Garwin and others that, you know, the one stage where you might expect to intercept is this early stage, if you're close enough, if you happen to have a submarine with an interceptor missile nearby within a few hundred miles, but then you have, the phase you have to do this

is in three minutes. You have three minutes from the time, you know, and it's just so all the logistics and the idea that you could get close enough and always be close enough to be get there within in three minutes. All of the logistics makes it the notion that we are safe from intercontinental ballistic missiles a complete fallacy. I have to bump in here because then you have another problem. Let's say you did have a system. Oh my God, let's do the system whereby we're trying to take out the missile in three minutes. Okay. So now you have North Korea, which doesn't play by the rules, that launches ballistic missiles without notifying anybody. They're just tests. They're going into the sea of Japan or maybe they're going to launch a satellite in space. What happens?

when the U.S. takes out its missile in under three minutes. Okay. You can understand. Now I have nuclear war scenario part two. Yeah, that's right in your next book. Okay, so we're only not, and this so far, it's right of our discussion. We're nine minutes into this. And something really hit me pointedly.

It wasn't, you know, just in reading. Nine minutes is, so we have warning systems that are in Alaska, which are designed to be able to line of sight, be able to provide, you know, the first systems that give evidence of the satellites, as you point out. But the line of the site systems in Alaska are designed to look and actually be able to see the first ICBMs coming from Russia or over the North Pole. What really hit me pointedly was it nine minutes in the discussion, you get direct confirmation for the first time. Now it's come over the horizon of a single ICBM. And just think about that.

I mean, think about this. That's what is so sort of hopeless. You have the nation, the United States, the president, the most incredibly technologically advanced military system in the world. They look and they see that single ICBM, which a few minutes later will be the terminal is going to be heading towards Washington. And there's absolutely nothing you can do. That's what's so crazy. The whole nation, the whole nuclear, the whole might of the U.S. military defense, and there's a single weapon seen in Alaska heading over. and all you can do is watch and wait.

And that's, that's, that is so strange and sad in any case. I'm going to interrupt and just thank you for. I'm interrupting you. You say what you want. Well, I just want to thank you for actually reading the book as it's meant to be read, which is where you bring your heart into the matter. Yeah. And you can precise, even with all your brain full of science and math and calculations

and experience and, you know, everything you have done, you realize the truth of what I try to convey is one tragic moment after the next that is pitiful and horrific at the same time. And there are so many mysteries as to how we wound up here, but there is also a clear solution, which begins by people understanding exactly having the kind of moment that you just described when you read the book and you can think precisely that. Yeah. And let's hope more people have that kind of moment where this variety of moments, you realize that the reality of this and the craziness of it and the only solution, ultimately,

is to stop this madness. And lots of people are saying for a lot of times. and yet the world keeps, as I'll point out at the very end, the direction doesn't seem to be good. Two things I want to point out, we're going to skip in through things relatively quickly so that we can, and by the way, we've now been going about a little under an hour,

and as I say, by the time in your book that basically modern civilization ends will be 12 minutes from now, from the time we started to talk before all the actions happened. So far, there's just to see. single missile coming over. And at about 11 minutes, we go to DefCon 1. I don't think it's probably necessary to describe that.

But one of the things in your book that's interesting is you talk about FEMA, federal emergency management agency. And basically, you know, so people think, okay, well, in the event of, you know, some catastrophe, FEMA is going to guide us on how to, how to help us. And as it has demonstrated a variety of times in the book, yeah, first they can send out a warning saying, you know, stay inside. second step don't stay inside evacuate or get underground

and third step you know put your head between your legs and you know your ask advice they used to say in the 60s basically the ultimate advice which they recognize is people should try and self-surviv at the end of a nuclear war to the extent they can and that that

notion of self-survival is almost is just ridiculous it's haunting yeah haunting at best ridiculous at worse maybe in 15 minutes in They're 15 minutes in. There's a concern, there's now discussion. The Secretary of Defense has already left because he's been underneath the bunker and the Pentagon,

but to point out the bunker of the Pentagon in the event of a one megaton nuclear weapons explosion or a bunch of one megaton nuclear weapons explosion or a bunch of 400 kiloton ones is not going to survive. So he, because he will, in the event that basically most of the other people in the line of succession are killed when a missile hits Washington, he will be the commander-in-chief. if the president goes, he's on his way to Raven Rock complex. And people begin to worry about the continuity of government by about 15 minutes, what to do and who's going to call the shots. You want to talk about that for a second? So those scenes grew out of a series of interviews I did with former Secretary of Defense, Bill Perry, your colleague.

A wonderful man. I wanted to know what he would think of, what he would. be thinking in a moment like that, you know, would he go down with the ship? And he explained to me, and that's why that section has direct quotes, that he would realize that it would make sense for himself and probably the vice chairman of the joint chief of staff to leave very quickly in a helicopter, which is what he does in the hypothetical situation. Right? So that someone could be alive to direct the madness. Yes, because of in the line of succession, you know, and as I see, say in the book and quote people who are knowledgeable in this, that what Washington fears most

is a bolt out of the blue attack against Washington. And so, you know, you have Secretary of Bill Perry telling me that he would leave and go to Raven Rock. And that coupled with this idea from my interviews with Obama's FEMA director, Craig Fugate, that in fact, there's nothing FEMA can do, that there is no population protection planning because everyone would be dead. And that FEMA does practice for asteroid strikes and nuclear war. And they're called low probability high consequence events. You begin to realize all of these manuals that FEMA puts out, you know, do this, do that in the event of a nuclear war, what you described. That's just, I don't even want to call it propaganda.

and I don't want to call it nonsense, but it's some word similar to all of that, which is basically just a big waste of taxpayer money in 400, 500-page documents, which says a lot of contradictory information. Yeah. And the truth is much more like what Craig Fugate had the candor to tell me, which is, you know, don't forget your morals and hope you stocked pediolite. Yes. to keep your electrolytes going if you can survive. And don't for your morals is going to be a big issue in a world without government and law. If there is any people to even be governed. In the book, it's 16 minutes.

A submarine launch ballistic missile from North Korea off the coast of California launched ultimately at the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor and ultimately destroys it. This gives us a chance to have it a little aside on submarines. And the other aspect of the craziness of military calculations, the United States has a triad, as you describe. It has bombers, it has round-based ballistic missiles,

and it has nuclear-capable submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The point that is amply made in the book is that the submarines are tried-in submarines, but in this case, well, both a North Korean submarine and later on a Russian submarine, can both get close to a coast, and they are virtually undetectable, and they will survive a nuclear war. And one could therefore ask, and I know a number of my colleagues have asked this question and tried to promote it, that there's no need for a triad. There's no need for all of those targets to be painted on the Midwest,

inviting an aggressor to attack those ICBMs, because if you just had the submarine-launched ballistic missiles and just had the number of subs we have and number of ballistic missiles they carry, you could still destroy the world several times over reliably without, and so there's no real purpose to the triad. You're absolutely right. And part of the reason why I chose to write about that in the scenario,

and I'm very clear to say, you know, when the North Korean sub gets up close to the coast of California and launches, I'm clear to say that some of the people I interviewed said, this is plausible, this is possible, and others, like Richard Garwin, said he didn't believe that the North Koreans had the capability to get a sub that close. But I do that on purpose because I want people who are the real, you know, air quotes and literal experts in this arena to be able to have these kinds of conversations and discuss them and debate them and not have to be right or wrong. Yeah. Because how would we really know who is right or wrong in the event it happens, okay?

Exactly. And so that is why I found it very important. And I appreciate your read on that and your recognition of that, that this is a possible scenario. And in some, the real terror is the fact that Russia and China actually have submarines that can most certainly get up within a couple hundred miles of both coast. And I reproduce an actual document. rarely would I have never seen that in print until I found that in of all things a budget request to Congress from the Navy. It's a document showing where submarines from Russia and China have traveled near the coast.

And it is. So readers can under or listeners can understand that because submarines are undetectable, that is not a real time. Like the Defense Department doesn't know where the subs are in real time, which makes them so deadly and dangerous, but that map demonstrates where they have been because of our technologies after the fact. After the fact and communications about them that are intercepted, et cetera, et cetera. And to point out, I mean, as I, and the example is well chosen, that that submarine launched ballistic missile launched at 16 minutes into this, which is the second North Korean one, it destroys the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor and makes a large part of

California, ultimately, the size of New Jersey or two, an inhabitable. And it explodes by 21 minutes, because if it's 26 minutes to get from North Korea, and if you have an ICBM launch from a few hundred miles away, you're talking five or six minutes. And you know, what I'm going to do now, I think, because I want to talk to you about items of principle, and I also want to read some things from the book that really, I think, bring home, you know, you can talk about casualties, you can talk about disasters, but in the abstract, it just becomes clinical. And I want to, I want to, I want to talk about some of that and then conclude by talking about where we are, where we are, and I want to, but let me just do the, and you can jump in if you want, but let me just do

the sort of the play by play. So that, that, that, that, that second missile hits at 21 minutes. By 22 minutes, the, the U.S. detection systems have determined that the original ballistic missile is now heading towards the Pentagon. They're now able to know that. The president is informed. He's now, at this point, he's left the White House. But at this point, after great discussion, he decides to launch a retaliatory attack of about 100 missiles, about 50 or 60 land-based missiles. 82. 82, and then an equal number are more or less from submarines. And so there are 40 or 50 that are launched from the states that therefore have to go over the North Pole to get down to North Korea, which means they will traverse Russia. And there are some that are launched from a submarine

south heading up towards North Korea. But if you're looking from Russia, you see missiles heading from the south in your direction, as you point out. At this point, very shortly thereafter, then, after 23 minutes, Moscow can now begin to see that there have been missiles launched and has evidence from a variety of sources that within a few minutes, and again, you point out And, you know, this may be the one quibbolite have in the book, is that the Russian system may not be as good, and therefore they may see 100 or not. And but they see weapons.

And ultimately, the bottom line is that they're not going to know. There's a possibility that some people could argue to the Russian president that these are missiles that are pointing at Russia. And there's a long discussion in the book, and I want to come back to that a little bit at the end. But that's 27 minutes into this. The Russians now know that they're potentially being attacked. But 28 minutes, there's a concern that the president's plane is not far enough away,

and one of the things that will come back to when a nuclear weapons explosion is what's called an electromagnetic pulse, which basically fries all communication systems and electromagnetics and electric systems. Therefore, there's a concern the president may not survive, and he's asked to give the universal unlock code to the Secretary of Defense and the STRATCOM, at the person, Strathcom, who by the way, has taken off because clearly the ICVAM base in Nebraska is a target, and he's now taken off in something called the Doomsday Plain, which is a plane which will fly and be able to coordinate a nuclear war from above, even if there's nothing left to coordinate down below. And he's up there coordinating it. And the sector of defense is trying to reach Russia at 33 minutes into this, the Pentagon. is destroyed, as is Washington, as is every person there killed, and we'll talk about it,

as is every symbol of the United States, from all the monuments to the archives, to everything you can imagine. The Russians, of course, see this at 33 minutes. A ridiculous FEMA message goes out. Up by 36 minutes, the Strathcom man is up in the Doomsday Plain. And by the time, it's basically Russia begins to see the vessels coming over the North Pole and able to see it. By 42 minutes or so, the Russian president

has become convinced that there's an attack and decides to launch 1,000 warheads on the major just the major 1,000 targets in the United States. That means within 26 minutes the continental United States will be destroyed

more or less. And that's the So those are the first. You divide your book in a 24 minutes, 24 minutes. So we had the first 24 minutes before the first bomb goes, the second 24 minutes before Russia launches its bombs. And the final 24 minutes is a rapid scurry to try and decide how to most effectively ensure that there's nobody left to fight a nuclear war. And one last little bit, which you do point out, which is that North Korea, in this case, has a card up their sleeve, that they have a satellite. And if you explode a nuclear weapon from a satellite, as it has been well known for a long time, you can produce a electromagnetic pulse, which will be so severe as to basically knock out essentially all communication systems destroy electronic control systems for power, for gas, for everything in the continental United States. States, and it goes off by, I think, 56 minutes into this. After that, it's just a matter of, finally, after seeing that that Stratcom or the Sector of Fentz is still alive, I think, at that point,

and hasn't been hit by the second wave of Russian missiles instructs for a final launch to basically destroy over a thousand remaining, or I forget several hundred remaining to attack Russia. At that point, that's 72 minutes in, and essentially both not only have the, have basically most, many of the people the United States been killed, has the, as a civilization of the United States, has a civilization of Russia been destroyed, but it sets the stage where, as you point out, the remaining 24 months, which may be worse. As Khrushchev once said, as you point out, after a nuclear war, the living will, will envy the dead. Because there are four, things that come out from this. There's fallout, a nuclear winter, which Carl Sagan was first to

describe, not quite right, but since then we've updated a little bit, and it's even worse. And the fact that we'll have destroyed a larger part of the ozone layer. So even if you're alive, the sunburns are bad. And ultimately, after that, at least five billion of the eight billion people on this planet will be dead. And what will happen to the rest of the people on the planet is not clear. And all of that is determined, essentially, initially, by the launch of one missile 72 minutes earlier. The world basically ends effectively for almost everyone on Earth and what the future will bring, we don't know. If we'd had more time, I would have helped you walk me through that, but I want to now have a

chance. It's a gripping story, and I haven't obviously given it in its, in its gory detail and its gripping intense moments, as are described literally as almost like a mystery story in this book. But I want to come back and talk about some of the consequences of that and how we got here. But before we do, in case listeners are depressed out of their minds at this point, I do want to bring up sort of the one aspect of the book that may give people hope that this scenario might not materialize. And it kept hitting me throughout. You could imagine that this would end with the mere and awful destruction of a large part of California and the death of millions of people in the Washington

D.C. area, if there wasn't both a retaliatory act by the United States and ultimately a retaliatory act by Russia. Now, there's two things that I would think that might give one hole. First of all, in your book, I'm assuming that in spite of the fact that Russia may not have the technical expertise of the United States, one of the things you don't describe in the book that I think is likely is that Russia probably would be able to detect the ICBM launched by North Korea at the same time as the U.S. because they're also probably worried about ICBMs from there. And that they would also, because very early in the game, U.S. computers, and I say it's a ballistic trajectory. It doesn't require, you know, I mean, a supercomputer is great, but you can, you can

calculate where it's going to land. And so Russia would, you know, Even for the countertack for the U.S., if they looked at the ballistic missiles and saw their trajectories, could, a university physics student, if enough time, could calculate that they would land in North Korea and not Russia. So while I understand, I mean, you make it quite clear, there are lots of hawks, there's concerns about U.S. foreign policy and what we did in Iraq. There's going to be a lot of irrational aspects to this. One could hope that at least there might be enough information, so both the retaliation, by Russia and maybe even the decision by the U.S. to wait before acting and speak to the Russian president might happen in the real world. Do you want to talk about that at all and give any hope

for people? Well, technically, I would say no, absolutely not. It's not plausible that Russian's satellite systems are not adequate to do what you say. And I take that through in the book and I interview not only the American defense scientists who say that, but also because I thought One would think, well, let's make sure we don't have people biased in favor of the great American technology and somehow against Russian technology. And so I interviewed Pavel Podvig, who is the liaison to the United Nations about, you know, he's probably the world's expert on Russian nuclear forces. He also conceded that the technology is not there. There are a lot of problems. Even with that said, you would have to have a very doveish Russian president. who was comfortable and confident that the United States wasn't after him.

And that is certainly not the case today. And a great argument for the beginning parts of our conversation about why it would be so important for people that are leaders of nuclear-armed nations to look at one another as opponents, as adversaries, and not as enemies. Not with that prisoner's dilemma. I better screw the other guy over attitude. No, okay, look, and I think it's worth having this discussion because, I mean, the fact that it's possible,

the fact that it's quite possible that a non-Dovish president could view an attack as likely, and again, U.S. foreign policy has not given any adversary much confidence in the fact that U.S. wouldn't take actions from Iraq onward. I was, to defend my point, I was given some, I had some pause here by, by you quote Putin, who is by no means Davish, saying that there be two conditions not to not to launch.

One, the conditions to launch would require a recording that a clear record that the U.S. had launched ICBMs and two, an accurate forecast of their trajectories. So if he's saying what he, if he believes what he's saying, he would say in that case that until he knew for certain or reasonably certain what the trajectories are, he himself would not launch a counterattack. In the actual heat of the moment, would that be the case? No, because let's give that context. And this is, again, from Pavel Podvik, that for decades, whether or not you believe this is up to you, but for decades, the Russia has maintained that they do not have a launch on morning policy. And this is very key. Yeah, even though they did. Even though they did. And you and I may think they did. They said they didn't. And many people, you know, would argue that they did. didn't because you are supposed to take them at the word. But what Putin was saying changed that position. That is terrifying. He was saying, oh, by the way, we now have a launch on morning

policy. Absolutely. And so all bets are off the table to think that they would be giving anybody the benefit of the doubt. I think what's important for listeners to keep in mind is this. when I did an interview with former Strathcom commander General Keeler, he told me when we were discussing a scenario whereby Russia and the United States had a nuclear exchange. He said to me, the world could end in the next couple of hours. And that is what one needs to really lead with, I believe. And the other thing is a comment by Professor Tune, one of the five authors of the nuclear winter theory when he said to me that, you know, the only... event that could end other than an asteroid strike, which killed the dinosaurs and some 70% of the species on Earth, the only event that could do that kind of extinction damage is nuclear war. I mean, there is nothing we can do about an asteroid strike. Well, it might be. But there are a separate book. Separate book. But there is a lot we can.

can do about curbing the immediate threat of nuclear war. Which we have created. That's the point. It's human created. Yeah, I didn't want to end this discussion with any quibbles. I just wanted to point out in my mind for people who might hope that there would be like. The other hope I would want to have.

And again, this is a scenario which is real. And I always thought maybe that general telling you the world could be over in a couple of hours is probably what motivated you to write the book the way he did. That one statement was probably, if I were you, have been okay. Absolutely. That's an awakening. If the world can be over two hours, two hours. And coming from the commander of Strathcom.

And again, this is very important because it lays bare the reality of the existential threat. And it also lays bare and opens up that this must be a discussion. Exactly. Because you can't undo, it would be foolish to undo 79 years worth of. situation in a single pen stroke. No one is suggesting that, but the conversation needs to go in a different direction. It has to. And the best conversations can happen in democracy are ones where the public has some inkling of what's going on, especially when it affects their future. The last bit of hope, before we go back to the madness, the world, is it there have been, and you point out

several in the book, moments, you know, you probably read the book command and control as well, but there's so many close calls that humans have had. And what has saved us several times is an individual sometimes who just said a rational action. I'm seeing this, but I can't believe it's happening, or I shouldn't take an innate response. And there have been a bunch of wonderful examples. My hope in the good moments, and I'm usually a pessimist, but in the good moments is that a rational president on either side might step back and say, yes, we have launch on warning, but if I do that, the world will end in two hours. and maybe I should step back. That's my hope.

You're giving a lot of credit to somebody taking that specific position. Oh, I agree. I'm not saying, it's a hope. It's not an expectation in any way. I want to, in the last eight or ten minutes, go to how we got here, and you give the chronology in the book, I want to read two descriptions in your book. And then I want to talk about the current budget in the last minute or two. because, you know, I just, I'm on, you know, I get information from the Arms Control Association.

They just talk about the new Biden budget and their request for additional funds for nuclear weapons. And in the content, it was very pointing because I got that the day before I started reading your book. And the two things, the juxtaposition of those two things really hit me. But the point is that after the Hiroshima in 1945, it didn't look like that things would, you know, that Los Alamos, which at where I've been, it would would do much. But the U.S. Navy in 1946 decided that, hey, it would be great for the Navy to have nuclear weapons, and they basically took it over. We went from three bombs in 1945 to nine bombs in 1946, and the statement by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that this could be useful, and, moreover,

Russia will one day be expected to have them, and therefore we better start stockpower. This is before Russia actually ever did that three years later. By 1947, we had 13, 1948, 50, 1949, 1949, 170. and that was when a discussion was made that 200 bombs were necessary to destroy this Soviet Union entirely. 200 fission bombs, not fusion bombs. That was, so you'd think that would have been enough. Look, that's enough.

But it wasn't. 1949, Russia has five nuclear weapons, has reproduced the fission bomb thing. We go up to 299. By 1951, 438, twice the number needed to destroy the Soviet Union. By 1952, 841. four times as many, just keep building and building and building without any rationale. And then, of course, 1952, the hydrogen bomb is developed, you know, which is more than a thousand times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb. And things take off by 1953, 1169. You know, Russia's beginning to build

1955. We have 24, 22, 1956, 36, 92. By 1967, we have 31,255. We have 31,255. and Russia has tens of thousands as well. That's when you're talking about the time when there were over 70,000 nuclear weapons. In 1960, the United States begins to seriously ask how can we run a nuclear war? That's how your work begins. Your book begins with a discussion from someone

who was at that briefing on how the U.S. would run a nuclear war where at that point, people seriously said, okay, we will kill 600 million people by this particular strategy. We will kill 600 million people and we will rationally say that that's what we need to do. A fifth of the world's population. Then, as I say, through negotiations and other things, we now have, as you point out, 1770 with 5,000 in our back pocket in the U.S. and 1674 in Russia, each of which each of those weapons

are 50 times stronger than the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima, more than enough to destroy the world over, and that's where we come to today, and we plan, and they're still planning for war that cannot be won. And I think before I close by reading, or asking you to comment on, or maybe Abby you read certain pages from your book, I'll point out that, so the arms control today turned out the Biden administration's $850 billion defense budget calls for $69 billion for nuclear weapons operations and modernization, including 400 new ICBMs, new nuclear arms subs and bombers and upgrades for all the warheads in the U.S. arsenal projected to total $756 billion over the next decade. And the reports from the military and from right-wing

are that that's not enough, that we will still be, that we will still be not have a deterrent, that America's enemies will become more emboldened while facing a hobbled and undersized American nuclear deterrent, an undersized deterrent. So we're willing in this current time, in spite of People in Washington knowing what you write here, in spite of what everyone should know, we are willing to modernize and upgrade and impoverish. That's almost a trillion dollars that could be spent on other things, making us not more safe, but less safe, and exposing us to a moment in time when a single mistake or a single malevolent individual can cause the world to end in two hours.

Let me ask you to comment that, and then I just want to read two pages. from your book. So comment on whether my summary has been, whether you're more optimistic or less optimistic than me. I have a one word comment precisely. Okay. Okay. Now, your book begins, and I think it's worthwhile reading what it actually happens

when a bomb explodes in Washington, D.C. So I want to just read only the first three seconds of what happens. A one-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light, and heat's so tremendous it's impossible for the human mind to comprehend 180 million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature that occurs in the center of the sun. Probably hotter still, actually. In the first fraction of a millisecond,

after this thermonuclear bomb strikes the Pentagon, there is light, soft X-ray light with a very short wavelength. The light super hates the surrounding air to millions of degrees, creating a massive fireball that expands at millions of miles per hour. Within a few seconds, this fireball increases to a diameter of little more than a mile. It's light and heat are, intense that concrete surfaces explode, metal objects melt or vaporize, stone shatters, humans instantaneously convert into combusting carbon. The five-story five-sided structure of the Pentagon, and everything inside its 6.5 million square feet of office space, explodes into superheated dust. From the initial flash of light and heat, all the walls shattering with the near simultaneous

arrival of the shock wave, all 27,000 employees perish instantaneously. Not a sense. single thing in the fireball remains. Nothing, round zero is zeroed. Traveling at the speed of light, the radiating heat from the fireball ignites everything flammable within the line of sight, several miles out in every direction. Curtains, papers, books, wood, fences, people's clothing, dry leaves, explode into flames and become kindling for a great firestorm that begins to consume a hundred or more square miles. Prior to this flash, that prior to this flash was the beating heart of American governance and home to some six million people. You know, I think I'll leave that there.

It's just the beginning because the force of the fireball, this is just the heat of the fireball. The force of the fireball hasn't even gone. And we haven't talked about the radiation that comes from that. The fact that within less than a second, this isn't all of the, as I say, it isn't the air expanding, it isn't the force. It's the less than the first second. you've annihilated essentially the entire, what many people think of as the signature of the

United States, every building, every bit of archival history of the country and all of the people who run the country, as well as all the institutions that most people depend upon or their livelihood. The other description that I want to read of yours is what happens when there's an EM pulse at the very end of the book, or near the end of the book, when a single satellite explodes seven or miles above the United States, above Nebraska. It's not just that it destroys all communication signals. All high-energy, high-voltage transformers begin to fail. The entire grid goes out of the way.

But worse than that, commercial aircraft are going to be canceled. And worse than that, combustion centers on coal-fired boilers suffer the wrong mix of air and fuel and cause them to ignite and blow. Motorized valves on America's water delivery systems no longer under anyone's control. and dams burst, mass flooding begins to happen, there's no fresh water, no toilets flush, fires everywhere, all from that single, this is how the world ends. As you point out, and as you just said earlier, as Carl Sagan said, the enemy is never ultimately enough to destroy the world is not Russia, China, North Korea, or the United States. It's a nuclear weapons

themselves, and we persist in building more and more and more when a single weapon produces the kind of devastation, death, destruction, and horror, and we haven't even gone into radiation poisoning, which if we had time, we would have. And I hope, I really hope that this book and the discussions it prompts will continue the work that so many of us have tried to do and really bring it home to get people to realize what the threat is and that the only way to overcome it, the only way to overcome the madness of nuclear weapons is begin to bring some rationality to the discussion.

I'll give you the last word because I talked a lot the last five minutes, but I think it's very important, and I applaud your efforts, and I really appreciate the book and the discussions, and, you know, it's obviously near and dear to my own heart. I've meant a lot of my life trying to speak out about it. Well, you get another one-word, you know, answer, which is precisely. And thank you so much for having me on the podcast and also for being such

an elegant reader of the book and taking the time to think it through and also for this discussion. Thanks. And good luck, Annie, with this and your next book. So I hope you get to interview me again sometime because I'm sure it was fun the first time. And I enjoy having a chance to chat with you now. And good luck on this and all your endeavors. Thanks. Thank you so much. Hi, it's Lawrence again. As the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world, I just wanted to say thank you.

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Thank you.