EP29 The Handmaidens of the Apocalypse
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It's Hardcore History. Throughout the entire history of the Hardcore History podcast, we've been talking about nuclear weapons.

Whether it's on shows that we've done about nothing else but nuclear weapons, like the Destroyer of Worlds, or the Logical Insanity and Logical Insanity Extra shows, the last Supernova in the East show, the Hardcore History addendum we did with Fred Kaplan, the many Common Sense shows that touched upon nuclear weapons, the changes to warfare that they've created and created.

the opportunity that they've opened up for dystopian outcomes that were practically unimaginable before their invention. If we want to think about how we're going to end up with a Statue of Liberty in the sand moment in our future, well, nuclear weapons would seem to be the odds-on favorite vehicle for creating it.

I can't think of a more important topic for discussion and something that should be far more a part of our conversation at all times than it is. I think we've forgotten...

how it felt during the height of the Cold War to consider the fact that you could wake up and find out that the missiles were on the way. And then sometime after the Soviet Union fell, and we entered into that period sometimes referred to as the end of history, when people sort of forgot, as we had referred to it in the Destroyer of Worlds show, that we had, metaphorically speaking, as a civilization, a gun pointed at our head,

Which brings me to a new book by investigative reporter, Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobson, that she did called Nuclear War, A Scenario. When I got this book, I didn't think it was going to be for me because it is written almost in a dramatic narrative sort of form and I'm not a fiction guy. But once I got to reading it, I realized that that was precisely what

what made it so good. And that so much of what I had read had sort of removed

the dramatic part of the story that turned it into kind of a dry history where we were talking about, you know, megatons and blast radius and destructive values and systems that were in place. And all of a sudden, sometimes you just need a reality check moment that brings you back down to, if you pardon the pun, ground zero and reminds you what we're talking about here, not just the destroying of all the people that

but every creation that humankind has ever come up with. Now, does that mean that that needs to be the way it goes? There's been a lot of military thought into the idea of having a nuclear war that one can win or a limited nuclear war. But in Jacobson's book, she goes a long way to pointing out how unlikely it is that you could limit a nuclear war once nuclear weapons are employed by anyone.

I would not like this book if it was just some fictional account coming out of her brain, but instead she talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of people who are in such high positions of authority in terms of their closeness to the nuclear weapon secrets that there were times in the book where she had to be very careful to avoid violating things like the Espionage Act.

But all these people were able to give her enough information on what they all have thought that nuclear war would be like and what they studied and what the war gaming showed and what the best guesses are and what the procedures and protocols are to give her enough material where she could write a scenario that gave you a sense of what it would be like. And it's a page turner. There's a dramatic...

narrative in this that keeps you wondering what's going to happen next even though you know it's going to be terrible you kind of want to figure out in what way it's going to be terrible and by the time you're done with the book there's an overwhelming sense which is the sense you should have after any one of our shows on nuclear weapons but she makes it perfectly clear in an entirely new way an overwhelming sense that we're not talking about this enough

And maybe it's just too hard for us to think about. But if thinking about it is going to make this even one iota less likely, then I can't think of anything more important than thinking about nuclear war, nuclear weapons, and where all of this stuff is heading. Annie Jacobson's new book is Nuclear War, A Scenario. It begins...

One second after a nuclear weapon is launched in her fictional account and then how everything proceeds from there. She's currently making the rounds on a book tour, so she's talked to a lot of people, but perhaps we're going to take it in directions they didn't.

So without further ado, our conversation with Pulitzer Prize finalist investigative reporter Annie Jacobson talking about, well, you know, the light, airy, and uplifting topics we normally address, things like nuclear holocaust.

Let's start by talking about the subject. I mean, you've got to decide you want to spend a year or two or more on this, and it's got to be something you can maintain an interest for and maybe feel like you're doing some good in the world. So let me ask you, why this subject and why now? So, Dan, I'm an investigative journalist, and I write about war and weapons and national security and secrets.

And in my previous six books, which have been about military and intelligence programs, everything from the CIA to DARPA, I cannot tell you how many sources have said to me with kind of a swelling pride, Annie, I dedicated my life to preventing nuclear World War III.

And so during the previous administration, when former President Trump was talking about fire and fury and the sort of nuclear saber-rattling rhetoric, I got to thinking, what if deterrence fails? And then I took that question to the highest level national security people I knew, and the result was

is the book.

Okay, so at first, when I first opened the book, I didn't think I was going to like the approach you took because I don't read a lot of fiction. And I opened it up and I realized that what you're doing is concocting a scenario. And I thought, I'm more of a history guy. I just want to read facts and figures. But then when I got into it, I realized that you were helping us overcome something by doing it this way. That reminded me of a Bertrand Russell quote that I looked up where he was trying to explain our inability to comprehend what we're talking about here.

And he said, what perhaps impedes understanding of the situation more than anything else is the term mankind, when he's talking about humankind, feels vague and abstract.

He said,

that what your book really did, that many of the other books I read on the subject that were much more, you know, cut and dried, your book gave us the impression that helps us to understand that reality that, as Bertrand Russell points out, is so impossible to conceptualize. And you are absolutely correct. I wanted to demonstrate in appalling detail just how horrific nuclear war would be.

Well, and let me not spoil anything for anybody out there. But the way that the book is organized is it starts one second from the first missile launching. And within about 57 minutes, the world is for all intents and purposes destroyed. So that's a pretty that's a pretty in your face historical lesson of the future that you're giving us. Yeah. And you know what?

I mean, what a great way to say that in your face, because that's exactly what it felt like when I was interviewing people like General Robert Keillor, the former director of STRATCOM. And in our discussions, I posed to him, you know, a scenario whereby...

Russia and the United States were involved in a nuclear exchange. And he said to me, yes, Annie, the world could end in the next few hours. And that's the kind of jaw dropping things that were said to me time and time again from sources who went on the record about this.

I was originally doing the reporting during COVID when people had a little more time to talk to somebody like me. And that was kind of fate and circumstance intervening, I think, in my favor because it allowed for me to really explore how people felt about what could happen. And so that is where I came up with the fact-based scenario of it all.

Well, and let me bring that up, too, because I would not have been interested had you just sort of extrapolated a little data from some secondary sources. But you talked to more than 100 people who have found themselves up close and personal with how this whole thing works. In fact, there were a couple of areas where, you know, we felt we were in danger of crossing the espionage act line.

And that to me is what makes this really real. You're extrapolating information that people who know about this stuff and have been intimately into the rooms and the conversations and the war gaming and then turning it into a scenario based on the best information

information that's available and maybe a little of the best information that's not even available. Like I said, I read a lot about this stuff and you surprised me with a number of different things. I mean, for example, can we talk a little bit about the space-based defense system that maybe isn't quite the defense system that we in the back of our minds hope and pray it is?

I mean, we could talk about anything because it's all sort of one, like, oh my God, after the next. And you're talking about SIBRS, which is the Lockheed-built space-based system of satellites that the United States government, the Defense Department, has parked in geosync over America's nuclear-armed enemies and adversaries so that...

we can see the hot rocket exhaust on an ICBM launch in under one second. That is an astonishing fact. I mean, pretty much, like you said, you are very learned. So am I. And yet to learn that fact was news to me that it happened so fast. And then, of course, I think that helps your average person on the street, who I always write for,

to understand that this situation is all about seconds and minutes, not weeks and months. Nuclear war happens so fast because an ICBM takes only approximately 30 minutes to get from one side of the world to the continental United States.

Well, and this I've explored this issue in relation to presidential power, because we were asking the question once why the president has this amount of authority when it comes to, for example, making a decision that could kill hundreds of millions of people or more. And the answer always is the time window. Right. You don't have time to convene Congress and have a big debate on the question that the very the very shrinking time window is what makes the way it is.

the way the protocol is set up so important. I think in your book you talked about maybe six minutes of decision-making time. Is that correct? Yeah. And people often say, like, how do you know it's six minutes? And I know other people report it differently. But, you know, I source everything in the back of the book in my notes, as you probably noticed. So,

So that people who have those doubts, you know, how does she know that? We'll go to the back of the book and look how I know that. And the six-minute window there that you're talking about, and that's from the moment the president is notified of an incoming nuclear missile. The president has roughly six minutes left.

to give the counterattack order to STRATCOM. And that information comes from President Reagan, who wrote about that in his memoir. And when he describes it, he uses the word irrational. He's saying, like, that is an irrational amount of time to have to make a decision about unleashing Armageddon.

And more than that, and this is another one of the things that surprised me in the book that I wasn't expecting, because one would imagine that when a person takes office in

as the person who has their finger on the metaphorical button, so to speak, that this would have been something thought out, planned to the nth degree and well understood. And yet in your book, you point out that by the time this scenario actually ends up at the foot of the president, they may not really even have planned or thought much about it. I mean, the number of times that the Secret Service in your book bursts into the room and grabs the president from underneath both armpits is

and he seems like he's a little lost by the whole experience, was disconcerting to say the least. And, you know, I mean, I don't mean to laugh, but it's like...

If it wasn't so tragic, it would be comical. And again, that stuff is not coming from Annie Jacobson's imagination. That is coming from, for example, an interview I did with the former director of the Secret Service about what his position would be in the event of a nuclear strike while you have, you know, the sort of Defense Department and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff trying to get the president involved

to give this counterattack order to STRATCOM, you would have this parallel movement by the Secret Service, by the CAT team, that's the counter-assault team within the Secret Service, and then there's something called the element, which is even inside the CAT team. Again, details sourced from the people who are in the know on these things.

Then you would see this vying for, you know, precedence over who does what. And that's where you begin to realize nuclear war is happening so fast. This sequence of all these events that are rehearsed over and over and over again in the event that there is nuclear war are going to all go to essentially hell in a handbasket in real time.

And let's talk power for a minute. For people who may not understand, just a little bit of background here about the difference between, say, a Hiroshima-sized atomic weapon and the larger thermonuclear bombs that we possess in our arsenal today. Actually, some of the larger ones are even larger than what we have in the arsenal because they're so large that there's not even a good military use for some of them. I mean, for example, at the Castle Bravo nuclear test, that's the largest bomb the U.S. ever set off, 15 megatons.

That's about a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. And then you have the largest one that the Soviet Union ever unleashed, the Tsar Bomba, 50 to 58 megatons, 3,300 times more powerful than Hiroshima. You talk about a 1 megaton weapon, which is about as powerful as 66 Nagasaki atomic bombs.

Let's talk about the difference in the power of these things compared to, you know, the only images we really have of the post-atomic ground zero situation were taken of post-atomic ground zero situations with much, much less powerful weaponry. Mm-hmm.

The Hiroshima bomb, for example, is 15 kilotons. And again, these numbers can be dizzying. I mean, you and I both know that. And we also know that our job, you know, is to try and make these numbers accessible to people.

So thank you for asking about like in layman's terms, what does it really mean? The best way that it was explained to me, okay, so on the cover of my book, there's a mushroom cloud. And that is a mushroom cloud. It's a photograph from Los Alamos of the Ivy Mike thermonuclear test, which was actually the first proof of concept test.

in the Marshall Islands in 1952. And it's a 10.4 megaton thermonuclear bomb. So it is almost 1,000 Hiroshima's. The man who drew the architectural plans for that bomb is a man named Richard Garwin. And I interviewed him for the book. He's now 95.

He was 23 or 24 when he drew those plans. And I asked Garwin the same question you're asking me, which is like, explain it to me in layman's terms. And he said that one way to think about it was that the thermonuclear bomb has a atomic bomb inside of the weapon that acts as a fuse.

And when you think about that, that the Hiroshima bomb would be essentially the ignition point of the bigger bomb, you can start to get a sense of how incomprehensible these orders of magnitude of power really are.

And then the question then arises as to how one might use something like this rationally. And you go over, and it is one of the most astounding things, how quickly we went from testing the first thermonuclear weapon, that's a hydrogen bomb in layman's terms, to how quickly we started manufacturing the things. And it's dizzying how fast, I mean, at one point you said we're making like five of them a day. Right.

And then we get up to more than 30,000 in the U.S. I think the Soviet Union had significantly more than that even. What is one even conceptualized doing with that number of weapons? When you think about deterrence, one would think that if you had, oh, I don't know, five or ten

10 large nuclear weapons, that would be enough to deter anyone. But somehow this whole system became a runaway formula here for an ever increasing number of these weapons. The well, let's put it this way. If 30,000 nuclear weapons isn't overkill, I don't know what is, but we went there and we paid for it and we had them in the arsenal. What accounts for that in the people that you spoke to that explains that level of irrational behavior?

I mean, it really is madness, isn't it? And it's ironic that the term mutual assured destruction, MAD, is what everyone quotes. You know, this idea that deterrence, you just have a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at the other side and they have them pointed at you and therefore you will never use them. But really, at its core, that is utter madness because it's

We know that this is all a mechanized system. It's a machine. You know, nuclear command and control is made up of men and machines, and all machines fail. And so this mad situation that we have ourselves in, to answer your question, how did we get here? I mean, you know...

The only answer is sort of a non-answer, which is it's madness that got us here. Because when you look back at it through the lens of history, as I do, and I try to take the reader through it quickly, or rather like parsimoniously, I just, for example, like you said, I give you the stats of how year by year, the numbers multiplying. And you think to yourself, where is the

where was the sane person in the room to say enough is enough? And that person wasn't there. And I think that again speaks to why so many of these sources in their 80s and 90s agreed to talk to me at this moment in history right now. Because looking back, they realize, at least it was conveyed to me, this sense of like,

Whoa. We used to think once upon a time that nuclear war could be fought and won. And we know now that is not true. And yet we have that same legacy. The foundation upon which it was all built is still with us, which is all of these nuclear weapons, some of them reduced in arsenal size, but

but the existence of the arsenal was born of this time of utter madness.

Well, you just bring up a great point. So where was the voice of reason in the room? And you talk about this for a minute. So let me quote from the book for a second. When you talk about one of those seminal moments in the history of nuclear weapons and you write, quote, in 1960, the world's population was three billion. What this meant was that the Pentagon had paid 1300 people to compile a war plan that would kill one fifth of the people on Earth in a preemptive nuclear first strike.

It's important to note, you write, that this number did not account for the 100 million or so Americans who would almost certainly be killed by a Russian equal measure counterattack, nor did it account for another 100 million or so people in North and South America who would die from radioactive fallout over approximately the next six months.

Then you point out that there are people who will die that have nothing to do with the nuclear war or the powers involved. And you quote a Marine commandant, David M. Shoup,

who is the only person that speaks out in this conference where they're, you know, kind of in a very sort of clinical, almost like accountant-type fashion, going over these casualties that noncombatants in countries not even in the war would face. And he said, all I can say is any plan that murders 300 million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. And you said that that was the only voice in the room that said anything. Right.

I mean, even to hear you read it astonishes me still. And you're referring to this 1960 meeting of sort of generals and admirals who had put together the first integrated nuclear warfighting plan. So hard to believe, but before that moment, each of the military organizations had its own arsenal of

I mean, we're talking about the Air Force having its nuclear weapons and weapon systems, delivery systems, the Army having its own, and the Navy having its own. And the incoming Secretary of Defense at the time got word of that and thought, oh my God, we have to integrate these so that there's one unified war plan. And in that integration, that meeting that you referred to took place,

And one individual named John Rubel had the chutzpah to write about that meeting. Only time any eyewitness to that event ever wrote about it. Rubel wrote about it when he was in his 80s and dying, like in the early 2000s. And it's a tiny, thin memoir almost no one knows about. I found it. I quote from it.

Everybody seems to be astonished by it. And I think with good reason, because these are jealously guarded secrets within the Defense Department. No one is supposed to know about them.

Well, and there were some good books written about how the nuclear weapons just ended up getting folded into the traditional service rivalries and whatnot. I mean, traditionally, for example, the Navy was the early service opposed to all these nuclear weapons and calling them these evil devices and everything until they got a hold of some for their own ships. And then they became a player in the game, too. Let's talk about the triad for a minute. The

The fact, I mean, I love a term you used, and I'm going to use it for the name of this show, I think, handmaidens of the apocalypse. Right? The idea of the nuclear subs role in the traditional triad. For those who don't know, nuclear weapons, there's a triad, and now if you want to add space, maybe more than that. But traditionally, there are the bomber-based nuclear weapons, there are the missile, land-based missile-based nuclear weapons, and then there are the submarine ones, and

And the submarine ones seem to be the ones that were the most terrifying, controversial, and difficult for an opponent to deal with in your book, The Handmaidens of the Apocalypse, you called them. Can we talk a little about that? Because you said they had a 30-minute warning if the missile was launched, for example, from ground zero in another country. But you have a lot less than that if a sub just pops up off your coast and decides to hit one of your nuclear power plants with one.

I mean, you're absolutely right. And Vice Admiral Michael Connor, who's a former, formerly in charge of America's nuclear sub forces, told me that it was easier, it's easier to find a grapefruit sized object in space than a nuclear armed, nuclear powered submarine under the sea.

And that is a chilling example of just how stealthy, just how impossible these submarines are to locate, which is why they're called in Washington the handmaidens of the apocalypse because no one can take them out, not ours and not theirs, not until they return to port. And that the fact that they're out in the sea lurking around, sneaking up,

to our coasts, our adversaries and enemies are sneaking up to our coasts and we are doing the same. And that they could unleash a sub-launched ballistic missile in literally 14 minutes from launch order. And then that missile takes, you know, less than 15 minutes, depending on precisely where it is, to reach its target.

And the fact that each, like the American Ohio-class submarines, for example, can have 90 nuclear weapons on them. I mean, that's not just a city destroyer. That's a country destroyer and maybe a continent destroyer.

I found it interesting, the adversary that you chose to make the one launching the initial nuclear weapon, the bolt out of the blue, as it's called, as you informed me, in the book. Because I think, you know, when we did a nuclear war show, we talked about...

aimed at our head. And we talked about a generation that wasn't accustomed to having a gun aimed at their head, the ones that lived in the pre-nuclear world who then transitioned to a nuclear world. But we wondered about those who were born into the nuclear world.

Right. People that never knew anything else and how you sort of maybe get used to the idea of a gun aimed at your head and don't even notice it anymore. And maybe start to assume that there are enough controls or safeguards built into our system or our principal adversaries system, potentially a Russia or a China. Right. You feel like there are intelligent men in charge. There are systems, there are controls, there are safeguards.

But then you use sort of a madman kind of scenario to point out that it isn't always going to be that way, even if that way is deemed to be safe, and that's far from a safe conclusion. But what happens if a Kim Jong-un decides he's got a way to win a nuclear war and enough of a system built for him to survive it? Talk about that a little bit and your choice of that as sort of, if you'll pardon the pun, ground zero in this story. Mm-hmm.

So I discussed this idea of a scenario with multiple sources. And it was one of the many conversations I had with Richard Garwin that I landed on the scenario that I used for the book, whereby it is a rogue bolt out of the blue attack from North Korea. And that's because I asked Garwin, who arguably knows more about nuclear weapons than anyone on this earth...

and has been advising presidents since the 1950s. And, you know, was a founding member of NRO. And so he knows all about space and he knows all about reconnaissance and he knows all about all of these issues that crisscross into nuclear Armageddon. And I said, what is the worst case scenario? And he said, one nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal.

And he sort of used that French phrase, après moi le déluge, which suggests, you know, after me, who cares, right? After me, the flood. And that is North Korea. North Korea is the only nuclear armed nation of the nine that not only does not adhere to sort of

the rules of nuclear launch tests, right? If you could call them rules, the announcement of tests to other countries. But they flagrantly violate them. They have launched over 100 missiles since January of 2022.

And after you read the book, you begin to understand once you know that it only – for the first 150 seconds after launch –

Every single person in nuclear command and control and those early warning system organizations are looking at that launch to try and determine, is it going to Moscow? Is it going to the continental United States? If so, San Francisco, Hawaii. Oh, and then they realize, wait, it's going into space or it's going into the Sea of Japan. And so that kind of razor's edge antagonistic behavior is,

is so dangerous. That's why I chose that for the opening salvo in the bolt out of the blue attack in my scenario.

Well, then that gets to a part of the book that I found traditionally troubling, as you might imagine. And it's the idea that something like that can so quickly expand into something that involves a lot of people that weren't involved in the initial attack. I mean, if there's a bolt out of the blue from North Korea to the United States, and many people may not know that there are now missiles that North Korea possesses that can reach the continental United States.

But why would all of a sudden that mean that you have a general nuclear holocaust involving the U.S. and Russia? How do things within an hour's time get to that level of freak out? Why can't they be contained and just involve the powers that are seemingly, you know, the launcher and the targetee of the attack? Mm-hmm.

So for listeners, like we talked about sole presidential authority, that the president has to make this decision alone about the counterattack. And that counterattack is part of an American policy called launch on warning. And so the system is set up that once the commander in chief is notified of the

an incoming nuclear missile, and a secondary early warning radar system confirms that that is in fact a ballistic missile coming in, the president has that six-minute window that he must make a counterattack. And so now you can see how radically the clock is ticking and everything is unfolding so fast. Here's where errors occur. Starting with, as Professor Emeritus said,

at MIT, Ted Postal, who used to be an advisor to the Pentagon, explained to me the first like real technological, oh my God, everything could go wrong in this moment is that, so we spoke about the SIBR system that the Defense Department has and how incredibly accurate and precise it is, parked over the other countries, able to detect missile launch in one second. Russia's system is

claims to be on balance, claims to have parity with ours. But U.S. defense scientists and those that are experts in Russian nuclear forces alike will tell us that their Tundra system, the Russian early warning satellite system, is deeply flawed. And it can often mistake things like clouds or sunlight for

for an ICBM launch. It can also misidentify numbers. And so in this scenario, I choose a very real situation that defense scientists are worried about, that Russia's Tundra system would see this, you know, counterattack and immediately

see it as an aggressive attack toward Russia. And then here's where we learn the most horrifying detail, I think, from the whole experience of reporting this book. Spoiler alert on my own book. America's ICBMs do not have enough reach to target North Korea without overflying Russia. So imagine

Russia having to just believe that the ICBMs headed their way are going to fly over their country, not at their country. And that's where things can really go wrong.

You know, it's interesting. I realize that this violates every tenant of military thinking, but it almost makes an argument, doesn't it, to share better technology with the Russians so that they'd be less likely to mistake our incoming missiles that directed at them

than directed at somebody where they're just overflying Russian territory to get to. I realize that violates all of the ideas of sharing high technology with a potential adversary, but it would seem to work in our favor possibly. Let me ask you this, 'cause you brought up an interesting point, which is that the president has sole authority, the president of the United States, to launch a retaliatory strike and to launch on warning, which is the protocol,

But let's ask the different question. In the 1950s and whatnot, when the U.S. didn't have a problem with the idea of a first strike capability, if they were trying to deal with an imbalance of conventional forces, for example, in Central Europe, does the president of the United States have full authority to launch a first strike? I mean, that has been debated, you know, over and over and over again across the decades. And

You'll often see situations where presidents are cornered into saying, you know, we don't know, we don't. I remember this very vividly during the war on terror years with Bush and Cheney in office. And I think that presidents always, if you look at it, they hedge around having a commitment to that. But so far,

As far as I know, no one has actually gone on the record to put an EO, an executive order in play that we do not have a launch on warning policy. That I'm not a thousand percent sure on because I don't address that in the book, but it is really indicative of what I learned in reporting the book that whatever the position of incoming presidents may be,

For whatever reason, once they take office, they must learn something from their briefings that puts them very far away from wanting to commit to changing the policies, the procedures in place in any manner. And that is very mysterious.

Because you've mentioned in the book that several presidents or would-be presidents had mentioned how ridiculous this system was and that it should be changed and yet didn't change it. Presidents from both major political parties, by the way. So you're right. There's a sort of a missing ingredient for X there. One of the things that's always fascinated me, and I'm sure you as well, are all of the efforts –

after the nuclear age began to try to figure out how to live with these weapons in the best possible way. I mean, that's why you get these think tanks created with, you know, these amazing intelligent minds, the John von Neumanns and people like that, you know, coming up with game theory and all the prisoner's dilemma and all these kinds of ideas.

I'm always fascinated with this weird idea of deterrence, though. And you know, and you mentioned it in the book, the idea that if deterrence fails, the next step is to try to reestablish deterrence and all that kind of crap. But I'm interested in this idea of having to retaliate if deterrence fails. There was a wonderful line. I wish I could remember who said it. But they were talking about the metaphorical red button, right? You know, if there were a red button that launched nuclear weapons into

And the idea was that maybe the red button shouldn't be attached to anything, that there shouldn't be any electrical wires attached to it at all. Because if deterrence fails, why would you push the button then and then kill an extra 500 million human beings when it's going to happen anyway? Are there any conversations about the idea that it makes no sense if deterrence fails to

to just go ahead and kill a lot of the enemy, even if they are the enemy, and of course, pollute the world, kill a bunch of people, for example, in China who have no dog in the fight and things like that? I mean, that is a great question. And I certainly ask that. And I bring that up in the book in a kind of one moment where the Secretary of Defense has a crisis of conscience, kind of like you described there.

And of course, again, giving away my own book, the commander in chief, the president is missing, having been zipped out of the White House on Marine One and not being able to get out before an EMP takes down the helicopter. And so the sec def who has escaped to Raven Rock

has a crisis of conscience. And this part of the scenario comes directly from my conversations about exactly this with former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry. And he's the one who described that crisis of conscience to me. Now, let's keep in mind, Perry is in his 90s. And so he was very clear in our interviews that,

in a very melancholy, remorseful way, at least my interpretation of it, that here he was, someone who had spent his whole life in the defense industry, in the military-industrial complex, in the very center of it, as an old man reflecting about a crisis of conscience. And so...

we have to imagine with kind of a deep horror. Well, in a real scenario,

that acting president isn't going to be a 92-year-old man. It's going to be somebody who has a different outlook on life and might not have that same crisis of conscience. Either way, he gets overruled by STRATCOM in this scenario. So, you know, it's all madness. It really is. And I think what I would hope is that people would read this book and be duly horrified to kind of ask themselves today,

to think about this a little bit more deeply and instead of sort of playing ostrich, you know, with like the head in the sand and the neck exposed, because that's where it seems to me we're all living right now.

Well, you brought up the EMP pulse question, the electromagnetic pulse question, and I found that to be a part of the book that hit me a little differently because anybody who's studied the subject at all knows about this, but I guess I hadn't followed the natural line of thinking to its logical conclusion about what that meant.

And you talked about, you talked about, for example, something about the weapons, which we all understand, right? When they explode, you create a dead zone. And what a dead zone means is all the people, all the animals, all the insects, which hadn't occurred to me, I mean, everything. So it's like the moon, we get that. But you talked about the idea that a country in this scenario, North Korea, could actually hide a weapon in a satellite that's orbiting the earth all the time. You wouldn't even know it was there. You wouldn't think about it.

and then that weapon could be exploded at an altitude so high most of us wouldn't even be aware it had gone off and the resulting emp blast effects

You know, it's crazy to say this, but it almost seems like if you wanted to look at the downstream effects of the nuclear weapons, that was almost as bad as anything else I read. Talk to me a little bit about that scenario. First of all, about a nuke and a satellite that's orbiting us all the time, but also what an EMP blast really means on the ground.

I mean, that was one of the most horrific parts to report and also one of the most difficult because that issue has been the subject of huge polemics. And again, this is very inside baseball, sort of military and PhD people debate this issue and

vociferously. In other words, that one side says that the other side is wrong and that side says the other side is wrong. And so I had to really drill down on this and go back to multiple sources because, you know, put simply, the more sort of liberal minded people have taken the position that the EMP threat, a nuclear weapon detonated in space, is

is not a real threat and is this concocted idea by a bunch of hawks who are trying to raise money for the EMP commission. Okay, that's one set of idea. And the other is that this is a very real threat. And for listeners, the reality that you spoke of is that there have been fears expressed that North Korea might actually use a satellite

to carry a small nuclear warhead into orbit, which it would then detonate in space. And that capability is very real, it does exist. And so the argument has been whether or not the effects would be, as one side likes to call it, electric Armageddon, or it would be a nothing burger in layman's terms.

And I went to the people like General Tuhill, America's first cyber chief under Obama, who wrote a paper on EMP and it's still classified. Richard Garwin wrote a paper on EMP in 1952 and it's still classified.

And everyone told me in the sort of general manner without breaking their security clearances that this is an incredibly real threat. And so to answer your question, what happens on the ground? You detonate a small nuclear weapon 300 miles in space, up in space, over the central part of America, over Nebraska, say.

And you have this massive three-phased electromagnetic shockwave, so incredibly powerful that all of the industrial strength surge suppressors do not hold. And you have a colossal

grid loss, and you have catastrophic failure of basically every system you can imagine, from railroads to ports to airplanes to GPS to fiber optics. It truly is electric Armageddon.

Oh, you mentioned even cars, which you don't think about, except that they're becoming more computerized all the time. So they're vulnerable to that, too. I mean, everything goes out. And, you know, I describe that in sort of the Shakespearean. I do the book in Acts. Right. And as you know, it's like 20. There's the setup. Twenty four minutes. The second 24 minutes. The last 24 minutes.

And then we have the aftermath, which is nuclear winter. But in that sort of, you know, Shakespearean all is lost moment in the third act, that is when the nuclear EMP happens for reasons that you will learn narratively, which sort of unfortunately makes sense to the national security apparatus. Right.

And that is when, you know, it's sort of like just when you thought the nightmare couldn't get any worse, it gets worse. This brings me to the nightmare getting worse question, which is about nuclear proliferation. It's a weird subject when you realize that we're talking about essentially, if we consider atomic weapons to be in the same general family, we're talking about a 75-year-old weapon system at this point.

And it's weird to expect nations to not even be allowed to build a weapon system that's three quarters of a century old. It almost smacks, I mean, if I was Iran, for example, I would want a nuclear weapon and that would seem like an absolute national security concern for me because look at the different way a country with a nuclear weapon gets treated versus a country without a nuclear weapon. So if you're looking at it from the point of view of a have not,

in the nuclear race here, having a nuclear weapon makes total sense. But for the world as a whole, or nuclear powers that are already in existence, that is the worst nightmare around. And I think the question that I have is, one, how reasonable is it to keep

this out of the hands of emerging powers and more and more of them. Also, if more powers get it, is it axiomatic that we can expect the chances of a bolt of the blue to expand from a North Korean possibility to multiple countries that don't have nuclear weapons now, but might in the not too distant future?

You know, when you think about that initial buildup of nuclear weapons that we were talking about earlier, when it was like just Russia and the United States, and you kind of close your eyes and think of all these swords pointed at each other except for their ICBMs.

And you think about the standoff, you who have written and thought and spoken so much about war over millennium, right? And you think about the duel and you think about two parties, okay? And then you're like, on don't or don't, right? Right.

But then you add multiples into there and you realize how precarious it is and how much could go wrong. And so what was set up for two and then three and then a couple more nuclear armed nations is now nine. And I think it's impossible to think anything other than adding more.

multiple nations with nuclear weapons into this mix is only taking us in one direction. Because I found in reporting the book, in learning from sources, that where things really go wrong is the other nation, other nuclear armed nations' reactions to what

those who are engaged in a nuclear exchange are doing and why. You know, it was an interview with former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that really hit home when I asked him about this, particularly about that, you know, what we were talking about earlier, whereby the missiles have to overfly Russia to get to North Korea. And how could Russia just take America's

word at it. And I asked Panetta what he thought about that, that sort of massive hole in national security. And he said, it's a real problem. And he also told me that he really didn't believe that there was a lot of thought put into this idea of all that could go wrong with mad chemistry when the bombs start flying.

Well, and you think about powers that could get involved in a nuclear war where none of the traditional powers we would have assumed would have been involved. I mean, in India, Pakistan, nuclear war would defy any of the the Rand Corporation type, you know, war games that they were working on in the 1950s. You know, I think about the Bertrand Russell stuff a lot because, of course, he's the philosopher and mathematician that was putting out, you know, warnings to the world with Albert Einstein and stuff like.

And he and he makes it, you know, he talked about what we would have to do, too. And it was he said basically that once the weapons have become so powerful that you can't imagine a war being fought with them, then you have to face the to humankind, maybe brutal reality that maybe we can't have war anymore. And I remember the line and I'm going to quote it here because it's such a wonderful coda to everything you've been talking about. He said, quote,

You, your families, your friends, and your countries are to be exterminated by the common decision of a few brutal but powerful men to

To please these men, all the private affections, all the public hopes, all that has been achieved in art and knowledge and thought, and all that might be achieved hereafter is to be wiped out forever. Our ruined, lifeless planet will continue for countless ages to circle aimlessly around the sun, unredeemed by the joys and loves, the occasional wisdom and power to create beauty, which have given value to human life."

End quote. I think of what Germany lost in the Second World War sometimes.

And it's not just, you know, when you realize every city, you know, above the level of like Heidelberg was reduced to rubble and you think, OK, that might have been what was required to get rid of Hitler. But what did that do? Well, that destroyed civilization in that area for humankind forever. None of us can ever, ever enjoy the history of Germany from, you know, like as a world heritage site, if you want to look at it that way. But not just that.

Generations of Germans from now until the end of time are now denied that. And in a nuclear war, one country turned to rubble would be Germany.

minuscule compared to what we would have. You make the point in the book, and I saw it over and over, this idea of all the things that would be lost. You keep pointing out monuments. I mean, you mentioned the Colosseum in Rome, all these things that we think of as having survived through the trials and tribulations of eons of human wars and yet consequences.

gone in an instant. Can we talk about what humankind loses in terms of its legacy and heritage and everything that's built up over millennia in, well, one hour in your book? I mean, I love thinking about that because it is the only sort of ray of hope and it's why...

After I talk about nuclear winter, which is just an astonishing concept that, you know, when it came out in 1983, this idea, nuclear winter, that the soot that would be lofted up into the troposphere after the mega fires were burning...

that soot would block out the sun's rays and the earth would become colder and things would freeze over and you would have nuclear winter. And initially the Defense Department took the position that that was Soviet propaganda. And now we know from state-of-the-art climate modeling and thanks to a couple professors who have been on this issue ever since that

that in fact nuclear winter would be worse than was imagined in the 1980s. And so you are really talking about exactly what you've brought up, which is that all would be lost. And not only would all the monuments and the things built by human ingenuity and human imagination be gone, but human brilliance itself, because...

A drop in 40 degree Fahrenheit around the mid-latitudes would result in the death of agriculture. And that means man would return to a hunter-gatherer state. And so it reminds me, you quote Bertram Russell, and I'm going to like sort of paraphrase Einstein, which is where he was said,

You know, I don't know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

You know, that reminds me of something that philosopher Nick Bostrom, who works at the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, once said when he was defining the term existential threat. Because most of us think of an existential threat as meaning we would just be eliminated off the face of the earth. But he includes another definition, and his other definition is if humankind were to get knocked back into

in a capabilities sense, never to regain what they had used to possess. So think about like, you know, losing the Roman Empire and all of a sudden you can't build the aqueducts and the baths or anything anymore, or losing the ability to put satellites into space or losing the internet and never getting it back again. That's the kind of thing you're talking about. Now, I always say that this is a rainbow and unicorn free zone, right?

here on this program. But I do want to try to end on a more uplifting note and just ask you, is anybody working on this? I mean, when your book has the impact that it should have, given the visibility of it, does that make people sit down and go, you know, maybe we

been ignoring this for the last, because, you know, the end of history happened when the Soviet Union fell. We didn't have to think about, you know, the end of the world anymore, theoretically, but you're reminding us that that never went away. Is this a problem that people are working on? And is it something that we can solve?

Well, the ray of hope, I think, no unicorns, no rainbows, just facts here, comes from the concept of the Reagan reversal, right? So when I was in high school in 1983...

there was an ABC miniseries. Yes, indeed. Called, which I know you know about, which was called We Saw, right? I was in high school too. I saw it, yeah. Yes, we are dating ourselves. But nonetheless, this is the ray of hope because, of course, you know, that...

That show was horrific. It depicted a fictional scenario of a nuclear war between the United States and then Soviet Russia. And it terrified everyone. It terrified me. It terrified 100 million Americans. But the very important American that it also terrified was President Ronald Reagan, who had been, in essence, a nuclear hawk.

definitely had this position of like, more weapons are better. We want to have American supremacy, you know, Mr. Tough Guy. And he saw the day after ABC miniseries, and as he wrote in his memoirs, he became greatly depressed. Those are his words. And as a result, he reached out to Gorbachev.

And what transpired from their communication was the Reykjavik summit, which reduced the number of nuclear warheads from their all-time insane high of 70,000 nuclear weapons to the approximately 12,500 that we have today.

That's pretty hopeful, if you ask me. I'm sorry, I see it differently that the president had to see a TV show to sort of grasp what he'd been in charge of the whole time. It strikes me as a little different differently. Let me ask you, has there been anything I haven't asked you today that we need to bring up? You know, it's a joy talking to you because I love listening to warfare reduced to its sort of human nature.

Right. Because I think this is very interesting to be able to talk about weapons and war and aggression and then the human at the center of it all and how we have these sort of big lofty ideas that we sometimes and people like Einstein or Bertram Russell that we quote and we think about.

And I really am a believer in that the conversation leads to the transformation. You know, I really believe that communication is where we evolve. So I'm all for communication.

hardcore history in the Dan Carlin conversation. I can't thank you enough for having me. Oh, that's so nice of you. Listen, I always say about those people in the stories we talk about that they're often trapped in the gears of history, but I don't like the idea that that could apply just as much to us.

Brilliant.

My thanks to author and investigative reporter Annie Jacobson for coming on today's program. Her new book is Nuclear War, a Scenario. And as strange as this is to say about a book on factual matters like this, it is a dramatic page-turner.

pick your copy up wherever you enjoy getting your books. And if you don't have a preference, well, we'll put a link to buying it in our show notes, as we almost always do for books we mentioned on the program. Just quick note, we are working, as always, on the next big hardcore history show. If you're one of those ones that enjoys when we play the hits, you should like this next show, which will probably be a series.

Also a reminder, we do sell the old shows. They stay free for several years and then we move them to the paid archives. If you'd like to get any of our paid archives, we keep them inexpensive in the hopes that you'll want them. If you don't already have them or if you want to buy a gift for someone else, head on over to dancarlin.com and pick yourself up a few old shows, would you? Hope everyone's doing well. Stay safe. And until I talk to you again, thanks for everything.

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