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Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Annie Jacobson. She's a journalist, investigative reporter, and an author. The threat of nuclear war has loomed for over half a century now, but the question remains, just how close to nuclear Armageddon are we? And what would happen if the world did go into a nuclear war?
Expect to learn how many nukes there are in the world right now, the most likely steps to an accidental nuclear war, what happens when a country fires the first nuke, which cities are the most likely targets of a strike, what are the most powerful bombs in history, how many people would die in a nuclear war between the US and Russia, how likely a nuclear war is in our future, and much more.
Positive stuff today. Real uplifting one about the potential end of humanity, but pretty important, I think. And Annie sort of takes you through step by step, second by second, what would happen if a nuke was released. It could be accidental. It could be on purpose. It's a harrowing, apocalyptic and kind of compelling. Very compelling, actually. Yeah, lots to take away from today.
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How many nukes are in existence right now? 12,500 approximately. And where does that number come from? How do we know that that's the number? Yeah. Well, there are nine nuclear armed nations. And the way we know the specifics of them is thanks to
a group here in the United States called the Federation of American Scientists. They have an organization within that called the Nuclear Notebook Group, led by a guy called Hans Christensen. And they do all the counting for us. The one variable would be North Korea, because they don't have any form of transparency. And so it's guessing when it comes to what we think North Korea has. Who are the nine?
The nine are the obvious Russia, America, UK, France, India, Pakistan, China, North Korea, Israel. Australia, no? No. Wow. How do we know that countries aren't giving a United States organization a
purposefully underreported numbers to make us think that they've got fewer, that they've gotten rid of it, that they've deescalated, when in fact they've still got loads? Well, some of the treaties which are being threatened right now
ask for transparency and also inspection. And so, like, for example, people go to Russia on our side and vice versa. Things can get held up when there's direct conflicts, like right now.
But it's amazing, you know, in my book, I take the readers from nuclear launch to nuclear winter. And I have these little sort of nerdish history breaks where I give you some of the details like this. But mostly I stay out of the policy, both behind nuclear nonproliferation and also the policies that could lead to nuclear war. Because I really want the readers to know, like, this is what happens.
And the things you're asking me are super important because they have to do with sort of preventative ideas. You know, this idea that if we are more transparent with one another, and I'm talking about the nuclear armed nations, there's going to be communication on some level. Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder if it's true. I wonder if 12,500 is the actual number. You know, it would make complete sense. Yeah.
cyber subterfuge and and and hacking of chips and getting it like the most obvious like the original psyop conspiracy lying like why not just lie about it uh hide them put them in a place that it's not like treaties and i don't know when it comes to nuclear war or the potential destruction of your of your country something tells me there's a lot of incentives to not be super transparent
I'll give you an example. North Korea, the CIA will tell you that North Korea has 50 nuclear weapons. But some private organizations, some NGOs, non-governmental organizations, will tell you that number is as high as 130. So that gives you an example of how accurate that number may or may not be. 70,000 was the number we were at when we peaked? That's right, 1986.
Right. What happened to, do you deconstruct a bomb? Do you sell it for parts? Do you keep the depleted uranium core to make a nuclear reactor? What do you do? I mean, what a great question and what an interesting concept of where does all that nuclear material go?
there's a plant in Texas called Pantex, and that's where they do that. And it is so profoundly classified, and not a lot of people know about it. And it's almost certainly on everybody's nuclear strike target list, because can you imagine the mayhem that would ensue if you struck that?
There's just so many precariously dangerous situations. It feels like any site that has to do with anything that touches a nuclear weapon becomes radioactive, like literally and figuratively. Where are most of America's nukes? Are they on land? Are they at sea? Have we got any that are in space?
Okay, so I map out the triad. America has what's called the triad, and what a great place to begin because it's like so much of what I try to do in this book is –
demystify. It's often said here in America that the nuclear weapons belong to the nuclear priesthood, the PhD priesthood, right? And there's kind of an almost, it seems like, a foolhardy attempt to keep the laymen out, to keep regular people like you and me from really knowing these things. But interestingly, when you look at them, they're very simple.
And because America is a democracy, a lot of our information is transparent. So, for example, the Defense Department puts out a very thick monograph, which almost no one reads. I have read. You can read. Which tells you exactly these numbers and it explains what is called the nuclear triad. And it's such an interesting place to...
to start and you realize actually things are easier than you think. Nuclear triad, oh, three. Okay. So we have silos, underground silos. We have a submarine force and then we have a bomber force. And the silos, there are 400 of them across America. And believe it or not, every single one of them is targetable. Every single one of them you can locate. It used to be on an old map. Now it's GPS.
then the submarines are just crazy to learn about. I mean, they are called the handmaidens of the apocalypse with good reason. There are 14 of them. They're nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered submarines. Satellites can't see them. They just cruise around underwater, like, loaded with nuclear weapons. Each one has as many as 90 submarines.
And that's enough to take out, like, not a city, like, not a continent, but arguably civilization because 90 nuclear weapons almost certainly sets off nuclear World War III. One does, right? Okay, so then the last part of the triad is the bomber force. We have 66 bombers. Those are the B-2s that are very famous that looks like a flying wing. And then the old school B-52s. And those drop gravity bombs. The interesting, spooky thing about...
That third part of the triad is that it's the only part of the triad, the nuclear triad, that can be recalled. So it's almost certainly what the president sends first. In other words, the ICBMs, the ballistic missiles that launch out of the silos and the sub-launched ballistic missiles in the submarines, once they are launched, they cannot be redirected.
or recalled. And so once they launch, that is endgame. Yeah, that's scary. That being said, something tells me that using the B-52s and the B-2s, you've got to ready the pilots. I have to presume that you basically have a 24-7 crew of nuclear-
missile carrying plane pilots permanently on base 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and the alarm goes off and they are in the planes, the planes are fueled, they're on the ground, they're ready to go, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, how long is it going to take a plane to get from wherever it is to Moscow to be able to, because you've got to be over the top of the target. If you're using gravity, you've got to be over the top of the target.
Well, you're absolutely right. And that's why the bombers get sent first, but they almost will have no role. And I interviewed pilots who are who, you know, fly these aircraft.
and who have trained for this, as you said, constantly through across all the decades that they have been in existence. And yet, they almost certainly don't play a role because by the time they would get to a target, for example, we keep the B-2 bomber very close to Pyongyang, right, for this reason. But very close means five-hour flight, right?
And when you're talking about nuclear war happening in seconds and minutes, not days, not hours and weeks or hours and days, you know, one pilot said to me, the chances are you would get there after the war has commenced and you would have no way to refuel in air because so many of these aircraft need that capacity.
So you're refueling capacity. Yes, it is. They are all suicides. I mean, nuclear war is one big, giant suicide. You said I saw you write about how Russian and Chinese submarines regularly sneak up to within a couple of hundred miles of the United States coasts.
What was that thing about something to do with the grapefruit on the moon? Right, right, right. Okay. So Michael Conner, Admiral Conner, the former commander of America's nuclear submarine force, not somebody who usually goes on the record or talks to journalists, he shared with me this stunning analogy, which is that it's harder to find a submarine under the sea than it is to find a grapefruit.
sized object in space. So that's how stealthy submarines are. And yes, thank you for noticing that detail in the book, because I was shocked to come across in a Defense Department budget request of all things,
A map, a sonar map, demonstrating the pathways of Soviet, or sorry, Freudian slip there, of Russian and Chinese submarines coming up along America's coast just a few hundred miles out. That is enough to keep you up at night, if all of the rest of it isn't. What are the most likely steps to a mistaken nuclear war, in your opinion? Well, you know,
Missed it, right? So there's this famous quote, which I use, whereby the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres says we are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear apocalypse. And so there is a lot of room for error, right? There's a lot of room for mistakes, but there's also a lot of room for the madman scenario.
And that's what I use in the book, whereby a nuclear-armed nation makes a rogue launch against the United States for reasons that we never know. That remains unanswered because the world ends before anyone gets that answer. But it is, according to sources I interviewed,
a plausible scenario, you know, a nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal. So be it a mistake, be it a misunderstanding, be it a madman, we are really on the brink of catastrophe here, which is like,
I think the calling, you know, the, the sort of clarion call to have all of us talking about this. Thank you for having me on your show because your show is, you know, listened to by all kinds of people, not just policy wonks. And, uh,
People that seem to be obsessed with the sort of geopolitical maneuvers of everyone. Nuclear war, you know, it's important to all of us. Well, it's not going to discriminate whether you're a policy wonk or a defense department person. Everybody's going to feel the impact. Okay, so someone fires a nuke.
What happens from there? Take us through the timeline from button of first nuke gets pushed. Let's say that it's from North Korea and it's going to be aimed at the US. Yeah. And this is like, this is that second by second thing.
telling the ticking clock scenario that, as I was reporting the book initially, wasn't sure how I was going to actually tell the story. And then once I began to really learn the specifics of this, it became only...
The ticking clock scenario, because as you say, it just it's a sequence. It just happens once nuclear launch happens. It all goes from there. And so the way it begins, interestingly, is in space. And that is because the United States has spent trillions of dollars over the past decades.
being aware of when anyone launches a nuclear missile, when anyone launches a ballistic missile, when anyone launches a missile at all. Hang on, hang on. What's a ballistic missile? Give me the hierarchy. Mm-hmm.
And it's a great question because we hear a lot about strategic weapons versus tactical weapons, right? So tactical nukes, that's what you hear Vladimir Putin threatening now when he's talking about using a tactical nuke. That's a battlefield nuke. America doesn't even keep them. We did in the Cold War, but realized what a ridiculously bad idea it is because it means you might actually use them.
On the battlefield, you know, you're just going upping the scale. You go from the mother of all bombs to the nuclear tactical weapon. A ballistic missile is a warhead loaded on a rocket that can travel. It's called an ICBM, intercontinental ballistic missile, so that it can travel from one continent to the other.
And it uses, you know, gravity in as much that it has three phases. Okay. That's what it takes. 30 minutes, three phases, boost phase, five minutes, mid course phase, 20 minutes, terminal phase, 100 seconds.
That's from a launch pad in Russia, 26 minutes, 40 seconds. From Pyongyang, it's 33 minutes. I mean, I geek out on the details and have like, you know, professors of mathematics at MIT do the math for me because you want to show how precise this all is, how specific the details are that the Defense Department works on. And so these satellite systems in space, it's called SIBRS.
Again, and now, you know, everything's in an acronym. Space-based infrared satellite system, SIBRS. A constellation of satellites in geosync.
meaning it can park above an enemy nation and watch for the hot rocket exhaust on a ballistic missile launch, which it can see in less than a fraction of a second. I mean, when you really think about that this all begins in the first fraction of a second, you understand the depth and scope
of what exists behind the veil of the possibility of nuclear warfare. What happens? So microseconds after the exhaust flares go off and it's not even left to the ground yet, satellite detects it, presumably sends that to the U.S.,
What is the sequence of events that occurs from a Defense Department's presidential perspective? And it all happens super fast. So literally within seconds, that data in space goes to the command centers. I was amazed to learn that it goes immediately to three command centers. And again, it becomes like very visual when you realize how simple this all is. The data goes to
You know, Cheyenne Mountain. We know about this from movies. It's in, you know, it's like the nuclear bunker in Colorado beneath the mountain. It's real. It's one of three. The other one is beneath the Pentagon. It's called the National Military Command Center. And the third nuclear bunker is beneath STRATCOM, U.S. Strategic Command. That's in Nebraska.
And the way it was explained to me that like made it really easy to understand, Cheyenne Mountain is like the brain. The Pentagon is the beating heart of nuclear war. And the bunker beneath Omaha, Nebraska is the muscle. And those three command centers with their partners in the Space Force and at various different command centers begin to interpret this data.
And so it takes only 150 seconds from launch for the machines, people call them AI, I call them machine learning, to start calculating, is that missile headed toward Moscow or Honolulu? Is the missile headed toward San Francisco or is it headed toward the East Coast? And 150 seconds.
Later, that information becomes clear. And by then, can you imagine what has been going on in those three command centers and all the hundreds of thousands of people that are working on this issue? Again, behind the veil, 24-7, 365. And so it becomes simply a matter of minutes.
before the president of the United States is notified about all this. And that comes to me directly from two former secretaries of defense here in the U.S. who are saying, this is how it works. Letting the president know that very soon he's going to have to make a decision about counterattack, about how to respond. And that sets in motion this crazy idea
policy called Launch On Warning, which requires the president of the United States to launch nuclear weapons in response to a rogue attack. It's called a bolt out of the blue attack before nuclear weapons actually hit the United States.
said differently, we don't wait to absorb a nuclear blow. We launch. And that has to do with what we just talked about, the nuclear silos. The theory is that whoever's launching at the United States will try and take out the nuclear silos. So we can't respond. So therefore, we must respond, which gets you into this
sort of Orwellian understanding of how Orwellian all of this is. And by the way, now I've only taken you through the first few minutes. Okay. The language that you used there, you said that the president will have to make a decision and that it is kind of the president's duty to do this launch on warning.
But all of that stops at the glass floor that is the president's right finger or him saying yes or in the affirmative type thing. It seems to me like there is still a human decision element of this in the U.S.,
So it sounds like what you're saying is that you believe that perhaps the president would choose not to launch nuclear weapons. It's not a completely automated system, absolutely outside of the bounds of human decision, that there is still a point at which, and maybe 999 times out of 1,000, the president would hit the button, but that there is still this
kind of like arbitrary odd integration of the president into the system. Absolutely. I mean, it is not what is called an executive order. The launch on warning is policy. It's not an executive order. And it is the president's decision and only the president's decision. So if you had an incredibly tempered
incredibly peaceful, incredibly fill-in-the-blank president who just simply was unwilling to launch nuclear weapons. You are absolutely right. Interestingly, you're the only person who has said
posed this it's the it's the it's the totally war-cooked brit in me that doesn't want to have a nuclear winter so i had a guy called andrew bustamante on the show who's ex-cia his first job was as a nuclear silo operative yeah so he was one of the two guys with the keys um i'm gonna guess that you have
worked out about every hour, roundabout on the hour or so, alarm goes off, keys go in, code gets put in, they have no... Can you just run us through, because that was one of my favorite stories that he taught me about how willing dissenters and stuff, basically because of the network of the 400 silos and they're linked and you don't know if yours is actually going or not. Can you just explain kind of how all of that works? I'm sure, I mean, listen, I'm a journalist and the first-hand witness is always better than
than the second-hand storyteller, which is me. So I'm sure that his account of it is riveting, and I will watch it. I have spoken to miscellaires who describe exactly that. And yes, there are protocols in place so that they don't make an error, so that a miscellaire can't go rogue and decide to do something. Mm-hmm.
But what there isn't in place is a system in between the president and the missileer. So, in other words, once the president says once the president gives the launch order, the sequence begins. There's no dissent. There's no room for dissent.
And I asked the Los Alamos classified historian, Glenn McDuff, a variation on your question to me. Like, what, you know, would we, could we see someone refuse, whether it's anyone below the president, let's say even the STRATCOM commander or down to the missile air? And he said to me, Annie, I would recommend you'd have better chances winning the Powerball than to have...
Someone in the nuclear command and control apparatus defy authority. Yeah. So what I learned from Andrew upon issuing of, in fact, before we get to issuing,
400 missile silos-ish around the US. In each of those, at all times, there are two operatives with keys around their neck. They have alarms that go off, firing alarms that go off, where they have to, keys go in, code gets input, they press a button. That happens about 24 times a day. They have no idea whether that is a false alarm or a real alarm.
real world activity. Also, if only one of the 400 puts the code in and turns the key, all of them fire because they're networked together. So you would need to have 399 and then one more willing dissenters. You also have the peer pressure of the other person with the key. You also have this sort of trained...
almost like a Pavlovian response where we've continued to do this and we've continued to do this. But one day you could get the alarm, come through, another day at work, put the code in, turn the key and then hear and go, oh fuck, you have no idea what you're aiming at.
You have no idea why it's been fired. You're just there to do that thing. And that, to me, is sort of distributed system. If anyone fires, then all of them fire. You only need the code to go in into one of these silos. So yeah, I think the Powerball analogy probably stands up. Those are some pretty incredible details. I'm going to have to drill down on those because I'm not familiar with them. But that is kind of shocking. Okay. Once you launch, you can't recall. Is it possible that...
to intercept a nuke as it's coming toward us. I've heard about hypersonic missiles. They sound faster than ICBMs. Can we fire a thing at their thing and knock it out the sky? Interestingly, an ICBM is hypersonic, right? So all of this business of hypersonic is just, in my opinion,
Great advertisement for the military industrial complex to have new weapons. No one I know thinks hypersonic missiles have really much are going to change much of anything in terms of defense. They're certainly going to spend a lot more money for taxpayers.
What is interesting that you pointed out is about the myths behind the Interceptor program. I myself was at a dinner party when I was reporting this book, seated next to a very knowledgeable person who, when I said, you know, I'm writing da-da-da, he said, oh, Annie, you know, we have an Interceptor program for that. And I didn't want to correct him.
There has to be a female version of the mansplaining concept. I haven't figured it out yet, but I didn't want to correct him. I figured I'll just give him a copy of my book because that is absolute fantasy.
This idea that America's interceptor system is anything like, for example, Israel's Iron Dome is just simply not true. We have 44 interceptor missiles total. Four of them are at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara. Forty of them are in Alaska.
And they, too, are like ballistic missiles. OK, so imagine Russia's one thousand six hundred and seventy four.
deployed nuclear weapons ready to launch in seconds or minutes coming at the United States up against 44 interceptor missiles. Presumably the interceptor missiles aren't under the same restriction and jurisdiction that the nuclear disarmament slowly winding down your thing consists of. So if that's the case, why not just have like
A million of them. Are they costly? Is it hard to make? Is it storage? You're absolutely right. And inside of them, the vehicle that takes out the nuclear warhead, by the way, is just a kinetic. There's no explosives in it. It's simply hitting. It's an object called an exo-atmospheric kill vehicle. How's that for a mouthful? And that is just simply going to collide.
with the nuclear warhead, one hopes. One of them, by the way, is going 14,000 miles an hour. The other one's going 20,000 miles an hour. This is taking place 500 miles in space. Okay? So...
Even the Missile Defense Agency, the spokesperson there said, yes, it is like taking out a bullet with a bullet. That's their quote. And the success rate is between 40 and 55 percent. So to answer your question, does it really make sense for anyone to have, you know, thousands of these on ready for launch status?
to maybe strike incoming war. It's madness. All of it. It's insane. And there has to be a better solution than more weapons. What do you think would be the most likely targets in the U.S.? Take us through. Triage the targets.
And this you're talking about for an enemy to attack us. Well, by all means, the Pentagon is the first and primary target. And almost everyone who I interviewed for the book said to me that it's the bolt out of the blue attack against Washington, D.C. that Washington, D.C. fears most. That has to do with the fact that it's not just that it would decapitate
leadership and kill, let's say, 2 million people if you had a one megaton thermonuclear bomb, as I do in my scenario.
But then you're setting off a catastrophe of problems having to do with what's called continuity of government. This idea that the United States government must continue functioning no matter what. Imagine, you know, D.C. being decapitated. And so there's this incredible scramble that I write about in the scenario of, you know, who's in charge and getting the commander in chief out of Washington, D.C.?
You know, the targets are everyone. It was said to me this way by Professor Brian Toon, who's one of the original five authors of the nuclear winter theory. He said, if you live in a major city or a minor city, if you live near an airport, if there's an industrial base in your city,
Just about any city in America up to, let's say, the top 800 of them, you have a nuclear weapon pointed at you. And that's enough to keep you up at night. And again, the same goes for anyone in America.
or an adversary of the United States that is also nuclear armed. They, too, have a nuclear weapon. Toon said pointed at them, but of course what he really meant is targetable to them because the nuclear weapons are actually left unarmed.
targeted out at sea in case there was a rogue launch, which I found like one of the only comforting details in all of this. And when those keys get turned, that's when the codes, the actual, you know, coordinates are put into play. What is the protocol that the president is chilling in the White House, answering emails on the phone, Mr. President,
This missile is coming toward us. Have you got any idea what the process from there is? Well, I do because I interviewed many people around the president that would be confronted with trying to, you know, make decisions about what happens next. So surely you would have his military advisors at U.S. Strategic Command and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff there.
trying to get a launch order in response from him, the counterattack order. And that is something called jamming the president. And that is well known and that is confirmed by almost all military sources, that they are very aware of the launch on warning protocols, the policy, and that's what they need from the president because the launch order can come from him and only from him.
But the most interesting sort of counter argument to that that would be the primary event happening came to me from the Secret Service, from the president has a paramilitary team that is with him all the time. This is not very well known. It's called the counter assault team.
And they shadow him everywhere and they are responsible, certainly in an event like this, for making sure that he's whisked out of Washington, D.C. to safety. That would be on the command of the person in charge of the president's detail, the special agent in charge, also known as the SAC.
And I interviewed Lou Merletti, who is the head of the Secret Service, sorry, the director of the Secret Service. And before that, he had been the sack for President Clinton. And he explained to me that most certainly Merletti
The Secret Service would be completely at odds with STRATCOM in that moment because they would want to move the president to Raven Rock, which is, again, that sometimes mythical, you know, command bunker outside Washington, D.C., that is very real and is actually called officially the alternate National Military Command Center because it is where anyone left living.
who should have been at the Pentagon, would now go in the event of nuclear war. It's about 70 miles outside of D.C., and it's a quick helicopter ride if you can get there before the EMP pulse takes the helicopter out. Are there any bunkers that can survive modern nuclear warheads?
Almost none. And certainly not the ones that were built in the 1950s. You know, the Raven Rock bunker, the Stratcom bunker, they were like the specs. And again, this is what's transparent. This is what is known on the record. But they were built to withstand a one megaton thermonuclear weapon. But almost certainly they would be targeted by 10 or 100 people.
smaller size nuclear weapons, which as I really nerd out in the latter part of the book where these bunkers get destroyed, you learn that nothing can survive being hit by multiple nuclear bombs because the energy is spread out in such a manner that they just simply can't survive. And we haven't even begun to talk about the problem of losing electricity because people forget that
All bunkers run on generators. And eventually, if there's no electricity, there's no way to pump fuel. Talk to me about the different types and sizes of bombs that have been developed. Oppenheimer just came out, and we got to see this very impressive, very scary explosion go on. And yet, compared with what we have now, that's like puny. It's like a stick of dynamite. Yeah. Yeah.
Atomic bombs are so different than thermonuclear weapons. And again, you know, what a great question, because so many people don't know this. The nuclear priesthood has kind of, you know, kept these kind of layman's details, I think, out of public discourse. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, for example, was 15 kilotons. Nagasaki was 20 kilotons.
A thermonuclear weapon like the one that's on the cover of my book, that is a photograph of the Ivy Mike thermonuclear device, which was the first ever exploded thermonuclear weapon. It was designed by Richard Garwin, who I interviewed for the book. He was 24 years old when he drew the plans. He's now 95. That weapon, he explained to me, was 10.4 megatons.
It exploded with the power of almost 1,000 Hiroshima bombs exploding at the same time from one center point of power. It is so massive. It is five miles of fire. And that says nothing of the blast and the destruction that pushes out like a bulldozer in rings.
At one point, the Russians had a 50 megaton weapon. Was that the Tsar Bomber? Yes, it was. And you can look at those images online and just be absolutely terrified. Is this...
What's the difference between an atomic bomb, hydrogen bomb, thermonuclear warhead? What's what? I'm so glad you're asking these questions because these are like what keep people from wanting to have this discussion. A hydrogen bomb is a synonym for a thermonuclear bomb. Same thing. Atomic bomb were the early...
fission bombs and the thermonuclear and the hydrogen same thing are used fusion. So the way that Richard Garwin explained it to me, and again, the smartest people in the room can explain things to a child because that's how smart they are and that's how easy it should be. And what Garwin said to me was, Annie, keep in mind that
A thermonuclear bomb uses an atomic bomb inside the weapon as a fuse. That gives you an idea of how much power is involved. Yeah, that's the striking pin. The thing that previously was the most destructive bomb ever dropped on a city is the thing that starts the thing that explodes.
You're absolutely right. Okay. So you mentioned about this sort of five mile radius. Let's say that, oh, actually that's a question. Are these, uh, whatever they're called above ground, uh, midair, are they, do they deploy in the air? Do they hit the ground? Yes.
So they can deploy either place. The way to kill the most people, and that's a quote from John von Neumann, who was working on this issue with Oppenheimer, when they were deciding the dynamics of where to detonate or explode the bomb, the Hiroshima bomb, the original bomb. Von Neumann, the mathematician, said,
figured out that you would kill the most people if it was 1,900 feet above the target. Again, what a gruesome and macabre fact. And interestingly, von Neumann was given the Medal of Honor, or I might be getting the title of the medal wrong, but some extraordinary prestigious medal from the president himself for having figured that out, which is sort of horrific when you really think about that. Um,
But that is a very specific issue about killing people because, of course, this is a weapon of mass genocide.
And if you explode it higher up, the blast will kill more people. But if a bomb is exploded on the ground, you have a whole different horrific set of consequential deaths. And that has to do with radiation poisoning. Because when the bomb explodes on the ground...
Think about all the dirt, the earth that is blasted up. All of that is now irradiated. And all of that dirt is going to fall back down to earth, irradiated, versus the detonation that occurs above the earth will essentially...
disperse into the atmosphere and be taken away by the winds, which is why people can walk around Hiroshima today. It's why you can go to the Nevada test site. Oh, wow. So if the Hiroshima bomb hadn't, I didn't know that it was an above 1,900 feet thing. If that had exploded by hitting the pavement, Hiroshima would be uninhabitable for 2,000 years.
Well, not uninhabitable, but it would have a different, the radiation would have a longer shelf life, right? Well, like I've been out to the Nevada test site where a very famous test was conducted in the 60s and it left behind what is called the Sedan crater. It's such a massive crater that it can be seen from outer space.
And I walked around nearby it. And so that was, what, 50 years ago. And it's no longer, you know, you can stay there for a little bit of time. But you're absolutely right that there are these radically different degrees of radiation poisonings of Earth and air dependent on atmosphere. Okay, so...
A standard megaton thermonuclear warhead goes off 1,900 feet above a city. What happens directly below it, five miles out, 25 miles out, 100 miles out? Talk me through that.
In the book, I use the one megaton thermonuclear bomb on the Pentagon detonating above, you know, around a thousand feet above. And the reason why I do that is, again, because I can give the effects to the reader, not from Annie Jacobson's imagination, but rather from absolute specific energy.
details sourced from Defense Department documents called The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, originally called Army Manual 50. Because defense scientists have spent all these decades since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and then through our own atmospheric testing in the Marshall Islands in the 50s, the defense scientists have been documenting
with great detail, what nuclear weapons do to people and things in blast areas going out. And so to begin with, you have this thermonuclear flash of light that is 180 million degrees at its center point. It's almost impossible for the human mind to comprehend that kind of power. It's
equivalent to about four times the center of the Earth's sun. And so it sets, it just in a flash, sets things alight going nine, ten miles out. I mean, the Defense Department knows in inches where pine needles will catch on fire versus the upholstery in car seats.
And then, of course, so you have the initial fireball. A one megaton thermonuclear weapon has one mile of fire, pure fire. That's 19 football fields. Everything is dead. Everything. There is nothing. No cellular life exists. And outside of that, you have...
You wish that you were at the center point because outside in the next ring going out, you have melted steel. You have streets turning into molten lava. You have people absorbing into things. You have permanent structures changing shape and collapsing. Then you have this bulldozer-like world.
blast that moves out. You have winds of 200, 300, 400 miles an hour. A hurricane level wind is 90 miles an hour, by the way. Everyone's on fire. Third degree burns on people that aren't. Buildings collapsing. I mean, shall I go on and horrify listeners? This is, okay, so how about this? As it was explained to me by a nuclear engineer who studies this,
You also have the issue of that mushroom. You know when you've seen an atomic explosion perhaps on YouTube, right, from some of the early tests that were done in the 50s? You see the mushroom stem and you see the mushroom cloud. Well, the mushroom stem creates a sucking motion of everything down on the land below it. So you have people, telephone poles, cars, cars,
People that have turned into combusting carbon being sucked up in a reverse sucking motion into that stem. Well, you've seen, if you watch the archive footage of, you know, a house that they've built out in the Nevada desert or whatever, you see things go crazy.
and then go back the other way to sort of this. And presumably that's the sucking motion. You're absolutely right. That is exactly what that is. And so, and then the most haunting detail of all is when you look at that mushroom cloud now that you can see on YouTube, you realize inside of that would be the remains of people, the remains of civilization.
Those bombs were exploded out in the Marshall Islands on atolls with no one around. But you can imagine what would be in that cloud stem and the cloud cap if it were detonated over a city. Yeah, wow. I mean, that's...
And that's just one. That's just one. You know, in the scenario that I propose, there's 1,000 or more that strike the United States when it's endgame, 72 minutes in. And the same is over in Russia. And so that begins nuclear winter, which I'm probably jumping to too fast because we haven't even gotten to it. Tell us about nuclear winter. Well...
You know, and I jumped there because you can, it was interesting writing and reporting this book. And it's been interesting. The book has only been out for a few days, but hearing people's reaction, because most people read it in one night, I'm told, right? Because, or one day, because they can't stop reading. And it is written that way because in the most dramatic human storytelling book,
you know, possible manner. I think you were like, what happens? And yet, you know what happens. But what happens at the end of a nuclear war is nuclear winter. And that is because after you get through the fireballs that we were just discussing, the blast, the radiation poisoning,
You have situations where every single one of those ground zeros becomes a megafire. So because that
tremendous x-ray flash of light that was 180 million degrees set everything on fire. Those fires create more fires. I mean, just imagine all the electricity, all the electric lines whipping and that are starting new fires everywhere. It's like thousands of matches, just fire after fire after fire. Each fire
Ground zero will be between 100 and 200 square miles of fire as it continues to burn. And so multiply that by 1,000, by 2,000 around the globe. And what happens is you have 330 billion pounds of soot lofted into the troposphere.
And that is, again, not from my imagination. That is from state-of-the-art climate modeling done by Professor Brian Toon, one of the original authors of the nuclear winter theory, along with Carl Sagan. Toon has stayed on this issue all these decades since. And the climate modeling today is
shows us that nuclear winter, the predictions from the 80s when the theory first came to be, those were nothing compared to the truth of it. That the sun will be blocked out by 70% or more from all that soot in the troposphere. And that the sun will be blocked out in that manner for between 7 to 10 years. Is that globally? That doesn't stay locally?
Globally, because the wind moves. And so nations that had nothing to do with this nuclear war will be profoundly affected. And what Toon explained to me is that around the Earth, temperatures will fall as much as 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
Large bodies of water in the mid-latitudes, in places like Iowa and Ukraine, the breadbaskets of the world, the large bodies of water there will be frozen over under sheets of ice for seven or eight or nine years. And so agriculture will fail. And when agriculture fails, people starve to death. And that is why the number of
is now estimated to be 5 billion people dead after a nuclear exchange. Is that all 12,500 nukes? Is that 2,000 of them? What's the number that you need to have launched to hit 5 billion? In the scenario, it's just a couple thousand. In the scenario, I don't involve yet the other nuclear-armed nations. And I did that on purpose because...
Because I was really trying to demonstrate that after 72 minutes in the scenario as it was explained to me and sort of, you know, fact-checked by the sources that I was using and others, once you lose electricity, then you have no ability to record history for the future. And so we never know if the other nuclear-armed nations get involved.
So to answer your question, we don't know about the remainder of the nuclear weapons and we don't know about the thousands that were in storage. All it takes is the amount of nuclear weapons that are on ready for launch status right now. Five billion people die in a war between the United States and Russia. Set off by a rogue nuclear nihilistic madman on a bolt out of the blue attack. There's been a number of
close calls in history some famous ones a guy in a submarine foil in the air the wrong vhs tape being put in what was the closest that we came to nuclear war in the past in your opinion
I believe that it's the nuclear test tape that you refer to. And the reason for that, so just for your listeners, it was 1979. And this story came to me from a firsthand witness, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry himself. He was on the night watch that night, the nuclear night watch. And he received word that the Russians had launched ballistic missiles at the United States. Both
Land-launched ICBMs and sub-launched SLBMs. So this looked like a massive, you know, first and second strike attack. And the information came from both the nuclear bunker beneath the Pentagon and the nuclear bunker beneath STRATCOM.
And so that idea, which we didn't get into, but I take the readers through in the book, that you can have the early warning launch, the early warning of a nuclear launch. And that is when the president gets advised. But then there has to be secondary confirmation, right? So this 1979 error you're talking about was moving toward secondary confirmation because there is already two bunkers confirming. When?
Suddenly, someone realized that it was actually a VHS training tape, a war game training tape that had been inserted into one of the machines at one of those bunkers. And as Bill Perry said to me, it looked real because it was meant to look real. And so he
What was particularly shocking to me about that and why I, as a journalist, work with sources to help me tell the story and convey the drama is because when Bill Perry was telling me that story, it had been, you know, 40-some-odd years since it had happened. And I could hear it in his voice, the terror and the almost trauma of,
Thinking that he was the person who was going to have to wake up the president and tell him that he was going to have to launch a nuclear counterattack. Well, who starts one of these wars, given that it's pretty obvious how it ends? Like, who in their right mind, like, it's not just you. You're...
a very good journalist and writer, but there's hundreds of people in every government around the world that's done the war games, that's played out the 5 billion people and the nuclear winter and the pine trees on fire. Why would anyone start this given what happens?
And for that, I looked to my discussions with Richard Garwin, who designed the Ivy Mike thermonuclear weapon, who has been advising presidents about nuclear weapons since the 1950s, who arguably knows more about nuclear weapons and nuclear policy than anyone on this earth.
And it was Garwin who said to me when I was discussing scenarios with him, because I made it very clear to all of my sources what I was doing. And I asked all of them if I was fear mongering. And not one of them said I was. You know, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said, Annie, I agree with what you're doing. The people need to know.
But it was Garwin who, when I asked him, what is the most dangerous scenario that you could think of? Kind of like you're asking me, you know, what kind of a crazy person would do this? We have leaders that know. And he said that his fear was one nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal is all it takes to start a nuclear war. What does that mean? Who is that? I would think that is the leader of North Korea today.
And I believe that's who Garwin was referring to. And the reason for that is, and the reason that we're singularly, the reason that we're sort of using that individual
is because North Korea is the only nuclear-armed nation that doesn't play by the rules. I mean, let's put rules in air quotes, right? But there are some rules of nuclear war, one of which is you tell people when you're going to launch nuclear weapons.
And all of the nine nuclear-armed nations do that. And when I say nuclear weapons, I mean when you're going to launch an ICBM test because you have to test your weapon systems to make sure they work. And so all nations warn one another. This is something I just learned in the book about North Korea, by the way, when I was reporting it, that, for example, during the Ukraine war, Russia said,
They canceled a test that they had already had on the books. They canceled it. The United States did the same.
Because no one wants to start a nuclear war by accident, particularly in times of great hostility, as is the world right now. Because it would be potentially mistaken by another country as, oh, this might be coming for Moscow or this might be coming for Washington. What they don't know is it's going to land in the middle of the North Atlantic and it's just a test.
Absolutely right. I mean, we talked about that earlier with a 150-second window between if you know or maybe it's going straight up into space to deliver a satellite.
So North Korea, I learned from the North Korea experts here in the United States, does not announce any of its missile tests. And since January of 22, they have launched 100 missiles unannounced. Now, I have spoken to the individuals who have to run these systems regularly.
are in these bunkers. Do you know what, imagine what must go on in those first 150 seconds every time North Korea launches. And that's happened once a week for the last two years. It's happened a hundred times. So I guess since 2022, right? That is reckless. And that is why North Korea, in my scenario, North Korea launches once
The bolt out of the blue attack because they are not playing by the rules. To them, the rules don't exist. I asked one of the experts, why do they do that? To show that they have power, to demonstrate that they are outside the norm, to demonstrate that they are menacing and will do what it is they choose to do.
It's so infantile. It's so juvenile. You think about North Korea, it's such a stupid, petty, idiotic system. It's so immature. I mean, yeah. It's just as well that the citizens of that country don't know just how stupid the people that are running it are. Because if they did, I think they'd be even more ashamed of the country that they live in. Okay, so moving forward, what do you want to have happen? Have you considered what a...
safer world would look like is de-escalation realistic we went from 70 000 to 12 500 reported should we continue to dial that down is there more policy that needs to be in place what do you want to have happen in future
Well, that's the Reagan reversal that we touched upon a little bit earlier, right? I mean, you think about me as a high school student watching the day after the ABC miniseries, a fictitional story of war between Russia and America, a nuclear war between those two countries. Terrifying, horrifying, 100 million people watched it.
But so did one very important American, Ronald Reagan. And he wrote in his presidential memoirs that he was greatly depressed after watching that. And he, as a result, because you're too young to remember, but Ronald Reagan was a hawk. He was pro-nuclear weapons. He was working on SDI, also known as Star Wars, to put nuclear weapons in space.
He believed in American supremacy through American nuclear power, nuclear might. And after watching the day after, he changed his mind. And that famously is known among D.C. insiders as the Reagan reversal. And that is why the world went from 70,000 nuclear warheads to
to the 12,500 we have today because he reached out to Gorbachev to communicate. And so that's the answer to your question, I believe, is called communication. It's called, it doesn't make any sense to have such animosity, to have such enmity toward anyone really, but certainly not your nuclear-armed adversaries because what is really...
the worst case scenario as a result of all that? Well, read nuclear war scenario and you will see. And so, sure, people may say, oh, Annie, it's pansy-ish of you. It's so naive to think that communication can get us out of the tree. But I believe that to be true. I really believe that if a
If a subject as significant as, you know, human existence is discussed openly among people, then ultimately that issue rises to the top and you start having people in positions of power like Gorbachev and Reagan once were to make changes.
Is it possible to still watch that series that you're talking about? Is that on YouTube anywhere? You can see it on YouTube. Absolutely. The Day After. Okay. And by the way, after the Reykjavik summit, the Reagan White House called the filmmakers and said, you guys had something to do with this. Wow. Annie Jacobson, ladies and gentlemen. Annie, it's a macabre, apocalyptic, but pretty important. I think I'm a massive fan.
I have for a very long time had a big concern about existential risks and the fact that nuclear war isn't a classic existential risk, permanent unrecoverable collapse, it's miserable and no one wants to go through that. And war can be done in a way which is a lot more targeted. So I really appreciate all of the work that you've done. The book's fantastic. Where should people go? They want to check out more of the things that you do online. My books are sold everywhere.
And I read the audio of my audio books, which I'm told makes it a little bit easier. Well, you've got a fantastic voice. So yeah, I imagine it does. I really appreciate you. I can't wait to see what you do next. Thank you for joining. Thank you so much for having me.