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Imagining nuclear armageddon, with Annie Jacobsen
2.3k Plays10 months ago
The world could end before you finish listening to this podcast. That's the reality of a nuclear-armed world. If a sense of complacency had crept in about the threat of nuclear weapons, Annie Jacobsen's stunning new book is a wake up call.
'Nuclear War: A Scenario' imagines the 72 minutes after the 'button is pushed', and it doesn't end well. It's shockingly realistic, due to Annie’s meticulous research, which reflects her status as a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author.
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Transcript
Introduction and the Nuclear Tightrope
00:00:20
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will from The Spectator Australia, your safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston.
00:00:29
Speaker
Bertrand Russell said of Nuclear War, You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes. It would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years. The message is unmistakable. Living in a nuclear-armed world is one long walk on a tightrope. One slip and it's all over. And no one can walk on a tightrope forever.
Annie Jacobson's Nuclear Scenario
00:00:53
Speaker
Truth be told, I hadn't really thought about the consequences of falling off that tightrope until I read Annie Jacobson's extraordinary new book, Nuclear War, a scenario. It is a bracing imagining of how nuclear Armageddon could start, what it could look like, and what would be left. The timeframe for that process? 72 minutes. In other words, from pushing the button to the end of the world before you finish listening to this podcast.
00:01:22
Speaker
And it's shockingly plausible, largely due to Annie's meticulous research, which reflects her status as a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author. Annie, welcome to Fire at Will. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. How do you reflect on that Bertrand Russell quote?
00:01:42
Speaker
I think he's exactly spot on, and I think it is likely a concept perhaps embedded in some of the hearts and minds of my octogenarian sources, former top tier echelons of nuclear command and control of the Cold War.
Cold War Command Insights
00:02:02
Speaker
I use the word imagining in that introduction and that's possibly a tad misleading because the research that you've done for this book is extraordinary. Perhaps before we get into the substance, tell me a bit about the process and some of those octogenarian sources that you mentioned. It is a scenario and it is a fact based hypothetical imagining of what would happen in
00:02:30
Speaker
the seconds and minutes after a ballistic missile is detected coming into the United States. And working with the different sources as I did was this extraordinary experience more than anything because I was surprised again and again at the candor with which a lot of these former officials spoke with me on this horrific matter.
00:02:56
Speaker
If I had expected sort of reservation or tempered comments, I time and time again was told just how perilous this all is. Why do you think they displayed such candor? Two reasons come to mind. One had to do with when I began reporting this book.
Nuclear Rhetoric in the Trump Era
00:03:20
Speaker
the previous administration was in office. So Donald Trump was president and there was rhetoric coming out of his mouth about fire and fury, about nuclear threats with North Korea. And I myself am not a political reporter. I leave politics completely out of my book. Just let that be said. I think no one should be for nuclear war and no one is anymore. I also
00:03:47
Speaker
make it a point of writing about POTUS, the Office of the President of the United States. But the thoughts and or rather the rhetoric coming out of the White House about nuclear threats was so unusual and so alarming that a number of sources spoke to me about this. And imagine, you know, flash forward to where we are now, just a few years later, where world leaders
00:04:14
Speaker
are making nuclear threats regularly.
Complacency Post-Cold War
00:04:18
Speaker
The president of Russia recently said he is not joking about using weapons of mass destruction. The leader of North Korea accuses the United States of having a sinister intention to provoke nuclear war. The world has changed so radically in just the past four years.
00:04:39
Speaker
What that may speak to is potentially a sense of complacency around nuclear weapons. So I was born just before the end of the Cold War, so I can't compare eras. But is it fair to say that since the days of the Cold War, a sense of complacency has taken hold when it comes to nukes, both with respect to politicians and the public more generally?
00:05:01
Speaker
By all means, that was the feeling among my sources when I was interviewing them during COVID. Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense, also the former CIA director, said to me when I explained to him what I was doing with this nuclear war scenario, the public has a right to know.
00:05:20
Speaker
Americans should know this. And so there was most definitely a sense a couple years ago that this threat of nuclear war had all but been forgotten. And again, here we are just a few years later in this radically different position.
00:05:34
Speaker
We'll get to what the scenario looks like in a bit more granular detail in a sec, but a few more questions to set the scene.
Cold War Nuclear Arsenals
00:05:41
Speaker
One thing I've never been able to understand, which I got closer to with your book, is why when one of these weapons can do such tremendous damage, the great powers of the second half of the 20th century proceeded to build up hundreds and thousands of weapons in their stockpiles or in their arsenal.
00:05:59
Speaker
Why did they do that? And why to this day does Russia, does the United States, I think it's non-nuclear powers have multitudes of these weapons given that they're tremendous damage of just one of them? I mean, that is a great paradox. And I explain it in the book in a section before the moment of nuclear launch. And then I take you through to nuclear winter after 72 minutes of action. But that first section attempts to answer your question
00:06:28
Speaker
And that section is called How We Got Here. And you're absolutely right that this buildup during the Cold War was so frenetic and crazed. At one point, I believe it was in 1957, the United States was churning out five thermonuclear weapons a day. This kind of madness was underpinned by the relic of an idea that nuclear war could actually be fought and won.
00:06:57
Speaker
And this is one of the inherent problems today. And while you asked that question, how can we possibly have such a massive arsenal? We have 5,000 nuclear weapons. Russia has approximately the same number. We have of that 5,000, 1,770 are on ready for launch status, also known as hair trigger alert.
The Paradox of Deterrence
00:07:17
Speaker
They can launch in seconds and minutes. Russia is approximately the same. And so the result of that
00:07:26
Speaker
mad legacy of churning out nuclear weapons and really believing that nuclear war could be fought and won remains embedded and entwined in the bizarre logic that exists about nuclear deterrence today, a deterrence concept that most people are completely unaware of, but is actually really pretty simple as I define it in the book. What is that definition?
00:07:54
Speaker
deterrence, so think of a synonym prevention, it's this idea that if we have a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at the other side and they have a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at us, no one would be crazy enough
00:08:16
Speaker
launch any of those nuclear weapons because surely it would result in mutual assured destruction. But the problem is that if deterrence fails, the end result is nuclear Armageddon. And we know that, not from Annie Jacobson's imagination only, but because it is spoken
00:08:41
Speaker
regularly by Defense Department officials. Everyone knows that once nuclear war begins, it ends in nuclear apocalypse. That is the foundation of this terrifying book. The interesting thing is that mentality, that deterrence will continue to work for time in memoriam.
00:09:00
Speaker
is very widespread. Now this may say more about my Twitter followers than anything else, but I put a poll out before this interview asking them if on balance nuclear weapons had made the world a safer place or a more dangerous place. And I think something like 65% came out saying nuclear weapons had made the world safer. I potentially would have said the same thing before reading your book and your book disavowed me of that notion pretty conclusively. I would assume you would disagree with that notion as well.
00:09:28
Speaker
Well, that's the paradox of deterrence, that once you really begin thinking about this issue, you might come to the conclusion like 65% of your followers. Well, deterrence will hold. And maybe that's wishful thinking. Maybe that's whistling by the graveyard. Who knows? But the point of my book was to take the question
00:09:49
Speaker
What happens if deterrence fails? Two top tier national security sources, nuclear weapons engineers, people who have advised the president on these matters if nuclear war had to come to pass. Take the question to them and find out what they think would happen if deterrence fails.
Threat of Irrational Actors: North Korea
00:10:12
Speaker
And the scenario you put forward posits the most likely way in which deterrence would fail, which is the Madman theory for want of a better term.
00:10:22
Speaker
I don't know if that is the most likely scenario. My book is called Nuclear War A Scenario for that reason. And we can certainly talk about the logic that I use to try and decide which scenario I would describe. But the Mad King scenario was presented to me as the biggest threat by arguably
00:10:49
Speaker
the man who knows more about nuclear weapons than anyone on Earth, and that is the 93-year-old Richard Garwin, whom I interviewed repeatedly during COVID and who designed the world's
00:11:03
Speaker
First, thermonuclear weapon, it was called Ivy Mike and it is on the cover of the American version of the book. And Richard Garwin has advised every president of the United States on nuclear weapons, on nuclear policy, since the 1950s. It was Garwin who said to me that what worried him most, what troubled him most was this idea of a narcissistic madman with a nuclear arsenal. And I interpreted that to mean North Korea.
00:11:33
Speaker
What did you learn about the psychology of the North Korean regime as you went through the research for your book?
00:11:40
Speaker
Here's the fundamental problem with the logic of that regime and why I believe it can truly be called a rogue nuclear power. I mean, one of the concepts of nuclear war that I write about is even though there are all these protocols, it is a system of systems that moves into action. There really are no rules in essence, but really the nation that doesn't adhere to the kind of rules that exist to prevent nuclear war is North Korea.
00:12:06
Speaker
And learning about that is very simple and very shocking. Nuclear armed nations in essence agree to inform one another of when they're going to do a test of an ICBM, of a ballistic missile that would carry a nuclear warhead. And the reason they inform one another is because early warning systems can easily be triggered and no one wants to start a nuclear war by accident.
00:12:34
Speaker
What I learned in reporting this book was that North Korea does not announce any of its missile tests, including its ballistic missile tests. And so in the sort of thick of it when I was reporting this book over this 18-month period, North Korea launched over one
00:12:54
Speaker
hundred of these missiles. And on balance, there I was interviewing people within the US nuclear command and control, like at cyber command, like in the space force, people who look at this data, the trajectory data of a missile launch halfway across the world in real time, in seconds, wondering in those seconds if that missile is coming to the United States.
Speed of Nuclear Attacks
00:13:20
Speaker
And when I began to see that kind of holistic
00:13:23
Speaker
thinking about what happens after an air quotes rogue missile launch, I began to realize how incredibly dangerous North Korea's behavior is and how likely it could trigger nuclear war. Well, from reading the book, it's particularly dangerous for two reasons. The first is the speed at which an intercontinental ballistic missile can go from Pyongyang to the continental United States. 32 minutes?
00:13:54
Speaker
That's right, and you know what? Let's give listeners a quick lesson on that. Once you learn about a ballistic missile, I think you can suddenly realize how simple this all is, how terrifying. An intercontinental ballistic missile takes 26 minutes and 40 seconds to get from a launch pad in Russia to the United States. It is broken down into three parts.
00:14:20
Speaker
Boost phase is the first five minutes. You can imagine the fire coming out of the back of the rocket launching it. We've all seen a rocket launch, or many of us have. Five minutes. That's when it can be seen by a satellite system in space. Then it moves into mid-course phase, which is approximately 20 minutes only. It's flying 500 miles altitude at speeds of Mach 23 approximate. And then the last 100 seconds
00:14:50
Speaker
are aptly called terminal phase.
00:14:53
Speaker
100 seconds when the warhead reenters the atmosphere and detonates on its target. An ICBM cannot be recalled. It cannot be redirected. The distance from Pyongyang is a little bit different, and so the time from launch to target is 33 minutes. Once you understand that very simple concept, I think you can begin to see, my God, no wonder it all unfolds so fast.
00:15:23
Speaker
Yeah, and the book is dazzling in the way that it pulls together the plethora of different organizations and people within those organizations who have to make decisions in that incredibly short window of time. We'll get to that side, but I want to just keep teasing out on the mentality of the aggressors a bit more because
00:15:45
Speaker
I think that the whole concept of mutually assured destruction is premised on the notion that international politics is made up of rational actors, as in people who will act in their best interests or their country's best interests. It's very hard to get into the minds of the North Korean regime, but do you think that they are rational actors?
00:16:05
Speaker
I on purpose left out the geopolitical maneuvers that could lead up to a nuclear war, a nuclear exchange. I wanted to show in appalling detail how horrific nuclear war would be, and I did so by taking you in seconds and minutes from nuclear launch to nuclear winter. The fundamental behind the question
00:16:26
Speaker
You're asking, I think is this. The systems were created in the 1950s. The concepts were created in the 1950s. Think of how different the world was in 1950 in terms of technology alone. It was a world of radio and black and white TV. And it was also a world of two nuclear armed superpowers, the United States and Russia. Now there are nine nuclear armed nations.
00:16:56
Speaker
possibly soon to be 10 if Iran gets the bomb. Saudi Arabia wants the bomb. We are moving into a world that is radically different than it was in the 1950s, and yet the thinking underpinning nuclear war, underpinning deterrence, underpinning your idea, we're all rational here.
Launch-on-Detection Policy
00:17:15
Speaker
That is fundamentally changing right in front of our eyes.
00:17:20
Speaker
The second reason why this can just spiral out of control so quickly in that very short window is the concept of launch on morning, which I hadn't heard of until reading your book. Explain to me the concept of launch on morning.
00:17:35
Speaker
Launch-on warning is also known as launch-on attack, and it's exactly as it sounds. That policy means that a nation does not wait to absorb a nuclear blow to decide what to do. It's a fundamental of deterrence. You don't wait for all the missiles to come in and count the dead and then decide with a roundtable discussion, here's how we're going to counter-attack.
00:18:00
Speaker
Embedded into deterrence is this idea that the US will launch when the missiles are on the way, when the missiles are in that 26 minute and 42nd or 33 minute trajectory en route to the United States. That is why untold numbers of time and treasure have been spent developing what are called early warning systems. First, they were long range radars. Now they're satellite systems to notify the US it's being attacked.
00:18:29
Speaker
It's not a 9-11 situation whereby someone comes and whispers in the president's ear that we've been attacked. This is known by the Defense Department in the first fraction of a second, thanks to our satellite systems. And so because of that, this launch on warning policy means that the president gets jammed into this decision making window
00:18:53
Speaker
that Ronald Reagan told us is six minutes. And it was Reagan who described in his memoir this decision making six minute window as being totally irrational. He said the exact quote is in the book, how could anyone use logic to make a decision that could end the world in an amount of time like that?
00:19:12
Speaker
One of the many shocking insights into the book is how seemingly unprepared almost invariably an American president is for that moment. It doesn't sound like there is a crash course when they enter office to say, this is what you need to do in that six minutes. Is it fair to say that they aren't well prepared for that six minute window if it is to arrive?
00:19:33
Speaker
That is what I learned from sources close to the president and presidents over multiple administrations. And yet, the military command and control is uniquely trained. Missileers practice how they would go to nuclear war. Submariners do the same thing. Individuals in each of the nuclear command and control bunkers, and I'm talking about the one beneath the Pentagon, the legendary one inside Cheyenne Mountain, the
00:20:01
Speaker
bunker beneath Stratcom, beneath Offit Air Force Base in Nebraska. These are considered the beating heart of nuclear war, the brainstem of nuclear war, and the muscle of nuclear war. All of these individuals working in these facilities are uniquely practiced at going to nuclear war should it happen. And yet,
00:20:24
Speaker
person in charge, the president, with his sole presidential authority to launch nuclear weapons, is, I have learned, the least in form.
00:20:36
Speaker
I'm conscious that you're not a political journalist, but on a more personal level, perhaps we are approaching an election in November where it's fair to say both candidates have serious questions to be answered around. They both come with a lot of flaws and they both potentially have questions to be answered around cognitive capacity. Has this research and this work that you've done changed the way that you look at the political dynamics in America today or influenced how you look at it?
00:21:03
Speaker
I don't know that they have influenced it. The concern is there and has always been there. The two most important qualities I believe for a president, for a POTUS to have, mindful that he is in charge of
00:21:21
Speaker
launching nuclear weapons if he is asked, if he is notified that that is the position to take. The two most important qualities of a president of a human would be judgment and cognition. I absolutely believe that a fundamental reckoning is due for all Americans to consider who it is they are voting for, who it is they're even putting forth as their candidate with judgment
00:21:46
Speaker
and cognition leading as leading characteristics of a presidential candidate.
The President's 'Black Book'
00:22:02
Speaker
You're referring to something called the Black Book, and the Black Book, along with the nuclear war plans in general, are probably the most jealously guarded secrets in the United States government. The plans for a general nuclear war are these long and cumbersome documents that have all kinds of
00:22:23
Speaker
you know, math and politics and geopolitics embedded within them. And they are worked through time and time again. They work in concert with the nuclear war games that take place, hundreds of them, all of which remain classified.
00:22:40
Speaker
except for maybe a few. They must get synthesized down to a discernible menu of options for the president so that the president can make his decision about how to launch a counterattack against a nuclear strike in that six minute window. And what I learned from
00:23:03
Speaker
a rare person who has had access to that black book, and that is Professor Emeritus at MIT, Ted Postle, who worked on the plans in the 80s and at one point saw the black book. And Postle conveyed to me that what concerned him most was that the watering down process took out so many of the critical details like what these nuclear targets actually were, how many
00:23:32
Speaker
millions of people would die and it sort of objectified them into numerical options that one of the president's military aides likened to a choice of options on a Denny's menu. It's interesting.
00:23:49
Speaker
The way that you lay it out, what happens when considerations of morality in that incredibly short timeframe are brought up and bump up against the pragmatic considerations? Is the expectation in that moment that questions of morality almost go out the window and it should be a brutally pragmatic calculus?
00:24:09
Speaker
The concept of morality is simply not built into the concept of deterrence. It can't be, and this brings us back to the paradox, which is that for deterrence to hold, you must essentially carry a very big stick.
00:24:25
Speaker
You have to convey to your enemies, to your adversaries, if you dare launch a nuclear weapon at us, we will come back at you with the mother load. That is the fundamental concept. And so you can't build in there. If you launch nuclear weapons at us, we will stop and think, hmm, we're all going to die. But does that mean for moral reasons that you guys all need to die to? It just simply doesn't work that way.
00:24:50
Speaker
While I do raise that exact moral question in the book, because it was shared with me the moral conundrum of nuclear war, should it happen, by former Secretary of Defense, Bill Perry, and what he shared with me still sort of raises the hair on the back of the neck in terms of trying to imagine what a commander in chief
00:25:18
Speaker
What kind of decisions a commander in chief would have to make in seconds and minutes in the event of a nuclear launch? You spoke to people like Mr. Parry. Did you get from any of them any feelings of guilt? Guilt is a very tricky word and I wouldn't want to assign that to another person without them saying it directly.
00:25:44
Speaker
On that subject, I do write at length about the experiences and the sort of confession, if you will, of a former defense official named John Ruble. Shortly before he died, Ruble wrote a very thin memoir in 2008. He was in his 80s at the time. And because the war on terror was going on, I think
00:26:07
Speaker
really almost no one paid attention to this memoir. But I write about it and I quote him in the book because Ruble refers to this incredibly important and significant historical meeting that took place in 1959, 1960, a set of meetings leading up to what was called the SIOP, the first
00:26:26
Speaker
single integrated operational plan for nuclear war written for the president so that the president and the president alone would be in charge of nuclear war if it happened. And Rubel talks about what it was like to sit inside that bunker beneath Offit Air Force Base and hear the plans for nuclear war, the plans to kill one-fifth
00:26:52
Speaker
of the people across the globe. It is a stunning confession and I would most definitely assign the word guilt to Rubel in terms of his feelings about having participated in that.
00:27:06
Speaker
moved to another practical consideration, which shocked me. I guess I assumed that if a missile is en route from North Korea or from Russia to the continental United States, we have the ability in 2024 to shoot that missile out of the air. And I was potentially influenced by looking at Israel at the moment and seeing the Iron Dome there. You say it's not that simple.
US Missile Defense Flaws
00:27:29
Speaker
Well, you're not alone in your naivete whatsoever. Most people have this fantastic idea that the United States could shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. It is simply not true. This is fantasy. I relay in painstaking details why, and just to keep in mind this Iron Dome concept.
00:27:52
Speaker
Shooting down short-range missiles or even intermediate-range missiles is an entirely different scenario than trying to shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile. I described it earlier. Just consider that it's going to be shot down in that mid-course range. I relayed that 20-minute portion of its trajectory where it's 500 miles above the Earth. It's moving at speeds of something like 14,000 miles an hour.
00:28:21
Speaker
The interceptor system in the United States is made up of 44 interceptor missiles. And even the Missile Defense Agency described what it was like to try and shoot down a ballistic missile, an incoming ballistic missile, with an interceptor missile. And they described it as akin to shooting a bullet with a bullet. We have 44 of these interceptor missiles. Russia alone has 1,670
00:28:50
Speaker
Nuclear warheads on ready for launch status. When you consider the math, it just simply doesn't add up. So they're largely for peace of mind, if nothing else?
00:29:03
Speaker
Well, look how effective it is that people actually believe that we have an interceptor system that works. We don't. And not only that, as I report in the section on the interceptors, the success rate of an interceptor missile is approximately 50% of the time.
00:29:22
Speaker
Now, that is with a curated missile test. That's when you're talking about testing the missile. Imagine the guys at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara and the missiles are flown to the Marshall Islands where they're intercepted out above the ocean. But it's a curated missile test. It's kind of like, hey guys, we're doing a missile test.
00:29:44
Speaker
keep your eyes out, it might be coming. Okay, there's that and it's successful 50% of the time versus an incoming missile that no one expected. We haven't even begun to discuss the fact that the nuclear warheads are almost always filled with decoys, multiple decoys. And so the 50% success rate goes down dramatically when
00:30:07
Speaker
the exo-atmospheric kill vehicle, that's what it's called, the inside the interceptor missile, is trying to locate and hit the incoming nuclear warhead. That's why they call it akin to hitting a bullet with a bullet. Yeah, it's not comforting, is it? And you mentioned the Russians there and it raises the next shocking wow moment for me in the book.
00:30:34
Speaker
I guess I thought in my mind that this is a bilateral problem. So if one bad guy shoots off a nuke, then the US responds and both of them get destroyed and that's bloody awful. But there are certain miscalculations and mistakes that can be made that turns this from being a bilateral problem into a problem that affects many more different actors.
00:30:58
Speaker
When I was interviewing the former commander of strategic command, that is the agency in charge of the nuclear weapons in direct contact with the president in a situation like this, former STRATCOM commander, General Keeler, and I were discussing what would happen if there were a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. And Keeler told me the world could end in the next few hours. When you stop and think about that, it is a horrifying concept.
00:31:28
Speaker
Then you thread into the thinking, as you said earlier, we're all rational actors and Russia has been privy to deterrence, been privy to the idea of deterrence must hold for decades. But then you throw into the mix this idea that
00:31:46
Speaker
A rogue nuclear armed nation like North Korea is new at the game, as in just a few decades, not even, okay? And now consider the quote by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently, where he said, we are all one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon. The exact quote of his is in the book.
00:32:15
Speaker
How would that miscalculation happen is what you are asking. And the answer I learned is in this terrifying detail about a weakness in the US ICBM missile system. And that is that our ICBMs do not have enough range. If they're going to target North Korea, they must fly over Russia. Imagine
00:32:43
Speaker
in a situation where nuclear missiles are flying. Russia being asked to just assume that those missiles aren't coming for them. They are going to fly over the country and go somewhere else. That is a fantasy thought. Never mind the fact that the two leaders of the two greatest superpowers in the world, America and Russia, are not on speaking terms, haven't spoken, is my understanding, in years.
00:33:11
Speaker
And you also mentioned that even any attempts in that period of time to try and get a dialogue going are often fruitless as well.
00:33:19
Speaker
It's absolutely right. People, again, have this fantasy that Leader X can call up Leader Y and just have a chat about anything, and it is simply not true. The best example I could provide of that was early in the Ukraine war. There was a reported missile that hit Poland, a NATO country, which would have been disastrous because it could invoke Article 5.
00:33:44
Speaker
As it turned out, the reporting was in error, so no Russian missile did in fact hit Poland. But we only learned after something like 36 hours when then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley held a press conference.
00:34:02
Speaker
that he was unable to reach his Russian counterpart during that entire time. That's 36 hours. We know from nuclear war a scenario that the world could end in 72 minutes.
Stealth of Nuclear Submarines
00:34:15
Speaker
I've held back another unfortunate detail, which is we've been talking about say a missile that could come from land and then attack the continental United States. That's not even the one that we should be most worried about. The ones that we should be more worried about are coming from
00:34:31
Speaker
submarines, why are they particularly dangerous?
00:34:34
Speaker
The nuclear-armed nuclear-powered submarines, sometimes called the handmaidens of the apocalypse, are capable of destroying not just a metropolis, but an entire country. Each one has 20 missile tubes, and each of those sub-launched ballistic missiles can carry multiple warheads, nuclear warheads in its nose cone.
00:35:03
Speaker
The nuclear-armed nuclear-powered submarines are stealth, meaning they're impossible to locate. So the way it was described to me by the former commander of the nuclear sub-forces, Admiral Conner, was that it's easier to find a grapefruit-sized object in space than a nuclear-armed nuclear-powered submarine under the sea. They can sneak up.
00:35:29
Speaker
within a couple hundred miles of a coast. And I reprint a map in the book that shows the Defense Department's sonar trails of Russian and Chinese submarines getting precisely that close to the continental United States.
00:35:46
Speaker
And that means that those sub-launch ballistic missiles, also known as SLBMs, can fire out of a stealth submarine and hit their target in under 10 minutes. I've held back on the impact of such a strike so far, but you start your book with what is the consequences of a nuclear strike on the ground.
00:36:10
Speaker
I probably was closer to the 1950s emergency manual way of thinking, get under the desk or go underground and hope for the best. That's not going to help you, is it? This is a difficult question, but as you were going through the actual impact of a nuclear blast from ground zero outwards, what shocked you or surprised you about the sheer devastation of it?
00:36:34
Speaker
So I describe in horrific detail what nuclear weapons do to people and to structures and to things. And again, these are not figments of Annie Jacobson's imagination. They are sourced from Defense Department documents because the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission began keeping track of these details starting
00:36:58
Speaker
with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And they continued to keep track of these details through all the atmospheric nuclear weapons testing days of the Cold War. And we can learn from that and I describe what happens in these thermonuclear blasts. But even more
00:37:19
Speaker
devastating is what I learned from a number of experts on the subject, but particularly a Stanford researcher, Professor Emeritus named Lynn Eden, who's kind of the world's expert on nuclear firestorms. And what she explains is that each of these
00:37:38
Speaker
initial bombs will result in a megafire. So we're talking about a megafire that is one, two, 300 square miles of fire with more energy, something like 15 to 50 times the energy of the initial blast, if you can even imagine such a devastation. These firestorms create cyclones of fire. They create more fires.
00:38:04
Speaker
Imagine 1,000 of them in the United States burning and burning. And this is what occurs from minute 72 on in this
Aftermath: Nuclear Winter
00:38:13
Speaker
scenario. And that is why the end of the book jumps forward to nuclear winter. Because we know from those who have written about nuclear winter for decades, a number of whom I interview in the book,
00:38:25
Speaker
that after the fires stop burning, what has happened is that some 330 billion pounds of soot have been lofted into the troposphere, and it blocks out something like 70% of the sun. And that is where the term nuclear winter comes from.
00:38:47
Speaker
You have large bodies of water frozen over. You have the death of agriculture. And ultimately, you have the death of 5 billion people. There was this misconception throughout a lot of the 20th century that nuclear war can be won. You paint a picture that that is absolutely ludicrous. And if we are to enter into a nuclear conflict, in all likelihood, that is the end of humanity as we know it.
00:39:14
Speaker
The next question is, I know this wasn't the focus of your book, but you would have reflected on it. In a world where there is nine, potentially 10 nuclear powers, some of whom are bad guys in inverted commas, is there anything that can be done about this or are we doomed to live in this period of perpetual risk forevermore?
Reagan's Nuclear Reduction Shift
00:39:33
Speaker
There is a ray of hope, and I'm glad you asked about it, because the ray of hope comes from, of all people, President Ronald Reagan, former President Ronald Reagan, himself a nuclear hawk, when Reagan
00:39:49
Speaker
entered office. He was so pro-nuclear supremacy, there was smoke coming out of his ears around it. I mean, he spoke about this with passion. He even wanted to put nuclear weapons in space. That's the SDI, the Star Wars program. And yet, a moment in time happened in 1983 that is now known
00:40:13
Speaker
in Washington DC as the Reagan reversal. And it goes like this. There was a ABC television movie called The Day After, which showed in horrific detail what nuclear war would be like between the United States and then Soviet Russia.
00:40:31
Speaker
It was terrifying. A hundred million people watched it. One of those Americans was Ronald Reagan. And he wrote in his White House Journal that he became greatly depressed after seeing it. And he changed his position on nuclear weapons, hence the Reagan reversal.
00:40:49
Speaker
He decided to stop looking at Russia as the enemy and instead looking at it as an adversary, as an opponent. He reached out to Gorbachev and as a result, the Reykjavik summit, the world went from having 70,000 nuclear weapons to having the approximately 12,500 that we have today. That is a movement
00:41:18
Speaker
in the right direction, I believe. That is my conclusion after writing this book, after reporting this book. And we might all benefit from thinking about nuclear warhead reduction. You can call it disarmament. You can call it whatever term you like, but less nuclear weapons, not more. And we are at the razor's edge in this moment in time because people are pulling out of treaties. Leaders are thinking of building up their arsenals.
00:41:45
Speaker
new nations are considering becoming nuclear superpowers. I think after reading my book, you might come to the conclusion that that too is madness. Well, I certainly did. My final question is one that I asked Dan Carlin, who you've spoken to recently. It is lifted directly from his book and it's a gloomy one, but it's one which I think is apt for this conversation. He posited in his book,
00:42:15
Speaker
Do you think that modern civilization will ever fall and our cities will ever lie in ruins? So Annie, I ask you the
Optimism and Public Awareness
00:42:23
Speaker
same question. Do you think that modern civilization will ever fall and our cities will ever lie in ruins? I'm an optimist at heart. I believe in that last part of President Eisenhower's famous military industrial complex speech that he gave
00:42:39
Speaker
as he was leaving office. The second part of that speech discussed how an alert and knowledgeable citizenry is what allows democracy to flourish. And that's why I write books about these grim subject matter, because I believe that an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can move humanity in a direction that is positive and does not necessarily have to leave to the fall of civilization.
00:43:08
Speaker
I think your book is such a wonderful contribution to a debate, which may have been forgotten. And after reading this, no one will forget the importance of this subject, nuclear war scenario. I strongly recommend everyone reads it, not just because this is an important topic, but because it is enthralling at the same time and you've done an absolutely wonderful job. Thank you for writing it and thank you for coming on the show today. Thank you so much for having me.