Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy | Lex Fridman Podcast #420

0:00 - The United States has 1,770 nuclear weapons deployed, meaning those weapons could launch in as little as 60 seconds and up to a couple minutes. Some of them on the bombers might take an hour or so. Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons, same scenario, their weapon systems are on par with ours. That's not to mention the 12,500 nuclear weapons amongst the nine nuclear armed nations. The sucking up into the nuclear stem, 300 mile an hour winds, you're talking about people miles out getting sucked up into that stem.

0:45 When you see the mushroom cloud, Lex, that would be people, 30, 40 mile wide mushroom cloud blocking out the sun. And that speaks nothing of the radiation poisoning that follows. In addition to the launch on warning concept, there's this other insane concept called sole presidential authority. And you might think, in a democracy that's impossible, you can't just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you are the commander in chief, the President of the United States. In fact, you're the only one who can do that. We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon. No matter how nuclear war starts,

1:31 it ends with everyone dead. - The following is a conversation with Annie Jacobsen, an investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and author of several amazing books on war, weapons, government secrecy, and national security, including the books titled "Area 51", "Operation Paperclip", "The Pentagon's Brain Phenomena", "Surprise, Kill, Vanish", and her new book, "Nuclear War". This is a Lex Fridman podcast, to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Annie Jacobsen. Let's start with an immensely dark topic,

2:17 nuclear war, how many people would a nuclear war between the United States and Russia kill? - So I'm coming back at you with a very dark answer and a very big number. And that number is 5 billion people. - You go second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour what would happen if the nuclear war started. So there's a lot of angles from which I would love to talk to you about this. First, how would the deaths happen in the short term and the long term? - So to start off, the reason I wrote the book

3:03 is so that readers like you could see in appalling detail just how horrific nuclear war would be. And as you said, second by second, minute minute. The book covers nuclear launch to nuclear winter. I purposely don't get into the politics that lead up to that or the national security maneuvers or the posturing or any of that, I just want people to know nuclear war is insane. And every source I interviewed for this book, from Secretary of Defense, all retired, nuclear sub force commander, Stratcom commander, FEMA director, on and on and on,

3:49 nuclear weapons engineers, they all shared with me the common denominator that nuclear war is insane. First millions, then tens of millions, then hundreds of millions of people will die in the first 72 minutes of a nuclear war. And then comes nuclear winter where the billions happen from starvation. And so the shock power of all of this is meant for each and every one of us to say, wait, what? This actually exists behind the veil of national security, most people do not think about nuclear war on a daily basis,

4:34 and yet hundreds of thousands of people in the nuclear command and control are at the ready in the event it happens. - But it doesn't take too many people to start one. - In the words of Richard Garwin, who was the nuclear weapons engineer who drew the plans for the Ivy Mike thermonuclear bomb, the first thermonuclear bomb ever exploded in 1952. Garwin shared with me his opinion that all it takes is one nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal to start a nuclear war. And that's how I begin the scenario. - What are the different ways it could start? Like literally, who presses a button,

5:21 and what does it take to press a button? - So the way it starts is in space, meaning the US Defense Department has a early warning system. And the system in space is called SBIRS, a constellation of satellites that is keeping an eye on all of America's enemies, so that the moment an ICBM launches, the satellite in space, and I'm talking about one 10th of the way to the moon, that's how powerful these satellites are in geosync, they see the hot rocket exhaust on the ICBM in a fraction of a second after it launches, a fraction of a second.

6:09 And so there begins this horrifying policy called launch on warning, and that's the US counter attack. Meaning the reason that the United States is so ferociously watching for a nuclear launch somewhere around the globe is so that the nuclear command and control system in the US can move into action to immediately make a counterstrike. Because we have that policy, launch on warning, which is exactly like it says, it means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack. It will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.

6:57 - So the president, as part of the launch on warning policy, has six minutes. I guess it can't launch for six minutes, but at six minute mark from that first warning, the president can launch. - And that was one of the most remarkable details to really nail down for this book when I was reporting this book and talking to Secretary of Defenses, for example, who are the people who advise the president on this matter, you say to yourself, wait a minute, how could that possibly be? And so let's unpack that, so in addition to the launch on warning concept, there's this other insane concept called sole presidential authority.

7:43 And you might think, in a democracy that's impossible, you can't just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you are the commander in chief, the President of the United States, in fact, you're the only one who can do that. And we can get into later why that exists, I was able to get the origin story of that concept from Los Alamos, they declassified it for the book. But the idea behind that is that nuclear war will unfold so fast, only one person can be in charge, the president, he asked permission of no one, not the Secretary of Defense, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the US Congress. So built into that is this extraordinary speed,

8:31 you talk about the six minute window, and some people say, oh, that's ridiculous, how do we know that six minute window? Well, here's the best sort of hitting the nail on the head statement I can give you, which is, in President Reagan's memoirs, he refers to the six minute window and he says, he calls it irrational, which it is, he says, "How can anyone make a decision to launch nuclear weapons based on a blip on a radar scope?" His words, to unleash Armageddon. And yet, that is the reality behind nuclear war. - Just imagine sitting there, one person, because a president is a human being, sitting there,

9:17 just got the warning that Russia launched. You have six minutes. I meditate on my mortality every day, and here you would be sitting and meditating, contemplating not just your own mortality, but the mortality of all the people you know, loved ones. Just imagining, like what would be going through my head is all the people I know and love, like personally, and knowing that they'll be no more, most likely, and if they somehow survive, they will be suffering and will eventually die. I guess the question that kept coming up is, how do we stop this? Is it inevitable that it's going to be escalated

10:03 to a full on nuclear war that destroys everything? And it seems like it will be, it's inevitable. In the position of the president, it's almost inevitable that they have to respond. - I mean, one of the things I found shocking was how little, apparently most presidents know about the responsibility that literally lays at their feet. So you may think through this six minute window, I may think through this six minute window, but what I learned, like for example, former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, was really helpful in explaining this to me, because before he was SecDef, he served as the director of the CIA. And before that he was the White House Chief of Staff.

10:51 And so he has seen these different roles that have been so close to the president, but he explained to me that when he was the White House Chief of Staff for President Clinton, he noticed how President Clinton didn't want to ever really deal with the nuclear issue, because he had so many other issues to deal with. And that only when Panetta became Secretary of Defense, he told me, did he really realize the weight of all of this. Because he knew he would be the person that the president would turn to, were he to be notified of a nuclear attack. And by the way, it's the launch on warning,

11:38 it's the ballistic missile seen from outer space by the satellite, and then there also must be a second confirmation from a ground radar system. But in that process, which is just a couple minutes, everyone is getting ready to notify the president, and one of the first people that gets notified by NORAD, or by Stratcom, or by NRO, these different parties that all see the early warning data, one of the first peoples that's notified is the Secretary of Defense as well as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because those two together are going to brief the president about, sir, you have six minutes to decide.

12:25 And that's where you realize the immediacy of all of this is so counter to imagining the scenario. And again, all the presidents come into office, I have learned, understanding the idea of deterrence, this idea that we have these massive arsenals of nuclear weapons pointed at one another, ready to launch, so that we never have nuclear war. But what we're talking about now is what if we did? What if we did? And what you've raised is like, this really spooky, eerie subtext of the world right now, because many of the nuclear armed nations are in direct conflict with other nations.

13:14 And for the first time in decades, nuclear threats are actually coming out of the mouths of leaders, this is shocking. - So deterrence, the polite, implied assumption is that nobody will launch, and if they did, we would launch back and everybody would be dead. But that assumption falls apart completely, the whole philosophy of it falls apart once the first launch happens. - Absolutely. - Then you have six minutes to decide, wait a minute, are we going to hit back and kill everybody on earth? Or do we turn the other cheek in the most horrific way possible? - Well, when nuclear war starts, there's no like battle for New York or battle for Moscow,

14:02 it's just literally, it was called in the Cold War push button warfare, but in essence, that is what it is. Let's get some numbers on the table if you don't mind, because when you're saying like, wait a minute, we're just hoping that it holds, let's just talk about Russia and the US, the arsenals that are literally pointed at one another right now. So the United States has 1,770 nuclear weapons deployed, meaning those weapons could launch in as little as 60 seconds and up to a couple minutes. Some of them on the bombers might take an hour or so. Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons,

14:52 same scenario, their weapon systems are on par with ours. That's not to mention the 12,500 nuclear weapons amongst the nine nuclear armed nations. But when you think about those kind of arsenals of just between the United States and Russia, and you realize everything can be launched in seconds and minutes, then you realize the madness of mad, that this idea that no one would launch because it would assure everyone's destruction, yes, but what if someone did? And in my interviews with scores of top tier national security advisors, people who advise the president, people who are responsible for these decisions,

15:38 if they had to be made, every single one of them said it could happen. They didn't say this would never happen. And so the idea is worth thinking about, because I believe that it pulls back the veil on a fundamental security that if someone were to use a tactical nuclear weapon, oh well, it's just an escalation. It's far more than that. - So to you, the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, maybe you can draw the line between a tactical and a strategic nuclear weapon, that could be a catalyst, like that's a very difficult thing to walk back from.

16:23 - Oh my God, almost certainly, and again, every person in the national security environment will agree with that, certainly on the American side. Strategic weapons, those are like big weapons systems, America has a nuclear triad, we have our ICBMs, which are the silo-based missiles that have a nuclear warhead in the nose cone, and they can get from one continent to the other in roughly 30 minutes. Then we have our bombers, B-52s and B-2s that are nuclear capable. Those take travel time to get to another continent, those can also be recalled, the ICBMs cannot be recalled or redirected once launched.

17:09 - That one is a particularly terrifying one. So land launched missiles, rockets with a warhead, can't be recalled. - Cannot be recalled or redirected. And speaking of how little the presidents generally know, as we were talking a moment ago, President Reagan in 1983 gave a press conference where he misstated that submarine launched ballistic missiles could be recalled. They cannot be recalled. Here's the guy in charge of the arsenal if it has to get let loose, and he doesn't even know that they cannot be recalled. So this is the kind of misinformation and disinformation. UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, recently said,

17:58 when he was talking about the conflicts rising around the world, he said, "We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon." - So just to sort of linger on the previous point of tactical nukes, so you were describing strategic nukes, land launched bombers, submarine launched, what are tactical nukes? - So that's the triad, and we have the triad and Russia has the triad. Tactical nuclear weapons are smaller warheads that were designed to be used in battle. And that is what Russia is sort of threatening to use right now, that is this idea that you would

18:45 make a decision on the battlefield in an operational environment to use a tactical nuclear weapon. You're just sort of upping the ante. But the problem is that all treaties are based on this idea of no nuclear use. You cannot cross that line. And so the what would happen if the line is crossed is so devastating to even consider, I think that the conversation is well worth having among everyone that is in a power of position. As the UN Secretary General said, "This is madness." This is madness, we must come back from the brink, we are at the brink.

19:32 - Can we talk about some other numbers? So you mentioned the number of warheads, so land launched, how long does it take to travel across the ocean from the United States to Russia, from Russia to the United States, from China to the United States, approximately how long? - When I was writing an earlier book on DARPA, the Pentagon Science Agency, I went to a library down in San Diego called the Giza Library, to look at Herb York's papers, Herb Bjork was the first chief scientist for the Pentagon for DARPA, then called ARPA. And I had been trying to get the number from the various agencies that be, to answer you,

20:20 like, what is the exact number and how do we know it? And like, does it change? And as technology advances, does that number reduce? All these kinds of questions, and no one will answer that question on an official level. And so much to my surprise, I found the answer in Herb York's dusty archive of papers. And this is information that was jealously guarded, I mean, it's not necessarily classified, but it certainly wasn't out there. And I felt like, wow, Herb York left these behind for someone like me to find. And he wanted to know the answer to your question, and as the guy in charge of it all, so he hired this group of scientists who then,

21:08 and still are in many ways, like the Superman scientists of the Pentagon, and they're called the JASON Scientists, many conspiracies about them abound, I interviewed their founder and have interviewed many of them, but they whittled the number down to seconds. Specifically for Herb York, and it goes like this, 'cause this is where my jaw dropped and I went, wow, okay. So 26 minutes and 40 seconds from a launchpad in the Soviet Union to the East coast. And it happens in three phases, very simple and interesting to remember, 'cause then suddenly all of this makes more sense, boost phase, mid-course phase, and then terminal phase.

21:55 Boost phase, five minutes, that's when the rocket launches. So you just imagine a rocket going off the launchpad and the fire beneath it, again, that's why the satellites can see it, now it's becoming visual, now it makes sense to me. Five minutes, and that's where the rocket can be tracked. And then imagine learning, wait a minute, after five minutes, the rocket can no longer be seen from space. The satellite can only see the hot rocket exhaust. Then the missile enters its mid-course phase, 20 minutes. And that's the ballistic part of it, where it's kind of flying up at between 500 and 700 miles above the earth, and moving very fast and with the earth,

22:42 until it gets very close to its target, and the last 100 seconds are terminal phase. It's where the warhead reenters the atmosphere and detonates, 26 minutes and 40 seconds. Now, in my scenario, I open with North Korea launching a one megaton nuclear warhead at Washington DC, that's the nihilistic madman maneuver, that's the bolt out of the blue attack that everyone in Washington will tell you they're afraid of. And North Korea has a little bit different geography, and so I had MIT professor emeritus Ted Postol do the math, 33 minutes from a launchpad

23:30 in Pyongyang to the East Coast of the United States. You get the idea, it's about 30 minutes, but hopefully now that allows readers to suddenly see all this as a real, you almost see it as poetry, as terrible as that may sound, you can visualize it and suddenly it makes sense. And I think the sensemaking part of it is really what I'm after in this book, because I want people to understand, on the one hand, it's incredibly simple, it's just the people that have made it so complicated. - But it's one of those things that can change all of world history in a matter of minutes. We just don't, as a human civilization, have experience with that.

24:16 But it doesn't mean it'll never happen. It can happen just like that. - I mean, I think what you're after, and I couldn't agree more with is like, why is this fundamentally annihilating system, a system of mass genocide, as John Rubel, in the book refers to it, why does it still exist? We've had 75 years since there have been two superpowers with the nuclear bomb. So that threat has been there for 75 years and we have managed to stay alive. One of the reasons why so many of the sources

25:03 in the book agreed to talk to me, people who had not previously gone on the record about all of this, was because they are now approaching the end of their lives. They spent their lives dedicated to preventing nuclear World War iii. And they'll be the first people to tell you we're closer to this as a reality than ever before. And so the only bright side of any of this is that the answer lies most definitely in communication. - So there's a million other questions here. I think the details are fascinating and important to understand. So one, you also say nuclear submarines, you mentioned about 30 minutes, 26, 33 minutes,

25:51 but with nuclear submarines, that number can be much, much lower. So how long does it take for a warhead missile to reach the East Coast of the United States from a submarine? - Just when you thought it was really bad, and then you kind of realize about the submarines, I mean, the submarines are what are called second strike capacity, and submarines were described to me this way, they are as dangerous to civilization, and let me say, a nuclear armed, nuclear powered submarine, is as dangerous to civilization as an asteroid. They are unstoppable, they are unlocatable. The former chief of the nuclear submarine forces, Admiral Michael Conner, told me,

26:38 "It's easier to find a grapefruit sized object in space than a submarine under the sea." So these things are like hell machines, and they're moving around throughout the oceans, ours, Russia's, China's, maybe North Korea's, constantly, and we now know they're sneaking up to the east and west coast of the United States within a couple hundred miles. How do we know that, why do we know that? Well, I found a document inside of a budget that the defense department was going to congress for more money recently and showed maps of precisely where these submarines, how close they were getting to the eastern seaboard. - So wait, wait, wait, so nuclear subs

27:25 are getting within 200 miles? - Couple hundred miles, yes, they weren't precise on the number, but when you look at the map- - Couple hundred. - Yep, and that's when you're talking about under 10 minutes from launch to strike. - Undetectable. - And they're undetectable, the map making is done after the fact because of a lot of underwater surveillance systems that we have, but in real time, you cannot find a nuclear submarine. And just the way a submarine launches, goes 150 feet below the surface to launch its ballistic missile. I mean, it comes out of the missile tube, and with enough thrust, the thrusters, they ignite outside the water

28:10 and then they move into boost. And so the technology involved is just stunning and shocking, and again, trillions of dollars spent so that we never have a nuclear war, but my God, what if we did. - As you write, they're called the handmaidens of the apocalypse. What a terrifying label. I mean, one of the things you also write about, so for the land launched ones, they're presumably underground. So the silos, how long does it take to go from like pressing the button to them emerging from underground for launch? And is that part detectable or it's only the heat.

28:55 - So what's interesting about the silos, America has 400 silos, we've had more. But we have 400 and they're underground, and they're called Minuteman, after the Revolutionary War heroes. But the sort of joke in Washington is they're not called Minuteman for nothing, because they can launch in one minute. So the president orders the launch of the ICBMs, ICBM stands for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, he orders the launch and they launch 60 seconds later, and then they take 30 some odd minutes to get to where they're going. The submarines take about 14 or 15 minutes from the launch command to actually launching.

29:43 And that has to do, I surmise, with the location of the submarine, its depth. Some of these things are so highly classified, and other details are shockingly available if you look deep enough or if you ask enough questions, and you can go from one document to the next to the next and really find these answers. - Not to ask top secret questions, but to what degree do you think the Russians know the locations of the silos in the US and vice versa? - Lex, you and I can find the location of every silo right now. - Oh no. - They're all there, and before they were there on Google, they were there in maps, because we're a democracy and we make these things known. Now, what's tricky is that Russia and North Korea

30:29 rely upon what are called Road Mobile Launchers. So Russia has a lot of underground silos, all of the scenario takes you through these different facilities that really do exist, and they're all sourced with how many weapons they have and their launch procedures and whatnot. But in addition to having underground silos, they have road mobile launchers. And that means you just have one of these giant ICBMs on a 22 axle truck that can move stealthily around the country so that it can't be targeted by the US Defense Department. We don't have those in America, because presumably, the average American isn't gonna go for like,

31:15 the ICBM road mobile launcher driving down the street in your town or city, which is why the defense department will justify we need the second strike capacity capability, the submarines, because I mean, the wonky stuff that is worth looking into if you really dig the book and are like, wait a minute, it's all footnoted where you can learn more about how these systems have changed over time, and why more than anything, it's very difficult to get out of this catch 22 conundrum that we need nuclear weapons to keep us safe, that is the real enigma, because the other guys have them.

32:03 And the other guys have sort of more sinister ways of using them, or at least that's what the nomenclature out of the Pentagon will always be when anyone tries to say, we just need to really think about full disarmament. - You've written about intelligence agencies. How good are the intelligence agencies on this? How much does CIA know about the Russian launch sites, and capabilities, and command and control procedures and all of this, and vice versa? - I mean, all of this, because it's decades old, is really well known. If you go to the Federation of American Scientists, they have a team led by a guy called Hans Kristensen who runs what's called the nuclear notebook, and he and his team every year are keeping track

32:50 of this number of warheads on these number of weapons systems, and because of the treaties, the different signatories to the treaty all report these numbers, and of course, the different intelligence community people are keeping track of what's being revealed honestly and reported with transparency and what is being hidden. The real issue is the new systems that Russia is working on right now, and that will lead us, we are kind of moving into an era whereby the threat of actually having new weapon systems that are nuclear capable is very real, because of the escalating tensions around the world. And that's where the CIA, I would guess,

33:36 is doing most of its work right now. - So most of your research is kind of looking at the older versions of the system, and presumably there's potentially secret development of new ones? Hopefully not. - Which violates treaties. - Yes. - So yes, that is where the intelligence agencies. But at a point it's overkill, literally and figuratively. People are up in arms about these hypersonic weapons, well, we have a hypersonic weapons program, FALCON, Google Black Swift, this is Lockheed's doing. DARPA exists to create the vast weapon systems of the future, that is its job, it has been doing that since its creation in 1957.

34:23 I would never believe that we aren't ahead of everyone, call me over informed or naive, one or the other. That would be my position, because DARPA works from the chicken or the egg scenario, that once you learn about something, once you learn Russia's created this typhoon submarine, which may or may not be viable, it's too late if you don't already have one. - We'll probably talk about DARPA a little bit. One of the things that makes me sad about Lockheed, many things makes me sad about Lockheed, but one of the things is because it's very top secret, you can't show off all the incredible engineering going on there, the other thing that's more philosophical, DARPA also, is that war seems to stimulate

35:12 most of our, not most, but a large percent of our exciting innovation in engineering. But that's also the pragmatic fact of life on earth, is that the risk of annihilation is a great motivator for innovation, for engineering and so on. But yes, I would not discount the United States in its ability to build the weapons of the future, nuclear included, again, terrifying. Can you tell me about the nuclear football as it's called? - I think Americans are familiar with the football, at least anyone who sort of follows national security concepts, because it's a satchel,

35:58 it's a leather satchel that is always with a military aid, in secret service nomenclature, that's the mill aid. And he's trailing around the president 24/7, 365 days a year, and also the vice president, by the way, with the ability to launch nuclear war in that six minute window all the time. That is also called the football, and it's always with the president. To report this part of the book, I interviewed a lot of people in the Secret Service that are with the president and talk about this. And the director of the Secret Service, a guy called Lew Merletti, told me a story that I just really found fascinating.

36:45 He was also in charge of the president's detail, president Clinton, this was, before he was director of the Secret Service. And he told me the story about how, he said, "The football is with the president at all times, period." They were traveling to Syria, and Clinton was meeting with President Assad, and they got into an elevator, Clinton and the Secret Service team, and one of Assad's guys was like, no, like about the mill aid. And Lew said it was like a standoff, because there was no way, they were not going to have the president with his football in an elevator. And it kind of sums up, for me anyways,

37:32 you realize what goes into every single one of these decisions. You realize the massive system of systems behind every item you might just see in passing and glancing on the news as you see the mill aid carrying that satchel, well, what's in that satchel? I really dug into that to report this book. - What is in that satchel? (both giggling) - Well, okay, first of all, people always say it's incredibly classified, I mean, people talk about UFOs, it's incredibly, I mean, come on guys, that is nothing burger, you wanna know what's really classified, what's in that football, what's in that satchel? But the PEAD, presidential emergency action directives,

38:18 those have never been leaked, no one knows what they are. What we do know from one of the mill aids who spoke on the record, a guy called Buzz Patterson, he describes the president's orders, so if a nuclear war has begun, if the president has been told there are nuclear missiles, one or more coming at the United States, you have to launch in a counter attack. The red clock is ticking, you have to get the blue impact clock ticking. He needs to look at this list to decide what targets to strike and what weapon systems to use. And that is what is on, according to Buzz Patterson, a piece of sort of laminated plastic, he described it like a Denny's menu.

39:05 And from that menu, the president chooses targets and chooses weapon systems. - And it's probably super old school, like all top secret systems are, because they have to be tested over, and over, and over, and over, and over. - Yes, and it's non-digital. - Non-digital, it might literally be a Denny's menu from hell. - Right, and meanwhile I learned this only in reporting the book, there is a identical black book inside the Stratcom bunker in Nebraska. Three command bunkers are involved when nuclear war begins, there's the bunker beneath the Pentagon, which is called the National Military Command Center.

39:53 Then there is the bunker beneath Cheyenne Mountain, which everyone, or many people have heard of because it's been made famous in movies, that is a very real bunker. And then there is a third bunker, which people are not so familiar with, which is the bunker beneath strategic command in Nebraska. And so it's described to me this way, the Pentagon bunker is the beating heart, the Cheyenne Mountain bunker is the brains, and the Stratcom bunker is the muscle. The Stratcom commander will receive word from the president, launch orders, and then directs the 150,000

40:39 people beneath him what to do, from the bunker beneath Stratcom. He gets the orders, then he has to run out of the building and jump onto what's called the doomsday plane, we'll get into that in a minute, let me just finish the, I mean, but again- - This is good. - These are the details, this is like, these are the systematic sequential details that happen in seconds and minutes, and reporting them, I never ceased to be amazed by what a system it is. A follows B, it's just numerical. - Yeah, but as we discuss this procedure, each individual person that follows that procedure

41:25 might lose the big picture of the whole thing. I mean, especially when you realize what is happening, that almost out of fear, you just follow the steps. - Yep, or, okay, so imagine this, imagine being the president and you got that six minute, you're looking at your list of strike options, you're being briefed by your chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and your SecDef, and this other really spooky detail, in the Stratcom bunker, in addition to the nuclear strike advisor who can answer very specific questions if the president's like, wait a minute, why are we striking that, not that? There's also a weather officer,

42:11 and this is the kind of human detail that kept me up at night, because that weather officer is in charge of explaining to the president really fast, how many people are going to die and how many people are going to die in minutes, weeks, months, and years from radiation fallout. - Because a lot of that has to do with the weather system. - Yes. Yes, and so the humanness balanced out with the mechanization of it all, it's just really grotesque.

42:58 - So the doomsday plane from Stratcom, what's that? Where's it going, what's on it? - Okay, ready? It's gonna fly in circles. That's where it's going, it's flying in circles around the United States of America, so that nuclear weapons can be launched from the air after the ground systems are taken out by the incoming ICBMs, or the incoming submarine launched ballistic missiles. This has been in play since the fifties. These are the contingency plans for when nuclear war happens. So again, going back to this absurd paradox,

43:44 nuclear war will never happen. Mutual assured destruction, that is why deterrence will hold. Well, I found a talk that the deputy director of Stratcom gave to a very close knit group, where he said, "Yes, deterrence will hold, but if it fails, everything unravels." And think about that word unravels, and the unraveling is the doomsday plane launches, the Stratcom commander jumps in, he's in that plane, he's flying around the United States, and he's making decisions, because the Pentagon's been taken out. At 9/11, by the way, Bush was in the doomsday plane. - And Bush had to make decisions quickly,

44:29 but not so quickly, not as quickly as he would've needed to have done if there's a nuclear launch. - I mean. - Six minutes. - It basically happens in three acts. There's the first 24 minutes, the next 24 minutes, and the last 24 minutes. And that is the reality of nuclear weapons. - What is the interceptor capabilities of the United States? How many nuclear missiles can be stopped? - I was at a dinner party with a very informed person, like somebody who really should have known this. This is what I was considering writing

45:14 and reporting this book, and he said to me, "Oh Annie, that would never happen, because of our powerful interceptor system." Okay, well, he's wrong, let me tell you about our powerful interceptor system. First of all, we have 44 interceptor missiles total, period, full stop, let me repeat, 44. Earlier we were talking about Russia's 1,670 deployed nuclear weapons, how are those 44 interceptor missiles gonna work? And they also have a success rate of around 50%, so they work 50% of the time. There are 40 of them in Alaska,

46:00 and there are four of them at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara. And they are responsible at about nine minutes into the scenario, after the ICBM has finished that five minute boost phase we talked about, now it's in mid-course phase, and the ground radar systems have identified, yes, this is an incoming ICBM, and now the interceptor missiles have to launch. It's essentially shooting a missile with a missile, inside the interceptor, which is just a big giant rocket, in its nose cone, it has what's called, the aptly named Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle.

46:48 There's no explosives in that thing, it's literally just going to take out the warhead, ideally, with force. So one of them is going like mock 20, and I mean, the speeds at which these two moving objects hurdling through space are going is astonishing, and the fact that interception is even possible is really remarkable, but it's only possible 50% of the time. - Is it possible that we only know about 44, but there could be a lot more? - No, impossible. That I would be willing to bet. - And how well tested are these interceptors? - Well, that's where we get the success rate that's around 50% because of the tests. And actually, the interceptor program is,

47:33 are you ready for this? It's on strategic pause right now, meaning the interceptor missiles are there, but developing them and making them more effective is on strategic pause, because they can't be made more effective. People have these fantasies that we have a system like the Iron Dome, and they see this in current events, and they're like, oh, our interceptors would do that, it's just simply not true. - Why can't an Iron Dome-like system be constructed for nuclear warheads? - We have systems I write about called the THAAD system, which is ground based, and then the Edge system, which is on vessels, and these are great at shooting down some rockets, but they can only shoot them sort of one at a time,

48:19 you cannot shoot the mother load as it's coming in. Those are the smaller systems, the tactical nuclear weapons. And by the way, our THAAD systems are all deployed overseas, and our Edge systems are all out at sea. And again, reporting that, I was like, wait, what? You have to really hunker down, are we sure about this? People really don't wanna believe this is an actual fact. After 9/11, Congress considered putting Edge's missiles and maybe even THAAD systems along the west coast of the United States to specifically deal with the threats against nuclear armed North Korea. But it hasn't done so yet, and again, you have to ask yourself, wait a minute, this is insanity, one nuclear weapon gets by any of these systems and it's full out nuclear warfare. So that's not the solution,

49:07 more nuclear weapons is not the solution. - I'm looking for a hopeful thing here about North Korea. How many deployed nuclear warheads does North Korea have? So does the current system, as we described it, the interceptors and so on, have a hope against the North Korean attack? The one that you mentioned people are worried about. - So North Korea has 50, let's say 50 nuclear weapons right now. Some NGOs put it at more than 100, it's impossible to know because North Korea's nuclear weapons program has no transparency. They're the only nuclear armed nation that doesn't announce when they do

49:54 a ballistic missile test, everyone else does, no one wants to start a nuclear war by accident. So if Russia's gonna launch an ICBM, they tell us, if we're gonna launch one, and I'm talking test runs here, with the dummy warhead, we tell them, not North Korea. That's a fact. So we're constantly up against the fear of North Korea. In the scenario, I have the incoming North Korean one megaton weapon coming in, and the interceptor system tries to shoot it down. So there's not enough time, and this, by the way, I ran by all generals from the Pentagon who run these scenarios for NORAD, and confirmed all of this as fact,

50:40 this is the situation. So in the scenario I have the nuclear ICBM coming in, the interceptor missiles try to shoot down the warhead, the capability is not like what's called shoot and look, there's not enough time to go, like, and we're gonna try to get it, we missed it, okay, let's go for another one, so you have to go. (mimicking shooting) So in my scenario, we fire off four, which is about what I was told, one to four, because you're worried about the next one that's gonna come in. You're gonna use up 10% of your missile force, of your interceptor force on one and all four miss, and that's totally plausible, - Right, how likely are mistakes, accidents, false alarms taken as real,

51:26 all this kind of stuff in this picture? So like, we've kind of assumed the detection works correctly. How likely is it possible? You've described this long chain of events that can happen, how possible is it just to make a mistake, a stupid human mistake along the way? - There have been at least six known, like absolute, like, oh my God, close calls, thank God this happened, type scenarios. One was described to me with an actual personal participant, former secretary of defense, Bill Perry, and he described what happened to him in 1979. He was not yet secretary of defense, he was the deputy director of the research and engineering,

52:13 which is like a big job at the Pentagon. The night watch fell on him, essentially, and he gets this call in the middle of the night, he's told that Russia has launched, not just ICBMs, but submarine launched ballistic missiles are coming at the United States. And he's about to notify the president that the six minute window has to begin, when he learns it was a mistake. The mistake was that there was a training tape with a nuclear war scenario. We haven't even begun to talk about the nuclear war scenarios that the Pentagon runs, an actual VHS training tape had been incorrectly inserted into a system at the Pentagon.

53:00 And so this nuclear launch showed up at that bunker beneath the Pentagon and at the bunker beneath Stratcom, because they're connected, as being real. And then it was like, oh, whoops, it's actually a simulation test tape. And Perry described to me what that was like, the pause in his spirit, and his mind, and his heart when he realized I'm about to have to tell the president that he needs to launch nuclear weapons. And he learned just in the neck of time that it was an error. And that's one of five examples. - Can you speak to maybe, is there any more color to the feelings he was feeling? Like what was your sense? And given all the experts you've talked to,

53:48 what can be said about the seconds that one feels once finding out that a launch has happened, even if that information is false information? - For me personally, that's the only firsthand story that I ever heard, because it's so rare and it's so unique. And most people in the national security system, at least in the past, have been loathed to talk about any of this. It's like the sacred oath, it's taboo. It's taboo to go against the system of systems that is making sure nuclear war never happens. Bill Perry was one of the first people who did this. And a lot of it, I believe, at least in my

54:33 lengthy conversations with him, we had a lot of Zoom calls over Covid when I began reporting this, and he had a lot to do with me feeling like I could write this book from a human point of view and not just from the mechanized systems. And I only lightly touch upon this, because it's such a fast, sweeping scenario, but Perry, for example, spent his whole life dedicated to building weapons of war, only later in life to realize this is madness. And he shared with me that it was that idea about one's grandchildren inheriting these nuclear arsenals, and the lack

55:20 of wisdom that comes with their origin stories. When you're involved in the ground up, apparently, perhaps your different kind of steward of these systems than if you just inherit them, and they are pages in a manual. - People forget, you mentioned the kind of nuclear war scenarios that the Pentagon runs. What do you know about those? - I mean, again, they are very classified. I mean, it was interesting coming across levels of classification I didn't even know existed, like ECI, for example, is exceptionally controlled information.

56:09 But the Pentagon nuclear war gaming scenarios, they're almost all still classified. One of them was declassified recently, if you can call it that. I show an image of it in the book and it's just basically like, almost entirely redacted, and then like, there'll be a date, or it'll say like, phase one, and that one was called Proud Prophet. But what was incredible about the declassification process of that is it allowed a couple of people who were there to talk about it, and that's why we have that information. And I write about Proud Prophet in the book, because it was super significant in many ways. One, it was happening right, in 1983, it was an insane moment

56:54 in nuclear arsenals, there were 60,000 nuclear weapons, right now there's 12,500, so we've come a long way baby in terms of disarmament, but there were 60,000. And by the way, that was not the ultimate high, the ultimate high was 70,000. This is insane, and Ronald Reagan was president and he orders this war game called Proud Prophet. And everyone that mattered was involved, they were running the war game scenarios, and what we learned from his declassification is that no matter how nuclear war starts, there was a bunch of different scenarios, with NATO involved, without NATO, all different scenarios, no matter how nuclear war starts,

57:41 it ends in Armageddon, it ends with everyone dead. I mean, this is shocking when you think about that coupled with the idea that all that has been done in the 40 some odd years since is, okay, let's just really lean in even harder to this theoretical phenomena of deterrence, 'cause that's all it is, it's just a statement, Lex, like deterrence will hold. Okay, well, what if it doesn't? Well, we know from Proud Prophet what happens if it doesn't. - Almost always, so there's no mechanisms in the human mind, in the human soul that stops it,

58:26 in the governments that we've created. The procedure escalates always. - I mean, here's a crazy nomenclature jargon thing for you, ready? Escalate to deescalate, that's what comes out of it. Think about what I just said, escalate to deescalate. So someone strikes you with a nuclear weapon, you're gonna escalate it. General Hayden recently said, he was Stratcom commander, he was sort of saber rattling with North Korea during Covid and he said, "They need to know, if they launch one nuclear weapon, we launch one, if they launch two, we launch two." But it's actually more than that, they launch one, we launch 80. That's called escalate to deescalate, like pound the you know what out of them to get them to stop.

59:14 - But I mean, there is, to make a case for that, there is a reason to the madness, because you want to threaten this gigantic response. But when it comes to it, the seconds before, there is still a probability that you'll pull back. - Which brings us to the most terrifying facts that I learned in all of that, and that has to do with errors. Not errors of, like we spoke about a minute ago with a simulation test tape, I'm talking about if one madman, one nihilistic madman were to launch a nuclear weapon as I write in this scenario,

1:00:00 and we needed to escalate to deescalate, we needed to send nuclear weapons at, let's say North Korea as I do in my scenario. Well, what is completely unknown to 98% of the planet is that not only do the Russians have a very flawed satellite system, so that they cannot interpret what is happening properly, but there is a absolutely existential flaw in the system, which Secretary of Defense, Leon Panneta confirmed with me. Which is that our ICBMs do not have enough range, if we launch a counter attack against, say North Korea, our ICBMs must fly over Russia.

1:00:48 They must fly over Russia. So imagine saying, oh no, no, these 82 warheads that are gonna actually strike the Northern Korean peninsula are not coming for you Russia, our adversary right now that we're sort of saber rattling with, just trust us. And that is where nuclear war unfolds into Armageddon. And that hole in national security is shocking, and as Panetta told me, no one wants to discuss it. - And if one nuclear weapon does reach its target, I presume communication breaks down completely, or like there's a high risk of breakdown of communication.

1:01:36 - Well, let's back up, we are both presumptuous to assume that communication could even happen prior to, and let me give you a very specific example, during the Ukraine war, if perhaps you remember, I think it was in November of 2022, news reports erroneously stated that a Russian rocket, a Russian missile had hit Poland, a NATO country, it turned out to be a mistake, but for several hours, this was actually the information that was all over the news, breaking news. 36 hours later, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, gave a press conference and talked about this and admitted

1:02:21 that he could not reach his Russian counterpart during those 36 hours. He could not reach him. How are you going to not have an absolute Armageddon-like furor with nuclear weapons in the air if people can't get on the phone during a ground war? - I'd like to believe that there's people in major nations that don't give a damn about the bullshit of politics and can always just pick up the phone, sort of very close to the top, but not at the very top, and just cut through the bullshit of it

1:03:08 in situations like this. - I hope that's true, I doubt it is, and lemme tell you why, and neither you nor I are political from what I gather, so I just write about Potus, President of the United States. You have no idea what my politics are, because they shouldn't matter, no one should be for nuclear war, or no one should be for national insecurity, yes, you wanna have a strong nation, but once you get into politics, then you're talking about sycophants. And the more a political leader becomes divisive, becomes polemic, the more his platform is predicated on hating the other side, either within his own country or with alleged enemy nations.

1:03:55 The more you surround yourself, as we see in the current day, with sycophants, with people who will tell you not only what they think you wanna hear, but will help them to hold onto power. So you don't have wise decision makers, long gone are the days where we had presidents who had advisors on both sides of the aisle. That's really important, because you wanna have differing opinions, but as things become more viperous, both here in the United States and in nuclear armed nations, all bets are off at whether your advisors are gonna give you good advice. - Who are the people around the president of the United States that give advice

1:04:42 in this six minute window? Maybe you could speak to the detail of that, but also to the spirit of the way they see the world, how many of them are warmongers? How many of them are kind of big picture peace, humanity type of thinkers? - Well, again, we're talking about that six minute window, so it's not exactly like you can, let me put a pot of coffee on and really tell me what you think and we can strategize here, you have your SecDef and your chairman, maybe the vice chairman, and, okay, we haven't even begun to talk about the fact that at the same time these advisors also have a parallel concern and that's called continuity of government. So while they're trying to advise on the nuclear counterstrike in response

1:05:28 to the incoming nuclear missile, they have to be thinking how are we gonna keep the government functioning when the missiles start hitting, when the bombs start going off? And that is about getting yourself out of the Pentagon, let's say, getting yourself to one of these nuclear bunkers that I write about at length in the book. So how much can you ask of a human? Because it comes down to a human, secretary of defense is a human. And imagine that job while trying to advise the president. And then there's also a really interesting term, which I learned about called jamming the president, which is often understood in Washington that the military advisors would, we don't know if this is legit, we've never seen it

1:06:14 put to the test, but jamming the president means the military advisors are gonna push for a really aggressive counter attack immediately. And again, you're the president who's not really been paying attention to this, because he has many other things to deal with, speed is not conducive to wisdom. - Can you speak to the jamming the president? So your sense is the advisors would by default be pushing for aggressive counter attack. - That is a term in sort of the national security nuclear command and control historical documentation that many of the people that you might call the more dovish type people are worried about,

1:07:01 that the more hawkish people are going to, the military advisors are gonna be jamming the president to make these decisions about which targets, not if, but what. - Right, which targets. The argument will be about which targets, - Yes, - not about if. - Yes. - I hope that even the war mongers would at this moment, because what underlies the idea of you wanting to go to war? It's power, it's like wanting to destroy the enemy and be the big kid on the block. But with nuclear war, it just feels like that falls apart. Do do you think war mongers actually believe they can win a nuclear war? - Well, you've raised a really important question

1:07:46 that we look to the historical record for that answer, because astonishingly, all of this began, like when Russia first got the bomb in 1949, the powers that be, and I write about them in the book in a setup for the moment of launch, it's called how we got here. And you see, and I cite declassified documents from some of these early meetings where nuclear war plans were being laid out. And absolutely, back in the 1950s, the generals and the admirals that were running the nuclear command and control system believed that we could fight

1:08:32 and win a nuclear war despite hundreds of millions of people dying. This was the prevailing thought. And only over time did the kind of concept come into play that no, we can never have a nuclear war, it's the famous Gorbachev and Reagan joint statement. A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. But before that, many people believed that it could be won, and they were preparing for that. - Not to be political and not to be ageist, but do cognitive abilities and all that kind of stuff come into play here? So if so much is riding on the president,

1:09:20 is there tests that are conducted? Is there regular training procedures on the president that you're aware of? Do you know? - I don't think that has anything to do with ageism. I think it's an earnest question, a really powerful one, and if people were to ask that question of themselves, or their sort of dinner party guests, or their family around the dinner table guests, you might come to a real good conclusion about how bad our political system is and how bad our presidential candidates are. Because why on earth there would be two candidates, one of whom has cognitive problems, and the other of whom has judgment problems. These are the two biggest issues with the nuclear launch, judgment and cognition.

1:10:07 And so where's the young-ish, thoughtful, forward-looking wise, dedicated civil servant running for president? I know that sounds fantastical, but I wish it weren't. - So that's one of the things you should really think about when voting for president, is this scenario that we've been describing, these six minutes. Imagine the man or woman sitting there for six minutes waiting for the pot of coffee. - But I think about that issue with any war, I mean, prior to writing

1:10:55 "Nuclear War, A Scenario", I previously wrote six books on military and intelligence programs designed to prevent nuclear war. And I believe, the president as commander in chief, should be of the highest character possible, because the programs, the wars that we have fought since World War ii have all been, how many octogenarian sources have I interviewed? I'm talking about Nobel laureates, and weapons designer, and spy pilots, and engineers in general, they've all said to me with great pride, we prevented World War iii, nuclear World War iii.

1:11:43 But that idea that the commander in chief and everyone within the national security apparatus, should be making really good decisions about war, it's the oldest cliche in the world that the wars are fought by the young kids, and that is not a cliche, it's true. And so the character part about the president should be in play whether we're thinking about nuclear war or any war, in my opinion. - Well, I agree with you first of all, but it feels like when nuclear war, one person becomes, like exponentially more important, with regular war, the decision to go to war or not, advisors start mattering more, there's judgment issues.

1:12:30 You could start to make arguments for sort of more leeway in terms of what kind of people we elect. It seems like with nuclear war, there's no leeway, it's like one person can resist the jamming the president force, the war mongers, all the calculation involved in considering what are the errors, the mistakes, the missiles flying over Russia, the full dynamics of the geopolitics going on in the world, consider all of humanity, the history of humanity, the future of humanity, all of it just loaded in to make a decision, then it becomes much more important that your cognitive abilities are strong

1:13:17 and your judgment abilities against powerful, wise people just as a human being are strong. So I think that's something to really, really consider when you vote for president. But to which degree is it really on the president versus to the people advising. - Oh no, it's on the president, the president has to make the call. And that six minute window happens so fast, I mean, the president is gonna be being moved for part of that time, the Secret Service is gonna be up against Stratcom, Stratcom saying, we need the launch orders, and the Secret Service is gonna be saying, we need to move the president. So it's not as much that he's delegating the issues, it's more like the issue is being postponed,

1:14:03 because there is only one issue, for the president to say these targets, for him to choose from the Denny's menu, okay, this is what we're gonna go with. And then this astonishing thing happens, the president takes out his wallet, he has a card in it that's colloquially called the biscuit, and that card with the codes matches up an item in the briefcase in the football, that then is received by an officer underneath the bunk, underneath the Pentagon in that bunker, it's a call and response, Lex, it's like alpha zeta, that's it, and then back so that the individual in the bunker realizes they are getting

1:14:50 the command from the president. And then that order is passed to Stratcom. And Stratcom, the commander of Stratcom, and I interviewed a former commander of Stratcom, commander of Stratcom then follows orders, which is he delivers the launch orders to the nuclear triad. And what's done is done. - What would you do if you were the commander of Stratcom in that situation, what would you do? Because my gut reaction right now, if you just throw me in there, I would refuse orders. - Okay, so good question, I asked that exact question to one of my very helpful sources on the book,

1:15:38 Dr. Glenn McDuff, who is at Los Alamos, and who for a while was the classified, they have a museum that's classified within the lab, and he was the historian in charge of it. So he's a nuclear weapons engineer, he worked on Star Wars during the Reagan era, and he does a lot having to do with the history of Los Alamos, and by the way, the Oppenheimer movie really, 'cause I've reported on nuclear weapons for 12 years now, and Oppenheimer movie had a very, to me, positive impact on Los Alamos's transparency with people like me. They had a real willingness to share information. I think before, perhaps they were on their heels

1:16:23 feeling they needed to be on the defensive, but now they're much more forthcoming, they were super helpful. I can tell you the origin story of the football, which they declassified for the book. But I asked this question to Dr. Glenn McDuff, like in a different manner, I said, "Is there a chance that the Stratcom commander would defy orders? And he said, "Annie, you have a better chance winning Powerball." - Why do you think, what's his intuition behind that? - You don't wind up a Stratcom commander unless you are someone who follows orders. You follow orders. - You don't think there's a deep humanity there?

1:17:10 Because his intuition is about everything we know so far, but this situation has never happened in the history of earth. - All right, so you're raising a really tricky, interesting conundrum here, because during COVID, when President Trump and the leader of North Korea were kind of locked in various relationships with one another, good, bad, threatening, non-threatening, friendly, just bananas you might say, like not presidential behavior. If you were someone watching c-span like I do, nerding out on what Stratcom was actually saying about all this, you noticed that Stratcom commanders were speaking out

1:17:56 publicly to Congress more so than I had ever seen before. And this issue came up, would you defy presidential order? So the caveat, I would say, to Mcduff's answer of easier to win the Powerball, is that if the commander of Stratcom interpreted the president's behavior to be unreliable, to be non-presidential, then dot dot dot, but now you're into some really radical territory. - Well, I mean, fundamentally,

1:18:44 it feels like just looking at all the presidents

…