All language subtitles for Minute By Minute Of What Happens If A Nuclear Bomb Hits & How To Survive

No matter how nuclear war begins, it

ends in 72 minutes and 5 billion people

would be dead. Do you think there will

be a nuclear war? So, I've interviewed

former secretaries of defense, the

former nuclear sub commander, the Secret

Service, and what I learned was

oh my god. Annie Jacobsen, investigative

researcher and writer who specializes in

uncovering the world's biggest secrets.

We are one misunderstanding away from

nuclear apocalypse. And yet you have

presidents threatening nuclear war. In

fact, the president of the United States

doesn't need to ask anyone to launch a

nuclear missile.

It makes me realize how important the

decision to pick our leaders is. Nothing

could be more important. Could you play

out a scenario where nuclear war broke

out?

Yes, and I can describe in painstaking

horrific detail precisely what happens.

So,

but after nuclear war, the survivors

would be forced to live underground and

envy the dead.

Annie,

is there anyone you interviewed that

brought you to tears? Yes, I met a woman

who was a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb,

and I haven't written about this yet.

But someone I interviewed and someone

that meant a lot to me wired that

nuclear weapon that was dropped on

Nagasaki.

Can you speak about the impact that it

had on both those individuals? Mhm, and

it's horrifying.

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episode.

Annie,

you wrote this book about nuclear war

and published it in March 2024.

The timing

of this book seems to be a little bit

coincidental when I

or not, when I look at what's going on

in the world at the moment.

Why did you write a book about nuclear

war? Mhm. And why did you write it now?

As an investigative journalist,

before nuclear war a scenario, I had

written six

previous books, all of which are about

the military and intelligence

organizations in the United States,

DARPA, Area 51, always the Pentagon, the

CIA. That's my That's my beat.

And think about how many sources I have

in each book, 100 or more. How many

covering all the wars, by the way, since

World War II.

All these intelligence and military

programs

uh intensely kinetic,

and think of how many people said to me

with a kind of

pride, I dedicated my life to preventing

nuclear World War III. That's always the

idea in the Defense Department and in

the CIA. We are there to prevent nuclear

war. And so, during the previous

administration,

former President Trump,

there was this presidential rhetoric

going on.

You may recall fire and fury.

Trump and the president of North Korea,

the leader of North Korea, threatening

this kind of thing, and I, like many,

I'm sure, began to wonder, my god, what

if deterrence, another word for

prevention, fails?

And that is the question that I put to

all of those sources in the book, and

that result is nuclear war a scenario.

What was your intention?

I wanted to show in horrific detail

just how

horrible, just how apocalyptic nuclear

war will be.

Because I think many people have

forgotten

or don't know to begin with

the consequences

of a nuclear exchange. As I show in the

book, almost certainly,

if a nuclear exchange happens, and we're

talking strategic ballistic missiles, it

will not stop until the world ends.

And we are talking about in seconds and

minutes, not in days and weeks and

months.

That is astonishing.

When did you start writing the book?

When was the first word written?

So, probably during COVID was the first

word written, but keep in mind, my

reporting on nuclear weapons goes back

my entire career. My first

book, Area 51,

is about a a joint CIA Air Force base

out there in the Nevada desert inside

a secret test and training range where

the United States government used to

explode nuclear weapons.

Atmospheric nuclear weapons in the '50s.

And so, my when I was reporting Area 51,

I I wound up quite literally, I did not

intend to, but I wound up interviewing

the people who armed, wired, and fired

those nuclear weapons, early Manhattan

Project members.

And they That was kind of my B story of

Area 51.

And what I learned was like,

oh my god. And I was also surprised to

learn that most people didn't even know

we, the American government, set off 100

some odd atmospheric nuclear weapons in

the desert in Nevada testing them.

So, my reporting, to answer That's a

long-winded answer of I've been on this

issue

peripherally,

you know, for years, for more than a

decade, but the idea in this book, the

word one, as you asked, was like, once I

understood that nuclear war is a

sequence,

it begins the first fraction of a second

after detection,

then I could see clearly, oh my god,

it's a ticking clock scenario.

Because it just all happens so fast.

I'll ask that again because So, if you

started writing the first word of the

book on nuclear war in COVID, sort of

2020,

Mhm.

2020, roughly? 2021?

Around there.

Yeah. 2020, 2021, yeah. Since then,

things have escalated around the world

in terms of conflict in a way that I

imagine you couldn't have forecasted.

And even it's almost ironic that in the

month that your book was published,

Putin moved I think he moved nuclear

weapons into Belarus, and the rhetoric

and he started saying that he would use

them. And if you look at the terminology

him and his commanders are using towards

the world, it seems like we're at a

moment that I haven't seen in my

lifetime where the subject of nuclear

war seems to be more real than ever

before.

You're absolutely right, and that is

astonishing because in 2021, when I

began the interviews,

people were forthcoming with me, you

know, as you know from the list of

sources I've interviewed, former

secretaries of defense, former nuclear

sub commander, you know, former STRATCOM

commander, former FEMA director, former

cyber chief.

And a lot of these individuals shared

with me in 2021 this idea that wow, the

world has kind of forgotten that the

nuclear

threat is always there.

And so, over the course of reporting and

writing, you're absolutely right that

the geopolitical

temperature of the world has escalated

to a point that you have not seen in

your lifetime and I haven't seen in my

lifetime.

Setting the stage even more, we talked

about how possible nuclear war is, but

one thing I learned from reading your

book, which actually surprised me,

was that it doesn't take thousands of

people to agree on a nuclear war for it

to begin.

In the case of the United States, it

only takes one person to make that

decision,

which I find quite unnerving that

there's one individual

that can theoretically make the decision

that would destroy the earth.

Uh you're absolutely right, and this

kind of thing is surprising to almost

everyone. One of the things that I

strive to do in my reporting is take

very complex

science and technology, military issues,

and simplify them down for the layman,

just for the average Joe or the average

Jane. And I do that by interviewing

the really smart, really knowledgeable

people on those subjects. I have two

things going for me, perhaps, as an

investigative journalist that help in

conveying a story, is that I'm not a

scientist, and so, I can ask questions

that the average person would ask, like,

really try and help me understand this,

whatever this is. And then also that I

have a real interest in

making what is conveyed to me

make sense

to other people in their lives, right?

So, and also, perhaps, make them

realize,

I never even stopped to think about the

fact, how strange is it that the United

States president, this is what you learn

in the book and you're talking about,

the United States president has sole

presidential authority to launch a

nuclear war. What does that mean? It's

exactly like it sounds. What's so

interesting is a lot of this stuff, this

nomenclature that gets thrown at you,

if you just break it down, it's sole,

solo,

presidential, he's the POTUS,

authority. He doesn't have to ask anyone

for permission.

Not the SECDEF, not the Chairman of the

Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the Congress.

I love the worried look on your face in

this moment because it is Once you know

that,

you say Well, first you might Google, is

it really true? And you will get, for

example, on Reddit, like, that's not

really true. You'll get like hundreds of

thousands of people,

you know, coming in with their opinions

about how that's not really true.

Well, it is really true.

It's absolutely true. And in fact,

during the former President Trump

administration,

Congress became so sort of

And I want to say motivated or alarmed

by this issue, meaning they were being

asked questions by the powers that be,

is this actually true? That they

released a report stating specifically,

and I quote in the book, yes, it is

true. As Commander in Chief, the

President has this sole authority. He

doesn't need to ask anyone.

And hopefully,

sort of my bringing sort of concepts

like that to the fore right away, the

reader can then become engaged and they

say, well, that's weird. Why? And then I

can give you a very simple answer

without

necessarily taking you through the whole

history of presidential authority, but

it has to do with the ticking clock of

it.

And I explain to you right away that a

ballistic missile

travels from one continent in It's

called an ICBM. People have heard of

that. Intercontinental ballistic

missile. Again,

exactly like it sounds. It can travel

from one continent to the next in

roughly 30 minutes carrying a nuclear

warhead to strike a target.

Once you realize, wait a minute, there

are only 30 minutes,

this isn't like, hey guys, should we go

have a war in Iraq? Let's discuss this.

Let's debate this. Let's take it to the

Congress.

This is There is a ballistic missile,

sir, coming at the United States, and

you must act.

And that's why, in the simplest layman's

terms, sole presidential authority

exists.

So, let's define then

what these weapons are. We Many of us

have seen that film Oppenheimer. We saw

them out in the desert, I think, in New

Mexico playing playing with all these

weapons and eventually making this one

bomb that they would then drop drop in

Japan.

The weapon we see in that film, which

was in the 1940 made in the 1940s that

ultimately led to the end of the war, is

that the same weapon that we're talking

about today?

No.

Well, in in in sort of principle, in

yes, meaning it's an atomic bomb, but

there's two things that separate where

we are now.

One has to do with the size and the

power of the bomb.

So, the the In 1945, there were atomic

bombs. Now, there are thermonuclear

bombs. So, an atomic bomb is used inside

a thermonuclear weapon as the trigger.

Okay.

It is a bomb inside a bomb. And the

power of the thermonuclear bomb is so

astonishingly,

you know, destructive, you can read the

details. I interviewed Richard Garwin,

who designed the first thermonuclear

bomb for Edward Teller when he was 24

years old. I interviewed him, he's in

his 90s. He explains to me, and I

explain to you,

what the power is behind that. But this

So, the atomic bomb and and it has to do

with size. Like, the old atomic bomb,

the one that was dropped on Hiroshima

was the size of a small elephant.

Okay, 15 kilotons in a big giant

elephant-sized bomb inside of an

aircraft having to fly from Tinian

Island to over Hiroshima where it drops

in an aircraft.

That all changed

when we brought the Nazi scientists to

us. Ooh, let's have Let's figure out how

to do two things. Let's figure out how

to

create more powerful bombs. That's the

result The result is the thermonuclear

bomb. And let's make them smaller.

We can't load an elephant-sized weapon

into the top of a ballistic missile. It

needs to be smaller. And so, so much of

this buildup was about creating more

powerful weapons to be smaller in size.

And then you see the military-industrial

complex. You see You can imagine, and I

do this as a history lesson in just a

few short pages to try to bring readers

up to speed without losing the drama of

the narrative.

And

the result, so if you flash forward to

where we are now, which is where we've

been for a very long time, is a nuclear

triad, just like it sounds, three parts.

We have ICBMs, silos under the ground.

So, those are weapons hidden in the

ground? In the United States, there are

400 of them. There were more. Now, there

400. You can find out where they are on

a map.

They're in silos, underground silos

across the Midwest and the West.

Then we have our nuclear-armed,

nuclear-powered submarines that carry

that same kind of concept of a ballistic

missile

with a warhead in its nose cone.

We have those same systems on

submarines.

And the technology behind it is

astonishing. I take the reader through

it fast from the experts who explain it

to me in a digestible way.

And those systems lurk around in the

oceans

all 24 hours a day,

7 days a week, 365

days a year. They're called the

handmaidens of the apocalypse. They're

almost impossible to find, right? They

are impossible to find. The nuclear The

former nuclear force sub commander,

um

Admiral Connor,

had this great way of describing it to

me. When I said, like, how hard is it to

find a sub? He said, Annie, it's easier

to find a grapefruit-sized

object in space

than a nuclear sub under the sea.

And it's not just the United States that

have these weapons, which I think is

important to say. There's many people

listening all around the world now who

have these weapons in their country,

too. You list um several of those

countries. I think it's nine countries

in total that have nuclear weapons,

right? What are those countries? I know

we have them back in the UK.

Yeah, there are nine nuclear-armed

nations. Also really interesting to

think about that the whole sort of

let's have a triad. Let's have all these

weapons that we will use We will have a

concept of mutually assured destruction,

so we will have these weapons, but we

will never use them because everyone

would be destroyed. Those concepts go

back to the '50s when there were only

two nuclear-armed nations, the United

States and Soviet Russia. So,

you know, really making all of this more

precarious, talk

looping back to your,

you know, notion that, like, my God, we

are at this precipice

of

danger, which we are, is because there

are nine nuclear-armed nations, many of

which are in direct conflict with others

or their neighbors. And they are the US,

Russia, China,

the UK, France, India and Pakistan,

Israel,

North Korea.

And there's some threat that Iran

are trying to Absolutely. I mean, that

is a very, very, very significant

threat. And you really have to look I

think the book

I stay away from the sort of

geopolitical

posturing or analysis or even,

um

you know, opinion about the political

aspect of all of this. But I think

readers get to take their away there and

have, because I have read a lot of the

responses and had a lot of really

interesting conversations since the book

published a month ago.

But yes, you can take away what you

think about the fact, what, my God, you

put a 10th nuclear-armed nation in here.

That is Iran.

How

more destabilizing is that going to be

to safety and security?

And when I look at the list of countries

um you've written about that have these

nuclear weapons,

the US, Russia, they're both basically

in proxy wars at the moment with

obviously the the war going on in

Ukraine.

Think about Pakistan and India, um

Israel and Iran, you know, they're both

at conflicts flat throwing different

missiles at each other and drones at

each other at the moment.

Um the UK and and France are obviously

part of NATO, so they're kind of

sucked into the whole Russia-Ukraine-US

conflict that's going on, that proxy war

there. These countries right now, many

of them, I think the majority of them,

are involved in a direct war or some

form of proxy war as it is.

And with many of these wars, it's hard

to find the way that it ends, the way

out, the kind of golden bridge, because

Ukraine aren't going to relent, so

Russia aren't going to necessarily

decide one day that they're going to

lose the war. That would cause

significant ramifications for Putin, his

reputation, and Russia as a whole. The

US can't let Ukraine lose for a variety

of geopolitical reasons. And then at the

same time, all this conflict started in

Israel following the the attack in

Israel, which has sucked Iran in and

much of that region. It's all seems

like,

you know, these are the countries right

now that are involved in

the conflict that is scaring many much

many of us

um in a significant way. And if all

these countries operate in a similar way

where there's one individual that can

make the decision

to release those weapons.

It is quite scary.

The UN Secretary General said recently

that we are one

misunderstanding, one miscalculation

away from nuclear Armageddon.

And so the scary part of it is that when

you look at that sort of verbage, right?

When I talk about you know, nuclear

Armageddon, nuclear apocalypse, nuclear

holocaust.

Those are words out of the mouths of

some of these leaders. So there is a

very clear notion that if nuclear war

starts, it ends

civilization. That is almost certainly

known among the leaders. And yet

you have people like the president of

Russia and the president of the United

States

and the leader of North Korea

throwing around threats and terms. You

know, the leader of North Korea recently

accused the United States of having a

sinister intention of provoking nuclear

war.

I mean, that is a provocation on top of

a provocation in you know, embedded in

but to your point

what's the point of being scared?

Well, the point is

to realize that passivity

is not necessarily the answer. That your

knowledge of the situation leads to

change. That's just the that's just the

history of of civilization. One of the

things that did make me think when I

realized that there's one individual in

in the United States, where we are now,

who can make that decision and that

there's basically like someone following

the president with a briefcase called

the it's like the football or something.

Yes. What is that football for people

that don't know? Yeah. And so so now

that people know about the football or

when they read it, you'll you'll see you

can see in photographs of the president,

you will almost if he's in frame, you'll

see the mill aid. That's the military

aid. An individual who is assigned to be

with the president 24/7 365. And inside

the football, it's called the emergency

satchel

are two important things. There's

instrumentation that allows the

president to be identified as the

president to the National Military

Command Center, which is the nuclear

bunker beneath the Pentagon.

Okay? So it's a it's a call and response

authentic authentication.

And then there is something called

colloquially the black book.

And it was told to me the reason it's

called the black book is cuz it involves

so much death.

And what the black book is is a list of

nuclear strike options for the president

to choose from. And so once the

president is notified that a ballistic

missile is coming at the United States

and he has to make a decision about a

counterattack

he must look quickly because as you

learn in the book and as I learned from

presidents

uh there is a 6-minute window of

decision-making.

And so there's no time for a round table

discussion.

There is a list of options that has been

pre-prepared

for the president to choose from.

And I interviewed for the book someone

who actually

was responsible for some of those

decisions in the '80s.

And he

described to me in appalling detail

what it was like to have worked on this

in the Pentagon, like worked out

numerically different targets and why

they would be targets in said strike XYZ

or Q against said nation.

And then later seeing the black book and

realizing the like sort of transmutation

of that information to what was

described by the only mill aid who's

ever gone on the record speaking about

this as essentially like a Denny's menu

list of options.

And

so you understand that this list is so

watered down

into strike options and there is so

little time that the president in

essence has really no idea

what he's striking and how many millions

of people will be killed.

When I

hear that, it makes me realize how

important the decision to pick our

leaders is.

Something I didn't realize before.

Nothing could be more important. And yet

I learned in the book and I'm talking

about from former secretaries of

defense, people very close to the

president, that most presidents are

ill-informed about their role as

commander in chief in a nuclear war

because and it was said to me, most

don't want to know.

And again, so this brings us back to

that paradox of deterrence. The original

question I asked in writing and

reporting this book, what if deterrence

fails? Deterrence is this idea, we will

have so many nuclear weapons pointed at

the other side, they will have so many

nuclear weapons pointed at us, no one

would be insane enough to let any of

them loose.

That's how we all stay safe.

Another way of saying deterrence is more

nuclear weapons make us more safe. You

can decide if you think that's a little

Orwellian, but that is what exists.

Okay, so with that in mind, we should

really be doing

mental

checks on our leaders every 3 months

because we've all probably

had an experience with someone who's had

a

episode.

You know, and I'll I'll leave it at at

episode because there's a variety of

different types of episodes one can

have. And I was thinking, well, if the

president just has a bit of an episode

and gets a little bit paranoid or you

know, sort of has a little bit of a

schizophrenic paranoia

which can happen to people for a variety

of different unpredictable reasons then

that president could potentially make a

decision to end the planet and there

doesn't seem to be a

defense mechanism to stop him doing that

or her doing that. You're reminding me

of a famous story when Nixon was

president and it was during the

Watergate scandal. He probably knew the

end of his presidency was near. And he

was very drunk one night and he began to

threaten or rather he just began to

talk, you know,

in in a sort of extremely verbose

drunken manner about how he could end

the world or kill tens of millions of

people with a push of a button. And his

it is said that that Kissinger called up

the military and said, if the president

orders any kind of a nuclear strike,

talk to me first.

Really?

And you'd say that you think that would

have happened?

I mean, we you know It's hard to know,

isn't it?

All of these stories, unless they come

out of the mouth of the individual who

actually said that, are in essence

stories. So there's an element of truth

to them for sure. Um you know, the

actual command and control, who's going

to follow the rules, people ask me that

question often. And I took that exact

question like

you know, I think people have a naivete

that if you're in the nuclear command

and control, whether you're a missileer

in a underground silo or a submariner on

a sub that you might when you get this

command, suddenly have this heart, you

know, like in a Hollywood movie, have

this moment where you say, my goodness,

I'm going to save the planet rather than

destroy it.

I put that question to Dr. Glenn McDuff,

the

historian at the classified

museum at Los Alamos, the one you and I

can't go see.

Um and I said, do you think that could

happen? And he said

Annie, you have a better chance at

winning Powerball

than betting on someone in the nuclear

chain of command and control

to defy orders. And I said, why? And he

said, well

you are trained to follow orders.

I spoke to a CIA agent or should I say

former CIA agent called Andy Bustamante.

Might have seen him, he did does some

podcasts. And

after speaking to him, I I completely

agree because as he said, he was trained

to

basically he was selected and trained on

the basis that he would

follow orders in that moment and they

even do drills to make sure dummy drills

to make sure that they're prepared, I

guess psychologically to follow through

on those instructions. It made me think

as well that if if um

what if the president's dead? What if

the president is hit by a nuclear weapon

from another country and now they can no

longer make the decision. Is the

decision deferred on to somebody else?

Well, I take the reader through that

precisely because those are the kind of

questions that I had to ask of my

sources as I was reporting this.

On the one hand as I was learning what

happens in the seconds and minutes you

know, after a launch is detected because

we have a satellite system that detects

the launch of a nuclear weapon in under

a fraction of a second. But it's not

always very trustworthy. This is why I'm

concerned.

The ours is very trustworthy as far as I

understand. It's called SIBERS. It's

built by Lockheed and it's astonishingly

powerful. Other nations do not have that

same kind of technology.

Cuz I was reading about the sort of

historic

mistakes that were made. Sometimes

people thought there was a a nuclear

bomb or a strike coming and it was

actually just a bunch of swans.

Absolutely. So I was a little bit like

you know.

these are these are you know, this is

the one miscalculation, one

misunderstanding away from nuclear

Armageddon.

What what are those instances from

history where the nuclear detection

system was triggered and someone in some

country decided um

not to follow through on a notification?

I think the most interesting stories

that I report come from the person who

is an actual first-hand witness to it

because what often happens is the

telephone game, you know, whereby one

person tells the story and then you

imagine you add a detail. So, I write

about a couple of them in the book, but

one of them came to me first-hand and

I'll share that with you, which was

former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry.

And he was on the night watch during the

Carter administration. He wasn't the

Secretary of Defense yet. He had like

the job before that, the Director of

Research and Engineering at the

Pentagon. But it was his his night watch

inform the president job.

And he was told by the National Military

Command Center, which is the bunker

beneath the Pentagon,

that

there were ballistic missiles on the way

from Soviet Russia.

This was confirmed

by the nuclear bunker beneath Offutt Air

Force Base in Nebraska, the STRATCOM

bunker.

And not only were they intercontinental

ballistic missiles flying at the United

States, but they were sub-launched

ballistic missiles coming at the United

States. And it was a massive mother lode

of warheads.

And Perry described to me as I recount

in the book what that was like

to try and process

in your mind oh my god, I'm going to

have to tell the president

and going to have to and he is going to

have to make a counterattack.

And

within a matter of minutes

he got word that it was a mistake.

And a mistake, you might ask like a

mistake? How does a mistake happen? What

he told me was that it was a VHS tape,

a simulated war game,

a simulated attack by the Soviet Union

against the United States.

And the VHS tape

had mistakenly been inserted into a

machine in the nuclear bunker beneath

the Pentagon and because it is linked to

STRATCOM,

it was seen in both places.

And Perry said to me, it looked real

because it was meant to look real.

Hm.

There was a president you talk about

that played a nuclear war game

and discovered that

there could be no winners.

So,

Proud Prophet Proud Prophet, yeah. is

one of the few

a very rare declassified nuclear war

game. People talk about, you know,

jealously guarded secrets in the United

States government. You can be sure that

anything having to do with nuclear war

gaming is way up there

in the top secrets along with what is

actually in that black book.

But the Proud Prophet war game was

declassified. Reagan had ordered it. I

don't believe he participated in it. His

sec desk everybody in the commit nuclear

command and control participated in for

two weeks in 1983.

And this is declassified. I reprint some

of it in the book. And if you have a

look at it, you might say to yourself,

well, what's the point of declassifying

something that looks like this? It's

just black. It's like there's a number

here and a word there and a page number,

but mostly it's entirely redacted.

And so, what's the point of

declassifying it? Well, for the public,

something very valuable came out of

that, which is it allowed a certain

civilian who was participating, Yale

professor named Paul Bracken,

to actually speak about it in a general

way. He couldn't, you know,

couldn't tell OPSEC, but he could

generally talk about it. And what he

said in his own book was that no matter

how nuclear war begins,

NATO's involved, NATO's not involved,

China's involved, China's no matter how

it begins, it ends in nuclear

Armageddon. And Bracken's words was that

everyone left really depressed.

Nuclear Armageddon essentially means the

world is destroyed. Nuclear Armageddon

is the world is destroyed. And when you

get to the end of the book, which

happens in 72 minutes, and that comes

from something that

former STRATCOM director General Keeler

said to me when we were discussing and

interviewing and I said we I asked him

about what could happen if there was a

nuclear exchange between Russia and the

United States and he said, the world

could end in the next couple of hours.

So, from where we are now in this

conversation to the end of this

conversation, if a nuclear war broke out

when we were sat here,

by the end of this conversation,

basically the entire world would be

destroyed. And we you and I wouldn't

even know before the first missile hit.

That was shocking to me to have that

confirmed in essence by

uh Obama's

FEMA director. So, FEMA, the Federal

Emergency Management Agency, is the is

the agency in the United States that's

in charge of disasters, right? So, if

there's a hurricane or a flood or an

earthquake, FEMA steps in to help the

people. They have something called

population planning.

Craig Fugate was Obama's FEMA director

for 8 years and he just covered an

extraordinary amount of catastrophes in

the United States. He was also

responsible for planning for a nuclear

war. He told me that they did that. He

also said, we plan for asteroid strikes.

These are called low probability, high

consequence events.

But what Fugate told me that was

shocking is that

there is no population protection

planning in a nuclear war because

everyone will be dead.

And he explained to me that there's

nothing

that that that that he could do as FEMA

director. He would really be putting his

efforts from this nuclear bunker where

he would be, which is called Mount

Weather, he would be putting his efforts

on

the continuity of government issues, the

continuity of like the government has

what are called essential functions. So,

and you know, as a nuclear war is

happening, the government is trying to

prepare to keep the government running,

which is a form of fantasy in itself.

And when you read Fugate's interviews

with me, he's just so candid about how

there is nothing anyone can do. And you

know, what he told me was so shocking, I

went back to him

and said like, I just want to really

make sure these are your actual quotes

that you that that

And he absolutely, you know, he was one

of the first people

to write an Amazon review of the book

after it published here in the United

States.

And I find that

both terrifying, but also heartening for

this reason is that a lot of these

people who leave office because my

sources are all former

and then the title.

They when they are in the command and

control, they are very focused on doing

their job. Hence what we spoke about

earlier about like following orders.

They are civil servants. They are

dedicated civil servants. They believe

in national security. They believe in,

you know, the perseverance of

government. And then they leave office

and they are just regular people again.

And that's when the heart

I think begins to lead and particularly

as people get older

because I interview a lot of people in

their 80s and 90s.

And then they begin to think about

what this means in terms of legacy.

What is nuclear command and control

really as buttoned up

as this is might be them talking, you

know,

as I thought.

And is it a good idea

in a world that is so rapidly changing

both geopolitically and also in terms of

technology?

Was there one individual you met that

comes to mind when I ask who the most

troubled person was in terms of the work

they participated in or troubled in the

context of

what they know and what it means for

humanity and how they're grappling with

that? The most concerned and sort of the

most activated by all means would be

former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry.

And he's now in his 90s and I I don't

believe he's doing interviews anymore.

But it it's not surprising that Perry

shared with me his intense worry about

all of this because he has been actively

working on this and

you know, for at least 15, 20 years. And

when I say this, I mean bringing the

information to the public so that the

public is aware. He wrote his own book

with a colleague called The Button. And

he has, you know, really

he did a podcast called At the Brink.

And what's fascinating is Perry spent

most of his life dedicated to what you

might call the military-industrial

complex, right? To the research and

development of weapon systems that I

write about in my other books,

the DARPA book in particular because

this is all part and parcel to what

we're talking about here that you have

this sort of

industry,

military weapon system industry that is

in a constant state of

forward movement. It's deeply tied to

economics, to jobs, to prosperity. And

so, where does that take us? And and at

what point does it end? It was

Eisenhower who said in his famous speech

where the public really learned about

this so-called military-industrial

complex because Eisenhower spoke of it

in his farewell speech. But he also said

an important thing in the second half of

that speech which doesn't get nearly as

much airtime, which is that a

knowledgeable and alert citizenry

is how you balance sort of an idea of

peace with an idea of defense.

And I think what frightens both of us

that we talked about in the beginning

here was that peace and defense are very

different than constant states of war.

72 minutes.

You you go through this in the book

minute almost minute by minute showing

exactly what will happen. We know in

this first

couple of minutes there's the

notification that there's a you know, a

nuclear bomb coming in from somewhere.

My question on that was and I was

thinking about this earlier as we were

talking about it, how does the president

know? How does the world leader of that

country know? The prime minister of the

UK, whoever it might be, or Netanyahu,

or Putin know where that nuclear bomb

has come from because we talked about

this sort of black black book of places,

this menu that the president has in that

football that his aide is carrying

around.

How does he know which place to pick on

the menu to send the nuclear bomb back?

Powerful distinction, right? This is not

9/11 where suddenly there are planes in

the Trade Center towers and

you know, everyone is scrambling to say

who did this and the CIA is saying this

is Al-Qaeda, it has the mark of Al but

no one knows for sure. This is not that.

This is the fact that for 79 years the

United States has been building nuclear

weapons, nuclear weapon systems, and

also systems to detect other people's

nuclear weapons should they have them.

What are these submarines? Okay, so

good point on the submarines, which is

but

we have a set of satellites called

Sibers, which are parked. Now, I'm only

talk when you said what how would

Netanyahu know, how would the president

of

that is a different scenario.

What I am talking about is the US

president because I have interviewed

people in the US Defense Department and

the intelligence community. And the

Defense Department knows precisely where

a weapon comes from within a second of

launch because the Siber satellites can

measure the hot rocket exhaust. So, you

imagine a rocket taking off, lots of

fire beneath it. That is measured

from 22,000 miles up in geosync. I mean,

that is just a technological

astonishment.

And then there begins the data sent down

to these various commands in the United

States, the Aerospace Data Center, the

Space Force, and they begin measuring

the trajectory of the missile and

figuring out where it's going to go.

Like, it's not going to Moscow and it's

not going to Guam, those would be

opposite directions. Is it going to San

Francisco or is it going to the East

Coast? That is learned in 100 seconds

approximately. Okay? Now, you are right,

you cannot you if some if a submarine

launches a ballistic missile, there's no

way of knowing where that came from,

which is why in the scenario I have that

happen and it creates a whole other set

of problems.

What are these I mean I mean I mean what

is the answer to that? Cuz I was

imagining

if the Siber system sees a nuclear bomb

coming out of the Pacific Ocean,

I mean, that could be Rishi Sunak, that

could be

that could be the UK firing one at

America. It could be, you know, could be

anybody. You are absolutely right that

there is no way of knowing. And in the

scenario that I chose because I wanted

to try to take the reader through a

logical sequence, if you could even call

any of this logical because it's all you

know, they call it MAD, Mutual Assured

Destruction. It's really madness.

But you cannot know who launched that.

So does we just go for our enemy in that

situation?

I mean,

Do you know what I mean?

now you

have a new task. You are going to write

nuclear war an even worse scenario.

Well, cuz that's what you would do,

right? If you're President Biden, your

aide turns to you and goes, "Hi

President, there's a nuclear bomb

heading our way." I go, "I know exactly

who that who did that."

And you might start firing a couple of

back back at just the people that you

assume would do it.

And then they do the same.

Um

The nuclear-armed submarines

that

are owned by Russia and China

regularly come within a couple hundred

miles of East of each coast of the

United States and you can assume the

same about England.

And how do we know this?

Well, you can't see a submarine moving

in real time, but you can track the

submarine's movements after the fact

owing to a very

complex system of underwater

surveillance

systems that we have in place.

And there's a map that appeared in a

recent Defense Department budget request

to Congress, which I reproduce in the

book, that shows just how close those

submarines, those enemy submarines get

to the coast. And that reduces the

travel time of a ballistic missile down

to under 10 minutes. And so this idea

that we really are living at the edge of

apocalypse is not an exaggeration. The

question is, how would this start? Why

would this start? Again, read the

scenario and you begin to realize

this could start in or have a discussion

with you and you this could start in so

many

the training test tape. I mean,

and the real takeaway is asking

ourselves is

why do none of us know about this? Or

most of us rather.

There's so many ways this could start

and one of them one of them obviously

again has emerged

front of mind for society since you

started writing the book, which is

artificial intelligence. Before I get to

that though, I really want to I really

want to close off on this 72 minutes. I

understand the first couple of minutes

there.

Um

what does the person listening to this

need to know about what happens in the

subsequent what are 60 minutes?

There's a very fast process where the

trajectory of the ballistic missile is

being determined and we're talking in

the first minutes of the sequence

because everyone is getting ready to

tell the president because what they're

going to tell the president is, "Sir,

you need to choose a counterattack."

That is called get the blue clock

running. Does the president not like

getting some plane super quick?

So, we'll get there in a second because

that's where the that's a decision tree

problem.

Okay. So, everyone is working on

figuring out the trajectory of the

ballistic missile.

And there is the first confirmation when

you see it and by the way, a ballistic

missile cannot be redirected or

recalled. Cannot be.

Now,

ultimately the Defense Department will

wait for second confirmation of that

missile from a ground radar system. We

have them around the world. The one in

the scenario that would see it is in

Alaska.

It has to be able to see and confirm

that missile is definitely coming this

way.

And that happens at around 8 or 9

minutes. And so the process in between

that everyone's getting ready to brief

the president about a counterattack. And

so

in the scenario the president learns

around 3 minutes and then they're

waiting on the secondary confirmation.

And in my interviews with the Secret

Service,

as I was reporting the book, interesting

things would happen exactly like your

question, like, "Wait a minute.

What would

would the president be staying at the

White House?" So, I as the reporter put

that question to the former director of

the Secret Service, who explains to me

how there is a team called the Counter

Assault Team.

Um and that is that is the sort of

paramilitary organization of the of the

Secret Service that's going to always be

there to move the president really fast

if need be. And in this situation, they

make a decision, "We're moving him." If

the target is Washington, D.C. or

anywhere on the East Coast for that

matter, we cannot have the president

anywhere near ground zero.

And their job that they are sworn to do

is to protect the president. And so that

then you're going to have a bit of a

stalemate because the military command

wants the president on on coms to be

able to give him counterstrike orders.

That is what they want.

And they can only get those orders from

the president, but the Secret Service

has a totally different agenda. And in

my scenario, the Secret Service,

considering they're the only ones in the

room that are armed, win.

They take the president out and he flies

out of Washington, D.C. in Marine One.

Marine One being the helicopter? The

helicopter that is that Yeah. You know,

and then I learned even more interesting

details like, "Okay, so in the scenario,

the likely situation is that the

electromagnetic pulse will really

threaten the the electronic system in

Marine One and it will be in deep danger

of crashing." What is that for people

that don't know? For people that don't

know, an an electromagnetic pulse is

like a three-pulsed

sort of shock wave that essentially just

zeros out electronics. Imagine your

house getting struck by lightning, a

direct hit,

and no surge suppressor. I mean, just

just it's all all the electronics go

out, and that will almost certainly

happen. Marine One is outfitted

retrofitted against EMP attack cuz they

think about these things, but no one

knows if it's going to really work. It's

been tested in a chamber. They're

So So, what you're saying, sorry, just

to be clear, is that whoever's attacking

the United States or another country

would send an electronic pulse first?

No, the pulse is part of the of the bomb

going off.

Ah, okay.

It's It's a It's inherent in the nuclear

explosion. Okay. And so, even if you

even if you're getting the president

out, if he's 7 8 9 miles 10 miles out of

ground zero, as they rush because

remember this is all happening in 30

minutes, under 30 minutes, as they rush

to get him out of the White House,

the EMP could seriously damage the

Marine One. So, the Secret Service

people I interviewed explained to me

that they would have a backup plan,

which would be to tandem jump the

president out of the aircraft

in a with with a parachute. They would

strap the president onto them and jump

out of the aircraft cuz at least there

would be the the aircraft is going to

crash if it gets hit by the

electromagnetic pulse.

So, at least there's a better chance.

Well, then you have to have the mill aid

has to have a parachute cuz he's got the

black book. And the direct the the

special agent in charge of the president

is definitely going to go. So, then I

learned that this incredible detail that

there aren't parachutes in Marine One.

So, they have to go to the White House

office to get the parachutes. You know,

these kind of details

I believe provide the reader with a

number of things like the the

astonishing understanding of how many

different scenarios are in play all the

time, you know, being rehearsed so that

we because we might have a nuclear war.

At the same time that the messaging is

we will never have a nuclear war.

And then when you begin to look at all

the competing agendas that will happen,

you you realize it's just chaos upon

mayhem.

What if the president dies

in the strike

and before we've made a counter attack?

Which is something that Stratcom thinks

about and it's certainly why I have that

in the scenario because if the president

is the only one that can order a

a counter attack, that can launch

nuclear weapons, what if he dies?

And so, I learned in the reporting that

if you're the president, let's say he

even gives the order, okay, here's my

counter strike. I'm choosing this from

the black book.

The situ- the command and control is set

up that if the president orders 82

nuclear weapons is in response,

you can't launch 83 nuclear weapons.

It's 82 and 82 only. And then to do

another launch requires passwords I

mean, it requires so much bureaucracy.

There's not time for that. And so,

there's this almost unknown little

detail inside of the nuclear command and

control apparatus called a universal

unlock code, which I learned about in

the book, and the eyebrow goes up for

exactly that reason, as did mine when I

Wait, what? And then you find out that

the president can release to the

Stratcom commander

the universal unlock code, which

basically says, okay, you if I die, you

have permission to launch

nuclear weapon number 83

or nuclear weapon number 5,000, you

know, all the way up. And that

is a pretty

shocking concept.

The president responds to the nuclear

attack,

hits I don't know, let's say they they

hit Russia.

They send the submarines out to

send the

ICBMs or whatever it's called to hit

strike Russia.

Russia have these submarines as well,

they send more back.

What does What's the aftermath

of

nuclear you know, that 72 that 72nd

minute? Cuz I imagine from the minute

the president hears that um

gets the notification that there are

it's been confirmed, it's had the second

confirmation,

he's going to make the decision to fire

nuclear weapons back, I assume.

And then from I mean, from there it's

just all fire as far as I'm concerned.

There's a concept called jamming the

president, which is So, the president

learns in the scenario I write that

North Korea has fired

a ballistic missile and then a second

one comes in from a sub and hits a

nuclear power plant in California.

Why did you pick North Korea?

I picked North Korea because of my

interviews with Richard Garwin, the

designer of the nuclear thermonuclear

bomb, the first one, which he designed

for Teller,

because in our interviews I asked him

what scared me most. Garwin, also in his

90s, has advised every president of the

United States since Eisenhower.

He was an early founder of NRO. I mean,

our one of our most classified agencies.

His

opinion matters. And while he didn't

want to be specific, he gave me sort of

a very interesting, almost poetic

metaphor when he spoke of the mad king.

And the mad king with a nuclear arsenal,

and he even used us that French phrase

après moi le déluge.

This idea of like after me the flood. If

I die, who cares? And I

interpreted that that Garwin was talking

about North Korea because North Korea is

the rogue nuclear-armed nation that

regularly sets off ballistic missiles

and doesn't tell anyone. There is an

unspoken reality among the other nations

that you inform people when you're going

to test an ICBM with a dummy warhead, of

course.

North Korea doesn't adhere to that. So,

you know,

when I interviewed people who are in

those command and control bunkers, those

first 100 seconds we spoke of where the

ballistic missile is on its way, and and

and all of that command and control is

focused on is this coming at us or is it

as launching a space satellite or is it

going into the Sea of Japan? That's what

North Korea does.

They don't announce those tests, and so

imagine the anxiety

in those command bunkers

every time they launch

a ballistic missile. They have launched

uh more than 100 ballistic missiles in

an 18-month period from like 2022

forward.

Testing.

Okay. Testing.

So, this is so dangerous and so rogue.

If they're, you know, on the one hand I

say there are no rules to nuclear war,

but there are a few nuclear rules to

nuclear deterrence like you tell your

neighbors. And that's why I chose North

Korea. But just to finish that, the

sequence

the president launches 82 missiles at

North Korea in a counter attack.

And that is And in the scenario that I

write, the failure

now becomes about miscommunication, a

very important concept, and also about

technology not working.

And I source in the book precisely where

this information comes from. So,

Russia

misinterprets

our launching nuclear weapons at North

Korea

as being launched at Russia. Why?

Because actual fact, our ICBMs do not

have enough range

to travel

to North Korea without overflying

Russia.

And so, imagine in a climate like now

with hostilities as an all-time high,

the Russian president just saying, okay,

well, maybe they're not coming for us.

And nuclear policy, the policy of

deterrence is you launch if someone's

launching at you. And so, that is where,

you know, in the second act of the book,

it's 24 minutes 24 minutes 24 minutes

end game, Russia launches. And Russia

launch You don't launch If someone's

attacking you with nuclear missiles,

you don't launch

one or two back. That's mad king logic.

You launch the mother lode, and that's

what I have Russia launch in the

scenario. What do you mean mad king

logic? Well, mad king logic is

why would you do that? Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So, in the book

in the mad king logic of the book, the

leader of North Korea, who is nameless,

um

launches a nuclear weapon at the United

States for reasons we don't know, and we

will never know because history will

end. The ability to write history ends

in 72 minutes of the book.

So, we will never know why.

And that is the sort of,

you know, question.

Mad king logic is very different than

Defense Department logic or in many

regards

Russian nuclear command and control

logic, which I interviewed sort of the

world's expert on those subjects to be

able to, you know, give readers quickly

an idea of what that logic is and why

it has held for 79 years.

Can't we just shoot it out the sky?

That is the great fantasy that is a

fallacy, right? So,

let's talk numbers for a second.

America has 1,770

nuclear weapons on ready for launch

status. They're deployed.

Okay? They can launch in seconds,

minutes, maybe some of the bombers take

an hour or two.

Russia has roughly the same, 1,674.

That's the parity of the nuclear

treaties. That says nothing of the

thousands more that we each have in

reserve. But those are actual nuclear

weapons that are pointed at one another

ready to go.

Ready to go. Okay? So those numbers

The US has an interceptor program

to allegedly intercept a long-range

ballistic missile. I'm not talking about

short-range or even medium-range,

long-range like that would come from

Russia or North Korea. We have 44

interceptor missiles. Four of them are

at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa

Barbara. 40 of them are at Fort Greely

in Alaska.

44. So if Russia has 1,607

nuclear weapons how are our 44

interceptors going to go up against

those?

And that and that says nothing by the

way, and I get into this in sort of the

little bit of the wonkiness inside a

nuclear warhead

many of them are what are called MIRV's,

which means they have multiple warheads

inside of it. And so when the warhead

unleashes the multiple warheads go out

along with decoys so that if an

interceptor missile is coming at it

it it greatly reduces the chance that

the interceptor will be able to shoot it

out of the sky. The way that it was said

to me was like this.

An interceptor missile, which is

basically just like a small ICBM, right?

It's a small rocket.

It

is like trying to shoot a bullet with a

bullet. That's a quote from the

spokesperson of at the Pentagon.

One of them is traveling at 14,000 miles

an hour, the ballistic missile. 14,000

miles an hour.

The interceptor, the little kinetic

vehicle inside of it that's going to hit

the warhead, hopefully, is traveling at

20,000 miles an hour. That's where you

get the trying to hit a bullet with a

bullet. And by the way, this is all

happening 500 miles up in space.

Good luck.

The success rate of our interceptor

program is between 40 and 55%. That's on

a good day where they're testing these

things and they go, "Hey, we're doing an

interceptor test. It might be around

there, right?" That's called a curated

test. That's not in the madness of the

moment.

The bombs land.

If I was a

fly on the wall, not that there would be

a wall left.

What would I what would I and I was

looking at America or the UK after it

had been strike struck by these nuclear

bombs by thousands of, you know, Russian

or North Korean nuclear weapons, what

would I see? What would the visuals be

in those minutes after the strike?

I describe the first bomb in the

scenario that strikes the Pentagon. It's

a one megaton thermonuclear bomb in

painstaking horrific detail all sourced

from Defense Department documents,

defense scientists who have worked for

decades to describe precisely what

happens to things and to humans. And

it's horrifying. But on top of the

initial flash of thermonuclear light,

which is 180 million degrees, which

catches everything on fire in a 9-mile

diameter radius. On top of the

bulldozing effect of the wind and the

all the buildings coming down and more

fires igniting more fires. On top of the

radiation poisoning people to death in

minutes and hours and days and weeks if

they happen to have survived. On top of

all of that, each one of these fires

creates a megafire that is 100 or more

square miles. And so essentially in

essence, what do you see? Well, in the

scenario at minute 72, a thousand

Russian nuclear weapons land on the

United States. And so it just becomes a

conflagration of fire. It's just fire

fires burning. Fires 100, 200 square

mile fires burning. And then we move

into nuclear winter. And that's sort of

the denouement of the book where I tell

you about nuclear winter from the point

of view of one of the original

scientists who wrote that original

nuclear winter paper with Carl Sagan

back in 1983. And his name is Professor

Brian Toon, and he's spent the decades

since working with the state-of-the-art

climate modeling systems that can now

precisely tell us what nuclear winter

will look like. Cuz I've always thought,

you know what, nuclear war wouldn't be

that bad if, you know, Russia launched a

thousand of their nuclear bombs at the

United States and I was here in New York

where I am now

I would die instantly so I wouldn't

really know it happened.

Is that true? I think you would want to

die instantly. I mean, there's a quote

from Nikita Khrushchev, the former

um premier of the Soviet Union, and he

said, "After nuclear war, the survivors

would envy the dead."

Because there is right? There is this

sense of if you survived, I mean, there

is no more law and order. There is no

more rule of law. There is no

government. Craig Fugate made that very

clear. The bunkers that the people in

the military command and control centers

would be in, let's say the secret

bunkers, not the ones that are targets

that Russia's going to take out that I

write about in the book, but the smaller

ones those are going to only function

for as long as there's gasoline to run

the diesel in the diesel generators. And

then those people are going to have to

come out. And who's left? It's man

returning to the most primal, most

violent state as people fight over the

tiny resources that remain. And by the

way, they're all malnourished.

Everybody's sick. And most people have

lost everything and everyone they know.

How's that going to feel?

It's going to feel as you describe here

on page 277

there are a thousand flashes of light

superheating the air in each ground zero

to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. A

thousand fireballs each more than a mile

in diameter.

A thousand steeply fronted blast waves.

A thousand walls of compressed air. A

thousand American cities and towns where

all where all engineered structures in

5, 6, or 7-mile radius change physical

shapes, collapse, and burn. A thousand

cities and towns with molten asphalt

streets. A thousand cities and towns

with survivors impaled to death by

flying debris. A thousand cities and

towns filled with tens of millions of

dead people. With tens of millions of

unfortunate survivors suffering fatal

third-degree burns. People naked,

tattered, bleeding, and suffocating.

People who don't look or act like people

anymore.

Across America and Europe, hundreds of

millions of people are dead and dying

while hundreds of military aircraft fly

circles in the air until they until they

run out of fuel.

I mean, that is

that is some visual.

How many people would be

dead or dying, do you think, after those

72 minutes?

Hundreds of millions of people die

in the fireballs, no question. But the

number that I think is very interesting

to think about comes from Professor Toon

and his team who wrote a paper for

Nature uh recently, 2022, and sort of

updated nuclear winter idea based around

food. And the number that they have is 5

billion people

would be dead. The population of the

planet currently is about 8 billion?

Yes. So there'd be 3 billion people

still alive.

Where shall I go to be one of the 3

billion? I I was just in New Zealand and

Australia. That's exactly where you'd

go. Although according to Toon, those

are the only places that could actually

sustain agriculture.

I was there two weeks ago. Not even two

weeks ago, it was maybe 10 days ago. I

was in New Zealand and Australia.

And at that time

I think Iran attacked Israel.

Right. Yes.

I was kind of happy. You're in the right

place at the right time. Yeah. I was

kind of happy for where I was located if

I'm you know, and I was thinking I

actually remember I was talking to my

friends and I pulled up a map and I was

trying to see how far away I was from

everything. I was thinking if cuz World

War III started trending on Twitter, I

was thinking if if it does break out

now, I think I'm pretty probably pretty

well placed. Is that the place to be, do

That is. That is according to Professor

Toon. I mean, he was so generous with

me. He shared a lot of his slideshows

that he has for his students. And that

is really pretty much what's left. I

mean, because most of the world is

certainly the mid-latitudes would be

covered in these,

you know, sheets of ice. The the

freshwater bodies,

places like Iowa and Ukraine would be

would be just snow for 10 years. And so

agriculture would fail. And when

agriculture fails, people just die. And

and on on top of that, you have the

radiation poisoning because the ozone

layer will be so damaged and destroyed

that

you can't be outside in the sunlight.

And so people will be forced to live

underground. And so you have to imagine

people living underground fighting for

food everywhere except for in New

Zealand and Australia. Um there was also

another interesting detail that that he

shared with me that, you know

66 million years ago an asteroid hit

Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs

and something like 70% of the known

species.

And Professor Toon compared nuclear war

to that situation.

And so when you really think about it

and and again this was also echoed by

Craig Fugate

FEMA's director.

You think about it there's nothing we

can do about an asteroid.

At least not right now.

And yet there is something

nuclear war is a man-made threat

and therefore it has to be a man-made

solution.

What is the solution?

I really believe that people motivate

other people. It's like a fundamental

truth on the smallest scale and on the

biggest scale. And so there's one person

who is incredibly powerful and that is

the president of the United States. For

better or for worse, it's just the way

it is. And so in the same way that the

president has

presidential sole authority to start a

nuclear war, the president also has a

very powerful pen with which he can

write executive orders and EO.

And the story I tell on the hopeful note

goes like this. When I was in high

school in 1983 there was an ABC TV movie

called The Day After

and it

showed a fictional war between the

United States and then Soviet Russia.

It was horrific and terrifying, okay?

100 million Americans watched it.

100 million Americans It's like the

third of the the population.

And I think it was half the population

then.

Um

President Reagan was one of those

Americans. He had a private screening at

Camp David.

His advisers told him not to watch it.

He did watch it. Before that President

Reagan was a hawk. He was pro nuclear

weapons. His position was the more

nuclear weapons the better. He was the

one putting nuclear weapons in space

with the Star Wars program, the SDI

program, okay? He couldn't have been

more pro deterrence

supremacy.

He saw The Day After

and he changed his position. He wrote in

his White House journal that he became

greatly depressed, his words.

And he reached out to Gorbachev.

And then they had a Reykjavik Summit a

summit in Iceland

Reagan and Gorbachev

and

through communication, right? Through

both of them realizing this is madness

realizing what could happen seeing The

Day After and realizing my God

this cannot happen. And they famously

issued a statement that said a nuke the

joint statement between the two of them

that said

a nuclear war cannot be won

and must never be fought.

And the result of the Reykjavik Summit

was that the world has gone from 70,000

nuclear warheads. That was the all-time

high.

70,000.

Why do you need 70,000 nuclear warheads?

That's what there were in 1986. And now

here we are because of the reductions,

because of the treaties, thanks to those

two.

12,500

approximately nuclear warheads. That is

the movement in the right direction.

And it came from

a dramatic story being told and it came

from the president taking action because

people would not stand for this anymore.

There were massive protests. Do you

believe we could ever get to zero?

Honestly.

That is for the disarmament experts. I

like to stay in my lane as a

storyteller, as an investigative

journalist. I like to give you the

dramatic

fast read and then pass the baton

to those who have been working on that

issue for decades because boy are they

qualified. I just had the great fortune

of being invited to Brussels where I was

part of a nuclear expo and there were

members of the European Parliament in

the audience.

And I and and there were all these

disarmament people there and I learned a

lot about all of these groups and they

have the answer and they are the ones

that should be asked that question and

they are doing a lot to get us there.

From the moment you wrote the first word

in this new book um nuclear war scenario

to when you finish the book, how did

your feelings change about the subject

matter?

It's interesting because

you

you write the This is just my experience

as a journalist, but

you you write the book and you're like

any

professional person you want to do a

really good job at your job, right? So

so I was very focused on gathering the

facts and then relaying them in a

readable way, you know? My husband Kevin

always says like you got to write

something that someone can read on the

beach or an airplane. Right? Which is

not necessarily conducive to like Nazi

scientists or the other things I've

written about. But for this it became

clear to me nuclear launch to nuclear

winter fast. Have people read it fast

because you want to grab their attention

because

I'm a mother, you know? I'm a hopeful

person that believes that we do not have

to live with this threat overhead. And

so my focus of the work was really on

doing the best job I could to narrate

the story and I think you you take your

hat off about um maybe any more sort of

emotional or sentimental feelings. You

try to

you try to push that into the prose I

suppose. So maybe in subtext

there is

a sense of urgency and and even fear.

But for me intellectually, you know as

an investigative journalist it was it

was just what's what's the next page

going to read like. But how do you feel

about you know the nature that you It's

interesting as well because you when you

think about the books you've written I

don't even think how many have you

written now six or seven? Seven books in

total.

The subject matter of your books are all

the basis of a lot of conspiracy theory.

If that makes sense. You know you've

written about Area 51 and this thing

called Operation Paperclip and the

Pentagon and

and our nuclear bombs and the CIA, all

these kinds of things which are the

basis of many of the conspiracy theories

that I hear hear about. Um so you've

you've got a very unique perspective on

the world because you've had the

privilege and the access of interviewing

some of the most interesting people that

are closest to these very interesting

subjects.

What are some of the things that you've

come to learn that you once thought were

just conspiracy theories?

I mean conspiracy theory is such a

loaded word and I think it's too bad

that um it's used as a catchall to kind

of dismiss

uh a lot of curiosity. Mhm. Because

curiosity is important, right? And

curiosity leads toward reading. I mean I

couldn't be a bigger fan of reading or

listening to pod you know educating

yourself. I mean things have really

changed in terms of audio. Like you can

listen to a podcast

and learn a lot. You can listen to an

audio book the same way that you used to

have to read them. And

and so

to just call things conspiracy

theories I find to be intellectually

thin, right? It's just too easy. And

it's also very self-righteous.

And I think two things I always work to

avoid um

is like

kind of being a know-it-all. And I am

around a lot of know-it-alls because

people who become experts in subjects

um and maybe they don't get as much

attention as they think they deserve

tend to become

a little bit of self-righteous

know-it-alls.

And so I have to wind my way

through that world because I'm always

What interests me are

subjects that

make me ask the question why, right?

Like

why does no one know about Area 51? What

why why is Area 51 so secret? I mean

when I wrote the book Area 51 the word

Area 51 was still classified. Really?

You couldn't say it. I went to the CIA

and I was told by my minder

if you say a certain word and number

you will be asked to leave.

It was classified. It only became

unclassified when President Obama spoke

about it publicly. Oh really? He just

mentioned it

and then it was unclassified. Right? And

so

to answer your question um

I find it really interesting tackling

subjects that are in the zeitgeist that

people are interested in and then trying

to unpack

the truths and the fictions. Is there

something you heard about you heard a

you know a whisper about and you thought

that can't possibly be true? And then

after doing a little bit of

investigative researching and journalism

you discover that it actually was true

and you were blown away. And I say that

in part because

I lived much of my life thinking that a

lot of these subjects Area 51, the CIA,

this idea that there's all these spies

and they're doing all this stuff and I

thought a lot of it was

just internet rumors and you know people

who certain people who have you know

they have like the silver foil on their

heads and they're just like whatever.

And then I had the privilege of speaking

to

some people on this podcast and just out

there in the world

who confirmed that a lot of the things I

once thought were

tin foil hat stuff is actually true. And

once once you have the curtain pulled

back,

it kind of blows your mind open to what

else could be true.

And I'm I'm a person that kind of like

needs evidence and logic and I'm not

going to believe something cuz I saw it

on like an Instagram post or a story or

a Telegram community.

But my mind's been blown, especially

over the last couple of years, about

how um how some of these things that

people consider to be conspiracy

theories are actually very true. Have

you had those moments in your career?

Oh, absolutely. But I mean, you can

really drill down on this stuff and

figure out the thematic element of

what's going on and then the specifics.

And I'll give you an example. Like in

Area 51, I learned about something

called strategic deception, which is a

CIA concept, okay?

And this plays into

conspiracy theories and when you come

across something

maybe having this information I'm about

to tell you will help you go,

"Okay, let me look at it in terms of

these two lanes." So it goes like this.

The CIA's

had a was building spy planes out at

Area 51.

The U-2 spy plane, which was going to

spy on the Soviet Union in the '50s

from above and figure out whether they

were preparing for nuclear war.

And the plane was built at Area 51 cuz

this no one could know about it. It flew

at 70,000 ft.

It was out of range of any

surface-to-air missiles.

Um I interviewed the first man who flew

over the Soviet Union in a U-2, Hervey

Stockman. And he took pictures with

these massive CIA cameras

that, you know, came back to the agency.

It was wet film and allowed the CIA to

understand what was actually going on on

the ground in Soviet Russia. It was

photographing military bases.

So the spy plane was being built and it

was so secret, like only the president

knew about it. At the same time, nuclear

weapons were being exploded next door,

right? So Area 51 and then over at Area

23 was where the the the bombs were

going off.

And

there was a I was interviewing all the

engineers who were building the spy

plane.

And Bob Murphy was one of the lead

engineers and he told me this story

about strategic deception. So,

he and others would go to the ranch,

that's what they called Area 51, then

they'd fly back to Burbank, California

where they all lived for the weekends to

be with their families. And they would

take the shuttle back and forth.

And one day, um they went to a big party

the night before and Bob Murphy got

drunk. He was not a guy who gets drunk,

but he got drunk.

He missed the shuttle.

And he was like, "Oh my god, I'm going

to lose my job. I'm in trouble." And he

opens the door, is how he described it

to me, to like,

you know, go out and deal with this. And

there's an FBI agent like about to knock

on the door.

And they tell and the guy turns white as

a ghost because Bob Murphy was supposed

to be on that flight, so he was on the

flight manifest and it crashed into

Mount Charleston on the way there and

everyone was dead.

Okay?

So that is a dramatic thing to begin

with, but here's how it ties up with

strategic deception.

The CIA

learns that its aircraft full of U-2

engineers, pilots, designers, all these

incredibly important people on this top

secret project are dead. They just

crashed into Mount Charleston.

What are they going to do? How are they

going to keep this secret? All the news

stations are racing up to the top of the

mountain to try to get to the crash

site.

Oh my god, this is going to be the

project's going to be blown open. What

are we going to do? So they quickly rope

off the areas. They do the damage

control to the best that they can.

But they're spinning and I have all the

declassified documents from that part of

it, learning how worried they are.

There's

almost no doubt the project's going to

be revealed. The U-2 program is going to

be no more because once the Soviets know

about it, it's off.

And instead, the press

comes up with a story.

The press reports that it's all these

atomic scientists working on this secret

new weapon. They just completely make

this up in essence, right? It's this new

weapons project. And that's what they're

all doing. Who knows who put what bug in

someone's ear.

And so that's the story that comes out.

And the CIA is like,

"Perfect." And what I The story explains

that there are two kinds of strategic

deception. There's cover when you say,

like Bob Murphy said to his wife, "I'm

just an engineer working out there on

some television systems." That's cover.

That was his cover. He didn't say I'm

working on the U-2 spy plane. And then

there's disinformation.

When the press reports that the crash

was full of a bunch of atomic engineers

working on a secret weapons program.

And those are both kinds of strategic

deception. And so you begin to realize

that

there is a purpose behind a lot of

information coming out into the public.

And the CIA often uses that to its

advantage. And so whenever a situation

happens, you have to say to yourself,

"Is this really what happened? Or is it

covering up something else?" And then of

course you have to put your rational

person

hat on and you can't just imagine

what the true story might be. You have

to actually find it and report it. Does

the CIA

um or the I think in the UK it's called

MI5 or MI6. MI6, I think it's the

equivalent. Does MI6, all of these sort

of special secret service agencies

around the world, do they work with the

media?

That's a much That's a totally separate

podcast. We could talk forever because

there's history of the CIA. I and I'm

not an expert on foreign intelligence

agencies as much as I am on the United

States. But by all means, there's a long

history of the CIA working with uh

journalists, reporters, authors,

um

to

put information there. I mean, there's

almost nothing that the CIA hasn't done

to my eye. The question is, you know,

reporting it in the context of

how that's happening. I wrote about in

The Pentagon's Brain, if you want a

little homework, you know, and you go

into the back and in the index and look

up brainwashing.

And there's a long story

uh where I talked to where I explain

exactly how this happened in the '50s

with

what ultimately an element that became

known as the MKUltra program, okay? So

like MKUltra was a real program and it

had a lot of sinister components to it.

Is it everything that, you know,

certain

groups of people that sometimes get

called conspiracy theorists say that it

was? No. But there are threads of truth

in it. And if you reverse engineer the

brainwashing concept from the back, you

will see what I'm talking about. And

it's I think it's a very interesting

story cuz it actually involves

the head of the CIA, a guy called Allen

Dulles, and his son who got brain

damaged in Korea, whom I tracked down

and interviewed for that book. Spoiler

alert.

What what happens?

Which part? I mean,

which part of I'm so I'm so compelled by

the the whole idea of the CIA because we

we had somebody here recently talking We

had Andrew here recently talking about

what goes on in the CIA and

I think um one of the things he said to

me is that the role of the CIA has

changed over time and once upon a time

it was

more capable of doing more things. And

by the way he described it, it sounded

like the CIA has less powers and can do

less of the things that it's been

accused of in the past. I think it's

been accused of killing the president

here

by some people or being involved in the

assassination of one of the presidents

here.

Um and

does the CIA report directly into the

president?

The CIA features in almost every one of

my books.

Um

the most sort of comprehensive look I

did at the CIA was a book called

Surprise, Kill, Vanish, which is about

the CIA's paramilitary.

And once I reported that, I understood

that there are actually two very

distinct components of the CIA. There's

the sort of Central Intelligence Agency,

the primary

um human

It's called human intelligence. And

there's analysts and there's espionage.

And And then there is the

paramilitary organization, which was set

up in 1947

specifically to go against the Russian

version of itself.

Sort of to do the darkest,

dirtiest,

nastiest

operations that we had to because the

Russians were. And so,

you know, the CIA is a is a is a giant

organization with a lot of tentacles.

And I think it's important to

speak, at least for me, having reported

on many of these different programs. You

know, Area 51 covers the aerial

espionage element of the CI, the science

and technology. The CIA was responsible

for putting the first satellite in

space, the Corona program.

Dr. Bud Wheelon, who I interviewed for

Area 51, remarkable

intelligence, surveillance, and

reconnaissance programs. And then you

have the paramilitary operators, the

trigger pullers,

uh the snake eaters, the individuals

who, you know, find, fix, and finish

people. That's a euphemism.

Um

the teams that do that.

But I prefer to speak very specifically

on programs because I find it's

the most

it it's the most responsible or the most

factual way for me to stick to a certain

lane of the agency because it is so

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On the the nuclear war subject, we

talked a little bit about um another

thing that has what we I kind of alluded

to it that has emerged since you started

writing this book, which is the

conversation around artificial

intelligence.

And when I start thinking about how you

overlay that with this idea of nuclear

war, it becomes even more

um concerning because we're heading

towards a world of what they call

artificial general intelligence, where a

lot of these systems will be making

autonomous decisions. They'll be able to

and a couple of people that I've spoken

to from DeepMind or from um Google have

talked to me about a world where

this is an extreme case, but our elected

leaders will be

either AI themselves or being basically

working in lockstep with AI. And And

then when you think about our nuclear

weapon systems, who is better to make

that decision? Is it a Joe Biden that's

better to make a decision to launch a

nuclear weapon, or is it some kind of

artificial intelligence that is so

advanced

we might not even know what it's

thinking or doing. Have you thought much

about artificial intelligence since this

book came out and since you started

writing? Absolutely. It's something I

covered at length in The Pentagon's

Brain, which is the book about DARPA.

And I think

that

maybe I'll speak to an origin story

here, right? Because I think of

Shakespeare, it's like what is past is

prologue. We can understand better the

question you raise, especially for

younger people, like, what is this going

to look like in the future? Is a

president really going to be working in

consort with AI?

If we know, wait, how did this all

begin? It somehow, at least to my eye,

becomes easier to

think about these things in a grounded

manner.

And so

I'll throw this detail at you. In In

reporting The Pentagon's Brain, it was

fascinating to learn that during World

War II, computers

were people.

A computer was someone who computed

mathematical

you know, call right

trajectories, bomb explosions were all

measured by people and pencils.

And right? So, then and I love the smile

because suddenly it all becomes easier.

Then you have a guy called John von

Neumann, the the The Pentagon's Brain.

He was the first brain that the Pentagon

really was interested in. And he created

one of the first

computers. You can't really assign the

first computer to anyone, but there was

a computer that was doing calculations

for

called ENIAC. And ultimately after the

war, von Neumann went to the Atomic

Energy Commission, the most powerful

organization in the world at the moment,

and said, I want to build a computer

that can actually think for itself. That

can He's kind of the progenitor of this

idea of software, not just hardware. So,

for a long time it was kind of Texas

Instruments type computing, almost just

like a giant calculator.

And von Neumann

wanted to put the brain inside the

calculator.

And they gave him a lot of money to do

it, and he did this in the basement of

Fooldall over at the Princeton Institute

for Advanced Study.

And it was giant vacuum tubes, and he

would do these tests, and I describe

this in The Pentagon's Brain, because

it's really interesting to think this

was only in 1945.

There were vacuum tubes and, you know,

cords, and they had to worry about mice

eating cords, and John von Neumann was

so brilliant and smart that his he could

beat the computer initially.

The his assistants would give him

numerical calculations, he would do them

in his mind, the computer would be

trying to do them, he would win.

And then one day, and like I think it

was 1946 or 1947, the computer beat him.

That was the moment that von Neumann

realized computers are going to be

computers just got smarter than me,

than man.

And then he began

to develop and systems, the Defense

Department began to put an extraordinary

amount of money into computer systems.

And if you really want to know where

they took off, cuz this has to do with

AI.

This is man-computer interface. The

Defense Department hires a guy called

Licklider

to essentially shrink computers down

from the size of a a house

to the size of this room. And think of

what they are now.

So, the Defense Department has always

led with artificial intelligence, which

is computer-based.

And when you can see that origin story,

you can begin to understand where we're

going. And AI had to have these military

the the benefits of these military

systems

to develop, right? Like nanotechnology.

Things had to start becoming smaller.

And that all happens in that book.

You know, not all of it, but in other

words, you can you can learn in a sort

of poetic manner the trajectory of

computers

and where they began not so long ago and

where we are now.

And it was in 1983 that DARPA, that

organization, decided that the battle

place the battlefield is no place for

humans. That was a statement of its

first robotic AI program.

I went on ChatGPT um a couple of months

ago, and I asked it, I said, could you

play out a scenario where the world ends

because an artificial intelligence

basically gets leaked out of its

out of the

computer that it was um

born out of born on. And it the scenario

that it played out involved nuclear war

because halfway, I think it was in step

three or four, it says that the AI

basically takes control of the nuclear

warheads

or at least some of them,

and then it kind of launches them at

other countries.

And

it hearing ChatGPT

say that

and and it and in step three or four use

nuclear weapons as a way to kind of make

the world extinct, it felt plausible.

Okay, so I'm going to push back against

that, and which is by no means right.

I'm not right. But we're just having a

like sort of theoretical conversation

here.

ChatGPT is gathering its information,

right? So, my I would argue that ChatGPT

has got a lot of information from The

Terminator movie. Yeah. Okay? There is

that in the zeitgeist of what happens.

Then I want you to consider that

the communication systems in nuclear

command and control, which is actually

nuclear command control and

communication,

the the ability to for

NC3 to communicate with the actual

weapons is so profoundly classified that

I don't have access to it. But I'm going

to give this to you as an idea.

What I do know and learned reporting

nuclear war scenario is a fascinating

detail that stands as an analogy, at

least for me,

which is how analog

our ballistic missile systems are

because of the exact

fear that you describe or that and that

ChatGPT

described back at you.

And will they stay that way forever?

Probably not, but are they that way

right now? From what I understand, yes.

Our submarine-launched ballistic

missiles

that that are just so the technology

behind them, and I I delineate it for

the reader, you it's it's astonishing

that you can launch a missile

from underwater, it can breach the

surface,

it's afterburners take off, and then it

begins its trajectory, you know, boost

phase, midcourse phase,

terminal phase, hits the target. This is

incredible.

And how does it get there?

You might ask. I asked. It gets there by

starsighting.

Oh, really?

So, you realize there's this little

panel that opens up in the ballistic

missile.

And there are other ways that it's

navigating. But the primary mean of

navigation is starsighting.

Right? I mean, you just have to really

stop and go, oh my first of all, it's

actually really interesting concept that

the

most advanced, potentially

civilization-ending

ballistic missile is guiding itself to

its target by this ancient concept,

like that our hunter-gatherer ancestors

used, which is looking at the stars.

It's looking at the stars and then

navigating using them.

And that's meant to be

a defense against a system an enemy

taking control of your nuclear weapons.

The issue we have is that there's

potentially nine or 10 different nuclear

powers

and they don't all have the same system.

So, if a if we get to the point of AGI,

which a lot of people almost see as the

singularity, almost you can't see past

moment where there is a new being

amongst us that is capable of

thinking faster and more expansively and

more intelligently than humans. It knows

things we don't.

I think it might look at our systems as

child's play. As maybe not our systems,

but maybe it'll look at North Korea's

systems as child's play. It might be

able to put that VCR into the system and

play out the nuclear simulation that

tricks those people into believing

they're being attacked and that Yes. And

so Which is maybe time for the answer to

your question of should we be at zero,

right?

Yeah. So, what you have presented, which

would be the whole point of somebody

like me writing a book that somebody

like you would read of a younger

generation and begin having these

conversations with their colleagues and

their thought leaders and the people

that could maybe influence public policy

and saying

well, that would be a very good reason

to have zero nuclear weapons or, you

know, everybody gets 10. I'm making that

up, but right?

Yeah, yeah. Because if you have 12,500

nuclear weapons, it's better than

70,000,

but that's way too many for an

artificially intelligent, you know,

trigger scenario like you're talking

about.

Are you optimistic?

Optimistic about I I am

I mean

I am an optimistic person by nature and

so Do you think there will be a nuclear

war

in the course of humanity?

I

wrote this book as the optimistic

hopeful person that's saying read this

and realize

that a man-made problem has a man-made

solution.

Earlier you talked about there being

high consequence and low probability,

but the more the years tick on, that

probability increases by nature of there

being this mad king

Absolutely.

point. So, you know, and that's what I

think. So, I was asking myself,

eventually, if we if we play this

forward, I don't know, 1,000 years,

what what is most likely to cause the

end of humanity? Is it

a mad king somewhere who doesn't want

that, you know, he realizes that he's

going to either die, he's got cancer, he

realizes that, you know, he's got some

sickness and he doesn't really want that

his son to take power. He starts getting

a bit agitated, maybe he has some kind

of psychosis, schizophrenia, I don't

know, decides to in his

dying days to let a couple of these

things fly. Is that

eventually going to happen? The laws of

probability, the laws of averages say

that the longer we're here, the longer

we have these weapons,

the higher the probability.

I mean, I leave that to people like you

to think about and talk about because I

do and I am fascinated that I find that

people of your generation

ask that question a lot more than

perhaps people of my generation and

older. Like that was not a mindset that

people necessarily

had and talked about and I think that

has to do with the confluence of events

that you talk about. First of all,

people are

have access to information in a manner

they didn't,

you know, 30, 40 years ago or it took a

lot more effort. And also that there are

these incredible new threats that you're

talking about that are that you cannot

overlook. And so you would think that

it's time to kind of and I'm not a

Pollyanna, but you have to move away

from seeing everyone and everything as

an enemy and moving toward it's fine to

have adversaries. Having opponents is,

you know,

Sportsmen have opponents, right? But

everyone being an enemy and having, you

know, wars

escalating around the world, it seems as

if what you are saying is there has to

be a fundamental shift in what people

are considering important. But war has

always existed and it's existed as long

as humans have. So, it makes me think

that war is just part of humans trying

to coexist. And all of the things that

are hardwired into us, our search for

status and ego and reproduction and

resources and survival result in war.

Like they result in recessions.

So, I read a lot about the origin of

war. Like there it's a debate. No one,

you know, it but it is discussed and the

anthropologists, I think, have the most

interesting

sort of thoughtful concepts around it,

which I'll share with you, which is

this. Because yes, technically men there

has always been war. And that one of the

debates is, you know, did war begin with

civilization or were hunter-gatherers

warring?

But more interesting to that, I think,

is about the anthropologists who studied

in the '60s the hunter-gatherer tribes

like in the Amazon when there were still

access to them and they were sort of,

you know, they were unaffected by

civilization at all and they could look

at how they perceived

enemies. And an interesting idea came

out of that, which makes me think about

optimist versus pessimist, right? Sort

of or rather those who trust versus

those who are suspicious. That

that no matter if a hunter is out

hunting in a that's part of a

hunter-gatherer tribal environment and

he comes across another person,

obviously, there could be that person is

either threatening or that person is

someone to team up with against the

greater threat.

And the anthropologists do not know why

it is that some people

interpret this person with suspicion and

then might kill him

and others would interpret that person

as a teammate.

And so, if we don't know

how human, you know, is it genetics?

Like how do people

either fall on one of those two sides,

but what we do know is that people can

learn to think differently. You talk

with half your guests on the podcast

about this. People can be trained, not,

you know, propagandized, but people can

learn to think differently. So, if

you're me who

is a hopeful person and wants to see the

positive side of even my dark reporting

because that's a better choice for me

and for my family.

I train myself to find, if you will, the

silver lining or rather, if that's too

Pollyanna-ish, to find the way in which

how do I look at the person coming at me

as someone who could be on my team or

even an

an opponent, but not an enemy that I

would have to kill.

What's the most interesting thing that

you've written about that we haven't

discussed?

Of all the and I don't just mean in the

nuclear war, I mean in all these books.

I mean, I'm particularly fascinated by

DARPA because I think in a lot of the

world, especially in Europe, in the UK,

we we don't even know what DARPA means.

So, you know, it was interesting reading

about the existence of that. But in all

these books, what is the most

interesting thing, the most resonant

thing when you talk about your work to

people? Maybe that surprised you.

I mean,

every single one of my books is

powerfully important to me, not just

because of the information there, but

because the people I met along the way.

And I really could not sit, you know,

put one over the other because that

would be like favoring a child. And I

mean that literally, you know,

sometimes when I prepare to do a

podcast, I read my own books. And I and

I'm really

it for me, it's the it's the

it's the sum total of these incredibly

fascinating people I have had the

incredible fortune of interviewing and

also how

fate and circumstance always seems to

play a role in all of their lives and

that's maybe the theme that I take away

from all of this as opposed to the

specific shocking thing. Because

remember that many of the people that I

interview,

because they're war fighters or

intelligence agency people,

many of their friends have died.

Is there anyone you interviewed that

brought you to tears when you were

interviewing them? Oh, absolutely. I

can't I can't even I can't even say it

now cuz I might

Yeah.

Yeah.

going to ask you for the example. You

want the example? I'll tell you right

now.

It's a hard one. Um

So, I was just in

I was just in uh Brussels, I told you,

at the nuclear convention and

and I met a woman who was 1 year and 10

months when

the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

So, she's a survivor of the Nagasaki

bomb.

Right?

And

I met her, I brought her a signed copy

of my book, right? I mean, you just

think about being

a victim of that. And also, I learned so

much about the stigma that followed

the survivors of the atomic bombs

of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stigma

because they were perceived as sort of

tainted people, tainted humans and there

was this deep fear of the legacy of

radiation.

And

I met her and I expected to just be so

composed, but in talking to her,

I got very emotional kind of, you know,

because you can't avoid that. And part

of the reason why I got so emotional was

that, and I haven't written about this

yet, but I will, is that

someone I interviewed and someone that

meant a lot to me and that I have

written about a lot wired

that nuclear weapon

that was dropped on Nagasaki.

And so, when you think about it,

and there's little old me, the reporter,

who fate and circumstance put in

Brussels last week at a Nuke Expo. You

couldn't make that up

if you were me, you know,

even a year ago, let alone 10 years ago,

let alone when I was a child.

And here I am, and one hand of my

reporting goes to that source that

worked with me for a very long time,

whose story I haven't written yet, who

wired the bomb that was dropped on

Nagasaki. And my other hand goes to

someone

who was there.

That

that wells you up.

Because it's the human condition.

Can you speak to this impact that

that had on both those individuals?

So,

starting with if we start with the

individual who was involved in wiring

that bomb.

Mhm.

So, and I know less about her than I

know about him, right?

And I've reached out to her and we will

do interviews now, okay? So, but for

him,

it impacted his whole life. And he

became a member of the Manhattan

Project, and he became uniquely tied

into the nuclear weapons industry.

So, these kind of long arcs of history

are so deeply interesting to me,

especially as I get older.

You move from

um

the intensity of specific missions that

people were on, of specific operations

they ran, and you begin to look

at a human

over the course of their life, and what

that means, because ultimately that's

the most interesting storytelling of

all. It's the most interesting

conversation you and I can have. And And

you have to get a little bit older to

know that, you know? But sometimes when

I'm interviewing people who are in their

80s and 90s, and I see them looking at

me,

and I like especially going back 15

years ago when I started reporting all

this, and I could see I can you know,

they're old and they're like earlobes

sag, and they have you know, incredible

wrinkles and

the course of their lives, what they

have done, and they're all involved in

these top formerly top secret programs,

and I can

I can

I sense them looking at me with this

sense of their own legacy, that they are

like, I'm telling her my story, and then

I'm going to be gone. And that's really

that's powerful.

It's a lot of trust as well, isn't it?

It It is. That's the role of the

reporter. You You work, at least my job

as an investigative journalist is like,

you know, I want people to trust me that

I am getting the in their information

down on the public record. And that has

a lot to do with why, you know, people

say, "How did you get so many people to

talk to you about nuclear weapons,

right?" So, to loop this back to

nuclear war scenario, I know I'm doing

my job, at least it feels like I'm doing

my job properly or earnestly, that I can

in the same week last week have two

people that are 100% part of the

military industrial complex, working for

the Space Force in Los Angeles,

you know, at a Space Force convention,

come to my house for dinner,

have a conversation with my family,

including my young son who's closer to

your age,

and then the week before have been with

peace activists

addressing members of the European

Parliament. I have my lane,

but yet all of these people are around

me.

They might not think they can get along,

but they probably can. And if I'm the

middle of the road of all of that, that

is important to me as an investigative

journalist, and but also like as an

American citizen as and as I said

earlier, as a as a mother.

That individual that wired that that

bomb, took took part in the Manhattan

Project, was involved in dropping the

bomb on the lady that you met recently.

How do they feel about that now in

hindsight with with their age and as

they look back?

He has died. Oh, okay.

He has died. Um and

How How did he feel about it?

There were other things that bothered

him more, which is

the great conundrum

of

using your own eyes to

perceive another person. And it's why I

have not written that book yet, because

it is still very confusing, and there is

a lot of mysterious elements of it. And

sometimes when people are involved in

really classified programs,

you have to spend a lot of time to

uh

dig and uncover and discover. It's a

long process.

Um and he was involved in some other

programs that

he had more intense thoughts about. And

that alone is enough to

I mean, the look on your face is the

look on my face

interviewing him. A happy man?

Absolutely.

Absolutely. Regret?

Yes, most definitely. Almost everyone

that I end up spending hours and hours

and hours with, that I would travel

with, and you know, another person that

comes to mind was Billy Waugh in the

Surprise Kill Vanish book, sort of the

longest serving singleton for the US

government as a paramilitary operator.

The saying goes, Billy Waugh killed more

people than cancer.

Okay? We traveled to Hanoi together. We

traveled to Havana together.

Um I spent a lot of time with him.

Uh they were you know, both of these men

were probably the two most powerful

sources I worked with in my life, in

their 80s and 90s. Both happy men?

Billy was more complex than happy, you

know? Um

you work hard to kind of get at the

to get at the character of someone, and

you you you you try the best to

represent them. But I mean,

you know, Billy had so many people um he

was involved in so many missions with so

many people that died that

I don't know if happiness is He

certainly wasn't ang- He certainly

wasn't sour,

but uh he had a lot of anger about a lot

of things. And then the lady, she was 1

and 1/2 years old when the bomb was

dropped. She survived as a baby. Mhm.

Her family, did they survive? Yes, and

it was it's fascinating. Um

uh I'm not saying her name because I

don't I I don't have quite her

permission yet, right? So, but um

although she is a public figure, but she

didn't know

about her story until she got older,

because it was kept hidden from her,

which is

So, these layers upon layers about what

we know about our own selves, you've

made me think of, which is you balance

that out with

ques- what you know about your own self

versus what how easy it is to to judge

someone else or perceive someone else.

And I think those two journeys in life

are interwoven always. Like, our own

journey for self-discovery,

right? In a way, you're on that with

your podcast, I'm guessing. You probably

learn as much about yourself

um as you do about others. I know I do.

I'm usually in your seat. Um and there's

no camera running. It's just a pen. And

so, I can learn so much from people

about how they speak, why they speak,

what they say to me, "I don't want this

on the record. I want you to know this

about me because it's important, but I

don't want it publicly known." And I

honor that, because in a way, being a

journalist is

being

a a trusted source that someone can

share information with within a context

that the person I I mean, knows the

groundwork about. Many people's

grandchildren's

grandchildren don't

they don't know what grandpa did.

And they might not know

for decades. I had a guy show up at one

of my book signings at the LA Times

Festival of Books just last Sunday. And

he had,

you know, a binder, and he said, "After

you're done signing, would you mind

looking at this binder and interpreting

it for me?" And of course I did, you

know? And his grandfather was a

seriously high-ranking person working on

nuclear sub launched ballistic missiles

in the early days of what was called the

Polaris experiment. And he had all these

documents, and no one in his family

cared about it. He had ID badges and

letters and pictures with the president

and picture and I could say to him, "Oh,

yes, this is the you know, I could give

him some context." And his wife was

there, and you know, it was just like

it's a great example of how

we sometimes have a desire to know about

our own selves and our own legacy. Where

did we come from? And then grandpa has

passed. And so my job is like getting

grandpa's story on the record.

That conversation you had um

since the book had come out with the

lady you met in Brussels.

Did it change how you viewed your your

book and the work you've done here

in writing this? Did it add an element?

Oh, it most certainly enhanced and added

and particularly that emotional one that

you saw for me when I think about that,

you know,

um

and I immediately had a long

conversation with my husband about it

when when I got home, right? Because I

use sounding boards to understand how I

even really feel about things, but

I already had a context to know about

survivors having read a lot of accounts

from survivors

to report the book and I mention

some of them. Setsuko Thurlow was a

survivor of Hiroshima and has given a

lot of incredible public statements on

the record to the United Nations and

elsewhere and I quote her in my book to

narrate the part of the story where we

learn about the bomb dropping on

Hiroshima and then I read a lot of the

ancillary material about that so I can

understand more

and try and a lot of work as a

journalist you're just at least if you

write narrative non-fiction as I do,

you're really trying to imagine

the situation. But then you meet someone

and it all becomes real. And that's

where the this comes in cuz it's not

just words on the paper. It hasn't been

When they say survivor

what what

how do you categorize or define a

survivor of a nuclear bomb?

Um there's a word in Japanese and I

don't want to get it wrong and it's

something like Hibakusha, right? So

forgive me for not having that word.

But um

that is an actual term

that is used by

anyone who

lived through

the atomic bombings in August of 1945

of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So if you lived through it, you are

in that category of people. If you lived

through that Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so in

other words now

uh this was, you know,

79 years ago.

So most of the survivors you can just

think about the ages of the people

involved. Setsuko Thurlow is 90.

You know, she's she's

one she was a recipient of the who I who

I write about. Um

she was a recipient of the Nobel Peace

Prize in 2017 with a group of physicians

Dr. Carlos Omana and others whom I met

in Brussels that are all part of these

organizations working to reduce nuclear

weapons down to zero.

Right? They are against

nuclear war.

And their organizations work diligently

to bring the information to the fore and

to affect change at a geopolitical level

like the United Nations.

That conversation you have with your

husband when you got home that day after

meeting her.

What can you tell me about that

conversation?

It's probably like you have with your I

mean my husband and I've been married a

very long time. So he knows everything.

Um

there's also a joke that he has what's

called spouse privilege which he does,

right? You can tell your spouse anything

legally

But no, those conversations are

priceless. Those are the conversations

that allow me to try and peel back one

layer

of what the next book is going to be and

what the next book aims to do because I

am always working on the next book. I am

one of those people who loves writing.

And so and I also love evolving as a

writer. So you want to get better in

terms of the small mistakes you make and

you want to get better in terms of the

the intentions that you might have

thematically about conveying it. And so

thank you for pointing out to me

and I mean this sincerely is that what

you helped me realize is that

the next book is trying will try to move

more toward those themes of cause

that was him and effect that was her.

This idea that there are always

consequences.

And very real people on both sides that

you know

one could class as both victims and

innocent at the same time, I guess.

I've just a horrific situation.

Absolutely. I'm really intrigued now by

this idea that you almost have to embody

two roles. You're a human being but at

the same time you've got a job to do

here

and you've got a mission.

And when you meet that person who's who

is a survivor of a nuclear attack

those lines can understandably become at

at least in your head

the wall can drop between the two. And

as you you touched your heart, you

referred to your head which I think is

typically when you're talking about your

journalistic hat, but then we all have

hearts as well, thank God.

Um you come home and I don't know the

conversations I have with my partner.

I guess I I'm assuming, you know, the

conversation you have with your husband

there is about

the complexity of the emotions you feel

upon meeting that person.

Absolutely and what you do with that and

what that means and you want to be able

to have those conversations so that you

can I think

have both of those bring both of those

components into your

into your work. I mean

maybe with the exception being the

military or the CIA, the two

organizations I write about. You know,

Billy Waugh can't bring his heart into

the mission when he is assigned to go X

Y Z.

You know, find, fix and finish someone.

They're not allowed to tell that that

partner are they in the CIA? No.

I was told to you. And and so so what we

that aren't in the military or the

intelligence community have that luxury.

Is it a luxury?

I don't know, but it's a necessity for

me.

What if you couldn't?

I wouldn't be myself. I wouldn't I

wouldn't choose that. I could never be

in the military. I could never be in the

agency.

Because I I think you are asked to wear

a hat that removes your heart.

And that's not possible for somebody

like me. I mean we just figure out our

strengths and our weaknesses. Um and

society needs all of those people by the

way. That is what a democracy is. It is

made up of all kinds of people. I'm all

for that. It's why I have so many

friends and colleagues from different

worlds on different sides of the aisle.

They just make me think

more interesting things about the world

in which we all live.

We have a closing tradition on this

podcast where the last guest leaves a

question for the next guest not knowing

who they're leaving it for.

And the question that's been left for

you

was written in Europe when we were in

our studio then.

It is what is the last thing you changed

your mind about?

Well, I'll just

it comes this comes to mind only because

it's apropos to what we've been talking

about and it has to do with reporting

not my personal life which is maybe more

interesting to people. Um

I always strive to interview people

and ask them questions even if they are

hard, even if I have a preconception

that maybe they are the sort of bad guy,

shall we say, or the you know

perpetrator the what?

the perpetrator some something not

necessarily the bad but just that like I

might not my brain might not think I

agree with what they did or the project

they were on.

And there was a general that I was

trying to interview for the Pentagon's

brain and he had he was kind of the

creator behind what's called the soldier

super suit, okay? And that's a totally

different subject but that these idea to

make super soldiers, okay? Off of this

idea of the this concept called the

weakling on the battlefield that humans

feel fear and get fatigued and those are

not good things for soldiers and so

there are all these programs to try and

enhance our top tier military fighters

to become super soldiers. This is a

fact. And this one general was part of

that program and I had reached out to

him and asked him to interview with me

and I get it. Lots of people say you

know, I'm going to pass. I don't want to

interview. That's fine. But he ignored

me. And I felt slighted. And so I'm

telling on myself here from your view.

And so when I was writing my narrative

of the super soldier, he essentially was

kind of cast as the bad guy.

And then

I was in the editorial phase of the book

and I got an email from him and he said,

"I'm so sorry I didn't get back to you.

My wife had cancer."

And I what a valuable lesson. What a

valuable lesson.

And we did two interviews. And I told my

editor, "I have to rewrite that

chapter." And I did.

I mean that story speaks to a lot of the

subjects we spoken about today which is

when we

see someone as different, when we see

them as aliens, adversaries, enemies,

opponents

we are much more likely to treat them

as such, but

in reality it often turns out that we're

all very much the same, struggling with

the same things, with the same worries,

anxieties, concerns,

apprehensions, and it's just sometimes

when there's a bridge built, in the case

of that email, that we realize that

we're not enemies after all.

And that we don't need to be at war,

whether that's with words or whether

it's with

nuclear weapons.

And when you see that fellow

hunter on the path,

they might not be

the enemy. They might be someone to work

with.

It's very good of you to admit that,

Annie, because

what you're actually admitting is that

you're a human being.

Because we all do that kind of thing.

When we see someone as an adversary, I

think, as you say, it's feels like it's

hardwired into us in some way, but also

within that story we learn to

try and find or make the bridge

ourselves.

Which in the world we live in now, with

social media and stuff, is

doesn't seem to be um

easy or obvious for people, with all of

this polarization and such. And maybe if

the you know, if the US could make a

bridge with some of these foreign

adversaries, we wouldn't be talking

about nuclear war in your book, nuclear

war scenario.

Thank you so much for writing this book,

because

I'm a big believer and a big

um advocate of confronting the realities

honestly and openly, regardless of how

uncomfortable it is, because

if we don't, I think it actually

increases the probability of us

finding ourselves in a 72-hour

scenario, as you write about in the

book. And I The same thing

72 minutes.

72

Christ, only two hours. Did I say 72

hours?

Yes.

We all make Freudian slips. Okay. I wish

it was 72.

Well, no, I actually don't. I

Well, if it was going to happen, I'd

rather it just

happened in the blink of an eye. But um

but no, I think it's it's so, so

important to write. A lot of people

would be scared. A lot of people would

choose not to even click on this

conversation, because they're scared of

the subject matter. But I I think it's

leaning in that helps us to resolve and

find solutions and start the

conversation. And I know lots of people

listen to this. You never know, like

that

like that documentary or movie you

talked about earlier, who's listening

and the powers that they have, and the

decisions that they can make to change

things or to create one of those bridges

to to sort of denuclearize the world.

And that's the work you're doing. So, I

think it's very, very important work,

and I'm glad that you've committed your

brilliance to doing it. So, thank you.

Thank you so much for having me.