#192 – Annie Jacobsen on what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US

Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

Annie Jacobsen: The reality that US ICBM Minuteman missiles do not have enough range to target North Korea without overflying Russia is a fact. It’s a fact almost no one knows. It’s such an astonishing fact that I fact-checked it with former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta himself, because you almost can’t believe that this is actual reality. And not only did Panetta confirm this, but he conceded that it’s a major problem.

And when you say, you know, Russia could interpret — my question would be, how could it think anything else?

Coupled with the fact that Russian technology systems, early warning satellite systems, are deeply flawed. So the idea that Russia has the same capacity to understand trajectory the way that the United States does is pure fantasy.

Luisa’s intro [00:01:03]

Luisa Rodriguez: Hi listeners, this is Luisa Rodriguez, one of the hosts of The 80,000 Hours Podcast.

Today’s episode is a deeply chilling and unsettling one, also sometimes a gruesome one, but in a way that I think is just genuinely important to face and grapple with. I talk with Annie Jacobsen about her new book where she interviewed dozens of insider civilians and military experts about what would actually happen in the seconds and minutes after a nuclear strike against the United States.

She talks me through:

• How we’re on a razor’s edge between the logic of nuclear deterrence and catastrophe, and urgently need reforms to move away from hair-trigger alert nuclear postures.
• What happens during the six-minute window that the US president would have to decide about nuclear retaliation after hearing news of a possible nuclear attack.
• The horrific humanitarian impacts on millions of innocent civilians from nuclear strikes.
• The overlooked dangers of a nuclear-triggered electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack crippling critical infrastructure within seconds.
• And plenty more.

All right, without further ado, I bring you Annie Jacobsen.

The interview begins [00:02:28]

Luisa Rodriguez: Today I’m speaking with Annie Jacobsen. Annie is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author. She’s written books on the US’s top secret base, Area 51, and the CIA’s secret history of paramilitary armies and assassinations, among many other fascinating topics.

Today’s interview focuses on her most recent book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, which is about what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US.

Thanks for coming on the podcast, Annie.

Annie Jacobsen: Thank you for having me.

The first 24 minutes [00:02:59]

Luisa Rodriguez: You focus on this scenario where North Korea has launched a nuclear weapon at the US, and you detail how things would play out from launch, basically on a second-by-second, minute-by-minute basis. Which makes the book both incredibly visceral and compelling, and also really is this incredible way to learn so, so many facts — just factual details about what would happen, how it would happen, when it would happen.

But you start with the first 24 minutes, which is about the time it would take for a nuclear weapon to reach its target. So, what are the very first things that happen following launch?

Annie Jacobsen: It’s a remarkable sequence that takes place in seconds, which should astonish readers and listeners alike. Unbeknownst to most people, there is a satellite system in space called SBIRS — Space-Based Infrared System. It is parked over nuclear-armed adversaries and enemies of the United States. And the reason it is there is to be able to identify — in one second or less — the hot rocket exhaust on a launching ICBM — an intercontinental ballistic missile. When you consider that astonishing fact — that in one second, the Defense Department knows this missile, which by the way, cannot be redirected or recalled, is on its way — now you can begin to imagine, my god, what happens at second two and second three and second four?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Can you paint a picture for me? So there are command centres in the US getting these early warnings. What happens from there?

Annie Jacobsen: That’s right. This data that is collected by this satellite system will process at incredible speeds and send the data down to numerous organisations that are the front-facing institutions of nuclear command and control. So aerospace data facilities within the space force: I write about each of these different facilities in the first few seconds of the scenario.

But the big-picture concepts that I think are really remarkable are these three command and control centres, nuclear bunkers underground. The first one is called the National Military Command Center. It’s located beneath the Pentagon. It is considered the beating heart of nuclear war. Then there’s the command centre inside Cheyenne Mountain. It’s kind of been made legendary by movies. That is considered the brainstem of nuclear war. And the third bunker is beneath Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. That is the bunker for US Strategic Command, also known as STRATCOM. And that, I have been told, is the muscle.

So when you think about this anthropomorphisation of nuclear command and control, it’s really a visual that I think sets things alight, and you can begin to understand how all of these facilities are now working together to make the next move — which is going to be: bring this information to the president. It happens that fast.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. So what is your best guess at how quickly the president is then informed and has to act?

Annie Jacobsen: The concept of bringing this information to the president so that he can launch a counterattack happens so quickly, it’s almost hard to process the information. But you begin to realise that as this data is coming in, all of these different facilities are at work for that primary goal. So the secretary of defence, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the commander of NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command], they are going to all be in communications as these systems are processing, to decide how to advise: “Mr President, we have an incoming ballistic missile.”

And once the president is informed, we learn very quickly he has this astonishingly small window to make a counterattack decision. That is a window of approximately six minutes.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, on this six minute thing. I’ve heard this actually many times before, and it is a completely incomprehensible fact to me. Six minutes. I think you point out that it’s about the length of time it takes to brew something like six to ten cups of coffee in a cafeteria. Sometimes, since reading your book, I’ll just note what six minutes feels like. I’ll do some dishes, and I get like three in and six minutes has passed. It kind of really drives home for me how absolutely insane this is.

But I actually don’t understand why it’s just six minutes rather than 10 or 20, or even slightly more, given that it would take something closer to 26 to 30 minutes for one of these missiles to reach the US from North Korea or maybe Russia.

Annie Jacobsen: Well, you’re absolutely right to point out that the length of time it takes for an intercontinental ballistic missile to get from one continent to the next is approximately 30 minutes. And that is a fact that most people don’t know. Or if they’ve heard it in passing, it’s almost impossible to digest — especially when you are reminded it cannot be redirected or recalled.

So that sets the framework, the architecture, for this ticking-clock scenario that must move forward. And the six-minute window specifically comes out of the mouth of President Ronald Reagan. You know, there have been different numbers reported, but as I do with everything in this book — which is a nonfiction scenario of what could happen in a nuclear launch — the reason I use Reagan’s six minutes is because of this incredible quote that he gives the public. And I quote him directly in the book, but it goes something like this: “Six minutes is an irrational amount of time to have to decide to unleash Armageddon.” That really should give citizens not just of America, but of the world, pause.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so then from there, the US president has sole authority over whether to launch nuclear weapons, including in retaliation to a first strike. Can you describe what the president’s decision process is like?

Annie Jacobsen: Absolutely. And, you know, that concept of presidential sole authority is another fundamental that most people don’t realise. And when you consider that, I think the first reaction is, wait a minute, did I hear that correctly? So let me explain.

During the “fire and fury” days of the rhetoric — the nuclear sabre-rattling coming out of the mouth of the former US President Donald Trump, the fire and fury days, with the arguments with North Korea over potential nuclear war — various members of the national security community, but also Congress, began to debate this idea in public forums about whether or not the president had sole authority. And I say that so that citizens of the world realise they are not alone in wondering how this could be.

Congress itself was so sort of confused that, as a sort of analogy for their position, they actually had a report written, which they issued, stating, “Yes, in fact, the commander-in-chief has sole presidential authority to launch nuclear war.” Congress stated that the president need ask no one, not the secretary of defence, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and not Congress.

And so, faced with this fundamental that the United States president can launch nuclear war — and must, on his own authority — you can also begin to see why that window is so critical: that he must make a decision and he must make a decision fast. There will be no roundtable discussion of all of this.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that’s actually a great point. And it is worth taking a step back to… I actually don’t feel like I’ve questioned enough the fact that there is a single person who will be deciding, on behalf of the many millions of us, whether to start a nuclear war. How is it possible? Maybe you can say a bit more about the debate that it sounds like was had, about whether it should be permissible, allowed, and good for the president to be the single person making this decision?

Annie Jacobsen: When I was reporting the book, I began to ask questions exactly like you’re asking me. And one of the statements that was quite haunting was, and this was repeated by many people, which is, there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war. And so you are absolutely right that when the president makes a decision to counterattack with nuclear weapons, he is, in essence, setting off a chain of events that will potentially affect billions of people. And let me change that word from potentially. That will almost certainly affect billions of people. And in the end of the scenario, that effect is death.

The Black Book and presidential advisors [00:13:35]

Luisa Rodriguez: Can you describe what the president’s decision is like? What’s the context, and what are the specific decisions they have to make?

Annie Jacobsen: OK, so pause for a second. On the one hand, you have this lane of action, which is the advisors taking the information to the president. On the other hand, at the same time, you have all the nuclear command and control facilities working to, A, confirm the information, B, determine the trajectory of the missile — that’s happening in seconds and minutes — and then you have a process by which the interceptor missile system is going to try and intercept it. This is again happening in the first few minutes.

And then ultimately, the system requires that there is a secondary confirmation that that ballistic missile is indeed coming to the continental United States. That happens around nine minutes. That happens when long-range radars that are ground-based, as opposed to the ones in space, confirm this information when they can finally see the missiles coming over the horizon.

So when you consider all that is happening, on the one hand, that is with the machine systems. Then you consider the human element, as you’re asking me. And that human element involves people, and it also involves the Black Book, which is that document very underreported — it so jealously guarded, the contents of the Black Book — that sits inside of the president’s football. The football is also known as the emergency satchel. And it follows the president 24/7, 365 days a year. It looks like an overstuffed briefcase. It’s carried by a military aide. Everyone on the team knows him as a mil aide.

And inside that football is an ability to confirm the identity of the president, which is coupled with a small laminated card the president must carry in his pocket at all times. It’s known as the “biscuit.” And that confirms his identity in an old school analogue way. Very interesting. It’s not state-of-the-art biometrics digital systems. It is a call and response. I drill down on this in the book.

And then also in there is this set of documents called the Black Book. Once a mil aide went on the record to talk about it, and he described it as a Denny’s-like menu. And what he means by that is that if you pull back, theoretically, and think about the nuclear war plans that exist: they are specific to a nation, they are specific to a potential attack. And then they must get synthesised down into a readable document — again, a very quickly readable document, because the president is going to be reading it in that six-minute window — which gives the president a list of counterstrike options.

And what I learned from an individual named Ted Postol, who is actually familiar with the contents of the Black Book, is that the counterstrike options — these nuclear strike options, which are then going to kill millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people on the other side of the globe — have been so watered down that they have become profoundly objectified. In other words, the way that Postol put it to me was that his concern was that the president almost won’t even know what it is he is authorising.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK. And how prepared would you say the president is to take in the information from the Black Book, take in what we know about the incoming missiles, and make this decision, choose between these options?

Annie Jacobsen: One of the most impactful interviews I did on this subject was with former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Now, before he was SecDef, Panetta was the director of the CIA. And before he was the director of the CIA, Panetta was the White House chief of staff for President Clinton. So he has a very broad spectrum of experience; he has decades of experience in multiple positions, dealing directly with multiple presidents.

And Panetta was not the only one who confirmed with me that most presidents are deeply unprepared for the reality that is nuclear war. And that is this idea that underpins it all: that the president, in essence, almost doesn’t want to know. Now, we — the public — will not know for certain that this is true until a former president does an interview and says, “Not true. I was incredibly well-versed in nuclear war plans. I sat and read them late at night, wondering what I would do.” Until that happens, we have only the information from multiple sources saying most presidents don’t want to know.

Luisa Rodriguez: Who is around the president to advise them? And if we know, what kinds of advice are they likely to give?

Annie Jacobsen: Another secretary of defence I interviewed for the book was Bill Perry. And Perry spent much of his life in the chain of command, if you will — I mean that literally and also figuratively — of the military-industrial complex. He was involved uniquely with research and development of weapons systems. And after he retired from government, he became very concerned about the threat of nuclear war, and spent the latter parts of his life — he’s now [96] — talking about how dangerous all of this is.

And from former Secretary of Defense Perry, we also learn how unprepared presidents are in general, and this idea that they have many other things on their mind than considering that they might have to start a nuclear war. Because nuclear war is never supposed to happen. That’s the fundamental of deterrence. So I spend quite some time quoting Perry in the book, because he had so many insights into all of these questions that you’re asking. And again, this is from someone who is deeply inside the military establishment.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I think one detail that really struck me was that there will be some people around the president, I think it might have been called “jamming the president”: basically this idea that some of his or her advisors will be saying, “Launch as soon as possible, and choose one of the more large-scale retaliatory strikes.”

Annie Jacobsen: Yes. So you’ve asked a very important question about who’s advising the president. And again, we know now there is such a tiny window of opportunity to present wise counsel to the president. The ideas of what might transpire came from former SecDef Bill Perry explaining to me that he might have a crisis of conscience and want to advise the president one way — but he was also mindful of the fact that this was his older, retired self thinking about the world at large, not necessarily himself as a young man, as the secretary of defence.

But what we do know from documents is that this concept that you refer to, called “jamming the president,” is a very real concept within the military hierarchy. And that is the idea that the STRATCOM commander — trained as he has been to fight nuclear war, if it comes to that — would be entirely focused on getting the counterattack launch order from the president. That is his focus. Secret Service has a different focus, but the STRATCOM commander is focused on getting that order. And perhaps the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would also be thinking in those terms.

Now, getting a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to go on the record about all of this is something I would welcome, because that would be incredibly revelatory to we citizens. And I think that is another sort of hope of the book: that it would provoke further discussion about some of these protocols that are in place, some of these concepts that are in place, and ultimately lead to their being refined.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I certainly hope so. And it is hard for me to imagine people getting through the book and being like, “Yeah, this is fine. It’s OK that these are our policies and heuristics.” So I do feel really hopeful, and just interested to know what comes of it as you learn more about how people react to the book.

On this decision the president is making, there’s at least some kind of live decision about which option to select off this menu. But the US has a launch-on-warning policy, which basically says that the US will launch a retaliatory nuclear strike as soon as it gets warning of an incoming nuclear attack. Does that mean that it is basically certain that the president would launch at least some kind of counterstrike?

Annie Jacobsen: It’s a very significant policy that’s worth drilling down on here to your audience members — who are a little bit, shall I say, savvier to the innuendos, or rather the details inside of the details.

So, in general, there is a launch-on-warning policy of the United States. As Secretary Perry said to me, “Once we know a missile is coming, we prepare to launch. Period.” So said differently, there’s no policy that says you don’t do that. This is where the sort of “pundits with PhDs,” I call them, go bananas and say that that’s not exactly true. And there’s a lot of refining. I feel it is far more important to demonstrate that launch on warning exists as a fundamental concept — and it is what, more than likely, STRATCOM and the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff would be pushing for. And that’s from SecDef Perry himself.

Inside of that policy is a tiny detail, explained to me elegantly by Jon Wolfsthal, who was an advisor to President Obama on this very issue. There is a concept called “damage limitation requirement.” It’s so Orwellian, let’s repeat it: damage limitation requirement. What that means is that the president has to make sure that he is limiting potential future damage to the United States. So if someone launches a nuclear weapon at the United States, the assumption is they’re going to do more damage. Because why would you be insane enough to launch one nuclear weapon, and not the mother lode? And I get into that later with my discussions with Richard Garwin, who designed the world’s first thermonuclear bomb, Ivy Mike.

But this concept of damage limitation requirement for the president is the basis of why STRATCOM could be arguing for the president, “Sir, you must launch this massive counterattack.” And this very significant player named Bruce Blair, himself a missileer, who was sort of a leading analyst of all things nuclear — he died tragically in COVID — he put forth in this significant monograph about how this would unfold, and why it would be likely that a nuclear counterattack against North Korea would result in 80-some-odd nuclear weapons being launched in counterattack.

Luisa Rodriguez: So the logic behind launch on warning is basically… Well, I think maybe there are a couple of pieces to it. One is something I think colloquially termed as “use it or lose it.” Part of why we’d want to launch before nuclear weapons hit US soil is because it’s actually just pretty well known where at least our land-based nuclear weapons are housed. So if we were to allow a full-scale nuclear strike to hit American soil, it’s possible we’d lose a huge fraction of our arsenal. And then I think another piece of it is just deterrence.

Are those the basic reasons? And do you think it makes sense as a policy? I’m actually a little bit torn. On the one hand, I’m like, what if it’s a false alarm? What if it means that an extra million, hundreds of millions of people are killed, and they didn’t have to be? On the other hand, maybe it does contribute to deterrence, and maybe it is true that we want to maintain the ability to counterattack, even if that means launching earlier than we might have otherwise.

Annie Jacobsen: So let’s remind listeners what deterrence is. A synonym for “deterrence” is essentially “prevention” — so this idea that we’re going to prevent nuclear war, we’re going to deter nuclear war by having a massive arsenal. The United States has 5,000 nuclear weapons. Russia has 5,000 nuclear weapons. This idea of like, “We have this massive arsenal pointed at you, and you have this massive arsenal pointed at us, and no one’s going to use them because it would be madness and the world would end.” That is the idea of deterrence. Summarised, it’s: “more nuclear weapons make us more safe.” I interpret that as slightly Orwellian. Other people interpret that a different way. Listeners can decide how they want to interpret that. That is deterrence, STRATCOM’s fundamental. They have it pinned on their Twitter account: “Deterrence will hold. Deterrence will hold.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow, that’s fascinating. I didn’t know that.

Annie Jacobsen: OK, now pause for a moment. Me finding in an inside-baseball meeting of STRATCOM deputies, the deputy commander of STRATCOM, Lieutenant General Thomas Bussiere, saying, “If deterrence fails, it all unravels.” So you have confidence, and then you have reality.

Within that, to get to the unpacking of your question, you have this idea that in the 1950s, it was believed by the generals that nuclear war could be fought and won. This is now insanity. Everyone knows that. We have the joint statement issued by Reagan and Gorbachev: “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Any sane person agrees with that.

And so why we are going to discuss this in this strange manner is because our arsenal, our nuclear triad, our 5,000-some-odd nuclear weapons were born of this idea that they could be used and we could win with them. But now that’s all changed to be entirely opposite. So it’s simply deterrence. But we still have all the same systems in place, on hair trigger alert with these policies of launch on warning.

Now, previously in the old days, there was also a preemptive strike policy that was very clear, that I write about in the book, which is why there’s so much paranoia embedded into this system — because at certain points in time, the United States’s doctrine was, “We might attack first if we feel we’re threatened.” And that’s terrifying. And launch on warning is sort of the ugly stepchild of all of that that I just said: that idea that if we were to say, “Go ahead and attack us, and then we’ll decide what to do,” that would somehow alter the concept of deterrence — which is, “Don’t you dare.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes sense. That actually reminds me that both President George W. Bush and President Obama explicitly said that they wanted to get rid of the hair trigger alert system — where, at a moment’s notice, many hundreds, at least, of nuclear weapons could be launched. Why didn’t they?

Annie Jacobsen: I so look forward to a former president going on the record and explaining this to us, we the people — because no one I know has the answer to that. And as I report in the book, many presidents went into office saying, “This is something I would change once I’m there.” And yet they didn’t. Why? And we have former presidential advisors — among them Paul Nitze, who was a huge nuclear hawk — saying, “This policy is inexcusably dangerous. It must change.” Again, these are people saying this either before going into office or after leaving office. What is this great mystery that none of us are privy to and no one can seem to figure out?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, right. I mean, former President Obama is a person who I trust to think really deeply and carefully about this kind of issue. And I am really just fascinated by the fact that somehow he was convinced not to do anything about this.

Annie Jacobsen: And I’m going to follow up for one thought, because what I think is interesting is one of the great paradoxes of deterrence is precisely what you said a moment ago. Which is: you gather a little bit of information from reading my book, and you begin to think that’s crazy. And then you stop and pause and say, when you say, we must never have a nuclear war, and then you think maybe deterrence is the way. And then you get stuck in that loop.

So I think it’s worth being clear that these are really difficult issues, and they have been embedded in the military for 79 years now. And to unwind them into a more viable 21st century concept requires deep thinking — not just by a small group of people with perhaps a vested interest either at the Pentagon or at the White House, but rather by all of us in some manner.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I actually really want to come back to deterrence as a concept and how much it makes sense or doesn’t make sense. But for now, going back to this decision the president must make in six minutes, what is the president meant to be considering? Are they meant to be focused on strategic considerations? How to decapitate North Korea? Are they trying to deescalate? Are they thinking about the numbers of casualties at all?

Annie Jacobsen: It’s interesting that you use the term “deescalate” because there’s a sort of semi-official term in Defense Department nomenclature which is called “escalate to deescalate.” And it sounds rather catch-22-ish. And it is exactly as it sounds.

What I learned from documents around this issue is that in the event North Korea were to send a nuclear missile at the United States in a madman’s move… While you do have one former commander of STRATCOM, General Hyten, on the record telling CNN — and this was again, back in the fire and fury rhetoric days — he said, “North Korea needs to know if they send one nuclear missile at us, we’ll send one at them. If they send two, we’ll send two.” And I quote Hyten accurately in the book. But that’s pretty much what he says.

What I found, however — and what I was told by top-tier national security advisors, many of whom are uniquely familiar with this process, and would advise the president in the event this would need to happen — was that that number is much more likely 80-some-odd nuclear missiles going at the nuclear command and control facilities on the upper half of the Korean peninsula. And so you realise that what that really means in actual terms, that saying “escalate to deescalate,” it means like, “annihilate the person who dared attack the United States.”

Luisa Rodriguez: I guess the thing I’d like to happen is for the president to be surrounded by thoughtful advisors, to have kind of rehearsed the scenario many times, and to be extremely thoughtful and wise about the decisions in front of them.

But the picture I got from your book is that there’s actually this intense chaos, I think, coming from all sorts of directions. A couple of directions that particularly struck me were, one, there’s STRATCOM, which is going to want the president to make decisions about the retaliatory strike as soon as possible. But also there’s the Secret Service. And the Secret Service has a duty to protect the president at all costs, and they’re going to want to move the president. And I got this sense that these kind of six-plus minutes aren’t going to be conducive to making reasonable strategic decisions. To what extent does that feel true to you?

Annie Jacobsen: Absolutely. I mean, you’ve pointed out a very important problem here. On the one hand, you have the president, who’s in charge of all of it. On the other hand, you have the military command and control system. And then on the third hand, you have the president’s advisors.

So if you consider the nuclear command and control system, the military chain of command, you have the STRATCOM commander, who’s the person who’s going to receive the counterattack orders from the president, and put the nuclear counterstrike into effect. And underneath the STRATCOM commander, there are 150,000 military people waiting and at the ready, all of whom have been rehearsing nuclear war. That really must be considered: they have all been rehearsing this action.

On the other hand, you have the president of the United States, who I learned from his close advisors is among the least well informed of people in any scenario. Meaning the way that it was said to me by former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was, “It’s almost as if the president doesn’t want to know.” And then you have the fact that the military advisors around the president — I believe, at least, having interviewed a lot of them — are very wise and knowledgeable individuals, but they cannot force the president to pay attention to something while he’s in office worrying about political concerns, worrying about domestic problems, worrying about big foreign policy issues having to do with conventional warfare.

So what I learned in reporting the book was that the idea behind the president actually ever having to consider, “Oh my god, I’m the one in charge here, and I have to make this decision in six minutes,” it’s almost become like the ostrich with the head in the sand scenario. It’s easier to remain naive to this.

Luisa Rodriguez: That is also extremely disturbing.

Annie Jacobsen: Now, with that said, I would welcome a president of the United States, a former president, explaining to the American people what I just suggested. Perhaps I and everyone I interviewed are wrong. And the president of the United States stays up late at night reviewing the Black Book, wondering, “What wise decision would I make if it came to it?” Because if the decision has to be made, it is going to be made so fast that one would hope the president knows what he is doing.

False alarms [00:40:43]

Luisa Rodriguez: A thing that worries me a lot is this possibility of false alarms, partly because I think some part of me believes, hopes that deterrence will hold, and part of me finds it really hard to believe that a world leader would launch nuclear weapons. So part of me is kind of hoping/believing that a deliberate nuclear launch is actually really unlikely. And we could probably talk at length about that.

But I do think it’s pretty undeniably plausible — given all of the near-miss events that have happened — that nuclear weapons could be launched by accident, or perceived as launched when they’re not actually launched. There are just loads of examples of this. And very likely it’s just been luck that kept us from escalating those near misses.

So I’m curious how likely you think it is for the president in this situation to be alerted or notified, if we were talking about a false alarm situation, in time not to launch those ICBMs that cannot be recalled.

Annie Jacobsen:When you look at the different false alarms that have occurred on the record, there’s always a last-minute save. And a last-minute save is a really dangerous way to move forward.

There have been, let’s say, half a dozen documented accounts of almosts. This is documented. Imagine how many there actually have been. But former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry told me one that he was directly involved in. And what is brilliant about that is there’s no telephone game there. It’s his memory from 1979. And him telling me this, all those decades later, I could sense in his voice the terror that he still felt. It went like this: He was not yet secretary of defence. He was the deputy of research and engineering at the Pentagon. But he had the night watch detail: he had the duty, if there was a launch detected, he was the person who would have to tell the president. And he got that phone call in the middle of the night.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow.

Annie Jacobsen: And the phone call came from the bunker beneath the Pentagon. Not only had the bunker beneath the Pentagon detected ICBMs coming at the United States, over 1,000 of them, but also SLBMs — sub-launched ballistic missiles — which come at the United States even faster than 30 minutes. And this information had been confirmed by the bunker beneath STRATCOM. It was just a moment where Perry described he couldn’t believe that he was going to have to tell the president it was time to order a counterattack. This was a major attack.

And then his phone rang again, and it was an officer at the Pentagon telling him it was a false alarm. And the false alarm was that a VHS tape, a simulated nuclear war game tape, had been mistakenly inserted into the machine at the Pentagon and therefore also showed up at the STRATCOM bunker. That is just enough to send a shiver up the spine all these decades later.

Luisa Rodriguez: Absolutely. Yeah. That is a near-miss account that I’m familiar with, but it does really change the flavour and tone of it for me to imagine being the person who has to inform the president of those 1,000 nuclear weapons coming. I mean, it would have been one of the worst experiences of my life.

Annie Jacobsen: Imagine if you later found out it was a false alarm.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, it’s impossible for me to imagine.

Russian misperception of US counterattack [00:44:50]

Luisa Rodriguez: So in the scenario you describe in the book, the US president does decide to launch a retaliatory strike on North Korea. But a really wild fact that I did not know before I read the book is that US ICBMs aimed at North Korea would have to pass over Russia, which Russian officials might interpret as a nuclear attack on Russia. This totally shocked me and blew my mind. I had no idea.

Can you say more about how that’s possible? How their early warning signs wouldn’t differentiate between nuclear weapons aimed at Russia versus nuclear weapons aimed at North Korea?

Annie Jacobsen: The reality that US ICBM Minuteman missiles do not have enough range to target North Korea without overflying Russia is a fact. It’s a fact almost no one knows. It’s a fact I didn’t know, and I’ve been writing about nuclear weapons since 2009. That fact was conveyed to me by Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists. He and his team keep track of information like this for the Nuclear Notebook. It’s an incredible resource, for anyone who wants to learn more.

It’s such an astonishing fact that I fact-checked it with former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta himself, because you almost can’t believe that this is actual reality. And not only did Panetta confirm this, but he conceded that it’s a major problem.

And when you say, you know, could interpret — Russia could interpret — my question would be, how could it think anything else? And the only way it could think anything else would be is if the president of the United States had a direct line to the president of Russia to say, “By the way, those missiles that are coming, they’re not coming at you.” And the two men would have to have a good enough relationship, a relationship based on trust, where you might take someone’s word for it. And that is impossible to think about in this climate.

Coupled with the fact that I learned in reporting Nuclear War: A Scenario that Russian technology systems, early warning satellite systems, are deeply flawed. So the idea that Russia has the same capacity to understand trajectory the way that the United States does is pure fantasy.

Luisa Rodriguez: I basically just knew that American systems could, with pretty astonishing accuracy, predict where incoming missiles were going to hit, and just assumed that surely Russian ones could too. And yeah, it just sounds like that is totally false. And not only false, but wildly wrong, and that the Russian early warning system is incredibly inaccurate. I think from memory it might interpret five missiles as hundreds. I might be getting the details wrong, but just like wildly inaccurate.

Annie Jacobsen: You’re absolutely right. You are right. And furthermore, it can mistake the hot rocket exhaust on a ballistic missile: it can interpret clouds or sunlight as hot rocket exhaust. So it could see a launch where there isn’t a launch, and it can see more missiles than there are.

And part of what is at issue here is that Russia would never want to admit it’s lacking in this field. So there’s a certain bravado from its defence scientists that its systems are as good as the United States’s. But when I was reporting on that, I went to sources that are not only US analysts, but people like Pavel Podvig, who is the world’s expert on Russian nuclear forces — speaks Russian, studied in Moscow, acts as a liaison to the UN — and he conceded how dangerous this issue is, and how lacking some of the Russian technologies really are in the early warning department.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. For me, this was just an astonishing fact, partly because I already kind of alluded to the fact that I find it really hard to imagine someone starting a nuclear war, even someone like Putin. But I actually do find it much easier to imagine North Korea starting a nuclear war, which then made this particular fact hit really hard for me. Because North Korea, with tens of nuclear weapons, starting a nuclear war would be horrible — but only a fraction as bad as a nuclear war that involved both Russia and the US’s thousands of nuclear weapons.

Should the US just give Russia its early warning systems technology, so that Russia can accurately predict where incoming nuclear weapons are going to hit?

Annie Jacobsen: I think that by the time you get to the end of the book, certainly my experience reporting the book, was the 100% takeaway something must be done. And that something that must be done would be some kind of an agreement between nuclear-armed nations that everybody loses. There’s no such thing as a small nuclear war, there’s no such thing as winning a nuclear war. So why aren’t superpowers working together to reduce the threat?

So if you’re going to have one nation — in the present day, that is North Korea — that is defying treaties outright, you could have unity among the other nuclear-armed nations to essentially make their behaviour taboo. That would be one idea.

I’m a journalist; I’m telling you the story about what could happen. There are so many organisations I have since learned about that have so many brilliant solutions, whether it’s technology sharing, whether it’s disarmament. All of these ideas, I believe, should come to the fore now. And the only bad idea is continued escalation, is nuclear rhetoric, is treating other nuclear-armed nations as enemies rather than as adversaries, or as having a different set of ideas. But agreeing on a consensus that nuclear war must never be fought.

Luisa Rodriguez: Sure, sure. That makes sense. On this fact that a nuclear attack could be misjudged and perceived as an attack on one country when it’s meant for another: I’ve done this interview with Christian Ruhl, and I think had I not done this interview, I would have found it really implausible that the US and Russia didn’t communicate to avoid this massive escalation. That, spoiler alert, is what transpires in the book, and which we’ll talk more about.

But Christian told me that apparently American officials haven’t been able to reach their Russian and Chinese counterparts during very important critical crises. Is that consistent with what you learned in your interviews?

Annie Jacobsen: It’s an absolute fact. And the best, most terrifying example I can give is recent: in the early days of the war in Ukraine, a Russian missile was said to have struck Poland, a NATO country. Now, that turned out to be erroneously reported. But for a number of hours, that was all over the internet and was believed to be true. And that would invoke Article 5. You’re talking about nuclear superpowers potentially getting involved. That is a really bad scenario.

It was something like 24 or 36 hours before Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley went to the press, gave a conference, and said that he had yet to be able to reach his Russian counterpart.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow.

Annie Jacobsen: That is astonishing. And it demonstrates exactly your point: these individuals are not just one phone call away from one another. There is a major gap in communication, and therefore in critical intelligence and information-sharing in real time.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. And I just do not understand why really rock-solid crisis communication isn’t more of a priority. But that is the current world we’re in, apparently, which is one of 100 different deeply disturbing facts in your book.

Annie Jacobsen: Here’s another really interesting side note that comes to mind. A couple books ago, I wrote The Pentagon’s Brain. It’s about DARPA, which is the American military science agency that’s probably the most powerful, most secretive agency in the world. And I learned an interesting fact about the red phone, the proverbial red phone. And this goes back to the Kennedy administration.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy became alarmed that there was a red phone on his desk. If you’re old enough — which you are not — you can visualise what this red phone looked like. It had a rotary dial. And Kennedy talks about how he was suddenly aware that if he needed to call Khrushchev, the amount of time it would take for his finger to dial the rotary — and the rotary to fall back — was really dangerous in a time of nuclear crisis.

And guess what the result was? The internet. I’m not kidding. He reached out to a guy called J. C. R. Licklider, who is considered the father of the internet, trying to say we need a faster way to communicate. And that was through computer technology, through digital technology. And J. C. R. Licklider set up for the Pentagon, the ARPANET, which is now known as the internet. That was one of the original babies of what is now called DARPA, which was originally called ARPA.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. That is fascinating. This question about communication and how solid it would be, another kind of flaw with it is what you’ve already pointed out: that Russia would have to trust the American president that those missiles weren’t intended for Russia.

It actually reminds me of another fact from your book. It’s a bit of a tangentially related fact, but we’re going to go with it because it really shocked me. Many casualties of an attack — whether it be a retaliatory attack on North Korea in this case, or an attack on Russia or another country — wouldn’t be citizens of the target country. For example, you explained that the 1960 nuclear strike plan against Moscow would have also killed half the population of China because of all the fallout that would have been carried by wind.

So even if the president can get a hold of China or Russia and say something like, either, “This attack isn’t meant for you,” or maybe in the case of China, something like, “FYI, we’re launching nuclear weapons. They’re not for you, and we don’t want to start a war with you, but they might kill millions of your citizens. But please don’t be mad and launch a retaliatory strike on us” — that also seems like an incredibly uninspiring default. That is another way I can imagine escalation being not just plausible, but likely. Just the fact that other nuclear powers might be the unintended, indirect targets of a large-scale nuclear attack.

Annie Jacobsen: What you’re hitting upon here, I believe, is an issue that really pertains to transparency, that pertains to a bigger understanding of these secret plans behind the veil. The SIOP that you’re referring to, the Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear war — whereby 600 million people would be killed, one-fifth of the world’s population at the time; and that says nothing about those in America that would die in a counterattack. As you mentioned, one-half of the population of China, who wasn’t even involved in the war, would die from fallout.

This was an actual nuclear war plan. And it was and remained classified at the highest levels of classification all the way until a decade ago. And even still, the details of that are classified. The reason we know the contents is because a participant named John Rubel wrote about it in a tiny memoir in 2008, shortly before he died. And I wrote about it in my book. Rubel’s memoir went almost unnoticed. America was in the middle of the war on terror, and he wrote it, and it was kind of… No one read it.

The point of this is that the world has existed, you know, with the sword of Damocles hanging over our head, based on the plans and decisions of small groups of military men for decades. Why? Why? Why was it OK to have this plan in place and to know that millions, perhaps billions of people would die, and yet no one spoke up? The why I ask in that question comes from John Rubel on his deathbed in 2008, and it gets echoed by me now in 2024, and I think asked by you — which is really the question of, what are the plans behind the veil, and why are they so secret, and why are they OK?

A narcissistic madman with a nuclear arsenal [01:00:13]

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Before we move on, something we haven’t talked about yet is the leadup to this first 24 minutes after a nuclear launch: what could possibly be going through North Korean leadership’s minds to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States? Why do you think it’s plausible that North Korea would launch a nuclear attack on the US in the first place?

Annie Jacobsen: Many great books have been written about the geopolitical manoeuvrings that could lead to the buildup of a nuclear war. I specifically wanted to take the reader from nuclear launch to nuclear winter after giving them a section called “How we got here,” which brings readers up to speed on the history of it all. The reason that I chose this bolt-out-of-the-blue attack by North Korea stemmed from a set of interviews that I did with Richard Garwin, who is a nuclear weapons designer, who is now in his 90s, who has advised every president since Eisenhower, who drew the plans to the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, the Ivy Mike bomb. It’s on the cover of the book.

And in my discussion with Garwin, I asked him precisely what you’re asking, which is: What’s the most dangerous threat? And he said to me it was a narcissistic madman with a nuclear arsenal. And he talked with me about mad king logic that scared him most, quoting even the famous French phrase “Après moi, le déluge”: this idea of “after me, the flood” — like, I don’t care what happens; I’m a narcissistic madman.

And I took that to mean Garwin was speaking of North Korea for precisely the reasons we spoke of earlier: that North Korea is not playing by the rules in terms of notifying neighbours about ballistic missile launches, and how dangerous that is, and how there is absolutely no transparency in the North Korean nuclear programme, and how that is by choice.

So to me, the essence of the story that I wanted to convey — that idea that I was going to show you in appalling detail how horrific nuclear war would be — it doesn’t need a reason to start. It just happens.

Is escalation inevitable? [01:02:53]

Luisa Rodriguez: Turning to another topic, which we’ve already kind of alluded to: I’m interested in the question of escalation in general, and how inevitable it is that if any nuclear weapons were used — including from North Korea, which has relatively few nuclear weapons — how likely is it that a large-scale nuclear war is to follow? Which I think is something a lot of experts believe. Can you start by talking me through the proud prophet war game and what you take from it?

Annie Jacobsen: You know, the nuclear war plans are among the most jealously guarded secrets in the United States. One has been declassified. I paused on that word, because if you look in the book, I reprint a couple pages of what a declassified nuclear war game looks like. It is 98% redacted, blacked out. There’s like one or two words here or there — you know, “scenario” and “global implications” — and that’s it. Everything else is blacked out. You do not learn a thing.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow.

Annie Jacobsen: So you might say, why reprint that? Well, as I explain in the book, the declassification allowed one very important person in that war game to speak about it publicly without violating his security clearance. That person is Professor Paul Bracken of Yale University. And in his own book, he is able to describe thoughts on that nuclear war game from 1983. And what Bracken tells us is that, no matter how nuclear war begins — whether NATO is involved or NATO isn’t involved, whether China is involved or China isn’t involved, you get the idea — no matter how it begins, it ends in total nuclear apocalypse.

Bracken wrote that everyone left the war game depressed. He’s talking about secretaries of defence and national security advisors. The game was played over two weeks. There were multiple scenarios, and yet it always ends in Armageddon. So that is the answer to, “How does nuclear war end?” It only ends one way.

Luisa Rodriguez: Did Bracken explain why these scenarios inevitably ended in escalation and basically Armageddon?

Annie Jacobsen: I think if you read Nuclear War: A Scenario, you learn precisely why, because, and you know, it’s not called Nuclear War: The Only Scenario; it’s not called Nuclear War: The Scenario That… I mean, you can fill in the blanks. It is a scenario. It is one of many. And every step of the way, the seconds and minutes that I take the reader through, pulling quotes from the individuals who would be involved in certain situations, in any part of the nuclear triad, the missiles, the submarines, the bombers, the close presidential advisors…

I interviewed people from the Secret Service who would be responsible for moving the president. The different conundrums that arise as the decision trees unfold… You realise that different groups of people, the Secret Service, for example, have an entirely different agenda than STRATCOM, who wants to get the counterattack order from the president. And then we haven’t even begun to discuss my interviews with FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] Director Craig Fugate, the agency that was allegedly responsible for the public after a nuclear war. Fugate told me there would be no population protection planning after a nuclear war, because everyone would be dead. That is a quote from President Obama’s FEMA director.

Luisa Rodriguez: That… Yeah, I’m speechless. That really is shocking. Maybe just to flesh out the kind of reasoning that your book did make clear to me for why escalation does seem basically all but inevitable: there are just so many, many things pushing toward escalation. Not just kind of the standing policies like mutually assured destruction, but also a bunch of small factors — like enormous time pressure, the idea of use it or lose it, the launch-on-warning policy, all of these things that make it so that the president has minutes.

Are there other important factors pushing toward escalation, or have we kind of covered the main ones?

Annie Jacobsen: So, for listeners, let’s consider for a moment the nuclear triad. In this world of complex and sometimes seemingly obfuscated nomenclature — which I believe is meant to kind of keep the public at bay, and maybe even dissuade people from discussing or thinking about these issues; as opposed to inviting people to participate in the conversation about nuclear war and how insane the fundamental concept is, and how it is time to look at things differently — if you consider the nuclear triad, it becomes very simple.

“Triad” means three. We have a three-part nuclear weapons system. There are the ICBMs we spoke about — the intercontinental ballistic missiles. The United States has 400 of them. They are buried in silos across the country.

Then we have the submarines, the nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered submarines — often referred to as the “handmaidens of the apocalypse.” That is because they carry submarine-launched ballistic missiles. SLBMs and submarines can sneak up to a coast. We have them, Russia has them, China has them. North Korea may or may not have them. They can get this close to the United States and launch an SLBM that can hit the United States in under 10 minutes.

Then you have the bombers. America has B-52s and the B-2 stealth bombers. We have a total of 66 of them. They carry gravity bombs and they fly from the base to the target.

So when you consider that the president has three options — and the first two cannot be redirected or recalled; the bombers can be called back — you realise that this system of systems that is going to go into play in nuclear war has not only these different lanes that we’ve talked about — nuclear command and control; what’s happening with the president; what’s happening with the president’s advisors; what is the Secret Service doing? — but those three silos of weapons systems are all now in play based upon the counterstrike orders that the president authorises from the Black Book.

That is the kind of second-and-minute drama that I take the reader through to understand not only how horribly inevitable the terrible outcome of nuclear winter seems, but that there are too many factors to undo.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, right. That was one really striking part for me. A kind of related lesson I took — which, again, we’ve kind of already touched on, but which I do still feel like there might be more to learn from — is the fact that there are just many routes to escalation. So in the scenario you talk about, there are two nuclear weapons launched by North Korea. And then from there, the US retaliates, at which point Russia mistakes this retaliation as an attack on them, at which point they launch their own attack on the US. That’s kind of one route to this massive escalation.

But there’s also the fact that there would have been millions, at least, probably Chinese casualties from an attack on North Korea You didn’t explore this fork, but it seems at least plausible that that would have been a route to escalation, where China all of a sudden has been grievously wronged.

Does it feel true to you that there are just lots of ways? That it’s not just North Korea strikes, the US strikes back — but as soon as nuclear weapons are used, paths to escalation actually just become much more numerous?

Annie Jacobsen: I was doing an interview with former STRATCOM commander General Kehler, and we were discussing what a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia would look like. And General Kehler said to me, “Annie, the world could end in the next few hours.” And it was that statement that really drilled down to me how I was going to frame the book, how I was going to lead up to this moment where a series of misunderstandings and miscalculations after the initial North Korean attack led to this exchange of more than 1,000 missiles between the United States and Russia. And for that reason, the book ends at 72 minutes. And what happens after that answers your question.

Firestorms and rings of annihilation [01:12:56]

Luisa Rodriguez: I want to come to some of those concrete effects that humans near nuclear detonations will be experiencing.

Annie Jacobsen: Yes, so, let’s talk about those nuclear effects, let’s talk about what nuclear weapons do to people and to things.

These are effects that I source specifically from Defense Department documents. And readers can and should turn to the back of the book and follow along in notes to see where these horrific series of effects come from. The Defense Department has been keeping track of all of this since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. And we exploded hundreds of atmospheric nuclear weapons during the Cold War, the effects of which were measured for these documents. I myself interviewed a number of these nuclear weapons engineers who armed, wired, and fired these weapons. And I thank them in my acknowledgments for teaching me so much about this horror.

The idea of what a nuclear weapon does to people begins with this thermonuclear flash of light. And I describe the effects of the one-megaton attack on Washington, DC — which sets off this horrible scenario — as “19 football fields of fire.” That is the centre fireball. It will obliterate everything in a one-mile square radius. Everything. Nothing will remain, no cellular life, nothing. All humans will be turned into combusting carbon.

Then you have to deal with the fact that there will be this dense wall of air pushing out from the centre point that is the blast, three miles out in every direction, knocking down everything. Engineered buildings change shapes; bridges, roads will melt into pools of essentially asphalt lava. That thermonuclear flash has set everything in the line of sight on fire.

And for the book, I interviewed one of the world’s experts on nuclear firestorms. Her name is Lynn Eden. She’s a professor emeritus at Stanford University. And she talks about how the energy from the mass fire that will ensue is 15 to 50 times greater than the energy from the initial blast.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK. So the fireball that you’ve described is what happens kind of right at the centre of the diameter of the nuclear detonation. But there are other rings further out that also have really horrific consequences for all of the kind of life in those areas too. Can you talk about what happens in the second ring?

Annie Jacobsen: I mean, the short version goes like this. Ring one: total annihilation; no cellular life remains. Ring two, another three-mile diameter out: everything is ablaze. Ring three, another three or five miles out on every side: third-degree burns among almost everyone. You are talking about people who may have gone down into the secret tunnels beneath Washington, DC, escaped from the Capitol and such: people are now broiling to death; people are dying from carbon monoxide poisoning; people who followed instructions and went into their basement are dying of suffocation.

Everywhere there is death, everywhere there is fire. People are dying left and right of blood loss. Imagine the projectiles flying through the air after several-hundred-mile-an-hour winds overtake Washington, DC.

Here’s an image which you will not be able to get out of your mind: the mushroom cloud — that iconic mushroom stem and cap that represents a nuclear blast — that mushroom cap and stem, when exploded, when a nuclear weapon has been exploded on a city, that stem and cap is made up of people. What is left over of people and of human civilisation.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh my god. And do you mean that in the sense that it’s basically the incinerated particles of people and buildings and everything and that’s being kind of lofted up as…?

Annie Jacobsen: That is precisely what it is.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that is…

Annie Jacobsen: I love your reaction, because it was exactly my reaction when I first learned that. You think to yourself, that is gruesome beyond gruesome. Then you ask yourself, is that really true? And then you think, well, of course it’s true. What else would it be?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, right.

Annie Jacobsen: And so it hopefully just paints the beginning picture of what will happen. And unfortunately, I do get into graphic detail about, you know, what third-degree burns are like. And when I say “unfortunately,” I had to make a conscious decision as an author about how much to give the readers so that they could continue reading and not just put the book down, like this is too much for me to handle. But there is a balance, because one shouldn’t look away entirely from the reality of what nuclear weapons do to human beings.

Luisa Rodriguez: I completely agree. And I feel like there is almost a taboo around talking about the concrete effects of nuclear weapons on humans. I get the sense that some people think it’s gratuitous or in bad taste — in the same way that some people think it’s tasteless to watch true crime, for example, because it’s about a real person’s death. And I just think it’s extremely important to look at it directly.

Lots of people know some of the very basic facts of what it’s like to die from radiation poisoning, for example. But I found that really coming to terms with how really inconceivably horrible it is to be anywhere near a nuclear weapon when it goes off is the way that I became actually motivated to care about making sure nuclear war never happens.

Because it is a small risk. I think intellectually I am like, it’s a small risk, but there are big consequences. So yes, we should spend some of our resources making sure that it never happens, because in expectation it would be bad. But I don’t think it was until I learned the details that I was like, “This cannot happen, and we are not doing enough to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

So anyways, that is a long-winded way of saying I was really grateful that you put the details in the book, because I think it is one of the main things that will actually motivate people to want to change the way things are currently set up.

Annie Jacobsen: The FEMA director shared with me that they do prepare for nuclear war the same way as they prepare for asteroid strikes: they call these events “low probability, high consequence” — which is essentially what you said.

When the book was about to come into the world, there were concerns voiced to me about fear mongering. And of course I had been through all of this with my sources. I asked my sources specifically, “Is this fear mongering?” None of them said that it was, but still the public’s perception was thought about by people on my side of the fence, shall we say.

Here is the antidote to that, which I continue to be amazed by: during the book tour, I was invited to speak at the nuclear exposition in Brussels, and there were members of the European Parliament in the audience. And there alongside me speaking, were a group of physicians from the IPPNW — that stands for the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. And they spoke to me at length about the powerful positive — shall we say, a strange word to use there — effects of describing precisely what nuclear weapons do to human bodies.

This group of physicians — who, by the way, won the Nobel Prize in the ’80s for their organisation — continue to do this work. And the co-president, Dr Carlos Umaña, who was a colleague I met at this in Brussels, explained to me that he felt what I was able to convey in 200 pages in essence summed up decades of work by these dedicated physicians trying to get the message out.

And boy, was I astonished just the other day when Dr Umaña presented to me a photograph. He had been invited to the Vatican to meet with the pope. Umaña was the 2017 Nobel laureate recipient for the Nobel Peace Prize. And he presented the pope with a copy of my book and sent me a photograph.

And this made me really feel as if those ideas of fear mongering versus reality, as you say was your experience, must be entwined for the world to move forward in a less dangerous manner. Because to quote UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”

Luisa Rodriguez: What an incredible way to learn about the really concrete impact your book is having.

Going back to the effects of an actual strike: further out, people survive. But one might imagine — and I used to think — that if you’re not in the direct vicinity of a detonation, things might be kind of OK.

But you paint a picture of what things are like for the survivors in other areas, and it’s actually pretty terrifying. It really changed my perception of what would happen in Wisconsin, or Texas, where I grew up. I don’t think that my particular neighbourhood in San Antonio, Texas is that likely to be the target, but everywhere in the US will be drastically impacted in ways that I really had not put together. So I found that extremely, extremely sobering.

Annie Jacobsen: When you look at the target list for the United States — and again, these are sourced from very obfuscated maps that have been released over the decades from the various organisations; not just the Defense Department, but FEMA, the Department of Energy — you realise very quickly that everything is a target. If you’re talking about 1,000 nuclear warheads from Russia coming at the United States, in the words of Professor Brian Toon — who is the world’s expert on nuclear winter, an original author of that paper back in the 1980s, who I interviewed for the book — he explained to me that if you are in any kind of a city, not just a major city, I’m talking about small cities, any place with a military base, in any place with an industrial capacity, you are a target. There is a nuclear weapon pointed at you.

And remember, this is happening over minutes, so it’s not a long amount of time that the survivors get to realise how horrific this all is.

I did an interview with America’s first cyber chief, General Touhill. He was appointed by President Obama. And Touhill has also written papers on EMP, by the way, which are still classified. But he’s able to tell us a little bit about this idea of what happens to the United States of America — the chaos that ensues, the mayhem, the madness in the seconds and minutes after the initial two nuclear strikes from North Korea.

Because given the age of social media, someone is videotaping this from even 25 miles out, or on an aeroplane far enough away that it wasn’t taken down by the EMP. And these images begin to circulate. This is not just plausible; this is probable. And then the world knows what has happened, and there begins a scramble for cover, a scramble for escape, a scramble for dot, dot, dot. And I describe that in the book.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. And yet, as you’ve already said, FEMA has no plan to help people, partly because no one will be… It’s not like FEMA employees will be out there with the ability to help. An EMP plus the fallout, literally and figuratively, of nuclear detonations will mean that really no one has anything remotely like normal infrastructure, normal anything.

Nuclear electromagnetic pulses [01:27:34]

Luisa Rodriguez: Actually, we haven’t touched on EMPs yet. Can you talk us through what would happen if a nuclear weapon were detonated in space in order to create a super EMP, or electromagnetic pulse?

Annie Jacobsen: So a super EMP is a three-phased electromagnetic shockwave so powerful that industrial-strength surge suppressors and lightning arrestors — all of which have been designed to block this kind of high-voltage spike — all become rendered useless at once.

Where does an EMP happen? Well, specifically, a super EMP happens by detonating a nuclear weapon — and it can be a small nuclear warhead — in space. Three hundred miles above the United States would do unbelievably catastrophic damage to the entire country.

What’s interesting, and I think unfortunate, about EMP as a concept, is that the issue has gotten so politicised in the United States. Among insiders, I’m talking about here. This was a result of the formation of an EMP Commission to investigate this. Shortly after 9/11, the government was afraid that terrorists would get hold of a small nuclear warhead and somehow get it into a satellite in space. And this issue became unfortunately politicised, so people took sides. And I think, or at least I found in my reporting, that those who put a certain horse in the race — either EMPs are terrifyingly dangerous, or EMPs would never happen — have found it difficult to unwind their initial position, I think to everybody’s detriment.

I went to the world experts to drill down on this: as I mentioned, General Touhill, Obama’s first cyber chief, and also Richard Garwin. Not only did he design the first thermonuclear weapon, Ivy Mike, but he wrote the first classified paper on EMP back in the 1950s. It’s still classified.

They both confirmed with me that the collateral effects of this EMP strike are what would be so deadly. In simple terms, what essentially happens is the whole electrical grid would shut down. It would be a catastrophic failure: a failure of the systems of systems ultimately centred on this one concept I think that listeners might be able to wrap their head around, which is there’s a system in the United States that pretty much runs everything, and it’s called SCADA. That stands for “supervisory control and data acquisition.” It sounds like a mouthful, but what it really is is a system of systems of computers and people that control all the systems of the industrial underpinnings of the United States.

So imagine losing control of railroad routers, of the liftgates on dams, of gas and oil refinery transmission centres. You’re going to lose assembly lines, you’re going to lose air traffic control, port facilities, fibre optics, GPS, hazardous materials. I go on and on in the book about what happens. It all happens in a second. Never mind that at least, at minimum, 10% of all cars in the United States will stop running simultaneously.

Luisa Rodriguez: The passage that struck me most, I’ll just quote:

There will be no more fresh water, no more toilets to flush, no sanitation, no streetlights, no tunnel lights, no lights at all — only candles until there are none left to burn. No gas pumps, no fuel, no ATMs, no cash withdrawals, no cell phones, no landlines, no emergency communication except for high frequency radios, no hospital equipment.

It’s really the end of…everything.

Annie Jacobsen: It really is. And you know, when I was reporting this book, really drilling down on the scientific facts about EMP… Because, as I mentioned, the issue has tragically been politicised. Some go so far as to make fun of people who refer to the EMP threat. This, despite the fact that the world experts pretty much unilaterally agree. And I’m talking about the Richard Garwins and the General Touhills of the world: when we’re talking about super EMP, they agree on the catastrophic possibilities here.

Imagine me, writing this book, drilling down on that, wondering how I might be able to bridge the information gap between people’s preconception and what experts say is reality, coupled with the fact that almost no one had ever even heard of this threat. And then shortly before the book publishes in March, you learn from the US intelligence community fears that Russia is considering putting a nuclear warhead in orbit. This is precisely what an EMP would do.

The reason why it’s politicised is, the science is there, but the intention is really what gets conflagrated, shall we say. You know, there have been fears expressed specifically that North Korea might use a satellite to carry a small nuclear warhead into orbit, and they have launched satellites that have perplexed people in the military about that exact orbit. In other words, it’s an unusual orbit that happens to fly exactly over the centre of the continental United States and over Washington, DC. That raised a lot of alarms during the war on terror.

Now, the idea of intention was further exacerbated when North Korea released a paper that said this was exactly a technology they were pursuing and suggested that it was a technology that they had.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. One of my favourite stories from the book, and I’m so glad you brought that up, is the fact that there had been controversy about super EMPs. And I think there was one American expert who really deeply believed that the satellite that North Korea had launched, which I think had the capacity to orbit with a nuclear weapon contained in it, this expert believed that while that might have been true, the North Korean story, that it was really just going to be used for radio to play patriotic songs in North Korea. That person kind of had this strong belief, and then investigated it themselves. And I don’t quite remember how. Can you say what they learned?

Annie Jacobsen: Yes. You’re referring to Dr Peter Pry, whom I interviewed for the book, who died recently. Pry was one of the heads of the EMP Commission. And before he had that position, he was an analyst with the CIA, a Russia expert who studied weapons of mass destruction.

And Pry not only was the leading voice bringing to the table the fears about EMP, but he was privy to an otherwise classified meeting with a group of Russian generals who shared with Pry that they had shared EMP [technology] — because we know Russia has this technology; they have had it since the Cold War. But Pry shared that the Russian generals sort of explained to him that “by accident” this technology had been transferred to North Korea. And that information was shared with the 9/11 commission, with the EMP Commission.

But again, a certain group of individuals decided that this was fear mongering, and that it was — this is my interpretation of it — a grab for money. And so you hear some of these individuals having done interviews on, let’s say, NPR and other radio stations. One of them, his response to the EMP threat was simply to laugh. Now, if you talk to General Touhill, America’s cyber chief in the Obama administration, this is not a laughing matter.

Continuity of government [01:36:35]

Luisa Rodriguez: So in a scenario where DC is targeted in a decapitation event, like the one you’ve described, it’s plausible a lot of the top-ranking US officials — including the president, but also the successors to the president — would be killed in an initial strike. What did you learn about how continuity of government would work? Are you confident that the government would even remain intact?

Annie Jacobsen: In an interview that I did with former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, this idea of continuity of government was a major issue that we discussed, because it was of such deep concern for him. The secretary of defence sits in that line of succession, and in the event of a decapitation strike on Washington, DC — which, by the way, I was told is what Washington fears most, for good reason — the secretary of defence would be one of the few people who would be notified about what was going on in the first few seconds after launch.

And so, as Bill Perry explained, he would have to make a decision if he was in the bunker beneath the Pentagon in those first minutes, as happens in the scenario that I write. Perry took me through what he would be thinking in that moment, and how he would come to the conclusion, most likely, that he needed to leave the Pentagon immediately in a helicopter that would be available to him. He would leave, he would go to the bunker outside Washington, DC, known as Raven Rock, which is also called the alternate National Military Command Center. And he would more than likely take the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with him, who would then assume the position of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who would most certainly be killed in a strike against the Pentagon.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. And in the book, you basically describe how, because of the chaos, we wouldn’t even know which of the people in the succession line were alive and dead. How long do you think there would be confusion about which people in the line of succession had survived, and who was going to become the next president?

Annie Jacobsen: If you look to the events of 9/11 as a metaphor, you realise there is a very long lag in terms of government officials knowing what is going on and what should be going on next. In the 9/11 reality, we see the fact that the president didn’t address the nation for hours. By this time in a nuclear war, the world would be over. We also see how congresspeople got really confused about where they were supposed to go after 9/11. Communications were down, it was impossible to get in touch with staffers. There’s a couple stories of different congresspeople calling taxis to try to get from A to B.

Luisa Rodriguez: Unbelievable. I guess that brings me to my next question, which is another quote from William Perry that really threw me:

In this case, if there was a nuclear bomb in Washington, DC, the Cabinet would likely be decapitated and an emergency government would have to be brought into play. An immediate consequence of a nuclear strike would be that democracy would be completely gone, and military rule would take place. Perry then said that if military rule is ever imposed on today’s America, it would be almost impossible to undo military rule.

Can you walk me through that? Why that’s the case and how we should feel about it?

Annie Jacobsen: I don’t think I can say it any better than Secretary of Defense Perry said. And the truth of the matter is that this is a man who spent his entire adult life in government in the military-industrial complex in its various forms. So when you hear a statement like that coming from someone like him, you realise none of this is fear mongering. This is the reality that wise people like Bill Perry know to be true.

Rays of hope [01:41:07]

Annie Jacobsen: Let me drop in one ray of hope here, because the subject can be so overwhelming. But there is a solution. Consider that nuclear weapons are a man-made problem; therefore there is a man-made solution. And the tiny ray of hope to my mind comes from that ABC TV movie The Day After which aired in 1983. It was watched by 100 million Americans. And by the way, the ABC execs were told, “Don’t air this, it’s too grim, it’s fear mongering.” But they aired it anyways.

Among the 100 million Americans that were watching was one very important American: President Ronald Reagan. He was interestingly told by his White House advisors, “Don’t watch it.” But he did watch it. He had a private screening of it at Camp David. And after he watched it, he wrote in his White House journal that he became greatly depressed. Before that moment, Ronald Reagan was a nuclear hawk. He believed in nuclear arms buildup. He believed the more nuclear weapons America had, the better. He was considering putting weapons in space — the SDI programme, also known as the Star Wars programme.

After that experience of watching The Day After movie, he had what is known in Washington as the “Reagan Reversal.” He changed his position. He reached out to the so-called “enemy” nation, Russia. He reached out to Gorbachev, and began to see Gorbachev as an adversary, as an opponent [rather than an enemy]. And the two began talking. It led to the Reykjavik Summit. And as a result, the world went from the all-time high in 1986 of 70,000 nuclear warheads to the approximate 12,500 we have today.

That is a move in the right direction. That makes us safer. And yet where we are now in 2024, with all the nuclear sabre-rattling and the new systems potentially coming online, we are in deep danger of moving toward a world where there are more nuclear weapons, where there are more nuclear-armed nations than less. And that is the danger I would hope reading Nuclear War: A Scenario will help people understand.

Where we’re headed [01:43:52]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that actually makes me curious: what did you learn about the direction nuclear weapons policy is headed, in terms of both technology and proliferation or deproliferation?

Annie Jacobsen: Well, in terms of diplomacy, leaders are pulling out of treaties — and that includes leaders in the United States and leaders in other nuclear-armed adversaries. There is this deep potential that Iran might acquire nuclear weapons technology. So these are very dangerous movements in the wrong direction, I believe.

As far as new technology goes, I’m fascinated by the fact that people seem to think that new technology somehow changes the technology inherent in an ICBM. It doesn’t. The ICBM takes 26 minutes and 40 seconds to get from a launchpad in Russia to the United States. It takes approximately 33 minutes to get from a launchpad in North Korea to the United States. A little different geography. That has never changed. That will never change.

Ballistic missiles work on gravity. They occur in three phases. Boost phase when the missile is launched; mid-course phase when the missile flies 500, 600 miles above the Earth at speeds of Mach 23, or something like that. And then the last 100 seconds is called terminal phase: it’s when the warhead reenters the atmosphere and it detonates on target.

That’s just basic physics. It’s not going to change. So when you hear people talking about hypersonic missiles, a ballistic missile is hypersonic. A hypersonic missile goes about Mach 5. This is a real misunderstanding, which is fine, but it leads to this idea that technology is somehow putting us in more danger in terms of nuclear ICBMs. The danger has always been there. It’s not going to change. Same with sub-launched ballistic missiles.

With that said, there are new systems that could be on the table. And this of course has, I believe, far more to do with the military-industrial complex looking for new job opportunities as opposed to making anybody safer, or making anybody more confident that they might be able to reduce the threat of an incoming nuclear missile.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. One of the big themes from your book is that deterrence might fail — and if it did, all bets are off. How plausible do you think it is that if nothing changes, deterrence will at some point fail for one reason or another?

Annie Jacobsen: Well, there’s that quote from the [UN] Secretary-General: “We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.” When you couple that with the fact that you have world leaders today actually threatening nuclear use; you have the president of Russia saying he is not kidding about the possibility of using weapons of mass destruction; you have the leader of North Korea publicly accusing the United States of having a sinister intention to provoke nuclear war — these threats are pushing us to the brink, are pushing us to the razor’s edge of safety and security, into the possibility of nuclear war.

Luisa Rodriguez: The book covers a very specific scenario: North Korea attacks the US with a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack. But I’m curious if you learned anything during the hundreds of hours of interviews that didn’t make it into the book, perhaps because they didn’t relate to the scenario or for some other reason, that you feel is worth airing?

Annie Jacobsen: I thought through a number of those scenarios, and I interviewed people who have themselves thought through those scenarios. For example, Professor Brian Toon — who I mentioned earlier; the world’s expert on nuclear winter — he and his colleagues have gamed out a number of scenarios, including a “limited exchange” between [India] and Pakistan, and how that would affect the world and how that would also lead to nuclear winter. I reference a lot of them in my notes, because they are valuable for people who want to learn more about this to consider.

One of the areas where I did the most editing, which was interesting to me, was the front part of the book, where I talk about how we got here. Because I’ve written six previous books on military and intelligence programmes, and so many of my sources in those books shared with me that they dedicated their lives and their careers to preventing nuclear World War III. So, as a historian, how we got here was very interesting to me. At one point, I had several hundred pages in that section, which is now something like 50. That’s what I ended up editing out, because it was fantastic for me to drill down on that knowledge for my own self and synthesise it out to what I felt was so important.

For example, the little mini chapter where I write about the buildup: in essence, I’m just listing the year and the number of nuclear weapons, the year and the next number of nuclear weapons. And I felt that that was so effective, because there’s one point, I believe it was 1957, where we were making something like five thermonuclear bombs a day. A day. This is mind-boggling. How did this happen?

So the sort of big way of answering that question is: what I really wanted to do, mindful that the goal was to demonstrate in appalling detail how horrific nuclear war would be, I wanted people to begin the book and end the book. And as I have learned, many people do that in one sitting.

Luisa Rodriguez: Doesn’t surprise me at all.

Annie Jacobsen: The process for me was about paring down the information into its essence.

Avoiding politics [01:50:34]

Luisa Rodriguez: We’ve got time for one last question. What do you think is the biggest impact you’ve been able to have during your career as a journalist?

Annie Jacobsen: You know, I never bring politics into my books. I write about POTUS, the president of the United States; I’m writing about the office of the president. And so sometimes I might have to mention a person by name, obviously, because his policies are important, but I do not bring politics into the mix.

Why that is important to me is that, while earlier in my career, it made it a little bit difficult — because often individuals want you to be writing to a specific audience; the idea is that you might wind up with more immediate readers — I am much more interested in the long-term goal of having a wide spectrum of readers.

And this book, more than any thus far, and maybe it’s the accumulative effect, makes me feel as if I am moving toward that higher goal — because I can speak to people of all different political slants. I can speak to peace activists, and I can speak to officials in the Pentagon. I can even sit at the same dinner table with them, and have a wise and interesting and complex conversation. No one should be for nuclear war. That is the point.

Luisa Rodriguez: Let’s end with that. My guest today has been Annie Jacobsen. Thank you so much for coming on. It’s been fascinating and disturbing and I think important.

Annie Jacobsen: Thank you so much for having me.

Luisa’s outro [01:52:29]

Luisa Rodriguez: Before we go, I want to mention that 80,000 Hours is running a census of everyone interested in mitigating risks from advanced AI systems to help organisations we think are doing good work in this space hire the right people.

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All right, The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris.

The audio engineering team is led by Ben Cordell, with mastering and technical editing by Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong.

Full transcripts and an extensive collection of links to learn more are available on our site, and put together as always by Katy Moore.

Thanks for joining, talk to you again soon.