22 Mar 2024 · 3h 12m · Lex Fridman, Annie Jacobsen · 26 quoted facts
Journalist Annie Jacobsen argues that nuclear war is far closer and far more mechanical than most people believe. A single president, acting within about six minutes of a warning, can start a war that kills millions within hours and billions through nuclear winter. Her view is that deterrence is only a theory, and that the systems meant to prevent war are fragile, secretive and error-prone.
The conversation moves from the minute-by-minute scenario of a nuclear launch to the wider world of secrecy she has reported on. Fear of catastrophe sits beside her belief in communication and human evolution. She then turns to the CIA, Area 51, UFO disinformation, assassination and surveillance. The tension is between secrecy that protects people and secrecy that hides risk, error or deception.
Jacobsen says sole presidential authority exists because a nuclear war would unfold too fast for anyone else to be consulted. Under launch on warning, the president may have only about six minutes after a satellite alert to decide.
She says the US has only 44 interceptor missiles, 40 in Alaska and 4 in California, with roughly a 50% success rate. They cannot stop a large attack, and the program is on a strategic pause because it cannot be made more effective.
Bill Perry told her that in 1979 a training tape showing a Soviet attack was mistaken for the real thing. He was about to alert the president when he learned it was an error, and she says there have been at least six such close calls.
Brian Toon told her that fires from hundreds of weapons would loft around 300 billion pounds of soot into the air. That would block the sun, freeze farmland for years, and cause the billions of deaths she estimates, on top of the first millions.
Jacobsen says the CIA ran UFO disinformation partly because U-2 spy planes were mistaken for UFOs, and she cites the Paul Bennewitz case. She also names Al O'Donnell as the source for her claim that Roswell was a Soviet hoax.
Jacobsen estimates 5 billion people. She says millions to hundreds of millions would die in the first 72 minutes, and the billions would die afterward from starvation caused by nuclear winter.
It is the US policy of firing back before enemy warheads land, once satellites detect a launch. Jacobsen says this leaves the president roughly six minutes to decide, and that only the president has the authority to order it.
Only in very small numbers. Jacobsen says there are just 44 interceptors, with about a 50% success rate, which is nowhere near enough against Russia's roughly 1,670 deployed weapons.
It is a long period of cold and darkness caused by soot from burning cities and forests blocking sunlight. Jacobsen cites Brian Toon's view that crops would fail, which is why most of the deaths would come from hunger.
No. She says her reporting gives her no reason to think so, and she believes many UFO stories were boosted by CIA and Air Force deception campaigns. She adds that she is agnostic and could be wrong.
Stated by the speakers. Each quote matches the transcript, which shows what was said, not that it is true.
Richard Garwin was the nuclear weapons engineer who drew the plans for the Ivy Mike thermonuclear bomb, the first thermonuclear bomb exploded, in 1952.
“In the words of Richard Garwin, who was the nuclear weapons engineer who drew the plans for the Ivy Mike thermonuclear bomb, the first thermonuclear bomb ever exploded in 1952.”
The US launch on warning policy means it would launch nuclear weapons in response to a detected attack before the enemy warheads actually land.
“It means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack, it will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.”
Jacobsen says Ronald Reagan's memoirs refer to the six minute launch decision window and call it irrational.
“in President Reagan's memoirs. He refers to the six minute window, and he says, he he calls it irrational, which it is.”
Jacobsen says the United States has 1,770 deployed nuclear weapons that can launch within about a minute to a couple of minutes.
“So the United States has 1,770 nuclear weapons deployed, meaning those weapons could launch in as little as sixty seconds and up to a couple minutes.”
Jacobsen says intercontinental ballistic missiles cannot be recalled or redirected once they are launched.
“The ICBMs cannot be recalled or redirected once launched.”
Ronald Reagan misstated at a 1983 press conference that submarine-launched ballistic missiles could be recalled.
“President Reagan in 1983 gave a press conference where he misstated that submarine-launched ballistic missiles could be recalled.”
Herb York, the first chief scientist of ARPA, hired the Jason scientists to work out how long an ICBM takes to reach its target, and the answer was 26 minutes 40 seconds from the Soviet Union to the US East Coast.
“So he hired this group of scientists who then and still are in many ways like the Penta the Superman scientists of the Pentagon, and they're called the Jason scientists.”
MIT professor emeritus Ted Postol calculated that a North Korean missile would take about 33 minutes to reach the US East Coast.
“Thirty three minutes from a launch pad in Pyongyang to the East Coast of the United States.”
Admiral Michael Connor, former chief of US nuclear submarine forces, told Jacobsen it is easier to find a grapefruit-sized object in space than a submarine at sea.
“The former chief of the nuclear submarine forces, Admiral Michael Connor told me, it's easier to find a grapefruit-sized object in space than a submarine under the sea”
The United States has 400 underground missile silos housing Minuteman missiles.
“America has 400 silos, right? We've had more, um, but we have 400, and they're underground, and they're called Minutemen, right after the Revolutionary War heroes.”
Three command bunkers handle a nuclear war: beneath the Pentagon, inside Cheyenne Mountain, and beneath Strategic Command in Nebraska.
“The Pentagon bunker is the beating heart, the Cheyenne Mountain bunker is the brains, and the Stratcom bunker is the muscle.”
The 44 US ground-based interceptor missiles are based 40 in Alaska and 4 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
“There are forty of them in Alaska, and there are four of them at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara.”
In 1979 a training tape depicting a Soviet nuclear attack was mistakenly loaded at the Pentagon and appeared real, as Bill Perry described to Jacobsen.
“An actual VHS training tape had been incorrectly inserted into a system at the Pentagon.”
General Mark Milley said he could not reach his Russian counterpart for 36 hours after false reports in November 2022 that a Russian missile had hit Poland.
“And admitted that he could not reach his Russian counterpart during those thirty six hours, he could not reach him.”
Jacobsen says the Russian early warning satellite system, called Tundra, can mistake sunlight or clouds for a missile launch.
“Uh, the Russian satellite system, for example, can mistake sunlight for flames, can mistake clouds for a nuclear launch.”
Jacobsen says Vladimir Putin gave a speech saying Russia would no longer wait to absorb an attack before launching, a shift from its past stated position.
“But that was their official position, and that changed just two years ago. When Putin gave a speech and he said that their position had changed, that they will no longer wait to absorb an attack.”
According to Brian Toon, nuclear war fires would loft about 300 billion pounds of soot that blocks out the sun.
“According to Toon, some 300 billion pounds of soot, and what happens, it blocks out the sun”
Brian Toon compared nuclear war to the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs.
“Professor Toon said it to me this way, you know? He said, 66 million years ago, an asteroid hit Earth, killed all the dinosaurs and wiped out seventy of the species.”
Jacobsen describes Gobekli Tepe in Turkey as the oldest known archaeological site, built by hunter-gatherers about 12,000 years ago.
“there is the oldest known civilization in the world. 12,000 years ago, a group of hunter-gatherers built this site.”
Area 51 began as a CIA site for building and testing the U-2 spy plane out of public view.
“And it began as a place to test the U-2 spy plane, um, and literally the CIA set up shop there to build this plane away from the public eye.”
The A-12 Oxcart was a CIA stealth spy plane capable of Mach 3, flown in the early 1960s.
“and that was the CIA's stealth Mach 3 spy plane. You know, think about that in the early 1960s, it's astonishing.”
Jacobsen says the Air Force ran a deception campaign against Paul Bennewitz, who thought he saw a UFO near Kirtland Air Force Base, and sent him to a mental institution.
“they destroyed Paul Bennewitz, they sent him to a mental institution by pulling a massive strategic deception campaign against him.”
Jacobsen revealed that the source for her Roswell account in Area 51 was Al O'Donnell, a nuclear weapons engineer who armed, wired and fired 186 nuclear weapons.
“who is the nuclear weapons engineer who armed, wired and fired 186 nuclear weapons”
Jacobsen says the bin Laden raid was run as a CIA operation because the US was not at war with Pakistan, so the military could not legally carry it out.
“We were not at war with Pakistan, so Title 50 doesn't apply.”
Jacobsen says Billy Waugh helped photograph Imad Mughniyah in Saudi Arabia, and a joint CIA and Mossad operation then killed him with a car bomb in Damascus.
“to give the photographs to Mossad and CIA. So they can do a joint operation to kill him, which they did with a car bomb in Damascus.”
Jacobsen says Albert Speer's memoirs recount Hitler dismissing nuclear physics as Jewish science, which she says kept Germany from developing the bomb.
“Speer referring to a conversation he had with Hitler, where Hitler said, No, I don't wanna do that. That's Jewish science.”
Jacobsen gives her headline estimate and explains that the book walks through a nuclear war from launch to nuclear winter.
“And that number is 5 billion people.”
She explains how satellites detect launches and why only the president can order a response, with a window of about six minutes.
“it will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits”
Jacobsen lays out the three phases of an ICBM flight and gives the timing for Russia, North Korea and submarine launches.
“twenty six minutes and forty seconds from a launch pad in the Soviet Union”
She says missile defense is far weaker than most people assume, which undermines the idea that the US could stop an attack.
“we have forty four interceptor missiles, total period, full stop”
Bill Perry's account of a 1979 false alarm shows how easily human or technical error could start a war.
“VHS training tape had been incorrectly inserted into a system at the Pentagon”
She describes what happens after the bombs stop falling, from fires and soot to failed agriculture and mass starvation.
“a mega fire that will burn between a hundred and three hundred square miles”
Jacobsen explains her skepticism about aliens and reveals the source behind her Soviet hoax theory of Roswell.
“who is the nuclear weapons engineer who armed, wired and fired 186 nuclear weapons”
She describes how the CIA's legal authority differs from the military's, using the bin Laden raid as the example.
“It says what the president wants, the president gets right.”
She argues that the data people share publicly now does much of the work government surveillance once did, with real consequences in war.
“find them with the biometric, fix him, meaning fix his position”
The following is a conversation with Annie Jacobsen, an investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and author of several amazing books on war, weapons, government secrecy and national security, including the books titled Area 51, Operation Paperclip, The Pentagon's Brain, Phenomena, Surprise Kill, Vanish, and her new book, Nuclear War. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is the best way to support this podcast. We got Hidden Layer for securing your neural networks, as one must, BetterHelp for securing your mind, Policygenius for securing your insurance on all fronts, and NetSuite for securing the awesomeness of your business.
See what I did there? Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, including to work with our amazing team, go to Lex Fridman dot com slash contact. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but friends, if you skip them, if you must, I shall forgive you in this life or the next, both this life and the next, I will forgive you.
But you should still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will, too. This episode is brought to you by Hidden Layer, a platform that provides security for your machine learning models. This episode with Annie Jacobsen is terrifying on many fronts. It's terrifying because you get to see just how close we are to the brink of self-destruction, just how few people are involved in saying yes, launch nuclear war. Just how easy it is for little mistakes, little misunderstandings, to lead to nuclear war.
And on this point of hidden layer of cybersecurity, just how easy it is to hack a system that creates misinformation that results in nuclear war. Cybersecurity, the attack and the defense, is really the story of the twenty first century. This is where the battles will be fought. This is where suffering may be created or alleviated or prevented. So this is a really, really, really important field, and it's not talked about enough. There's the sexy field of sort of AI safety where you talk about kind of the existential risk, the ethical risk, that all of that kind of stuff of artificial intelligence as it becomes smarter and smarter and smarter.
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Let's start with a an immensely dark topic, nuclear war. How many people would a nuclear war between the United States and Russia kill?
So I'm coming back at you with a very dark answer and a very big number. And that number is 5 billion people.
You go second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, what would happen if the nuclear war started? So, uh, there's a lot of angles on which I would love to talk to you about this. At first, how would the deaths happen in the short term and the long term?
So to start off, the reason I wrote the book is so that readers like you could see in appalling detail just how horrific nuclear war would be. And as you said, second by second, minute by minute, the book covers nuclear launch to nuclear winter. I purposely don't get into the politics that lead up to that, or the national security maneuvers, or the posturing, or any of that. I just want people to know nuclear war is insane.
And every source I interviewed for this book from secretary of defense, you know, all retired nuclear subforce commander, stratcom commander, FEMA director, et cetera, on and on and on, nuclear weapons engineers, they all shared with me the common denominator that nuclear war is insane. You know, first millions, then tens of millions, then hundreds of millions of people will die in the first seventy two minutes of a nuclear war. And then comes nuclear win winter, where the billions happen from starvation.
And so the shock power of all of this is meant for each and every one of us to say, wait, what? This actually exists behind the veil of national security, and I don't know, you know, most people do not think about nuclear war on a daily basis. And yet hundreds of thousands of people in the nuclear command and control are at the ready in the event it happens.
But it doesn't take too many people to start one.
In the words of Richard Garwin, who was the nuclear weapons engineer who drew the plans for the Ivy Mike thermonuclear bomb, the first thermonuclear bomb ever exploded in 1952. Garwin shared with me his opinion that all it takes is one nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal to start a nuclear war. And that's how I begin the scenario.
What are the different ways it could start? Like literally who presses a button and what does it take to press a button?
So the way it starts is in space, meaning the U.S. Defense Department has a early warning system, and the system in space is called Cibers. It's a constellation of satellites that is keeping an eye on all of America's enemies. So that the moment an ICBM launches the satellite in space, and I'm talking about one tenth of the way to the moon, that's how powerful these satellites are in Geosync. They see the hot rocket exhaust on the ICBM in a fraction of a second after it launches, a fraction of a second.
And so there begins this horrifying policy called launch on warning, right? And that's the U.S. counterattack. Meaning the reason that the United States is so ferociously watching for a nuclear launch somewhere around the globe is so that the nuclear command and control system in the US can move into action to immediately make a counterstrike. Because we have that policy launch on warning, which is exactly like it says. It means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack, it will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.
So the president, as part of the launch on warning policy, has six minutes, I guess, can't launch for six minutes, but at six minute mark from that first warning, the president can launch.
And that was one of the most remarkable details to really nail down for this book when I was reporting this book and talking to Secretary of Defenses, for example, who are the people who advise the president on this matter, right? You say to yourself, wait a minute, how could that possibly be? And so let's unpack that, right? So in addition to the launch on warning concept, there's this other insane concept called sole presidential authority. And you might think in a democracy that's impossible, right?
You can't just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you're the commander in chief, the president of the United States. In fact, you're the only one who can do that. And we can get into later why that exists. I was able to get the origin story of that concept from Los Alamos. They declassified it for the book. Um, but the idea behind that is that nuclear war will unfold so fast, only one person can be in charge, the president.
He asked permission of no one, not the secretary of defense, not the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, not the U.S. Congress. So built into that is this extraordinary speed you talk about, the six minute window. And some people say, oh, that's ridiculous. How do we know that six minute window? Well, here's the best sort of, you know, hitting the nail on the head statement I can give you, which is in President Reagan's memoirs. He refers to the six minute window, and he says, he he calls it irrational, which it is.
He says, how can anyone make a decision to launch nuclear weapons based on a blip on a radar scope? His words to unleash Armageddon. And yet that is the reality behind nuclear war.
Just imagine sitting there, one person, because the president is a human being sitting there. Just got the warning that Russia launched. You have six minutes. You know, I I meditate on my mortality every day, and here you would be sitting and meditating, contemplating not just your own mortality, but the mortality of all the people you know, loved ones. Just imagining, like, what what would be going through my head is all the people I know and love, like personally, and knowing that they'll be no more, most likely.
And if they somehow survive, they will be suffering and will eventually die. I guess the question that kept coming up is, how do we stop this? Is it inevitable that it's going to be escalated to a full-on nuclear war that destroys everything? And it seems like it it will be. It's inevitable. In the position of the president, it's almost inevitable that they have to respond.
I mean, one of the things I found shocking was how little, apparently, most presidents know about the responsibility that literally lays at their feet, right? So you may think through this six minute window, I may think through this six minute window. But what I learned, like, for example, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was really helpful in explaining this to me because before he was SecDef, he served as the UM director of the CIA, and before that, he was the White House Chief of Staff.
And so he has seen these different roles that have been so close to the president. But he explained to me that when he was the White House Chief of Staff for President Clinton, he noticed how President Clinton didn't want to ever really deal with the nuclear issue because he had so many other issues to deal with. Um, and that only when Panetta became Secretary of Defense, he told me, did he really realize the weight of all of this?
Because he knew he would be the person that the president would turn to were he to be notified of a nuclear attack. And by the way, it's the launch on warning, it's the it's the the ballistic missile s seen from outer space by the satellite, and then there also must be a second confirmation from a ground radar system. But in that process, which is just a couple minutes, everyone is getting ready to notify the president. And one of the first people that gets notified by NORAD or by Stratcom or by NRO, these different parties that all see the early warning data.
One of the first people that's notified is the Secretary of Defense, as well as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because those two together are going to brief the president about, you know, sir, you have six minutes to decide. And that's where you realize the immediacy of all of this is so counter to imagining the scenario. And again, all the presidents come into office, I have learned understanding the idea that d of deterrence, this idea that we have these massive arsenals of nuclear weapons pointed at one another, ready to launch, so that we never have nuclear war.
But what we're talking about now is what if we did? What if we did? And what you've raised is like this really spooky, eerie subtext of the world right now because many of the nuclear armed nations are in direct conflict with other nations. And for the first time in decades, nuclear threats are actually coming out of the mouths of leaders. This is shocking.
So deterrence, the polite implied assumption is that nobody will launch, and if they did, we would launch back and everybody would be dead. But that assumption falls apart completely. The whole philosophy of it falls apart once the first launch happens. Then you have six minutes to decide, wait a minute, are we going to hit back and kill everybody on Earth, or do we turn the other cheek in the most horrific way possible?
Well, when when nuclear war starts, there's no like battle for New York or battle for Moscow. It's just literally it, you know, it was called in the Cold War push button warfare, but in essence, that is w that is what it is. Let's get some numbers on the table if you don't mind, right? Because th w when you're saying, like, wait a minute, w we're just hoping that it holds, right? Let's just talk about Russia and the US.
The arsenals that are literally pointed at one another right now, right? So the United States has 1,770 nuclear weapons deployed, meaning those weapons could launch in as little as sixty seconds and up to a couple minutes. Some of them on the bombers might take an hour or so. Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons. Same scenario, their weapon systems are on par with ours. That's not to mention the 12,500 nuclear weapons amongst the nine nuclear armed nations.
But when you think about those kind of arsenals of just between the United States and Russia, you real and you realize everything can be launched in seconds and minutes. Then you realize the madness of Matt, that this idea that no one would launch because it would assure everyone's destruction. Yes, but what if someone did? And in my interviews with scores of top tier national security advisors, people who advise the president, people who are responsible for these decisions if they had to be made.
Every single one of them said it could happen. They didn't say this would never happen. And so the idea is worth thinking about because I believe that it pulls back the veil on a fundamental security that if someone were to use a tactical nuclear weapon, oh well, it's just an escalation. It's far more than that.
So to you, the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, maybe you can draw the line between a tactical and a strategic nuclear weapon that could be a catalyst. Like, that's a very difficult thing to walk back from.
Oh my god, almost certainly. And again, any every person in the national security environment tells will will agree with that, right? Certainly on the American side. Um, strategic weapons, those are like big weapons systems. The U. America has a nuclear triad. We have our ICBMs, which are the silo-based missiles that have a nuclear warhead in the nose cone, and they can get from one continent to the other in roughly thirty minutes. Then we have our bombers, B-52s and B-2s that are nuclear capable.
Um, those take travel time to get to another continent. Those can also be recalled. The ICBMs cannot be recalled or redirected once launched.
That one is a particularly terrifying one. So land-launched missiles, rockets with a warhead can't be recalled.
Cannot be recalled or redirected. And speaking of how little the presidents generally know, as we were talking a moment ago, President Reagan in 1983 gave a press conference where he misstated that submarine-launched ballistic missiles could be recalled. They cannot be recalled. So that gives you here's the guy in charge of the arsenal if it has to get let loose, and he doesn't even know that they cannot be recalled. So this is the kind of misinformation and disinformation.
And and pro, you know, U N Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently said when he was talking about the conflicts rising around the world, he said, We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon.
So just to sort of linger on the previous point of tactical nukes. So you're describing strategic nukes, land-launched, uh bombers, submarine launched. What are tactical nukes?
So that's the triad, right? And we have the triad and Russia has the triad. Tactical nuclear weapons are smaller warheads that were designed to be used in battle. And that is what Russia is sort of threatening to use right now. That is this idea that you would, y, you know, make a decision on the battlefield in an operational environment to use a tactical nuclear weapon. You're just sort of upping the ante. But the problem is that all treaties are based on this idea of no nuclear use, right?
You cannot cross that line. And so the what would happen if the line is crossed is so devastating to even consider. I think that the conversation is well worth having among everyone, you know, that is in a power of position. How, as you know, the U N Secretary General said, this is madness, right? This is madness. We must come back from the brink. We are at the brink.
Uh, can we talk about some other numbers? So you mentioned the number of uh warheads, so land launched, how long does it take to travel across the ocean from the United States to to Russia, from Russia to the United States, from China to the United States? Uh, how approximately how long?
When I was writing an earlier book on DARPA, the the Pentagon Science Agency, um, I went to a library down in San Diego called the Gisel Library to look at Herb York's papers. Herb York was the first chief scientist for the Pentagon for DARPA, then called ARPA. And I had been trying to get the number from the various agencies that be to answer like, what is the exact number and how do we know it? And like, does it change?
And, you know, as technology advances, does that number reduce? All these kinds of questions, and no one will answer that question on an official level. And so, much to my surprise, I found the answer in Herb York's like dusty archive of papers. And this is information that was jealously guarded. I mean, it didn't, it it was not, it's not necessarily classified, but it certainly wasn't out there. And I felt like, wow, Herb York left these behind for someone like me to find, right?
And what the process he wanted to know, the answer to your question, and as the guy in charge of it all. So he hired this group of scientists who then and still are in many ways like the Penta the Superman scientists of the Pentagon, and they're called the Jason scientists. Many conspiracies a about them abound. I interviewed their founder and have interviewed many of them, but they whittled the number down to seconds, okay? F specifically for Herb York, and it goes like this, because this is where my jaw dropped and I went, Wow, okay.
So twenty six minutes and forty seconds from a launch pad in the Soviet Union to the East Coast. And it happens in three phases, very simple and interesting to remember, because it then suddenly all of this makes more sense. Boost phase, midcourse phase, and then terminal phase, okay, boost phase, five minutes. That's when the rocket launches. So you just imagine a rocket going off the launch pad and the fire beneath it again. That's why the satellites can see it, okay?
Now it's becoming visual. Now it makes sense to me, right? Five minutes, and that's where the rocket can be tracked. And then imagine learning, wait a minute, after five minutes, the rocket can no longer be seen from space. The satellite can only see the hot rocket exhaust. Then the missile enters its midcourse phase, twenty minutes, and that's the ballistic part of it, where it's kind of flying up at between five hundred and seven hundred miles above the Earth, and moving very fast, and with the Earth, until it gets very close to its target.
And the last one hundred seconds are terminal phase. It's where the warhead re-enters the atmosphere and detonates. Twenty six minutes and forty seconds. Now, in my scenario, I open with North Korea launching a one megaton nuclear warhead at Washington, D C. That's the nihilistic madman maneuver. That's the bolt out of the blue attack that everyone in Washington will tell you they're afraid of. And North Korea is a little has a little bit different geography. And so I had MIT professor emeritus Ted Postel do the math.
Thirty three minutes from a launch pad in Pyongyang to the East Coast of the United States. You get the idea, it's about thirty minutes. But hopefully now that allows readers to suddenly see all this as a real you, you almost see it as, you know, as poetry, as terrible as that may sound. You can visualize it, and suddenly it makes sense. And I think the sense-making part of it is really what I'm after in this book because I want people to understand.
On the the one hand, it's incredibly simple. It's just the people that have made it so complicated. But it's one of those things that can change all of world history in a matter of minutes. We just don't, as a human civilization, have experience with that. But it doesn't mean it'll never happen. It can happen just like that. I mean, I think what you're after, and I couldn't agree more with, is like, why is why is this fundamentally annihilating system, a system of mass genocide, as John Rubel, you know, in the book refers to it?
Why is it still exist? You know, we've had seventy five years since there have been two superpowers with the nuclear bomb. Um, so that threat has been there for seventy five years, and we have managed to stay alive. One of the reasons why so many of the sources in the book agreed to talk to me, people who had not previously gone on the record about all of this was because they are now approaching the end of their lives.
They spent their lives dedicated to preventing nuclear World War Three. And they'll be the first people to tell you we're closer to this as a reality than ever before. And so on the bright, the only bright side of any of this is that, like, the answer lies most definitely in communication.
So there's a million other questions here. Uh, I think the details are fascinating and important to understand. So one, you also say, uh, nuclear submarines. You mentioned about thirty minutes, twenty, twenty six, thirty three minutes, but with, uh, nuclear submarines, that number can be much, much lower. So how long does it take for a warhead to a missile to reach the East Coast of the United States from a submarine?
Just when you thought it was really bad, and then you kind of realize about the submarines. I mean, the submarines are what are called second strike capacity, right? And you know, it was described submarines were described to me this way. They are as dangerous to civilization, and let me say a nuclear armed, nuclear powered submarine is as dangerous to civilization as an asteroid, okay? They are unstoppable, they are unlocatable. The former chief of the nuclear submarine forces, Admiral Michael Connor told me, it's easier to find a grapefruit-sized object in space than a submarine under the sea, okay?
So these things are like hell machines, and they're moving around throughout the oceans, ours, Russia's, China's, maybe North Korea's, constantly. And we now know they're sneaking up to the East and West Coast of the United States within a couple hundred miles. How do we know that? Why do we know that? Well, I found a document inside of a budget, um, that the Defense Department was going to Congress for more money recently and showed maps of precisely where these submarines, how close they were getting to the Eastern Seaboard.
So wait, wait, wait. So nuclear subs are getting within 200 miles,
Couple hundred miles, yes, they weren't precise on the number, but when you look at the map, yep. And that's when you're talking about under ten minutes from launch to to strike.
undetectable?
And they're undetectable. The the map making is done after the fact because of a lot of underwater surveillance systems that we have, you know, but in real time, you cannot find an a nuclear submarine. And you know, just the way a submarine launches goes 150 feet below the surface to launch its ballistic missile. I mean, it comes out of the missile tube and with enough thrust that the the thrusters, the boot, they ignite outside the water and then they move into boost.
And so the technology involved is just stunning and shocking, and again, trillions of dollars spent so that we never have a nuclear war. But my God, what if we did?
As you write, they're called the handmaidens of the apocalypse. What a terrifying label. I mean, uh, you one one of the things you also write about. So for the land-launched ones, they're presumably underground. So the silos, how long does it take to go from, like pressing the button to them emerging from underground for launch? And is is that part detectable, or it's only the the heat?
Yes. So what's interesting about the silos? America has 400 silos, right? We've had more, um, but we have 400, and they're underground, and they're called Minutemen, right after the Revolutionary War heroes. But the sort of joke in Washington is they're not called Minutemen for nothing because they can launch in one minute, right? So the president orders the launch of the ICBMs, ICBM stands for intercontinental ballistic missile. He orders the launch, and they launch sixty seconds later, and then they take thirty some odd minutes to get to where they're going.
The submarines take about fourteen or fifteen minutes from the presidential, from the launch command to actually launching. And that has to do, I surmise, with the location of the submarine, its depth. Some of these things are so highly classified, and others other details are shockingly available if you look deep enough, or if you ask enough questions. And you can go from one document to the next to the next and really find these answers.
not to ask top secret questions, but, uh, to what degree do you think the Russians know the locations of the silos in the US. and vice versa?
Lex, you can, you and I can find the location of every silo right now. They're all there, and before they were there on on, you know, Google, they were there in maps. Because we're a democracy and we make these things known, okay? Now, what's tricky is that Russia and North Korea rely upon what are called road mobile launchers, right? So Russia has a lot of underground silos. You know, all of the scenario takes you through these different facilities that really do exist, and they're all sourced with how many weapons they have and their launch procedures and whatnot.
But in addition to having, um, underground silos, they have road mobile launchers. And that means you you just have one of these giant ICBMs on a twenty two axle truck that can move stealthily around the country so that it can't be targeted by the U S. Defense Department. We don't have those in America because presumably the average, you know, American isn't gonna go for, like the ICBM road mobile launcher driving down the street in your town or city.
Um, which is why the Defense Department will justify we need the second strike capacity capability, the uh submarines, right? Because, you know, the I mean, the wonky stuff that is worth looking into as a if you really dig the book and are like, wait a minute, it's all footnoted, where you can learn more about how these systems have changed over time, um, and why, more than anything, it's very difficult to get out of this catch twenty two conundrum that, you know, we need nuclear weapons to keep us safe.
That is the real enigma because the other guys have them, right? And the other guys have sort of more sinister ways of of using them, or at least that's what the nomenclature out of the Pentagon will always be when anyone tries to say we just need to really think about full disarmament.
You've written about intelligence agencies. How good are the intelligence agencies on this? How much does CIA know about the the Russian, uh, the Russian launch sites and capabilities and command and control procedures and all of this, and vice versa?
I mean, all of this because it's decades old is really well known. If you go to the Federation of American Scientists, they have a team led by a guy called Hans Christensen, who runs what's called the Nuclear Notebook. And he and his team every year are keeping track of this number of warheads on these number of weapon systems. And because of the treaties, the different signatories to the treaty all report these numbers. And of course, the different intelligence community people are keeping track of what's being, you know, revealed honestly and and reported with transparency and what is being hidden.
The real issue is the new systems that Russia is working on right now. Um, and that will lead us, you know, we are kind of moving into an era whereby the the threat of actually having new weapon systems that are nuclear capable is very real because of the escalating tensions around the world. And that's where the CIA, would guess, is doing most of its work right now.
So most of your research is kind of looking at the the older versions of the system, and presumably there's potentially secret development of new ones. Hopefully not.
Which violates treaties. So yes, that is where the intelligence agencies. But, you know, at a point, it's overkill, literally and figuratively, right? People are up in arms about these hypersonic weapons. Well, we have a hypersonic weapons program, you know, Falcon, Google Blackswift, right? This is Lockheed's doing. Um, you know, we're DARPA exists to create the vast weapons systems of the future. That is its job. It has been doing that since its creation in 1957.
I would never believe that we aren't ahead of everyone. Call me, you know, overinformed or naive, one or the other. Uh, that would be my position because DARPA works from the chicken or the egg scenario, you know, that w like once once you learn about something, once you learn Russia's created this, you know, typhoon submarine, which may or may not, you know, be viable. It's too late if you don't already have one.
we'll probably talk about DARPA a little bit. Uh, one of the things that makes me sad about Lockheed, many things make me sad about Lockheed, um, but one of the things is because it's very top secret, you can't show off all the incredible engineering go going on there. The other thing that's more philosophical, DARPA also, is that war seems to stimulate most of our, not most, but a large percent of our exciting innovation in engineering. And so, but that's also the pragmatic fact of life on Earth is that, uh, the risk of, uh, annihilation is is a great motivator for for for innovation, for engineering and so on.
But yes, I would, uh, not discount, uh, the United States in its ability to build the weapons of the future, nuclear included. Again, terrifying. Can you tell me about the nuclear football, as it's called?
I think Americans are familiar with the football, at least anyone who sort of, you know, follows national security concepts. Because it's a satchel, it's a leather satchel that is always with a military aide in Secret Service nomenclature, that's the mill aide. And he's trailing around the president 247, 365 days a year, and also the vice president, by the way, with the ability to launch nuclear war in that six minute window all the time, okay?
Um, that is also called the football, and it's always with the president. To report this part of the book, I interviewed a lot of people in the Secret Service that are with the president and talk about this. And the director of the Secret Service, a guy called Lou Merletti, told me a a story that I just really found fascinating. Um, he was also in charge of the president's detail, President Clinton this was, um, before he was director of the Secret Service.
And he told me the story about how he said the football is with the president at all times, period, okay? They were traveling to Syria and Clinton was meeting with President Assad, and they got into an elevator, uh, Clinton and a Secret Service team, and s one of Assad's guys was like, no, you know, like about the mill aid. And Lou said it was like a standoff because there was no way they were not going to have the president with his football in an elevator.
And it kind of sums up for me anyways. You you realize what goes into every single one of these decisions. You realize the massive system of systems behind every item you might just see in in passing and glancing on the news as you see the mill aid carrying that satchel. Well, what's in that satchel? I really dug into that to report this book.
What is in that satchel?
Okay, so well, okay, first of all, that is, you know, people always say it's incredibly classified. I mean, people talk about UFOs. It's incredibly cl. I mean, come on, guys, that is nothing burger, right? You want to know what's really classified? What's in that football, right? What's in that satchel? But the PED Presidential Emergency Action Directives, right? Those have never been leaked. No one knows what they are. What we do know from one of the mill aides who spoke on the record, a guy called Buzz Patterson.
He describes the president's orders, right? So if a nuclear war has begun, if the president has been told there are nuclear missiles, one or more coming at the United States, you have to launch in a counterattack, right? The red clock is ticking, you have to get the blue in impact clock ticking. Um, he needs to look at this list to decide what targets to strike and what weapon systems to use. And that is what is on, according to Buzz Patterson, a piece of like sort of laminated plastic.
He described it like a Denny's menu. And from that menu, the president chooses targets and chooses weapon systems.
and it's probably super old school, like all, uh, top secret systems are because they have to be tested over and over and over and over and over.
Yes, and it's non digital,
Non digital. It might literally be a Denny's menu from hell.
right? And there's a meanwhile, I learned this only in reporting the book. Um, there is a identical black book inside the Stratcom bunker in Nebraska. Okay, so let me three command bunkers are involved when when nuclear war begins, right? There's the bunker beneath the Pentagon, which is called the National Military Command Center. Okay, then there is the bunker beneath Cheyenne Mountain, which everyone has, you know, or many people have heard of because it's been made famous in movies, right?
That is a very real bunker. And then there is a third bunker, which people are not so familiar with, which is the bunker beneath Strategic Command in Nebraska. And so it's described to me this way. The Pentagon bunker is the beating heart, the Cheyenne Mountain bunker is the brains, and the Stratcom bunker is the muscle. The Stratcom commander will receive word from the president, launch orders, and then directs the 150,000 people beneath him what to do, okay, from the bunker in STR beneath Stratcom.
That's before he run, you know, he he gets the orders. Then he has to run out of the building and jump onto a what's called the doomsday plane. We'll get into that in a minute. Let me just finish the I mean, but again,
no, this is great. All right, all right.
th these are the details. This is like these are the systematic, sequential details that happen in seconds and minutes, and reporting them. I never cease to be amazed by what a system it is, you know, a a follows b, you know, just it's just numerical, right?
Yeah, but a as we discuss this procedure, each individual person that follows that procedure might lose the big picture of the whole thing. I And mean, especially when you realize what what is happening, that almost out of fear, you just follow the steps.
yep, or okay. So imagine this, imagine being the president. You got that six minute. We you have to. You're looking at your list of strike options. You're being briefed by your chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and your sec def. And this other really spooky detail in the Stratcom bunker, in addition to the nuclear strike advisor, who can answer very specific questions if the president's like, wait a minute, why are we striking that, not that?
There's also a weather officer, and this is the kind of human detail that kept me up at night. Because that weather officer is in charge of explaining to the president really fast how many people are going to die and how many people are going to die in minutes, weeks, months, and years from radiation fallout.
Because a lot of that has to do with the weather system.
Yes, yes, and so these kinds of the humanness, you know, balanced out with the mechanization of it all is, it's just really grotesque.
So the uh, doomsday plane from Stratcom, what's that? Where is it going? What's on it? What's its design?
Yeah, right, it's it okay, ready? It's gonna fly in circles. That's where it's going. It's flying in circles around the United States of America. So that nuclear weapons can be launched from the air after the ground systems are taken out by the incoming ICBMs or the incoming submarine launched ballistic missiles. This has been in play since the fifties. This is these these are the contingency plans for when nuclear war happens. So again, going back to this absurd paradox, nuclear war will never happen, you know, mutual assured destruction, that is why deterrence will hold.
Well, I found a talk that the deputy director of Stratcom gave to a very close knit group where he said, Yes, deterrence will hold, but if it fails, everything unravels. And think about that word unravels, right? And the unraveling is, you know, the doomsday plane launches, the Stratcom commander jumps in, he's in that plane, he's flying around the United States, and, uh, he's making decisions because the Pentagon's been taken out. At nine eleven, by the way, Bush was in the doomsday plane.
And uh, Bush had to make decisions quickly, but not so quickly, not as quickly as he would have need to have done if there's a nuclear launch. Six minutes.
I mean, it's basically happens in three acts. There's the first twenty four minutes, the next twenty four minutes, and the last twenty four minutes. And that is the reality of nuclear weapons.
What is the interceptor capabilities of the United States? How many nuclear missiles can be stopped?
I was at a dinner party with a very informed person, right? Like somebody who really, you know, should have known this. And I this is when I was considering writing and reporting this book. And he said to me, Oh, Annie, that would never happen because of our powerful interceptor system. Okay, well, he's wrong. Let me tell you about our powerful interceptor system. First of all, we have forty four interceptor missiles, total period, full stop. Let me repeat forty four.
Okay. Earlier we were talking about Russia's 1,670 deployed nuclear weapons. How are they? How are those forty four interceptor missiles gonna work, right? Um, and they also have a success rate of around 50%, so they work 50% of the time. There are forty of them in Alaska, and there are four of them at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara. Okay, and they are responsible at about nine minutes into the scenario, right after the ICBM has finished that five minute boost phase we talked about.
Now it's in mid course phase, and the ground radar systems have identified, yes, this is an incoming ICBM. And now the interceptor missiles have to launch, right? It's essentially shooting a missile with a missile inside the interceptor, which is just a big giant rocket. In its nose cone, it has what's called a the aptly named exo atmospheric kill vehicle. Okay, there's no explosives in that thing. It's literally just going to take out the warhead, ideally with force.
So one of them is going, like, you know, mock twenty and the I mean, the the speeds at which these two moving objects hurtling through space are going is astonishing. And the fact that that interception is even possible is really remarkable, but it's only possible 50% of the time.
is it possible that we only know about forty four, but there could be a lot more?
No, impossible. That I would be willing to bet.
And how well tested are these interceptors?
Well, th that's where we get the success rate that's around 50% because of the tests, right? And actually, the interceptor program is, are you ready for this? It's on strategic pause, right right now, meaning the interceptor missiles are there, but developing them and making them more effective is on strategic pause because they can't be made more effective, right? People have these fantasies that, uh, we have a system like the iron dome, and they see this in in current events, and they're like, Oh, w our interceptors would do that.
It's just simply not true.
Why? Why can't an iron dome like system be constructed for nuclear warheads?
We have systems I write about called the THAAD system, which is ground based, and then the Aegis system, which is on, you know, vessels. And these are great at shooting down some inc, you know, some rockets, but they they they can only shoot them sort of one at a time. You cannot shoot the mother load as it's coming in. Those are the smaller systems, right? The tactical nuclear weapons. And by the way, our THAAD systems are all deployed overseas, and our Aegis systems are all out at sea.
And again, reporting that I was like, Wait, what? You know, you have to really hunker down. Are we sure about this? People really don't want to believe this. It's an actual fact. After nine eleven, Congress considered putting, and, you know, Aegis missiles and maybe even THAAD systems along the West Coast of the United States to specifically deal with the threats against nuclear armed North Korea, but it hasn't done so yet. And again, you have to ask yourself, wait a minute, this is insanity, you know, one nuclear weapon gets by any of these systems, and it's full out nuclear warfare.
So, w that's not the solution. More nuclear weapons is not the solution.
I'm looking for a hopeful thing here about North Korea. Uh, how many deployed nuclear warheads does North Korea have? So does the current system, as we described it, uh, the interceptors and so on, have a hope against the North Korean attack, the one that you mentioned people are worried about?
so they North Korea has fifty, let's say fifty nuclear weapons right now. Some NGOs put it at more than a hundred. It's it's impossible to know because North Korea's nuclear weapons program has no transparency. They're the only nuclear-armed nation that doesn't announce when they do a ballistic missile test, everyone else does. No one wants to start a nuclear war by accident, right? So if Russia's gonna launch an ICBM, they tell us if we're gonna launch one, and I'm I'm talking test runs here, you know, with a dummy warhead, we we tell them, not North Korea, that's a fact, okay?
So we're constantly up against the fear of North Korea. In this scenario, I have the incoming North Korean one megaton, you know, weapon coming in, and the interceptor system tries to shoot it down. So there there's not enough time. And this, by the way, I ran through by all, you know, generals from the Pentagon who run these scenarios for no. Red right and confirmed all of this as fact. This is not this, this is, this is the situation, right?
So in this scenario, I have the nuclear ICBM coming in. The interceptor missiles try to shoot down the warhead. The capability is is not like what's called shoot, you know, and look they can't. There's not enough time to go like, and we're gonna try to get it. We missed it. Okay, let's go for another one. So you have to go pew pew, right? So in my scenario, we fire off four, which is about what I was told would one to four.
Because you're worried about the next one that's gonna come in, you're gonna use up ten of your missile force, of your interceptor force on one, and all four miss, and that's totally plausible.
right. Uh, how likely are mistakes, accidents, false alarms, taking as real all this kind of stuff in this picture? So, like you've, we've kind of assumed the detection works correctly. How likely is it possible? Like anywhere that you, you've described this long chain of events that can happen? H How possible is it just to make a mistake, a stupid human mistake along the way?
There have been at least six known, like absolute, like, like, oh my god, close calls, how, how, thank God this happened type scenarios. One was described to me with an actual personal participant, Secretary, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, right? And he described what happened to him in 1979. He was not yet Secretary of Defense, he was the the deputy director of the research and engineering, which is like a big job at the Pentagon.
And it was the the the night watch fell on him, essentially, right? And he gets this call in the middle of the night. He's told that Russia has launched not just ICBMs, but submarine-launched ballistic missiles are coming at the United States. And he is about to notify the president that the six-minute window has to begin. When he learns it was a mistake, the mistake was that there was a training tape with a nuclear war scenario, right?
We haven't even begun to talk about the nuclear war scenarios that the Pentagon runs. An actual VHS training tape had been incorrectly inserted into a system at the Pentagon. And so this nuclear launch showed up at that bunker beneath the Pentagon and at the bunker beneath Stratcom, because they're connected as being real. And then it was like, Oh, whoops, it's actually a simulation test tape. And Perry described to me what that was like, the pause in his spirit and his mind and his heart.
When he realized, I'm about to have to tell the president that he needs to launch nuclear weapons. And he learned just in the nick of time that it was a it was an error. And that's one of five examples.
can you speak to? Maybe? Um, is there any more color to the feelings he was feeling, like, what's your sense? And, given all the experts you've talked to, what? What can be said about the seconds that one feels, uh, once finding out that a launch has happened, even if that information is a f- is false information?
for me personally, that's the only first-hand story that I ever heard, because it's so rare and it's so unique. And most people in the national security system, at least in the past, have been loath to talk about any of this, right? It's like the sacred oath, it's taboo, it's taboo to go against, um, the system of systems that is, you know, making sure nuclear war never happens. Bill Perry was one of the first people who did this, and a lot of it, I believe, at least in my lengthy conversations with him.
OV- We had a lot of Zoom calls over Covid. When I began reporting this, and he had a lot to do with me, feeling like I could write this book from a human point of view, and not just from the mechanized systems. Because, and I only lightly touch upon this because it's such a fast, sweeping scenario. But Perry, for example, spent his whole life dedicated to building weapons of war, only later in life to realize this is madness.
And he shared with me that it was that idea about one's grandchildren inheriting these nuclear arsenals and the lack of, you know, wisdom that comes with their origin stories, right? When you're involved in it in the ground up, apparently it has, perhaps, you're a different kind of steward of these systems than if you just inherit them. And they are, you know, pages in a manual.
hm, hm. People forget you mentioned the kind of nuclear war scenarios that the Pentagon runs. I'd love to. What, what do you know about those?
I mean, again, they are very classified, right? I mean, it was interesting coming across informa- levels of classification I didn't even know existed, like eci, for example, is exceptionally controlled information, right? Um, but the Pentagon war nuclear war gaming scenarios, they're almost all still classified. One of them was declassified recently, if you can call it that. I show an image of it in the book, and it's just basically like almost all, almost entirely redacted. And then, like, there'll be a date, you know, or it'll say, like, phase one, um, and that one was called proud profit.
But what was incredible about the declassification process of that is it allowed allowed a couple of people who were there to talk about it, okay, and that's why we have that information. And I write about proud profit in the book because it was super significant in many ways. One, it was happening right. I in 1983, there was an. It was an insane moment in nuclear arsenals. There were 60,000 nuclear weapons. Right now, there's twelve, 500, so we've come a long way, baby, right?
In terms of disarmament, but there were 60,000. And by the way, that was not the ultimate high. The ultimate high was 70,000. Okay, this is insane. And Ronald Reagan was president, and he orders this war game called Proud Prophet. And, um, you know this, everyone, everyone that mattered was involved. They were running the war game scenarios. And what we learned from this declassification is that no matter how nuclear war starts, there is a bunch of different scenarios with, you know, NATO involved, without NATO, with all different scenarios.
No matter how nuclear war starts, it ends in Armageddon, it ends with everyone dead. I mean, this is shocking when you think about that, coupled with the idea that all that has been done in the forty, some odd years since, is okay. This. Let's just really lean in even harder to this theoretical phenomena of deterrence, cause that's all it is. It's just a statement. Lex Like, deterrence will hold. Okay, well, what if it doesn't? Well, we know from Proud Profit what happens if it doesn't.
So it almost always. So there's no mechanisms in the human mind, in the human soul, that stops it in the in the governments they've created, they just keep the the procedure escalates. Always.
I mean, here's a crazy nomenclature jargon thing for you. Ready? Escalate to de-escalate, that's what comes out of it. Think about what, what I just said, escalate to de-escalate. Okay, so someone strikes, and you with a nuclear weapon, you're gonna escalate it, right? General Hyten recently said he was Stratcom commander, you know, if he? He was sort of saber-rattling with North Korea during Covid. And he said, they need to know if if they launch one nuclear weapon, we launch one, if they launch two, we launch two, but it's actually more than that, they launch one, we launch eighty.
Okay, that's called escalate to de-escalate, like, pound the you know what out of them to get them to stop.
but there, I mean, there is to make a case for that. There is a reason to the madness, because you want to threaten this gigantic response. But when it comes to it, the seconds before, there is still a probability that you'll pull back.
Which brings us to the most terrifying facts that I learned in all of that. And that that has to do with errors, right? Not just not errors of, like, we spoke about a minute ago with an, you know, a simulation test tape. I'm talking about if one nuke, one madman, one nihilistic madman were to launch a nuclear weapon. As I as I write in the scenario, um, and we needed to escalate to de-escalate, we needed to send nuclear weapons at, let's say, North Korea, as I do in my scenario.
Well, what is completely unknown to 98% of the planet is that not only do the Russians have a very flawed satellite system so that they cannot interpret what is happening properly, but there is a absolutely existential flaw in the system. Which Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta confirmed with me, which is that our ICBMs do not have enough range. If they're if we launch a counterattack against, say, North Korea, our ICBMs must fly over Russia, they must fly over Russia.
So imagine saying, Oh, no, no, these eighty two, you know, warheads that are gonna actually hit the strike. The northern Korean peninsula are not coming for you, Russia, our adversary right now that we're sort of saber-rattling with, just trust us. And that is where nuclear war unfolds into Armageddon, and that hole in national security is shocking. And, as Panetta told me, no one wants to discuss it.
and if one nuclear weapon, uh, does reach its target, I presume communication breaks down completely, or like, there's a high risk of breakdown of communication.
Uh, well, let's back up. We are both presumptuous to assume that communication could even happen prior to. And let me give you a very specific example. During the Ukraine war, okay, if perhaps you remember, I think it was in November of 2022. News reports erroneously stated that a Russian rocket, a Russian missile, had hit Poland, a NATO country, right? It turned out to be a mistake, but for several hours, this was actually the information that was all over the news, breaking news.
Okay, thirty six hours later, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley, gave a press conference and talked about this. And admitted that he could not reach his Russian counterpart during those thirty six hours, he could not reach him. How are you going to not have an absolute armageddon like furor with nuclear weapons in the air? If people can't get on the phone during a ground war?
I I'd like to believe that there's people in major nations that don't give a damn about the bullshit of politics and can always just pick up the phone. Sort of very close to the top, but not at the very top, and just cut through the bullshit of it in situations like this.
I hope that's true, I doubt it is, and let me tell you why. Most, and you neither you nor I are political, from what I gather, right? So I just write about POTUS, President of the United States. I don't. You have no idea what my politics are, because they shouldn't matter. No one should be for nuclear war, or no one should be for nuclear, you know, uh, national insecurity. Yes, you wanna have a strong nation, but once you get into politics, then you're talking about sycophants.
And the more a political leader becomes divisive, becomes polemic, it the more his platform is predicated on hating the other side. Either of it within his own country or, uh, with enemy, uh, alleged enemy nations. The more you surround yourself, as we see in the current day, with sycophants, with people who will tell you not only what they think you wanna hear, but what will help them to hold on to power. So you don't have wise decision makers.
Long gone are the days where we had presidents who had advisors on both sides of the aisle. That's really important because you wanna you wanna have differing opinions. But as things become more viperous, both here in the United States and in nuclear armed nations, all bets are off at whether your advisors are gonna give you good advice.
Who are the people around the president of the United States that give advice in this six minute window? H How many of them? Just to maybe you could speak to the detail of that, but also to the spirit of the way they see the world. How many of them are warmongers? How many of them are kinda big picture peace, humanity type of thinkers?
Well, again, we're talking about that six minute window, so it's not exactly like you can let me put a pot pot of coffee on and really tell me what you think. And we can strategize here, right? You have your sec def and your chairman, maybe the vice chairman, and okay. We haven't even begun to talk about the fact that at the same time, these advisors also have an inc- a parallel concern, and that's called continuity of government.
Okay, so while they're trying to advise on the nuclear counterstrike in response to the incoming nuclear missile, they have to be thinking, how are we gonna keep the government functioning when the missiles start hitting, when the bombs start going off? And that is about getting yourself out of the Pentagon, let's say, getting yourself to one of these nuclear bunkers that I write about at length in the book. So how much can you ask of a human, right?
Cause it comes down to a human. The secretary of defense is a human, um, and and imagine that job while trying to advise the president. And then there's also a really interesting term, which I learned about, called jamming the president, which is often understood in Washington. That the military advisors would, we don't know if this is legit, we've never seen it put to the test, but jamming the president means the military advisors are gonna push for a really aggressive counterattack immediately.
And again, you're the president who's not really been paying attention to this because he has many other things to deal with. Speed is not conducive to wisdom.
Can you speak to the jamming? The president? So your sense is the advisors would, by default, be pushing for aggressive counterattack.
That is a term in sort of the national security, nuclear command and control, historical documentation. That many of the people that you might call the more dovish type people are, you know, worried about that. The more hawkish people are going to the military advisors, right, are gonna s are gonna be jamming. The president to make these decisions about tar- which targets, not if, right, which but what? targets? The argument will Yeah,
be about which targets, not about if. I I hope that even the warmongers would, uh, at this moment, because what underlies the idea of you wanting to go to war? It's it's power. It's like wanting to destroy the enemy and be the the the big kid on the block. But with nuclear war, it just feels like that falls apart. Do do you think warmongers actually believe they can win a nuclear war,
well, you've raised a really important question that we look to the historical record for that answer, right? Because, y- astonishingly, all of this began, like when, when Russia first got the bomb in 1949, the powers that be. And I write about them in the book as in a setup to the first, n- you know, for the for the moment of launch, right? Like it's called How We Got Here, right? And you see, and I cite, you know, declassified documents from some of these early, um, meetings where nuclear war plans were being laid out.
And absolutely, back in the nineteen fifties, the the generals and the admirals that were running the nuclear command and control system believed that we could fight and win a nuclear war, despite hundreds of millions of people dying. This was the prevailing thought, and only over time did did the did the kind of concept come into play that no, we can, we can never have a nuclear war. It's the famous Gorbachev and Reagan joint statement. A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
But before that, many people be believed that it could be won, and they were preparing for that.
Not to be political and not to be ageist, but do, uh, cognitive abilities and all that kind of stuff come into play here? So if so much is riding on the president, is there tests that are conducted? Is there regular training procedures on the president that you're aware of? Do you know?
I don't think that has anything to do with ageism, I think it has to do with, I think it's an earnest question, a really powerful one. And if people were to ask that question of themselves, or their sort of, you know, dinner party guests, or their family around the dinner table guests. You might come to a real good conclusion about how bad our political system is and how bad our presidential candidates are. Because why on earth there would be two candidates, one of whom has cognitive problems and the other of whom has judgment problems?
Um, these are the two biggest issues with a nuclear launch, judgment and cognition. And so where's the, you know, young-ish, um, thoughtful, forward-looking, wise, dedicated civil servant running for president? I know that sounds, you know, fantastical, but I wish it weren't.
So that's one of the things that you really think about when voting for president? Is, uh, this scenario that we've been describing these six minutes? Imagine the man or woman sitting there for six minutes, waiting for the pot of coffee.
But I think about that issue with with any, with any war, right? I mean, prior to writing nuclear war scenario, I previously wrote six books on military and intelligence programs designed to prevent nuclear war. And I believe the president, as commander in chief, should be of the highest character possible. Because the the programs, the wars that's that we have fought since World War II have all been, you know, how many octogenarian sources have I interviewed? I'm talking about Nobel laureates and weapons designer and spy pilots and engineers in general.
They've all said to me with great pride, you know, we prevented World War III, nuclear World War III, right? And that? But that idea that the commander in chief and everyone in the in within the national security apparatus should be making really good decisions about about war. It's the oldest cliche in the world that, you know, the the wars are fought by the young kids, and that is, it's not a cliche, it's true. And so the character part about the president should be in play, whether we're thinking about nuclear war or any war, in my opinion.
Well, uh, I agree with you first of all, but it feels like with nuclear war, one person becomes like, exponentially more important with, uh, regular war. The decision to go to war or not, uh, advisors start mattering more. There's judgment issues. You can start to make arguments for, um, sort of more leeway in terms of what kind of people we elect. It seems like with nuclear war, there's no leeway. It's like one person can, uh, resist this, uh uh, the jamming.
The president force the the warmongers, the use the like, uh. All the calculation involved in considering what are the errors, the mistakes, the missiles flying over Russia, the full dynamics of the geopolitics going on in the world. Consider all of humanity, the history of humanity, the future of humanity, all the your loved, all, all of it, just loaded in to make decision. Then it becomes much more important that your cognitive abilities are strong and your judgment abilities against m, against powerful, wise people, just as a human being, are strong.
So I think that's something to really, really consider when you vote for president. But to which degree is it really on the president versus to the people advising?
oh no, it's on the president. The president has to make the call, and that six minute window happens so fast. I mean, the president is gonna be m being moved for part of that time. The Secret Service is gonna be, you know, up against up against Stratcom, Stratcom saying we need launch, you know, we need the launch orders, and the Secret Service is gonna be saying we need to move the president. So it's not as much that he's delegating the issues, it's more like the issue is being postponed because there is only one issue for the president to say.
These targets, you know, h- for him to choose from the Denny's like menu. Okay, this is what we're gonna go with. And then this astonishing thing happens. The president pulls, you know, takes out his wallet. He has a card in it that's colloquially called the biscuit, and that card with the codes matches up an item in the the briefcase, in the in the football. That then is received by an officer underneath the bunk, underneath the Pentagon, in that bunker.
It's a call and response, Lex, it's like, you know, Alpha, Zeta, right, that's it, and that then back. So that the individual in the bunker realizes they are getting the command from the president, and then that order is passed to Stratcom and Stratcom, the commander of Stratcom, and I interviewed a former Strat- commander of Stratcom, commander of Stratcom. Then follows orders, which is he delivers the launch orders to the nuclear triad, and what's done is done.
What would you do if you were the commander of Stratcom in that situation? What would you do? Cause I I like my gut reaction right now, if you just throw me in there, I would refuse orders.
Okay, so good question. I asked that exact question to one of my very helpful sources on the book, doctor Glenn McDuff, who is at Los Alamos and who for a while was the classified. They have a a museum that's classified within the lab, and he was the historian in charge of it, right? So he's a nuclear weapons engineer, he worked on Star Wars during the Reagan era, and and he does a lot having to do with the history of Los Alamos.
And the by the way, the Oppenheimer movie, really, cause I've reported on nuclear weapons for, you know, twelve years now, and Oppenheimer movie had a very to me positive impact on Los Alamos's transparency. With people like me, they had a real willingness to share information. I think before, perhaps they were on their heels, feeling they needed to be on the defensive, but now they're much more forthcoming. They were super helpful. I can tell you the origin story of the football, which they declassified for the book.
But, uh, I asked this question to doctor Glenn McDuff, right? Like, in a different manner, I said, Is there a chance that the Stratcom commander would defy orders? And he said, Annie, you have a better chance winning Powerball.
why do you think? What's his intuition behind that?
You don't wind up a Stratcom commander unless you are someone who follows orders, you follow orders.
You don't think there's a deep humanity there? That because his C, his intuition is about everything we know so far, but this situation has never happened in the history of Earth.
Well, this is Tr- and alright, so you're raising a really tricky, interesting conundrum here. Because during Covid, when President Trump and the leader of North Korea were kind of locked in various relationships with one another, good, bad, threatening, non-threatening, friendly, just bananas. You might say, like, not presidential behavior. If you were someone watching C-SPAN, like I do, nerding out on what Stratcom was actually saying about all this, you noticed that Stratcom commanders were speaking out publicly to Congress more so than ever I had ever seen before.
And this issue came up, would you defy presidential orders? So the caveat I would say to Mcduff's answer of easier to win, win the Powerball, right? Um, is that if the commander of Stratcom interpreted the president's behavior to be unreliable, to be non-presidential, then dot dot dot. But now you're into some really radical territory.
well, I mean, fundamentally, it feels like just looking at all the presidents of the United States in my lifetime, it feels like none of them are qualified for this six minutes. So, like, I could see, uh, you know, I, I could, I could see. As being the commander of Stratcom, I being like this guy, like, basically respecting no president. I, I know you're supposed to commander in chief, but in this situation, saying, like, I mean, everybody, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden.
If I was a commander of Stratcom, I'd be like, this, what does this guy know about any of this? Um, it, I would defy orders. I mean, in this situation, when the the future of human civilization hangs in the balance, I mean it to be the person that says, yes, launch. It's no matter what. I just can't see a human being on Earth being able to do that in the United States of America.
That's a hell of a decision. Like, this is it, This is that's it.
it well. But now you've raised a great important, you know, presentation, essentially, because what you're saying is people, be aware, right? Be aware of, like, why you're voting, or why certain individuals are being escalated to even being able to run for president. What does that mean? Why are people in America not more involved as citizens? Do we have a responsibility for that? Because you've opened up the door for people to understand, okay, the ultimate thing is the is the nuclear launch decision.
So if a person can't be trusted with that, you know, everything spirals, everything unravels from there.
Also, I want to look up who's the commander of Stratcom now. Um, speaking of which, you've interviewed a lot of experts for this book. Is there, uh, some commonalities about the way you've talked about this a little bit? But in in the way they see this whole situation, what, what, like, scares them the most about, uh, this whole system, and, uh, the whole possibility of nuclear war?
I first learned about nuclear weapons from a guy called Al O'Donnell, who appears in my earlier books. Because I interviewed him for over a period of four and a half years. Because he was an engineer who actually wired nuclear bombs in the nineteen fifties. He was a member of the Manhattan Project in 1946, worked on Operation Crossroads, the first explosions of nuclear bombs after the war ended, after World War II ended, and went on to arm wire and fire.
186 out of the 200, some odd atmospheric nuclear tests that the United States did before this was banned. And so I learned from him the power of these weapons, right? And I learned from him this very almost nationalistic idea about how important it was to have nuclear weapons. And while I learned a lot about his human side, I also saw saw the side of him that was very cold war warrior, right?
And then so he was kind of the first, and then I don't know. There's been a hundred people that have been directly involved in nuclear weapons along the way. Billy Waugh, who was my subject of my main, my main sort of central figure in a book I wrote about the CIA's paramilitary called Surprise Kill Vanish. And Waugh halo jumped, um, a tactical nuclear weapon into the Nevada test site with a small team, almost unknown to anyone, right?
Only recently declassified. And so his position was like, tactical nuclear weapons may end up being used. So I'm trying to speak here to the scope of different people I have interviewed over over the years, right? And what has happened is as as we're as I've gotten closer to the present day, you know, in arrears. There seems to be a growing movement from some of these cold warriors off the position of nuclear weapons. Make us great and strong toward something must be done to reduce this threat.
How much do you know, uh, in the same way that you know about the United States, how much do you know about the Russian side, maybe the Chinese side? Uh, India and Pakistan, that all, all, all of this, like, what, how their thinking differs, perhaps?
Yes, well, for that, you, you wanna go to the experts, right? So in for Russia, for example, um, there's a guy called Pavel Podvig, who is probably the West's top expert on Russian nuclear forces. He works in parallel with the UN. He also studied in Moscow and he interviewed. So my information comes from him, right? Like you do all the footwork to know what questions to ask, and then you take the very specific questions to him.
And I learned from him about how the Russian command and control goes down, and it's very similar to ours. Because America and Russia have been at sort of nuclear dueling with one another, um, for seventy five years now, and so everything we have, they have, right, with the exception of we have a great satellite system and they have a super flawed one. theirs is called Tundra, and even, um, Pavel Podvig admitted that there are serious flaws in Tundra.
Uh, the Russian satellite system, for example, can mistake sunlight for flames, can mistake clouds for a nuclear launch. This is a fact, okay? And, um, you know, what was interesting in interviewing him was also this recent, very, very dangerous shift in nuclear Russian nuclear policy, which is this. Many Russian experts will tell you that Russia has always maintained that it never had a launch-on-warning policy. Now, I don't know if I believe that's true, but I'm just telling you what they say.
And this is coming from the generals, the Cold War generals in Soviet Russia, saying, Oh, no, no, no, we would wait. Th- they were kind of playing the noble warrior. We would wait to absorb a nuclear attack until we launched. Okay, so many Americans, you know, experts will tell you that that's just posturing and propaganda. But that was their official position, and that changed just two years ago. When Putin gave a speech and he said that their position had changed, that they will no longer wait to absorb an attack.
That they once they learn of how did he phrase it? He called it like the the p- the trajectory of the missiles, right? Which is a way of of sort of talking about parity, the same way we see the missile coming over in midcourse. But Putin made that same statement and said, we would launch.
What do you know of the way Putin thinks about nuclear weapons and nuclear war? Is it just something to allude to in a speech, or do you think he contemplates the possibilities of nuclear war?
I don't know, but if I had to guess, it would go like this. I would look at his background, and he comes from the intelligence world, right? So my experience in interviewing old timers who've spent decades working for the CIA or even NRO or NSA. I know the way they think from having spent hundreds of hours interviewing them, right? And then I know the way that, you know, military men think, and it's very different, right? So Putin's not a military person per se, he's an intelligence officer.
So what con would concern me there if I had to guess about his mindset has to do with paranoia, right? Most intelligence officers must have a degree of healthy paranoia, or they're gonna wind up dead, right? And so that's not a great quality to have.
You would be more trigger happy, perhaps, uh, so you're more, you would be more prone to respond to erroneous signals. And
And you'd be suspicious, and you can see that now. There's a such a, you know, incredible distrust and and and sort of real conflict between Russia, between its leader and NATO, between its leader and all of the West. And then that is fueled by his closest advisors. Um, kind of, you know, seem, they seem to be f- the from the statements they have made that I've read in translation, they seem to be fostering that same idea.
That, you know, NATO really has it in for Russia, the America really has it in. And that is so dangerous and disheartening.
and perhaps makes it less likely that the president would pick up the phone and talk to the other president.
And or that the close advisors near the president would make that happen.
You were talking about the procedure with the football. Is there any concern for cyber attacks, for sort of security concerns of, uh, at at at every level here? False signals, errors, uh, shutting down the the channels of communication through cyber attacks, all that kind of stuff.
hm. So to answer those questions, I interviewed a number of people, but most specifically General Two Hill, who was Obama's cyber chief, and he was actually America's first cyber chief. And the nuclear command and control system, and really the triad, functions on a L- on analog systems, they've it functions on old school systems. If there's not digital interface, you can't hack into it, right? So most of the issues that I raise in the book have to do with what happens to cyber after a nuclear attack, attack, right?
What happens to cyber in the minutes after, um, a bomb, a nuclear weapon strikes America, and how that impacts the ability for people to communicate with one another, and that's when chaos takes control.
well, let let's talk about it. I, uh, so, God forbid, if a nuclear weapon reaches its target, what happens? What, uh, perhaps you could say what you think would be the first target hit? Would it be the Pentagon?
I was told by many people I interviewed that the biggest fear in Washington, DC. is what's called a bolt out of the blue attack. That's an unwarned nuclear attack against Washington, DC. The target would be the Pentagon, and that's what I begin the scenario with, you know, and I reported in graphic, horrifying detail what happens.
Yes, you did.
Because I don't know what's worse, me writing that all out, or the fact that it's all documented by the Defense Department. I mean, they have been documenting the effect of nuclear weapons on people and animals and things since the earliest days of the Cold War. And all of the details I pull are from these documents, like the effects of nuclear weapons. Um, and again, this document was the original information, the original data in this document come from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right?
It was all classified, and then it was built upon by those 200 some odd atmospheric nuclear weapons tests we did. Um, and you know, we're talking about like millimeters and inches, we're talking about the Defense Department knowing that. Oh, seven and a half miles out, the upholstery on cars will spontaneously combust, the pine needles will catch on fire, they will start more fires. You know, you have all kinds of mayhem and ca- chaos happening, um, based on reported facts from observations, and this is really shocking and grotesque at the same time.
So one warhead reaches the Pentagon, everybody in the Pentagon perishes.
180 million degrees. The fireball on a one megaton nuclear weapon is nineteen football fields of fire. Think about that. Nothing remains, nothing remains.
And there's then a radius where people die immediately, and then there's people that are dead when found, and then there's, uh, people that will die slowly. The centric rings.
and again, rings defined by defense scientists. But before that, you know, the bomb goes off, then there's this blast wave that's like several hundred miles an hour, pushing out like a bulldozer, knocking everything down bridges, buildings. I mean, you can read FEMA, uh, manuals about what the rubble will be like. You're talking about thirty feet deep rubble as the buildings go over six, seven, eight, ten miles out. That speaks nothing of the mega fires that will then ensue.
So once all these people die, and third degree radiation burns burns, did you even know there was such a thing as fourth degree radiation burns, right? We're talking about the wind ripping the skin off people's faces many miles out. Um, and then you have a meg a sucking action, right? Everyone is, or many people are familiar with what the nuclear mushroom cloud looks like, and its stem is actually creates. And again, this is from, you know, physicists who advised the Defense Department on this, the sucking up into the nuclear stem, 300 mile an hour winds.
You're talking about people miles out getting sucked up into that stem. When you see the mushroom cloud, Lex, that is in a nuclear war, that would be people. Those are like the remnants of people and of things in the cloud, thirty forty mile wide mushroom cloud blocking out the sun. And that speaks nothing of the radiation poisoning that follows.
And then the power grid goes out. Basically, everything we rely on in terms of, uh, systems in our way of life goes out. You write, quote, Those who somehow managed to escape death by the initial blast, shockwave and firestorm suddenly realize an insidious truth about nuclear war that they're entirely on their own. Here begins a quote fight for food and water. I mean, that is, um, a wake up call on top of a wake up call that we go back to a kind of primitive fight for survival, each on their own.
And by the way, those details were given to me by Obama's FEMA director, Craig Fugate, who was in charge of, um, so FEMA is the agency in America that plans for nuclear war. Okay, and what Fug- Fugate said to me was, you know, Annie, we plan for asteroid strikes. These are called low probability, but high consequence events, and FEMA is the organization that, you know, when there's a hurricane or an earthquake or a flood, FEMA steps in and they do what's called population protection planning, right?
They take care of people. And what Fugate told me is after a n- nuclear strike, after a bolt out of the blue attack, he used those terms, there is no population protection. Everyone's dead, right? And he means that metaphorically, but also kind of more literally, because he just said, at that point, you just hope that you stocked pedialyte.
What do you think happens to humans, like, how does, uh, human nature manifest itself in such conditions? Do you think, like, brutality will come out? Like people will just for survival, will steal, will murder, will?
I can't imagine that not happening. I think that's why people love post-apocalyptic television shows and films, because they see that. And then, of course, there's always one great charismatic person who's trying to restore morality. And these are great narratives that people like to tell themselves in the world of science fiction. But what we're dealing with is science fact in this scenario. And it is meant to terrify people into realizing, wait a minute, this is a conversation that absolutely should be have had while it c- can still be had.
Because the reality is, when you have the director of FEMA telling you this, it's a real wake-up call. And by the way, Craig Fugate was so transparently human with me, and I quote him directly in the book. But he spoke about you asked me earlier about, like, what would be going through the president's mind, and we don't know, I don't know, but Craig Fugate told me what would be going through his mind. And he said, along the lines, I'm paraphrasing, like, it's almost something you couldn't even comprehend, you would ju- it would just like ruin you, you know?
His words are really powerful. And, of course, the FEMA director in the scenario is notified in that first window while the launch, you know, while the ballistic missile is on its way, and no one in America yet knows. And I have the FEMA director pull over to the side of the road and jump in a helicopter that's sent for him to take him to the bunker that FEMA goes to, which is called Mount Weather. And so he's aware that Fugate was aware that as FEMA director, you would likely be taken to a safe place, however many hours you're gonna be safe, um, or days, or maybe weeks, or maybe months.
But as I also learned from the cyber people I interviewed that, you know, there's a complete fallacy that these military bases can continue functioning. They run on diesel fuel, and when the fuel stops pumping, there's no more generators.
Electricity's gone, uh, communication lines are all gone, the food supply, all of it, all the supply chain is gone. Um, it's terrifying, and that's just in the first few days, first few hours. Uh, in part five, you describe the twenty four months and beyond after this first hour we've been talking about. So what happens to Earth? What happens to humans if a full-on nuclear war happens?
hm, hm. So for that, I was super privileged to talk to Professor Brian Toon, who is one of the original five authors of the Nuclear Winter theory. And then that theory was developed in, was published in Nineteen in the early nineteen eighties. One of Professor Toon's professors was Carl Sagan, who was sort of the most famous AU- author of the Nuclear Winter theory. And, you know, there were all kinds of controversies about it when it came out, including the Defense Department saying it was Soviet propaganda, which it wasn't.
And what the nuclear winter author authors conceded back in the eighties was that their modeling was just the best it could be based on what they had at the time. And so now flash forward to where we are in 2024, and talking to Professor Toon, who's been working on this issue for all these decades since. He shared with me how the climate models today, with the systems we have, the computer systems, reveal that actually nuclear winter is worse, right?
So, to answer your questions, the bombs stop falling in my scenario, seventy two minutes after they first launch, the bombs stop falling, and then the mega fires begin. Each nuclear weapon will have, according to the Defense Department, a mega fire that will burn between a hundred and three hundred square miles. So a thousand weapons, 1,500 weapons. M think about those mega fires, everything is burning forests, cities, py- think about the pyrotoxins in all the cities, you know, high rises burning, and all of this soot gets lofted into the air.
According to Toon, some 300 billion pounds of soot, and what happens, it blocks out the sun, and without sun, we have nuclear winter. We have a situation whereby ice sheets form. You're talking about bodies of water in places like Iowa being frozen for ten years. So temperature drops, Temperature plummets, right? And there are all kinds of papers that have been written about this using modern calcula- you know, systems, and the numbers vary. But the bottom line is agriculture fails.
hm, hm, food's obviously, uh, dies, uh. So the agriculture system completely shuts down, so the food sources shut down, so there's no food, there's no sun, temperature drops completely, no electricity.
And we haven't even spoken of radiation poisoning, because, you know, the radiation poisoning kills many people in the aftermath of the nuclear, the nuclear exchange. But after the nuclear freeze ends, after nuclear winter, you know, af- after the sun starts to come back, let's say eight, nine, ten years. Um, now you have no ozone layer, or you have a severely depleted ozone layer, and so the sun's rays are now poisonous. So you have people living underground, and you have this great thawing, and with that great thawing comes pathogens and plague.
And you have this, you know, system where the small-bodied animals, the insects and whatnot, begin reproducing really fast, and the larger-bodied animals, like you and me, begin to go extinct. Professor Toon said it to me this way, you know? He said, 66 million years ago, an asteroid hit Earth, killed all the dinosaurs and wiped out seventy of the species. And nuclear war would likely do the same. And so here we are talking about this, because there is a difference.
There's nothing you can do about an asteroid, but there is something you can do about a nuclear war.
Do you think it's possible that some humans will survive all of this? So if we look, I mean, how long would it be? Uh, would it be decades, would it be centuries? Before the you start to have? Earth starts to have the capacity to grow food again?
Carl Sagan talked about that in his this amazing book that he wrote with two scientist colleagues called The Cold and the Dark. And they and they have. There's a bunch of essays about exactly this, right? Like, how, what would happen and how, how long would it take? It's really interesting. It's dated, you know, it's from the 80s, but man, is it shocking? And you think about that where, okay? So men return to sort of the worst, most base versions of themselves.
Civilization is gone, right? Meaning, you know, civil society, there's no rule of law, it's just fend for yourself. There's, you know, people fighting over what little resources there are. Man returns to a hunter-gatherer state. And to really think about this idea, I looked at, uh, the oldest known archaeological site in the world in Turkey, which is called Gobekli Tepe. And it's really fascinating to me because I interviewed one of the two archaeologists who first found this site in the early 90s.
And the lead archaeologist was a a guy named Klaus Schmidt. And Michael. Morse was the young graduate student who was with him. And Morse's description of, like, coming across upon this like rumored to be site. There was something called a wishing tree on the site, which I just found so human and perfect that it was this magical place. And it was locatable because there was a wishing tree on a hill. And it's where people went to wish and to hope that their wishes came true.
I mean, how human is that, right? And that is where, beneath the wishing tree, kind of like in the shadow of the wishing tree, there was a tep, which is a hill. Um, and beneath that, there is the oldest known civilization in the world. 12,000 years ago, a group of hunter-gatherers built this site. Why, we don't know, but I imagined when through Morsh's descriptions of coming upon, like, you know, he tripped on a rock, he told me, right?
He tripped over a stone that turned out to be the the top part of a twelve zero, zero, zero year old sculpted man, giant pillar, right? And he talked about coming upon that. And then no one knows really what Gobekli Tepe was for. And that makes my mind try and answer your, uh, the question you asked me internally, right? Just as like a human who's here on Earth for the amount of time I'm here. Like, if there were a nuclear war, what would it be like?
What it? What would it be like when someone in the future, some ar- ar- would we become archeologists? One day? Would civilization rebuild? Would we develop computers? Who knows? It's interesting to think about. I hope we never have to,
What would we remember about this time? It is terrifying to think that most of it will be forgotten, everything we kind of assume will not be forgotten. We think maybe some of the technological developments will be forgotten, but we assume, like some of history won't be forgotten. But realistically, especially the US. descending into primitive survival, probably everything since the industrial age will be forgotten, like everything. Maybe some religious ideas will persist, some stories and myths will persist, but, like all the wisdom we've gathered, higher level sort of technological wisdom would be gone.
Like, that's terrifying to think about. And like, maybe even as as you touch on, the very fact of nuclear war might be forgotten, like the lessons of nuclear war might be forgotten. That there are these weapons, sort of the obvious elephant in the room, would be one of the things that's completely forgotten. Or become so vague in the recollection of h humans that our understanding will, uh, change. It's almost as if a God descended on Earth and destroyed everything.
Maybe that's how it'll persist, sort of like mythological interpretation of what nuclear weapons are. That's terrifying, cause then it it, it could repeat again.
hm, hm. But I think, for me, the idea of the what is buried becomes very interesting and very human. And the and in a strange way, optimistic and positive. Because if you can visualize that wishing tree, and I have a picture of it in the book from one of the archaeologists who work on that, right? W You, you think, what were they wishing, what were they wishing for, right? And then you think of your own self, what do I wish for in this world, right?
Because, you know, I do think all things come from what happens, you know, metaphorically around the dinner table, right? Like, what people put their eyes on becomes interesting and expands what people talk about. Um, and ultimately, when you think about the long arc of time and human civilization, it does kind of make you wanna communicate more with your enemies, with your adversaries. And, you know, I think about the quote, what Einstein is said to have said, which is that he was asked what weapons World War III would be fought with.
And he said, I don't know, but I know that World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
let me ask you about the great filter. When you look up into our galaxy, into our universe, look up at the sky. Do you think, uh, there's other alien civilizations that are contending with some similar questions? And perhaps the reason we have not definitively seen alien civilizations is because the others have failed to find a solution to this great filter. Something like nuclear weapons.
I'm not sure I'm gonna have to think about that question. But what I what does come to mind is an answer that was given to me similarly right by a man by Ed Mitchell, who went to the moon, right? Um, and he was the 6th man to walk on the moon. And so his opinion, I think, might count a little more than mine on that subject, because his lens is so much greater, right? And Mitchell was vilified when he got back from the moon because it became known that he believed in things like extrasensory perception and this kind of mystical, metaphysical way of looking at the world.
And he, he really suffered from that. I mean, he was ridiculed and he lost a lot of his career and his friends. But what he said to me in our interview about his trip home from the moon answers that great filter question, I think, in an in a way I might want to adopt, right? Which is which is this that he said that as they were returning from the moon to Earth, he looked down at the Earth.
And and I'm paraphrasing him, I write all this in in Phenomena, an an earlier book, but he s the the paraphrasing is that he looked down from the Earth. And he, and it was 1971. And he thought about all the conflict going on down below, particularly the Vietnam War, where many of his friends were. And then he looked behind him into the great, vast galaxy. And he had a moment, he says, that was like an epiphany.
Like, not a near death experience, but a sort of near life experience, right? Where he believed that the human consciousness, which is where so much of this thoughtfulness about metaphysics and, uh, ESP, perhaps come from. Mitchell's theory was that human consciousness, the, uh, the the way to understand. It was had something to do with realizing that man's inner life and man's outer life are deeply connected in the same way that man is connected to the galaxy.
And he said it much more eloquently. But you kinda get the idea that, and I think it's why humans have always loved to look up, right? Um, that that there's more there, and it's a bit like the wish. It's like the it's like the big version of the wishing tree. You know, what do I wish for for myself? And what is maybe perhaps the the realignment of thinking for those of us in search of happiness, right?
And rather instead of war is, um, you know, what does it mean to have a conscience, to have consciousness? What does it mean to be a thinking person? What does it mean to be on this earth, to born, to be born, to live, to die? And then there is legacy, and so all of those ideas are, I think, foster the kind of conversation that would that de-escalates conflict.
yeah, so in in some deep way. So the mysteries of what's out there when we look out to the stars, uh, are the same mysteries that, uh, we find in when trying to understand the human mind, and they're they're coupled in some way. For me, thinking about alien civilizations out there is really the same kind of question, which is what, what are we? What is this? What? What are we doing here? How do we come here?
W Why does it seem to be so magical and beautiful and powerful? Uh, where's it going? Because it feels like we're really, perhaps for the 1st time in history, are in a moment where we can destroy ourselves. And so naturally, you ask, Well, where's others like us? Is is it perhaps are we inevitably going to a place where we'll destroy ourselves? Is it basically inevitable that we destroy ourselves? We become too powerful and not insufficiently wise to know what to do with that power.
But, like you said, probably the answers to that are in here. We don't need to look out there. Uh, I'd love to ask you about the extrasensory, uh perception you've written, like you said, the book Phenomena on the secret history of the US. government's investigations into extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. Uh, what are some of the more interesting extrasensory abilities that were explored by the government, and maybe just in general? ESP, what is it? What? What do you know of it?
The book was so interesting to report because I spent so much time dealing with, like mechanized systems, machines, war machines. And yet the military and intelligence, uh, were and continue to be incredibly interested in the human mind, in consciousness. And so, you know, if one is called hard science, this what we're talking about now is called squishy science, right? And it was really interesting to delve into that world. It just couldn't be farther from from weapons and war, or could it, right?
And then I really began thinking, well, before science and technology, sort of the supernatural ruled the world. You know, the Oracle of Delphi in Greece exists for the, you know, pre before the common error. Rulers to go and beg to learn from the powers that be what was going to happen, right? So all ESP programs, I think, pull from that origin story, right? The the leaders desire to know. Um, and so I really found it amazing that many people think these systems, or rather these programs, started in the 70s.
I learned they actually began right after World War II, and that was because, and here, you know, uh, in my reporting, I find all things sort of always circle back to the Third Reich, to the Nazis. The Nazis had a massive, uh, occult program, an ESP program, uh, psychokinesis program, astrology. Both Hitler and Himmler were s deeply interested in these occult concepts. And after I learned from records at the National Archives that after the war, um, you know, the sov- half of everything went to the Soviet Union.
And I'm talking about the trove of Nazi documents from which the superpowers were then going to learn to fight future wars. And half of them went to the United States. And so we got this, uh, trove of documents about all of this, and the Soviets got the other. And so it set off a kind of psychic arms race, which, in a weird way, paralleled the nuclear arms race, which we've been talking about. Inasmuch that it led one side to constantly wonder what the other side had.
hm, hm. Have they been able to find anything interesting in this, uh, squishy science analysis of trying to, uh, see how the human mind could be used as a weapon?
The CIA most definitely believed, from from my reading of the documents, that there was something very legit, shall we say, about ESP. It couldn't, it was uncontrollable, it was unreliable, but nonetheless, it existed. And the and being the intelligence agency that they are, they cared less about why it worked, they just wanted to know how they could use it. Um, and then it got into all kinds of elements of placebo effect and this, you know, and the, you know, when the military stepped in and got involved in the programs, that was a complete disaster in my opinion, because the military needs to control everything in a mechanized, systematic way.
And so they started, for example, teaching people to be psychic, which is a really, really, really bad idea. I mean, um, and, you know, flash forward to where we are today, these programs still exist. There's a Navy program which is working on, uh, based on a lot of data that came back from, uh, the war on terror. With certain soldiers knowing, you know, wait, don't walk down that path, there is an IED there. And they call this the Spidey sense, and they actually have a program that that works from this.
So these things never go away, they kind of circle around in terms of, you know, being made fun of and then taken seriously, and a little of this and of that. Um, my biggest takeaway from writing that book was a a a quote that I that I reference in the beginning, which is the the Thomas theorem. And it says, if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.
Yeah, I mean, placebo, as you've mentioned, is a fascinating concept. Uh, by the way, a short plug I started listening to it. Andrew Huberman just released a, uh, podcast on placebo, the placebo effect.
Does he know the origin story of placebo? We'll have to ask him,
We'll have to ask him. But are you ready Yeah, for this yes,
CIA? Okay? And not only that, I can tell you that Dr. Henry Beecher Harvard, I think he was also at MIT for a bit. Um, he came up with that term, and you might even say, for the CIA,
Does that trouble you that so much of this is coming from the CIA? 1st,
you mean, the placebo concept, or the placebo the
concept, but a lot of the sort of, uh, scientific investigations.
listen? I have such mixed feelings about the CIA as one should. I think you should have mixed feelings about anything that you cover as a reporter or as a human. Because, and maybe change that from mixed to, you know, conflicting, right? Because there are there are really positive elements of every organization within the federal government. I mean, my 1st learning about the CIA came from the work I did on the Area 51 book about their aerial reconnaissance programs, which were set up again to prevent World War III, right?
Nuclear World War III. It was this idea that information was king. The U-2 spy plane was developed out at Area at, Uh, Area 51. And I interviewed Herve Stockman, the 1st man to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2, gathered all this intelligence, prevented wars. Later, I wrote a book about the CIA's paramilitary Surprise, Kill, Vanish. So, like, just when I was thinking, Wow, the CIA is doing all this amazing, you know, non-kinetic activity with aerial reconnaissance, then you learn about their kill programs, and that's a whole different set of issues.
It turns out, as you write in that book, that, uh, the CIA assassinates people sometimes, and we'll talk about it, uh. But anyway, like you said, conflicting feelings.
Hm, hm, I mean, I work with sources to report my books, and so put yourself in my shoes, right? I interview for dozens or hundreds of hours. My primary sources, in the case of of the Surprise Kill Vanish book. I traveled with Billy Wa, the longest serving CIA operator, back to the scene of the crime, you know, back to the battle. We went to Hanoi, we went to Havana. Um, and you really get to know someone, and that's when I say conflicting, uh, you know, I work with sources on, uh, a real trust basis, right?
And sometimes people will tell me things, they'll say, Annie, this is this is off the record. This is for you to know about me on deep background. Because I want you to know who I am. And that's powerful. And they a lot of times it's personal, right? It's personal, it's about their personal life, and they don't want that. And and it, it isn't apropos to what I'm writing about, but I need to know that. And that's where it gets conflicted.
Because you in a good way, because you realize we're we're all such creatures of our personal lives, right? So you have a professional life where your national security or in your hands. I don't know what that is like.
I wonder if you could just speak to that. You've interviewed so many powerful people, so many fascinating people, and as you've spoken about, trust is fundamental to that. So they open up and really show you into their world. What does it take to do that?
hm, I think willingness. We were talking about trust earlier, like you have to trust that there's. I have to trust that there's a reason I find myself in a certain situation, right? Otherwise, it would just be a constant, you know, doubt paradox, right? Why am I here? What am I doing? Um, and so I trust that I'm going to learn something of value, and so I'm willing to listen. I really am willing to listen, right? Um, because, and so far, it's always proven, you know, my the expectations I might have going into something are dwarfed by the outcome.
Because people are so interesting, and because the people that I interview, because I write about war and weapons and national security and government secrets, and the people I interview are at the heart of all of this. I mean, they are really capable people, intellectually brilliant, physically capable. They go so far out on the limb to do their jobs. And by the way, the reason they're talking to me is cause they're still alive, and so many of their colleagues are dead.
So it gives them also a wisdom about, you know, life, about sacrifice. Not in cliched sort of nationalistic, jingoistic terms whatsoever. I'm talking like, real, real, what is their real truth? You know, when I went to Vietnam with Billy Wa, I mean, so much of it was the details are just, you know, every detail, right? I mean, starting with the fact that he. He showed up at my house with a giant suitcase and a bunch of clothes.
PR, you know, dry cleaning, pressed clothes in plastic hangers carrying them. I'm like, Billy, we're going to Vietnam and we're going back into the jungle to find the Oscar 8 battle site. Like, What are you? what are you carrying, right? And he got really mad at me, did not like anyone correcting him. And I got my husband on the job, like, Kevin, you gotta sort this out, right? And what transpired was that Billy Wa had never taken a trip for personal reasons.
He operated, I think, in 62 countries every single time for the CIA. And it would go like this Billy, go to there and get to there, right? And that's what he would do. And when he arrived, they whatever he needed, he would just get, you know, it's not a fashion trip, right? So he had no idea how to pack for an overseas trip. This was like, Oh my god, how can you not have the hugest smile on your face going into this?
I'm with a guy who's 89 years old. He's got eight bullet, you know, he's got B. He'd had eight Purple Hearts from Vietnam, right? I mean, he operated against Osama bin Laden ten years before 09:11. He went after bin Laden in Afghanistan when he was 72, and he went after Qaddafi during the Arab Spring when he was 82. And now here he is with me, going to Hanoi, you know? Um, the details, those human details. But the the my husband repacked his bag and, uh, wi, you know, like, got him a proper suitcase that was carryable and small and didn't have the hangers, you know, he wasn't trailing the hangers.
But it was the Ro- it was the trip home in the taxi that I got. This really big reveal. Um, Billy reached into that small suitcase my husband had given him and pulled out a rolled-up American flag. And he had taken this flag, cause I had tried to help him pack and he wouldn't let me. And I just thought it was like an old guy being stubborn, but he didn't want me to see that. He was bringing an American flag to Vietnam, which is not legal.
And he wanted to bring that flag and take it around everywhere with him, as he explained to me later, to honor all of his friends who died there 50 years ago. And then when the trip was finished, he gave me that flag and it's in my office. And that's the kind of relationship that you can develop with people as a reporter, if you're willing to go the extra mile with them, to trust them, that they'll tell you things of value.
And to me, something like that is as of value as as any, you know, secret mission I'm able to get declassified. Because we are a nation of people,
And probably there's a bunch of human details that you can't possibly express in words, things left unspoken. But you saw in the silence exchanged between the two of you, the sadness, the the maybe you could see in his face. Looking back at memories of, uh, the people he's lost, all that kind of stuff.
all that kind of stuff.
Uh, you mentioned you wrote a book on Area 51. For people who don't know, you've written a lot about security, the military secrets, all of this kind of stuff. So Area 51 is one of the legendary centers of all of these kinds of topics. So high level 1st is what is Area 51, as you understand it, as you've written about the lore and the reality.
I think everybody wants to know about Area 51, because it kind of it's like this American enigma, you know? It's like to some people, it's the Shangri-La of, uh, you know, test bed aerospace programs, right? And to others, it's the place of captured aliens, right? And everything in between. I had the great fortune of interviewing 75 people who lived and worked at that base for extended periods of time, uh, mostly leading up to the 90s, because everything since then is classified, right?
So things get declassified after decades, not everything, but some, and that allows you to piece together stories.
so you've talked to a lot of people that worked there. Um, what can you describe as the sort of the history of technological development that went on there?
I mean, Area 51 is huge, by the way, and it's, you know, it's a secret. It's a top secret military facility inside a top secret military facility inside the Nevada Test and Training Range, which is this massive not secret facility, right? So you're just talking about layers, talk about peeling the onion in reverse. And it began as a place to test the U-2 spy plane, um, and literally the CIA set up shop there to build this plane away from the public eye.
And then that led to another, uh, espionage platform called the A-12 Oxcart, which is, you know, anyone who's seen the X Men movies knows about the SR-71. But be. And that's a 2-seater, right? And before that, that there was the A-12 Oxcart, and that was the CIA's stealth Mach 3 spy plane. You know, think about that in the early 1960s, it's astonishing. Uh, and I interviewed the pilots who flew it. Um,
What do they say about it? What? What do others say about my god, I it?
mean, you know, uh, look, I I describe in detail in Area 51. But also the the amazing thing Lex about that was that, and you know, I just look back on that with such fondness. This is like in 2009, when I was reporting that. And all. Many of the guys who were in their 80s and 90s were World War II heroes, like serious World War II heroes, like Colonel Slater, who was the commander of Area 51.
He flew the U-2 on the what the missions called the Black Cat missions over China in the early 1960s to see about their Lop Nur nuclear facility, right? So all of these things tie in when you're reporting on military, um, and intelligence programs. But the these guys had been World War II heroes and then were given this cushy job out at Area 51, you know? And it just came with all these perks. Colonel Slater told me this one perk I just love so much.
They all had a hankering for lobster one day, right? And here they are in the middle of the desert, Nevada, and they have these really fast planes, you know? And they literally called like they arranged. They didn't take the the Ox guard out for that one, but they they, they would. They got some lobsters from Massachusetts, like delivered to them in like record time. They didn't even need to put them on ice, you know? And again, those are the these details where you're like, thank God, at least for me, thank God, I got these details.
These guys are all passed now.
yeah. So there's there's a lot of incredible technological work going on there. So the legend, the lore, like you said, aliens were there ever aliens in Area 51, as you understand it,
So I've interviewed hundreds of people
that worked there?
in the net. Well, not just at Area 51, but in all the different national security and military intelligence and intelligence programs. And I have n- I personally have no reason to believe that aliens have ever visited Earth. That's just me personally.
Just in our Earth period.
I I d. I have no information to that that causes me to conclude that's the case. Now, with that said, many of the primary players in this present day, you know, there are aliens among us narrative are in my phenomena book. I continue to communicate with a lot of these people I'm talking about astrophysicists, um, who fundamentally believe that there are aliens among us, right? Um, so we beg to differ on that issue.
but for you, in terms of doing research on, uh, government agencies that do top secret military work, I mean, they would know, right? So you have interviewed a lot of people that have a at at every layer of the onion. You don't have a s, you don't, you don't see evidence, or, um, a reason to believe that there was ever aliens or UFOs captured from out of this world.
That is correct, and and even perhaps more important, and perhaps this colors my thinking. But I am uniquely familiar with disinformation programs put forth by the CIA, or the agency, as it's called by insiders, right? And I've known, and I've learned firsthand about these programs, or rather learned from firsthand participants in strategic deception campaigns that the CIA has engaged in. Beginning with Area 51, you know, the idea that all these reports of this U-2 spy plane, this giant, long wind, long-winged aircraft flying 70,000 feet up, people didn't think airplanes could fly that high.
And it's, you know, the sun shining off of it. It looked like a UFO and all the reports coming in. And the CIA opened up a a UFO disinformation campaign office headed by a guy named Toto Otarenco, you know, specifically for this reason. Now, does that mean that every UFO sighting I in the world is has been a U-2? No, but I come from it, from that lane of thinking, and there are so many strategic deception campaigns.
And as I look over the decades of how these same UFO stories, and again, this is just my opinion, based on my reporting, this narrative that keeps reoccurring. It seems to me like a very large catch-all to keep the public's attention on that, not on that
so so to you, like, sexy stories like UFOs are going to be leveraged by the CIA for strategic deception.
100. I mean, Google Paul Bennewitz. I'm always amazed that Paul Bennewitz's story is not more widely spoken of. Um, and I think that's because people there's like the sort of ufologists, or the people who are, like, absolutely convinced that that aliens are among us. Um, and I use that term loosely, but you know what I mean. And then there's the quote unquote skeptics, and the skeptics tend to be sort of like, self-righteous, and I would never wanna be self-righteous.
So I'm not a skeptic, I'm just, you know, agnostic, I suppose. But Google Paul Bennewitz and you can learn the story of that man who thought he saw a UFO in the 70s, early 80s. And the Air Force, because the Air Force intelligence community works hand in glove with CIA a lot, and some of the other intelligence agencies. Of course, there's 17, not just the CIA. And, um, they destroyed Paul Bennewitz, they sent him to a mental institution by pulling a massive strategic deception campaign against him.
Because they didn't want him to know about the technology that he was seeing at Kirkland Air Force Base. So look that up and then you go, Oh my God. And, you know, to my eye, you can apply any of these other names, substitute in Paul Bennewitz or any of the current individuals, you know, who really become convinced of X, Y or Z. When, in fact, there is a strategic deception campaign going on.
yeah. There's, uh, a lot of incentive for the CIA and other intelligence agencies to get you to look the other way on whatever. W- whatever is happening. Plus, from a, uh, enemy perspective, whenever two nations are at war, to try to create hysteria in the other
But then you have the Thomas theorem that becomes applicable there, too. If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences, right? So this idea of like, UFOs, and we're being lied to, it becomes real to many people. And then that creates a whole subset of problems, to the point where things are spiraling out of control and there is no, there is no center anymore, right? So a lot of people that are briefed on programs maybe don't even aren't even aware of their position within a greater campaign.
Or I'm wrong, and there are aliens among us.
right. So, you know, do you? I? I appreciate your the possibility of, uh, acknowledging that you might be wrong. Uh, from everything you know about the US. government, if there was an alien spacecraft, like, what do you think would happen? Would they be able to hold on to those secrets for, you know, decades? Uh, like, would they want to hold on to those secrets? Like, what would they do? What's your sense?
I, I can't imagine that kind of exciting situation not becoming public information, right? And the counter to that is this, right? Which is this is a very strong argument for why this is a big strategic deception campaign, right? Think about the defense department and the air. Think about how jealously they guard its airspace, right? I mean, you had a Chinese balloon flying over and the whole world went crazy, right? It was front page news. So the fact that the one element or a couple people in the defense department have made this statement, we've lost control of our airspace.
Over this, this UFO, uh, alleged UFO craft that they can't explain. I don't buy that at all. Zero.
but of course, it's possible that, you know, it is alien spacecraft, if it is that. And they operate under a very different set of technological capabilities. In theory.
In my interviews with Jacques Vallée, who is the kind of grandfather of all ufology. And he's such an interesting person and has such a really unique origin story about how he came into all of this. And he's such a scientist, right? And he is profoundly dedicated to this issue and stands completely on the opposite end of the spectrum from me and knows a lot more and has studied this for decades more. But what he said to me is the most interesting thing, which is that it's not a military problem, it's an intelligence problem.
Because Jacques believes that this is some kind of intelligence, right? Which really the closest I can do in to wrapping my head around that takes me to consciousness, right? The idea of what is consciousness, and I think that's where it becomes very interesting. I think the government is hiding bodies and crafts is is very Paul Bennewitz. Read it, Google it, look into it, right?
yeah, uh, yeah. I I think this kind of flying saucer thing is a is a a trivialization of what kind of. If there's alien civilizations out there,
Trivialization, that's a great word, trivialization, that's, I agree with you.
I tend to believe that there's like a very large number of alien civilizations out there. And I I believe we we would have trouble comprehending what that even looks like, were they to visit. I I tend to believe they are already here or have visited, and we're too dumb to understand what that even means. And they certainly would not appear as, um, as, uh, flying objects that defy gravity for brief moments of time on a low resolution video.
Um, I tend to have humility about this, all this kind of stuff, uh, but I think radical humility is required to even like, open your eyes to what an alien intelligence would actually look like. And it, I, to me, it's beyond military applications. It's like the basic human question of, like, what is even this thing? Like you mentioned consciousness that's going on, like, where does this come from? Why is it so powerful, is it unique in the universe?
I tend to believe not. Uh, of course, I, uh, hang out a bunch with with other folks like Elon who believe we are alone. But I think that belief, just like you said, has power because it S actually manifests itself in, uh, in reality. So if you believe that we're alone in this universe, that's a great motivator to build rockets and become multiplanetary and save ourselves, especially in the case of a nuclear war. Uh, because otherwise, whatever this special sauce, this this flame of consciousness, will go out if we destroy ourselves on this earth.
And, uh, for people like Elon, it's too high of a probability that we destroy ourselves on earth not to try to become multiplanetary. In your book on Area 51, you propose an explanation that I think some people have criticized at the very end. Uh, that this might have been a disinformation campaign from, I guess, Stalin, that the Roswell incident was a remotely piloted plane with a quote grotesque, child sized aviator. Just looking back at all that now, years later, um, what's the probability that it's true?
what's the probability it's not?
so you know, I've never, I've never revealed who that source is. Did you know that? I knew Want me to tell you?
the source. Okay, well, who's the source?
yeah. So before I say anything on that, let me, let me, let me speak to the the question that you asked, right? So w- you asked me, what's the probability that that is still standing as an idea? 14, 12, 13, 14 years later, right? So I continued to work with that source for years afterwards. We talked about this. Look, I mean, his whole family knew it, it was him, and I knew his family, cause I was an integral part of, you know, I was at his house, met all his kids, grandkids.
And
And we should say the source is the main expert advisor behind the story. That it was. Maybe you can explain what the story is that you report in the book, that it was a disinformation campaign created by Stalin to cause mass hysteria in the United States. The the very kind that we've been speaking about with the CIA and so on.
yes, predicated on the on the narrative of the war of the worlds, right? And the war of the worlds. When it was a radio program in the United States, made people go crazy. Oh my god, we're being invaded by aliens. Well, the government was always interested in this story, and Joseph Stalin was too. We know that from declassified documents, right? And so the source told me that the the, uh, the reason for this program, and that the real Roswell crash remains were, in fact, it was a a black propaganda hoax infiltrated, you know, or rather predicated at this idea that you were gonna overwhelm America's early warning air defense system, cause mayhem and maybe be able to attack the United
States. That was the plan, and Stalin was also messing with the United States, messing with Truman, who sort of, you know, turned his back on him, right? At Potsdam. And so, um, this idea was, and the reason that the source is important. And unlike, you know, a lot of people, I saw, I, I saw this, I saw that, I learned that was, according to the source, once it was once. It was determined that this was a hoax and that Stalin was able to get a craft over the United States and it crashed.
And it had, you know, people inside of it. They were people that were sort of deformed and meant surgically altered to look like aliens. The United States government decided that it needed to know what on earth that was all about, and if it was possible for us to have the same program. This, according to the source, right? And so it sounds preposterous. And if it was just someone saying, I n- you might say, Well, it's ridiculous.
Tell me and get them onto another subject. But the difference was is this source, who was very well placed and friends with all of the other 75 people, you know, told me this as a confession, right? A real tearful confession. Because what he said is he was involved in the American program to do the same thing. And people died because there were human experiments that went on. And I, I write about this in the last twelve pages of Area 51.
It was an explosive, you know, revelation, and I felt very confident in writing this because the source wanted it written. Why? Because he said, I'm dedicated to my country. I know about being committed to national security and this kind of thing must never happen. And if you give people too much power, they will take advantage of it. And he wanted it on the record, and his wife of 60 years did not know until after the book published, nor did his children.
Okay, so after the book published, I was called to his house and sat there with his family. And they said, Tell us this isn't true, and he said, It is true, right now. That source is Al O'Donnell, who is the nuclear weapons engineer who armed, wired and fired 186 nuclear weapons. Okay, so if you wanna talk about someone, and you're the 1st person I've told that on on the record, but it's kind of about time.
wow, well, I, uh. You've received a lot of criticism over this story, and it confused me why, because it's, uh, given the context of everything you've described with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, it is reasonable that such a th- action would be taken.
And the source is extraordinarily credible, right? If you al- if you wanted to take the position, well, that person isn't very reliable. Then you have to ask yourself, why did they have top secret clearances that are higher than any in the the United States whatsoever? Because he was responsible for arming nuclear bombs, he was called the trigger man. And, by the way, he told me that I could tell the world who he was. There's a lot of details that are really dark, uh, involving that program.
And when is it appropriate, right? Well, it feels appropriate now. 1st of all, cause you and I have been talking for several hours, so this is what it's a truly a long form conversation. And it's the outcome of, you know, a very long time of my reporting. And also being judicious about what, you know, closing the loop on that, right? Because I do think it's important for people to know that sources, um, have revelations.
And like you said, the programs, both on the Soviet side and the American side, uh, conflicting, I think, is the the term we used previously, uh, ethically, morally, uh, on all fronts, uh, um, people have done some horrible things in the name of security. In your book, Surprise Kill Vanish, you write about the CIA and the, uh, so-called president's 3rd option. It turns out so, 1st of all, 1st option being diplomacy, and, uh, 2nd option being war.
So when diplomacy is inadequate and war's a terrible idea, we go to the 3rd option. And, uh, this 3rd option is about covert action a, and it's about assassination. So how much of that does the CIA do
That is open to debate. We know from the historical record that the CIA was heavily involved in assassination during the Cold War. That's non-negotiable, you know? Even the names of the programs that were assigned to perform assassinations are fascinating and now declassified, like Eisenhower's, for example, was the Health Alteration Committee, well? We used to right?
have a sense of humor to this dark topic.
You know, then the more modern names are targeted killing, right? executive action, targeted killing, right? I mean, drone striking is essentially assassination. And, you know, people jump up and down and say, that's not true. Well, I spent quite a long time interviewing the CIA's lead counsel, John Rizzo. He died recently, but Rizzo was very forthcoming with me. Of course, never sharing classified information, but going up to the edge of what can legally be known. Rizzo was thrown under the bus by sort of the general public for he was the fall guy for the torture campaign.
The CIA calls it enhanced interrogation. And so Rizzo had this long career, you know? He began working under the Carter administration, right? And was responsible for the torture memos, was responsible for legally making sure the president's ass was covered, um, and then got thrown under the bus. And so he was very forthcoming, not in a bitter way, but in a very earnest way. About a lot of how these programs are made to be legal, because if the president of the United States says they're legal, they're legal.
Executive Order 12333, you know, it says we don't assassinate, but it can be overwritten by another order. That's straight out of Rizzo's mouth, right? Um, also, really important to keep in mind is that the military un- operates under what's called Title 50. It's part of the National Security Code that gives, like, sort of, you know, rules and et cetera, how you must behave in a war theater. Well, the CIA is under no such rules, it operates under what's called Title 50.
And, you know, what's interesting to me as a reporter, cause before I wrote the book and reported openly about Title 50, it was not really discussed. And now you even see operators themselves on podcasts talking about Title 50, which is kind of great. Because it's like the cat's out of the bag, guys, that's what it's called, and that's how it works. It means what we say goes.
can you elaborate on what Title 50? So it basically says assassination is allowed.
It says what the president wants, the president gets right. And so, I mean, the best example is the killing of Bin Laden, right? We were not at war with Pakistan, so Title 50 doesn't apply. You can't have a military operation in a country you're not at war with. I mean, the lines, my God, now they've really blurred, but even then they were a little more honored, right? And so what do you do? Well, Leon Panetta was the CIA director.
Um, and you work out a scenario whereby the seals, and by the way, it wasn't J- the seal, it was. There was a rotational on that, um, killer capture mission, which was really just a kill mission. Seals were practicing, Delta was practicing, and Special Activities Division was practicing. They were all practicing at a secret facility in North Carolina, right? And it was just like, you know, they're ready to till they get the go order, and it just happened to be the seals.
Okay, so the seals operate under Title 10, so they had to get what I call sheept dip, because that's what the insiders call it, right? And that is a term that comes from, interestingly, Area 51. The U-2 pilots were Air Force pilots, they needed to be sheept dipped over to the CIA so they could do things that defied the law. Okay, so you can see how these all entwine, and you become more and more informed, and you go, aha, right?
So that's how Title 50 worked. So the night of that mission, it was a CIA mission because the CIA is allowed to go into Pakistan and kill someone, and the military can't.
that's fascinating. So people talk about the Navy Seals doing it, but it's really, legally speaking, to get the permission to do it within the whole f- legal framework of the United States, it was the CIA.
Yep, and if you look at their uniforms that they were wearing, and now that you know this, you'll be like, Oh, you'll see. There's no nomenclature on them, there's no right, so those are it. They're just meant to be completely untraceable. Were that were they to be shot down and captured, it's like, Wait, who are these guys? Oh, a bunch of rogue guys, okay? And this goes back the origin story of all that is in Vietnam with Mac V.
SOG and these cross-border operations that I chronicle in Surprise Kill Vanish, which still amaze me to this day, right? I mean, SOG missions, they called it suicide on the ground, cause that's what it was. And these guys had no identifiable nothing, I mean, they're. They were essentially in pajamas, right? Even their weapons were specially designed by the CIA to have no serial numbers, no nothing. So if they were captured and they became POWs, BOWs, I don't know who these guys are.
W- What do you think, and how much do they think, uh, at the highest levels of power, about the ethics of assassination? A And about the role of that in geopolitics and military operations? Like to you, maybe also, does assassination make sense as a as a good, as a good methodology of war?
I mean, again, I try to remain agnostic on the policy part of it and just report the operator's perspective, right? Because this is what people do, and this is what people are asked to do. Um, and it and it, it depends on the individual. I mean, Billy Wa went on a lot of those missions. I mean, the the saying is like, Oh, Billy Wa, he killed more people than cancer, right? Uh, did Billy Wa ever tell me about direct assassinations?
No, because they're all classified, right? Did he tell me about some failed ones? Yes, I'll give you an example. It's really interesting. Um, he would, he would show me these powerpoints that were just fantastic, you know? Late in in his life, he was constantly being asked to go up to Fort Bragg and lecture to the young soldiers, and everybody loved him, you know? And he would, um, he would drive all night to get there, and he would create these powerpoints, and then he would show me the powerpoints.
And he would, um, all unclassified. But at one point, when Hugo Chavez was in power, Billy Wa was kind of asked. That's how it works of like, if you had to think about doing something, what would it look like? Let's just say hypothetically. So he took me through this PowerPoint that never happened. Whereby he and a group of operators, agency operators, were gonna halo jump in to the palace and grab Chavez and probably kill him, cause he wouldn't allow himself to be captured.
And w- uh, you know what, Billy? And by the way, halo jumping for those of listeners who don't know, high altitude, low opening, right? So you jump out of an aircraft and you go down like a pencil until you're really low to the deck, like a thousand feet. You pull your parachute cord, and that way you're not picked up on radar, and you're also not traceable when you get to the ground, cause it's so fast. Billy Waugh took the second halo jump in history into a war theater in Laos during the Vietnam War, right?
So he's like this famous halo jumper, right? So he, he and a team were gonna go in, grab Chavez. And and he said to me a very interesting thing. That was kind of a one moment in time where I saw a different side of Billy Waugh, where he said, I'm so glad we didn't do that, even though I really wanted to at the time. Because can you, you know, can you imagine that country's problems where it is now?
Can you imagine how we would have been blamed? And it was like an interesting, rare moment for Billy Waugh to comment on the bigger picture that you're asking me about, right? I think pretty much the operators I know, they just stick to the mission.
So, on the technical difficulty of those missions, just your big sense, how hard is it to do to assassinate, uh, to assassinate a target on the soil of that nation?
I suppose that just depends, right? I here's another insightful Bill thing. Billy Waugh said to me, and I'm answering the question around because I don't know, because, again, you know, I never had anyone say to me, here's how it went down, right? Because you can't. That would be 1st of all, those are classified, so I'm never gonna receive classified information. I did hear a lot about reconnaissance missions when people would be in charge of. You have to be able to what's called make book on the target before, right?
And making book on the target means, um, photographing them to really. Then that gets run up the chain of command to make sure this is really. Imad Mughniyah. We're about to kill, right? Um, but I once asked Billy when I was trying to get the question, you know, and he wouldn't answer it. And I said, So, there's another person in my book named Rick Prado, who's also like a legendary agency guy. And um, and so B- you know, he's like 20 years younger than Billy.
And I said, Um, Billy, if you and Rick had to kill each other, like, who would win, right? I was trying to imagine this, like, hypothetical, like, how would that work? Who would win, right? And I a I posed the question to each of them, right? And B- And of course, each of them said me right. But Billy. Then I went back to them and they and I. Billy said, Let me tell you how I would win, okay, right?
And he said, I'd cheat, I'd show up before the duel and I'd kill him.
yeah. It's such a such a, uh, like, a, you know, I have a lot of friends who are Navy seals. It's such a guy conversation. Uh,
Well, you would be amazed at what the women do. Let me just tell you that women are part of the Special Activities Division, a big part of it.
can you comment on that?
I can. Women can get a hell of a lot closer to a target, and I mean that literally.
the special operations, do you mean, is this part of the CIA? The Special Activities Division Special activities?
now it's called the Special Activities Center. Um, but originally, that's the that's the umbrella agency that has the different paramilitary organizations under it, right? So the most lethal one is Ground Branch, um, and that's what I reported on in Surprise Kill Vanish. And its origins go way back to the guerrilla warfare corps that was started, uh, in 1947 for the president.
so women are also, uh, a part of the alleged assassination, and you're saying they can at times be more effective. I'm just gonna leave that pause there. The reason I ask of how difficult the assassinations are, you know, with Bin Laden, it took a long time. So I guess the reconnaissance, the intelligence for finding the target, I imagine with Mossad, maybe the CIA. Now, the leadership of Hamas, of the military branch of Hamas, is much wanted from a assassination perspective.
So to me, as an outside observer, it seems like it's more difficult than you would imagine. Uh, but perhaps that's the intelligence aspect of it, not the actual assassination of locating the person.
well, I think most. It's because mostly, from what I understand, it's a really, it's a really dirty game and people are covering for people, right? And I'll give, I'll give you the example of Billy Waugh and Emaad Mughniyah, if I may, right? So Emaad Mughniyah was the most wanted terrorist in the world before Bin Laden, you know, Hezbollah's chief of operations, and he was wanted by every, you know, Mossad. John down, but no one could find him.
He was missing for 20 years, there wasn't even a photograph of him, and then he resurfaced, and h- of all places, he resurfaced in Saudi Arabia. Okay, so what? That's when I say it's a dirty game, right? Hezbollah, Iran, Hezbollah, Iran, enemies with Saudi Arabia. Why on earth was Emaad Mughniyah in Saudi Arabia? Well, that's where he was. There was a Na Navy Seal who was doing reconnaissance on him. This is according to Billy Waugh, and this is around 2005, so Billy's in his 80s at this point, right?
Late 70s, 80s. And he gets word that the Seal who's been tracking Mughnia to get photographs of him, to give the photographs to Mossad and CIA. So they can do a joint operation to kill him, which they did with a car bomb in Damascus. That's the end of the story, right? But how we got there was we needed co- you know, the CIA needed confirmation. You can't kill the wrong person, so the Seal panicked, according to Billy Waugh, and was just like, I'm out of here, this is too dangerous and I do not wanna wind up in a Saudi prison.
So who do you send in? Billy Waugh, right? He shows up, he's there for 24 h, he finds he knows where Mughnia lives from the Seal. He positions himself in a cafe across the street, which is run by Sudanese men, and, of course, Waugh speaks some Sudanese because he operated in Sudan, right? And he's shooting the shit with him, by his own words. He had the most foul mouth. That was just absolutely delightful to listen to.
And then, in between him and Mughnia's house is a dumpster, and Billy Waugh, being Billy Waugh, who will go to any lengths to do the job, decides to r- conduct reconnaissance from inside the dumpster. And that is where he is when he takes the picture of Emaad Mughnia living so comfortably in Saudi that he Mughnia. Ca- According to Billy, came out of his apartment building with dry cleaner plastic bag hangers over his shoulder. That's how comfortable he lived there.
It was his neighborhood. Click, click, click. Billy Waugh takes the photographs, runs them to the CIA headquarters in Saudi at the embassy. Oh my god, it's Mughnia, get the hell out of here. He gets to the airport, he leaves. Those photographs get sent to the agency, and then they do the operation with Mossad and Mughnia is dead. Now that the truth about that being a co-CIA mission was not reported for many years after the fact. It was originally Mossad took credit, as the CIA often likes to just give other people credit.
They just want the job done.
well, speaking of Mossad, what? In your understanding of all the intelligence agencies, what are the strengths and weaknesses of of the different intelligence agencies out there? CIA, Mossad, MI6, um, SVR and FSB and the Chinese intelligence, all this kind of stuff. Is there some interesting differences, insights that you have from all of your studying of CIA?
that's a really interesting question. I I don't know, and here's why is because I've never interviewed any intelligence officer with those other agencies, right? I've interviewed a couple people with Shin Bet in in Israel. But um, until you, until I speak to an actual source whose job it was, I don't know. And so the information that I'm getting is based on perception of others, which one would think would be deeply clouded by the idea that America's the greatest, right?
We're better than them, you know?
Yes, uh, well, actually, the fascinating thing is cause you've spoken to a lot of people about the CIA. How do you know they're telling the truth? Like, how do you? And this actually probably applies generally to your, uh, interviews with very secretive people. How do you get past the bullshit? Like,
well, that's just like multiple sourcing, right? So so you find the story out, and then you have to. You go to the National Archives and you find the operation, and then you learn all about this. And then you interview other people who were there, and you put the story together to the best of your ability. And you make very specific choices with, you know, quote, so and so said, end quote, said so and so, right? And on.
Very rarely do I report on a single source, as I did in the end of Area 51. And then it says, essentially, look, the look, dear reader, this is what the source told me. I have no way of corroborating it, this is legit, and here it is. So that's a a an area to make your reader comfortable with the information that they're being given. And then, in all of my books, whether they're 3 or 400 pages, there's always 100 pages of notes at the end.
So you can see all the sourcing and you can begin to get an understanding of how journalism in the national security world works. And also great opportunity for me to say I'm often standing on the shoulders of journalists before me who did an incredible job digging into something and being able to report what they knew. Often, the books are 1020, 30 years old, and so much more has come to light since.
and I also would just like to say that I I appreciate that you said, great question. I don't know, uh, not enough people say I don't know, and that's a sign of a great journalist. Uh, but speaking about things you might not know about, uh, let me ask you about something going on currently. Uh, so, uh, recently, Alexei Navalny, uh, died in prison, perhaps was killed in prison. Uh, what's your sense from looking at it? Do you think he died of natural causes in prison?
Uh, do you think it's possible he was assassinated? Uh, Russia, Ukraine, Mossad, CIA, um, whoever has interest in this particular war.
hm. For that, I look directly to the historical record, right? Having written about Russian assassination campaigns and programs since the earliest days of the Cold War, right? And Russia has a long history of assassinating, murdering dissidents. And in Surprise Kill Vanish, I tell the story of an actual KGB assassin named Kolkoff, who knocked on the door of his of the man he was assigned to kill. And and by the way, this all comes from a book that Kolkoff wrote later, right?
Cause he defected to the United States, he knocks on the door and the guy answers the door. And instead of killing him, he has like this moment of conscious of crisis or crisis of conscience and says, like, I can't kill you, even though that's what I'm supposed to do. And then sits down with the guy and together decides, Okay, we're gonna defect, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna let the Western intelligence agencies know what we're doing here.
And the CIA got involved, but Russian assassins were able to poison Kolkoff with polonium. Um, what happens to him is insane, and it's a miracle he didn't die, but he doesn't, and then he defects to the West. And he writes these books, and he tells lots of incredible secrets about the Russian assassination programs and their poison labs, and they're really, really, really interesting. And so to answer that question, I mean, to my eye, of course, I don't know, but it certainly looks like Russia is acting in the same vein that it has always acted, the taking care of dissidents that go against Mother Russia.
so in the in the style of KGB assassinations, uh, is there something you can comment on about the ways that KGB operates versus the CIA? When we look at the history of the two organizations, the Cold War after World War II and leading up to today.
Hm, I mean, my feeling on that is always that there's a thread somewhere in every in in declassified documentation about these programs of America working to maintain a semblance of democratic ideals, however surprising that may be, right? In other words, always trying to. I don't wanna say fight fair, because, you know, killing people isn't fair. But um, versus a certain ruthlessness, a real sinister totalitarian type ruthlessness, certainly from Soviet Russia. I'm far less familiar with modern day Russian assassination activities, although we certainly know on the record, you know, that they exist.
Some people have done great reporting on that, um, but there seems to be a kind of almost a sadism about the Russian programs that I personally have not seen in the American programs.
what about on the surveillance side? It seems like America's pretty good at surveil mass surveillance, or at least has been revealed through NSA and all this kind of, uh, reporting and leaks and whistleblowers. Um, can you comment to the degree to how much surveillance is done by the US. government, internally and externally?
if you'd asked me five years ago, I would have a very different answer, right? Because, all right, first of all, you can't. They're looking for a needle in the haystack, they're looking for the Bin Laden, and they can't find the needle in the haystack. But they continue to m create the haystack and and survey the haystack. So that, right, okay, so, but the real problem what has happened? And I write about this in my book First Platoon, which is about a group of young soldiers who goes to Afghanistan and unwittingly becomes part of the Defense Department's biom efforts to capture biometrics on 85 of the population of Afghanistan.
Okay, which, by the way, China then emulated in their own biometric surveillance program, right? And I think this is a a a terrible idea. But what has happened? These biometric systems that have been created, and biometrics are, of course, fingerprints, facial images, DNA and iris scans that allow you to tag, track and locate people. Okay, and what has happened in the five years since this question was first, you know, on everybody's minds about NSA surveillance is that the civilian sector companies have essentially Cr- done all the Defense Department's biometric surveillance job for them.
By all of us sharing our facially recognizable images on Instagram and Facebook and everywhere else. X Um, by sharing information, by writing up narratives about ourselves, um, this information has become part of the database. Five years ago, when I was reporting First Platoon, I was interviewing the police chief of El Segundo, which is kind of like on the outskirts of LA. It's right near the airport. And why it's important is cause it's like Defense Contractor Haven.
Okay, so they have, like, you know, massive surveillance. And Chief Whalen, when I posed this question to him, he said to me, Annie, let me show you something. And he had Clearwater AI, the s the the rec- the recognition software on his phone. And this was still when it was like, quasi not supposed to have to have that for law enforcement. And he said, I want you to go down the block and I want you to just turn the corner and come back toward me, right?
Which I did. And he just didn't even hold up his phone, he just kind of his. It looked like his hand w- and his phone was on me and he went back down. It was like tiniest movement. And when I came back to him, he went like this and he showed me there. I was everything about me, everything about me, facts and figures and all images, and he knew who I was before I even got to him.
So is that a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, we could have another 3 hour conversation about that alone,
So you're saying more and more, you don't need an NSA. We're we're giving over the data ourselves, uh, publicly or semi publicly.
yeah. During the war on terror, people were just like, incensed to learn that there is a drone that's flying at something like 20,000 feet. It's called Argus, is right, and it could. It can capture the it's not a license plate, it's like it can basically capture, like what's written on a golf ball from 17,000 feet, 20,000 feet up. Okay, and people went crazy over this, like, Oh my god, it's big brother. Well, one of the lead engineers on that, Pat Bilkin, is someone I talk to regularly because we talk about surveillance a lot.
Cause he thinks about it a lot, cause he has kids now, and he is has given so much thoughtful. It, you know, really thinks about this issue. Because he believes, just like you stated, that what we are turning over about ourselves actually exceeds anything that Argus is could do from above. Because we're doing it willfully. And so what it's doing is it's creating an ability for if someone wants to know about you, if someone, let's say in government, wants to know about Lex Friedman, they can find out everything about you.
And then that gets used for tagging, tracking, and ultimately, you know, in the in the war theater, it was called find, fix, finish. Well, what do you think the finish is in that statement?
It's not pleasant.
It's called a drone strike find, find them with the biometric, fix him, meaning fix his position. We know he's moving in a car, that's him, that's him, finish him, call it in drone strike, boom.
if we could, uh, return to nuclear war. You've briefly mentioned that a lot of things go back to the Third Reich and Hitler. If we go back to World War II, we look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dropping of the 2 bombs. I would love to get your opinion on whether we should or shouldn't have done that, and also to get your opinion on what would have happened if Hitler and Germany built the bomb 1st. Do you think it was possible he could have built the bomb 1st?
In my researching Third Reich weapons for Operation Paperclip, because, of course, we got a lot of those scientists after.
which is another great book and a terrifyingly complicated operation.
Yes, um, when you know, at what point do the ends justify the means, right? Um, but in looking at those programs, and we acquired Hitler's favorite weapons designers, um, and I'm talking about weapons of mass destruction, like chemical weapons and biological weapons. But of course, America was ahead in the nuclear program. And an interesting detail reading Albert Speer's memoirs was, um, Speer referring to a conversation he had with Hitler, where Hitler said, No, I don't wanna do that.
That's Jewish science. And so because of Hitler's own racial ethnic preju- prejudices, they didn't develop the bomb, right? As far as should we have dropped the bombs on Hiroshima? You know, I've interviewed all kinds of people with different opinions, most of them that it ended the war. Um, the best interview and most meaningful, perhaps, that I ever did was with Al O'Donnell, who was a participant in the Battle of Okinawa, which was like this insane. Uh, just to read stories about Okinawa, it makes your hair stand on end.
And O'Donnell, like so many others, was slated to invade mainland Japan to his almost certain death, right? So somebody like that. It makes sense right from the get-go why he would be pro nuclear weapons. It saved his own personal life, and it saved everyone that he knew that he was fighting with, and it ended the war.
do you think it sent a signal like, without that, we wouldn't have known, perhaps, about the power of the weapons? So in the long arc of that history, 70 years plus it, it is, it is the reason why deterrence has worked so far.
Y- Yes, that's an interesting thought. My thought goes to this idea that, like, of more, right, that everybody always wants more. It's a very dangerous, it's like more power, literally, not just figur- more power, right? And what? What is more confounding to me, beyond the fact that we dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the war ended, is that this decision was then made to develop the thermonuclear bomb. A force that is such, it's the degree of magnitude of that power is mind-boggling.
I mean, even projects within the Manhattan Project defined thermonuclear weapon, the thermonuclear weapon as the evil thing, like it was evil. It's, um, it's a weapon of genocide, atomic weapons destroy cities, um, thermonuclear weapons destroy civilizations.
You open the book with a Churchill quote The story of the human race is war, except for brief and precarious interludes. There has never been peace in the world, and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending. Do you think there will always be war? Do you think that there is some deep human way in which we're tending to this kind of global war eternally?
Well, the optimistic answer of that would be that we could evolve beyond that, right? Because certainly, if we look at our an ancestors, um, they had not developed their consciousness as far as we have to be able to build the tools that we have. And so the hopeful answer is we will evolve beyond this kind of brute force, kill the other guy attitude. Certainly, you know, these are questions that will become more obvious over time. I just want to play my little part in this world that I live in as the storyteller who brings information to people so that they can have these kind of questions with themselves, with their friends, with their families.
And I think in asking that very question, you're what you're really saying is, why don't we evolve beyond war fighting?
It is very possible, and y- your book is such a stark and powerful reminder that human civilization, as we know it, ends in this century. It's a, uh, it's a good motivator to get our shit together.
But aren't you really saying human civilization could end, not it ends, Could end, could end,
but the power of our weapons is growing rapidly. So,
as they say, it's time to come back from the brink, right? And it's time to have that discussion while we're still talking.
and, uh, you know, there's another complexity sneaking up into the picture in the form of artificial intelligence, and in the in cyber war, but also in hot war, the use of autonomous weapons. All of it starts becoming super complicated as we delegate some of these, uh, decisions about war, including nuclear war, to more and more autonomy. And artificial intelligence systems, it's gonna be a very interesting century. Do you, just to zoom out a little bit, hope that we become a multiplanetary species?
I'm all for adventure.
Uh, and I, too, while I am for adventure, I'm all for backups in all forms. So I d I. I hope that humans started civilization on Mars and beyond, out in space. And if you zoom out on across all of it, what gives you hope about human civilization, about this whole thing we have going on here?
I mean, I am a fundamentally optimistic person. I must have come out of the chute that way because I just am right, even though I write about really grim things, I I get inspired by them because I do always believe in evolution, right? I also have, like, the greatest family ever two kids, Jet and Finley. Shout out to them, they're Lex Friedman fans, you know? Um, like, and uh, and my husband, and, you know, so what inspires me is like this idea of legacy.
I think that you always wanna have your eye on being a good example to the best that you can, and so and passing on what you know and believing kind of in the next generation. And again, that's a sentiment echoed by all these cold warriors I've been talking to, because they also share that, um, that idea that, wow. Look at what we have done as a civilization and look where we're going, whether it's interplan- exoplanetary travel or AI.
Um, it's just that the the human factor of, like, the desire to fight, the desire to have conflict, needs to be reconfigured. Because with all these new technologies that we have, the peril is growing at an accelerating pace, perhaps faster than the average human can keep up with.
Well, Annie, thank you for being a wonderful example of a great journalist, a great writer, a great human being, and I'm a big fan of yours. It's a huge honor to meet you, to talk with you today, so thank you so much for talking today.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you for listening to this conversation with Annie Jacobsen. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from John F. Kennedy. The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society, and we are, as a people, inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.