Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 4, Episode 4: Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

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Season 4, Episode 4: Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs, and welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: We speak in the Book Club podcasts with the authors of important books, and I could not be more thrilled and in a way gratified, but I'll explain the term to be speaking with this amazing author of an absolutely amazing, crucial book.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I would say the book of the year.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: We're speaking with Annie Jacobson, a leading journalist, best-selling author, multiple award winner, investigative writer who has been exploring crucial facets of the American security state, if I could put it that way, for many, many years, writing about the weapons systems programs in the United States, the uh creation of the so-called Pentagon's brain, uh DARPA, which was uh one of her best-selling books uh in 2016, an absolutely shocking book about the relationship of uh the U.S.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: and Nazi war criminal scientists after World War II, the uh U.S.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: government operation paperclip to bring those scientists to the U.S.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: war effort immediately after World War II.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I think, Annie, the book you've written this year is in a way the shocker of all of them.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I was, as I'm sure every reader, and in my case, I was a listener on audiobook, and I believe you narrated it, if I've been not mistaken.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: The book is uh nuclear war, a scenario, and it is absolutely the most terrifying, riveting book that I have read, because you described meticulously, literally, second by second, the end of the world.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me, how do you write a book about the end of the world in such remarkable clarity, so shocking?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, you know, the way you narrated it with such utter calm and precision shows that it's a mechanism for ending the world.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh out of our control after a certain moment, is is what the book says.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and we're close to disaster.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for that introduction and for having me.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: And you are absolutely right.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: I the book that I wrote does, you know, demonstrate in appalling detail precisely what would happen in the event of a full-scale nuclear exchange.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I wanted to do that because I have written about nuclear weapons my whole career, kind of on the periphery.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it's usually from a rather, you know, intellectual, shall we say, point of view.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of you're talking about historical, how the program began, et cetera, et cetera.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I wanted to show, I wanted to cut through all of that and go right to the heart of the matter, which is that if we have a nuclear war, five billion people will be dead.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: What does that mean?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: What does that mean to you, to me, to our family?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Those are the questions that get asked, I think, by everybody, not necessarily when they get to the end of the book, but from second one.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because unfortunately, this is one of those stories that you know how it ends.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it's uh not only five billion dead, but basically uh in the time of reading the book itself, uh, because even the narration is almost real time.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Minute by minute, the world is being destroyed because that is the technological reality right now.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you say that this is a scenario of a full-scale nuclear war.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: One of the absolutely uh fascinating, crucial parts of the book is that it doesn't start as a full-scale nuclear war.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: It starts uh as one missile fired.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm gonna let you tell it, then two, then three, then the end of the world.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Could you lay it out?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's it's not exactly giving away the plot.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone needs to read it or hear you tell it, because really this is our world right now, how dangerous the world is, and you make clear that in a few minutes, not only can everything change, but everything can end.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let me set the stage for a moment, if I may, with how I reported the book so that listeners understand this is not some scenario out of Annie Jacobson's imagination per se.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: Meaning when I committed to writing this book, it was during COVID, and I wanted to have discussions with top-tier individuals in the national security, nuclear command and control apparatus.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: People who formerly advised the president on these matters.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because I wanted to portray a second by second, as you say, minute by minute unfolding of what would happen with an authority that really shook readers to their bones.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a daunting task.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: I wondered if it was even possible.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: But because I did so much of my heavy reporting during COVID, I found an extraordinary number of these top-tier former advisors to the president with a little extra time on their hands.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so and willing to talk, by the way.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And willing to talk.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's not to be taken for granted.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: Most certainly, and it was a remarkable process because I would interview people, generals, admirals, former secretaries of defense, nuclear weapons designers, and I would interview them and I would get a little bit of the puzzle unveiled.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: But it was enough to go off, look at monographs, look at declassified documents, ask more questions, and come back to them and say, explain to me about this.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: Is or more often than not, oh my God, is this really true?
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I was amazed that so many of these individuals, I I kind of would call them Cold War warriors.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: People now in their late 70s, 80s, even 90s, forthright in their answers because of exactly the end part of your question, which is, you know, we are living at the razor's edge.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: The Secretary General of the United Nations said recently that we are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: And he is absolutely right.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And Annie, my kind of go-to guidepost for that has been the Doomsday Clock, which listeners will know was launched as a graphic device to explain to the world just how dangerous the atomic age and now the nuclear, thermonuclear age is back in 1947.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea was that the clock would tell us how close we are or how far we are from nuclear annihilation.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: And when the clock was uh unveiled in 1947, it was put at seven minutes to midnight, which was taken as the message we are close to doom, seven minutes to midnight.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Today we are 90 seconds to midnight, according to the doomsday clock.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's notable, and I am repeating it uh every time and place I can, that every president, from Clinton onward, from the end of uh the Soviet Union in December 1991, when it looked like this was the new age of peace, every president since then has been an administration where at the end of the administration, the minute hand or second hand is closer to midnight than before.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, we've become more and more insecure from 1992 until today.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And we are in an unprecedented knife edge, as you said, and as the Secretary General has said.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: And what I find so depressing is we have, for example, our CIA director, William Burns, saying in public, oh, don't worry about Putin's bluffs.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, if he says nuclear, don't worry about it.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're not going to be scared.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Should we be scared?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: You're reminding me of a conversation I had with retired General Robert Keeler, who was the commander of U.S.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: Strategic Command, StratCom.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: That is the commander in charge of the nuclear arsenal.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, in the event of a nuclear exchange, the president would order the launch and he would speak directly to the StratCom commander.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: General Keeler said to me when I was discussing with him what would happen in a full-scale nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States, he said to me, Annie, the world could end in the next couple of hours.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: That is from the top authority on this subject.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that when you go back to a source and said, just want to make sure this is actually what you said, and they said yes, you know, wow.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: So you must couple that with this other idea that I think is very important that you touched upon when you said it's not a full-scale nuclear exchange is not how the scenario begins.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that is exactly right.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: I begin with what is called a bolt out of the blue attack.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Again, readers should know these are actual terms and concepts that people in Washington are uniquely familiar with.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: If the CIA director is telling us one thing, I have a very strong feeling what is being said behind closed doors is a very different story.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: And what I wanted to do was show to people this is what is truthful.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: So when Andrew Weber, who was the advisor to President Obama on nuclear weapons, he had the highest ranking person with the title nuclear in his in his title.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: He said to me when I ran by him that I was going to run the scenario with a bolt out of the blue attack from North Korea.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: He said to me, Annie, a bolt out of the blue attack against Washington, D.C.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: is what Washington fears most.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's a direct quote, and it begins the book, and you see exactly that is what happens.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And and I was just uh shivering, by the way, because I was remembering uh hearing you describe that at the opening of the book as you're narrating on the audio book.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: An intercontinental ballistic missile carrying a powerful nuclear warhead is launched.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And if I remember correctly, it's something like five seconds after the launch that uh there's a detection on the U.S.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: satellites.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's your first entry.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, even more shocking, it is actually in under one second.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: That is the technology that exists today.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: The Defense Department has a satellite system parked over our nuclear-armed enemies, watching for a nuclear launch.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so nuclear war begins in the first fraction of a second when that launch is detected.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: The satellite sensors can actually see the hot rocket exhaust on the bottom of the rocket as it launches.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And there begins nuclear war.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is not a 9-11 scenario where someone comes and whispers in the ear of the president, remember, you know, tells President Bush at the time, the towers have been hit.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is not that.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: This is the Defense Department knowing nuclear war has begun in that first fraction of a second.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: And there begins the ticking clock scenario.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: But then what's amazing is uh you recount from that first fraction of a second, and it is in many cases second by second, uh, determining okay, it's a missile, it's uh heading towards North America.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: A little bit more time elapses, the trajectory of the missile is then understood.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh heading towards the East Coast a few seconds or a few tens of seconds after that, it is heading towards Washington.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: And talk about the fact that some people probably suspect, well, why don't we just shoot it down at that point?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: We saw it, we know it's coming, uh, we have missile defenses, uh, why aren't we shooting it down?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: There is a general myth among the general population that the U.S.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: interceptor system is capable of shooting down a long-range strategic ballistic missile.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: It is not.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: When we see things like the Iron Dome in play and we hear on the news that American Navy systems, the Aegis system, for example, the THAAD system, I write about these in the mid-part of the book, where these are ground systems or systems out at sea that can shoot down short-range and even some medium-range missiles.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: But the ICBM is a monster missile.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we're taping this today.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Just two days ago, North Korea launched a new version of the ICBM, an intercontinental ballistic missile.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: It can travel from one continent to the United States in under 30 minutes.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: This is the fact of the matter.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: I describe it quickly but in painstaking detail, what it does, how it works, and you learn very quickly, as in minute, you know, five, six, and seven of this scenario, as the Defense Department's bunkers, their nuclear bunkers, the individuals in those bunkers are scrambling to get the missile defense agency into action to try and shoot this missile down.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: You learn very quickly it is an absolute failure.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: For example, Russia has 1,670 nuclear missiles on ready-for-launch status.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: We have a grand total of 44 interceptor missiles.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Each missile has a success rate, or you should say a failure rate, of approximately 50%.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I had certain generals at the Pentagon read the final proofs of the book, I asked them, can you please pay particular attention to the interceptor missile part of this book?
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because it is such a fantastical myth that people across the United States think, and even, you know, former President Trump has recently said, oh, we're going to have an Iron Dome.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: That is not plausible.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: If we are being shot at by Mexico or by Canada, yes, but the threat comes from another continent.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: And uh what is uh searing about the scenario is that within a few minutes it's understood that it's uh coming to Washington.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: And again, uh people might think well, the president will go into his deep underground bunker, or uh the Pentagon leadership will go into the deep uh nuclear secure underground bunker under the Pentagon, or there will be escape routes for uh the leading members of Congress and the cabinet and so forth.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: You make perfectly clear there's nothing even remotely, not even an iota like that reality.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: And to learn this from the individuals themselves, the people who would be in those bunkers, and understand that this is also fantasy.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: This is part of an idea that is just a pretense.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: That was shocking.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Let me tell you a little detail that is horrifying that comes from the FEMA director, the emergency management agency that would be in charge of a nuclear war aftermath should it happen.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: So FEMA people know because it's in charge of hurricanes and floods, and we see it in action.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I interviewed Craig Fugate, who was Obama's FEMA chief for all eight years.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I expected him to tell me this elaborate, you know, in great detail.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, we do this and we do that.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Oh, yes, Annie, we prepare for nuclear war, same as we prepare for asteroid strikes.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, wow, that's a big statement.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: And he said to me, We call these low probability, high consequence events.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: No kidding.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: You think, okay, wow.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, So, what would happen?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Expecting it, you know, with my pen out, my tape recorder going, expecting I'm gonna be on, you know, learning about this for hours.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Annie, if there was a nuclear war, there would be no population protection planning because everyone would be dead.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing in the scenario.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: You make clear FEMA has zero role except to describe what you just said.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing for anybody at all from the first moments of this.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: And imagine me as a journalist listening to this on the recorder.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we did this incredible interview, and I learned many other things like, oh, you know, don't forget your morals, you know, for the survivors, don't forget your morals.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and I'm listening to this and I think I'm really gonna go back to Craig Fugate and just triple check that, you know, he didn't have too much ice cream and was, you know, not I mean.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Is this really exactly precisely what you said and what you meant?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, absolutely, and he changed nothing.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: And after the book published, he was one of the first people to write an Amazon review and said, everyone should read this book.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, amazing.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: The missile approaches Washington, and you describe again uh it's fascinating, it's shocking, it's uh movie scene, which I I think it's going to be also trying to scramble the president out of the White House at the Pentagon.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Am I right?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of people survive because uh a couple are tasked to leave to uh a mountainside uh bunker uh outside of DC.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, there is no survival at all in Washington, period.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's a complete and total destruction of the government, but for well, it's the defense secretary and and the president initially, and uh that's just about it.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Ground zero is zeroed, and I write in appalling detail what happens to the people, how a nuclear weapon affects people and buildings and things.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: And you may again say, wow, Annie Jacobson has a great imagination, not my imagination.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: I was stunned to learn that all of these facts have been compiled in a book called The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's a 750-page tome.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: I have a copy right here on my desk.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's also called Department of the Army Pamphlet number 50-3.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if that doesn't alone freak you out.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: And you go through it and there are photographs and graphs, and there are measurements and distances and descriptions, because this is what the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission have been compiling in all their nuclear weapons tests that were done in the decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: So it started with collecting that data of what happened to the people there, and it built.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: And you realize all of these details are known because the United States government originally believed that nuclear war could be fought and won.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: And this should horrify everyone.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: The uh scenario just has one uh shock after another.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it's uh so completely riveting.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like you to describe first just the technical aside uh briefly, and then a couple of the things that naturally completely go haywire, no matter what anyone thinks might be possible of survivability.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: But two of the further shocks are this idea of a strike on a nuclear power plant.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: I hadn't realized the combination of those two, but the second missile that's fired, the first ends the government, and the second is fired towards uh El Diablo nuclear power plant in California.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Can you describe that?
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because my God, when did you realize that or hear about that scenario?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because that one was also mind-boggling.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, again, it's just the worst, worst, worst case scenario.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it has been written about for decades because many nuclear scientists were worried about this.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, there is, you know, the International Committee on the Red Cross Rule 42 that you do not strike a power plant with conventional weapons even.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: And what again, while I was reporting a book, there was a little bit of sort of worrisome curiosity, like, Annie, is this going too far?
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I insisted it wasn't because of the reporting that I was doing, because of what sources were telling me, how deeply afraid they are of that.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, when Russia attacked the Zaporizia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, but then Ukraine counterattacked uh with missile.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: You have situations that are extraordinarily dangerous.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, Russia took over the power plant, just to say, because I was also horrified by all of that, but Russia physically took over the plant as part of its invasion in 2022.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then Ukraine essentially sent drones and artillery against the power plant.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, the International Atomic Energy Agency was horrified.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was horrified, Andy, because no one would call out Ukraine for actually making this provocation.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because being in the U.S., we want to say it's Russia, this, it's part of the propaganda machine not to say anything about Ukraine.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: But I talked to senior officials, I can't name their names because it was said in confidence.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: I said, why don't you tell the truth?
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Russia's inside.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Ukraine is attacking from the outside.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you say Ukraine, maybe they'll stop attacking because it's a threat to the nuclear power plant.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, Yes.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let me just say, Jeff, you're not on the wrong track.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I was told.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: But no public statement, by the way.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because just to say, propaganda dominates everything, as you know better than anybody, because you've been reporting the deep truth all along.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: But we have these unbelievably risky things happening, and they can't even be discussed as they're happening in reality because we have narratives, we have secrecy, we have confidentiality.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it's precisely why in the book I demonstrated scientifically what happens.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so I quote people who have been studying what would happen if a nuclear power plant were hit.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I describe how that meltdown, I describe what would happen.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: And you it is just one horror show after the next.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: Again, demonstrating how quickly all of this unfolds.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so the takeaway on all of this, I think there's a saying that I often think about, which is that you can't fix what you can't face.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: And the point of the book is to show people the grim reality of what would happen in the event of a nuclear war.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because the truth of the that statement is you can fix what you are willing to face.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I would hope that readers would take away this horror and realize this is madness, this is insanity, we must reverse course.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things, another technical thing, if I could just come back to it, that I was completely unaware of and uh shocked by was this uh electromagnetic pulse attack.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: That that was also documented to you or explained to you.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: Can you just describe that?
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because uh people need to understand how many unbelievably dangerous things are around us right now.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: The thermonuclear weapon that hits Washington, D.C.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: is a one-megaton thermonuclear bomb.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I use that size weapon specifically because that is the size weapon that is used in the effects manual.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so I knew I could be precise and was not trying to recalibrate the numbers based on the Defense Department's results.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: They often use a 300-kiloton bomb as an example, and they use a one megaton.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: Those are two weapons that I use in the book.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: But a small weapon, a small weapon, the size perhaps even of Hiroshima, for example, if it were to be exploded precisely 300 miles altitude above Omaha, Nebraska, it would create an electromagnetic pulse that would essentially zero all of America's electricity.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: It is called electric Armageddon.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, readers should, and I encourage read the book to see the details precisely of what happens.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: But I wanted to mention something about reporting this part of the book because you bring it up and because I think it's very important.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it has to do with you say propaganda, I would say convenient narrative.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: And certain individuals who believe that they own the space, right?
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: So they become sort of the leading authority in X, Y, or Z on nuclear weapons, put a statement out there that perhaps is maybe even made, you know, not even thought through thoroughly, but they put a statement out there, and then they have what I consider to be a horse in the race.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: And they won't move off that position even when they are wrong.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: And there are a number of individuals who have, for example, not to be named, but will go on to NPR and make fun of other individuals in the government who are warning about the EMP threat.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I found this very peculiar.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: And what I usually do in situations like that, because this kind of arguments I find very mediocre when you consider what is at stake.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: My process is to then go to the smartest person in the room, usually the person who invented the technology.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: I've done that before with, you know, I go to the Nobel laureate who invented it for two reasons.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: One, because they know what they're talking about.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: And two, because they're not afraid to explain something to a layman.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: I often say to them, explain it to me like I'm a child, like you would a child.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's no shame in not knowing something.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we don't know not being Who could imagine?
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: Who knows about electromagnetic pulse weapons?
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so, except for a some pundit who has crowned himself the moral authority on it.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so, for example, in that, I went to Richard Garwin, who not only was the weapons engineer who designed the th the first thermonuclear weapon at the age of 24, it's the Ivy Mike bomb that is on the cover of the book.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: But Garwin also wrote the first classified, still classified paper for the government on the EMP weapon in the 1950s.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: Garwin has advised every president since Eisenhower.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: And Garwin told me precisely what would happen.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: I relate that for readers in the book.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: And interestingly, those pundits who have laughed at people who have spoken of this EMP weapon, have fortunately remained silent about this because, and I would hope that they would be able to stand corrected.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because that kind of misinformation is just not in service of any of us.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: One of the uh parts of the scenario is that this strike, devastating as it is by uh North Korea, this bolt out of the blue, and it leads to a U.S.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: retaliation that is not designed to end the world.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly it's designed to end uh North Korea in response, but it's misinterpreted by the Russian military because of its satellite readings.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and because, as you point out, another shocker of an endless stream of shockers, to attack North Korea means overflying Russian airspace with our missiles in retaliation.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that is what ends up triggering the unleashing of the Russian arsenal against the U.S., the U.S.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: arsenal against Russia, and the end of the world.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: You turn to a favorite of mine, one of our most experienced and brilliant scientists in the U.S., a true rocket scientist, Ted Postel at MIT, who describes uh the fact that we count on a level of precision uh to understand what is and isn't being attacked, to try to keep something under control that is unmerited.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, things can escalate absolutely out of hand, not because of an underlying real attack, but because of a misperception of what an attack is.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And Ted Postal, professor emeritus at MIT, was extremely helpful in helping me report the book.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: And he and Garwin have written numerous papers on the threat of a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack from North Korea, and numerous things that they advise could be done have not been done.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: But it was Ted Postal who pointed out this precarious reality having to do with the satellite system.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: So we spoke earlier how powerful America's satellite system is that can see the hot rocket exhaust on a missile and identify it in the first fraction of a second after launch.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: But what we haven't yet spoken about, and what you are bringing up now, is the flaws in the Russian systems, in the Russian technology.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, no one likes to admit that their technologies are flawed, so they pretend they're not.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I sourced this with Pavel Podvig, who is kind of the Western world's expert on Soviet technology, having, you know, studied in Moscow.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: And he confirmed with me that this is a fact, that the Soviet systems, their satellite systems that are looking at ICBMs, are flawed.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: They don't have what is called lookdown capacity, so they can sometimes mistake clouds or sunlight for exhaust.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: Coupled that with what you pointed out, the most frightening reality of all is that in the event of a counterattack, so if North Korea were to strike America with one nuclear weapon, I learned that our response would be approximately 82 weapons on North Korea.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: We would level North Korea, we would turn it into a fireplace so as to take out its nuclear command and control, its ability to launch any more nuclear weapons.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's the theory.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: But in doing so, were we to launch ICBMs from our missile silos in the Midwest, they do not have enough range to strike North Korea without flying over Russia.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: Which means you would have to assume that Russia would just accept oh, those missiles that are gonna come, those are going over you.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: They're not coming at you.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, even imagine if we were best friends with Russia, that would be a hard pill to swallow.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine at a time of end-minute.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, as as you point out in the scenario, you know, the tensions are so high that there's no trust.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so the communications immediately break down in effect when the president isn't there to make the call.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's all very realistic, knowing that even without war, these two governments are not talking to each other properly at all.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so in the middle, when you have minute to minute, and the only issue is survival or not survival, the idea that you're going to establish trust suddenly after years of uh animus, of proxy wars, of lies, of cheating.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't happen, of course, in this scenario.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: In the end, uh these missiles are misinterpreted.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: Russia thinks that it's under attack from the United States, rather plausibly, I would say, and there is no control.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that is why the result is the full-scale nuclear exchange, which is precisely how the systems were set up.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: One thing that you mentioned, again, I have to say to the readers, of course, you need to read the scenario.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's so riveting.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: Or do what I did, which is listen to Annie narrate the scenario because it's uh probably even more powerful that way.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: But you describe various war games that have been played, nuclear war games or nuclear escalation games, or conventional war games that have the potential for nuclear escalation.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the absolutely harrowing, but again, for me, quite believable points that you make is that all of these war games somehow seem to end up in relentless escalation.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: Could you tell us what you learned about that?
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: Many of these are not explained in public.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have our generals saying, my God, it's out of control.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: We have to turn to the diplomats.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: We don't hear that at all.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: But you learned a lot about what has been found in the simulations, and none of it is heartening, frankly.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, these are incredibly jealously guarded secrets, the nuclear war games, and yet they are played regularly.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: They are run regularly.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: And we have only one known example of a full two-week-long nuclear war game scenario whereby multiple scenarios were run.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's declassified.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: I print a page in the book, and you know, it demonstrates that no matter how nuclear war begins, whether NATO is involved, if NATO isn't involved, if China is involved, if China isn't involved, no matter how it begins, nuclear war ends only in one way, and that is full nuclear Armageddon.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: No one in the Defense Department will doubt that.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: No one has come forth and said, actually, I learned of a different scenario.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: It is just unimaginable that this is what all of our nuclear command and control knows and has known for decades.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the public essentially, we have been kind of running around like the ostrich with the head in the sand, the neck exposed, not really knowing the danger.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think they lie to us, frankly, or they don't tell us, they don't treat us like adults.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's my view of it, which is uh tell us these things.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they have our lives in their hands.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: And um I don't feel safe, and your book didn't make me feel any safer.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it ebbs and flows.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: We have to give a little bit of credit to the past movements to disarms, right?
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, as it was pointed out to me, in the 80s, people were protesting in Hyde Park.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: People were protesting in Central Park.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so this groundswell of momentum coupled with what I call the Reagan reversal, whereby Reagan decided to no longer see the Soviet Union as the arch enemy, but rather as the adversary.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that is interestingly because of an ABC television movie he watched called The Day After.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: He saw the film, he wrote in his White House journal that he became greatly depressed.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: Actual fact.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so there is hope because, you know, he was a nuclear hawk.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm so happy you're smiling because it makes me smile too to even think that that kind of perspective reversal is accurate.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it is.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: And he reached out to Gorbachev and said, we must reverse course.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: And the world went from the all-time high.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: In 1986, there were 70,000 nuclear weapons.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: Today, there are approximately 12,000.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: That is the direction in which we must travel.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, it's an amazing fact, and of course, I remember Helsinki, and we should recall that when Reagan and Gorbachev met in Helsinki in 1986, I believe uh it is, not only did they strike up a personal rapport, and I loved Gorbachev personally, and uh found him one of the greatest statesmen of our age, maybe the greatest, because he was a peacemaker, and Reagan uh had the same feeling.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: They almost reached an agreement, okay, we've got to get to zero.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we have to eliminate nuclear arms.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Then it seems the AIDS ran and said, no, no, no, no, no, no, we have to get these leaders apart.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they're gonna do something reckless if if uh if they agree with each other, uh, because serious people know we need the nuclear weapons.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they rather pulled them apart from what was uh potentially truly the decisive turn to denuclearization, which we should recall is actually a commitment of the nuclear powers under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it recalls another period in time which I've studied, and I I wrote a book about it now uh 11 years ago, after the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, President Kennedy and Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev felt we must pull back from the brink.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: This was the most harrowing, awful, close call of humanity imaginable.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: And they signed the partial nuclear test ban treaty in the summer of 1963 because they reached out to each other on a personal level.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it does say something about the power of the human connection.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: If our leaders would talk with each other, if they would discuss with each other, if they would realize in that way our common vulnerability, this craziness of war games that escalate to the end of the world might start to penetrate more deeply into our actual policy making.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I couldn't agree with you more that the fixing comes from the people.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: The fixing comes from the ability to reach out across the aisle and have a conversation.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to love them.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean, that in a like, you know, you don't have to even admire them, but you have to move, as Reagan did, from seeing someone as the enemy.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the enemy is a militaristic term.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: The enemy is who you kill.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: And and Annie, you know, in uh 1963, in my favorite speech of the modern presidency, which was Kennedy's speech on June 10, 1963, calling for the partial nuclear test ban treaty, he not only did not call the Soviet Union the enemy, he said, we have to admire the valor and the culture of the Soviet people and all that they have done in science and in the arts and in defending us and being an ally with us in World War II.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that respect at the height of the Cold War was one of the personal motivations for Khrushchev.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, to he called the US envoy in Moscow, Avril Harriman, and said, that was the finest speech by an American president since Franklin Roosevelt.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: I want to make peace with your president.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: And a few weeks later, the partial nuclear test ban treaty.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the Reagan and Gorbachev and a brilliant.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, just to put a parentheses uh around this topic, you know, one of the things that was also not understood or revealed to the public for decades afterwards, not even properly understood, was that in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, after Kennedy and Khrushchev had arrived at the deal of uh mutually removing weapon systems, missile systems pointed at each other's land in proximity in Cuba and in Turkey respectively, after reaching that agreement, a disabled Soviet submarine, thinking that there was a war going on uh over its head, nearly launched a nuclear-tipped torpedo, which, in my understanding, under U.S.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: military doctrine at the time, would have unleashed the full force of the U.S.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: nuclear arsenal, maybe a world ender at that moment.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it was one person, a man named Vasily Arkipov, a person unknown uh to almost everybody in the world who saved the world by countermanding the Soviet submarine captain, and said, No, you're not launching that weapon.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we are going to rise to the surface and find out what's going on.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: We're not going to inadvertently start World War III.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that order prevented the firing of the nuclear-tiffed torpedo.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I wanted to ask you: in your research, you must have heard about close calls or mistakes or misjudgments or the potential for them, even aside from a bolt out of the blue, just an apparent bolt out of the blue on the radar screen.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder if you could say uh a bit about that also, because uh that one terrifies me knowing how there's always a Murphy's Law in this, but Murphy's Law to end the world, we shouldn't have.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: And there are like four or five or eight examples on the record of such near misses.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: So you can imagine how many have happened that we don't know about.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: But I did learn one.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: I try or strive to get the firsthand witness, someone who was actually there, who was telling me the story from their own point of view.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: And for that, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry told me a near miss he was involved in.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: He was on the night watch with Jimmy Carter.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it was would be up to him to tell the president if he had to launch a nuclear war.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the call came from the Pentagon, from the bunker beneath the Pentagon, and said there is a nuclear attack coming at Washington, and it wasn't just ICBMs, it was also submarine launched ballistic missiles.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: They said, You must wake up the president and he must give us a counter-strike.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: And as Bill Perry sat there thinking to himself, formulating his words, and by the way, he told me this story, you know, just a few years ago.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: So he was reflecting decades earlier, and I could hear the intensity in his voice all those decades later.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: And what Perry said happened is just as he was about to wake up the president, the second call came.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: And they said, It's a mistake.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, it was registering not only in the bunker beneath the Pentagon, but in the bunker beneath Stratcom in Nebraska.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because those two computer systems are connected.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: And as it turned out, someone had inserted a training tape, a nuclear war training tape, into the machine.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it was playing.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: And what Perry said to me was it looked real because it was designed to look.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, where do we go from here?
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you go from here with this, Annie?
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's it's so powerful, it's so terrifying.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: We have one war in the Middle East with at least one of the countries, uh, Israel nuclear armed.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: We don't uh even know possibly uh Iran has or could soon have nuclear weapons if it's attacked.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: We have uh war in Ukraine, where the U.S.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: talks about defeating Russia.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: Russia has 6,000 nuclear warheads, uh, has revised its nuclear doctrine saying that this is our fundamental security, and we reserve the right to use these weapons if our national uh security, our fundamental security of our homeland is uh at threat.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_00: And yet there's open talk of uh striking deep into Russia, many, many things that seem so provocative it's hard to imagine.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: And and we seem to live with this a couple of days ago before our conversation just now, as as we taped this conversation, a lead story in the New York Times talked about preparation for the next global war.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I wrote to a New York Times reporter saying, uh, thanks for writing the story because uh I won't be able to read it afterwards.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the world will end.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there will be no paper the next day.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the reporter said, Yes, my editors took out some of the caveats, and Pentagon doesn't really want this war, but my editor uh removed that sentence and so forth.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: Unbelievable the drumbeats of war with nuclear adversaries all over the place.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, my final thought on that is this.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I end after I take the reader through Nuclear Winter from the scientists who wrote the nuclear winter theory, updated for the modern.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_00: And just to say the nuclear winter theory, maybe you could just summarize it for 30 seconds for people not familiar with it.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, after this full-scale nuclear exchange, you have fires burning, burning and burning and burning.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: Each nuclear weapon will ultimately create a firestorm that is between one and three hundred square miles.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: There will be no one to put out the fires.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so all of the United States will burn the cities, the bogs, the forests, and all across the world.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: And what happens is some 330 billion pounds of soot will be lofted into the troposphere, and it will block out the sun's rays.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: And without the sun's warming rays, our uh agriculture will fail.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I take the reader through this bit by bit.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_01: We also get into the radiation, the lack of the ozone, the path, the bugs, there will be disease.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: Whoever is left, it will be just like Nikita Kruz Jeff said the survivors will envy the dead.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: But at the end of all of that, to your point about these drumbeats of war, I end with a thought I'm echoing from Carl Sagan himself, who brought this up decades ago when the nuclear war theory was originally written.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: And he asked people to think about, and I asked people to think about that perhaps the enemy, and not perhaps, almost certainly, the enemy is not necessarily China or Russia or Iran or North Korea or us.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: The enemy are the nuclear weapons themselves.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that could be said about all weapon systems and all war as a fundamental.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: We have a real expression of that, a new treaty, a treaty uh to prevent nuclear weapons, a treaty basically to end nuclear weapons, that countries all over the world have signed on to a new UN treaty, the uh initiative won, the Nobel Peace Prize, but so far no nuclear power has signed.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so the world is saying to these nuclear powers, our lives are in your hands, you have to stop.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: The people want to survive.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: They want their children to survive, they want their grandchildren to survive.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_00: And we have to reach those that are holding the weapons, the scientists that you interviewed, the generals that you interviewed that write these manuals to say this madness is so dangerous, so many accidents, so many misunderstandings could trigger the end of the world right now, not to mention the hot wars that we're in.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: We need a different course.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: We absolutely need a course.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and your book will play a huge role in that.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to encourage everybody to read it.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: Nuclear war a scenario.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: But I also want to say your whole body of work is uh interconnected, eye-opening and mesmerizing.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: One anecdote to close, if I might, Operation Paperclip, your 2014 book about the end of World War II and the scramble by the United States to take Nazi scientists, many of them who were engaged in shocking war crimes, into the U.S.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_00: to develop uh weapons against the Soviet Union.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: One anecdote blew my mind, Annie, and that is when the missile designer Werner von Braun, who became the chief scientist of our space program, in fact, I think uh soon after coming to the United States, after having created the bombs that bombed Britain using slave labor, terrible, terrible crimes, brought to the U.S., one of the first things he does, in as you describe it, and I had no idea, he sends a letter to, I don't know exactly who the recipient was, hey, why don't we put a nuclear weapon on the top of these rockets?
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he invents the concept of the intercontinental ballistic missile.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: A Nazi war scientist within months or a year or two of the end of World War II is concocting the weapon system that can end the world, and America is uh eager for the uptake.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: That was amazing.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: How did you find that, by the way?
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for noticing the militaristic threat, because of course, I think these are core to people's personalities.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that you are always going to have the Werner von Browns of the world disguised as scientists.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: They're just militarists.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then that must be balanced out by the people who want to see the end of nuclear weapons, who believe that a different way of life is possible.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that if I can add to that through the narratives I write, I'm happy that I'm doing my job.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_00: Annie, you are doing your job, doing it magnificently.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: We have been speaking with Annie Jacobson, author of Nuclear War, a scenario, an absolute must-read for our time, the most important book for our time.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: It is uh terrifying, it's riveting, it is precise, it uh conveys an essential message.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: We need a different course to get rid of these weapons.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_00: They indeed are the enemy.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: They are the greatest threat to our survival today.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: Annie, thank you so much for joining Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm most grateful, I'm sure all the listeners are most grateful for your work and for the conversation today.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for having me.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.