Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #097_ STORY INSPIRE: A Nuclear Bomb Hits — Minute by Minute, What Happens and How to Survive

Transcript

#097_ STORY INSPIRE: A Nuclear Bomb Hits — Minute by Minute, What Happens and How to Survive · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: No matter how nuclear war begins, it ends in 72
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: minutes and 5 billion people would be dead.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: Do you think there will be a nuclear war?
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: So I've interviewed former secretaries of defense, the former nuclear sub-commander,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: the Secret Service, and what I learned was, oh my God.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Annie Jacobson, investigative researcher and writer who specializes in uncovering
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: the world's biggest secrets.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: We are one misunderstanding away from nuclear apocalypse. And yet
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: you have presidents threatening nuclear war. In fact, the president
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: of the United States doesn't need to ask anyone to
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: launch a nuclear missile.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: It makes me realize how important the decision to pick
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: our leaders is.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Nothing could be more important.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: Could you play out a scenario where nuclear war broke out?
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Yes. And I can describe in painstaking horrific detail precisely
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: what happens. So... But after nuclear war, the survivors would
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: be forced to live underground and envy the dead.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Annie, is there anyone you interviewed that brought you to tears? Yes.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: I met a woman who is a survivor of the
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Nagasaki bomb. And I haven't written about this yet. But
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: someone I interviewed and someone that meant a lot to
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: me wired that nuclear weapon that was dropped on Nagasaki.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: Can you speak about the impact that it had on
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: both those individuals?
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: And it's horrifying.
• 1:30
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• 1:54
  Speaker 2: and enjoy this episode.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: Annie, you wrote this book about nuclear war and published
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: it in March 2024. The timing of this book seems
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: to be a little bit coincidental when I, or not,
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: when I look at what's going on in the world
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: at the moment. Why did you write a book about
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: nuclear war? And why did you write it now?
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: As an investigative journalist before nuclear war, a scenario. I
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: had written six previous books, all of which are about
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: the military and intelligence organizations in the United States, DARPA,
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: Area 51, always the Pentagon, the CIA. That's my beat.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: And think about how many sources I have in each book,
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: a hundred or more. How many, covering all the wars,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: by the way, since World War II. All these intelligence
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: and military programs. intensely kinetic. And think of how many
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: people said to me with a kind of pride, I
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: dedicated my life to preventing nuclear World War III. That's
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: always the idea in the Defense Department and in the CIA.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: We are there to prevent nuclear war. And so during
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: the previous administration, former President Trump, there was this presidential
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: rhetoric going on. you may recall, fire and fury. Trump
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: and the president of North Korea, the leader of North Korea,
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: threatening this kind of thing. And I, like many, I'm sure,
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: began to wonder, my God, what if deterrence, another word
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: for prevention, fails? And that is the question that I
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: put to all of those sources in the book. And
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: that result is nuclear war, a scenario.
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: What was your intention?
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: I wanted to show in horrific detail just how horrible,
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: just how apocalyptic nuclear war will be. Because I think
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: many people have forgotten or don't know to begin with
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: the consequences of a nuclear exchange. As I show in
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: the book, almost certainly, if a nuclear exchange happens, and
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: we're talking strategic ballistic missiles, it will not stop until
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: the world ends. And we're talking about in seconds and minutes,
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: not in days and weeks and months. That is astonishing.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: When did you start writing the book? When was the
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: first word written?
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: So probably during COVID was the first word written. But
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: keep in mind, my reporting on nuclear weapons goes back
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: my entire career. My first book, Area 51, is about
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: a joint CIA Air Force base out there in the
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: Nevada desert inside a secret test and training range where
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: the United States government used to explode nuclear weapons, atmospheric
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: nuclear weapons, in the 50s. And so when I was
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: reporting Area 51— I wound up, quite literally, I did
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: not intend to, but I wound up interviewing the people
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: who armed, wired, and fired those nuclear weapons, early Manhattan
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: Project members. And that was kind of my B story
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: of Area 51. And what I learned was like, oh
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: my God. And I was also surprised to learn that
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: most people didn't even know we, the American government, set
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: off a hundred some odd atmospheric nuclear weapons in the
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: desert in Nevada, testing them. So my reporting to answer,
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: that's a long-winded answer of, I've been on this issue peripherally,
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: you know, for years, for more than a decade. But
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: the idea in this book, the word one, as you ask,
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: was like, once I understood that nuclear war is a sequence,
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: it begins the first fraction of a second after detection.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: then I could see clearly, oh my God, it's a
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: ticking clock scenario because it just all happened so fast.
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: I ask that again because, so if you started writing
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: the first word of the book on nuclear war in
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: COVID sort of 2020, 2020, roughly, 2021?
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: Around there, 2021, yeah.
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: Since then, things have escalated around the world in terms
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: of conflict in a way that I imagine you couldn't
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: have forecasted. And even, it's almost ironic that In the
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: month that your book was published, Putin moved, I think
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: he moved nuclear weapons into Belarus. And the rhetoric, and
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: he started saying that he would use them. And if
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: you look at the terminology him and his commanders are
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: using towards the world, it seems like we're at a
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: moment that I haven't seen in my lifetime where the
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: subject of nuclear war seems to be more real than
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: ever before.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: You're absolutely right. And that is astonishing because in 2021,
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: when I began the interviews, People were forthcoming with me,
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: you know, as you know from the list of sources
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: I've interviewed, former secretaries of defense, former nuclear sub commander,
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: you know, former STRATCOM commander, former FEMA director, former cyber chief.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: And a lot of these individuals shared with me in
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: 2021 this idea that, wow, the world has kind of
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: forgotten that the nuclear threat is always there. And so
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: over the course of reporting and writing, you're absolutely right
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: that the geopolitical temperature of the world has escalated to
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: a point that you have not seen in your lifetime
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: and I haven't seen in my lifetime.
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: Setting the stage even more, we talked about how possible
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: nuclear war is. But one thing I learned from reading
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: your book, which actually surprised me, was that it doesn't
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: take thousands of people to agree on a nuclear war
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: for it to begin. In the case of the United States,
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: it only takes one person to make that decision, which
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: I find quite unnerving that there's one individual that could
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: theoretically make the decision that would destroy the earth.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: You're absolutely right. And this kind of thing is surprising
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: to almost everyone. One of the things that I strive
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: to do in my reporting is take very complex science
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: and technology military issues and simplify them down for the layman,
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: just for the average Joe or the average Jane. And
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: I do that by interviewing the really smart, really knowledgeable
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: people on those subjects. I have two things going for me,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: perhaps as an investigative journalist that help in conveying the
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: story is that I'm not a scientist. And so I
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: can ask questions that the average person would ask, like
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: really try and help me understand this, whatever this is.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: And then also that I have a real interest in
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: making what is conveyed to me make sense to other
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: people in their lives, right? And also perhaps make them
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: realize I never even stopped to think about the fact,
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: how strange is it that the United States president This
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: is what you learn in the book and you're talking about.
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: The United States president has sole presidential authority to launch
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: a nuclear war.
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: What does that mean?
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: It's exactly like it sounds. What's so interesting is a
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: lot of this stuff, this nomenclature that gets thrown at you,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: if you just break it down... it's sole, solo, presidential,
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: he's the POTUS, authority. He doesn't have to ask anyone
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: for permission. Not the SECDAF, not the chairman of the
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the Congress. I love the
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: worried look on your face in this moment because it is,
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: once you know that, you say, well, first you might Google,
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: is it really true? And you will get, for example,
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: on Reddit, like, that's not really true. You'll get like
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of people, you know, coming in with
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: their opinions about how that's not really true. Well, it
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: is really true. It's absolutely true. And in fact, during
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: the former President Trump administration, Congress became so sort of
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: I want to say motivated or alarmed by this issue,
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: meaning they were being asked questions by the powers that be.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: Is this actually true that they released a report stating specifically,
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: and I quote in the book, yes, it is true.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: As commander in chief, the president has this sole authority.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: He doesn't need to ask anyone. And hopefully, sort of
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: my bringing sort of concepts like that to the fore
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: right away, the reader can then become engaged and they say, well,
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: that's weird.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: And then I can give you a very simple answer
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: without necessarily taking you through the whole history of presidential authority,
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: but it has to do with the ticking clock of it.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: And I explained to you right away that a ballistic
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: missile travels from one continent. It's called an ICBM. People
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: have heard of that. Intercontinental ballistic missile again exactly like
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: it sounds it can travel from one continent to the
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: next in roughly 30 minutes carrying a nuclear warhead to
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: strike a target once you realize wait a minute there
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: are only 30 minutes this isn't like hey guys should
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: we go have a war in iraq let's discuss this
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: let's debate this let's take it to the congress this
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: is there is a ballistic missile sir coming at the
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: United States, and you must act. And that's why, in
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: the simplest layman's terms, sole presidential authority exists.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: So let's define then what these weapons are. Many of
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: us have seen that film Oppenheimer. We saw them out
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: in the desert, I think in New Mexico, playing with
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: all these weapons and eventually making this one bomb that
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: they would then drop in Japan. The weapon we see
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: in that film, which was made in the 1940s that
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: ultimately led to the end of the war, is that
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: the same weapon that we're talking about today? No.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: Well, in sort of principle, yes, meaning it's an atomic bomb.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: But there's two things that separate where we are now.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: One has to do with the size and the power
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: of the bomb. So in 1945, there were atomic bombs.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Now there are thermonuclear bombs. So an atomic bomb is
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: used inside a thermonuclear weapon as the trigger. Okay. It
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: is a bomb inside a bomb. And the power of
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: the thermonuclear bomb is so astonishingly, you know, destructive. You
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: can read the details. I interviewed Richard Garwin, who designed
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: the first thermonuclear bomb for Edward Teller when he was
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: 24 years old. I interviewed him. He's in his 90s.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: He explains to me, and I explain to you, what
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: the power is behind that. So the atomic bomb, and
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: it has to do with size. Like the old atomic bomb,
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: the one that was dropped on Hiroshima, was the size
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: of a small elephant. Okay, 15 kilotons in a big,
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: giant elephant-sized bomb inside of an aircraft having to fly
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: from Tinian Island to over Hiroshima where it drops in
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: an aircraft. That all changed when... We brought the Nazi
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: scientists to us. Oh, let's have, let's figure out how
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: to do two things. Let's figure out how to create
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: more powerful bombs. That's the result. The result is the
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: thermonuclear bomb. And let's make them smaller. We can't load
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: an elephant-sized weapon into the top of a ballistic missile.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: It needs to be smaller. And so so much of
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: this buildup was about creating more powerful weapons to be
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: smaller in size. And then you see the military-industrial complex.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: You can imagine, and I do this as a history
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: lesson in just a few short pages to try to
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: bring readers up to speed without losing the drama of
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: the narrative. And the results, if you flash forward to
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: where we are now, which is where we've been for
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: a very long time, is a nuclear triad, just like
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: it sounds, three parts. We have ICBMs, silos under the ground.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: So those are weapons hidden in the ground?
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: In the United States, there are 400 of them. There
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: were more. Now there are 400. You can find out
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: where they are on a map. They're in silos, underground
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: silos across the Midwest and the West. Then we have
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: our nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered submarines that carry that same kind of
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: concept of a ballistic missile with a warhead in its
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: nose cone. We have those same systems on submarines. And
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: the technology behind it is astonishing. I take the reader
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: through it fast from the experts who explain it to
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: me in a digestible way. And those systems lurk around
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: in the oceans 24 hours a day, seven days a week,
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: 365 days a year. They're called the handmaidens of the apocalypse.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: They're almost impossible to find, right?
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: They are impossible to find. The former nuclear force sub-commander,
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Admiral Conner, had this great way of describing it to me.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: And I said, like, how hard is it to find
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: a sub? He said, Annie, it's easier to find a
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: grapefruit-sized object in space than a nuclear sub under the sea.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: And it's not just the United States that have these weapons,
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: which I think is important to say. There's many people
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: listening all around the world now who have these weapons
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: in their country too. You list several of those countries.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: I think it's nine countries in total that has nuclear weapons, right?
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: One of those countries. I know we have them back
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: in the UK.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there are nine nuclear-armed nations. Also really interesting to
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: think about that the whole sort of Let's have a triad.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: Let's have all these weapons that we will have a
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: concept of mutual assured destruction. So we will have these weapons,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: but we will never use them because everyone would be destroyed.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: Those concepts go back to the 50s when there were
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: only two nuclear armed nations, the United States and Soviet Russia. So,
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: you know, really making all of this more precarious, looping
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: back to your, you know, notion that like, my God,
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: we are at this precipice. of danger, which we are,
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: is because there are nine nuclear-armed nations, many of which
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: are in direct conflict with others or their neighbors. And
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: they are the US, Russia, China, the UK, France, India
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: and Pakistan, Israel, North Korea.
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: And there's some threat that Iran.
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: Trying to?
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. I mean, this is a very, very, very significant threat.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: And you really have to look, I think the book,
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: I stay away from the sort of geopolitical posturing or
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: analysis or even, you know, opinion about the political aspect
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: of all of this. But I think readers get to
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: take their away there and have, because I have read
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: a lot of the responses and had a lot of
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: really interesting conversation since the book published a month ago.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: But yes, you can take away what you think about
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: the fact what, my God, you put a 10th nuclear
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: armed nation in here. That is Iran. How more destabilizing
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: is that going to be to safety and security?
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: And when I look at the list of countries you've
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: written about that have these nuclear weapons, The US, Russia,
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: they're both basically in proxy wars at the moment with
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: obviously the war going on in Ukraine. Think about Pakistan
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: and India. Israel and Iran, they're both at conflict, throwing
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: different missiles at each other and drones at each other
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: at the moment. The UK and France are obviously part
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: of NATO, so they're kind of sucked into the whole
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: Russia-Ukraine-US conflict that's going on, that proxy war there. These countries...
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: Right now, many of them, I think the majority of them,
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: are involved in a direct war or some form of
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: proxy war as it is. And with many of these wars,
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: it's hard to find the way that it ends, the
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: way out, the kind of golden bridge, because Ukraine aren't
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: going to relent. So Russia aren't going to necessarily decide
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: one day that they're going to lose the war. That
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: would cause significant ramifications for Putin, his reputation, and Russia
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: as a whole. The US can't let Ukraine lose for
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: a variety of geopolitical reasons. And then at the same time,
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: all of this conflict started in Israel following the attack
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: in Israel, which has sucked Iran in in much of
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: that region. It all seems like these are the countries
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: right now that are involved in the conflict that is
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: scaring many of us in a significant way. And if
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: all these countries operate in a similar way, where there's
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: one individual that can make the decision to release those weapons,
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: it is quite scary.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: The UN Secretary General said recently that we are one misunderstanding,
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon. And so the scary
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: part of it is that when you look at that
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: sort of verbiage, right, when I talk about, you know,
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: nuclear Armageddon, nuclear apocalypse, nuclear holocaust, those are words out
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: of the mouths of some of these leaders. So there
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: is a very clear notion that if nuclear war starts,
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: it ends civilization. That is true. almost certainly known among
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: the leaders. And yet you have people like the president
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: of Russia and the president of the United States and
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: the leader of North Korea throwing around threats and terms.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: You know, the leader of North Korea recently accused the
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: United States of having a sinister intention of provoking nuclear war.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: I mean, that is a provocation on top of a provocation,
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: you know, embedded in. But to your point, what's the
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: point of being scared? Well, the point is to realize
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: that passivity is not necessarily the answer. That your knowledge
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: of this situation leads to change. That's just the history
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: of civilization.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: One of the things that did make me think when
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: I realized that there's one individual person in the United
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: States where we are now, who can make that decision?
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: And that there's basically like someone following the president with
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: a briefcase called, it's like the football or something? What
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: is that football for people that don't know? Yeah.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: And so now that people know about the football or
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: they read it, you'll see, you can see in photographs
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: of the president, you will almost, if he's in frame,
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: you'll see the mill aide. That's the military aide, an
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: individual who is assigned to be with the president 24-7, 365.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: And inside the football, it's called the emergency satchel, are
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: two important things. There's instrumentation that allows the president to
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: be identified as the president to the National Military Command Center,
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: which is the nuclear bunker beneath the Pentagon. Okay? So
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: it's a call and response authentication. And then there is
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: something called colloquially, the Black Book. And it was told
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: to me the reason it's called the Black Book is
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: because it involves so much death. And what the Black
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: Book is, is a list of nuclear strike options for
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: the president to choose from. And so once the president
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: is notified that a ballistic missile is coming at the
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: United States, and he has to make a decision about
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: a counterattack, He must look quickly because, as you learn
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: in the book and as I learn from presidents, there
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: is a six-minute window of decision-making. And so there's no
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: time for a roundtable discussion. There is a list of
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: options that has been pre-prepared for the president to choose from.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: And I interviewed for the book someone who actually was
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: responsible for some of those decisions in the 80s. And
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: he described to me in appalling detail what it was
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: like to have worked on this in the Pentagon, like
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: worked out numerically different targets and why they would be
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: targets in said strike X, Y, Z, or Q against
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: said nation. And then later seeing the black book and
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: realizing the like sort of transmutation of that information to
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: what was described by the only mill aide who's ever
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: gone on the record speaking about this as essentially like
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: a Denny's menu list of options. And so you understand
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: that this list is so watered down into strike options
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: and there is so little time that the president in
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: essence has really no idea what he's striking and how
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: many millions of people will be killed.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: When I hear that, it makes me realize how important
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: the decision to pick our leaders is, something I didn't
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: realize before.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: Nothing could be more important. And yet I learned in
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: the book, and I'm talking about from former secretaries of defense,
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: people very close to the president, that most presidents are
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: ill-informed about their role as commander-in-chief in a nuclear war.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: And it was said to me, most don't want to know.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: And again, so this brings us back to that paradox
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: of deterrence. The original question I asked in writing and
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: reporting this book, what if deterrence fails? Deterrence is this idea,
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: we will have so many nuclear weapons pointed at the
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: other side. They will have so many nuclear weapons pointed
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: at us. No one would be insane enough to let
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: any of them loose. That's how we all stay safe.
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: Another way of saying deterrence is more nuclear weapons make
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: us more safe. You can decide if you think that's
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: a little Orwellian, but that is what exists. Okay.
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: So with that in mind, we should really be doing
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: mental checks on our leaders every three months because we've
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: all probably had an experience with someone who's had a episode,
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: you know, and I'll leave it at episode because there's
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: a variety of different types of episodes one can have.
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: And I was thinking, well, if the president just has
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: a bit of an episode and gets a little bit
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: paranoid or, you know, sort of has a little bit
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: of a schizophrenic paranoia, which can happen to people for
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: a variety of different unpredictable reasons, then that president could
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: potentially make a decision to end the planet. And there
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: doesn't seem to be a defense mechanism to stop him
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: doing that or her doing that.
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: You're reminding me of a famous story when Nixon was
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: president and it was during the Watergate scandal. he probably
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: knew the end of his presidency was near. And he
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: was very drunk one night, and he began to threaten,
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: or rather he just began to talk, you know, in
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: a sort of extremely verbose, drunken manner about how he
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: could end the world or kill tens of millions of
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: people with the push of a button. And it is
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: said that Kissinger called up the military and said, if
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: the president orders any kind of a nuclear strike, talk
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: to me first.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: Really? And so do you think that would have happened?
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: I mean, we, you know.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: It's hard to know, isn't it?
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: All of these stories, unless they come out of the
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: mouth of the individual who actually said that, are in
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: essence stories. So there's an element of truth to them
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: for sure. You know, the actual command and control who's
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: going to follow the rules, people ask me that question often.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: And I took that exact question like, you know, I
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: think people have a naivete that if you're in the
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: nuclear command and control, whether you're a missileer in an
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: underground silo or a submariner on a sub, that you might,
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: when you get this command, suddenly have this heart, you know,
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: like in a Hollywood movie, have this moment where you say,
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: my goodness, I'm going to save the planet rather than
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: destroy it. I put that question to Dr. Glenn McDuff,
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: the historian at the Classified museum at Los Alamos, the
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: one you and I can't go see. And I said,
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: do you think that could happen? And he said, Annie,
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: you have a better chance at winning Powerball than betting
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: on someone in the nuclear chain of command and control
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: to defy orders. And I said, why? And he said, well,
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: you are trained to follow orders.
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: I spoke to a CIA agent, or should I say
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: a former CIA agent called Andrew Bustamante. Might have seen him,
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: he does some podcasts. And after speaking to him, I
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: completely agree because as he said, he was trained to,
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: basically he was selected and trained on the basis that
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: he would follow orders in that moment. And they even
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: do drills to make sure, dummy drills to make sure
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: that they're prepared, I guess, psychologically to follow through on
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: those instructions. It made me think as well that if,
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: what if the president's dead? What if the president is
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: hit by a nuclear weapon from another country? And now
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: they can no longer make the decision. Is the decision
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: deferred on to somebody else?
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: Well, I take the reader through that precisely because those
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: are the kind of questions that I had to ask
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: of my sources as I was reporting this. On the
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: one hand, as I was learning what happens in the
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: seconds and minutes, you know, after a launch is detected,
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: because we have a satellite system that detects the launch
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: of a nuclear weapon in under a fraction of a second.
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: But it's not always very trustworthy. This is why I'm concerned.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: Ours is very trustworthy, as far as I understand. It's
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: called Sibbers. It's built by Lockheed, and it's astonishingly powerful.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: Other nations do not have that same kind of technology.
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: Because I was reading about the sort of historic mistakes
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: that were made. Sometimes people thought there was a nuclear
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: bomb or a strike coming, and it was actually just
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: a bunch of swans.
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: I was a little bit like, you know.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: These are, you know, this is the one miscalculation, one
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: misunderstanding away from nuclear Armageddon.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: What are those instances from history where the nuclear detection
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: system was triggered and someone in some country decided not
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: to follow through on a notification?
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: I think the most interesting stories that I report come
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: from the person who is an actual firsthand witness to it.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: Because what often happens is the telephone game, you know,
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: whereby one person tells the story and then you're imagining,
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: you add a detail. So I write about a couple
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: of them in the book, but one of them came
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: to me firsthand. And I'll share that with you, which
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: was former secretary of defense, Bill Perry. And he was
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: on the night watch during the Carter administration. He wasn't
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: the secretary of defense yet. He had like the job
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: before that, the director of research. and engineering at the Pentagon.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: But it was his night watch informed the president's job.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: And he was told by the National Military Command Center,
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: which is the bunker beneath the Pentagon, that there were
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: ballistic missiles on the way from Soviet Russia. This was
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: confirmed by the nuclear bunker beneath Offutt Air Force Base
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: in Nebraska, the Stratcom bunker. And not only were they intercontinental,
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: ballistic missiles flying at the United States, but they were
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: sub-launched ballistic missiles coming at the United States. And it
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: was a massive motherlode of warheads. And Perry described to me,
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: as I recount in the book, what that was like
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: to try and process in your mind, oh my God,
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: I'm going to have to tell the president and he
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: is going to have to make a counterattack. And within
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: a matter of minutes, he got word that it was
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: a mistake. And a mistake, you might ask, like, a mistake?
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: How does a mistake happen? What he told me was
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: that it was a VHS tape, a simulated war game,
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: a simulated attack by the Soviet Union against the United States.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: And the VHS tape had... mistakenly been inserted into a
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: machine in the nuclear bunker beneath the Pentagon. And because
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: it is linked to Stratcom, it was seen in both places.
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: And Perry said to me, it looked real because it
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: was meant to look real.
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: There was a president you talk about that played a
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: nuclear war game and discovered that there could be no winners.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: So The Proud Prophet war game is one of the few,
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: a very rare declassified nuclear war game. People talk about,
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: you know, jealously guarded secrets in the United States government.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: You can be sure that anything having to do with
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: nuclear war gaming is way up there in the top
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: secrets along with what is actually in that black book.
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: But the Proud Prophet war game was declassified. Reagan had
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: ordered it. I don't believe he participated in it. Everybody
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: in the nuclear command and control participated in it for
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: two weeks in 1983. And this is declassified. I reprint
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: some of it in the book. And if you have
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: a look at it, you might say to yourself, well,
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: what's the point of declassifying something that looks like this?
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: It's just black. It's like there's a number here and
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: a word there and a page number. But mostly it's
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: entirely redacted. And so what's the point of declassifying it? Well,
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: for the public, something very valuable came out of that,
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: which is it allowed a certain civilian who was participating,
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: a Yale professor named Paul Bracken, to actually speak about
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: it in a general way. He couldn't, you know, couldn't
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: tell OPSEC, but he could generally talk about it. And
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: what he said in his own book was that no
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: matter how nuclear war begins— NATO's involved, NATO's not involved.
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: China's involved. No matter how it begins, it ends in
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: nuclear Armageddon. And Bracken's words was that everyone left really depressed.
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: Nuclear Armageddon essentially means the world is destroyed.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: Nuclear Armageddon is the world is destroyed. And when you
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: get to the end of the book, which happens in
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: 72 minutes, and that comes from something that former STRATCOM
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: director General Keillor said to me, when we were discussing
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: and interviewing, and I asked him about what could happen
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: if there was a nuclear exchange between Russia and the
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: United States. And he said the world could end in
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: the next couple of hours.
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: So from where we are now in this conversation to
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: the end of this conversation, if a nuclear war broke
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: out and we were sat here, by the end of
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: this conversation, basically the entire world would be destroyed.
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: And you and I wouldn't even know before the first
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: missile hit. That was shocking to me. to have that
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: confirmed in essence by Obama's FEMA director. So FEMA, the
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: Federal Emergency Management Agency, is the agency in the United
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: States that's in charge of disasters, right? So if there's
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: a hurricane or a flood or an earthquake, FEMA steps
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: in to help the people. They have something called population
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: protection planning. Craig Fugate was Obama's FEMA director for eight years,
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: and he just covered an extraordinary amount of catastrophes in
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: the United States, he was also responsible for planning for
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: a nuclear war. He told me that they did that.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: He also said, we plan for asteroid strikes. These are
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: called low probability, high consequence events. But what Fugate told
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: me that was shocking is that there is no population
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: protection planning in a nuclear war because everyone will be dead.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: And he explained to me that there's nothing that he
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: could do as president FEMA director, he would really be
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: putting his efforts from this nuclear bunker where he would be,
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: which is called Mount Weather. He would be putting his
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: efforts on the continuity of government issues, the continuity of
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: like the government has what are called essential functions. So,
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: you know, as a nuclear war is happening, the government
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: is trying to prepare to keep the government running, which
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: is a form of fantasy in itself. And when you
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: read Fugate's interviews with me, he's just so candid about
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: how there is nothing anyone can do. And, you know,
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: what he told me was so shocking. I went back
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: to him and said, like, I just want to really
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: make sure these are your actual quotes. And he, absolutely,
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: you know, he was one of the first people to
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: write an Amazon review of the book after it published
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: here in the United States. And I find that both
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: terrifying but also heartening for this reason, is that a
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: lot of these people who leave office, because my sources
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: are all former and then the title, when they are
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: in the command and control, they are very focused on
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: doing their job. Hence what we spoke about earlier, about
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: like following orders. They are civil servants. They are dedicated
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: civil servants. They believe in national security. They believe in,
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: you know, the perseverance of government. And then they leave
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: office and they're just regular people again. And that's when
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: the heart, I think, begins to lead. And particularly as
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: people get older. Because I interview a lot of people
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: in their 80s and 90s. And then they begin to
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: think about what this means in terms of legacy. What
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: is legacy? nuclear command and control really as buttoned up as,
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: this might be them talking, you know, as I thought?
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: And is it a good idea in a world that
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: is so rapidly changing, both geopolitically and also in terms
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: of technology?
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: Was there one individual you met that comes to mind
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: when I ask who the most troubled person was in
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: terms of the work they participated in? Or troubled in
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: the context of what they know and what it means
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: for humanity and how they're grappling with that?
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: The most concerned and sort of the most activated, by
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: all means, would be former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry.
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: And he's now in his 90s, and I don't believe
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: he's doing interviews anymore. But it's not surprising that Perry
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: shared with me his intense worry about all of this,
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: because he has been actively Working on this and, you know,
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: for at least 15, 20 years. And when I say this,
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: I mean bringing the information to the public so that
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: the public is aware. He wrote his own book with
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: a colleague called The Button. And he has, you know, really,
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: he did a podcast called At the Brink. And what's
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: fascinating is Perry spent most of his life dedicated to
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: what you might call the military-industrial complex. right, to the
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: research and development of weapon systems that I write about
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: in my other books, the DARPA book in particular, because
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: this is all part and parcel to what we're talking
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: about here, that you have... this sort of industry, military
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: weapon system industry that is in a constant state of
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: forward movement. It's deeply tied to economics, to jobs, to prosperity.
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: And so where does that take us? And And at
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: what point does it end? It was Eisenhower who said
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: in his famous speech where the public really learned about
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: this so-called military industrial complex because Eisenhower spoke of it
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: in his farewell speech. But he also said an important
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: thing in the second half of that speech, which doesn't
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: get nearly as much airtime, which is that a knowledgeable
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: and alert citizenry is how you balance sort of an
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: idea of peace with an idea of defense. And I
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: think what frightens both of us that we talked about
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: in the beginning here was that peace and defense are
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: very different than constant states of war.
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: 72 minutes. You go through this in the book, almost
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: minute by minute, showing exactly what will happen. We know
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: in those first couple of minutes there's a notification that
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: there's a nuclear bomb coming in from somewhere. My question
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: on that was, and I was thinking about this earlier
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: as we were talking about it, How does the president know?
• 40:48
  Speaker 2: How does the world leader of that country know, the
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: prime minister of the UK, whoever it might be, or
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: Netanyahu or Putin, know where that nuclear bomb has come from?
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: Because we talked about this sort of black book of places,
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: this menu that the president has in that football that
• 41:04
  Speaker 2: his aide is carrying around. How does he know which
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: place to pick on the menu to send a nuclear
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: bomb back?
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: Powerful distinction, right? This is not 9-11, where suddenly... There
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: are planes in the Trade Center towers, and, you know,
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: everyone is scrambling to say, who did this? And the
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: CIA is saying, this is al-Qaeda. It has the mark
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: of al-Qaeda. But no one knows for sure. This is
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: not that. This is the fact that for 79 years,
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: the United States has been building nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons systems,
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: and also systems to detect other people's nuclear weapons, should
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: they have them.
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: But what if they're submarines?
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: Okay, so. Good point on the submarines, which is, but
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: we have a set of satellites called Sibbers, which are parked. Now,
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: I'm only talking, when you said, how would Netanyahu know?
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: How would the president of Russia? That is a different scenario.
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: What I am talking about is the U.S. president, because
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: I have interviewed people in the U.S. Defense Department and
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: the intelligence community, and the Defense Department knows precisely what,
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: where a weapon comes from within a second of launch
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: because the SIBR satellites can measure the hot rocket exhaust.
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: So you imagine a rocket taking off, lots of fire
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: beneath it. That is measured from 22,000 miles up in geosync.
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: I mean, that is just a technological astonishment. And then
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: there begins the data sent down to these various commands
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: in the United States, the Aerospace Data Center, the Space Force,
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: And they begin measuring the trajectory of the missile and
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: figuring out where it's going to go. Like it's not
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: going to Moscow and it's not going to Guam. Those
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: would be opposite directions. Is it going to San Francisco
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: or is it going to the East Coast? That is
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: learned in 100 seconds approximately. Okay. Now you are right.
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: You cannot, if a submarine launches a ballistic missile, there's
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: no way of knowing where that came from. which is
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: why in the scenario I have that happen. And it
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: creates a whole other set of problems.
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: What are those? I mean, what is the answer to that?
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: Because I was imagining if the Cibra system sees a
• 43:24
  Speaker 2: nuclear bomb coming out of the Pacific Ocean, I mean,
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: that could be Rishi Sunak. That could be the UK
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: firing one at America. It could be anybody.
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: You are absolutely right that there is no way of knowing.
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: And in the scenario that I chose, because I wanted
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: to try to take the reader through a logical sequence
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: if you could even call any of this logical because
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: it's all you know they call it mad mutual assured
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: destruction it's really madness but you cannot know who launched
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: that uh.
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: So does we just go for our enemy in that situation.
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: I mean do you know you have a new task
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: you are going to write nuclear war an even worse scenario.
• 44:09
  Speaker 2: Because that's what you would do, right? If you're President Biden,
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: your aide turns to you and goes, hi, President, there's
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: a nuclear bomb heading our way. I go, I know
• 44:16
  Speaker 2: exactly who did that. And you might start firing a
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: couple of back at just the people that you assume
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: would do it. And then they do the same.
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: The nuclear armed submarines that are owned by Russia and
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: China regularly come within a couple hundred miles of each
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: coast of the United States, and you can assume the
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: same about England. And how do we know this? Well,
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: you can't see a submarine moving in real time, but
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: you can track the submarine's movements after the fact, owing
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: to a very complex system of underwater surveillance systems that
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: we have in place. And there's a map that appeared
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: in a recent Defense Department budget request to Congress, which
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: I reproduce in the book, that shows just how close
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: those submarines, those enemy submarines, get to the coast. And
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: that reduces the travel time of a ballistic missile down
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: to under 10 minutes. And so this idea that we
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: really are living at the edge of apocalypse is not
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: an exaggeration. The question is, How would this start? Why
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: would this start? Again, read the scenario, and you begin
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: to realize this could start in, or have a discussion
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: with you, and you go, this could start in so many,
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: the training test tape. I mean, and the real takeaway
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: is asking ourselves is, why do none of us know
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: about this? Or most of us, rather.
• 46:02
  Speaker 2: There's so many ways this could start, and one of them,
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: One of them obviously, again, has emerged front of mind
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: for society since you started writing the book, which is
• 46:09
  Speaker 2: artificial intelligence. Before I get to that, though, I really
• 46:12
  Speaker 2: want to close off on this 72 minutes. I understand
• 46:15
  Speaker 2: the first couple of minutes there. What does the person
• 46:20
  Speaker 2: listening to this need to know about what happens in
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: the subsequent sort of 60 minutes?
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: There's a very fast process where the trajectory of the
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: ballistic missile is being determined by And we're talking in
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: the first minutes of the sequence because everyone is getting
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: ready to tell the president. Because what they're going to
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: tell the president is, sir, you need to choose a counterattack.
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: That is called get the blue clock running.
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: Does the president not get in some plane super quick?
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: So we'll get there in a second because that's the
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: decision tree problem.
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: So everyone is working on figuring out the trajectory of
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: the ballistic missile. Okay. There is the first confirmation when
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: you see it. And by the way, a ballistic missile
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: cannot be redirected or recalled. Cannot be. Now, ultimately, the
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: Defense Department will wait for second confirmation of that missile
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: from a ground radar system. We have them around the world.
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: The one in the scenario that would see it is
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: in Alaska. It has to be able to see and
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: confirm that missile is definitely coming this way. And that
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: happens at around eight or nine minutes. And so the
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: process in between that, everyone's getting ready to brief the
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: president about a counterattack. And so in the scenario, the
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: president learns around three minutes, and then they're waiting on
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: the secondary confirmation. And in my interviews with the Secret Service,
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: as I was reporting the book, interesting things would happen,
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: exactly like your question, like, wait a minute, what would
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: Would the president be staying at the White House? So I,
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: as the reporter, put that question to the former director
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: of the Secret Service, who explains to me how there
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: is a team called the counter-assault team. And that is
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: the sort of paramilitary organization of the Secret Service that's
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: going to always be there to move the president really
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: fast if need be. And in this situation, they make
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: a decision, we're moving him. if the target is Washington, D.C.,
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: or anywhere on the East Coast for that matter, we
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: cannot have the president anywhere near ground zero. And their
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: job that they are sworn to do is to protect
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: the president. And so then you're going to have a
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: bit of a stalemate because the military command wants the
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: president on comms to be able to give him counter-strike orders.
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: That is what they want. And they can only get
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: those orders from the president. But the Secret Service has
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: a totally different agenda. And in my scenario, the Secret Service,
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: considering they're the only ones in the room that are armed, win.
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: They take the president out and he flies out of Washington, D.C.
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: in Marine One.
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: Marine One being the helicopter.
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: The helicopter that is, you know. And then I learned
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: even more interesting details like, okay, so in the scenario,
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: the likely situation is that the electromagnetic pulse will really
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: threaten the electronic system in Marine One and it will
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: be in deep danger of crashing.
• 49:26
  Speaker 2: What is that for people that don't know?
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: For people that don't know, an electromagnetic pulse is like
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: a three-pulsed sort of shock wave that essentially just zeroes
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: out electronics. Imagine your house... getting struck by lightning, a
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: direct hit. And no surge suppressor. I mean, it's just,
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: it's all, the electronics go out. And that will almost
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: certainly happen. Marine One is outfitted, retrofitted against EMP attack,
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: because they think about these things. But no one knows
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: if it's going to really work. It's been tested in
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: a chamber.
• 50:01
  Speaker 2: So what you're saying, sorry, just to be clear, is
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: that whoever's attacking the United States or another country would
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: send an electronic pulse first.
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: No, the pulse is part of the bomb going off.
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: It's inherent in the nuclear explosion. And so even if
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: you're getting the president out, if he's seven, eight, nine miles,
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: ten miles out of ground zero, as they rush, because
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: remember this is all happening in 30 minutes, under 30 minutes,
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: as they rush to get him out of the White House,
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: the EMP could seriously damage the Marine One. So the
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: Secret Service people I interviewed explained to me that they
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: would have a backup plan, which would be to tandem
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: jump the president out of the aircraft with a parachute.
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: They would strap the president onto them and jump out
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: of the aircraft because at least there would be, the
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: aircraft is going to crash if it gets hit by
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: the electromagnetic pulse. So at least there's a better chance. Well,
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: then you have to have, the mill aide has to
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: have a parachute because he's got the black book and
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: the direct, the special agent in charge of the president
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: is definitely going to go. So then I learned that
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: this incredible detail that there aren't, parachutes in Marine One.
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: So they have to go to the White House office
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: to get the parachutes. You know, these kind of details,
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: I believe, provide the reader with a number of things
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: like the astonishing understanding of how many different scenarios are
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: in play all the time, you know, being rehearsed so
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: that because we might have a nuclear war at the
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: same time that the messaging is we will never have
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: a nuclear war. And then when you begin to look
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: at all the competing agendas that will happen, you realize
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: it's just chaos upon mayhem.
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: What if the president dies in the strike? And before
• 51:51
  Speaker 2: we've made a counterattack?
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: Which is something that Stratcom thinks about, and it's certainly
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: why I have that in the scenario. Because if the
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: president is the only one that can order a counterattack,
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: that can launch nuclear weapons, what if he dies? And
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: so I learned in the reportings that if you're the president,
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: let's say he even gives the order, okay, here's my counter-strike,
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: I'm choosing this from the black book. The command and
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: control is set up that if the president orders 82
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: nuclear weapons in response, you can't launch 83 nuclear weapons.
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: It's 82 and 82 only. And then to do another
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: launch requires... Passwords. I mean, it requires so much bureaucracy.
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: There's not time for that. And so there's this almost
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: unknown little detail inside of the nuclear command and control
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: apparatus called a universal unlock code, which I learned about
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: in the book. And the eyebrow goes up for exactly
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: that reason, as did mine when I, wait, what? And
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: then you find out that the president can release to
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: the STRATCOM commander The universal unlock code, which basically says, okay, you,
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: if I die, you have permission to launch nuclear weapon
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: number 83 or nuclear weapon number 5,000, you know, all
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: the way up. And that is a pretty shocking concept.
• 53:23
  Speaker 2: The president responds to the nuclear attack, hits, I don't know,
• 53:27
  Speaker 2: let's say they hit Russia. They send the submarines out
• 53:31
  Speaker 2: to send the ICBMs or whatever it's called to hit,
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: strike Russia. Russia have these submarines as well. They send
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: more back. What's the aftermath of nuclear, you know, that 72,
• 53:47
  Speaker 2: that 72nd minute? Because I imagine from the minute the
• 53:50
  Speaker 2: president hears that, gets the notification that there are, it's
• 53:54
  Speaker 2: been confirmed, it's had the second confirmation. He's going to
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: make the decision to fire nuclear weapons back, I assume.
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: And then, I mean, from there, it's just all fire,
• 54:03
  Speaker 2: as far as I'm concerned.
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: There's a concept called jamming the president, which is, so
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: the president learns in the scenario I write that North
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: Korea has fired a ballistic missile. And then a second
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: one comes in from a sub and hits a nuclear
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: power plant in California.
• 54:17
  Speaker 2: Why did you pick North Korea?
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: I picked North Korea because of my interviews with Richard Garwin,
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: the designer of the thermonuclear bombs. the first one, which
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: she designed for Teller. Because in our interviews, I asked
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: him what scared me most. Garwin, also in his 90s,
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: has advised every president of the United States since Eisenhower.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: He was an early founder of NRO. I mean, one
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: of our most classified agencies. His opinion matters. And while
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: he didn't want to be specific, he gave me sort
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: of a very interesting, almost poetic metaphor when he spoke
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: of the mad king. and the mad king with a
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: nuclear arsenal. And he even used that French phrase, après
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: moi le déluge, this idea of like after me the flood.
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: If I die, who cares? And I interpreted that, that
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: Garwin was talking about North Korea, because North Korea is
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: the rogue nuclear-armed nation that regularly sets off ballistic missiles
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: and doesn't tell anyone. There is an unspoken reality among
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: the other nations that you inform people when you're going
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: to test an ICBM with a dummy warhead, of course.
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: North Korea doesn't adhere to that. So, you know, when
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: I interviewed people who are in those command and control bunkers,
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: those first hundred seconds we spoke of where the ballistic
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: missile is on its way and all of that command
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: and control is focused on is this coming at us
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: or is it launching a space satellite or is it
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: going into the Sea of Japan? That's what North Korea does.
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: They don't announce those tests. And so imagine the anxiety
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: in those command bunkers every time they launch a ballistic missile.
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: They have launched more than 100 ballistic missiles in an
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: 18-month period from like 2022 forward. Testing. Testing. So this
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: is so dangerous and so rogue. On the one hand,
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: I say there are no rules to nuclear war, but
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: there are a few rules to nuclear deterrence, like you
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: tell your neighbors. And that's why I chose North Korea.
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: But just to finish that, the sequence, the president launches
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: 82 missiles at North Korea in a counterattack. And in
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: the scenario that I write, the failure now becomes about miscommunication,
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: a very important concept, and also about technology not working.
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: And I source in the book precisely where this information
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: comes from. So Russia misinterprets our launching nuclear weapons at
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: North Korea as being launched at Russia. Why? Because, actual fact,
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: our ICBMs do not have enough range to travel to
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: North Korea without overflying Russia. And so imagine in a
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: climate like now, with hostilities as an all-time high, the
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: Russian president just saying, okay, well, maybe they're not coming
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: for us. And nuclear policy, the policy of deterrence is
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: you launch if someone's launching at you. And so that
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: is where, you know, In the second act of the book,
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: it's 24 minutes, 24 minutes, 24 minutes, endgame. Russia launches.
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: And Russia launches. If someone's attacking you with nuclear missiles,
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: you don't launch one or two back. That's Mad King logic.
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: You launch the mother load. And that's what I have
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: Russia launch in this scenario.
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: What do you mean Mad King logic?
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: Well, Mad King logic is.
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: Why would you do that?
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay.
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: So in the Mad King logic of the book, the
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: leader of North Korea, who is nameless, launches a nuclear
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: weapon at the United States for reasons we don't know.
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: And we will never know because history will end. The
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: ability to write history ends in 72 minutes of the book.
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: So we will never know why. And that is the
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: sort of, you know, question. Mad King logic is very
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: different than Defense Department logic or, in many regards, Russian
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: nuclear command and control logic, which I interviewed sort of
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: the world's expert on those subjects to be able to,
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: you know, give readers quickly an idea of what that
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: logic is and why it has held for 79 years.
• 59:03
  Speaker 2: Can't we just shoot it out the sky?
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: That is the great fantasy that is a fallacy, right?
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: So let's talk numbers for a second. America has 1,770
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: nuclear weapons on ready for launch status. They're deployed, okay?
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: They can launch in seconds, minutes. Maybe some of the
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: bombers take an hour or two. Russia has roughly the same. 1,674.
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: That's the parity of the nuclear treaties. That says nothing
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: of the thousands more that we each have in reserve.
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: But those are actual nuclear weapons that are pointed at
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: one another, ready to go. Ready to go.
• 59:44
  Speaker 2: Okay?
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: So those numbers. The U.S. has an interceptor program to
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: allegedly intercept a long-range ballistic missile. I'm not talking about
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: short-range or even medium-range. long range, like that would come
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: from Russia or North Korea. We have 44 interceptor missiles.
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: Four of them are at Vandenberg Air Force Base in
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: Santa Barbara. Forty of them are at Fort Greeley in Alaska. Forty-four.
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: So if Russia has 1,670 nuclear weapons, how are our
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: 44 interceptors going to go up against those? And that
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: says nothing, by the way, and I get into this
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: in sort of the little bit of the wonkiness. Inside
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: a nuclear warhead, many of them are what are called MIRV,
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: which means they have multiple warheads inside of it. And
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: so when the warhead unleashes, the multiple warheads go out
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: along with decoys so that if an interceptor missile is
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: coming at it, it greatly reduces the chance that the
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: interceptor will be able to shoot it out of the sky.
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: The way that it was said to me was like this.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: An interceptor missile, which is basically just like a small ICBM, right?
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: It's a rocket. It is like trying to shoot a
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: bullet with a bullet. That's a quote from the spokesperson
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: at the Pentagon. One of them is traveling at 14,000
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: miles an hour, the ballistic missile, 14,000 miles an hour.
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: The interceptor, the little kinetic vehicle inside of it that's
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: going to hit the warhead, hopefully— is traveling at 20,000
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: miles an hour. That's where you get the trying to
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: hit a bullet with a bullet. And by the way,
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: this is all happening 500 miles up in space. Good luck.
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: The success rate of our interceptor program is between 40
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: and 55%. That's on a good day where they're testing
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: these things and they go, hey, we're doing an interceptor test.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: It might be around there, right? That's called a curated test.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: That's not in the madness of the moment.
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 2: The bombs land. If I was a fly on the wall,
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 2: not that there would be a wall left, what would
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 2: I see? And I was looking at America or the
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 2: UK after it had been struck by these nuclear bombs,
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 2: by thousands of Russian or North Korean nuclear weapons. What
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: would I see? What would the visuals be in those
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 2: minutes after the strike?
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: I describe... The first bomb in the scenario that strikes
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: the Pentagon, it's a one-megaton thermonuclear bomb in painstaking horrific detail,
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: all sourced from Defense Department documents, defense scientists who have
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: worked for decades to describe precisely what happens to things
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: and to humans. And it's horrifying. But on top of
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: the initial flash of thermonuclear light, which is 180 million degrees,
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: which catches everything on fire in a nine-mile diameter radius...
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: on top of the bulldozing effect of the wind and
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: all the buildings coming down and more fires, igniting more fires,
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: on top of the radiation poisoning people to death in
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: minutes and hours and days and weeks, if they happen
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: to have survived, on top of all of that, each
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: one of these fires creates a megafire that is a
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: hundred or more square miles. And so essentially, in essence,
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: what do you see? Well, in the scenario at minute 72, 1,000 people.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: Russian nuclear weapons land on the United States. And so
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: it just becomes a conflagration of fire. It's just fire,
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: fires burning, fires, 100, 200 square mile fires burning. And
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: then we move into nuclear winter. And that's sort of
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: the denouement of the book, where I tell you about
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: nuclear winter from the point of view of one of
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: the original who wrote that original nuclear winter paper with
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: Carl Sagan back in 1983. And his name is Professor
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: Brian June. And he's spent the decades since working with
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: the state-of-the-art climate modeling systems that can now precisely tell
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: us what nuclear winter will look like.
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 2: Because I've always thought, you know what, nuclear war wouldn't
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 2: be that bad if, you know, Russia launched a thousand
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 2: of their nuclear bombs at the United States and I
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 2: was here in New York where I am now. I
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 2: would die instantly, so I wouldn't really know it happened.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 2: Is that true?
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: I think you would want to die instantly. I mean,
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: there's a quote from Nikita Khrushchev, the former premier of
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: the Soviet Union, and he said, after nuclear war, the
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: survivors would envy the dead. Because there is, right, there
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: is this sense of if you survived, I mean, there
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: is no more law and order. There is no more
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: rule of law. There is no government. Craig Fugate made
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: that very clear. The bunkers that the people in the
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: military command and control centers would be in, let's say
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: the secret bunkers, not the ones that are targets that
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: Russia's going to take out that I write about in
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: the book, but the smaller ones, those are going to
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: only function for as long as there's gasoline to run
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: the diesel generators. And then those people are going to
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: have to come out. And who's left? It's man returning
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: to the most primal most violent state as people fight
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: over the tiny resources that remain and by the way
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: they're all malnourished everybody's sick and most people have lost
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: everything and everyone they know how's that going to feel.
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 2: It's going to feel as you describe here on page
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 2: 277 there are a thousand flashes of light superheating the
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 2: air in each ground zero to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit,
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: a thousand fireballs each more than a mile in diameter,
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 2: a thousand steeply fronted blast waves, a thousand walls of
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 2: compressed air, a thousand American cities and towns where all
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 2: engineered structures in five, six or seven miles radius change
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 2: physical shapes, collapse and burn, a thousand cities and towns
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 2: with molten asphalt streets. a thousand cities and towns with
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 2: survivors impaled to death by flying debris, a thousand cities
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 2: and towns filled with tens of millions of dead people,
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 2: with tens of millions of unfortunate survivors suffering fatal third-degree burns,
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 2: people naked, tattered, bleeding, and suffocating, people who don't look
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 2: or act like people anymore. Across America and Europe, hundreds
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 2: of millions of people are dead and dying, while hundreds
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 2: of military aircraft fly circles in the air until they
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 2: run out of fuel. I mean, that is some visual.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 2: How many people would be dead or dying, do you think,
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: after those 72 minutes?
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: Hundreds of millions of people die in the fireballs, no question.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: But the number that I think is very interesting to
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: think about comes from Professor Toon and his team who
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: wrote a paper for Nature. recently, 2022, and sort of
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: updated nuclear winter idea based around food. And the number
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: that they have is 5 billion people would be dead.
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 2: The population of the planet currently is what, 8 billion?
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 2: So there'd be 3 billion people still alive. Where shall
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 2: I go to be one of the three billion? I
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 2: was just in New Zealand and Australia.
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: That's exactly where you'd go.
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 2: Good.
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: According to Toon, those are the only places that could
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: actually sustain agriculture.
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 2: I was there two weeks ago. Not even two weeks ago.
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 2: It was maybe 10 days ago. I was in New
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 2: Zealand and Australia. And at that time, I think Iran
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: attacked Israel. Yes. I was kind of happy.
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: You were in the right place at the right time.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 2: I was kind of happy for where I was located.
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 2: I was thinking, I actually remember talking to my friends
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 2: and I pulled up a map. I was trying to
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 2: see how far away I was from everything. I was
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 2: thinking if, because World War III started trending on Twitter,
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 2: I was thinking if it does break out now, I
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 2: think I'm probably pretty well placed. Is that the place
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 2: to be?
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: That is. That is, according to Professor Toon. I mean,
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: he was so generous with me. He shared a lot
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: of his slide shows that he has for his students online.
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: And that is really pretty much what's left. I mean,
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: because most of the world is certainly the mid-latitudes would
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: be covered in these, you know, sheets of ice, the
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: freshwater bodies. Places like Iowa and Ukraine would be just
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: snow for 10 years. And so agriculture would fail. And
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: when agriculture fails, people just die. And on top of that,
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: you have the radiation poisoning because the ozone layer will
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: be so damaged and destroyed that, you can't be outside
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: in the sunlight. And so people will be forced to
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: live underground. And so you have to imagine people living underground,
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: fighting for food everywhere except for in New Zealand and Australia.
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: There was also another interesting detail that that he shared
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: with me that, you know, 66 million years ago, an
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: asteroid hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs and something
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: like 70% of the known species. And Professor Toon compared
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: nuclear war to that situation. And so when you really
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: think about it, and again, this was also echoed by
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: Craig Fugate, FEMA's director, You think about it, there's nothing
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: we can do about an asteroid, at least not right now.
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: And yet there is something. Nuclear war is a man-made threat.
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: And therefore, it has to be a man-made solution.
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 2: What is the solution?
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: I really believe that people motivate other people. It's like
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: a fundamental truth on the smallest scale and on the
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: biggest scale. And so there's one person who is incredibly powerful,
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: and that is the president of the United States. For
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: better or for worse, it's just the way it is.
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: And so in the same way that the president has
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: presidential sole authority to start a nuclear war, the president
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: also has a very powerful pen with which he can
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: write executive orders, an EO. And the story I tell
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: on the hopeful note goes like this. When I was
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: in high school in 1983, there was an ABC TV
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: movie called The Day After. And it showed a fictional
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: war between the United States and then Soviet Russia. It
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: was horrific and terrifying, okay? A hundred million Americans watched it.
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: A hundred million Americans. It was like the third of
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: the population.
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 2: And.
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: I think it was half the population then. President Reagan
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: was one of those Americans. He had a private screening
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: at Camp David. His advisors told him not to watch it.
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: He did watch it. Before that, President Reagan was a hawk.
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: He was pro-nuclear weapons. His position was the more nuclear weapons,
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: the better. He was the one putting nuclear weapons in
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: space with the Star Wars program. the SDI program, okay?
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: He couldn't have been more pro-deterrence supremacy. He saw the
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: day after, and he changed his position. He wrote in
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: his White House journal that he became greatly depressed, his words.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: And he reached out to Gorbachev, and then they had
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: a Reykjavik summit, a summit in Iceland, Reagan and Gorbachev.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: And through communication, right? Through both of them realizing this
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: is madness, realizing what could happen, seeing the day after
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: and realizing, my God, this cannot happen. And they famously
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: issued a statement that said, the joint statement between the
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: two of them said, a nuclear war cannot be won
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: and must never be fought. And the result of the
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: Reykjavik summit was that the world has gone from 70,000
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: nuclear warheads. That was the all-time high. 70,000. Why do
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: you need 70,000 nuclear warheads? That's what there were in 1986.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: And now, here we are, because of the reductions, because
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: of the treaties, thanks to those two, 12,500 approximately nuclear warheads.
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: That is the movement in the right direction And it
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: came from a dramatic story being told. And it came
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: from the president taking action because people would not stand
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: for this anymore. There were massive protests.
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 2: Do you believe we can ever get to zero? Honestly.
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: That is for the disarmament experts. I like to stay
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: in my lane as a storyteller, as an investigative journalist.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: I like to give you the dramatic, fast read and
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: then pass the baton to those who have been working
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: on that issue for decades because, boy, are they qualified.
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: I just had the great fortune of being invited to
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: Brussels where I was part of a nuclear expo, and
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: there were members of the European Parliament in the audience.
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: And there were all these disarmament people there, and I
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: learned a lot about all of these groups. And they
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: have the answer, and they are the ones that should
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: be asked that question, and they are doing a lot
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: to get us there.
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 2: From the moment you wrote the first word in this
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 2: new book, Nuclear War Scenario, to when you finished the book,
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 2: how did your feelings change about the subject matter?
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: It's interesting because you write, this is just my experience
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: as a journalist, but you write the book and you're
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: like any journalist. professional person, you want to do a
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: really good job at your job. Right. So, so I
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: was very focused on gathering the facts and then relaying
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: them in a readable way. You know, my husband, Kevin
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: always says like, you got to write something that someone
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: can read on the beach or an airplane, right. Which
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: is not necessarily conducive to like Nazi scientists or the
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: other things I've written about. But for this, it became
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: clear to me, nuclear launch to nuclear winter fast. Have
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: people read it fast because you want to grab their
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: attention because I'm a mother, you know. I'm a hopeful
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: person that believes that we do not have to live
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: with this threat overhead. And so my focus of the
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: work was really on doing the best job I could
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: to narrate the story. And I think you take your
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: hat off about maybe any more sort of emotional or
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: sentimental feelings. You try to You try to push that
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: into the prose, I suppose. So maybe in subtext, there
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: is a sense of urgency and even fear. But for me, intellectually,
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: you know, as an investigative journalist, it was just, what's
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: the next page going to read like?
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: But how do you feel about, you know, the nature
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 2: of the... It's interesting as well, because when you think
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 2: about the books you've written, I think, how many have
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 2: you written now? Six or seven? Seven books in total.
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 2: The subject matter of your books are all the basis
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 2: of a lot of conspiracy theory, if that makes sense.
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 2: You've written about Area 51 and this thing called Operation
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 2: Paperclip and the Pentagon and now nuclear bombs and the CIA,
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 2: all these kinds of things, which are the basis of
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 2: many of the conspiracy theories that I hear about. So
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 2: you've got a very unique perspective on the world because
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 2: you've had the privilege and the access of interviewing some
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 2: of the most interesting people that are closest to these
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 2: very interesting subjects. What are some of the things that
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 2: you've come to learn that you once thought were just
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 2: conspiracy theories?
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: I mean, conspiracy theory is such a loaded word. And
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: I think it's too bad that it's used as a
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: catch-all to kind of dismiss a lot of curiosity. Because
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: curiosity is important, right? And curiosity leads toward reading. I mean,
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: I couldn't be a bigger fan of reading or listening to,
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: you know, educating yourself. I mean, things have really changed
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: in terms of audio. Like, you can listen to a
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: podcast and learn a lot. You can listen to an
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: audio book the same way that you used to have
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: to read them. And so to just call things conspiracy theories,
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: I find to be intellectually thin, right? It's just too easy.
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: And it's also very self-righteous. And I think two things
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: I always work to avoid— is like kind of being
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: a know-it-all. And I am around a lot of know-it-alls
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: because people who become experts in subjects and maybe they
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: don't get as much attention as they think they deserve
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: tend to become a little bit of self-righteous know-it-alls. And
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: so I have to wind my way through that world
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: because I'm always, what interests me are subjects that make
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: me ask the question why, right? Like, why does no
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: one know about Area 51? Why is Area 51 so secret?
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: I mean, when I wrote the book Area 51, the
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: word Area 51 was still classified. You couldn't say it.
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: I went to the CIA, and I was told by
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: my minder, if you say a certain word and number,
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: you will be asked to leave. It was classified. It
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: only became unclassified when President Obama spoke about it publicly.
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 2: Oh, really?
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: He just mentioned it, and then it was unclassified, right?
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: And so to answer your question, I find it really
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: interesting tackling subjects that are in the zeitgeist, that people
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: are interested in, and then trying to unpack the truths
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: and the fictions.
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 2: But is there something you heard about, you heard a
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 2: whisper about, and you thought that can't possibly be true?
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 2: And then after doing a little bit of investigative researching
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 2: and journalism, you discovered that it actually was true and
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 2: you were blown away. And I say that in part
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 2: because I lived much of my life thinking that a
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 2: lot of these subjects, Area 51, the CIA, this idea
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 2: that there's all these spies and they're doing all of
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 2: this stuff and I thought a lot of it was
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 2: just internet rumors and, you know, people who, certain people
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 2: who have, you know, they have like the silver foil
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 2: on their heads and they're just like, whatever. And then
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 2: I had the privilege of speaking to some people on
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 2: this podcast and just out there in the world who
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 2: confirmed that a lot of the things I once thought
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 2: were tinfoil hat stuff is actually true. And once you
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 2: have the curtain pulled back, it kind of blows your
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 2: mind open to what else could be true. And I'm
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 2: a person that kind of needs evidence and logic, and
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 2: I'm not going to believe something because I saw it
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 2: on an Instagram post or a story or a Telegram community.
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 2: But my mind's been blown, especially over the last couple
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 2: of years, about how some of these things that people
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 2: consider to be conspiracy theories are actually very true. Have
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 2: you had those moments in your career? Yeah.
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely. But I mean, you can really drill down
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: on this stuff and figure out the thematic element of
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: what's going on and then the specifics. And I'll give
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: you an example. Like in Area 51, I learned about
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: something called strategic deception, which is a CIA concept, okay?
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: And this plays into conspiracy theories. And when you come
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: across something, maybe having this information I'm about to tell
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: you will help you go, Okay, let me look at
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: it in terms of these two lanes. So it goes
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: like this. The CIA was building spy planes out at
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: Area 51. The U-2 spy plane, which was going to
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: spy on the Soviet Union in the 50s from above
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: and figure out whether they were preparing for nuclear war.
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: And the plane was built at Area 51 because no
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: one could know about it. It flew at 70,000 feet.
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: It was out of range of any surface-to-air missiles. I
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: interviewed the first man who flew over the Soviet Union
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: in a U-2, Hervey Stockman. And he took pictures with
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: these massive CIA cameras that, you know, came back to
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: the agency. It was wet film and allowed the CIA
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: to understand what was actually going on on the ground
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: in Soviet Russia. It was photographing military bases. So the
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: spy plane was being built and it was so secret,
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: like only the president knew about it. At the same time,
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: nuclear weapons were being exploded next door, right? So Area
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: 51 and then over at Area 23 was where the
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: bombs were going off. And I was interviewing all the
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: engineers who were building the spy plane. And Bob Murphy
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: was one of the lead engineers, and he told me
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: this story about strategic deception. So he and others would
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: go to the ranch, that's what they called Area 51,
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: then they'd fly back to Burbank, California, where they all
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: lived for the weekends to be with their families. And
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: they would take this shuttle back and forth. And one
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: day they went to a big party the night before
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: and Bob Murphy got drunk. He was not a guy
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: who gets drunk, but he got drunk. He missed the shuttle.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: And he was like, oh, my God, I'm going to
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: lose my job. I'm in trouble. And he opens the doors,
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: how he described it to me, to like, you know,
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: go out and deal with this. And there's an FBI
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: agent like about to knock on the door. And they tell,
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: and the guy turns white as a ghost because Bob
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: Murphy was supposed to be on that flight. So he
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: was on the flight manifest and it crashed into Mount
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: Charleston on the way there and everyone was dead.
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: So that is a dramatic thing to begin with, but
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: here's how it ties up with strategic deception. The CIA
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: learns that it's aircraft full of U2 engineers, designers, all
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: these incredibly important people on this top secret project. are dead.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: They just crashed into Mount Charleston. What are they going
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: to do? How are they going to keep this secret?
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: All the new stations are racing up to the top
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: of the mountain to try to get to the crash site. Oh,
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: my God. The project's going to be blown open. What
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: are we going to do? So they quickly rope off
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: the areas. They do the damage control to the best
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: that they can But they're spinning, and I have all
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: the declassified documents from that part of it, learning how
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: worried they are. There's almost no doubt the project's going
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: to be revealed. The U2 program is going to be
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: no more because once the Soviets know about it, it's off.
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: And instead, the press comes up with a story. The
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: press reports that it's all these atomic scientists working on
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: this secret new weapon. They just completely make this up
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: in essence, right? It's this new weapons project. And that's
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: what they're all doing. Who knows who put what bug
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: in someone's ear? And so that's the story that comes out.
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: And the CIA is like, perfect. And the story explains
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: that there are two kinds of strategic deception. There's cover
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: when you say, like Bob Murphy said to his wife,
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: I'm just an engineer working out there on some television systems.
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: That's cover. That was his cover. He didn't say I'm
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: working on the U-2 spy plane. And then there's disinformation.
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: When the press reports that the crash was full of
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: a bunch of atomic engineers working on a secret weapons program.
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: And those are both kinds of strategic deception. And so
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: you begin to realize that There is a purpose behind
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: a lot of information coming out into the public. And
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: the CIA often uses that to its advantage. And so
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: whenever a situation happens, you have to say to yourself,
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: is this really what happened or is it covering up
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: something else? And then, of course, you have to put
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: your rational person hat on. And you can't just imagine
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: what the true story might be. You have to actually
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: find it and report it.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 2: Does the CIA or the, I think in the UK
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 2: it's called MI5 or MI6, MI6 I think is the equivalent.
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 2: Does MI6, all of these sort of special secret service
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 2: agencies around the world, do they work with the media?
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: That's a much, that's a totally separate podcast. We could
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: talk forever because there's history of the CIA. And I'm
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: not an expert on foreign intelligence agencies as much as
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: I am on the United States. But by all means,
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: there's a long history of the CIA working with journalists, reporters,
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: authors to put information there. I mean, there's almost nothing
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: that the CIA hasn't done to my eye. The question is,
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: you know, reporting it in the context of how that's happening.
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: I write about in the Pentagon's brain, if you want
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: a little homework, you know, and you go into the
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: back and in the index and look up brainwashing. And
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: there's a long story where I talk to, where I
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: explain exactly how this happened in the 50s with what ultimately,
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: an element that became known as the MKUltra program. Okay,
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: so like MKUltra was a real program and it had
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: a lot of sinister components to it. Is it everything that,
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: you know, certain groups of people that sometimes get called
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: conspiracy theorists say that it was? No. But there are
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: threads of truth in it. And if you reverse engineer
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: the brainwashing concept from the back, you will see what
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: I'm talking about. And I think it's a very interesting
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: story because it actually involves the head of the CIA,
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: a guy called Alan Dulles, and his son who got
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: brain damaged in Korea, whom I tracked down and interviewed
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: for that book. Spoiler alert.
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 2: What happens? I'm so compelled by the whole idea of
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 2: the CIA because we had someone here recently talking, we
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 2: had Andrew here recently talking about what goes on in
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 2: the CIA. I think one of the things he said
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 2: to me is that the role of the CIA has
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 2: changed over time and once upon a time it was
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 2: more capable of doing more things. And by the way
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 2: he described it, it sounded like the CIA has less
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 2: powers and can do less of the things that it's
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 2: been accused of in the past. I think it's been
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 2: accused of killing the president here. by some people, or
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 2: being involved in the assassination of one of the presidents here.
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 2: And does the CIA report directly into the president?
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: The CIA features in almost every one of my books.
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: The most sort of comprehensive look I did at the
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: CIA was a book called Surprise, Kill, Vanish, which is
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: about the CIA's paramilitary. And once I reported that, I
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: understood that there are actually two very distinct components of
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: the CIA. There's the sort of central intelligence agency, the
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: primary human, it's called human intelligence, and there's analysts and
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: there's espionage. And then there's the paramilitary organization, which was
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: set up in 1947 specifically to go against the Russian
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: version of itself, sort of to do the darkest, dirtiest,
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: nastiest operations that we had to because the Russians were.
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: And so, you know, the CIA is a giant organization
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: with a lot of tentacles. And I think it's important
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: to speak, at least for me, having reported on many
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: of these different programs. You know, Area 51 covers the
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: aerial espionage element of the CIA, the science and technology.
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 1: The CIA was responsible for putting the first satellite in space,
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: the Corona program. Dr. Bud Whelan, who I interviewed for
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: Area 51, remarkable intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance programs. And then
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: you have the paramilitary operators, the trigger pullers, the snake eaters,
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: the individuals who, you know, find, fix, and finish people.
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: That's a euphemism. The teams that do that. But I
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: prefer to speak very specifically about on programs because I
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: find it's the most, it's the most responsible or the
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: most factual way for me to stick to a certain
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: lane of the agency because it is so vast.
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 2: Once upon a time, if you had a business idea,
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 2: it was exceptionally difficult to get going. But now in
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 2: the age of Shopify, it is exceptionally easy. As many
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 2: of you will know, Shopify are a sponsor of this podcast.
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 2: If you don't know Shopify, it's an exceptionally simple web
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 2: platform for anybody that's got an idea that wants to
• 1:30:00
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• 1:30:04
  Speaker 2: which we sell, we've sold using Shopify and it only
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 2: took us a couple of clicks to get going. So
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 2: why did we choose Shopify? For a number of reasons,
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 2: but I think one of the big ones, which goes unappreciated,
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 2: is their checkout system converts 36% better compared to other platforms. platforms.
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 2: And here's what I'm going to do to remove the
• 1:30:22
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• 1:30:26
  Speaker 2: you'll be able to try Shopify for $ 1 a month.
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 2: I've seen Shopify completely change people's lives. And for many
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 2: of you, I think it could change yours. On the
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 2: nuclear war subject, we talked a little bit about another
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 2: thing that has, well, we kind of alluded to it,
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 2: that has emerged since you started writing this book, which
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 2: is the conversation around artificial intelligence. And when I start
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 2: thinking about how you overlay that with this idea of
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 2: nuclear war, it becomes even more concerning because we're heading
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 2: towards a world of what they call artificial general intelligence,
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 2: where a lot of these systems will be making autonomous decisions.
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 2: They'll be able to, and a couple of people that
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 2: I've spoken to from DeepMind or from Google have talked
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 2: to me about a world where this is an extreme case,
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 2: but our elected leaders will be either AI themselves or
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 2: being basically working in lockstep with AI. And then when
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 2: you think about our nuclear weapon systems, who is better
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 2: to make that decision? Is it a Joe Biden that's
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 2: better to make a decision to launch a nuclear weapon?
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 2: Or is it some kind of artificial intelligence that is
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 2: so advanced, we might not even know what it's thinking
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 2: or doing? Have you thought much about artificial intelligence since
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 2: this book came out and since you started writing?
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. It's something I covered at length in The Pentagon's Brain,
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: which is the book about DARPA. And I think that
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: maybe I'll speak to an origin story here, right? Because
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: I think of Shakespeare, it's like, what is past is prologue.
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: We can understand better the question you raise, especially for
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: younger people, like, what is this going to look like
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: in the future? Is a president really going to be
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: working in consort with AI? If we know, wait, how
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: did this all begin? It somehow, at least to my eye,
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: becomes easier to understand think about these things in a
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: grounded manner. And so I'll throw this detail at you.
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: In reporting the Pentagon's brain, it was fascinating to learn
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: that during World War II, computers were people. A computer
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: was someone who computed mathematical, you know, trajectories, bomb, explosions
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: were all measured people. by people and pencils. And I
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: love the smile because suddenly it all becomes easier. Then
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: you have a guy called John von Neumann, the Pentagon's brain.
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: He was the first brain that the Pentagon really was
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: interested in. And he created one of the first computers.
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: You can't really assign the first computer to anyone, but
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: there was a computer that was doing calculations called ENIAC.
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 1: And Ultimately, after the war, von Neumann went to the
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: Atomic Energy Commission, the most powerful organization in the world
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: at the moment, and said, I want to build a
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: computer that can actually think for itself. He's kind of
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: the progenitor of this idea of software, not just hardware.
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: So for a long time, it was kind of Texas
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: Instruments-type computing, almost just like a giant calculator. And von
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: Neumann wanted to put the brain inside the calculator. And
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 1: they gave him a lot of money to do it.
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: And he did this in the basement of Fould Hall
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 1: over at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. And it
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: was giant vacuum tubes. And he would do these tests.
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: And I describe this in the Pentagon's brain, because it's
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: really interesting to think this was only in 1945. There
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: were vacuum tubes and cords, and they had to worry
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: about mice eating cords. And John von Neumann was so
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: brilliant and smart that he could beat the computer initially.
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: His assistants would give him numerical calculations. He would do
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: them in his mind. The computer would be trying to
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: do them. He would win. And then one day, I
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 1: think it was 1946 or 1947, the computer beat him.
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: That was the moment that von Neumann realized computers just
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: got smarter than me, than man. And then he began
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: to develop systems. The Defense Department began to put an
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: extraordinary amount of money into computer systems. And if you
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: really want to know where they took off, because this
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: has to do with AI, this is man-computer interface. The
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: Defense Department hires a guy called Licklider to essentially shrink
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 1: computers down from the size of a house to the
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: size of this room and think of what they are now.
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 1: So the Defense Department has always led with artificial intelligence,
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: which is computer-based. And when you can see that origin story,
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: you can begin to understand where we're going. And AI
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: had to have the benefits of these military systems to develop, right?
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: Like nanotechnology. Things had to start becoming smaller. And that
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 1: all happens in that book. You know, not all of it,
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: but in other words, you can learn in a sort
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: of poetic manner the trajectory of computers and where they
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: began not so long ago and where we are now.
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: And it was in 1983 that DARPA, that organization, decided
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: that the battlefield is no place for humans. That was
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: a statement of its first robotic AI program.
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 2: I went on ChatGPT a couple of months ago and
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 2: I asked it, I said, could you play out a
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 2: scenario where the world ends because artificial intelligence basically gets
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 2: leaked out of the computer that it was born on.
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 2: And the scenario that it played out involved nuclear war
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 2: because halfway, I think it was in step three or four,
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 2: it says that the AI basically takes control of the
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 2: nuclear warheads, or at least some of them. And then
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 2: it kind of launches them at other countries. And hearing
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 2: Chachi PT say that, and in step three or four,
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 2: use nuclear weapons as a way to kind of make
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 2: the world extinct, it felt plausible.
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 1: Okay, so I'm going to push back against that, which
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: is by no means right. I'm not right, but we're
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: just having a sort of theoretical conversation here. ChatGPT is
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: gathering its information, right? So I would argue that ChatGPT
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 1: has got a lot of information from the Terminator movie.
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: Okay? There is that in the zeitgeist of what happens.
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 1: Then I want you to consider that the communication systems
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: in nuclear command and control, which is actually nuclear command
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: control and communication, the ability for– NC3 to communicate with
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: the actual weapons is so profoundly classified that I don't
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: have access to it. But I'm going to give this
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: to you as an idea. What I do know and
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: learned reporting nuclear war scenario is a fascinating detail that
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: stands as an analogy, at least for me, which is
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: how analog our ballistic missile systems are because of the
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: exact fear that you described and that ChatGPT described back
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: at you. And Will they stay that way forever? Probably not.
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: But are they that way right now? From what I understand, yes.
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: Our submarine-launched ballistic missiles that are just so— the technology behind them,
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: and I delineate it for the reader, it's astonishing that
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: you can launch a missile from underwater. It can breach
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: the surface and— It's after burners take off and then
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: it begins its trajectory, you know, boost phase, mid-course phase,
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: terminal phase, hits the target. This is incredible. And how
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: does it get there? You might ask. I asked. It
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: gets there by star sighting.
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 2: Oh, really?
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: So you realize there's this little panel that opens up
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: in the ballistic missile. And there are other ways that
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: it's navigating. But the primary mean of navigation is star sighting.
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: I mean, you just have to really stop and go, oh,
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: first of all, it's actually a really interesting concept that
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: the most advanced, potentially civilization-ending ballistic missile is guiding itself
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: to its target by this ancient concept, like that our
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: hunter-gatherer ancestors used, which is looking at the stars.
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 2: It's looking at the stars and then navigating using them.
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: And that's meant to be a defense against a system,
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: an enemy taking control of your nuclear weapons.
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 2: The issue we have is that there's potentially nine or
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 2: 10 different nuclear powers and they don't all have the
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 2: same system. So if we get to the point of AGI,
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 2: which a lot of people almost see as the singularity,
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 2: almost you can't see past that moment where there is
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 2: a new being amongst us that is capable of thinking
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 2: faster and more expansively and more intelligently than humans and
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 2: those things we don't i think it might look at
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 2: our systems as child's play as well maybe not our
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 2: systems but maybe it'll look at north korea systems as
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 2: child's play it might be able to put that vcr
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 2: into the system and play out the nucleus simulation that
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 2: tricks those people into believing they're being attacked.
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: Yes and so which is maybe time for the answer
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: to your question of should we be at zero right
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: yeah so what you have presented, which would be the
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: whole point of somebody like me writing a book that
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: somebody like you would read of a younger generation and
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: begin having these conversations with their colleagues and their thought
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: leaders and the people that could maybe influence public policy
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: and saying, well, that would be a very good reason
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: to have zero nuclear weapons or, you know, everybody gets 10.
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: I'm making that up, but right? Because if you have 12,500
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: nuclear weapons, it's, better than 70,000, but there's way too
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: many for an artificially intelligent, you know, trigger scenario like
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: you're talking about.
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 2: Are you optimistic?
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: Optimistic about? The future. I mean, I am an optimistic
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 1: person by nature. And so.
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 2: Do you think there will be a nuclear war in
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 2: the course of humanity?
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: I wrote this book as the optimistic, hopeful person that's saying,
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: read this and realize that a man-made problem has a
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 1: man-made solution.
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 2: Earlier you talked about there being high consequence and low probability.
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 2: But the more the years tick on, that probability increases
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 2: by nature of there being this mad king that might
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 2: at some point... That's what I think. So I was
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 2: asking myself, eventually, if we play this forward, I don't know,
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 2: a thousand years, what is most likely to cause the
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 2: end of humanity? Is it a mad king somewhere who
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 2: doesn't want that? He realizes that he's going to either die,
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 2: he's got cancer, he realizes that he's got some sickness
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 2: and he doesn't really want his son to take power.
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 2: He starts getting a bit agitated. Maybe he has some
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 2: kind of psychosis, schizophrenia, I don't know, decides to, in
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 2: his dying days, to let a couple of these things fly.
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 2: Is that eventually going to happen? The laws of probability,
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 2: the laws of averages say that the longer we're here,
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 2: the longer we have these weapons, the higher the probability.
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: I mean, I leave that to people like you to
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: think about and talk about because I do, and I
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: am fascinated that I find that people of your generation
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: ask that question a lot more than perhaps people of
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: my generation and older. Like that was not a mindset
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 1: that people necessarily had. hadn't talked about. And I think
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: that has to do with the confluence of events that
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: you talk about. First of all, people have access to
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: information in a manner they didn't 30, 40 years ago,
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: or it took a lot more effort. And also that
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 1: there are these incredible new threats that you're talking about
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: that you cannot overlook. And so you would think that
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: it's time to kind of, and I'm not a Pollyanna,
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: but you have to move away from seeing everyone and
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: everything as an enemy and moving toward It's fine to
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: have adversaries. Having opponents is, you know, sportsmen have opponents, right?
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: But everyone being an enemy and having, you know, wars
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 1: escalating around the world, it seems as if what you
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: are saying is there has to be a fundamental shift
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: in what people are considering important.
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 2: But war has always existed, and it's existed as long
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 2: as humans have. So it makes me think that war
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 2: is just part of humans trying to coexist. And all
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 2: of the things that are hardwired into us, our search
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 2: for status and ego and reproduction and resources and survival
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 2: result in war, like they result in recessions.
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: So I read a lot about the origin of war.
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: It's a debate, but it is discussed. And the anthropologists,
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 1: I think, have the most interesting insight sort of thoughtful
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: concepts around it, which I'll share with you, which is this,
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: because yes, technically there has always been war. And one
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: of the debates is, you know, did war begin with
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 1: civilization or were hunter-gatherers warring? But more interesting to that,
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: I think, is about the anthropologists who studied in the 60s,
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: the hunter-gatherer tribes like in the Amazon, when there were
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 1: still access to them and they were sort of, you know,
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: they were unaffected by civilization at all. And they could
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: look at how they perceived enemies and an interesting idea
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: came out of that which makes me think about optimists
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 1: versus pessimists right sort of or rather those who trust
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: versus those who are suspicious that and that no matter
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: if a hunter is out hunting you know that's part
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 1: of a hunter-gatherer tribal environment and he comes across another
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: person obviously there could be that person is either threatening
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: or that person is someone to team up with against
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: the greater threat. And the anthropologists do not know why
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 1: it is that some people interpret this person with suspicion
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: and then might kill him, and others would interpret that
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: person as a teammate. And so if we don't know
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: how human, you know, is it genetics? Like, how do people...
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: either fall on one of those two sides. But what
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: we do know is that people can learn to think differently.
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: You talk with half your guests on the podcast about this.
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: People can be trained, not, you know, propagandized, but people
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: can learn to think differently. So if you're me, who
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: is a hopeful person and wants to see the positive
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 1: side of even my dark reporting, because that's a better
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: way choice for me and for my family. I train
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: myself to find, if you will, the silver lining, or rather,
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: if that's too Pollyannish, to find the way in which,
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: how do I look at the person coming at me
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: as someone who could be on my team or even
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 1: an opponent, but not an enemy that I would have
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: to kill?
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 2: What's the most interesting thing that you've written about that
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 2: we haven't discussed? And I don't just mean in No
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 2: Nuclear War, I mean in all these books. I mean,
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 2: I'm particularly fascinated by DARPA because I think in a
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 2: lot of the world, especially in Europe, in the UK,
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 2: we don't even know what DARPA means. So it was
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 2: interesting reading about the existence of that. But in all
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 2: these books, what is the most interesting thing, the most
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 2: resonant thing when you talk about your work to people?
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 2: Maybe that surprised you.
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: I mean, every single one of my books is powerfully
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: important to me, not just because of the information there,
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: but because the people I met along the way. And
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 1: I really could not you know, put one over the
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 1: other because that would be like favoring a child. And
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: I mean that literally, you know. Sometimes when I prepare
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 1: to do a podcast, I read my own books. And
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: I'm really, for me, it's the sum total of these
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: incredibly fascinating people I have had the incredible fortune of
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: interviewing and also how fate and circumstance always seems to
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: play a role In all of their lives. And that's
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: maybe the theme that I take away from all of
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: this as opposed to the specific shocking thing. Because remember
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: that many of the people that I interview, because they're
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: war fighters or intelligence agency people, many of their friends
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: have died.
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 2: Is there anyone you interviewed that brought you to tears
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 2: when you were interviewing them?
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely. I can't even say it now because I might. Yeah.
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 2: I'm going to ask you for the example.
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 1: You want the example? I'll tell you right now.
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 2: It's a hard one.
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: So I was just in Brussels, I told you, at
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: the nuclear convention. And I met a woman who was
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: one year and 10 months when the bomb was dropped
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: on nagasaki so she's a survivor of the nagasaki bomb
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: right and i met her i brought her a signed
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: copy of my book right i mean you just think
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 1: about being a victim of that and also i learned
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: so much about the stigma that followed the survivors of
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 1: the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the stigma, because
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: they were perceived as sort of tainted people, tainted humans.
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: And there was this deep fear of the legacy of radiation.
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: And I met her and I expected to just be
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: so composed. But in talking to her, I got very
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: emotional kind of, you know, because You can't avoid that.
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 1: And part of the reason why I got so emotional
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: was that, and I haven't written about this yet, but
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: I will, is that someone I interviewed and someone that
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: meant a lot to me and that I have written
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 1: about a lot wired that nuclear weapon that was dropped
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: on Nagasaki. And so when you think about it, And
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: there's little old me, the reporter, who fate and circumstance
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: put in Brussels last week at a nuke expo. You
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: couldn't make that up if you were me, you know,
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: even a year ago, let alone 10 years ago, let
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: alone when I was a child. And here I am,
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: and one hand of my reporting goes to that source
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: that worked with me for a very long time, whose
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 1: story I haven't written yet, who wired the bomb that
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: was dropped on Nagasaki And my other hand goes to
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: someone who was there. That, that wells you up because
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 1: it's the human condition.
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 2: Can you speak to this impact that that had on
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 2: both those individuals? So starting with, if we start with
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 2: the individual who was involved in wiring that bomb.
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: So, and I know less about her than I know
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: about him.
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: And I've reached out to her and we will do
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: interviews now.
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 1: So, but for him, it impacted his whole life and
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: he became a member of the Manhattan project and he
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: became uniquely tied into the nuclear weapons industry. So these
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 1: kind of long arcs of history are so deeply interesting
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 1: to me, especially as I get older. You move from
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: the intensity of specific missions that people were on, of
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: specific operations they ran, and you begin to look at
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: a human over the course of their life. And what
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 1: that means, because ultimately that's the most interesting storytelling of all.
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 1: It's the most interesting conversation you and I can have.
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: And you have to get a little bit older to
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: know that, you know. But sometimes when I'm interviewing people
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: who are in their 80s and 90s and I see
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: them looking at me. And I, like, especially going back
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: 15 years ago when I started reporting all this, and
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: I could see, I can, you know, they're old and
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: they're like earlobe sag and they have, you know, incredible
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: wrinkles and the course of their lives, what they have done,
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: and they're all involved in these top, formerly top secret programs.
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 1: And I can, I can, I sense them looking at
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: me with this sense of their own legacy, that they
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 1: are like, I'm telling her my story and I'm going
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: to be gone. And that's really, that's powerful.
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 2: It's a lot of trust as well, isn't it?
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: It is. That's the role of the reporter. You work,
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: at least my job as an investigative journalist is like,
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: you know, I want people to trust me that I
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: am getting their information down on the public record. And
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: that has a lot to do with why You know,
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: people say, how did you get so many people to
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: talk to you about nuclear weapons, right? So to loop
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: this back to nuclear war scenario, I know I'm doing
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: my job, at least it feels like I'm doing my
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: job properly or earnestly, that I can, in the same week,
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: last week, have two people that are 100% part of
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: the military-industrial complex working for the Space Force in Los Angeles,
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 1: you know, at a Space Force convention, come to my
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: house for dinner, have a conversation with my family, including
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: my young son, who's closer to your age. And then
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: the week before have been with peace activists addressing members
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: of the European Parliament. I have my lane, but yet
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: all of these people are around me. They might not
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: think they can get along, but they probably can. And
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: if I'm the middle of the road of all of
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: that that is important to me as an investigative journalist
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 1: and but also like as an american citizen as and
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: as i said earlier as a as a mother that.
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 2: Individual that wide that that bomb tip took part in
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 2: the manhattan project was involved in dropping the bomb on
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 2: the lady that you met recently how do they feel
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 2: about that now in hindsight with with their age And
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 2: as they look back?
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 1: He has died.
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 2: Oh, okay.
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: He has died.
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 2: How did he feel about it?
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: There were other things that bothered him more, which is
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 1: the great conundrum of using your own eyes to perceive
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 1: another person. And it's why I have not written that
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: book yet, because it is still very confusing. And there's
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 1: a lot of, mysterious elements of it. And sometimes when
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 1: people are involved in really classified programs, you have to
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: spend a lot of time to dig and uncover and discover.
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: It's a long process. And he was involved in some
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: other programs that he had more intense thoughts about. And
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: that alone is enough to, I mean, the look on
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 1: your face is the look on my face. Interviewing him.
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 2: A happy moment.
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. Regret?
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 1: Yes, most definitely. Almost everyone that I end up spending
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 1: hours and hours and hours with, that I would travel with. And,
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: you know, another person that comes to mind was Billy
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 1: Waugh in the Surprise Kill Vanish book. Sort of the
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: longest serving singleton for the U.S. government as a paramilitary operator.
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 1: The saying goes, Billy Waugh killed more people than cancer. Okay? Okay.
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: We traveled to Hanoi together. We traveled to Havana together.
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time with him. Both of
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: these men were probably the two most powerful sources I
• 1:55:54
  Speaker 1: worked with in my life in their 80s and 90s.
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 2: Both happy men?
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: Billy was more complex than happy, you know. You work
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 1: hard to kind of get at the to get at
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 1: the character of someone and you, you, you, you try
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 1: the best to represent them. But I mean, you know,
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: Billy had so many people, um, he was involved in
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 1: so many missions with so many people that died that
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: I don't know if happiness is, he certainly wasn't angry.
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: He certainly wasn't sour, but, uh, he had a lot
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 1: of anger about a lot of things.
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 2: And then the lady, she was one and a half
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 2: years old when the bomb was dropped. She survived as
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 2: a baby. Her family, did they survive? Yes.
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: And it's fascinating. I'm not saying her name because I
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: don't have quite her permission yet, right? Although she is
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: a public figure. But she didn't know about her story
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: until she got older because it was kept hidden from her.
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 1: So these layers upon layers about what we know about
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 1: our own selves, you've made me think of, which is
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 1: you balance that out with what you know about your
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 1: own self versus how easy it is to judge someone
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 1: else or perceive someone else. And I think those two
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 1: journeys in life are interwoven always. Like our own journey
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: for self-discovery, right? In a way, you're on that with
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: your podcast, I'm guessing. You probably learn as much about
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: yourself as you do about others. I know I do.
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: I'm usually in your seat. And there's no camera running.
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: It's just a pen. And so... I can learn so
• 1:57:40
  Speaker 1: much from people about how they speak, why they speak,
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 1: what they say to me. I don't want this on
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: the record. I want you to know this about me
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: because it's important, but I don't want it publicly known.
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: And I honor that because in a way, being a
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: journalist is being a trusted source that someone can share
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: information with within a context that the person, i.e. me,
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: knows the groundwork about. many people's grandchildren. grandchildren don't, they
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: don't know what grandpa did. And they might not know
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 1: for decades. I had a guy show up at one
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 1: of my book signings at the LA Times Festival of
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 1: Bull of Books just last Sunday. And he had you know,
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: a binder. And he said, after you're done signing, would
• 1:58:30
  Speaker 1: you mind looking at this binder and interpreting it for me?
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 1: And of course I did, you know. And his grandfather
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: was a seriously high-ranking person working on nuclear sub-launched ballistic
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 1: missiles in the early days of what was called the
• 1:58:47
  Speaker 1: Polaris experiment. And he had all these documents and no
• 1:58:50
  Speaker 1: one in his family cared about it. He had ID
• 1:58:52
  Speaker 1: badges and letters and pictures with the president and picture.
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: And I could say to him, oh, yes, this is,
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 1: you know, I could give him some context. And his
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: wife was there. And, you know, it was just like,
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: it's a great example of how we sometimes have a
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 1: desire to know about our own selves and our own legacy.
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: Where did we come from? And then grandpa has passed.
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: And so my job is like getting grandpa's story on
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 1: the records.
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 2: That conversation you had since the book had come out
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 2: with the lady you met in Brussels, did it change
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 2: how you viewed your book and the work you've done
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 2: here in writing this? Did it add an element?
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: Oh, it most certainly enhanced and added, and particularly that
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 1: emotional one that you saw for me when I think
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: about that, you know? And I immediately had a long
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: conversation with my husband about it when I got home, right?
• 1:59:44
  Speaker 1: Because I used sounding boards to understand how I even
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 1: really feel about things. But I already had a context
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 1: to know about survivors, having read a lot of accounts
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: from survivors to report the book. And I mention some
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 1: of them. Setsuko Thurlow was a survivor of Hiroshima and
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 1: has given a lot of incredible public statements on the
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 1: record to the United Nations and elsewhere. And I quote
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 1: her in my book to narrate the part of the
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: story where we learn about the bomb dropping on Hiroshima.
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 1: And then I read a lot of the ancillary material
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: about that so I can understand more and try and
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: a lot of work as a journalist, you're just, at
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 1: least if you write narrative nonfiction as I do, you're
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 1: really trying to imagine the situation.
• 2:00:38
  Speaker 2: But then you meet someone and it all becomes real.
• 2:00:41
  Speaker 1: And that's where the this comes in because it's not
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: just words on the paper. It hasn't been.
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 2: When they say a survivor, how do you categorize or
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 2: define a survivor of a nuclear bomb?
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 1: There's a word in Japanese, and I don't want to
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: get it wrong, and it's something like hibakusha. So forgive
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 1: me for not having that word. But that is an
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 1: actual term that is used by anyone who lived through
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 1: the atomic bombings in August of 1945 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• 2:01:23
  Speaker 1: So if you lived through it, you are in that
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: category of people. If you live there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: And so, in other words, now, this was, you know,
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 1: 79 years ago. So most of the survivors, you can
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: just think about the ages of the people involved. Setsuko
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 1: Thurlow is 90. She was a recipient of the– who
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 1: I write about. She was a recipient of the Nobel
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 1: Peace Prize in 2017 with a group of physicians, Dr.
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: Carlos Omana and others whom I met in Brussels that
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 1: are all part of these organizations working to reduce nuclear
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 1: weapons down to zero. They are against– nuclear war and
• 2:02:17
  Speaker 1: their organizations work diligently to bring the information to the
• 2:02:21
  Speaker 1: fore and to affect change at a geopolitical level like
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: the united nations that.
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 2: Conversation you have with your husband when you get home
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 2: that day after meeting her what can you tell me
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 2: about that conversation.
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: It's probably like you have with your i mean my
• 2:02:38
  Speaker 1: husband i've been married a very long time so he
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 1: knows everything um There's also a joke that he has
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: what's called spouse privilege, which he does, right? You can
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 1: tell your spouse anything legally. But no, those conversations are priceless.
• 2:02:55
  Speaker 1: Those are the conversations that allow me to try and
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 1: peel back one layer of what the next book is
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: going to be and what the next book aims to do.
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 1: Because I am always working on the next book. I
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: am one of those people who loves writing. And I
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 1: also love evolving as a writer. So you want to
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 1: get better in terms of the small mistakes you make,
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 1: and you want to get better in terms of the
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 1: intentions that you might have thematically about conveying it. And
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: so thank you for pointing out to me, and I
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 1: mean this sincerely, is that what you helped me realize
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: is that the next book will try to move more
• 2:03:38
  Speaker 1: toward those themes of cause, that was him, and effect
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 1: that was her. This idea that there are always consequences.
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 2: And very real people on both sides that, you know,
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 2: one could class as both victims and innocent at the
• 2:03:57
  Speaker 2: same time, I guess. Of just a horrific situation.
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 2: I'm really intrigued now by this idea that you almost
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 2: have to embody two roles. You're a human being, but
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 2: at the same time, you've got a job to do here.
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 2: And you've got a mission. And when you meet that
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 2: person who was a survivor of a nuclear attack, those
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 2: lines can understandably become, at least in your head, the
• 2:04:23
  Speaker 2: wall can drop between the two. And as you touched
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 2: your heart, you referred to your head, which I think
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 2: is typically when you're talking about your journalistic hat, but
• 2:04:31
  Speaker 2: then we all have hearts as well. Thank God. You
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 2: come home and I know the conversations I have with
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 2: my partner. I guess I'm assuming, you know, the conversation
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 2: you have with your husband there is about the complexity
• 2:04:43
  Speaker 2: of the emotions you feel upon meeting that person. Absolutely.
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: And what you do with that and what that means,
• 2:04:48
  Speaker 1: and you want to be able to have those conversations
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 1: so that you can, I think, have both of those,
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 1: bring both of those components into your work. I mean,
• 2:05:02
  Speaker 1: maybe with the exception being the military or the CIA,
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 1: the two organizations I write about, you know, Billy Wah
• 2:05:08
  Speaker 1: can't bring his heart into the mission when he is
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 1: assigned to go X, Y, Z, you know, find, fix,
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 1: and finish someone.
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 2: They're not allowed to tell their partners, are they, in
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 2: the CIA? No. From what I was told, yeah.
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 1: And so we that aren't in the military or the
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 1: intelligence community have that luxury. Is it a luxury? I
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 1: don't know, but it's a necessity for me.
• 2:05:31
  Speaker 2: What if you couldn't?
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't be myself. I wouldn't. I wouldn't choose that.
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 1: I could never be in the military. I could never
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 1: be in the agency. Because I think you are asked
• 2:05:43
  Speaker 1: to wear a hat that removes your heart. And that's
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 1: not possible for somebody like me. I mean, we just
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 1: figure out our strengths and our weaknesses. And society needs
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 1: all of those people, by the way. That is what
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 1: a democracy is. It is made up of all kinds
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 1: of people. I'm all for that. It's why I have
• 2:06:04
  Speaker 1: so many friends and colleagues from different worlds on different
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 1: sides of the aisle. They just make me think more
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: interesting things about the world in which we all live.
• 2:06:18
  Speaker 2: We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 2: last guest leaves a question for the next guest not
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 2: knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 2: been left for you was written in Europe when we
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 2: were over in our studio there. It is, what is
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 2: the last thing you changed your mind about?
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 1: Well, I'll just, This comes to mind only because it's
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 1: apropos to what we've been talking about, and it has
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 1: to do with reporting, not my personal life, which is
• 2:06:47
  Speaker 1: maybe more interesting to people. I always strive to interview
• 2:06:54
  Speaker 1: people and ask them questions, even if they're hard, even
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: if I have a preconception that maybe they are the
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 1: sort of bad guy, shall we say, or the– Arbitrator. Arbitrator.
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 1: The what?
• 2:07:05
  Speaker 2: The perpetrator.
• 2:07:07
  Speaker 1: Something, not necessarily the, but just that like, I might not,
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: my brain might not think I agree with what they
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 1: did or the project they were on. And there was
• 2:07:15
  Speaker 1: a general that I was trying to interview for the
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 1: Pentagon's brain. And he had, he was kind of the
• 2:07:21
  Speaker 1: creator behind what's called the soldier's super suit.
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 1: And that's a totally different subject, but then these ideas
• 2:07:26
  Speaker 1: to make super soldiers.
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 1: Off of this idea of the, this concept called the
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 1: weakling on the battlefield that humans feel fear. and get fatigued.
• 2:07:36
  Speaker 1: And those are not good things for soldiers. And so
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 1: there are all these programs to try and enhance our
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 1: top tier military fighters to become super soldiers. This is
• 2:07:46
  Speaker 1: a fact. And this one general was part of that program.
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 1: And I had reached out to him and asked him
• 2:07:52
  Speaker 1: to interview with me. And I get it. Lots of
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 1: people say, you know, I'm going to pass. I don't
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 1: want to interview. That's fine. But he ignored me. and
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 1: I felt slighted. And so I'm telling on myself here
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 1: from your view. And so when I was writing my
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 1: narrative of the super soldier, he essentially was kind of
• 2:08:10
  Speaker 1: cast as the bad guy. And then I was in
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: the editorial phase of the book and I got an
• 2:08:18
  Speaker 1: email from him and he said, I'm so sorry I
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 1: didn't get back to you. My wife had cancer. And I,
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 1: what a valuable lesson. What a valuable lesson. And we
• 2:08:33
  Speaker 1: did two interviews and I told my editor, I have
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 1: to rewrite that chapter. And I did.
• 2:08:42
  Speaker 2: I mean, that story speaks. to a lot of the
• 2:08:45
  Speaker 2: subjects we've spoken about today, which is when we see
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 2: someone as different, when we see them as aliens, adversaries, enemies, opponents,
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 2: we are much more likely to treat them as such.
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 2: But in reality, it often turns out that we're all
• 2:09:01
  Speaker 2: very much the same, struggling with the same things, with
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 2: the same worries, anxieties, concerns, apprehensions. And it's just sometimes
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 2: when there's a bridge built in the case of that
• 2:09:10
  Speaker 2: email that we realize that we're not enemies after all.
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 2: and that we don't need to be at war, whether
• 2:09:16
  Speaker 2: that's with words or whether it's with nuclear weapons.
• 2:09:21
  Speaker 1: And when you see that fellow hunter on the path,
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 1: they might not be the enemy. They might be someone
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 1: to work with.
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 2: It's very good of you to admit that, Annie, because
• 2:09:35
  Speaker 2: what you're actually admitting is that you're a human being,
• 2:09:38
  Speaker 2: because we all do that kind of thing. When we
• 2:09:40
  Speaker 2: see someone as an adversary, I think, as you say,
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 2: it feels like it's hardwired into us in some way,
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 2: but But also within that story, we learned to try
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 2: and find or make the bridge ourselves, which in the
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 2: world we live in now with social media and stuff
• 2:09:52
  Speaker 2: doesn't seem to be easy or obvious for people with
• 2:09:56
  Speaker 2: all this polarization and such. And maybe if the US
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 2: could make a bridge with some of these foreign adversaries,
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 2: we wouldn't be talking about nuclear war in your book,
• 2:10:06
  Speaker 2: Nuclear War Scenario. Thank you so much for writing this
• 2:10:09
  Speaker 2: book because I'm a big believer and a big advocate
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 2: of confronting the realities honestly and openly regardless of how
• 2:10:17
  Speaker 2: uncomfortable it is because if we don't i think it
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 2: actually increases the probability of us finding ourselves in a
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 2: 72 hour scenario as you write about in the book
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 2: and i the.
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 1: Same thing 72 minutes 72.
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 2: Minutes jesus christ 72 hours.
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 1: Did i say 72 hours we all make freudian slips
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 1: okay i wish.
• 2:10:34
  Speaker 2: It was 72 uh well i actually don't i i
• 2:10:37
  Speaker 2: don't know if it was gonna happen i'd rather it
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 2: just happened in the blink of an eye but um
• 2:10:42
  Speaker 2: But no, I think it's so important to write. A
• 2:10:44
  Speaker 2: lot of people will be scared. A lot of people
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 2: would choose not to even click on this conversation because
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 2: they're scared of the subject matter. But I think it's
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 2: leaning in that helps us to resolve and find solutions
• 2:10:54
  Speaker 2: to start the conversation. And I know lots of people
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 2: listen to this. You never know, like that documentary or
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 2: movie you talked about earlier, who's listening and the powers
• 2:11:03
  Speaker 2: that they have and the decisions that they can make
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 2: to change things or to create one of those bridges
• 2:11:07
  Speaker 2: to sort of denuclearize the world. And that's the work
• 2:11:11
  Speaker 2: you're doing. So I think it's very, very important work.
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 2: And I'm glad that you've committed your brilliance to doing it.
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 2: So thank you.
• 2:11:16
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me.
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 2: Thank you.