Nuclear War Expert: 72 Minutes To Wipe Out 60% Of Humans, In The Hands Of 1 Person! – Annie Jacobsen

no matter how nuclear war begins it ends in 72 minutes and 5 billion people would be dead do you think there will be a nuclear war so I’ve interviewed former secretaries of defense the former nuclear sub Commander the Secret Service and what I learned was oh my God Annie Jacobson investigative researcher and writer who specializes in uncovering the world’s biggest secrets We Are One misunder standing away from nuclear apocalypse and yet you have presidents threatening nuclear war in fact the president of the United States doesn’t need to ask anyone to launch a nuclear missile it makes me realize how important the decision to pick our leaders is nothing could be more important could you play out scenario where nuclear war broke out yes and I can describe in painstaking horrific detail precisely what happens so but after nuclear war the survivors would be forced to live underground and envy the dead Annie is there anyone you interviewed that brought you to tears yes I met a woman who is a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb and I haven’t written about this yet but someone I interviewed and someone that meant a lot to me wired that nuclear weapon that was dropped on Nagasaki can you speaking about the impact that it had on both those individuals and it’s horrifying congratulations Dio gang we’ve made some progress 63% of you that listen to this podcast regularly don’t subscribe which is down from 69% our goal is 50% so if you’ve ever liked any of the videos we’ve posted if you like this channel can you do me a quick favor and hit the Subscribe button it helps this channel more than you know and the bigger the channel gets as you’ve seen the bigger the guests get thank you and enjoy this [Music] episode Annie you wrote this book about nuclear war and published it in March 2024 the timing of this book seems to be a little bit coincidental when I or not when I look at what’s going on in the world at the moment why did you write a book about nuclear war and why did you write it now as an investigative journalist before nuclear war a scenario I had written six previous books all of which are about the military and intelligence organizations in the United States DARPA Area 51 always the Pentagon the CIA that’s my that’s my beat and think about how many sources I have in each book a hundred or more how many covering all the wars by the way since World War II all these intelligence and Military programs uh intensely kinetic and think of how many people said to me with a kind of Pride I dedicated my life to preventing nuclear World War III that’s always the idea in the defense department and in the CIA we are there to prevent nuclear war and so during the previous administration former president Trump there was this presidential rhetoric going on you may recall fire and fury Trump and the president of North Korea the leader of North Korea threatening this kind of thing and I like many I’m sure began to wonder my God what if deterrence another word for prevention fails and that is the question that I put to all of those sources in the book and that result is nuclear war a scenario what was your intention I wanted to show in horrific detail just how horrible just how apocalyptic nuclear war will be because I think many people have forgotten or don’t know to begin with the consequences of a nuclear exchange as I show in the book almost certainly if a nuclear exchange happens and we’re talking strategic ballistic missiles it will not stop until the world ends and we are talking about in seconds and minutes not in days and weeks and months that is astonishing when did you start writing the book when was the first word written so probably during covid was the first word written but keep in mind my reporting on nuclear weapons goes back my entire career my first book Area 51 is about a a joint CIA Air Force Base out there in the Nevada desert inside a secret test and training range where the United States government used to explode nuclear weapons atmospheric nuclear weapons in the 50s and so my when I was reporting Area 51 I inter I wound up quite literally I did not intend to but I wound up interviewing the people who armed wired and fired those nuclear weapons early Manhattan Project members and they that was kind of my B story of Area 51 and what I learned was like oh my God and I was also surprised to learn that most people didn’t even know we the American government set off a hundred some odd atmospheric nuclear weapons in the desert in Nevada testing them so my reporting to answer that’s a long- winded answer of I’ve been on this issue peripherally you know for years for more than a decade but the idea in this book the word one as you ask was like once I understood that nuclear war is a sequence it begins the first fraction of a second after detection then I could see clearly oh my God it’s a ticking clock scenario because it just all happened so fast I ask that again because so if you started writing the first word of the book on nuclear war in Co sort of 2020 2020 roughly 2021 around there 20 2021 yeah since then things have escalated around the world in terms of conflict in a way that I imagine you couldn’t have forecasted and even it’s almost ironic that in the month that your book was published Putin moved I think he moved nuclear weapons into bellarus and the rhetoric and he started saying that he would use them and if you look at the terminology him and his commanders are using towards the world it seems like we’re at a moment that I haven’t seen in my lifetime where the subject of nuclear war seems to be more real than ever before you’re absolutely right and that is astonishing because in 2021 when I began the interviews people were forthcoming with me you know as you know from the list of sources I’ve interviewed former secretaries of defense former nuclear sub Commander you know former former stratcom Commander former FEMA director former cyber Chief and a lot of these individuals shared with me in 2021 this idea that wow the world has kind of forgotten that the nuclear threat is always there and so over the course of reporting and writing you’re absolutely right that the geopolitical temperature of the world has escalated to a point point that you have not seen in your lifetime and I haven’t seen in my lifetime setting the stage even more we talked about how possible nuclear war is but one thing I learned from reading your book which actually surprised me was that it doesn’t take thousands of people to agree on a nuclear war for it to begin in the case of the United States it only takes one person to make that decision which I find quite unnerving that there’s one individual that could theoretically make the decision that would destroy the Earth you’re absolutely right and this kind of thing is surprising to almost everyone one of the things that I strive to do in my reporting is take very complex Science and Technology military issues and simplify them down for the Layman just for the average Joe or the average Jane and I do that by interviewing the really smart really knowledgeable people on those subjects I have two things going for me perhaps as an investigative journalist that help in conveying the story is that I’m not a scientist and so I can ask questions that the average person would ask like really try and help me understand this whatever this is and then also that I have a real interest in making what is conveyed to me make sense to other people in their lives right so and also perhaps make them realize I never even stopped to think about the fact how strange is it that the United States President this is what you learned in the book and you’re talking about the United States president has sole presidential authority to launch a nuclear war what does that mean it’s exactly like it sounds what’s so interesting is a lot of this stuff this nomenclature that gets thrown at you if you just break down it’s Soul solo presidential he’s the podus authority he doesn’t have to ask anyone for permission not the SEF not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff not the Congress I love the worried look on your face in this moment because it is once you know that you say well first you might Google is it really true and you will get for example on Reddit like that’s not really true you’ll get like hundreds of thousands of people you know coming in with their opinions but how that’s not really true well it is really true it’s absolutely true and in fact during the former president Trump Administration Congress became so sort of I want to say motivated or alarmed by this issue meaning they were being asked questions by the powers that be is this actually true that they released a report stating specifically and quote it in the book yes it is true as commanderin-chief the president has this sole Authority he doesn’t need to ask anyone and hopefully sort of my bringing sort of Concepts like that to the four right away the reader can then become engaged and they say well that’s weird why and then I can give you a very simple answer without necessarily taking you through the whole history of presidential Authority but it has to do with the ticking clock of it and I explained to you right away that a ballistic missile travels from one continent it’s called an ICBM people have heard of that intercontinental ballistic missile again exactly like it sounds it can travel from one continent to the next in roughly 30 minutes carrying a nuclear warhead to strike a Target once you realize wait a minute there are only 30 minutes this isn’t like hey guys should did we go have a war in Iraq let’s discuss this let’s debate this let’s take it to the Congress this is there is a ballistic missile sir coming at the United States and you must act and that’s why in the simplest layman’s terms sole presidential Authority exists so let’s define then what these weapons are we’ve many of us have seen that film up inimer we saw them out in the desert I think in New Mexico playing playing with with all these weapons and eventually making this one bomb that they would then drop drop in Japan the weapon we see in that film which was in the 19 made in the 1940s that ultimately led to the end of the war is that the same weapon that we’re talking about today no well in in in sort of principle in yes meaning it’s an atomic bomb but there’s two things that separate where we are now one has to do with the size and the power of the bomb so the the in 194 5 there were atomic bombs now there are thermonuclear bombs so an atomic bomb is used inside a thermonuclear weapon as the trigger okay it is a bomb inside a bomb and the power of the thermonuclear bomb is so astonishingly you know destructive you can read the details I interviewed Richard Garwin who designed the first thermonuclear bomb for Edward Teller when he was 24 years old I interview me in his ’90s he explains to me and I explain to you what the power is behind that but this so the atomic bomb and and it has to do with size like the old atomic bomb the one that was dropped on Hiroshima was the size of a small elephant okay 15 kilotons in a big giant elephant-sized bomb inside of an aircraft having to fly from tinan Island to over Hiroshima where it drops in an aircraft that all changed when we brought the Nazi scientists to us oh let’s have let’s figure out how to do two things let’s figure out how to create more powerful bombs that’s the result the result is the thermonuclear bomb and let’s make them smaller we can’t load an elephant-sized weapon into the top of a ballistic missile it needs to be smaller and so so much of this buildup was about creating more powerful weapons to be smaller in size and then you see the military-industrial complex you you can imagine and I do this as a history lesson in just a few short pages to try to bring readers up to speed without losing the drama of the narrative and the results if you flash forward to where we are now which is where we’ve been for a very long time is a nuclear Triad just like it sounds three parts we have icbms silos under the ground so those are weapons hidden in the ground ground in the United States there are 400 of them there were more now there are 400 you can find out where they are on a map they’re in silos underground silos across the Midwest and the west then we have our nuclear armed nuclear powerered submarines that carry that same kind of concept of a ballistic missile with a warhead in its nose cone we have those same systems on submarines and the technology behind it is astonishing I take the reader through it fast from the experts who explain it to me in a digestible way and those systems lurk around in the oceans all 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year they’re called the handmaidens of the Apocalypse they’re almost impossible to find right they are impossible to find the nuclear the former nuclear force subc Commander um Admiral Connor had this great way of describing it to me when I said like how hard is it to find a sub he said Annie it’s easier to find a grapefruit sized object in space than a nuclear sub under the sea and it’s not just the United States that have these weapons which I think is important to say there’s many people listening all around the world now who have these weapons in their country to you list um several of those countries I think it’s nine countries in total that has nuclear weapons right what are those countries I know we have them back in the UK yeah there are nine nuclear armed Nation also really interesting to think about that the whole sort of let’s have a Triad let’s have all these weapons that we will you we will have a concept of mutual assured destruction so we will have these weapons but we will never use them because everyone would be destroyed those Concepts go back to the 50s when there were only two nuclear armed Nations the United States and Soviet Russia so you know really making all of this more precarious talk looping back to your you know notion that like my God we are at this precipice of danger which we are is because there are nine nuclear armed Nations many of which are in direct conflict with others or their neighbors and they are the US Russia China the UK France India and Pakistan Israel North Korea and there’s some threat that Iran are trying to absolutely I mean this is a very very very significant threat and you really have to look I think the book I stay away from the sort of geopolitical posturing or analysis or even um you know opinion about the political aspect of all of this but but I think readers get to take their away their and have because I have read a lot of the responses and had a lot of really interesting conversation since the book published a month ago but yes you can take away what you think about the fact what my God you put a tenth nuclear armed nation in here that is Iran how more destabilizing is that going to be to Safety and Security and when I look at the list of countries um you’ve written about that have these nuclear weapons the US Russia they’re both basically in proxy wars at the moment with obviously the the war going on in Ukraine think about Pakistan and India um Israel and Iran you know they’re both at conflict fly throwing different missiles at each other and DRS at each other at the moment um the UK and France are obviously part of NATO so they’re kind of sucked into the whole Russia Ukraine us conflict that’s going on that proxy war there these countries right now many of them I think the majority of them are involved in a direct war or some form of proxy war as it is and with many of these wars it’s hard to find the way that it ends the way out the kind of golden bridge because Ukraine aren’t going to relent so Russia aren’t going to necessarily decide one day that they’re going to lose the war that would cause significant ramifications for Putin his reputation and Russia as a whole the US can’t let Ukraine lose for a variety of geopolitical reasons and then at the same time all this conflict started in Israel following the the attack in Israel which has sucked Iran in in much of that region it all seems like you know these are the countries right now that are involved in the conflict that is scaring many much many of us um in a significant way and if all these countries operate in a similar way where there’s one individual that can make the decision to release those weapons it is quite scary the UN Secretary General said recently that we are one misunderstanding one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon and so the scary part of it is that when you look at that sort of verbage right when I talk about you know nuclear Armageddon nuclear apocalypse nuclear Holocaust those are words out of the mouths of some of these leaders so there is a very clear notion that if nuclear war starts it ends civilization that is almost certainly known among the leaders and yet you have people like the president of Russia and the president of the United States and the leader of North Korea throwing around threats and terms you know the leader of North Korea recently accused the United States of having a Sinister intention of provoking nuclear war I mean that is a provocation on top of a provocation you know embedded in but to your point what’s the point of being scared well the point is to realize that paity is not necessarily the answer that your knowledge of this situation leads to that’s just that’s just the history of of civilization one of the things it did make me think when I realized that there’s one individual in in the United States where we are now who can make that decision and that there’s basically like someone following the president with a briefcase called that it’s like the football or something yes what is that football for people that don’t know yeah and so so now that people know about the football or whe they read it you’ll you’ll see you can see in photographs of the president you will almost if he’s in frame you’ll see the Aid that’s the military aid an individual who is assigned to be with the president 24/7 365 and inside the football it’s called the emergency satal are two important things there’s in instrumentation that allows the president to be identified as the president to the National military command center which is the nuclear bunker beneath the Pentagon okay so it’s a it’s a call and response authent authentication and then there is something called colloquially the black book and it was told to me the reason it’s called the black book is because it involves so Much Death and what the black book is is a list of nuclear strike options for the president to choose from and so once the president is notified that a ballistic missile is coming at the United States and he has to make a decision about a Counterattack he must look quickly because as you learn in the book and as I learned from presidents uh there is a six minute window of decision making and so there’s no time for a Roundtable discussion there is a list of options that has been pre-prepared for the president to choose from and I interviewed for the book someone who actually was responsible for some of those decisions in the 880s and he described to me in appalling detail what it was like to have worked on this in the Pentagon like worked out numerically different targets and why they would be Targets in said strike XYZ or Q against said nation and then later seeing the black book and realizing the like sort of transmutation of that information information to what was described by the only Mill Aid who’s ever gone on the record speaking about this as essentially like a Denise menu list of options and so you understand that this list is so watered down into strike options and there is so little time that the president in essence has really no idea what he’s striking and how many millions people will be killed when I hear that it makes me realize how important the decision to pick our leaders is something I didn’t realized before nothing could be more important and yet I learned in the book and I’m talking about from former secretaries of defense people very close to the president that most presidents are ill informed about their role as commander-in-chief in a nuclear war because and it was said to me most don’t want to know and again so this brings us back to that Paradox of deterrence the original question I asked in writing and Reporting this book what if deterrence fails deterrence is this idea we will have so many nuclear weapons pointed at the other side they will have so many nuclear weapons pointed at us no one would be insane enough to let any of them loose that’s how we all stay safe another way of saying deterrence is more nuclear weapons make us more safe you can decide if you think that’s a little or a wellan but that is what exists okay so with that in mind we should really be doing mental checks on our leaders every three months because we’ve all probably had an experience with someone who’s had a episode you know and I’ll I’ll leave it at episode because there’s a variety of different types of episodes one can have and I was thinking well if the president just has a bit of an episode and gets a little bit paranoid or you know sort of has a little bit of a schizophrenic paranoia which can happen to people for a variety of different unpredictable reasons then that President could potentially make a decision to end the planet and there doesn’t seem to be a defense mechanism to stop him doing that or her doing that you’re reminding me of a famous story when Nixon was president and it was during the Watergate scandal he probably knew the end of his presidency was near and he was very drunk one night and he began to threaten or rather he just began to talk you know in in this sort of extremely verbose drunken manner about how he could end the world or kill tens of millions of people with the push of a button and his it is said that that Kissinger called up the military and said if the president orders any kind of a nuclear strike talk to me first really and do you so do you think that would have happened I mean we you know it’s hard to know isn’t it all of these stories unless they come out of the mouth of the individual who actually said that are in essence stories so there’s an element of Truth to them for sure um you know the actual command and control who’s going to follow the rules people ask me that question o often and I took that exact question like you know I think people have a niev that if you’re in the nuclear command and control whether you’re missileer in a an underground silo or a Submariner on a sub that you might when you get this command suddenly have this heart you know like in a Hollywood movie have this moment where you say my goodness I’m going to save the planet rather than destroy it I put that question to Dr Glenn McDuff the historian at the classified museum at Los Alamos the one you and I can’t go see um and I said do you think that could happen and he said Annie you have a better chance at winning Powerball than betting on someone in the nuclear chain of command and control to defy orders and I said why and he said well you are trained to follow orders I spoke to a CIA agent or should I say a former CIA agent called Andrew Bustamante might have seen him does some podcasts and um after speaking to him I I completely agree because as he said he was trained to basically he was selected and trained on the basis that he would follow orders in that moment and they even do drills to make sure dummy drills to make sure that they’re prepared I guess psychologically to follow through all those instructions it made me think as well that if if um what if the president’s dead what if the president is hit by a nuclear weapon from another country and now they can no longer make the decision is the decision deferred onto somebody else well I take the reader through that precisely because those are the kind of questions that I had to ask of my sources as I was reporting this on the one hand as I was learning what happens in the seconds and minutes you know after a launch is detected because we have a satellite system that detects the launch of a nuclear weapon in under a fraction of a second but it’s not always very trustworthy this is why I’m concerned the ours is very trustworthy as far as I understand it’s called cbers it’s built by Lockheed and it’s astonishingly powerful other nations do not have that same kind of Technology cuz I was reading about the sort of historic um mistakes that were made sometimes people thought there was a a nuclear bomb or a strike coming and it was actually just a bunch of swans absolutely I was a little bit like I me these are these are you know this is the one miscalculation one misunderstanding away from nuclear arm again what what are those instances from history where the nuclear detection system was triggered and someone in some country decided um not to follow through on a notification I think the most interesting stories that I report come from the person who is an actual firsthand witness to it because what often happens is the telephone game you know whereby one person tells the story and then your imagin you add a detail so I write about a couple of them in the book but one of them came to me firsthand and I’ll share that with you which was former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and he was on the night watch during the Carter Administration he wasn’t the secretary of defense yet he had like the job before that the director of research and Engineering at the Pentagon but it was his his night watch informed the president job and he was told by the National military command center which is the bunker beneath the Pentagon that there were ballistic missiles on the way from Soviet Russia this was confirmed by the nuclear bunker beneath offet Air Force Base in Nebraska the stratcom bunker and not only were intercontinental ballistic missiles flying at the United States but they were subl launched ballistic missiles coming at the United States and it was a massive motherload of warheads and Perry described to me as I recount in the book what that was like to try and process in your mind oh my God I’m going to have to tell the president and going to have to and he is going to have to make make a Counterattack and within a matter of minutes he got word that it was a mistake and a mistake you might ask like a mistake how does a mistake happen what he told me was that it was a VHS tape a simulated war game a simulated attack by the Soviet Union against the United States and the VHS tape had mistaken ly been inserted into a machine in the nuclear bunker beneath the Pentagon and because it is linked to stratcom it was seen in both places and Perry said to me it looked real because it was meant to look real there was a president you talk about that played a nuclear war game and discovered that there could be no winners so proud profit is one of the few a very rare Declassified nuclear war game people talk about you know jealously guarded secrets in the United States government you can be sure that anything having to do with nuclear war gaming is way up there in the top secrets along with what is actually in that black book but the proud profit war game was Declassified Reagan had ordered it I don’t believe he participated in it his sect Des everybody in the Comm nuclear command and control participated it for two weeks in 1983 and this is Declassified I reprint some of it in the book and if you have a look at it you might say to yourself what’s the point of declassifying something that looks like this it’s just black it’s like there’s a number here and a word there and a page number but mostly it’s entirely redacted and so what’s the point of De classifying it well for the public something very valuable came out of that which is it allowed a certain civilian who was participating a Yale Professor named Paul Bracken to actually speak about it in a general way he couldn’t you know couldn’t tell opsac but he could generally talk about it and what he said in his own book was that no matter how nuclear war begins NATO is involved NATO is not involved China is involved China’s no matter how it begins it ends in nuclear Armageddon and bracken’s words was that everyone left really depressed nuclear Armageddon essentially means the world is destroyed nuclear Armageddon is the world is destroyed and when you get to the end of the book which happens in 72 minutes and that comes from something that former stratcom director General Keeler said to me when we were discussing and interviewing and I said we I asked him about what could happen if there was a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States and he said the world could end in the next couple of hours so from where we are now in this conversation to the end of this conversation if a nuclear war broke out and we were sat here by the end of this conversation basically the entire world would be destroyed and you and I wouldn’t even know before the first Missile hit that was shocking to me to have that confirmed in essence by uh Obama FEMA director so FEMA the Federal Emergency Management agency is the is the agency in the United States that’s in charge of disasters right so if there’s a hurricane or a flood or an earthquake FEMA steps in to help the people they have something called population protection planning Craig Fugate was Obama’s FEMA director for eight years and he just covered an extraordinary amount of catastrophes in the United States he was also responsible for planning for a nuclear war he told me they did that he also said we plan for asteroid strikes these are called Low probability High consequence events but what Fugate told me that was shocking is that there is no population protection planning in a nuclear war because everyone will be dead and he explained to me that there’s nothing that that the that he could do as FEMA director he would really be putting his efforts from this nuclear bunker where he would be which is called Mount weather he would be putting his efforts on the continuity of government issues the continuity of like the government has what are called essential functions so and you know as a nuclear war is happening the government is trying to prepare to keep the government running which is a form of fantasy in itself and when you read fugates interviews with me he’s just so candid about how there is nothing anyone can do and you know what he told me was so shocking I went back to him and said like I just want to really make sure these are your actual quotes that you that that and he absolutely you know he was one of the first people to write an Amazon review of the book after it published here in the United States and I find that both terrifying but also heartening for this reason is that a lot of these people who leave office because my sources are all former and then the title they when they are in the command and control they are very focused on doing their job hence what we spoke about earlier about like following orders they are civil servants they are dedicated civil servants they believe in National Security they believe in you know the perseverance of government and then they leave office and they are just regular people again and that’s when the heart I think begins to lead and particularly as people get older because I interview a lot of people in their 80s and 90s and then they begin to think about what this means in terms of Legacy what is nuclear command and control really as buttoned up as this is might be them talking you know as as I thought and is it a good idea in a world that is so rapidly changing both geopolitically and also in terms of Technology was there one individual you met that comes to mind when I ask who the most troubled person was in terms of the work they participated in or troubled in the context of what they know and what it means for Humanity and how they’re grappling with that the most concerned and sort of of the most activated by all means would be former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and he’s now in his 90s and I I don’t believe he’s doing interviews anymore but it it’s not surprising that Perry shared with me his intense worry about all of this because he has been actively working on this and you know for at least 152 years and when I say this I mean bringing the information to the public so that the public is aware he wrote his own book with a colleague called the button and he has you know really he did a podcast called at the brink and what’s fascinating is Perry spent most of his life dedicated to what you might call the military industrial complex right to the research and development of weapon systems that I write about in my other books the DARPA book in particular because this is all part and partial to what we’re talking about here that you have this sort of Industry military weapon system industry that is in a constant state of forward movement it’s deeply tied to economics to jobs to prosperity and so where does that take us and and at what point does it end it was Eisenhower who said in his famous speech where the public really learned about this so-called military-industrial complex because Eisenhower spoke of it in his farewell speech but he also said an important thing in the second half of that speech which doesn’t get nearly as much airtime which is that a knowledgeable and alert citizenry is how you balance sort of an idea of peace with an idea of defense and I think what frightens both of us that we talked about in the beginning here was that peace and defense are very different than constant states of War 72 minutes you you go through this in the book minute almost minute by minute showing exactly what will happen we know in those first couple of minutes there’s a notification that there’s a you know a nuclear bomb coming in from somewhere my question on that was and I was thinking about this earlier as we were talking about it how does the president know how does the world leader of that country know the prime minister of the UK whoever it might be or Netanyahu or Putin know where that nuclear bomb has come from because we talked about this sort of black black book of places this menu that the president has in that football that his Aid is carrying around how does he know which place to pick on the menu to send a nu CLI bom back powerful distinction right this is not 911 where suddenly there are planes in the Trade Center towers and you know everyone is scrambling to say who did this and the CIA is saying this is Al-Qaeda it has the mark of but no one knows for sure this is not that this is the fact that for 79 years the United States has been building nuclear weapons nuclear weapons systems and also systems to detect other people’s nuclear weapons should they have them okay but what if the submarines okay so good point on the submarines which is but we have a set of satellites called cbers which are parked now I’m only when you said what how would Netanyahu know how how would the president of r that is a different scenario what I am talking about is the US president because I have interviewed people in the US defense department and the intelligence community and the defense department knows precisely where a weapon comes from within a second of launch because the cber satellites can measure the hot rocket exhaust so you imagine a Rocket taking off lots of fire beneath it that is measured from 22,000 Mi up in geosync I mean that is just a technological astonishment and then there Begins the data sent down to these various commands in the United States the Aerospace data center the space force and they begin measuring the trajectory of the missile and figuring out where it’s going to go like it’s not going to Moscow and it’s not going to Guam those would be opposite directions is it going to San Francisco or is it going to the East Coast that is learned in 100 seconds approximately okay now you are right you cannot you if some if a submarine launches a ballistic missile there’s no way of knowing where that came from which is why in the scenario I have that happen and it creates a whole other set of problems what are those I I mean I mean what is the answer to that cuz I was imagining if the cber system sees a nuclear bomb coming out of the Pacific Ocean I mean that could be rishy sunak that could be that could be the UK firing one at America it could be you know could be anybody you are absolutely right that there is no way of knowing and in the scenario that I chose because I wanted to try to take the reader through a logical sequence if you could even call any of this logical because it’s all you know they call it mad Mutual assured destruction it’s really Madness but you cannot know who launched that uh so does we just go for our enemy in that situation I mean do you know what I mean now you have a new task you are going to right nuclear war an even worse scenario well because that’s what you would do right if you’re President Biden your a turns during goes hi president there’s a nuclear bomb heading our way I go I know who exactly who that who did that and and you might start firing a couple of back back just the people that you assume would do it and then they do the same um the nuclear armed submarines that are owned by Russia and China regularly come within a couple hundred miles of East Co of each coast of the United States and you can assume the same about England and how do we know this well you can’t see a submarine moving in real time but you can track the submarines movements after the fact owing to a very complex system of underwater surveillance systems that we have in place and there’s a map that appeared in a recent defense department budget request to Congress which I reproduce in the book that shows just how close those submarines those enemy submarines get to the coast and that reduces the travel time of a ballistic missile down to under 10 minutes and so this idea that we really are living at the edge of Apocalypse is not an exaggeration the question is how would this start why would this start again read the scenario and you begin to realize this could start in or have a discussion with you and you this could start in so many the training test tape I mean and the real takeaway is asking ourselves is why did n of us know about this or most of us rather there’s so many ways this could start and one of them one of them obviously again has emerged front of mind for society since you started writing the book which is artificial intelligence before I get to that though I really want to I really want to close off on this 72 minutes I understand the first couple of minutes there um what does the person listening to this need to know about what happens in the subsequence what are 60 minutes there’s a very fast process where the trajectory of the ballistic missile is being determined and we’re talking in the first minutes of the sequence because everyone is getting ready to tell the president because what they’re going to tell the president is Sir you need to choose a Counterattack that is called get the blue clock running does the president not like get in some plane super quick so we’ll get there in a second that’s where the that’s the decision tree problem okay so everyone is working on figuring out the trajectory of the ballistic missile and there is the first confirmation when you see it and by the way a ballistic missile cannot be redirected or recalled cannot be now ultimately the defense department will wait for second confirmation of that missile from a ground radar system we have them around the world the one in the scenario that would see it is in Alaska it has to be able to see and confirm that missile is definitely coming this way and that happens at around 8 or 9 minutes and so the process in between them everyone’s getting ready to brief the president about a Counterattack and so in the scenario the president learns around three minutes and then they’re waiting on the secondary confirmation and in my interviews with the Secret Service as I was reporting the book interesting things would happen exactly like your question like wait a minute what would would the president be staying at the White House so I as the reporter put that question to the former director of The Secret Service who explains to me how there is a team called the counter assault team um and that is that is the sort of paramilitary organization of the C of the Secret Service that’s going to always be there to move the president really fast if need be and in this situation they make a decision we’re moving him if the target is Washington DC or anywhere on the E East Coast for that matter we cannot have the president anywhere near Ground Zero and their job that they are sworn to do is to protect the president and so that then you’re going to have a bit of a stalemate because the military command wants the president on on comms to be able to give him Counterstrike orders that is what they want and they can only get those orders from the president but the secret service has a totally different agenda and in my scenario the Secret Service considering they’re the only ones in the room that are armed win they take the president out and he flies out of Washington DC in Marine One Marine one being the helicopter the helicopter that is that yeah you know and then I learned even more interesting details like okay so in the scenario the likely situation is that the electromagnetic pulse will really threaten the the electronic system in Marine 1 and it will be in deep danger of crashing for people that don’t know for people that don’t know an an electromagnetic pulse is like a thre pulsed sort of shock wave that essentially just zeros out Electronics imagine your house getting struck by lightning a direct hit and no surge suppressor I mean it’s just it’s all the electronics go out and that will almost certainly happen Marine one is outfitted retrofitted against EMP attack because they think about these things but no one knows if it’s going to really work it’s been tested in a chamber there so what you’re saying sorry just to clear is that whoever’s attacking the United States or another country would send an electronic pulse first no the pulse is part of the of the bomb going on okay it’s it’s a it’s inherent in the nuclear explosion okay and so even if even if you’re getting the president out if he’s 78 n miles 10 miles out of ground zero as they rush because remember this is all happening in 30 minutes under 30 minutes as they rushed to get him out of the White House the EMP could seriously damage the Marine one so the Secret Service people I interviewed explained to me that they would have a backup plan which would be to Tandem jump the president out of the aircraft in a with with a parachute they would strap the president onto them and jump out of the aircraft because at least there would be the the aircraft is going to crash if it gets hit by the electromagnetic bols so at least there’s a better chance well then you have to have the mill Aid has to have a parachute cuz he’s got the black book and the direct the the special agent in charge of the president is definitely going to go so then I learned that this incredible detail that there aren’t parachutes in Marine one so they have to go to the White House office to get the parachutes you know these kind of details I believe provide the reader with a number of things like the the astonishing understanding of how many different scenarios are in play all the time you know being rehearsed so that we because we might have a nuclear war at the same time that the messaging is we will never have a nuclear war and then when you begin to look at all the competing agendas that will happen you you realize it’s just chaos upon Mayhem what if the president dies in the strike and before we’ve made a Counterattack which is something that stratcom thinks about and it’s certainly why have that in the scenario because if the president is the only one that can order a count a Counterattack that can launch nuclear weapons what if he dies and so I learned in the reporting that if you’re the president let’s say he even gives the order okay here’s my counter- strike I’m choosing this from the Black Book the situ the command and control is set up that if the president orders 82 nuclear weapons in response you can’t launch 83 nuclear weapons it’s 82 and 82 only and then to do another launch requires passwords p i mean it requires so much bureaucracy there’s not time for that and so there’s this almost unknown little detail inside of the nuclear command and control apparatus called a universal unlock code which I learned about in the book and the eyebrow goes up for exactly that reason as did mine when I wait what then you find out that the president can release to the stratcom commander the universal unlock code which basically says okay you if I die you have permission to launch nuclear weapon number 83 or nuclear weapon number 5,000 you know all the way up and that is a pretty shocking concept the president responds to the nuclear attack hits I don’t know let’s say they they hit Russia they send the submarines out to send the um ICB whatever it’s called to hit strike Russia Russia have these submarines as well they send more back what does what’s the aftermath of nuclear you know that 72 that 72nd minute because I imagine from the minute the president hears that um gets the notification that there are it’s been confirmed it’s had the second confirmation he’s going to make the decision to fire nuclear weapons back I assume and then I mean from there it’s just all fire as far as I’m concerned there’s a concept called jamming the president which is so the president learns in the scenario I write that North Korea has fired a ballistic missile and then a second one comes in from a sub and hits a nuclear power plant in California why did you pick North Korea I picked North Korea because of my interviews with Richard Garwin the designer of the nuclear thermonuclear bomb the first one which he designed for teller because in our interviews I asked him what scared me most Garwin also in his 90s has advised every president of the United States since Eisenhower he was an early founder of nro I mean our one of our most classified agencies his opinion matters and while he didn’t want to be specific he gave me sort of a very interesting almost poetic metaphor when he spoke of the Mad King and the Mad King with a nuclear Arsenal and he even used that French phrase this idea of like after me the flood if I die who cares and I interpreted that that Garwin was talking about North Korea because North Korea is the Rogue nuclear armed nation that regularly sets off ballistic missiles and doesn’t tell anyone there is an unspoken reality among the other nations that you inform people when you’re going to test an ICBM with a dummy Warhead of course North Korea doesn’t adhere to that so you know H when I interviewed people who are in those command and control bunkers those first 100 seconds we spoke of where the ballistic missile is on its way and and and all of that command and control is focused on is this coming at us or is it as launching a space satellite or is it going into the Sea of Japan that’s what North Korea does they don’t announce those test and so imagine the anxiety in those command bunkers every time they launch a ballistic missile they have launched a more than a 100 ballistic missiles in an 18-month period from like 2022 forward testing okay testing so this is so dangerous and so Rogue if there you know on the one hand I say there are no rules to nuclear war but there are a few nuclear rules to nuclear deterrence like you tell neighbors and that’s why I chose North Korea but just to finish that the sequence the president launches 82 missiles at North Korea in a Counterattack and that is and in the scenario that I write the failure now becomes about miscommunication a very important concept and also about technology not working and I Source in the book precisely where this information comes from so Russia misinterprets our launching nuclear weapons at North Korea as being launched at Russia why because actual fact our icbms do not have enough range to travel to North Korea without overflying Russia and so imagine in a climate like now with hostilities as an all-time high the Russian president just saying okay well maybe they’re not coming for us and nuclear policy the policy of deterrence is you launch if someone’s launching at you and so that is where you know in the second act of the book it’s 24 minutes 24 minutes 24 minutes endgame Russia launches and Russia launch you don’t La if someone’s attacking you with nuclear missiles you don’t launch one or two back that’s mad king logic you launch the motherload and that’s what I have Russia launch in this scenario what do you mean Mad King logic well Mad King logic is why would you do that yeah okay so in the book in the Mad King logic of the book the leader of North Korea who is nameless um launches a nuclear weapon at the United States for reasons we don’t know and we will never know because history will end the ability to write history ends in 72 minutes of the book so we will never know why and that is the sort of you know question Mad King logic is very different than defense department logic yeah or many regards Russian nuclear command and control logic which I interview sort of the world’s expert on those subjects to be able to you know give readers quickly an idea of what that logic is and why it has held for 79 years can’t we just shoot to out the sky that is the great fantasy that is a fallacy right so let’s talk numbers for a second America has 1,770 nuclear weapons on ready for launch status they’re deployed okay they can launch in seconds minutes maybe some of the bombers take an hour or two Russia has roughly the same 1,674 that’s the parody of the nuclear treaties that says nothing of the thousands more that we each have in reserve but those are actual nuclear weapons that are pointed at one another ready to go ready to go okay so those numbers the US has an Interceptor program to allegedly intercept a long range ballistic missile I’m not talking about short range or even medium range long range like that would come from Russia or North Korea we have 44 Interceptor missiles four of them are at vandenbberg air force base in Santa Barbara 40 of them are at Fort Gan Alaska 44 so if Russia has 1,670 nuclear weapons how are our 44 interceptors going to go up against those and that and that says nothing by the way and I get into this in sort of the little bit of the wonkiness inside a nuclear warhead many of them are what are called mved which means they have multiple Warheads inside of it and so when the Warhead unleashes the multiple Warheads go out along with decoys so that if an interceptor missile is coming at it it it greatly reduces the chance that the Interceptor will be able to shoot it out of the sky the way that it was said to me was like this an interceptor missile which is basically just like a small ICBM right it’s a small rock it’s a rocket it is like trying to shoot a bullet with a bullet that’s a quote from the spokesperson of at the Pentagon one of them is traveling at 14,000 M an hour the ballistic missile 14,000 M hour the Interceptor the little kinetic vehicle inside of it that’s going to hit the Warhead hopefully is traveling at 20,000 mil an hour that’s where you get the trying to hit a bullet with a bullet and by the way this is all happening 500 miles up in space good luck the success rate of our Interceptor program is between 40 and 55% that’s on a good day where they’re testing these things and they go hey we’re doing an Interceptor test it might be around there right that’s called a curated test that’s not in The Madness of the moment the bombs land if I was a fly on the wall not that there would be a w left what would I what would I and I was looking at America or the UK after it had been strike struck by these nuclear bombs by thousands of you know Russian or North Korean nuclear weapons what would I see what would the visuals be in those minutes after the strike I describe the first bomb in the scenario that strikes the Pentagon it’s a one megga on thermonuclear bomb in painstaking horrific detail all sourced from defense department documents defense scientists who have worked for decades to describe precisely what happens to things and to humans and it’s horrifying but on top of the initial flash of thermonuclear light which is 180 million degrees which catches everything on fire in a 9 mile diameter radius on top of the bulldozing effect of the wind and all the buildings coming down and more fires igniting more fires on top of the radiation poisoning people to death in minutes and hours and days and weeks if they happen to have survived on top of all of that each one of these fires creates a mega fire that is 100 or more square miles and so essentially in essence what do you see well in the scenario at minute 72 a thousand Russian nuclear weapons land on the United States and so it just becomes a conflagration of fire it’s just fire fires burning fires 100 200 square mile fires burning and then we move into nuclear winter and that’s sort of the day new malt of the book where I tell you about nuclear winter from the point of view of one of the original scientists who wrote that original nuclear winter paper with Carl San back in 1983 his name is Professor Brian tun and he’s spent the decade since working with the state-of-the-art climate modeling systems that can now precisely tell us what nuclear winter will look like because I’ve always thought you know what nuclear war wouldn’t be that bad if you know Russia launched a thousand of their nuclear bombs at the United States and I was here in New York where I am now I would die instantly so I wouldn’t really know it happened is that true I think you would want to die instantly I mean there’s a quote from Nikita Cru Jeff the former um premere of the Soviet Union and he said after nuclear war the survivors would envy the dead because there is right there is this sense of if you survived I mean there is no more Law and Order there is no more rule of law there is no government Craig Fugate made that very clear the bunkers that the people in the military command and control centers would be in let’s say the secret bunkers not ones that are targets that Russia’s going to take out that I write about in the book but the smaller ones those are going to only function for as long as there’s gasoline to run the diesel and the diesel generators and then those people are going to have to come out and who’s left it’s man returning to the most Primal most violent State as people fight over the tiny resources that remain and by the way they’re all malnourished everybody’s sick and most people have lost everything and everyone they know how’s that going to feel it’s going to feel as you describe here on page 277 there are a thousand flashes of light superheating the air in each ground Zer to 180 million degrees fah 1,000 fibal each more than a mile in diameter a th000 steeply fronted blast waves a th000 walls of compressed air a thousand American cities and towns where all where all engineered structures in five six or seven miles radius change physical shapes collapse and burn a thousand cities and towns with molten asphalt streets a thousand cities and towns with survivors impaled to death by flying debris a thousand cities and towns filled with tens of millions of dead people with tens of millions of unfortunate survivors suffering fatal third degree BS people naked tattered bleeding and suffocating people who don’t look or act act like people anymore Across America and Europe hundreds of millions of people are dead and dying while hundreds of military aircraft fly circles in the air until they until they run out of fuel I mean that is that is some visual how many people would be dead or dying do you think after those 72 minutes hundreds of millions of people die in the Fireballs no question but the number that I think is very interesting to think about comes from Professor tune and his team who wrote a paper for nature uh recently 2022 and sort of updated nuclear winter idea based around food and the number that they have is five billion people would be dead the population of the planet currently is about 8 billion yes so there’d be three billion people still alive where shall I go to be one of the three billion I was I was just in New Zealand and Australia that’s exactly where you’d go although according to tune those are the only places that could actually sustain agriculture I was there two weeks ago not even two weeks ago it was maybe 10 days ago I was in New Zealand in Australia and at that time I think Iran attacked Israel right yes I was kind of happy you were in the right place at the right time I was kind of happy for where I was located if I’m know I was thinking I actually remember I talking to my friends and I pulled up a map and I was trying to see how far away I was from everything I was thinking if because World War III started training on Twitter I was thinking if if it does break out now I think I’m pretty probably pretty well placed is that the place to be that is that is according to Professor tun I mean he was so generous with me he shared a lot of his slid shows that he has for his students and that is really pretty much what’s left I mean because most of the world is certainly the mid latitudes would be covered in these you know sheets of ice the the freshwater bodies and places like Iowa and UK Ukraine would be would be just snow for 10 years and so agriculture would fail and when agriculture fails people just die and not and on on top of that you have the radiation poisoning because the ozone layer will be so damaged and destroyed that you can’t be outside in the sunlight and so people will be forced to live underground and so you have to imagine people living underground fighting for food everywhere except for in New Zealand and Australia um there was also another interesting detail that that he shared with me that you know 66 million years ago an asteroid hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs and something like 70% of the known species and Professor ton compared nuclear war to that situation and so when you really think about it and and again this was also echoed by Craig Fugate FEMA’s director you think about it there’s nothing we can do about an asteroid at least not right now and yet there is something nuclear war is a manmade threat and therefore it has to be a man-made solution what is the solution I really believe that people motivate other people it’s like a fundamental truth on the smallest scale and on the biggest scale and so there’s one person who is incredibly powerful and that is the president of the United States For Better or For Worse it’s just the way it is and so in the same way that the president has presidential soulle authority to start a nuclear war the President also has a very powerful pen with which he can write executive orders an EO and the story I tell on the hopeful note goes like this when I was in high school in 1983 there was an ABC TV movie called The Day After and it showed a fictional war between the United States and then Soviet Russia was horrific and terrifying okay a 100 million Americans watched it a 100 Millions Americans it’s like the third of a the population and I think it was half the population then um President Reagan was one of those Americans he had a private screening at Camp David his advisers told him not to watch it he did watch it before that President Reagan was a hawk he was Pro nuclear weapons his position was the more nuclear weapons the better he was the one putting nuclear weapons in space with the Star Wars program the SDI program okay he couldn’t have been more pro- deterrence Supremacy he saw the day after and he changed his position he wrote In His White House Journal that he became greatly depressed his words and he reached out to gorbachov and then they had a rovic summit a summit in Iceland Reagan and gorbachov and through communication right through both of them realizing this is madness realizing what could happen seeing the day after and realizing my God this cannot happen and they famously issued a statement that said a new The Joint statement between the two of them it said a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought and the result of the recov summit was that the world has gone from 70,000 nuclear warheads that was the all-time high 70,000 why do you need 70,000 nuclear warheads that’s what there were in 1986 and now here we are because of the reductions because of the treaties thanks to those two 12,500 approximately nuclear warheads that is the movement in the right direction and it came from a dramatic story being told and it came from the president taking action because people would not stand for this anymore there were massive protests do you believe we could ever get to zero honestly that is for the disarmament experts I like to stay in my Lane as a Storyteller as an investigative journalist I like to give you the Dr atic fast read and then pass the Baton to those who have been working on that issue for decades because boy are they qualified I just had the great Fortune of being invited to Brussels where I was part of a nuclear Expo and there were members of the European Parliament in the audience and I and and there were all these disarmament people there and I learned a lot about all of these groups and they have the answer and they are the ones that should be asked that question and they are doing a lot to get us there from the moment you wrote the first word in this new book um nuclear war scenario to when you finish the book how did your feelings change about the subject matter it’s interesting because you you write the this is just my experience as a journalist but you you write the book and you’re like any professional person you want to do a really good job at your job right so so I was very focused on Gathering the facts and then relaying them in a readable way you know my husband Kevin always says like you got to write something that someone can read on the beach or an airplane right which is not necessarily conducive to like Nazi scientists or the other things I’ve written about but for this it became clear to me nuclear launch to nuclear clear winter fast have people read it fast because you want to grab their attention because I’m a mother you know I’m a hopeful person that believes that we do not have to live with this threat overhead and so my focus of the work was really on doing the best job I could to narrate the story and I think you you take your hat off about um maybe any more sort of emotional or sentimental mental feelings you try to you try to push that into the pros I suppose so maybe in subtext there is a sense of urgency and and even fear but for me intellectually you know as an investigative journalist it was it was just what’s what’s the next page going to read like but how do you feel about you know the nature you it’s interesting as well because you when you think about the books you’ve written think how many have you written now six or seven seven books in total the subject matter of your books are all the basis of a lot of conspiracy theory if that makes sense you know you’ve written about era 51 and this thing called Operation Paperclip and the Pentagon and and our nuclear bombs and the CIA all these kinds of things which are the basis of many of the conspiracy theories that I hear hear about um so you’ve you’ve got a very unique perspective on the world because you’ve had the privilege and the access of interviewing some of the most interesting people that are closest to these very interesting subjects what are some of the things that you’ve come to learn that you once thought were just conspiracy theories I mean conspiracy theory is such a loaded word and I think it’s too bad that um it’s used as a catchall to kind of dismiss uh a lot of curiosity because curiosity is important right and curiosity leads toward reading I mean I couldn’t be a bigger fan of reading orist listening to you know educating yourself I mean things have really changed in terms of audio like you can listen to a podcast and learn a lot you can listen to an audio book the same way that you used to have to read them and and so to just call things conspiracy theories I find to be intellectually thin right it’s just too easy and it’s also very self-righteous and I think two things I always work to avoid um is like kind of being a know-it-all and I am around a lot of know-it-alls because people who become experts in subjects um and maybe they don’t get as much attention as they think they deserve tend to become a little bit of self-righteous no adults and so I have to wind my way through that world because I’m always what interests me are subjects that make me ask the question why right like why does no one know about area what why why is Area 51 so secret I mean when I wrote the book Area 51 the word Area 51 was still classified you couldn’t say it I went to the CIA and I was told by my minder if you say a certain word and number you will be asked to leave it was classified it only became unclassified when President Obama spoke about it publicly oh really he just mentioned it and then it was unclassified right and so to answer your question um I find it really interesting tackling subjects that are in the zeit guys that people are interested in and then trying to unpack the truths and the fictions but is there something you heard about you heard a you know whisper about and you thought that can’t possibly be true and then after doing a little bit of invest ative researching and journalism you discovered that it actually was true and you blown away and I say that in part because I lived much of my life thinking that a lot of these subjects era 51 the CIA this idea that there’s all these spies and they’re doing all this stuff and I thought a lot of it was just internet rumors and you know people who certain people who have you know they have like the silver foil on their heads and they’re just like whatever and then I had the privilege of speaking to to some people on this podcast and just out there in the world who confirmed that a lot of the things I once thought were tinfoil hat stuff is actually true and once once you have the curtain pull back it kind of blows your mind open to what else could be true and I’m I’m a person that kind of like needs evidence and logic and I’m not going to believe something CU I saw it on like a Instagram post or a story or a telegram Community but my mind’s been blown especially over the last couple of years about how um how some of these things that people consider to be conspiracy theories are actually very true have you had those moments in your career oh absolutely but I mean you can really drill down on this stuff and figure out the Thematic element of what’s going on and then the specifics and I’ll give you an example like in Area 51 I learned about something called strategic deception which is a CIA concept okay and this plays into conspiracy theories and when you come across something maybe having this information I’m about to tell you will help you go okay let me look at it in terms of these two lanes so it goes like this the CIA had a was building spy planes out at Area 51 the U2 spy plane which was going to spy on the Soviet Union in the 50s from above and figure out whether they were preparing for nuclear war and the plane was built at area 51 cuz this no one could know about it it flew at 70,000 ft it was out of range of any surface to air missiles um I interviewed the first man who flew over the Soviet Union in a U2 hervey Stockman and he took pictures with these massive CIA cameras that you know came back to the agency it was wet film and allowed the CIA to understand what was actually going on on the ground in Soviet Russia it was photographing military bases so the spy plane was being built and it was so secret like only the president knew about it at the same time nuclear weapons were being exploded next door right so Area 51 and then over at area 23 was where the the the bombs were going off and there was a I was interviewing all the engineers who were building the spy plane and Bob Murphy was one of the lead engineers and he told me the story about strategic deception so he and others would go to the ranch that’s what they called Area 51 then they’d fly back to Burbank California where they all lived for the weekends to be with their families and they would take this shuttle back and forth and one day um they went to a big party the night before and Bob Murphy got drunk he was not a guy who gets drunk but he got drunk he missed the shuttle and he was like oh my God I’m going to lose my job I’m in trouble and he opens the door is how he described it to me to like you know go out and deal with this and there’s a FBI agent like about to knock on the door and they they tell and the guy turns white as a ghost because Bob Murphy was supposed to be on that flight so he was on the flight manifest and it crashed into Mount Charleston on the way there and everyone was dead Okay so that is just a dramatic thing to begin with but here’s how it ties up with strategic deception the CIA learns that it’s aircraft full of you two Engineers P designers all these incredibly important people on this top secret project are dead they just crashed into Mount Charleston what are they going to do how are they going to keep this secret all the new stations are racing up to the top of the mountain to try to get to the crash site oh my God this is going to be the Project’s going to be blown open what are we going to do so they quickly rope off the areas they do the damage control to the best that they can but they’re spinning and I have all the Declassified documents from that part of it learning how worried they are there’s no almost no doubt the project is going to be revealed the YouTube program is going to be no more because once the Soviets know about it it’s off and instead the Press comes up with a story The Press reports that it’s all these Atomic scientists working on this secret new weap they just completely make this up in essence right it’s this new weapons project and that’s what they’re all doing who knows who put what bug in someone’s ear and so that’s the story that comes out and and the CIA is like perfect and what I the story explains that there are two kinds of strategic deception there’s cover when you say like Bob Murphy said to his wife I’m just a engineer working out there on some television systems that’s cover that was his cover he didn’t say I’m working on the U2 spy plane and then there’s disinformation when the Press reports that the crash was full of a bunch of atomic Engineers working on a secret weapons program and those are both kinds of strategic deception and so you begin to realize that there is a purpose behind a lot of information coming out into the public and the CIA often uses that to his advantage and so whenever a situation happens you have to say to yourself is this really what happened or is it covering up something else and then of course you have to put your rational person hat on and you can’t just imagine what the true story might be you have to actually find it and report it does the CIA um or the I think in the UK it’s called MI5 or MI6 MI6 I think is the equivalent does MI6 all of these sort of special secret service agencies around the world do they work with the media that’s a much that’s a totally separate podcast we could talk forever because there’s history of the CIA and I’m not an expert on foreign intelligence agency as much as I am on the United States but by all means there’s a long history of the CIA working with uh journalist reporters authors um to put information there I mean there’s almost nothing that the CIA hasn’t done to my eye the question is you know reporting it in the context of how that’s happening I write about in the pentagon’s brain if you want a little homework you know and you go into the back and in the index and look up brainwashing and there’s a long story uh where I talk to where I explain exactly how this happened in the 50s with what ultimately an element that became known as the MK Ultra program okay so like MK Ultra was a real program and it had a lot of sinister components to it is it everything that you know certain groups of people that sometimes get called conspiracy theorists say that it was no but there are threads of Truth in it and if you reverse engineer the brainwashing concept from the back you will see what I’m talking about and it’s I think it’s a very interesting story because it actually involves the head of the CIA a guy called Alan Dulles and his son who got brain damaged in Korea whom I tracked down and interviewed for that book spoiler alert what happens which part I mean which part I’m so I’m so compelled by this the whole idea of the CIA because we we had someone here recently talking we had Andrew here recently talking about what goes on at the CIA and I think um one of the things he said to me is that the role of the CIA has changed over time and once upon a time it was more capable of doing more things and by the way he described it sounded like the CIA has less powers and can do less of the things that it’s been accused of in the past I think it’s been accused of killing the president here by some people or being involved in the assassination of one of the presidents here um and does the CIA report directly into the president the CIA features in almost every one of my books um the most sort of comprehensive look I did at the CIA was a book called surprise kill vanish which is about the cia’s paramilitary and once I reported that I understood that there are actually two very distinct components of the CIA there’s the sort of Central Intelligence Agency the primary um human it’s called human intelligence and there’s analysts and there’s Espionage and and then there’s the paramilitary organization which was set up in 1947 specifically to go against the Russian version of itself sort of to do the darkest dirtiest nastiest operations that we had to because the Russians were and so you know the CIA is a is a is a giant organization with a lot of tentacles and I think it’s important to speak at least for me having reported on many of these different programs you know Area 51 covers the aial Espionage element of the CIA the Science and Technology the CIA was responsible for putting the first satellite in space the corona program Dr Bud won who I interviewed for Area 51 remarkable intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance programs and then you have the paramilitary operators the trigger pullers uh the snake eaters the individuals who you know find fix and finish people that’s a euphemism um the teams that do that but I prefer to speak very specifically on programs because I find it’s the most it it’s the most responsible or the most factual way for me to stick to a certain Lane of the agency because it is so vast Once Upon a Time if you had a business idea it was exceptionally difficult to get going but now in the age of Shopify it is exceptionally easy as many of you will know Shopify are a sponsor of this podcast if you don’t know Shopify it’s an exceptionally simple web platform for anybody that’s got an idea that wants to transact on a global scale so things like these conversation cards which we sell we’ve sold using Shopify and it only took us a couple of clicks to get going so why did we choose Shopify for a number of reasons but I think one of the big ones which goes unappreciated is their checkout system converts 36% better compared to other platforms and here’s what I’m going to do to remove the cost for you if you go to shopify.com Bartlet you’ll be able to try Shopify for $1 a month I’ve seen Shopify completely change people’s lives and for many of you I think it could change yours on the the nuclear war subject we talked a little bit about um another thing that has well we I kind of alluded to it that has emerged since you started writing this book which is the conversation around artificial intelligence and when I start thinking about how you overlay that with this idea of nuclear war it becomes even more um concerning because we’re heading towards a world of what they call artificial general intelligence where a lot of these systems will be making autonomous decisions they’ll be able to and a couple of people that I’ve spoken to from Deep Mind or from um Google have talked to me about a world where this is an extreme case but our elected leaders will be either AI themselves or being basically working in lock step with AI and and then when you think about our nuclear weapon systems who is better to make that decision is it a Joe Biden that’s better to make a decision to launch a nuclear weapon or is it some kind of artificial intelligence that is so Advanced we might not even know what it’s thinking or doing have you thought much about artificial intelligence since this book came out and since you started writing absolutely it’s something I covered at length in the pentagon’s brain which is the book about DARPA and I think that maybe I’ll speak to an origin story here right because I think of Shakespeare it’s like what is past is prologue we can understand better the question you raised especially for younger people like what is this going to look like in the future is a president really going to be working in consort with AI if we know wait how did this all begin it somehow at least to my eye becomes easier to think about these things in a grounded Manner and so I’ll throw this detail at you in in reporting the pentagon’s brain it was fascinating to learn that during World War II computers were people a computer was someone who computed mathematical you know call right trajectories bomb explosions were all measured by people and pencils and right so then and I love the smile because suddenly It all becomes easier then you have a guy called John Von noyman the the the pentagon’s brain he was the first brain that the Pentagon really was interested in and he created one of the first computers you can’t really assign the first computer to anyone but there was a computer that was doing calculations for called eniac and ultimately after the war Von noyman went to the atomic energy commission the most powerful organization in the world at the moment and said I want to build a computer that can actually think for itself that can he he’s kind of the progenitor of this of software not just Hardware so for a long time it was kind of Texas Instruments type Computing almost just like a giant calculator and Von noyman wanted to put the brain inside the calculator and they gave him a lot of money to do it and he did this in the basement of foed Hall over at the Princeton Institute for advanced study and it was giant vacuum tubes and he would do these tests and I described this in the Pentagon ‘s brain because it’s really interesting to think this was only in 1945 there were vacuum tubes and you know cords and they had to worry about mice eating cords and John Von neyman was so brilliant and smart that his he could beat the computer initially the his assistants would give him numerical calculations he would do them in his mind the computer would be trying to do them he would win and then one day in like I think it was 1946 or 247 the computer beat him that was the moment that Von noyman realized computers are going to be computers just got smarter than me than man and then he began to develop and systems the defense department began to put an extraordinary amount of money into computer systems and if you really want to know where they took off because this has to do with AI this is man computer interface the defense Department hires a guy called lick lier to essentially shrink computers down from the size of a house to the size of this room and think of what they are now so the defense department has always LED with artificial intelligence which is computer-based and when you can see that origin story you can begin to understand where we’re going and AI had to have these military the the benefits of these military systems to develop right like nano technology things had to start becoming smaller and that all happens in that book you know not all of it but in other words you can you can learn in a sort of poetic manner the trajectory of computers and where they began not so long ago and where we are now and it was in 1983 that DARPA that organization decided that the battle place the battlefield is no place for humans that was a statement of its first robotic AI program I went on Chachi PT um a couple of months ago and I asked it I said could you play out a scenario where the world ends because an artificial intelligence basically gets leaked out of its out of the computer that it was um born out born on and it the scenario that it played out involved nuclear war because halfway I think it was in step three or four it says that the AI basically takes control control of the nuclear warheads or at least some of them and then it kind of launches them at other countries and hearing chat PT say that and and it and in step three or four use nuclear weapons as a way to kind of make the world extinct it it felt plausible okay so I’m going to push back against that and which is by no means right I’m not right but we’re just having a like sort of theoretical conversation here chat GPT is gathering its information right so my I would argue that chat GP has got a lot of information from the Terminator movie yeah okay there is that in the Zeitgeist of what happens then I want you to consider that the communication systems in nuclear command and control which is actually nuclear command control and communication the the ability to for nc3 to communicate with the actual weapons is so profoundly classified that I don’t have access to it but I’m going to give this to you as an idea what I do know and learned reporting nuclear war scenario is a fascinating detail that stands as an analogy at least for me which is how analog our ballistic missile systems are because of the exact fear that you describe or that and that chat GPT described back at you and will they stay that way forever probably not but are they that way right now from what I understand yes our submarine launched ballistic missiles that that are just so the technology behind them and I I delineate it for the re you it’s it’s astonishing that you can launch a missile from underwater it can breach the surface its after burners take off and then it begins its trajectory you know boost phase midcourse phase terminal phase hits the target this is incredible and how does it get there you might ask I asked it gets there by star sighting oh really so you realize there’s this little panel that opens up in the ballistic missile and there are other ways that it’s navigating but the primary mean of navigation is star sighing right I mean you just have to really stop and go oh my first of all it’s actually really interesting concept that the most advanced potentially civilization ending ballistic missile is guiding itself to its Target by this ancient concept like that are Hunter gather ancestors used which is looking at the stars it’s looking at the stars and then navigating using them and that’s meant to be a defense against system an enemy taking control of your nuclear weapons the the issue we have is that there’s potentially nine or 10 different nuclear powers and they don’t all have the same system so if a if we get to the point of AGI which a lot of people almost see as the um Singularity almost you can’t see past that moment where there is a new being amongst us that is capable of thinking faster and more expansively and more intelligently than humans it knows things we don’t I think it might look at our systems as Child’s Play maybe not our systems but maybe it’ll look at North Korea systems as Child’s Play it might be able to put that VCR into the system and play out the nucleus simulation that tricks those people into believing they’re being attacked and that yes and so which is maybe time for the answer to your question of should we be at zero right yeah so what you have presented which would be the whole point of somebody like me writing a book that somebody like you would read of a younger generation and begin having these conversations ations with their colleagues and their thought leaders and the people that could maybe influence public policy and saying well that would be a very good reason to have zero nuclear weapons or you know everybody gets 10 I’m making that up but right because if you have 12,500 nuclear weapons it’s better than 70,000 but there’s way too many for an artificially intelligent you know trigger scenario like you’re talking about are you optimistic optimistic about I I am I mean I am an optimistic person by nature and so do you think there will be a nuclear war in the course of humanity I wrote this book as the optimistic hopeful person that’s saying read this and realize that a man-made problem has a man-made solution earli you talked about there being high consequence and low probability but the more the years tick on that probability increases by nature of there being this Mad King that might at some point so you know and that’s what I think so I was asking myself eventually if we if we play this forward I don’t know a thousand years what what is most likely to cause the end of humanity is it a mad King somewhere who doesn’t want that you know he realizes that he’s going to either die he’s got cancer he realizes that you know he’s got some sickness and he doesn’t really want the his son to take power he starts getting a bit agitated maybe he has some kind of psychosis schizophrenia I don’t know decides to in his dying days to let a couple of these things fly is that eventually going to happen the laws of probability the laws of averages say that the longer we’re here the longer we have these weapons the higher the probability I mean I leave that to people like you to think about and talk about because I do and I am fascinated that I find that people of your generation ask that question a lot more than perhaps people of my generation and older like that was not a mindset that people necessarily hadn’t talked about and I think that has to do with the Confluence of events that you talk about first of all people are have access to information in a manner they didn’t you know 30 40 years ago or it took a lot more effort and also that there are these incredible new threats that you’re talking about that are that you cannot Overlook and so you would think that it’s time to kind of and I’m not a paana but you have to move away from seeing everyone and everything as an enemy and moving toward it’s fine to have adversaries having opponents is you know ver Sportsmen have opponents right but everyone being an enemy and having you know War escalating around the world it seems as if what you are saying is there has to be a fundamental shift in what people are considering important but War has always existed and it’s existed as long as humans have so it makes me think that war is just part of humans trying to coexist and all of the things that are hard wide into us our search for status and ego and reproduction and resources and survival result in War like they result in recessions so I read a lot about the origin of War like there it’s a debate no one you know but it is discussed and the anthropologists I think have the most interesting sort of thoughtful Concepts around it which I’ll share with you which is this because yes technically meant there has always been war and there one of the debates is you know did war begin with civilization or were hunter gatherers Waring but more interesting to that I think is about the Anthropologist who studied in the 60 the hunter gatherer tribes like in the Amazon when there were still access to them and they were sort of you know they were unaffected by civilization at all and they could look at how they perceived enemies and an interesting idea came out of that which makes me think about Optimist versus pessimist right sort or rather those who trust versus those who are suspicious that that no matter if a hunter is out hunting in a that’s part of a hunter gatherer tribal environment and he comes across another person obviously there could be that person is either threatening or that person is someone to team up with against the greater threat and the Anthropologist do not know why it is that some people interpret this person with suspicion and then might kill him and others would interpret that person as a teammate and so if we don’t know how human you know is it genetics like how do people either fall on one of those two sides but what we do know is that people can learn to think differently you talk with half your guests on the podcast about this people can be trained not you know propagandized but people can learn to think differently so if you’re me who is a hopeful person and wants to see the positive side of even my dark reporting because that’s a better choice for me and for my family I train myself to find if you will the Silver Lining or rather if that’s too poly Anish to find the way in which how do I look at the person coming at me as someone who could be on my team or even an an opponent but not an enemy that I would have to kill what’s the most interesting thing that you’ve written about that we haven’t discussed of all and I don’t just mean in the nuclear war I mean in all these books I mean I’m particularly fascinated by Dara because I think in a lot of the world especially in Europe in the UK we we don’t even know what DARPA means so it was interesting reading about the existence of that but in all these books what is the most interesting thing the most resonant thing when you talk about your work to people maybe that surprised you I mean every single one of my books is powerfully important to me not just because of the information there but because the people I met along the way and I really could not you know put one over the other because that would be like favoring a child and I mean that literally you know the sometimes when I prepare to do a podcast I read my own books and I and I’m really it for me it’s the it’s the it’s the sum total of these incredibly Fascinating People I have had the incredible Fortune of interviewing and also how fate and Circumstance always seems to play a role in all of their lives and that’s maybe the theme that I take away from all of this as opposed to the specific shocking thing because remember that many of the people that I interview because they’re Warf Fighters or intelligence agency people many of their friends have died is there anyone you interviewed that brought you to tears when you were interviewing them oh absolutely I can’t I can’t even I can’t even say it now because I might yeah yeah I’m going to ask you for the example you wanted the example I’ll tell you right now it’s a hard one um so I was just I was just in uh Brussels I told you at the nuclear convention and and I met a woman who was one year and 10 months when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki so she’s a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb right and I met her I brought her a signed copy of my book right I mean you just think about being a victim of that and also I learned so much about the stigma that followed the survivors of the atomic bombs of Hiroshima Nagasaki the stigma because they were perceived as sort of Tainted people people tainted humans and there was this deep fear of the legacy of radiation and I met her and I expected to just be so composed but in talking to her I got very emotional kind of you know because you can’t avoid that and part of the reason why I got so emotional was that and I haven’t written about this yet but I will is that someone I interviewed and someone that meant a lot to me and that I have written about a lot wired that nuclear weapon that was dropped on Nagasaki and so when you think about it and there’s little old me the reporter who fate and Circumstance put in Brussels last week at a nuke Expo you couldn’t make that up if you were may you know even a year ago let alone 10 years ago let alone when I was a child and here I am and one hand of my reporting goes to that source that worked with me for a very long time whose story I haven’t written yet who wired the bomb that was dropped on nagazaki and my other hand goes to someone who was there that that Wells you up because it’s The Human Condition can you speak to this impact that that had on both those individuals so starting with if we start with the individual who was involved in wiring that bomb MH so and I know less about her than I know about him right and I’ve reached out to her and we will do inter interviews now okay so but for him it impacted his whole life and he became a member of the Manhattan Project and he became uniquely tied into the nuclear weapons industry so these kind of long arcs of History are so deeply interesting to me especially as I get older you move from um the intensity of specific spefic missions that people were on of specific operations they ran and you begin to look at a human over the course of their life and what that means because ultimately that’s the most interesting storytelling of all it’s the most interesting conversation you and I can have and it and you have to get a little bit older to know that you know but sometimes when I’m interviewing people who are in their 80s and 90s and I see them looking at me and I like especially going back 15 years ago when I started reporting all this and I could see I can you know they’re old and they’re like earlobe sag and they have you know incredible wrinkles and the course of their lives what they have done and they’re all involved in these top formerly top secret programs and I can I can I sense them looking at me with this sense of their own legacy that they are like like I’m telling her my story and then I’m going to be gone and that’s really that’s powerful it’s a lot of trust as well isn’t it it it is that’s the role of the reporter you you work at least my job as an investigative journalist is like you know I want people to trust me that I am getting the in their information down on the public record and that has a lot to do with why you know people say how did you get so many people to talk to you about nuclear weapons right so to Loop this back to nuclear war scenario I know I’m doing my job at least it feels like I’m doing my job properly or earnestly that I can in the same week last week have two people that are 100% part of the military industrial complex working for the space force in Los Angeles you know at a space force convention come to my house for dinner have a conversation with my family including my young son who’s closer to your age and then the week before have been with peace activists addressing members of the European Parliament I have my Lane but yet all of these people are around me they might not think they can get along but they probably can and if I’m the middle of the road of all of that that is important to me as an investigative journalist and but also like as an American citizen as and as I said earlier as a as a mother that individual that wired that that bomb T took part in the Manhattan Project was involved in dropping the bomb on the lady that you met recently how do they feel about that now in hindsight with with their age and as they look back he has died oh okay he has died um how did he feel about it there were other things that bothered him more which is the great conundrum of using your own eyes to perceive another person and it’s why I have not written that book yet because it is still very confusing and there is a lot of mysterious elements of it and sometimes when people are involved in really classified programs you have to spend a lot of time to uh dig and uncover and discover it’s a long process um and he was involved in some other programs that he had more intense thoughts about and that alone is enough to I mean the look on your face is the look on my face interviewing him happy man absolutely absolutely regret yes most definitely almost everyone that I end up spending hours and hours and hours with that I would travel with and you know another person that comes to mind was Billy wall and the surprise kill vanish book sort of the longest serving Singleton for the US government as a paramilitary operator the saying goes Billy wall killed more people than cancer okay we traveled to Hanoi together we traveled to Havana together um I spent a lot of time with him uh they were you know both of these men were probably the two most powerful sources I worked with in my life in their 80s and ’90s both happy men Billy was more complex than happy you know um you work hard to kind of get at the to get at the character of someone and you you you you try the best to represent them but I mean you know Billy had so many people um he was involved in so many missions with so many people that died that I don’t know if happiness is he certainly wasn’t Ang he certainly wasn’t sour but uh he had a lot of anger about a lot of things and then the lady she was one and a half years old when the bomb was dropped she survived as a baby her family did they survive yes and it was it’s fascinating um uh I’m not saying her name because I don’t I don’t have quite her permission yet right so but um although she is a public figure but she didn’t know about her story until she got older because it was kept hidden from her which is so these layers upon layers about what we know about our own selves you’ve made me think of which is you balance that out with qu what you know about your own self versus what how easy it is to to judge someone else or perceive someone else and I think those two Journeys in life are interwoven always like our own Journey for self-discovery right in a way you’re on that with your podcast I’m guessing you probably learn as much about yourself um as you do about others I know I do I’m usually in your seat um and there’s no camera Runnings it’s just a pen and so I can learn so much from people about how they speak why they speak what they say to me I don’t want this on the record I want you to know this about me because it’s important but I don’t want it publicly know and I honor that because in a way being a journalist is being a a trusted source that someone can share information with within a context that the person IE me knows the groundwork about many people’s grandchildren’s grandchildren don’t they don’t know what Grandpa did and they might not know for decades I had a guy show up at one of my book signings at the LA Times Festival bu of books just last Sunday and he had you know a binder and he said after you’re done signing would you mind looking at this binder and interpreting it for me and of course I did you know and his grandfather was a seriously high- ranking person working on nuclear sub launched ballistic missiles in the early days of what was called the Polaris experiment and he had all these documents and no one in his family cared about it he had ID badges and letters and pictures with the president and picture and I could say to him oh yes this is the you know I could give him some context and his wife was there and you know it was just like it’s a great example of how we sometimes have a desire to know about our own selves and our own legacy where did we come from and then grandpa has passed and so my job is like getting Grandpa’s story on the record that conversation you had um since the book had come out with the lady you met in Brussels did it change how you viewed your your book and the work you’ve done here in writing this did it add an element oh it most certainly enhanced and added and particularly that emotional one that you saw for me when I think about that you know um and I immediately had a long conversation with my husband about it when when I got home right because I used sounding boards to understand how I even really feel about things but I already had a context to know about survivors having read a lot of accounts from survivors to report the book and I mention some of them satsuko thurlo was a survivor of Hiroshima and has given a lot of incredible public statements on the record to the United Nations and elsewhere and I quote her in my book to narrate the part of the story where we learn about the bomb dropping on Hiroshima and then I read a lot of the ancillary material about that so I can understand more and try and a lot of work as a journalist you’re just at least if you write narrative non-fiction as I do you’re really trying to imagine the situation but then you meet someone and it all becomes real and that’s where the this comes in because it’s not just words on the paper it hasn’t been when they say a Survivor what what how do you C would Define a survivor of a nuclear bomb I’m there’s a word in Japanese and I don’t want to get it wrong and it’s something like habaka right so forgive me for not having that word but um that is an actual term that is used by anyone who lived through the atomic bombings in August of 1945 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki so if you lived through it you are in that category of people and most yeah yeah yeah and so in other words now uh this was you know 79 years ago so most of the survivors you can just think about the ages of the people involved cuko thoro is 90 you know she’s she’s one she was a recipient of the who I who I write about um she was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 with a group of physicians Dr Carlos omana and others whom I met in Brussels that are all part of these organizations working to reduce nuclear weapons down to zero right they are against nuclear war and their organizations work diligently to bring the information to the four and to affect change at a geopolitical level like the United Nations that conversation you have with your husband when you get home that day after meeting her what can you tell me about that conversation it’s probably like you have with your I mean my husband and I have been married a very long time so he knows everything um there’s also a joke that he has what’s called Sprouse privilege which he does right you can tell your spouse anything legally and but no those conversations are Priceless those are the conversations that allow me to try and peel back one layer of what the next book is going to be and what the next book aims to do because I am always working on the next book I am one of those people who loves writing and so and I also love evolving as a writer so you want to get better in terms of the small mistakes you make and you want to get better in terms of the the intentions that you might have thematically about conveying it and so thank you for pointing out to me and I mean this sincerely is that what you helped me realize is that the next book is trying will try to move more toward those themes of cause that was him and effect that was her this idea that there are always consequences and very real people on both decides that you know one could class as both victims and innocent at the same time I guess of just a horrific situation absolutely I’m really intrigued Now by this idea that you almost have to embody two roles you’re a human being but at the same time you’ve got a job to do here and you’ve got a mission and when you meet that person who’s who was a survivor of a nuclear attack those lines can understandably become at least in your head the wall can drop between the two and as you you touched your heart you referred to your head which I think is typically when you’re talking about your journalistic hat but then we all have hearts as well thank god um you come home and I know the conversations I have with my partner I guess I’m assuming you know the conversation you have with your husband there is about the complexity of the emotions you feel upon meeting that person absolutely and what you do with that and what that means and you want to be able to have those conversations so that you can I think have both of those bring both of those components into your into your work I mean maybe with the exception being the military or the CIA the two organizations I write about you know Billy W can’t bring his heart into the mission when he is assigned to go XYZ you know find fix and finish someone they’re not allowed to tell that that partners are they in the CIA no what I was told to you and and so so what we that aren’t in the military or the intelligence Community have that luxury is it a luxury I don’t know but it’s a necessity for me what if you couldn’t I wouldn’t be myself I wouldn’t I wouldn’t choose that I could never be in the military I could never be in the agency because I I think you are asked to wear a hat that removes your heart and that’s not possible for somebody like me I mean we just figure out our strengths and our weaknesses um and Society needs all of those people by the way that is what a democracy is it is made up of all kinds of people I’m all for that it’s why I have so many friends and colleagues from different worlds on different sides of the aisle they just make me think more interesting things about the world in which we all live we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they’re leaving it for and the question that’s been left for you was written in Europe when we’re over in our studio there it is what is the last thing you changed your mind about well I’ll just it comes this comes to mind only because it’s appropo to what we’ve been talking about and it has to do with reporting not my personal life which is may be more interesting to people um I always strive to interview people and ask them questions even if they’re hard even if I have a preconception that maybe they are the sort of bad guy shall we say or the you know perpetrator the what the perpetrator of some something not necessarily the but just that like I I might not my brain might not think I agree with what they did or the project they were on and there was a general that I was trying to interview for the pentagon’s brain and he had he was kind of the creator behind What’s called the solders super suit okay and that’s a totally different subject but then these idea to make super soldiers okay off of this idea of the this concept called the weakling on the battlefield that humans feel fear and get fatigued and those are not good things for soldiers and so there are all these programs to try and enhance our top tier military fighters to become super soldiers this is a fact and this one General was part of that program and I had reached out to him and asked him to interview with me and I get it lots of people say and you know I’m going to pass I don’t want to interview that’s fine but he ignored me and I felt slighted and so I’m telling on myself here from your view and so when I was writing my Narrative of the super soldier he essentially was kind of cast as the bad guy and then I was in the editorial phase of the book and I got an email from him and he said I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you my wife had cancer and I what a valuable lesson what a valuable lesson and we did two interviews and I told my editor I have to rewrite that chapter and I did I mean that story speaks to a lot of the subjects we’ve spoken about today which is when we see someone as different when we see them as aliens adversaries enemies opponents we are much more likely to treat them as such but in reality it often turns out that we’re all very much the same struggling with the same things with the same worries anxieties concerns apprehensions and it’s just sometimes when there’s a bridge built in the case of that email that we realize that we’re not enemies after all and that we don’t need to be at War whether that’s with words or whether it’s with nuclear weapons and when you see that fellow Hunter on the path they might not be the enemy they might be someone to work with it’s very good of you to admit that Annie because what you’re actually admitting is that you’re a human being because we all do that kind of thing when we see someone as an adversary I think as you say it’s feels like it’s hardwired into us in some way but also within that story we learned to um to try and find or make the bridge ourselves which in the world we live in now with social media and stuff is doesn’t seem to be um easy or obvious for people with although this polarization and such and maybe if the you know if the us could make a bridge with some of these foreign adversaries we wouldn’t be talking about nuclear war in your book nuclear war scenario thank you so much for writing this book because I’m a big believer and a big um advocate of confronting the realities honestly and openly regardless of how uncomfortable it is because if we don’t I think it actually increases is the probability of us finding ourselves in a 72 hour scenario as you write about in the book and I the same2 minutes 72 minutes Jesus Christ 72 hours did I say 72 hours yes we all make Freudian oh jez I wish it was 72 uh well no actually don’t I i’ ra if it was going to happen I’d rather it just happened in the blink of an eye but um but no I think it’s it’s so so important to write a lot of people be scared a lot of people chose not to even click on this conversation because they’re scared of the subject matter but I I think it’s leaning in that helps us to um resolve and find solutions to start the conversation and I know lots of people listen to this you never know like that um like that documentary or movie you talked about earlier who’s listening and the powers that they have and the decisions that they can make to change things or to create one of those bridges to to sort of denuclearize the world and that’s the work you’re doing so I think it’s very very important work and I’m glad that you’ve um committed your Brilliance to doing it so thank you thank you so much for having me oh [Music]

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