Annie Jacobson, welcome to the show.

It's delightful to be here. Thank you for having me.

I have been looking forward to this for so long. We had to postpone it because you went and spoke at the EU parliament.

I spoke in Brussels to members of the EU parliament in the audience. Yes.

Well, I think it was well worth the wait. And actually, I think it worked out better, you know, that we rescheduled for. Because now we have more to talk about.

We do. We have no shortage of things to talk about.

Yeah, we could, we could probably go on for days here. But everybody starts off with an introduction, so let me know if I'm missing anything, but. Annie Jacobson, american investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and New York Times bestselling author. You're an author of seven books and best known for your book so far, area 51 in uncensored, censored history of America's top secret military base. You just released your 7th book called Nuclear a scenario. Write and produces television programs including Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan. Your books have been named best of the year and most anticipated by outlets including the Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Apple, and Amazon. Your Princeton graduate and captain of the women's varsity ice hockey team, as we spoke about earlier. And you're a wife and the mother of two sons.

Yes.

Am I missing anything?

That's about it.

Well, we got a lot to dive into. I want to focus mostly on your new book, Nuclear War. But we have, we got to knock a couple things out before we get in the weeds. So I have a Patreon account. They're our top supporters that have been with us since the beginning. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them, and neither would you. And so one of the perks that I offer them is they get to ask a question to each guest. And so today's question is, with today's attitude towards fake news, do you think we will ever gain public knowledge of the topics covered by your books?

What a great opener question. I think of the idea of fake news as air quotes entwined with the idea of strategic deception. And that is something I have written about in many of my books. No doubt we will cover this. But an interesting question there, because the takeaway that I see is like, how much should we trust what we are being told? And that is certainly why I write books, is to sort of uncover these long held secrets and bring them into the light of day. And so to answer the question specifically, I think you want to go to as many sources as possible. It's why I read all sides of the aisle. I will read international papers. I will watch different programs that people might otherwise think are in opposition of one another, read things on the Internet, listen to the podcast, and then come to your own opinion about things because that's interesting.

Well, one, how much should we trust? I would love to talk to you about that, but, you know, I try to do that, and I try to read both sides of the l do you get a lot of flack for that?

I used to, but I dont anymore because I think thats very much part of my reporting style. No one knows how I vote. No one needs to know how I vote. I write about POTUS in all of my books, president of the United States. And so that keeps me in the middle. And it also allows me to have incredible conversations with all kinds of people. And that, I think, keeps me comfortable with what I'm learning because I'm learning how to make my own judgments about things. And I think America's getting savvy to that as well.

Man, that's great to hear because I do that. I think people probably know which way I vote, but I don't like to make it a point of any of my discussions. I like to hear both sides. And sometimes when I, especially when I'm critical to my own side, man, I really get a lot of flack. But, you know, I think that's part of the problem that we're facing in the country right now is people have become, and I've talked about this several times, I think people have become, they're not tied to their own ideas, values and beliefs anymore. They're tied to their political candidate and party. And, you know, when you do that, you're only getting what that side wants you to hear, whether you like it or not, you know? And so it's just, it's refreshing to hear somebody that, that listens or pays attention to both sides and gives a, you know, a bipartisan take on, on whatever you're reporting on. So thank you for doing that.

Well, also, what comes to mind is people talk a lot about tribalism, right? Like, and there's tribe, and then there's tribalism. You want to have a tribe. You want to have people that, you know, have your back. And usually those people, the tribe, the true tribe, right. They actually are perfectly fine with you having opinions. At least this is my take. My tribe is, oh, Annie with her opinion about that or Annie with her interest in that. They're fine with it. They might not like that or do that or think that, but that's the tribe tribalism is like, that's where I think it becomes a little bit dangerous and fraught because then you're supposed to adopt, really, a party line. You have to have an opinion about this and that. That just puts you in a really awkward position because I think naturally we're all such creatures of multiple, you know, multiple ideas and multiple ways in directions in which we want to head. And it doesn't have, they don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's weird times we're in, right?

Well, there are weird times. But, you know, I am a historian also. And so all of my books cover going back national security issues to World War Two. And we, if were talking about Americans, have always been tribal, have always had weird times. So im not as pessimistic about how terrible the times are right now because ive read so much history about how terrible the times have always been. It's kind of how you want to see it.

Do you find it? Do you find times today different than some of the stuff that you've studied in the past?

Well, one thing about me is I'm always looking for the similarities and then understanding the differences, but I find things. I'm an optimist at heart, even though I write about these incredibly dark, grim topics. I think that, like, I'm a pragmatist, right? Like, know the facts, don't be afraid of them. But the optimism of it all comes from being able to see, certainly as I get older and I write more books and I learn more things and I interview more interesting people. Oh, we are more similar than different, both as people and also culturally through his, like, through the different decades and generations of modern America.

Interesting how much you brought up. How much should we trust? How much, how do we even know what to trust anymore?

Well, I look at things specifically head on. So I would be better to your listeners and my readers to deal with, like, specifics than big generalizations. I can certainly make big generalizations about what I think about war and weapons and us national security and secrets because that is what I write about. But in terms of operations, the specificity is important. It's like, wait, is area 51 really that were the nazi scientists really? That is the DARPA program about bio hybrids really that I can speak to them specifically? Because I think that, again, I'm going to give you the information that I know and then people can decide what they think because the takeaway is incredibly. Want me to give you an example yes, please. So this is the best example I can think of, of point of view when I wrote a book called Operation Paperclip, which is about the nazi scientists who came to America to build our weapons programs after World War Two. So they were former Nazis. And this book published in 2013, 2014, back in a time when a journalist like me could actually appear on Fox News and CNN on the same night.

You almost can't do that anymore. Right? They just don't, the royal, they don't let you. But you could then, and I would go on to the, let's just call them the conservative and the liberal. Right. So I'd go onto a conservative organization's media program and they would say, oh, my God. Annie Jacobson, thank you so much for writing Operation Paperclip. I mean, you showed us that these guys were these terrible Nazis, odious, et cetera, et cetera. But man, did we need them to come to the United States or otherwise we'd all be speaking Russian now. So thank you for writing this book. Okay. Then I would go over to the really liberal stations, maybe even the Holocaust museum type scenarios, and they would say to me, oh, my God. Annie Jacobson, thank you so much for writing this book. Operation Paperclip. You showed us in no uncertain terms, these horrible, evil, criminal minds should have been hung at Nuremberg. They never should have come here. You make that so clear. Thank you so much for writing this book.

Interesting.

You take away, they read the same book, they took away a point of view based on the same set of facts. And so when I can understand that about people, and there's no, I suppose one group isn't right and one group isn't wrong. And when you can look at it like that, and maybe this also comes into play of you being, we talked about this earlier, like, when you're a new parent versus my kids are college aged. Right. The wisdom that comes with parenting, I believe if you want to be an optimist, is that you learn how to help your children understand that different points of view are fine, same sets of facts.

That's great advice. That's great advice.

Parent to parent.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. But we want to talk about, actually, I forgot something. I almost, sometimes I forget, not very often, but everybody, everybody starts off with a gift. Okay, there you go.

Performing vigilance enhancing gummy bears.

Gummy bears performance. These are legal in all 50 states.

Amazing.

They're definitely legal in California. So, so you're, you're cleared out to bring them back. It's just can't, amazing.

The TSA will not, you know, pull me over.

They might try to steal them, but.

They'D be like, wow, that's Sean Ryan.

That's right. That's right.

Great. Fantastic. Amazing. Keep going.

Oh, no, that's good.

Oh, no. This is very important.

Some stickers.

Yeah, put it on my car.

There you go.

With my mammoth mountain sticker.

Nice.

And the Shawn Ryan show.

There you go. There you go.

I had a Macv sog sticker on my car for a while.

Did you really?

I did. And I got some honks.

Yeah, that's a. I've never even seen a Mac visa. Mac.

I'm gonna send you one. Thank you so much.

Sticker.

And here's something for you. Oh, man. That's a Billy Waugh coin. And we'll get. I'm sure we'll get into surprise kill, vanish after nuclear war. But they kind of entwine all my books. Entwine. But Billy Waugh's perhaps the most legendary ciataine operator Singleton, in the agency's history, man. Began his operations when Eisenhower was president.

That's incredible. Thank you.

Just died. Yeah.

He just died. When did he die?

He died April, a year ago.

Oh, man. So. Yeah, so a year exact. Almost. Wow. Well, thank you very much. I can't wait to speak about him in a little bit. Nuclear war. So your new book is about a nuclear war scenario. And, you know, you talk to all these. I mean, you get access to people that nobody really gets access to. I read that. Leon Panetta. How are you getting access to former SecDef, former director of Ciataine, and all the rest of his resume, which I'm not. I could go on here, but people don't get access to figures like that. How are you gaining access to former directors?

What's the saying? The harder I work, the luckier I get? There's that part of it. This is not my first rodeo, so, seven books. I do find that when I reach out to people to ask them if I can interview them, and I say, my creds, sometimes they say, oh, I'm familiar with your work. I've read and they name a book, so that helps. But I think, in principle, the greatest contribution that I can put on the table, and it's perhaps why some of these really, you know, significant people. And when I say that, like, they have a lot of information to share, that is powerful and that the public benefits from knowing, like Panetta, it's that objectivity card that I have, which I believe is so important. I'm trained as an old school journalist, you are here to report the news down the middle of the aisle. You should not have an opinion. Okay. When you write long form books, maybe at the end you kind of give your opinion a little bit, or you might suggest it so that there's something to think about for the reader. But for the most part, tell the, you know, relay the facts.

I mean, the origins of journalism come from this idea that anyone, a high school student, should be able to understand what you're writing about. And I, that's how I write. You know, I write for the regular old people. I know I'm read by the generals and admirals of the Pentagon because they tell me so, but I just write for regular people.

Nice. Nice. You had an interesting fact here. I want to just kick it off with this. A full scale nuclear exchange between the US and Russia will likely kill some 5 billion people. Can you.

Yeah.

How did you come up with 5 billion? And what does that scenario look like?

And keep in mind, nuclear war scenario is a nonfiction book. It presents a hypothetical situation in the future that is based on fact. So the 5 billion figure, for example, is not my fact. That is a fact from Professor Brian Toon and a group of scientists that he led reporting on this subject for decades in their newest paper for Nature magazine, Nature Food, actually, based on climate modeling systems of what would happen after nuclear winter. And so the book takes you from nuclear launch to nuclear winter. Okay, 5 billion people are dead after nuclear winter. But a key, haunting line that was said to me that really allowed me to see the book clearly, because when you're, you know, writing books as a process, you're reporting, you're interviewing people, you're figuring out how your chapters are going to lay out. When I did an interview with the former Stratcom commander, General Keillor, and we were discussing what a nuclear exchange between Russia and America would look like, and he said to me, the world could end in the next couple of hours.

What is Stratcon?

Okay, great question. And how great that we don't need to know everything. That's how. Right. Strategic command is the most important combatant command. You know, combatant commands, they're what, eleven now? Right? I. Its the most important combatant command that almost nobody has ever heard of outside of strategic command, outside of the military structure. It is, the commander of strategic command is in charge of the nukes. Hes in charge of them. Hes the steward of them. Theres 150,000 employees beneath him in his chain of command. The president, when the president needs to launch nuclear weapons. He communicates with the Stratcom commander. That's how important the stratcom commander is.

Ok. And you got access to him?

I did.

And you guys had a discussion about this?

We did.

How did that start?

You know, dear General Keillor, I mean, the actual discussion. Yeah. Oh, the actual discussion with his origins, like, very much. It's what I relate to about your podcast. Like, his origins, like, how did you wind up the commander of Stratcom? Right. And, like, he wanted to be a musician, you know? So it's like there's this idea that you wind up Stratcom commander, and then you begin with people's origin stories and how. How they are as a person. And, you know, I recall him telling me about how he was tending his garden before our interview. Now, this is not all in the book, because unlike a podcast, I interview people for a certain amount of time, and then I kind of condense down what is I'm going to say about them, because I'm driving the narrative for the reader. But the discussions, I think, begin with human questions, and then you can get to what's important and what you're after. And also, like you, I'm very transparent about what I'm after. Right. So I do not like the idea of Gotcha journalism. I think it is incredibly unhelpful. I think it's at the verge of dangerous.

Whenever I read a piece in the. In any of the legacy media that, like, sort of is a hit piece against someone, I cringe. I think of that person, you know, opening up themselves to a reporter and then being, you know, presented in a way that perhaps they certainly didn't intend. Yeah, I think that is, I cringe. And I. And I actually feel for the journalist who's stuck doing that, you know, because I think that it just takes you down a real path of mistrust and suspicion. Anyways, I'm digressing. I tell my sources right up front what I'm doing. I told every single one of them, I am writing this book called Nuclear a scenario, you know, and I also ask them, is this fear mongering? Because that was the question in my own mind that led a lot of the reporting. Sean, what happens in this book is like, everybody dies and they die in the most horrific ways. I described to you in appalling detail what happens to humans, you know, in a nuclear flash. I wanted people to know how horrific this concept is, and I told my sources that, and they were forthcoming with me, which says so much about nuclear weapons.

Interesting. What, how did, I mean, where did the interest in this come from? Are you worried about a nuclear war?

I am now. I mean, all of my books touch upon nuclear weapons because they all cover american history since World War Two and in every one of my books. So imagine 100 plus sources for each book. How many of those people told me, with deep pride, Annie, I did what I did to prevent nuclear World War III, right? So a lot of our really dark, dirty opera, even the CIAs most dastardly sort of dark hearted operations, you could say, in the fifties and sixties, people I interviewed who worked on those or the very non kinetic operations like in Area 51, which deals with reconnaissance, you know, spying on the Soviet Union to try and find out whats really going on there instead of speculating. All of these people, a majority of them said to me, I did what I did to prevent nuclear World War III. And so in the previous administration, former President Trump, with the rhetoric about, you know, fire and fury against the north korean leader, I found that, like, shocking and rather unpresidential, right. Because there had been a precedent not to threaten people with nuclear weapons. It's dangerous. It really is.

That's not an opinion. That's a fact. I, like many people, began to wonder, what if deterrence failed? Deterrence just another synonym for prevention. What if it fails? Because all of nuclear warfighting, deterrence is predicated on this psychological phenomena. You who are so interested in the mind, right? It is a psychological phenomena. Deterrence will hold. Deterrence will hold. Deterrence will hold. And then you have a quote from a deputy director at Stratcom saying, if deterrence fails, it all unravels.

You've heard me talk about them before, and I'm excited to talk about them again. Hoist is iv level hydration that's made right here in the USA. Hoist is a proud supporter of the us military and serves many of our service members across the globe. I wish I'd had Hoist during my military career. Hoist offers military and first responders discounts when they use their government id at checkout. Now is the perfect time to try hoist, because for the entire month of July, Hoist is donating 10% of sales, up to 10,000, to Team red, white and Blue, an amazing organization that provides physical and social activities for military veterans and their families. So by grabbing some hoist, you're not just staying hydrated, you're also helping support an incredible cause. Give hoist a try. I love the strawberry lemonade flavor they sent me, and it tastes incredible. Use my discount code to save 15% when you order, just go to drinkhoist.com and use code Sean. That's drinkhoist.com and use the code Sean for 15% off. Today's show is sponsored by helixsleep.com. dot sleep, especially as you get older, is critical. Especially that deep, comforting sleep. Go to helixsleep.com and take the sleep quiz.

I took it and was matched with the midnight luxe. Helix knows that everyone's unique, so they have several different mattress models to match based on your body type and sleeve preferences. Once you match, your mattress comes right to your door, shipped for free. When you receive your Helix mattress, you'll be amazed at how well you'll sleep. And if your back needs some extra tlc like mine, you'll love their hybrid design that combines individually wrapped steel coils in the base with premium foam layers on top. They have a ten year warranty and financing option, so a great night's sleep is never far away. Helix Sleep is also proud to support our active military service members, veterans, military spouses and military family members. With exclusive discounts on promotions on Helix products, Helix is offering up to 30% off all mattress orders and two free pillows. For our listeners. Go to helixsleep.com srs. That's helixsleep.com srs. This is their best offer yet, and it's not going to last long. With Helix, better sleep starts now.

That unraveling is this book.

Well, it must be a very realistic scenario if you're speaking. How do I say this to. You're speaking in Brussels and there happen to be members of the EU parliament listening. So let's go over the scenario. What do you think would trigger this?

A nuclear war could be triggered by any nuclear launch at the United States, period. Right. So there are now nine nuclear armed nations. In my scenario, I chose a rogue launch from a ballistic missile, an intercontinental ballistic missile, just like it sounds. It can travel from one continent to the other. That's an ICBM in 30 minutes. Launch to target, 30 minutes.

That's the farthest target.

30 minutes. 33 minutes is actually from Pyongyang. 26 minutes and 40 seconds from Moscow to. To the east coast. This is specificity. It doesn't change. All the new weapon systems, that doesn't change. That is what it was when they were invented. This is just basic physics. It goes up and over the earth and down. Okay. And so then once you know that. Wait, that's all it takes. This is not a 911 scenario where, you know someone whispers in the president's ears. Sir, the planes have hit the buildings. It's not that. If you're me reporting this, suddenly you learn that the United States has not only spent trillions of dollars creating this vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, but defense systems to survey other nations. So we have a system of satellites in space, in geosync, one 10th of the way to the moon. A satellite the size of a school bus parked over North Korea, watching, watching, watching, watching. So when launch happens, we see it in under 1 second. That's why my scenario goes by seconds and minutes. It's 72 minutes. This book.

Wow.

Three acts, 72 minutes. 24 minutes. 24 minutes and 24 minutes. Then you got the setup at the beginning and nuclear winter at the end.

Interesting. Real quick, before. So here's what I'd like to do is dive into the scenario and then talk about some of the defenses that we have. Talk about what? Maybe you weren't. Maybe your sources weren't able to tell you. You know, I'd like to go maybe a little more into the scenario, but real quick. Who are the nine nations?

US, Russia, China, UK, France, Pakistan, India, Israel, North Korea.

Iran's not on there yet.

Iran is not on there yet.

Right on. Good for us. But who would you, out of those nations, who would you be the most concerned about? Give me your top three.

North Korea.

North Korea.

North Korea. And that's how I begin the scenario. It's a launch from North Korea. One of the most interesting people I interviewed for this book. Okay, this on the COVID here is a thermonuclear bomb called Ivy Mike. This is the first thermonuclear bomb ever exploded in 1952 in the Marshall Islands. It was a test. Okay. Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. This is 10.4 megatons.

Wow.

Okay, think about that scale. This weapon takes a nuclear. An atomic bomb acts as its triggering mechanism inside the bomb. Okay. I interviewed the Mandev who drew the plans for this bomb.

No kidding.

93. Now, Richard Garwin. Talk about classified. His information was so classified, it was all. No one knew. He even drew the plans to the bomb. He was 24 years old when he drew them.

Are you serious? Does he regret drawing them?

I asked him that question. I said, do you wish that you hadn't drawn the plans for the thermonuclear bomb? And he said to me, after a long pause, I wish they couldn't have been drawn.

Wow.

I mean, we could do a whole podcast on what that might mean. Yeah, right. Does it mean Russia would have drawn them anyways? Does it mean. Right. But interviewing Garwin, who advised every president since then on nuclear weapons, you asked about why North Korea is like the most dangerous. Garwin so sharp, you know, in his, we did all these zooms during COVID and he presented, when I asked him what's the biggest threat, he said a madman, sort of mad king logic is what he called it, a madman with a nuclear arsenal. And he said this french term which is called apres moi le deluge. After me, the flood. Okay, which is like, if you have a mad King leader who doesn't care what happens, you know, let it all flood. Thats what Garwin told me he was most afraid of. And so that made me interpret that he was speaking about North Korea.

Wow.

Because North Korea does not play by the rules. I mean, its very tricky rules of nuclear warfare, rules of nuclear testing. We all, nuclear armed nations inform their adversaries of their nuclear tests, like informally, formally, through, you know, different ways, but not North Korea. They just launch. And when you learn what I have learned, and you can learn from reading this book, what happens inside nuclear command and control, inside those nuclear bunkers at the Pentagon, beneath stratcom in Cheyenne mountain, the first 150 seconds after a ballistic missile launches, when the satellite in space sees the launch, it sees the hot rocket exhaust from its incredible sensor, one 10th of the way to the moon sees it. For the next 150 seconds, us nuclear command and control, all those assigned to the job, are trying to figure out where that ballistic missile is going. It's like.

I'm glad you brought that up because that's what I was going to ask. Are the satellites advanced enough to pick up on the trajectory and where it's headed and how fast?

So in seconds, the data goes to the satellite and then it's relayed to command centers in the United States. There's a facility called the Aerospace Data facility in Colorado that was only declassified. Its existence was only declassified in 2008. Okay. And that facility then and others, NSA, you know, there's numerous intelligence agencies, military intelligence agencies that are then processing that data. This is happening in seconds and interpreting the trajectory of the missile launch. So I show a map in the book that Garwin and Professor emeritus at MIT, Ted postol drew, and then let me render and put in the book that shows, so you can see a missile launching. It's a map, and then it shows the missile and it shows they're co centric rings. It's like at 10 seconds, this is where it might be going. So Guam is in one direction, Moscow is in that direction. And then you realize if it's going in that direction, San Francisco, east coast, Hawaii, the seconds tick away. The data is determining where that is headed.

So this is almost like a, it's like when a hurricane's inbound, except a lot faster. It narrows in, narrows in, narrows in.

Narrows in, and by 150 seconds. Stratcom or, you know, the Petersen Air Force Base, the Space force, the aerospace data center, they know this ballistic missile is headed toward the United States. 150 seconds. Normally, what North Korea does is send the satellite. Theyre sending it up to space to drop a satellite. So thats one different trajectory, or they launch into the Sea of Japan. So within seconds, the facilities know its going into the Sea of Japan. Everybody can relax now, but in my scenario at 152nd, boom. Oh, my God, its coming to the east coast of the United States. And that is when everything kicks off, because the next step is to inform the president. Now, there must be a secondary confirmation of that nuclear missile on its way to the United States before the president launches a counterattack. That secondary confirmation takes eight and 9 minutes. These are like nerd things that I figured out in the book and present them to you, hopefully in this incredibly dramatic manner that you realize, oh, my God. Once a ballistic missile launch happens, nuclear war begins, because a ballistic missile cannot be redirected or recalled.

None of them, not even our own.

None. None. And once President Reagan, okay, I mean, the lack of information the president has about nuclear war is astonishing.

Really.

President Reagan, and by the way, they have presidential sole authority. So only the president can launch nuclear war? Only the president. He doesnt ask permission of anyone, not his secdef, not his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the Congress. Certainly not the Congress. This is all happening in 6 minutes. Presidents in charge and presidents, most presidents. Leon Panetta confirmed this with me, the White House chief of staff under Clinton. Right. And he said that many presidents just dont want to know because, again, the paradox of nuclear deterrence will hold.

Dont want to know what they dont.

Want to know about nuclear war.

Thats frightening.

So Reagan mistakenly said during a press conference, and I think it was 1983, that our submarine launched ballistic missiles can be recalled. They can't. He's the commander in chief.

Mm hmm.

He didn't know.

Do you think it's possible that technology, we have technology to recall them, but.

They'Re not satisfying it. It's impossible. Right. And, but I love the astonishment with which people express themselves when they learn these details because it is astonishing. And I had that same experience even knowing what I know I know so many other things about nuclear weapons from different points of view. Having written a number of books that deal with people who dealt with nuclear weapons but I never knew the command and control ticking clock scenario hypothetically in the future until reporting this book and I was, I was shocked at everything I learned, shocked at everything I learned and it's such ba from wait a minute, they really can't be redirected or recalled? Nope.

Wow. I did not know that. I did not know that. So. So you're saying within 6 minutes of something being launched towards us we're going to we make a decision whether we're responding and sending one at them or not?

Yes. So think about it this way, when the nuclear, if it just takes approximately 30 minutes, the concept that has been put into play over decades of strategy of how to fight a nuclear war is that but the president must make a counterattack decision before those nukes land. So this is all going to happen without the public ever having any idea. Okay. The reason is because no one ever thought of having a nuclear war where theres like one nuclear missile, the rogue launch off of Garwins worry is how my scenario starts and then you see all these things go wrong. The war fighting concepts of nuclear war were built with like Russia's gonna send 1000 missiles, the mother load it's often called. And so a strategy kicks in called use em or lose em. Very simple to understand right. If we don't use them were going to lose them to the russian incoming missiles and so thats why the president is positioned to make a counter strike within a window of time before the missiles hit.

So basically so if they have 6 minutes why is the number 6 minutes?

So okay 30 minutes is the nuclear launch gets detected in lets say 150 seconds.

So we got two and a half minutes gone on right gone.

Everybodys now getting ready to prepare the president. At the same time the long range ground radar systems that are going to give that secondary confirmation which exists in multiple places around the world. I write about them quickly in the book. In this scenario if the missiles coming from North Korea its going to be the ground station in Alaska. They have this massive radar, I have a picture of it in the book, it's like five stories tall it's just sitting there waiting to see over the horizon. That will happen at eight or 9 minutes. In the meantime they have to get ready to brief the president. People I have interviewed had to brief the president when we had false alarms. Okay so it's like really this intense you know, suddenly everything is mo, the decision tree unfolds in this radical way. While the individual leaders, the stratcom commander, the secdef, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are getting ready to brief the president, theyre waiting on the secondary confirmation. But once the president is told, so there is AITs called the red, the red clock is running. And that clock in the strategic command headquarters has, you know, is ticking down until the missiles going to strike, in this case, Washington, DC.

Now they have to get the blue clock running. The blue clock is the counterattack. Okay? So you send general Hytenother, former Stratcom commander during the fire and fury rhetoric of Trump, did an interview with Barbara Starr from CNN, and she asked him directly about this, like, what do we do if they launch at us? And Hyten said, if they launch one missile, we launch one. If they launch two, we launch two. But if you dig a little bit deeper, as I did, and it's all sourced in the book, when you're reading, if you ever wonder, how does she know this, you can go to the back and you can see the notes of the documents, where it comes from. So the deep digger, the deeper digging revealed that if North Korea launches one missile at us, we're going to launch 82 in response.

82?

82.

Seems a little excessive.

You know, it's called escalate to de.

Escalate when you look at the size of Korea. But I mean, would it take, how many, how many missiles would it take to just completely obliterate Korea?

82.

It would take 80. It would actually take 82 missiles.

No, no, you're absolutely right. But there is a sense of overkill, literally and figuratively. And you know this from your operating days, that like, you know, its like go big or go home. I mean, the idea, theres a concept with the president that was explained to me by one of the President Obamas national security advisers named John Wolfsdhal, who sat in the room with the president when this was being negotiated. Okay? So theres a policy in the United States called launch on warning. And this exists, okay, which, this is the, this is the idea. This is, the president has the authority that if the missiles are coming, he launches. We launch on warning. We do not wait until we are hit. And Wolfstall explained to me that what that has to do with is what's called a damage limitation responsibility. Okay? Everything has like a term that is difficult to come out of the mouth. It's why they have acronyms for them. But this is pointing to your why do we have to launch 82 questions. So the president now has a responsibility to limit further damage. That's what his military is telling him. So a strike with a one megaton thermonuclear weapon against Washington, DC, that I described to.

It kills 2 million people. Sean.

Mm hmm.

Never mind that the things are about to really take off. It destroys the beating heart of american governance. That is like, the response is 82 nuclear weapons. The damage limitation responsibility, because all the military stratcom is thinking at that point is you're gonna let another nuke come in. And so the 82 we learn from those, the scientists and the analysts who have spent a lot of time looking at this, is how to limit the damage 82 nuclear weapons could possibly take out, not just, like, turn the entire country into a furnace, but obliterate their nuclear command and control their ability to launch more nuclear weapons. That's why that is set up that way.

Man, I would think 82 nuclear missiles would. I would think the flash alone would be enough to wipe out the entire country.

It would kill tens of millions of people. Not a question. But that. And the book was read after it was written, before it went into production and publication. Bye. Many of my sources and by people who actually were not my sources, but who ran these scenarios for NORAD generals. I'm talking about people who were not in the book. So they didn't have a horse in the race, that they could say to me, you're wrong about this. This is too. And there were some tweaks that I did, but that was not one of them. No one said, that's too many. We wouldn't do that.

Do you have any idea how many nuclear weapons we have? How many?

So on. Ready for launch status. Meaning theyre forward deployed. Meaning they can be launched in seconds or minutes from the presidents order. Seconds or minutes. We have 1770. The numbers change a little bit every year. Russia has 1674. That says nothing about the thousands more in storage that we have ready to, you know, that could be pulled out. So we have approximately 5000 each. Why do we need that many nuclear weapons? You must be asking yourself?

We need that many because they have that many. And they need that many because we have that many.

And guess how. Guess how. Guess what the number was at the all time high, which was in 1986.

10,000?

70,000.

70,000. Wow.

And so the setup of the book, it's like 50 pages or something. It's like how we got here. I explain how America sort of had this insane buildup of nuclear weapons during the 1950s. There was one point in 1957, this bomb went off in 1952. And the military industrial complex just went ba ba ba boom. At one point we were building on average five nuclear weapons a day. A day. And then you're building the weapon. That's just the bombs, the warheads. You're building weapons systems. Because we have a triad. We don't just have the ICBM's in the silos and the ground. We have nuclear armed, nuclear powered submarines outfitted with submarine launched ballistic missiles. And then we also have the bombers. So we have a triad. But during the Cold War we had, you know, we were shooting tactical nuclear weapons out of cannons. Billy Wall was halo jumping a hand carried portable nuclear weapon out of an airplane in case we needed to use it on the battlefield.

How do you, I mean, I know you don't like to give your opinion and if you don't want to, that's okay. How do you feel about having like 1000?

What did you say, 1770?

US 1770? How do you, do you think we need that?

I mean, that's an opinion I think that, that I own, which is absolutely not. I mean, look, my lane is as an investigative journalist, reporting the facts, doing the interviews and setting them down on the record. But of course you get to have an opinion at some point, certainly when time like times have changed. We are back in the original buildup it was us and Russia and then China in the early sixties. Now there are nine nuclear armed nations, many of which are in direct conflict with one another. All of the new technology, artificial intelligence. You know, this is crazy. Its like the United nations secretary general recently said, we are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon.

Mm hmm.

And he said, we must reverse course and we must. So I was in Brussels talking about my book because people were interested in it. What I learned is because they said to me, and these are disarmament groups, right. And they said to me, your book condenses in a really dramatic, terrifying way what we have been trying to convey to world leaders for decades with a lot of information, you just. And what we're trying to convey is this is madness. So the progress is that we've gone from 70,000 nuclear warheads. There are a total of approximately 12,500 today amongst the nuclear nine nuclear armed nations. The disarmament people will tell you that's 12,500 too many. The United nations recently created a treaty called I'm going to mess this up. The international, the IPTNW, the international treaty on the Prohibition of nuclear weapons. And their idea is that gradually, nations should begin to reduce their arsenals down to zero gradually. And so the opinion I would have, which seems like a responsible journalist, that sounds like a really good idea. And the word gradual is important because, okay, so we've been talking about the horrors of nuclear war, but you can also talk to proponents of deterrence, as I do, who will tell you we must have a nuclear arsenal because the bad guys do.

Mm hmm. That's where I would fall.

Right. And by the way, that's the easier it really is, the easier, quicker conclusion.

I mean, I feel like it would be great if there were no nuclear weapons. However, you know, we don't play nicely with one another. Right. And so I think the. I mean, how. I'm just going to go off on a tangent here and say that the only way. Look, if I were president or in charge of this country, the only way I would even consider eliminating our nuclear weapons as if we had a defense capability that was able to eliminate any nuclear weapon on the way here.

Well, yes, the idea is absolutely that the disarmament idea isn't, oh, we should give up all of our nuclear weapons and then just believe that North Korea and Russia and China and Iran, or, you know, Iran doesn't have the weapon yet, all of these other countries will just give up their capability. That would be madness. Mm hmm. But the disarmament, that when we went from 70,000 down to 12,500, Russia reduced their arsenal alongside of us. So reduction in the.

Did we really reduce, did we really reduce the arsenal, though? Or have we developed better? Maybe not. Maybe better is the wrong word. Have we developed more powerful and more devastating nuclear missiles to where we don't need 70,000? Maybe. Maybe I'm pulling numbers out of nowhere right now, but just for example, maybe one of today's nuclear warheads is equivalent to 100 back in 1950s.

Except for that's not the way it is.

Okay.

Which is so interesting because you and I both know the weapon systems that are, you know, the kinetic weapon systems that are used by the military in ground wars or air wars have been advancing like nobody's business. As technology has been advancing, the nuclear weapons are essentially the same. Not much has changed. We haven't built any new nuclear weapons since Clinton was president because he signed a treaty prohibiting that, and Russia complied. So allegedly, we do not build any new nuclear weapons. It would be a massive violation of a treaty. All of our nuclear weapons are decades old, which is a whole other debate, because now the Defense Department has just asked for. I don't I think it's $900 billion to upgrade the arsenal because it is old and the ICBM's are old. So this is a, it's like a, you're suddenly down the rabbit hole and going, wait a minute, how did I wind up here? But the number of nuclear warheads is simply the number of nuclear warheads. What's another grim consideration is that dismantling a nuclear warhead is also a dirty process. And theres a plant in Texas that does this, which itself is like a major target because it has all the dismantled plutonium and uranium cores.

So the eyes can glaze over with like, isnt it just easier to have an arsenal of nuclear weapons that's the same size as ours? Which is why I point to the people like ICANN, like the Arms Control association, who actively work on these disarmament issues with the United nations. And the point of a book like mine is to make it digestible. For the average person to understand that, like this many nuclear weapons is madness. An accident or a miscalculation could lead to a nuclear war. And its only going to end one way. Almost no one disagrees with that. Once nuclear war starts, it ends in Armageddon. And the scenario takes you through what happens and then the mistakes that happen because of technology holes.

What has been upgraded. It must be the transportation of the warhead that has to have been upgraded by this point.

No, really, I mean a ballistic missile is. Okay, so here's how a ballistic missile works. Ready? Cause this helped me to understand it. Shall I give you the 32nd version?

Please, let's do it.

Okay. So it happens in, you can just imagine it going from there over to that continent. To that continent. And there's a little diagram in the book, by the way, the way, I know this is because the first director of DARPA. Are you familiar with DARPA?

I am.

Okay. DARPA's created in 1957 58.

I can't remember what it stands for, but basically DARPA is our advanced weapons. Yes, it's our advanced technology. Weapons. Correct.

Defense advanced research projects.

There we go.

Agency. Another mouthful. DARPA. Okay. It began in 1957 after the Russians launched Sputnik. We got caught by scientific military surprise. That was like a bad thing. Herb York becomes its first science director. And he wanted to know because the reason Sputnik was so threatening, it was a satellite, the russian satellite, the first one orbiting Earth. The reason it was threatening was because it takes a rocket to get a satellite into space. And if you can put a rocket, if you can put a satellite in space, pretty soon you can put a nuclear warhead on that rocket and hit the United States. That was 1957. Thats where everything changed. And so Herb York wanted to know in seconds and minutes how long it took for that ICBM to get to the United States. So he hired this reallythe smartest guys in the roomthe Jason scientist, about which there are extraordinary many conspiracy theories. I interviewed a number of them, including its founder, for the DARPA book. So York and I learned this because I went and looked in the archives at a library in San Diego because I couldnt get the Defense Department to tell me the answer.

Go to Yorks papers, where a lot of, you know, if you go to the scientists papers, you find a lot of secrets. And sure enough, theres this, you know, process. York asking the Jason scientist, there's all these incredibly cool documents about it. Figure out, tell me how many seconds and minutes it takes. Because you forget that people don't know until they know. You know, you can be the smartest guy in the room, and you don't know how a ballistic missile works until someone tells you.

Mm hmm.

Okay, so they tell York, here's how it works. Three phases. Boost phase, the rocket ignites. You can imagine that fire. Missile goes up 5 minutes. 5 minutes of fire, launching the missile. That's when the satellite can see it. The satellite sees the fire, okay? Then it burns out. Then it has a 20 minutes mid course phase where it's just moving with the rotation of the earth 500 miles above the earth, and then it has 100 seconds of terminal phase, a good term for it. Terminal phase is the last hundred seconds. The warhead, which has been traveling because everything else burns away. The nuclear warhead, or plural warheads, because there might be multiple of them, is now going to reenter the atmosphere in 100 seconds and detonate on target. That's it. That's it. It's so simple. And once you understand that, certainly for me as a reporter, then you can kind of understand, oh, that's how an ICBM works. So there's no upgrading to do, right. You can maybe make the rocket motor.

More powerful, but I guess that's kind of what I'm getting at. I mean, we just, I can't remember who developed it, but we just saw the new, maybe it was within the past year. The hypersonic missile.

Do you remember who developed, it's probably Lockheed's falcon program.

I thought it was, yeah, I thought it was another country, but that's kind of what I was, what I was leaning towards is, you know, maybe a little more stealthy, faster, less than 30 minutes. I don't know.

This isn't, you know, I mean, but again, that my job as a reporter is exact, is exactly to take those questions, demystify them. Right. And definitely not take the approach of, like, you know, you don't know which so many, so much of society kind of, I think, functions that way and prohibits people from asking really basic questions. There's no such thing as a dumb question. Yeah. Okay. Because then once you know it, you know it. But, like, hypersonic, people talk about hyper. We have hypersonics. Well, a hypersonic goes approximately mach five. Okay. Ballistic missiles go mach 20.

Okay?

Okay. So the ballistic missile is such a, it's just like ending. It's such a doomsday machine. You can have hypersonics. This is, you know, this is like warfare that is non nuclear. Nuclear war is in a case by itself, which is why we're at this incredibly threatening moment right now, because nuclear war is coming out of the or nuclear weapons. The use of nuclear weapons is coming out of the mouth of world leaders. And the nuclear war used to be the red line in the sand. And yes, if someone decides to marry a nuclear warhead onto a hypersonic missile, you know, a hypersonic missile will take an hour where an ICBM will take 30 minutes, but its mixing as soon as youre talking about tactical nuclear weapons. Its just the worst possible scenario. Because I know, I can tell you from looking at one of the only declassified nuclear war games called proud prophet. And I write about it in the book, and I show you what a declassified paper looks like. Nomad, that war game showed us two weeks in 1983, ordered by President Reagan. It showed us that no matter how nuclear war begins, it ends in nuclear Armageddon.

Everybody in nuclear command and control knows that. Everyone knows that there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war.

That's terrifying.

It can sometimes feel like TMI, right, that it's almost easier to just not know. And also like, a lot of the war fighting concepts you have on these walls, right, which involve humans, are so much easier in a way to think about, to talk about, to discuss, to wonder about. Nuclear weapons are so abstract. There's no battle for Chicago, battle for New York. It's just, it's just literally push button warfare. Why do we, why is that okay?

I mean, I don't think it's.

I.

Don'T think it's okay. I think I personally feel like it's a necessity that we have to have it because our adversaries have it. Unless we have some type of defense system that can disarm, destroy whatever nuclear warhead is headed our way before it reaches destination.

Mm hmm.

Do we have that capability?

So now it gets really depressing when I tell you about the interceptor missile capability, because you will hear people say, oh, we have, like, an iron dome. You know, we both read the news, and we saw what happened when Iran lobbed missiles, including ballistic missiles, at Israel, and they were intercepted. Right. Those are short range and medium range missiles. Totally different story than trying to shoot down a long range ballistic missile. Also called a strategic missile. What I told you about that 30 minutes arc 500 miles up in space, you're trying to shoot that down. That's where interceptor phase happens.

Don't we have some sort of space weapon that could initiate that instead of shooting up at it?

We do not. We have 44 land based interceptor missiles. 44. People have asked me, like, maybe we have secret. A secret arsenal. We do not. We have 45.

How can you be so sure?

You know, maybe Secretary Panetta is lying to me. Hey, I don't think so. We have four. I mean, we have 44 interceptor missiles. Russia has 1670 on missile.

That's why I'm saying it doesn't even make sense. It doesn't even make sense why we would only have 44 when the adversary's arsenals are so much bigger than 44.

It might have to do with this. Okay. When you can look at the numbers and the cost of the program, which I tell you about the interceptor missiles. Now, the success rate on those interceptor missiles, of which we have 44, is between 40 and 55% the success rate. And right now, that program is on strategic pause, which is a euphemism for. Oh, shit.

So we could take 22 if.

Because inside the warhead.

Best case scenario.

Best case scenario. Inside the warhead is almost certainly decoys that are meant to confuse. So here's how the interceptor system works. It's basically a mini version of that giant rocket that is the ICBM, and inside of its nose cone, it has the aptly named exo atmospheric kill vehicle. That's what it's called. It's a 140 pound. It's not a warhead because it doesn't have any explosives in it. It's just an object. 140 pound object that is going. So the interceptor missile fires up. It's communicating with its ground, with its sensor systems that's guiding it, and it's going to now try and hit the missile. The warhead moving through mid course phase at 14,000 miles an hour, 500 miles up in space, it's going to try to hit it, that the exo atmospheric kill vehicle is going at 20,000 miles an hour. The missile Defense Agency spokesperson says yes. It's like hitting a bullet with a bullet.

Wow. Damn near impossible. And there's no spatial technology. Wow.

It's illegal to put nuclear weapons in space as per the treaties as it should be. And there's one spoiler alert I'm not going to give away. But in the third act of the book, North Korea unleashes a nuclear warhead. It has flying in space already in space, disguised as a satellite, a technology that is actually capable and that North Korea has expressed intention of. Whether it really has it, we don't know. And that unleashes a new kind of mayhem. I'm going to make you read the book to learn about. But just when you thought it was bad, it gets really bad. So you definitely don't want nuclear weapons in space.

Perfect. I didn't necessarily mean nuclear weapons. I meant something to disable a nuclear weapon that is in mid flight in space, like maybe a laser or something, some sort of, some sort of new technology that we don't know yet. But in this, you know, back to that, you had mentioned a war game, I think, that the Reagan administration had put together. So just for the, I want to dive into that. And so just for the audience, a war game is basically a made up scenario, but a realistic scenario that they put, and it kind of shows the probability of what the outcome would look like. And so they do this with all kinds of, a lot of countries do this, and we do this with a multitude of scenarios, cyberattacks, nuclear warfare, and I mean regular warfare. So what did the Reagan administration uncover with that war game, the proud prophet?

So also they do hundreds of these a year. Like, if you read Stratcom, you know, discussions with Congress, as I do, you can interpret how many of these nuclear war games, how many of these war games are going on nuclear war games, because Stratcom wouldnt be doing other operations. So theyre happening all the time, and theyre incredibly classified, meaning they dont get declassified. But this one, proud prophet 83 war game got declassified. Nuclear war game got declassified. And I show you in the book, it's literally all blacked out. It's redacted. You've seen documents like that. It's just all black. There's maybe like one word, you know, aftermath or, you know, buildup, everything else. And so you might say, well, what's the point of releasing this? How can we get any information? It's all redacted. We get the information from a civilian scientist professor who was on that war game named Paul Bracken. He's a professor at Yale now.

Okay?

And once it was declassified, like ten years ago, it allowed Bracken to speak about it generally. Before that, he couldn't say anything, you know, about, you know, the classification requirements. But then suddenly, because it was declassified, he could speak about it in a general manner. And he wrote in his own book what I just conveyed to you, that no matter how nuclear war, so it was a two week long program, Sec Deaf, like, the highest ranking people in military nuclear command and control got together and gamed out these different scenarios. According to Professor Bracken, NATO was involved. NATO wasnt involved. Tactical weapons are involved. Tactical weapons not involved. China gets involved. And what Bracken said was, no matter how nuclear war begins, it only ends in nuclear Armageddon. And his exact words was that everyone left the war game very depressed. And so I think I pulled the veil back on some of this that, and it's almost like a little bit of our experience communicating the nuclear war conundrum is so complex and tightly wound. It began with the generals and the admirals at the Pentagon in the 1950s, working from an idea that nuclear war could be fought and won, which itself is insane.

The original nuclear war plan against the Soviet Union that I write about in the book was going to kill 600 million people.

Wow.

600 million people. How can you have a plan like that and not call it mass extermination? That's how it began. That was a long time ago. The Soviets were the big, bad threat. No one's doubting that. It's different. It's a different world that we live in now. Why do we have, why have we not acknowledged that what began as madness will likely end in madness unless all of these issues are addressed?

Money.

You mean there's more money to build more weapons? Mm hmm.

I think we're, I think we're at a new crossroads that's completely different, but maybe has some similarities with aihdeme.

Okay, do you keep going? I'm interested. What you have to say?

Well, I mean, there's a lot of fear of what AI could develop into, and it basically, you know, gets to the point where it makes humanity completely irrelevant. And so it's a dangerous game we're playing. I don't think anybody really knows the extent of what we might experience if this keeps, keeps on with the brain chips, with everything. And so it's another. It's, once it's out of the bag, it's not going back in. And I feel like that's where we're at with AI, is where we were with nuclear war.

It's the Pandora's box idea. Yes, yes. Which kind of begs the question, okay, so how about doing something about it? And I know we all have busy lives, and that is part of the, you know, no one can stop what theyre doing and suddenly become an expert on existential threats, per se. So we talk about it and we, you know, pontificate what can be done. But we should remember that there are powers that be that are paid to deal with these issues in our own government. And also the days are over where you could just trust the government to be doing the. How do I say that?

Yeah, I know where you're going. We should be able to trust the government to have our. To be doing things in our best interest.

Yeah, right? Like if you watch the propaganda films of the fifties having to do with nuclear war, right? I mean, and you see like, a housewife with a tiny waist and, you know, curlers maybe even making pancakes, and then like, a siren goes off, Jimmy, come quick. And they duck and cover, and that's going to protect you against a nuclear bomb. And everybody went, okay, I mean, those days are over. But then you kind of. I think the point you're raising is what kind of, like, version of that are we dealing with today?

I think it's AI. I mean, it's happening right now. You know, Xi Jinping in China says, the first country that masters AI will achieve global domination. And so now you have all these people over here that are worried about, I mean, I'm conflicted. What do you do? China's not gonna stop. They're not gonna stop. So if we stop, then we put ourselves at a disadvantage. But if none of us stop, we put the entire human species at the risk of becoming irrelevant, you know? And does it make sense?

Of course it makes sense. And it's absolutely on point. And, you know, you can also throw into that mix biology because, okay, so here's how I would tie that together, right? Because you have biological warfare threats that become more threatening, more existentially threatening with the introduction of AI, I believe. Perhaps more so than with the nuclear weapons, right. One of the areas, I'm gonna try to hold this thought together, but it ties. So you might say nuclear weapons could, you know, AI could get hold of nuclear weapons. Well, maybe. And this is where I'm either informed or inaccurate? I don't know. Okay. What I do know is that from interviewing people in cyber command is that our nuclear weapons are surprisingly analog, meaning they are not digital. Okay, so, for example, I learned in reporting the book that our sublance ballistic missiles guide to the targets by star sighting. Sean, a little panel opens, and they use the stars to guide to the target. There are other systems in place, and this stuff is very classified. What is leading is like this ancient technology that our hunter gatherer ancestors used. Okay, so nuclear weapons, because they happened before the advent of the digital age, there has been a concerted effort to make sure they remain analog so that they can't be hacked.

Okay.

Okay. And these are assurances that I have gotten from cyber command. You're just taking somebody at their word at that point because the documentation is not declassified. So hold that thought. Then you have this idea that biological weapons used to exist. We used to have, we had a program about biological weapons. I wrote about it. We hired the nazi scientists. They built up our biological warfare program, and we used to have an arsenal, and then. And Nixon made them illegal. So all of the biological weapons were destroyed. We found out Russia was cheating and they, I mean, rat hole upon rat hole. So biological weapons are no more, which exist, sort of. Thats the reason that nuclear disarmament people say we dont need a nuclear arsenal to keep us safe, because we were able to say we dont need biological weapons to keep us safe. Biological weapons have become taboo. So the disarmament people will say nuclear weapons should be taboo. Now, you take AI, okay. What you're saying, which is really significant to think about, is how does AI fit into the mix if there is indeed a giant gap on purpose between AI being able to access nuclear weapons because it has grown up with that.

That is one lane of security, shall we say? But with the biological issues, that is far more dangerous to my eye, because they didn't grow up together. And AI has the capacity to make biological weapons and chemical weapons. On paper, does that make sense? Because a lot of AI is pulling from information in the public domain, and so far, no student in a basement that we know of has made a nuclear weapon. Think about that. It remains this jealously guarded recipe. Pakistan got the bomb because they stole the. Most people get the bomb because they steal it. But biology, we have biological, synthetic, biological situations being made by, you know, students in high school because of AI. Because what you can program AI, make me a chemical weapon. That to me, is a majorly existential threat. But again, we don't have the language yet, just as laymen or with a little bit of knowledge to understand what AI is really capable of. And so you're bringing up the question, should we trust the same people that said, like, duck and cover and you'll be safe? That's what you're saying. And that's a very important question.

I would say probably not. We should probably not trust them. I mean, I don't, you know, I don't know. Once again, this is like the disarming of the nukes. I mean, what do we do? We can't do we, I mean, what is your opinion?

What do we do about the nukes or about AI?

With AI.

I mean, I always start by looking at the opinions of people I respect, and then I start to kind of gather more information. Like, why did they wind up with their opinion? And so one person that comes to mind when I was stuck, when I was looking at early AI, because a lot of the early AI comes from DARPA and I. They have. DARPA has always had this idea. So also, I think it's important to make a distinction, at least to my eye, between, or I do, when I think about it, AI, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Machine learning is making computers a lot smarter. Artificial intelligence is actually trying to figure out how to make a machine think. For that, I visited, I went to Los Alamos when I was reporting the Pentagon's brain and visited a DARPA scientist who had a grant to try and create, you know, a brain, in essence. And he was using the computer that used to have all the nuclear codes on it. It was really interesting. But he explained to me his name was Doctor Garrett Kenyon, and he gave me this analogy where he said, we're so far out from computers being able to think.

And I said, try and just give me an average Jane or Joe way to understand this. And he said, okay, think about the facial recognition software on your iPhone, right? Very basic thing, you and I, that is machine learning. So he said, have your iPhone look at you and then try to have it look at you further away and with a baseball cap or with sunglasses. Right. So you're kind of making it harder for the machine to know it's you. Now, this interview we did, by the way, was like eight years ago, and things have changed a lot in a frightening manner. Then he said to me, the iPhone could definitely not recognize me across a football field, walking with a baseball cap on the. He said, my daughter, on the other hand, who is, I think, something like eight years old at the time, he said, my daughter knows who I am. Across a football field walking with a baseball cap. Good question. And begins running toward me. That is human intelligence.

I mean, do you think. I think we've, I mean, look, now, China supposedly has camera systems. I don't know what you call them. I guess that wouldn't be facial recognition. They would just be.

They are facial recognition. Yes.

Well, I guess what I'm saying is it can pick up how you walk.

Gait recognition.

And so people are putting rocks in their shoes so that they walk different. Did you not.

I did not know the way to spoof that.

By putting rocks in their shoes so that they walk different so that the technology doesn't pick up how they actually walk.

Yep. And they can now have systems that can read your heartbeat.

I didn't know that.

So this gets into tricky. My opinion on this, or rather my lots of facts opinion, gets into a tricky area here because I speak often about the military industrial complex, not in, and I want to preface this, what I'm about to say about China and all that. Right. Which is not in what might be called a conspiratorial way, per se, like the military industrial complex, literally as a fact based military industrial complex. And it is real. And it is also provides a lot of jobs for a lot of people. I often think about this. So the military industrial complex as a term comes from Eisenhower's farewell speech. Okay. And that's very well known, but less known is what Eisenhower said as a follow up to that in that same speech, which is, interestingly, something I tell my sources as a principal I work from. Would they let me interview them? And most of them say yes on those grounds, which is this, that the way in which America can function as a sort of peaceful nation and a democratic nation and a nation that is strong, that has a strong defense is through an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, which is exactly what we've been talking about this whole time, which is, in a way, the question for the original listener asked.

Right. So what Eisenhower was saying to us is be alert and be knowledgeable. And so I think it's always good to temper that. Like, if you say I'm being alert and I'm being knowledgeable in sort of like a nerdy way, then you can, I can differentiate my, like my pontificating about what does that mean? And I can see my sort of more paranoid brain thinking thing. Right. And it just is, it balances things out. But on the concept of the military industrial complex specifically and China's surveillance, I want to say this, which is that one way of looking at that, which I would look at, because I've done quite a bit of reporting on it, is that it's that problem of the chicken or egg scenario, that when the United States creates a radical new technology that it's using for its own defense, China follows suit, Russia follow suits, and nowhere is that more specific and more obvious. If you really think about it, then what the United States did during the war on terror, what the government did during the war on terror, and that is create these biometric surveillance systems, which, you know, to go after bad guys in Iraq, in Afghanistan, fingerprint technology, find the bomber, not the bomb.

A great idea. If youre just going to take out, if youre going to go after the bomb, you're just gonna be think about, that's what your teams were doing, but as soon as you can go after the bomber, you're cutting off the head of the snake. But the biometric surveillance system got out of control before you knew it, perhaps because of the military industrial complex, the Pentagon had decided, well, let's just get biometrics on everybody. So it went from, do you know about this a little bit? It went, I'll keep it short, because it can be like too much of a rabbit hole, but it went from finding the fingerprints on the bomb are two, let's get fingerprints on every single person. In Iraq, 85% of the population was the goal, and then they did that in Afghanistan. These are facts. This is like David Petraeus fact. Okay? And so the idea was, we're gonna have this colossal database of everybody, which used to be considered an FBI criminal concept. We're just gonna have this on everybody, and then that way we're gonna know if you're a bad guy or a good guy. And it got totally out of control, and it happened too fast, and there was so much money being made that it just became a deluge of systems, and China copied that.

China did not have that system of systems until we introduced it to them. And because China is great at stealing our intellectual property, that is precisely what happened. And then China, because it's a communist country and it does not have any of the same rules to abide by, just went berserk with it and said, we're gonna now they have a system called physicals for all. Physicals for all. What a great euphemism. What it means is we're gonna get your DNA, and that's what they are in the process of doing, having DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, gate monitor of everybody. So it's. It's becoming a massive police state. If it wasn't already, it is now. It's a technology based police state. But remember, my point in that would be the Defense department set that up, you could say to happen, or is that military industrial complex?

It's a good point. I've not thought of. It's a great point. What do you think?

I think it's the Eisenhower quote, like an alert and knowledgeable citizenry. Right. And also a little bit, if you pick your battles because you can become subsumed with, this is just a horrible, you know, you could really, and you want to enjoy your life and be a good parent and write your books or do your podcast. So. And then I look to history to say, okay, oh, that's right. This has always been going on. I do believe money needs to be spent to keep the economy going. But there could be a restructuring of the military industrial complex in a manner that suits the livelihood and the future.

Yeah, I agree with you on that. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, I'd like to see what it looks like here in the US if we do endure a nuclear attack.

Hmm. It's not pretty.

Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance designed by parents for parents and has been trusted by millions of families just like yours for over 50 years. I trust fabric to have what I need to protect my family. Thinking about getting life insurance? Now's the time. Your kids are young. You're healthy. Lock in low rates with fabric by Gerber life. My family's financial security is always my number one priority, and it should be yours, too. Fabric was designed by parents for parents entrusted by millions of families like yours. They have over 1805 star reviews on trustpilot with a rating of excellent. Having term life insurance for myself is crucial because I can rest easier knowing my family is taken care of even if I'm not there. That's where fabric by Gerber life comes in. Join me and thousands of parents who trust fabric to protect their family. Apply today in just minutes@meetfabric.com. sean, that's Meetfabriche policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company not available in certain states, prices subject to underwriting and health questions. You know, I've seen a lot during my time as a Navy SeaL and a CIA contractor, and I've learned even more hosting this show.

The one thing I can tell you for sure is that it pays to be prepared. Right now, with our national debt surging to unfathomable levels, global tension rising and the corruption in Washington. Ask yourself, are you prepared financially? Me, I'm buying gold and silver so I'm not caught off guard by the next recession or global conflict. And I've teamed up with one of the top gold IRA companies, gold company to make that happen. So I want you to go to seanlikesgold.com or call 855936 gold. You'll get a free 2024 wealth protection kit from Gold Co. Plus you may qualify for up to 10,000 in bonus silver while supplies last. So go to seanlikesgold.com or call 855936 GoLd and get your bonus silver today. Once again, that's 855936 goLd. Or visit seanlikesgold.com. performance may vary. Consult with your tax attorney or financial professional before making an investment decision. When I first started this whole podcasting thing, an online store was about as far from my mind as you can get. And now most of you already know this, but I'm selling vigilance elite gummy bears online. We actually have an entire merch collection that's coming soon.

And let me tell you, it is so easy because I'm using a platform that is extremely user friendly and that's Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. What I really like about Shopify is it prompts you all the things that you want to do with your web store, like connect your social media accounts, write blog posts, just have a blog in general, Shopify actually prompts you to do this. You want people to leave reviews under your items. You can do that on Shopify. It's very simple. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the Internet's best converting checkout, 36% better on average compared to the other leading commerce platforms. Shopify is a global force for millions of entrepreneurs in over 175 countries. Empower 10% of all e commerce platforms here in the United States. You can sign up right now for $1 a month. It's shopify.com, sean. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com, sean now to grow your business. No matter what stage you're in that shopify.com, sean. All right, Andy, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to dive into what it would look like if we do get hit.

I just looked back at my notes, though, and I just want to cover one more thing. Back to the 6 minutes for the president to make a decision, don't you? Have you talked? How do I put this? I would think that a lot of these decisions have already been predetermined. If there's only nine nations, us included. So eight other ones, and then I can't remember how many are our allies. I know. Russia, China, Korea. Is there another one? That's Pakistan. Pakistan.

Questionable. Yeah, definitely.

Okay. Definitely questionable. But you who've been there, right? Yeah. So I would think we would definitely have a lot of predetermined decisions made if one of those four countries launched towards us. So the reason I'm bringing this up is for the audience more to at least I would think that there would be contingency plan after contingency plan after contingency plan on what were to happen. One of those countries launched a nuclear weapon towards us. And so that I think it's important to know that the president isn't just making a. Going through a raw decision process from beginning to end in 6 minutes on what he's gonna do. Would you agree with that?

Absolutely. Okay, great. So let's talk about the football.

Okay.

Because there is not time. You're absolutely right for the secdef to say, okay, sir, we think there's no time for that. You're talking about a six minute window. I mean, that's like making a pot of coffee. Okay. That is a tiny amount of time. And so the football. Do you know what the football is?

I do.

Okay.

Do you want to describe it?

The football is the emergent, also known as the emergency satchel. It's this leather bag that is always with the president. Any photograph you look the president, if you can see around him, you will see the mill aide, the military aide who is the person assigned to carry the football. 24 7365 with the president. It is always with the president. Lou Murletti, the former director of the secret service, told me a great story about the football. When I said, is it really always with the president? He said, it is always with the president. He was, before he was director of secret service, the head of President Clintons detail. And he told me about going to Syria with Clinton to see President Assad, the current presidents father, and that they got into the elevator and you know, one of Assads guys was like, no, like about the mill aid. And Lou said it was like a standoff. There was no way they were going to let the president ride in the elevator without the football. Thats how significant it is. It is with him at all times. Inside the football are two key items. One is an ability for the presidents identity to be confirmed with and by those in the nuclear bunker beneath the Pentagon, which is called the National Military Command center.

So the president has like a card, a laminated card inside his wallet known as the biscuit. It has information on it which matches up to the information in the football. That is literally a call in response. It is a verbal call and response. This is not digital. This is not biometric. It's old school. And the other important item in the football is the black book. Thats not its official name, but thats what its called. And the classified historian at Los Alamos told me that the reason its called the black book is because it involves so much death. The black book is another jealously guarded secret. What is in the black book? Almost no one that has seen the contents of it has spoken of it. Once a mill aide referred to the, in an interview with Smithsonian magazine, described the contents of the black book. And he described it like a Denny's menu, which gets us to how does the president choose his targets? So the countries that are perceived as enemies, nuclear armed enemies who might launch at us are broken down into this Dennys menu type document with options for the president to choose from in that six minute window really fast.

I interviewed for the book one person who has actually seen the contents of the black book. His name is Ted Postal, and hes the one with Richard Garwin, who drew the map for me about the launch and the missile. And postal in the eighties, was the chief advisor to the Navy about nuclear missiles. That was his job in the eighties. And so he worked on some of the statistics, the information about potential targets. But what he told me was this very frightening story about the black book, which gets to your question about, like, the president making a decision. He said they would work on all these different scenarios, kind of. Let's consider the 82 missile scenario. We're talking about why you would get to that, how you would get to that, how you would determine where the CIA thinks North Korea's nuclear command and control centers may be. Operative word thinks we have no real intelligence on them. And then Postal told me, and of course, North Korea wasn't involved in the eighties because they didn't have nuclear weapons. But Postal told me that he had another experience, which was another day he was at the Pentagon, and he became privy to the black book.

Kind of like by accident. It was out. And he looked at it. And what freaked him out, his words, was that he said the difference between what they had been working on with these very precise calculations about why different targets should be chosen and what resulted were almost not recognizable. And he could.

Can you say that again? I'm sorry.

Yeah. Okay. So like they nerded out like you can imagine guys with pencils and rulers and going, what are the targets in said enemy nation? What are the, where are their nuclear command and control facilities that we would want to take out in a nuclear strike? Thats what the, you know, their big industries that their bunkers, their version of the Stratcom bunker, their version of the Pentagon, they kind of nerd out around all the details to get down, pare down what the targets are and how many bombs youre going to put on a target because you never put just one. You know this from ground warfare. Right? So, but what postol said is when he went over to the Pentagon and was looking at the black book, the Denny's menu, if you will, that he was shocked. He actually said he was freaked out at the disconnect between them. In other words, they had just been reduced to option a in a, you know, there was not information the president wouldn't realize. You're striking a city that's going to kill 15 million people.

It's a playbook.

And I got the sense it's numerical or alphanumerical. Again, that's classified information, but that's the sense I got. It's like a 324 b. I'm using that kind of as an analogy, but maybe even literally. So in other words, that is what theyre not. The president doesnt go, okay, im going to hit. And theyre not cities with humans.

Its a, look, I dont know anything about nuclear warfare. Im a ground guy. Thats it. I dont do nuclear strategy or anything like that. But I will say that combat, that planning strategy contingencies is very much like a football game you call a play, and nobody that has not been briefed understands what that play is. So if it's a, did you say a numeric or alphanumeric alpha five two, then they go to the, everybody, everybody who is read in knows what Alpha five two is in that scenario. That that scenario plays out. And does that make sense?

Absolutely. I agree with, I think that's the best analogy I've heard. From what I understand now, I could be wrong because I haven't had anyone who's seen the contents of the black book tell me precisely, they've only spoken in metaphor because they can't. And very, very few people have seen it.

Yeah. So it'd be, I mean, I would imagine it would be very similar to a quarterback when he calls a play. Everybody on that team knows exactly what's going to happen, where they're going to go, what they're going to do, what route they're going to run, where the ball is going to land. So in the black book on the Denny's menu, if he calls Alpha two six, all the key players know what's going to be struck, where they're going to be, how long it's going to take to get there, what countries are going to. All of that is already, it's already been predetermined. It's a predetermined playbook of possible scenarios.

And you're exactly probably right. And so then imagine this. The president says, well, what is Alpha 52, whatever the thing? And now you, the six minute window. The clock is ticking. Inside Stratcom, the bunker beneath Offutt Air Force Base, which is one of three of the three nuclear bunkers that are central to this, in this moment in time as this is happening. There's one in Cheyenne Mountain, there's one beneath offuttout Air Force base, and there's one at the Pentagon. And the president, wherever he may be, is trying to discern this black book and he's being advised. So at Stratcom, there is an identical black book. It's in a safe. It gets, the safe gets open. The black book gets taken out. They're identical so that they know exactly they're talking about the same thing. There is a target officer who will, whos prepared to brief if the president has any questions. And theres also a weather officer thats going to tell him how many people are going to die, maybe if theres time. And if he asks that question from the radioactive fallout in co centric circles going out from ground zero, each ground zero.

Mm hmm.

But again, how much time do you have in a six minute window? And imagine whats going through the presidents mind. In the scenario that I write, I have the president ask a number of key questions, which were, which I learned, questions I learned from interviewing people that they are worried the president, or that they think the president might ask, like, ill give you an example of a key question. The president in my scenario, how do we know theres a nuclear warhead in the nose coming in that ballistic missile? And you know what the answer is?

They don't.

And then the next answer is, you know, where the president might then wonder, perhaps someone is, you know, tricking me into starting a nuclear war. And the answer is, no one sends a ballistic missile unless they know we are going to send the mother load in response.

Yeah.

Which brings us back to the paradox, the catch 22 of deterrence so you could use this as an argument, which is why no one would be insane enough to ever launch a nuclear missile at the United States because they would be obliterated. Or you can use the argument that that's ridiculous. How can more nuclear weapons make us more safe?

I mean, we shouldn't be. So we shouldn't put so much weight on that. I mean, we're just going down to a lower level. I mean, look at suicide bombers. They had no problem recruiting suicide bombers, you know, in the global war on terrorism. And so all you would need is somebody with that mindset to get into government and become a world leader. I mean, not an easy task, but not impossible.

Not impossible. And in 2024, certainly more likely than in 1952.

Mm hmm. On top of that, going back to the decision making of the president, I mean, I'm sure he would have if it happened, I'm sure he would have advisors that would say something along the lines of, this is what's happening right now. These are our top three. These are our top three actions that we have recommended that you take. Here they are.

And that is the job of the advisers.

Which one would you like us to do? You know, and so he's not, he's not reading the whole Denny's menu.

You're absolutely right. And so you also have to imagine what would be going through the president's mind, who, from what I understand, has not thought this through, has not been part of the, these wargaming scenarios. Hes been concerned with other issues, both domestic and abroad, suddenly new to this, you know, asking questions like, is this a test? And his advisors knowing it is not a test and his advisors being much more aware of how this is going to end, meaning, you know, having war game these situations out. But then you can learn about a concept, as I did, which is something called jamming the president, which is what is understood would happen at a moment like this, whereby the military advisors almost universally would be advising him to escalate, to deescalate, to hit them with an extraordinary amount of force. And that is a natural military mindset, particularly if you are attacked. You know this. Right? And so in the scenario that I report, that's where things go awry because of some technological holes in the system, and that is why Russia gets involved.

Interesting. Well, let's get into this scenario. What does it look like if we're hithing?

A nuclear bomb explodes with a flash of light, of x ray light that is so powerful and hot it is impossible to comprehend. It is 180 million degrees that's the temperature at the center of the sun times five, really? Times five. And so the thermonuclear flash sets everything on fire depending on the size of the bomb. In the scenario that I write, it's 3 miles out.

Is that a fact? Is that the biggest.

Yes, that's not the biggest bomb, but that is a fact. And so by the way, like when I write about these horrific details about what happens to people and third degree burns and wind ripping skin off people's faces, you know, 9 miles out, limbs being ripped off, you know, the sucking motion that happens, the blast wave, that's like a bulldozer. The buildings that come down, when I write all those details, those are not out of Annie Jacobson's imagination. Those are sourced from a primary document called the effects of nuclear weapons, which is a 600 and some odd page book. It's also called army pamphlet number 59, if I'm remembering correctly. And that began with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the effects of nuclear weapons on buildings and people. And as the tests were done, we conducted atmospheric tests in the Pacific and also in Nevada at the test site. As the tests were done, defense scientists were constantly measuring the effects that nuclear weapons have on things and people. And the people substitutes were animals. And they measured these with a specificity that's just stunning. And that's a polite word for gruesome. And I use those details in the book and I source them again in notes.

So then you get to learn as a reader, oh, wait a minute, how does the Pentagon know that a pine needle will catch on fire 6 miles out from ground zero, spontaneously combust and start more fires? Oh, because these have been studied 6 miles out.

So does that mean the blast radius of the flash can be up to 6 miles?

The people can go blind up to 50 miles out if they're looking in the direction of the bomb.

50 miles.

50. And the way we know, you know, the Defense Department would put rabbits in cages and fly them, you know, 50 miles out from this bomb and put their, you know, it's very clockwork orange to determine the effects on the retina. A one megaton bomb that I have hit the Pentagon and I use the Pentagon as a target, by the way, again, that's not just because it's my imagination, but because many people that I interviewed told me that a bolt out of the blue attack against Washington is what Washington fears most. And so a one megaton bomb that detonates over the Pentagon creates a ball of fire, pure fire, that is 5700ft in diameter that's a little over a mile. Again, like, the specificity of these numbers are from defense scientists. A ball of fire. So nothing remains. Not a cricket, no cellular life in that. And then you have this blast wave. It's called a steeply fronted blast wave, and it pushes out and it bulldozes down metaphorically. All physical bridges go down. You know, stone splits apart, steel lead melts 10 miles out, streets become like molten lava. So if you survive, you're suddenly, you know, sucked into a lava street.

Third degree burns on everyone. Anyone in a subway is going to die. If they're, you know, 10 miles out, they're going to die of asphyxiation.

So ten mile. Would 10 miles be the, let's talk immediate death, 10 miles?

Well, there's like three rings that I write about specifically, you know, in their diameters, and they go out up to the Washington DC Zoo is kind of the edge where all the animals, you know, have their skin hanging off of them. Sorry it's dark. It's true. And so then you have to think about, you know, you have all these people dead. All these people now with. That are far out. As far as 10 miles out, with third degree burns, fourth degree burns. Did you even know there was such a thing as a fourth degree burns? Third degree burns require a specialized bed. There are like, ten in Washington. They've now all been obliterated. In this scenario, people die of, you know, blood loss. Imagine the projectiles from this. There are several hundred mile an hour winds accompanying that steeply fronted blast wave. The buildings topple over and become rubble. We haven't even spoken to the fact that no first responder can go in there for 72 hours. By then, the world's over. The situation, I write in appalling detail because I want you to see how horrific you would hope you were inside the fireball, because the further out you are, the worse it is when you think about this, the mushroom cloud that we've all seen, right?

That mushroom stem. And the cloud is made up of the remnants of people who have turned into combusting carbon. That is the detritus of civilization. That's just one nuclear bomb. So people get to see that every nuclear weapon is really a mass extinction weapon. Because when you consider the black, you know, we're talking about the ring out ten, shall we say, 1010 miles out. What will then? Because all these fires have started now, from the flash, the situation becomes a mesocyclone of fire, is how it's described there. In a matter of minutes or hours, there will be a hundred mile radius of fire burning because there's no first responders in a nuclear attack. I learned this from Obama's FEMA director, a guy called Craig Fugate, who did all these on the record interviews with me and described to me how horrific a nuclear war. He was so candid. I went back, are you sure you said this, this, this, and this. It's quoted in the book. You know, that he said that FEMA does something called population protection planning. So earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, when these happen, femas at the ready to help the people, population protection planning.

And Fugate said to me, after a nuclear strike, there is no population protection planning because everyone will be dead. You're on your own. I said, what do you suggest people do? And he said, hope that you stalked pedialyte and don't forget your moral. That kind of candor from that level of an individual made me realize people leave office and become civilians again, become parents again, and grandparents and estimate, and they suddenly realize, like, nuclear war is insane. We cannot have a nuclear war. Mm hmm.

Mm hmm. What do you, have you talked to any of your sources about likely targets other than DC?

Every, every city in America is a target. Every airport in America is a target. Every industrial base in America is a target. Maybe not for the rogue launch that happens in my scenario. In the beginning, as I describe in the book, a series of events happen. Shall I jump forward to, like, what really goes wrong?

Sure.

Okay, so we have a really great satellite system. Russia does not. They pretend they do. Theirs is called tundra. I told you, ours can measure, you know, inches from 22,000 miles up. Theirs pretends to. Their system is so flawed that it sees clouds and sunlight as exhaust as fire sometimes. Now, I sourced this not just from american experts, but from people who are experts on russian nuclear command and control, including a guy called Pavel Podvig, who studied in Moscow, whos the liaison to the UN for russian nuclear forces. So he would be prone to giving you a different opinion, maybe than, and he even conceded that the tundra system is deeply flawed. And so Russia cant see, Russia could easily misinterpret what it is seeing happening. Were talking about once the missiles start flying, once America, the american president learns that he has to make a counterattack, and our missiles are now flying. And as Leon Panetta said to me, you're right. No one thinks about mad chemistry, mutual assured destruction chemistry once the missiles are flying. And that's where the mistakes happen. So in the scenario, a very, a very serious flaw arises, which is that us ICBM's do not have enough range.

If we are sending ICBM's at North Korea, they have to fly over Russia. An actual fact confirmed by Panetta, by the way, they have to fly over Russia. Think about the state of affairs between Russia and the United States right now. I dont believe the two presidents have spoken in years. During the war, General Milley couldnt get his, in the early days of the war, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley couldnt get his russian counterpart on the phone when there was an errant, erroneously reported missile attack against Poland. Couldnt get him on the phone. Imagine a scenario where nuclear missiles are flying and Russia sees missiles coming. It would interpret at themselves not even if you could get the president on the phone and say, trust us, theyre going to go over you, not at you. And so Russia makes a decision to launch, and when Russia launches, it sends 1000 nuclear weapons.

Does that mean North Korea is. Nuclear weapons would also have to fly over Russia.

North Korea's nuclear weapons fly over Russia and China, but they do not have the same technology that we have, according to my understanding of the technology, to see neither China nor Russia, to see in real time the way that we see in real time any ballistic missile launch anywhere on the globe.

Only reason I'm bringing that up is context.

Yeah.

Because if they do have somewhat of a capability and North Korea launches a nuke at the US, and it does have to fly over China and Russia, at least in our response, they would have some context and they could go, okay, we did just see one. We just saw one fly this way. Now we're going to see one head west, you know, and so it wouldn't be 100% in the blind.

Which is a could, that is a, that is a possibility.

Now with that being said, you're also, you know, there would have to be some type of communications. And if we don't have communications and we can't, we can't even get our counterpart on the phone then.

And here's the fundamental problem with that in terms of long thinking, which is that America's first nuclear war plan against Russia was a preemptive nuclear strike. Okay, a preemptive nuclear strike. Russia has been paranoid ever since, maybe with good reason, because this is an origin story that we would do a preemptive nuclear strike. I have heard some leading experts on Putin, including Fiona Hill, who advised multiple presidents, so shes completely nonpartisan, talk about how the invasion of Iraq profoundly impacted Putins. Thinking about the United States, about regime change, about a preemptive attack and how dangerous that is. So its not just long history that someone might be thinking of its short history, more immediate history. And so another example of how paranoid Russia has been for decades is its system that it created called the dead hand. Okay. It's the literal name of it is perimeter. This perimeter system, dead hand was originally reported by a Washington Post reporter named David Hoffman, like in 1999 when he first learned about it, right after the wall had gone down, before we were back to this nuclear threat posture. But the way the dead hand works is like Russia was so paranoid that the United States was going to launch a preemptive nuclear attack against it during the cold War that it created a dead hand system.

What is that? It's kind of like it sounds. They created a system whereby ground sensors would be able to determine nuclear weapons hitting nuclear bombs, hitting the russian soil, and if they werent hearing from the nuclear command and control. So the idea being that the nuclear command and control had been taken out in this preemptive nuclear strike, the dead hand system would launch all of Russias remaining nuclear weapons, which were like 30,000 at the time, okay. Would launch all of them without even needing a hand to push the button. Hence the name the dead hand. So it set up a system to launch no matter what, even if were all dead. And the idea behind it is kind of part of deterrence. Like, dont you dare launch at us, or even our own dead hand will get you. And so when you think about that, you realize there's a long history of suspicion in Russia. And even more terrifying is I have heard in defense circles and I haven't been able to confirm it, but I have heard that even now the US Defense Department is thinking of creating some kind of a dead hand equivalent because allegedly Russia never got rid of that system.

That's where AI would become a real problem.

Yeah, that's a great point. That is a great point.

The dead AI hand.

Wow, that's a great point. Let's keep with the, let's go back into what life looks like. It sounds like, excuse me, if I'm mistaken, it sounds like immediate devastation is about ten mile radius, a hundred miles. You're going to feel effects.

Mm hmm.

What happens after that?

So in the scenario I have the president making this decision, the, you know, the six minute window is upon him. They're waiting for minute eight nine to have the secondary ground confirmation from the ground radar systems. That happens. Sir, its confirmed the ICBM is coming to Washington. Then I have a situation unfold between the Secret Service and nuclear command and control. Based on interviews I did with Secret Service once, I realized, wait a minute, the secret Services job is to protect the president. As soon as the secret Service learns the special agent in charge, the SAC in charge of the president learns that theres a missile coming at Washington, hes moving the president, period, non negotiable. The Secret Service has an element, a CaT team, counter assault team. Theyre kind of like the presidents version of ground branch. In essence, a lot of guys go back and forth. So the counter assault team gets called in by the sack. Within the counter assault team, theres an even tinier group called the element. An element is a three man team. A three man team is now going to move the president on Air Force one out of the White hall, out of the White House.

Back off. So its a standoff. Who do you thinks going to win? Who has better equipment?

We do.

The cat team wins. They move the president, much to the chagrin of the Stratcom commander and everybody else who wants that order while they are moving the president. And there's a problem because I learned that, getting a little into the weeds here, but I'm gonna the, there's an EMP, which will happen with any nuclear. You're familiar with that? Marine one is emp proof for listeners. It's an electromagnetic pulse that could very easily fry the electronic system on Marine one, causing it to crash. So the SAC needs to make sure there are parachutes. They can tandem jump the president. Theyre not in marine one, a detail I learned. They probably are now, but they werent then. So the element has to swing by the White House office, grab the parachutes. They need one for the mill aid, one for the guy whos going to jump the president, and one for the sack. They get them, they get into marine one. Its a while that is happening. I have in the scenario a second ballistic missile strikes a nuclear power plant in California, a sub launched ballistic missile. Now, I had Ted postol, I'm pointing to this, and Richard Garwin discuss with me whether or not it was plausible, whether or not North Korea can actually get a submarine up to the west coast of the United States, because we know China and Russia can.

Thats a fact. You learn that later in the book. Can North Korea? Ted Postal believes that they can. Garwin says he doesnt think they can yet. I wanted to have that kind of a debate available for readers to think about. Mm hmm. You just dont know until you know. I take you through the technology of why postol thinks its possible. The north korean sub launch ballistic missile fires from a couple hundred miles off the west coast. That takes less than 10 minutes. Its like 6 minutes or something. While the president is deciding whether or not hes going to give this counter launch and the secret service is moving him, the power plant is hit. And when the nuclear, the reason I chose the nuclear power plant to be hit is because it's the, it's what's called the devil's scenario. It's worse. It's the worst of the worst, worst case scenario. And I won't get too into the reader, into the weeds about what happens.

Why not?

Okay. I want you to read the book.

Okay.

But no, and I shouldn't say it like that. I say, what I mean is because the details, if you're me, you almost can't, like, tell the details in like a 32nd version because it's so profound what happens, and it's so terrifying. And people would say that they would never do that. Well, there's actually a rule, it's called rule 42 in the international committee for the Red Cross that says, you will, you must never strike a nuclear power plant. Thats even with kinetic weapons. Were not talking about nuclear weapons. And so when I was doing this scenario, people that were sort of mentors, are you sure you want to do that? I mean, thats against the rules. It was like, well, thats the point. There are no rules if youre going to play nuclear war. And then this is before the Ukraine war unfolded. And so when Russia, Russia has now exploded weapons around the Zaporizha nuclear power plant in Ukraine, eight or nine times they have been on backup generator. Thats one step away from losing power. Thats one step away from a nuclear core materials meltdown. If you strike a nuclear power plant directly with a nuclear weapon, you will have a nuclear core materials meltdown.

The land will be uninhabited all the way to Colorado.

Are you serious?

Fact checked with Los Alamos.

Wow.

That's why I don't want to give it away. I want you to have that experience, Sean, where you read it and you're just like, how is this possible? And hopefully, the only reason you're stopping to read is to go back into the notes to check, is this really true?

So that's like a third of the country.

Rendered uninhabitable. And so thats why the president agrees in the logic of this scenario to the 82 nuclear warhead counterattack, because he learns from his secdef, we just got hit in a nuclear power plant in California. Hes going to send the mother lode. And thats what he does. And that is why things go awry, is that decision to send 82. So perhaps the only way this scenario might have unfolded differently, and I did this discussion with former secretary of defense Bill Perry because we talked about this a lot, because he thinks about this a lot. Hes now in his nineties, and he stopped doing interviews. But during COVID he and I did a number of zooms going through these scenarios. He shared with me that perhaps a certain kind of president might wait to see the outcome after, might not instill the launch on warning policy, might wait. But once you see a catastrophic attack, you just, the emotions take over and it's revenge.

What does the middle of the country look like when?

So 50 some odd minutes later when Russia launches? Okay, so because the president makes the decision to launch the 82 as the weapons fly, he launches 50 ICBM's and 32 SLBMs. The 50 can be launched in 60 seconds. That's how long it takes to launch an ICBM once the president gives the command. The joke is those missiles are called minutemen because of the revolutionary war. But the joke in Washington is they don't call them minutemen for nothing because they take 60 seconds to launch. Sub launched ballistic missiles take 14 minutes from the time the commander in chief gives that order. The sub has to get into position. It's a little bit more complicated. 14 minutes. And so as the clock is ticking, russian early warning systems now move into place. And the russian early warning systems see the ballistic missiles coming over the pole and interpret them as coming for them. And then there are other, you know, and I went through experts that are, know all about the russian early warning systems to take the reader through how this happens. And then you go into the command bunker where the russian president is with his advisors, who are all almost certainly hawks, who are all almost certainly extremely suspicious of the United States, and they advise him.

And so a thousand nuclear warheads get launched at the United States. So when you ask what happens to the middle of the country, think of a thousand targets. I have a map drawn based on Defense Department targets, doe, you know, different documents that have been released over the years, leaked.

Guesstimated, the whole country is obliterated.

And then you have a hundred to 300 square mile ring of fire, a mega fire that's now producing its own weather. You have a thousand of them. People die from radiation, you know, blast, they die from, you know, objects flying through the air. They die from immediate radiation poisoning, and they die from fire a thousand times and then we talk about the survivors.

Have you looked at what immediate radiation poisoning looks like?

For that, I tell the story of. And again, this stuff is like, okay, how do you get, how do you, where is that information? Well, I found that information. There was a guy called Louis Slotin who was an original Manhattan project member, and his death was declassified by Los Alamos. The doctor's report on his death after he died of radiation poisoning. And I source that precisely throughout the book as the, you know, it's a ticking time clock scenario. But I stop and give you little history lessons at moments where you might ask, like, you just asked me that question. I give the reader, what does radiation poisoning look like? And I tell the story of Louis Slotin. He was, he was a member of the Manhattan Project, and after the war was over, he was like, I don't want to keep making nuclear bombs. I'm out. And they were like, okay, that's fine, but you have to train the next guy. And so at Los Alamos, they went out into this little site kind of outside of the lab in the forest. The building's still there. It's a historical building now. And Slotin was training the next guy how to, like, work with the plutonium core, uranium core.

Like, this is the center of the bomb. And they were doing this experiment that was so dangerous, it was called tickling the dragon's tail. And Slotin is working on this, and it drops, and so everybody takes off. And Slotin, what happens to him is, like, documented in seconds. He dies eight or nine days later. This had been classified for a very long time, but it's been declassified, and you can you just learn what happens to his body? I mean, you know, where the hands blow up, the skin, you know, essentially peels off. I mean, it just is so grotesque. You really want me to describe it?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, they tried everything, like blood transfusions, and, you know, your body swells up. They're debriding his hands. They're putting Vaseline on them. His insides begin to. The radiation ruins the lining on your organs. And so you essentially just become like, it almost reminded me of. I read a description once of what happens to an Ebola patient. It's like that. Like, the lining sloughs away. And so your organs start to merge and you just have sepsis, and then you get gangrene, and then you die. And when they cut you open, you're just like soup inside.

It's like a blender.

It's a horrific way to die. That's acute radiation poisoning. The really sinister thing about radiation poisoning is, first of all, it's invisible. You know, it's not like a burn. And the degrees of radiation poisoning are not necessarily dependent on proximity to the bomb. And of course, if you're really close, you know, sayonara. But you can have acute radiation poisoning far away from. One of the things about the nuclear power plant exploding that's just so crazy is that it's not just the nuclear core materials meltdown of the actual nuclear reactor, it's that every nuclear facility has spent fuel rods. Those are the rods that used to power the nuclear generator. Theyre in cooling pools right nearby, and theyre incredibly radioactive. And when those blast apart, the pieces of the spent fuel rods become entrained in the cloud. So in that mushroom stem, you have all this radioactive material thats like the size of a marble or a pencil. Thats how it was described to me. And it goes up in the cloud and then it moves, and then it's dropped. One of those drops near you, you have Louis Slotin type poisoning man. Man.

Where would the survivors be?

So are you familiar at all with the nuclear winter theory?

No.

Okay, so nuclear winter theory was originally written in 1983. Have you heard of Carl Sagan?

No.

Carl Sagan was an astrophysicist who like, became very famous in the seventies and eighties. And then he died tragically of cancer. But he became a real proponent, an anti nuclear weapons proponent. And he and a number of people wrote this theory called nuclear winter, where they climbed, they modeled out what would happen after the fires stopped burning. So you have all these fires, and again, were just talking about the thousand in the United States. The US launched in my scenario 1000 at Russia, because we dont just go, you know, okay, were all going to die, so were just going to let all of you guys live. We launch, and for reasons why, I take you through that. So you have, you know, 2000, 3000 nuclear weapons that have gone off. And the modeling on that suggests that after all the fires stopped burning, this is state of the art climate modeling, updated since the 1983 nuclear winter theory. So this is still the nuclear winter theory, but now with the technology, instead of scientists like doing, you know, calculations on paper with old computers, these are like really advanced computer systems. Confirming all of this, the fires will loft into the air.

330 billion pounds of soot goes up into the troposphere and blocks out the sun. 70% of the sun's rays disappear. And so hence nuclear winter. Suddenly, in places like across the mid latitudes of the globe, you have all bodies become all bodies of water. Freshwater bodies become ice. The ice at the arctic circle doubles. You have a temperature drop around the earth between 27 and 40 degrees.

Whoa. Wow.

Places like Iowa and Ukraine, breadbaskets of the world, they become frozen for 8910 years. Agriculture fails. So now you have people, any survivors who are, you know, malnourished, suffering from radiation poisoning. Everyone who they know is dead and fighting over a tiny amount of resources. When the sun returns, you think the sun's back out, but the ozone layer has been destroyed, so the sun will give you radiation poisoning. So people have to live underground. And this interesting detail I found I that was shared with me was that, like, the small bodied animals, the sort of insects, they can bounce back faster and they will reproduce faster than large bodied animals like you and me. And so you have pathogens, you have plague, you have, like, all these horrific, you know, plagues that come with insects and abundance of index, never mind all the 5 billion people who died. I mean, at some point, their bodies thaw out. Think about that. That's like dark beyond dark. One of the original authors of the nuclear winter theory is a guy called Professor Brian Toon. And I interviewed him for the book. He's been on this issue since he was Carl Sagan's student in 1983, when he was one of the original five authors.

And he took me through all of this, you know, and he said to me, Annie, 66 million years ago, an asteroid struck the planet, killed the dinosaurs, and 70% of the species that we know of. He said nuclear war would not be unlike that. So you have to ask yourself, you know, there's nothing we can do about an asteroid strike, but there is something we can do about nuclear war.

This isn't a nation ending event. This is a.

It's a civilization ending event. Civilization meaning civilized man. Civilized. Civilized man. Civilized man. Einstein was asked if he had, like, about what weapons he thought World War III would be fought with. And his response is said to have been, I know, not with what weapons world war three will be fought, but world war four will be fought with sticks and stones. So after a nuclear war, man returns to his hunter gatherer state. And the philosophical question I find so interesting to think about is, like, here we are, humans who have moved in the past 12,000 years from hunter gatherers to, like, look at us, podcasts, microphones. I flew here. There's a probe on Mars.

Do you think I'm gonna go down a rabbit hole and you can entertain it or not? But have you looked at any of the. Have you looked at anybody? Like, I don't want to mention any names. If you looked at anybody or looked into kind of the cataclysm type stuff and how civilization just restarts over and over and over again. You have. What do you think of that?

I mean, we started out this conference. I read all things.

Do you think that this has happened before?

I mean, I don't know, but sometimes I try to counter what could be perceived as conspiracy, conspiratorial thinking, shall we say, with maybe a more bookish, you know, concept, which is actually the same thing. Right. So let me go back at you with this. That there's, there was a paper written by, like, two nerds, and I say that love, like, two guys with probably. They probably have like, five PhDs. And you can google it. It's called the silurian concept. And I think they took the name off of a doctor who character, if I'm not mistaken. And an interesting thing to think about is, in my experience, digressing for a second before a lot of times, like super intelligent PhD people, Nobel laureates, science geniuses, they read science fiction. They like to think about the very concepts that you just suggested. And when you think about it, that's where a lot of DARPA concepts come from. You know, you could say Jules Verne, you know, thought about the submarine before. Right? So the silurian concept were these two PhD people imagining, if what you propose is true, that there had been advanced civilizations before, how would we present day man see it in the geological record?

Which is actually a really brilliant thought. Not talking about, like, ancient archeology. That's such like that. You're talking about 12,000 years ago. They're talking about a million years ago, 2 million years ago or beyond. And the only way to know about that would be to look in the geological record. And I think that is really interesting to think about two things. One, that's where it would be, and two, that all kinds of people wonder that. And why wouldn't you wonder that? It's a little bit like wondering, are we alone? I sometimes think of geology and, you know, people look up to the cosmos and get really inspired. I often look. I look at the ground. I can drive and through the Sierra Nevadas and look at the mountains and have that same thought, like, what was here before? Like a long time before.

Reason I'm asking is if you. I think it's turkey. There's all these underground. They're like underground cities, you know? And I believe it's turkey. They have, I wish I had more facts on this. I didn't think we were going to go here, but, I mean, it seems like. Like hundreds of thousands of people could live in these underground cities. They never end. They never find the end of them, and nobody knows why they were built. And then you're saying the only way you could survive is underground.

Yes, I know that site. I mean, it's very, very interesting, and I love thinking about those exact questions that you raise in the end of nuclear war scenario. I take the reader to a different ancient site in Turkey, because Turkey is super interesting. They seem to have these incredibly old sites that are almost now newly becoming, not necessarily discovered, but becoming sort of more people are aware of them. And I learned that that has to do with the bias from the archeological world that used to look down on Turkey, like Greece and Rome or everything but Turkey. It's a backwater. Ignore it. So I write about Gobekli Tep, which is a site in Turkey that is the oldest known civilization to date. Like, before it was found in the mid nineties by an archeologist named Klaus Schmidt. And I interviewed the young student who was with him. Schmidt died, but I interviewed Michael Morse about finding this site. Okay. Because before this site was found, the archeologists all had one idea about man. They had this idea that. About civilization, rather, that man were hunter gatherers, primitives. And then suddenly, man figured out how to domesticate animals, and agriculture evolved and led to civilization by civilization.

That means groups of people doing things together, a team. Well, Gobekli Tepe was unearthed, and I have pictures of it in the book. It was a site with, it's like co centric circles, almost like a stadium, an ancient stadium, massive, with giant 20 foot tall carved stone pillars covered with non domesticated animals, by the way, cranes, ibis, foxes. They were hunter gatherers. They had not domesticated animals yet, as far as we can tell, certainly, given the age of everything there. But they were smart enough to create architectural plans. You can't build something like that with, like, a group of, you know, hunter gatherers. You have to really have a team. So it's upended the way that archeologists get to think about man and about the birth of civilization. And it's super interesting. And what interests me in terms of this book is exactly on the question that you're interested in, and so am I, which is like, well, it's like a twofold question. One, what was going on before? Okay. And two, why is it that we, the royal we, a group of people, like, get to decide this is what it was, and this is how it is.

It's just gonna be that way because we tell you so. And you have to balance that out with, like, some crazy idea that I might have, you know, out on a hike. But it is worth thinking about. And I think that it opens the mind up to a lot more wonder and also a lot more flexibility.

It makes you think. It definitely makes you think. And, you know, it's, we're kind of off on a tangent now, but I mean, I just, how was, how were we not aware of this stuff before.

The existence of these incredible sites in Turkey?

Yeah.

I mean, or any of them? During COVID I went down an archeological rabbit hole because. Right. And like, I bought a bunch of books on eBay. Cause here's the thing. If you read the original books, or rather you go back in time and you read books that were printed, then you can get a really interesting different sense on what historians say about it. And so I read all these books. Archeology only really began in sort of the late 18 hundreds. And I have these books like what people were actually saying at the time about the sites they were uncovering, the goods which they stole, which are now, you know, in the Louver and the British Museum and everywhere. And it was, thats where I got that. I kind of figured out that it had to do with a group of people at the time who were the leading experts, the British and the French, deciding this is important, were going to study this and were going to ignore the rest of it. And thats why Turkey got ignored for a long time, up until like the 1950s.

Wow. Interesting, interesting stuff. You know, it's, it's, I never really, I've watched a couple documentaries on it, and, you know, the commonality between all of them is what were these people hiding from? Why were they going underground? I mean, thousands, and it could hold thousands and thousands of people. And if I remember correctly, I mean, there's, there's, I don't know if plumbing's the right word, but I mean, they have plumbing. They have, they had everything. You know, it was, it was capable of holding. And I never, it never occurred to me to think that it could be, but possibly, excuse me, some type of nuclear fallout shelter.

And it's, I mean, almost certainly it had to do with warfare that you would create. I think it's called Darien Kirk. Is that right?

Darian? Man, I don't know. I don't know.

I mean, almost certainly it has to do with defense, but to create that much of a system underground begs many, many, many questions. And I think that that's also, like, why that idea of science fiction is so interesting. Here's a quote from DARPA that the DARPA director said when I was reporting that book, which is here at DARPA, we're where science fiction becomes science fact. Right. So you're making me think that site is like, a perfect place for, like, a science fiction novel or dot, dot, dot. Because then when you begin to look at it and archeologists are studying it, you realize there is scientific fact here. And how do you reverse engineer the truth about that? What it is, I think only with people having eyes on it, which is why I think you and I both appreciate all these different ideas that people bring to the table. You don't have to agree with all of them, but they certainly anything that gets my mind going, I consider a value.

Me, too. Me, too. It kind of, I don't understand people that just shut it off, you know, it's like we were talking about at the beginning. People get too into political figures, their side of things. It's. It's, it's. People are just too one sided. And I don't know, I don't know why there are not more critical thinkers. But I love talking to you about this stuff, by the way. This is great conversation.

This is what it makes me think about. And I'm really going to go on a tangent here. It makes me think about what hill do you want to die on? Can I tangent here?

Absolutely.

I personally think the more different kinds of people you can talk to, the more interesting ideas you can hold in your brain, the more flexible you can be in your thinking, and then the more amicable you are. Right. So the more welcoming you are to different kinds of people. And so you just said, like, what hill are you going to die on? Right. Why do people get so set in their ways? And I'm just jumping tangent here, but at the hotel where I'm staying, here I am in Tennessee. I haven't been here since I was 20 years old. And I look at the geology a lot of places, and outside the window of the hotel, there's like, I didn't realize Tennessee had so many hills. Okay. And that. That concept, I immediately had this flashback to Billy Waugh, okay. Because the concept of what hill are you gonna die on? Comes from Vietnam, at least according to Waugh. Did you know this?

I didn't.

Okay. And I didn't either until he told me. But I went with Billy Waugh back to Vietnam. We were gonna go to Que San. I wanted. Do you know about khe Sanh?

I don't.

Okay. Khe sanh is like. It's like the equivalent of Fallujah in the Vietnam war. I mean, it was. It was the. It was. The fight for Que san as a marine base was just. It's astounding how important that place was because it was the closest to North Vietnam and what happened there and the books that have. It's just so tragic to me that it's, like, completely lost to history. But it was this incredibly important base. All kinds of Americans died there. Billy Waugh and I went back there because that's where his. He was with a unit called Mac V SOG, which is kind of the precursor to ground branch, really. It was special activities division. And they had a base underground, a base beneath the base, surrounded by concertina Weil. That's how classified MACV SOG missions were, because they were the cross border missions into Laos. We go back to Caisson, and we were in a little hotel just like, not that far from the hotel I'm staying in. And there I am standing with Billy Waugh, looking out the window at these hills, not unlike the hills in Tennessee. And that's when he explained to me, you know, where the expression what hill you're gonna die on comes from.

Wow.

And he. I'm like, no, no, tell me. And that hill. And now, if you look up anything about Vietnam, and for your older listeners, they're sitting there going, uh huh, uh huh. I mean, the expression, let's take that hill. And it's so powerful and so important and so tragic at the same time, because that is what was being done. All these american boys, these young soldiers. Billy was an old soldier. I mean, by then he was Billy Washington. He was the guy who raised his hand and said, send me. You know? But so many of these young kids that were sent to war died taking the hill. It was like the defense department was like, we need that hill. And in Quezon, you could see them out the window. You could just see the hills. And it makes. And then when I was studying the war on terror and writing about it, you know, and I think about that with, like. Like the people I've interviewed who so many of their friends died, you know, essentially taking a hill. Not a hill, but figuratively. And then here we are talking about the same idea, which is like, what hill are you gonna die on?

You know? Why is it so important to be right about an idea which you only know some of?

Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. Let's take another break. When we come back, I'd like to talk a little bit about global strategy with nuclear warfare. Sound good?

Yeah, anything you want.

Those of you that have been around srs for a while know that we take mental health very seriously here. So seriously that in almost every episode, you'll find a segment where we discuss how to improve your mental health. And part of improving your mental health is keeping your mind sharp. And part of keeping your mind sharp is giving it the fuel that it needs to balance energy, focus, cognition, and just regenerating your brain. That triggered me to go on a journey to find the supplement that supports brain health with the cleanest of ingredients on the planet. And I found it. I was actually going to start my own company and do this, but I found Laird superfoods. I've partnered with them. Now. I'm a partial owner and I really believe in these products. Here's my favorite product. Performance mushrooms by Laird Superfoods brain fuel. Put this in your coffee, you can put it in your tea. You can drink it raw, you can mix it with their greens. You can do all kinds of stuff. Bottom line, it is this is the best possible supplement with the cleanest ingredients, all sourced in the United States, that supports brain health.

And here's two other products that I'm a fan of. Layered superfoods creamer. Guess what? Contains functional mushroom extracts. Put this in your tea or coffee. And most of you know, I'm not a caffeine or coffee drinker, but a lot of you are. And they just happen to have layered superfoods coffee, organic peruvian coffee with, you guessed it, functional mushrooms that support and regenerate your brain. Go to laird superfoods.com. use the promo code srs. You'll get 20% off. Guys, this is the real deal. These are the finest of ingredients. Check it out. Laird superfoods.com promo code srs 20% off. Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. All right, Andy, we're back from the break. We're going to get into some world strategy when it comes to nuclear warfare. So we have kind of talked about if North Korea sends nuclear warheads to the US, US returns. They have to fly over Russia. Russia fires on us pretty much automatically.

It sounds like. What about the other, what, six nations that have this type of capability? What are they going to do?

So the scenario I write takes place in 72 minutes when the EMP nuclear weapon goes off. Earlier than that. That was there all along. Launched into space by North Korea disguised as a radio satellite, it takes out the entire grid. That's what an empty exploded 300 miles over the center of the country would do. It's just a massive failure. It's a colossal failure of everything electric. And so in essence, the ability to understand what anyone is doing outside, what you can physically see, disappears. So for that reason, that's where the scenario ends. Other than nuclear winter. Meaning what did China do? What did India and Pakistan do? I don't know, but it was done specifically for. That idea that continues to interest me is how did man become civilized? How did we go from, how did we figure out how to write? You know, we only know so much about history back to where people started writing it down. It's just guesswork before then, archeological interpretation. So, man, you know, 5000 BC figures out how to write. That wasn't that long. So we've had a 7000 year run of history, and once all electronics cease in the world in which we live today, just the information goes.

Everything on your computer is gone. Who writes Longhand anymore besides me and a couple of others?

Not very many people.

Not very many people. So it's the end of civilization. It's the end of history. Meaning the ability to report what happened, happened. Thats for that same reason I dont get into the geopolitics in my book. In the scenario of why it happens, many books have been written about that. The geopolitical maneuvering, China, the long game, the great powers, all of that. Thats been written by many people. And its very interesting to think about, but its not part of this book. This book is. Heres what happens once the missile launches.

Okay. Did any of your sources start to tangent into that by chance?

Interestingly not. Interestingly not, no. I mean, we just kept the focus. You only have so much time with a source, you know, and you might want to just pull them back in. There were reasons to think about that in terms of my other books, for sure. Usually it's about how did we deter the Soviet Union? Right? The whole the CIAS paramilitary, which you know about from direct personal experience, was set up to counter the vicious activities of the Soviet Union. As if they were trying, whatever they were doing, it was trying to weaken the United States and then attack us with nuclear weapons. So I've looked at it from all these different angles, but in this book, it's just game on. Then what happens?

Okay, and you, you picked, you picked North Korea. Because.

Garland made me think about this idea of a mad king, the sort of madman with a nuclear arsenal, which, I mean, I think your reference to suicide bombers is, and it's the reason why most people in the west would tell you that Iran should not never have a nuclear bomb. I mean, the fundamentals of their governance is religion based. And their ideas about the end of the world are frightening. I mean, they are very apocalyptic. They are very apocalyptic in their thinking. Like, the apocalypse is fine. That's not someone you want with a nuclear arsenal.

Yeah, yeah, no kidding. Do you know how many, how many nuclear warheads the other six countries have? How many does India have?

And also, just to shout out to anyone who wants to nerd out on this, that theres an organization led by a guy called Hans Christensen. He writes the nuclear notebook with a team of people, Matt Corda, Ileana Reynolds, and thats inside the Federation of American Scientists. And they keep track of the nuclear warheads to the best of their ability, based on what is transparent. Thats why they change every year. So they write these long monographs, which are profoundly important to people like me, who has what, where, what we know about them and why. Really important to understand the system of systems were up against. So my information comes from them. So China last year was reported to have 400 nuclear weapons. This year they have 500. That is deeply concerning. The Defense Department believes that in the next ten years, China will have 1500. That's deeply concerning. Russia is not building new nuclear weapons, allegedly. Neither are we. India and Pakistan are said to have, are understood to have about 165. I think it is each okay. But when you really drill down on it, you realize that we don't really know. The transparency from them is limited.

And how much intelligence the agency has on it is anyone's guess.

What about our allies? What about UK and France?

UK, I believe, has about 200. And I'm forgetting the exact number of France right now. But the UK is interesting because they have reduced their weapons systems down to only submarines, which is really interesting. A lot of disarmament advocates believe that the United States, for safety and security reasons, should get rid of the ICBM's, that they're just too dangerous, that the nuclear armed, nuclear powered submarines, they have enough capacity to end civilization in a single submarine. We have 14 of them. So why do you need all of the other equipment? Well, you can get into that whole like sort of deterrent, spinous, but that is a legitimate point that the ICBM's are dangerous. The ICBM's are the one also that could be misinterpreted as coming over the pole. You know, the sub launched ballistic missiles can land on a target in under 10 minutes. There's a document that I located in a budget request from the Pentagon asking for more money from Congress. And one of the reasons, one of the reasons they ask for more money has to do with the threats from the submarines that are owned by China and Russia. And I had never seen this map before and I reprint it in the book so that people do not take my word for it.

They can say, holy wow, you cant tell where a submarine is moving in real time. Theyre stealthy as Admiral Connor told me he was the former commander of the nuclear subforce for the United States. He said to me, Annie, it's easier to find a grapefruit sized object in space than it is to find a nuclear submarine under the sea.

Are you serious?

How? Stealth. That's from the man who ran the program. Okay, so these are not called handmaidens of the apocalypse for nothing. They can really do everything that you would never want to have happen. So why do we need the ICBM's? Why do we need the bombers? The bombers aren't even going to get to the targets in time. I learned from the bomber pilots, they have a multi hour trip. The whole scenario ends in 72 minutes. That you could say has to do with posturing, has to do with the perception of deterrence and has to do with the military industrial complex, which is. I'm not talking about fighter jets for conventional warfare, I'm just talking about the b that carry our 66 nuclear capable bombers. And they're very threatening. You know, whenever we want North Korea to know we mean business, we do like drills over the korean peninsula. I mean is that agitating or is it. I don't know.

I think it just lets them know we're watching and we've got our eye on them. Could be taken as a threat but, and it probably is. But I don't, I mean.

The leader of North Korea recently said America has a sinister intention to provoke nuclear war. When I hear or read that and then I think about the UN secretary general saying we're one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear arm. Again, it's the word miscalculation that troubles me. That's what the scenario is built upon because the miscalculation can't be undone in the same way that the ballistic missile can't be recalled once it sparks it's fire and dry grass.

Yeah, man, it's, I would love to dive into it. I don't know how it would go, but I would love to. I mean, especially with, with bricks.

BRICS.

Are you familiar with Brics? Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. It's basically, it's like the counterpart to NATO. And India, Russia, China, they're all in there, you know, and I feel like a nuclear attack would be, could turn into an alliance against us instead of just one country and then a misunderstanding, you know, I feel like China would probably be in there as well.

One of the, and Pakistan, one of the more sort of keeps you up at night things to consider is that, and again, this is just from interviews I did where we did kind of discuss the geopolitical ideas about things, is that Russia has thought about nuclear weapons for a long time. Their command and control has been in place since 1949 when they got the bomb. The countries that have newer nuclear weapons do not have that same long lens of history. And if you also consider what I was told about the knowledge depth of the american president on nuclear war, should it happen, and you consider if that's the same for the leaders of some of these other nuclear armed nations that are, you know, not reliable, then you have another problem where you have somebody actually thinking, like you just said, like a nuclear war, a nuclear strike could dot, dot, dot, instead of realizing you can't ever have a nuclear war because it would end in Armageddon. Now, before the Ukraine war, I would have told you that the president of Russia knew that and would never threaten that way. So the nuclear threats coming from Putin are so alarming to someone like me.

But then again, they began with the US president, former President Trump, talking that way with north. So we're into a dangerous rhetoric that didn't exist ten years ago, Bill.

So the US set the precedent to bring up nuclear war.

I believe so.

And now it's spreading.

Now it's spreading. And nuclear threats. Nuclear saber rattling is so dangerous because it somehow minimizes, or rather it maximizes the possibility that, eh. Right. And that people are talking about tactical nuclear weapons. I mean, shall I like, give you like, the, do you know the difference between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons to listeners? Go ahead, Jedi. I mean, in a nutshell, a tactical nuclear weapon is a battlefield weapon. It's just a bigger bomb, but not just because it's nuclear. We, in the cold war, we were building tactical weapons like they were going out of style. And weve pulled back entirely from that to only having this leading concept of strategic, strategic nuclear weapons is like a euphemism for ballistic missiles. And then our bombers carry, you know, gravity bombs. But the tactical nuclear weapons that Putin keeps threatening, potential use of or that he moved into Belarus recently, thats like such a. Thats like moving the red line in the sand to a dramatic new position which is saying this could be a possibility. And I can only imagine what the National Security Council must be going, the gymnastics they must be doing to try to figure out how to position themselves against this kind of rhetoric.

Scary, scary stuff. Scary stuff. Another tangent.

Yeah.

Why do you think. Why do you think we are seeing so much UFO activity around nuclear sites?

Well, I was gonna say. What I was gonna say is we're on such a dark topic, maybe we should talk about UFO's. Which may answer that question. I mean, how do I answer this in an interesting, informative way? I mean, I love narrative. I love stories. I love storytelling. I love talking. It's how people tell each other stories. To communicate. You have to have an interesting story to be able to grab somebody's attention and talk about them. And UFO's are so interesting. The idea that these spaceships would carry people from outer space to us. What could be more interesting than that? So the idea of UFO's to my eye, has been around forever as long as man has been writing history or before he was writing history. When I was writing the book Phenomena, I interviewed Jacques Valet who is the sort of perhaps the world's leading ufologist. And he wrote this amazing book which I have a copy of like a hardcover book with beautiful illustrations in it that takes the reader through some of the oldest images in art history. And Jacques has curated them all to show UFO's. The idea of UFO's throughout recorded history, it's always been there.

The nuclear thing is interesting. I do know that a theory has developed a narrative around this idea that, you know, aliens or people from outer space were somehow concerned that we invented this weapon that could end civilization. And they therefore came to aid or help or make themselves noticed. I mean its an interesting narrative. It is an interesting narrative. All different kinds of people have different things to add to that narrative, including Jacques Vallee, including Hal Puth, including a lot of these people who are leaders in the field. My lens of UFO's comes from very specifically from sources I have worked with, who have a different take on that, who see that as part of a strategic deception campaign. Should I give you a little more detail?

Yes, please.

So the early book I wrote, the first book I wrote Area 51 is about a CIA base in the middle of the Nevada desert, inside the Nevada test and training range where we set off nuclear weapons. Did you know this?

I did.

Okay. I mean people know that now and it's great. And then that base is inside an even bigger test and training range where pilots fly out of Nellis. But in the fifties, area 51 was specifically set up by the CIA to develop the U two spy plane, which was this high flying aircraft 70,000ft up. It flew. I mean in 1950, that is just nothing short of a miracle. It was out of the range of russian surface to air missiles for Area 51. I got to interview the guys who built that airplane from scratch. Literally. It did not come with the manual. They built it. I interviewed the pilots who flew it, flew it over the Soviet Union, flew it over, you know, all kinds of places. And it was so secret that Eisenhower knew about it, the director of the CIA and the guys at Area 51 working on it.

That's it.

That's it. It was like as cause it needed to be secret because if the Russians knew about it, they'd shoot it down, which they ended up doing with Gary Powers in 1960. So the CIA knew it was inevitable that it would get shot down. But they were just playing with fire until it did. But the point of all this is when that was flying, it was mistaken for a UFO. Think about something flying 70,000ft up. People didn't know airplanes fly at 25,000ft ish. Imagine you're somebody that looks up and also the U two has these incredibly long wings so it just looks like a flying cross. And the reflection of it, it looks like a UFO because it's not where it's supposed to be.

Yeah, I mean could you even see it 70,000ft?

You could.

And people didn't know it was across.

Well just. They didn't know what it was. But the CIA learned about that and it was like an oh shit moment. You know, our project's going to become busted open, the public's going to know about it. And people started writing to their congressmen. I have seen these letters declassified from the CIA. You know we're really concerned there's a UFO overdose their state. And then the CIA decided to use this as part of a strategic deception campaign. Well lets goose this idea that there are UFO's because its going to hide its cover for the actual U two. Does that mean that every UFO or every uFO sighting is a U two? Of course not. But when you look at that as a fact, it becomes interesting in the narrative when the CIA built the follow on plane, which was called the a twelve ox cart. So did you ever see any of the X Men movies?

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so you know that plane they fly?

I do.

Right. So that's the SR 71.

Okay.

That's the Air Force version of it. It's a two seater, the CIA precursor plane, which was totally secret, not declassified till, I don't know, 2015. Years ago, 20 years ago, it was a one seater. It had a CIA pilot in it. They flew it out at Area 51. It went mach three something in 1960. 2300 miles an hour at 90,000ft. Okay, in 1960. Think of what a refrigerator looked like in 1960. Okay, so this was like technology that no one could even comprehend, and they had to keep it secret. And in my interviews with Colonel Slater, who was in charge of the whole program, he took me through the exact details of like people seeing the plane, even in a commercial airplane. The example he gave me was a group of people in, I think it was an American Airlines flight, saw the ox cart as it was coming down from 90,000ft to try to land at Area 51. And they saw it and they all thought they saw UFO's. And Slater told me the story and showed me some documentation of the FBI meeting the plane in Los Angeles when it landed, saying, like, you did not see a UFO, you must sign this disclosure paper saying you will never share that you saw a UFO.

So it built this mystique in. I mean, if the FBI shows up and says you did not see that UFO.

Who are they doing this to?

The civilians on the american airline. They had them all signed. So the point of this is the CIA would use the sort of mythology of a UFO in its to help cover the programs that it's trying to hide.

So was the FBI in on it?

The FBI was only. The FBI did not know. Good question. The FBI did not know about the a twelve oxcraft. The FBI was told, make all those people sign those non disclosures and tell them that you didn't see a UFO. So then you have all these FBI agents now who are prone to thinking that was a UFO. Again, does it mean all UFO sightings are the a twelve oxcart which doesn't fly anymore? Of course not. But if you have that information, I think you can think more on balance for me. Yeah.

And the deception that the governments capable of and does.

And also, when youre talking about aircraft and airspace, its very difficult for me to accept that our sacredly guarded airspace is regularly intruded by craft that somebody at the Defense Department doesnt know what it is. I just have trouble believing that, knowing having written the books that I've written about high performance aircraft. But I don't even bother getting into this argument with. It's not an argument, but this discussion with the people who really believe, you know, that these are Uaps, the new term, which I'm fascinated by.

Have you looked into Skinwalker ranch at all by chance?

I mean, I've interviewed all the guys who were at Skinwalker, not all of them, but many of them. This is before, not the current situation, but this is when Bigelow owned it and the original, original team that was there that claimed to have seen the portals and the werewolves and the. And by the way, these are PhDs with DARPA contracts telling me all this. It's just hard for my brain to conceptualize that other than their perception, which is what we were talking about at break.

Yep, yep, yep. With that being said, now, you know, now they see all these radiation spikes, right, as these Uaps, UFO's, these phenomenons happened. And have you looked into that at all?

Well, I haven't, because I would say my first thing would be like, who's they and where are these radiation spike documents coming from? So when I, in other words, when I worked with all the bigelow, the people that were at the Skinwalker ranch, when it was bigelow, it was always an internal situation and it was, the documents are bigelows and you can't look at them because they're in his possession. So it seemed like a closed loop. But I do want to say, and we were talking about this at break, that the analogy that I think of that, of all of this, so that it's clear that I'm not just dismissively self righteous, which I would never want to be, I'm much more curious than that. But the analogy I used was what I told you about hearing things, right? Like, because I believe this is an issue of perception. What you can see, you know, you think of some people being colorblind. What I see is so different than what they see. Then I think of, as I told you before, like sometimes, you know, you have, like you hear a high pitched frequency and maybe it's because you were listening to your ear pods too long or you were, you know, in an airplane.

And so you suddenly say to someone, do you hear that? Because it's, you know, you hear, you actually hear something. Is that in your brain? Is that in your perception? Is that in the environment? Perhaps when people see Uaps, they are seeing them and others aren't. For me, that's my current position on how I think about that.

So are you saying it originates in the mind?

I don't. I do not have the answer. I'm just curious about what it might be because. And I'm also the reason why it's really interesting is millions of people are interested in this. You. We talked about this before. It's. I mean, who wants to talk about nuclear holocaust when you can talk about possible aliens among us, right?

Yeah, yeah.

But they don't have to cancel one another out.

I mean, it's an interest. It's interesting. I mean, it's interesting because now even a lot of what astrophysicists are starting to say, that the, you know, the expansive universe, and no matter how far out we look, something will be there. And I think what they're alluding to is that our minds are creating the unseeable universe.

Yeah. I mean, you had said when we were discussing earlier, like, is it also have something to do with people's perception of religion or spirituality? And what comes to mind on that is one of my favorite thinkers, Carl Jung. Have you ever read any jungden?

I haven't.

Oh, my goodness. I mean, he was just. He was so interested in consciousness, and he's almost the, like the. I don't want to say the inventor, but he did a lot of work on archetypes. What archetypes mean, you know, the wizard, the priest, the king, the queen, the witch. Archetypes of humans and symbols. And he wrote all about this. He wrote a book on UFO's and that they. That UFo's were the product. The modern day UFO's were the product of people's fear of nuclear annihilation. Very interesting book. But Jung and Pauli, a Nobel laureate, I'm forgetting his first name. They were friends, and they would have a lot of discussions about the phenomena of UFO's. And I write about this in my phenomena book because Pauley had this crazy quality about him that he would go walk into places and somehow disturb the electronics. Okay, so he was like a Nobel laureate physicist.

Wow.

But the cameras would shut off. Things would fall over. This is documented.

Are you serious?

Read the book. You'll love this part of it. And he couldn't explain why, but it was known and notable. And so he had some kind of different energy going on or however you want to interpret it. But this led to these discussions between Jung and Paulie about whether or not ESP was real, because of course, esP, extrasensory perception and UFO's often get linked together. And their takeaway, one of their takeaways was that whenever you're talking about it or thinking about it, you have to think about the age that you are in when you are thinking about it having to do with technology. So again, diluting that down, it's almost like my takeaway is they were saying, there's the narrative of it, and then there's the technology that exists in the present day, and then you can begin to maybe think more deeply about the whole issue without getting the answer.

Yeah, fascinating stuff. Let's get back to nukes. So when you went to Brussels, I would like to talk about your discussions there, how you came up, how you came up on their radar. Actually, let me, let's go further. Who were you? What was this event that you were speaking at?

It was a nuclear expo put together in Brussels. The host was the ICRC, the International Committee for the Red Cross, the Norwegian Red Cross, Red Cross, the Belgian Red Cross, and the Norwegian people's AIDS. There was many doctors, physicians who were there as well, because the emphasis of the symposium was on what nuclear weapons do to the human body. How horrific of a weapon it is not just to warfighters who are, you know, sign up for war or are drafted into war, who are fighting a war, hopefully away from the civilian population, but rather that nuclear weapons kill millions of civilians indiscriminately. And their job, these organizations, these aid organizations, is to put the emphasis on that so that they can have more people interested in, kind of opened the pathway to why regular people like you and me should be thinking about nuclear weapons. And it shouldnt just be left to the military or the geopolitical thinkers. And because its in Brussels, the members of the European Parliament were invited. And I took questions from some of them. Some of us, many of us did. So these organizations have been hard at work for decades on this issue, and they don't want it to go away.

What were some of the most relevant questions, in your opinion, that you were asked?

I mean, it was a day long. You know, there were panels. There were. I was the keynote speaker. It was incredible honor. The other main speaker was an 80 year old woman who was a haubakuja. I'm not saying the word right, but that is a survivor. If you're a survivor of the Nagasaki or the Hiroshima bombing. Wow. She was 80 years old, and she was one year and ten months old when Nagasaki destroyed her city. And she survived.

Wow.

So that gives you some context of who I was with. But back up for a second because you asked me how I wound up there, because this might be interesting. The book published in the end of March, and I was doing a book event at a bookstore in Washington, DC, called politics and prose. And normally authors just sign books and you maybe give a little talk. But for this event, I had asked two colleagues to participate. One was John Woolsthal, who was a national security advisor to President Obama, and the other was lieutenant General Charles Moore, who just retired as the deputy commander of cyber command. And before that he was in the Pentagon running the J three. Maybe it was the J two. So reporting directly to the Joint Chiefs. And before that he was running nuclear war scenarios for NORAD. And so you could say that Obamas national security adviser was on the side of kind of disarmament. And you could say that that General Moore was on the side of military nuclear command and control, because thats the truth. So these are maybe even two people that dont normally have a conversation with one another.

They might consider themselves on different sides of the aisle. But again, one of my great, hopefully the good kind of pride of my reporting is that I talk to both sides. I talk to everybody and in fact want them at my book signings to have a conversation. And we had this profound conversation. It was so excellent. It's on tape. And the audience was filled. I mean, there was standing room only. And there were two really interesting people in that audience. I mean, everybody was interesting. All the questions were interesting. But the director of Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory was in, the current director was in the audience.

No kidding.

And he came up to me afterwards and asked me if I would speak at the lab. And I said, of course. And he said, many people at the lab designing the, you know, nuclear future don't know what's in my book. They're under five year employees at the lab. I mean, that's astonishing. Super grateful for his candor about that. And another person that was in the audience was with NTI, which is a disarmament group that is affiliated with the nuke Expo. And I think between the two of them, that's how I wound up at the nuke expo. So you just show up and do your book signings, and you never know what can come of it.

Wow. Wow. When are you going to speak at Los Angeles?

It hasn't been arranged yet, but I'm really intrigued by that. And, you know, here's another thing. I know you're not a big fan of Hollywood necessarily. Right. I will convert you yet? I know you trained Keanu shooting for John Wick, so that's another story. Well, then we roll reversal and I ask you questions. But. So films Hollywood, the Oppenheimer movie, which you may or may not have seen, it was such a billion dollar success around the world. And from what I understand from my sources at Los Alamos, it profoundly impacted Los Alamos. Meaning I've been reporting on nuclear weapons for what, 15 years now. And Los Alamos has always been like this with me. I've been there. I've been to their library, their archives, but they'd always been like this. As if the journalist is somehow the opponent, as if Joe or Jane public is somehow the opponent. And Oppenheimer seems to have shifted that. Suddenly, Los Alamos, at least the historian there, Glenn McDuff, shared with me, has gotten like softer. They were inundated with questions about the last after the Oppenheimer film by regular people wanting to know things. And they responded with a kind of openness and transparency that if you're a journalist, you think is a great thing.

And I think that effect may have also carried up to the top. And that's why the director was at my book signing as opposed to I'm.

Excited for you, that's going to be really cool.

Were kind of all on the same page when you really think about it, like no one should be for nuclear war. Yeah. The question is, should no one be for nuclear weapons?

What are some questions I should be asking you that I havent asked yet?

I mean, I think it's just so interesting that we get to have a conversation when we kind of go back and forth and down the rabbit holes. Because I think that's where the more interesting thoughts happen, you know, and also the takeaways. You know, sometimes you go away from a conversation a little bit changed about an idea or excited to explore a new idea. You know, I also think it's interesting that we have probably a number of colleagues in common. But since those worlds are classified, I only know their code names and you only know their code names.

Different code names. And they might know their real name. I might know the code name, I might know the real name or vice versa name. And yeah, that's a, that's just a part of living in that world, you know. Well, it gets a little confusing, but how do you.

This is back to the Eisenhower question. I mean, what is your take on how you balance liberty and defense? And if you parse out liberty, you want security, you want times of peace, you don't want war. I often think about the president's options. You know, he has diplomacy. That's his first option. He has war. And then the third option is covert action, which you were involved in, which I've written about. So the idea would be, you know, to be living in a permanent state of diplomacy, but that's not practical. How do you think one balances liberty and security?

Wow, that's a tough, tough question. But, I mean, I think it's definitely constantly has to evolve because we gain enemies, we lose enemies, we gain allies, we lose allies. I mean, we just, as America, we have so many targets on our back, and we have so many enemies throughout the world, which, with a lot of them, I can't even blame them. You know, on the show, we, you know, I talked to you this morning, and we told you how this podcast kind of started, and it was all former colleagues, and we dissect. I'm getting off on a tangent here, but we dissect, you know, are we the bad guys in some of these scenarios? And, you know, after, after 20 plus years of, you know, this generation's war, the Gwad, should we have been in Iraq? How would we have acted if we were invaded by a country? Would we have fought against the invading country? And it opens up a really interesting discussion, because a lot of people think that maybe we're not the good guys in all of these conflicts. But back to your question, security, diplomacy. I mean, you, in my opinion, you have to take into account that we have a lot of enemies.

Whether we created them, whether they just hate us, that's another discussion. But with as much as we have going on, we have the world currency. I mean, we are the superpower. And I don't, as much as I would love to say, yep, we should get rid of our nuclear warheads, strive more towards peace. I don't think that's a viable option because we're the world's superpower. We have a lot of targets on our back, and we have to be able to show force. We have to have people know somewhat what our capabilities might be and that there will be repercussions if they launch anything at us. As far as balancing that, man, it's. I don't know. I have a thought about that.

When you say we have a lot of targets on our back, it sends like a shiver up the spine, because it's absolutely true. And just when you're thinking diplomacy is everything, you must always couple that with, we are a target and there are enemies out there. I wonder, perhaps more than any other book I've written, this book has made me wonder about POTUS as a concept, not political, not him or him as a concept, the president of the United States. Because an interesting thing happened when many presidents. This speaks to your point of, like, could we ever get rid of nukes? I don't know. And then we think of the deterrence going. Many presidents go into office, and I mean, many, like almost all the modern off the modern presidents learning a little bit about nuclear weapons before their debrief, their presidential debrief. And then you hear them say things like, I'm going to get rid of the launch on warning policy. It's inexcusably dangerous. So they hear things as a civilian, and then a mysterious thing happens. They get into office and they learn something that then you never hear from that. You never hear talk of that again.

And I want to know what it is they hear.

Hmm. That's a great point. I mean.

I sometimes feel like it's a metaphor for. That has to do with the immigration crisis. Right. And again, not to politicize it, but like, I mean, let's just say a baseline that everyone could agree that illegal immigration is a bad thing because it's illegal and we are a nation of laws, and you want to have rule of law. So that's all right. But as a concept, you hear the same thing. You hear presidents have really big ideas about immigration, and then, and they say certain things. They espouse certain things. I mean, president elect or, you know, running for office candidates, and then they learn something and you never hear from it again. And I know that has changed a little bit in the past few years because immigration has become a different issue. But you get the analogy. Like, what is it that POTUS learns that we, the people, don't get to know about these issues on completely opposite sides of the existential threat margin, maybe, or maybe. Right, but kind of exist as equal threats. What do they learn? And why can't we know that?

Yeah. What information are they getting that changes their mind? Maybe it's not information. Maybe it's money.

And I have that same thought, meaning whatever information they're giving, they're getting is perhaps a moneyed piece of information, meaning a lot of money has gone into telling the president that whatever that is.

I mean, back to, sorry, I get the security versus diplomacy running through my mind. I mean, I think we kind of, I kind of talked about it a little bit at the beginning, and I think if you want to, because essentially we're talking about no nukes worldwide, starting here. I think the only way I could see that happening is by influencing the military industrial complex companies with money to develop better defense systems to develop the next generation weapon. Maybe that is AI, I don't know. But you have to have something that defeats nuclear capabilities and or something that's more powerful than a nuke to add to your arsenal that doesn't necessarily need to be mass destruction. Maybe it's. I mean, I don't know what's possible. I'm not a physicist and I'm not an inventor. Maybe we could get our buddy Chris Beck on here and he'll tell us. But maybe it's some type of laser weapon from space, maybe, who knows? But I think that's the only viable way that we could essentially get rid of our nuclear program is by better defense systems that is proven to work and a more capable weapon system that is that.

You know that.

And so what's interesting and problematic is at the end of that statement, which just when you're thinking that sounds, then you realize, wait a minute. Now I'm caught in the nuclear deter. Now I'm caught in the military industrial complex loop and the deterrence loop, which seems to be a moneyed, again, a loop that an empire of money, an empire of industry wants to exist as a paradox. The directed energy, the laser weapons, by the way, are a massive program at the Defense department. They're called directed energy weapons. And when I was asking about that, like why, what makes them more powerful? And I got a great answer. So I'm just going to share it with you because it seems so hard to comprehend sometimes, like laser weapons. But it was the inventor of the laser who shared this with me, Charles Town, who died at the age of 99 and gave me his last interview at like age 97 still clair, isabelle and speed. So a laser moves at the speed of light, so that even shortens the 33 minutes ballistic window. You could have a laser weapon on the moon and you're talking about less than a second, but then you have the problem.

Oh, laser weapons aren't any kind of solution for anything having to do with no nukes. It's just a whole different set of weapons for the military industrial complex to promote and build and then watch the other side promote and build. And so you have to have new systems. It's the self licking ice cream cone, as they call it at DARPA. So the no nukes idea I really do think exists. And I'll end with, you know, I want to get this in because I was influenced by the nuke expo, I was influenced by meeting the physicians against nuclear weapons, by meeting people who survived an atomic bomb, and by hearing them talk about how this is possible to reduce nuclear weapons. And they use the word taboo. And I thought that was interesting. Me, who loves narrative, just the simple, oh, right, biological weapons have become taboo. No one sits around and says, like, our arsenal of bubonic plague weapons is better than your arsenal, and we need some more and we need to update them and we need better delivery systems and faster. No one says that. They say, my God, a bubonic plague weapon?

Are you insane? And what the doctors and the humanitarians are attempting to do, which is a very noble effort, is put taboo on nuclear weapons, demonstrate how horrific they are to people, and then begin the reduction from all the nations. And they can say, ideally to zero. Perhaps the pragmatist would say at some point, you, okay, maybe everybody keeps a few. Is the world going to end with a few nuclear weapons? Well, certainly not with the same maturity than with thousands of them.

How do you do that? How do you label them?

How do you label them taboo?

Yeah. How do you start that?

I mean, listen, it was a great honor to have some of these people say to me, great job. Thank you for writing the book. You just condensed down and made our job a little bit easier, which is not what I intended. Me, who was worried about fear mongering and Eriche, why? I asked all of my sources. I mean, this book is frightening. People read it. The Amazon reviews are like, oh, my God. I read it in one sitting because I had to know how it ended, how it ended. But then on this idea of taboo. So at the convention, I met a doctor named Doctor Carlos Umana, and he is part of the international. Hes part of a group of physicians that are working to get rid of nuclear weapons. And he himself was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. And he said to me that he and his colleagues were going to meet the pope on May 10. And he asked me if I would inscribe a copy of nuclear war, a scenario for the pope as a gift, so the pope could read it and in a condensed manner, understand what nuclear weapons do to people.

And writing that out was pretty cool.

That is. That's incredible.

So you don't know what will happen on your journey in life if you just keep showing up.

Yeah, no kidding. Well, wow. Wow. Has that happened?

May 10? They meet with him, but I did write the inscription, you know, to his Holiness Pope Francis.

Oh, man, that is so cool. Congratulations.

That's, you know, I had to google that.

Yeah.

What do you. How do you. Right. You can't know everything. I didn't know how to address the pope.

Yeah. Wow. That is. That's really cool. That is. That is. That's something. Congratulations. That is very cool. Well, Annie, this is. This has been a fascinating discussion, and we were going to dive into some more topics, but off camera, I had expressed how much I love talking to you and how much, how I love this conversation, and I don't think it would do this interview justice to try to compile some of your other work into this episode. And so we'll keep it at nuclear war with, with a little bit of UFO stuff. And I can't wait to have you back.

Thank you so much for having me.

Looking forward to that. So it was an honor to have you here.

It was an honor to be here.

Thank you.

What a show you have. And congratulations to you on the massive viewership, listenership, getting the word out, helping people to realize we're all so much more alike than different.

Thank you. That means a lot. And so I can't wait to see you again. Your book, all your social, everything will be linked in the description. So everybody go buy nuclear war a scenario. And Annie, I love this conversation. I love talking to you, and I can't wait to see you again.

Thank you so much.

When I was in the SEAL teams, I loved to dip. I spent a lot of time on operations, and dipping was a ritual. So if it's a ritual for you, too, I get it. If you're an adult, age 21 or older and use nicotine or tobacco, I want to tell you about an american brand, black buffalo. Black buffalo's nicotine pouches do nothing contain tobacco leaf or stem, but they are packed with tons of flavor and nicotine. The magic of black buffalo is they discovered a way to make cured, edible green leaves behave like the texture of tobacco and have classic flavors. You're in good company if you roam with the black buffalo herd. The business was built by dippers with decades of smokeless tobacco use. They manufactured their tobacco alternatives with respect for those products that came before them, bold flavors, full pouches, metal lids, and a brand that stands for something America. Their products are also proudly endorsed by many, myself included. If you're 21 and older, consume nicotine or tobacco, join the herd and head over to blackbuffalo.com to learn more. You can order online and they ship directly to most states. Or check out their store locator to purchase pouches at thousands of locations around the country.

Black Buffalo, an american brand and pouches worth respect. Warning this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Black Buffalo products are intended for adults aged 21 and older who are consumers of nicotine or tobacco.