Nuclear War Expert: 72 Minutes To Wipe Out 60% Of Humans, In The Hands Of 1 Person! If Nuclear War Starts, Go To This Country!

32:21There was a president you talk about that played a nuclear war game and discovered that there could be no winners. So proud profit is one of the few a very rare declassified nuclear war game. People talk about, you know, jealously guarded secrets in the United States government. You can be sure that anything having to do with nuclear war gaming is way up there in the top secrets along with what is actually in that black book. But the proud profit war game was declassified. Reagan had ordered it. I don't believe he participated in it. His sectess everybody in the new command and control participated it for two weeks in 1983.

33:11And this is declassified. I reprint some of it in the book. And if you have a look at it, you might say to yourself, what's the point of declassifying something that looks like this? It's just black. It's like there's a number here and a word there and a page number. But mostly it's entirely redacted. And so what's the point of declassifying it? Well, for the public, something very valuable came out of that, which is it allowed a certain civilian who was participating, a Yale professor named Paul Bracken, to actually speak about it in a general way. He couldn't, you know, couldn't tell op -sac, but he could generally talk about it.

33:54And what he said in his own book was that no matter how nuclear war begins, NATO's involved, NATO's not involved. China's involved, China's no matter how it begins, it ends in nuclear Armageddon. And Bracken's words was that everyone left really depressed. Nuclear Armageddon essentially means the world is destroyed. Nuclear Armageddon is the world is destroyed. And when you get to the end of the book, which happens in 72 minutes. And that comes from something that former Stratcom director General Keeler said to me when we were discussing and interviewing. And I said, I asked him about what could happen if there was a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States.

34:37And he said the world could end in the next couple of hours. So from where we are now in this conversation to the end of this conversation, if a nuclear war broke out when we were sat here by the end of this conversation, basically the entire world would be destroyed. And you and I wouldn't even know before the first missile hit. That was shocking to me to have that confirmed in essence by Obama's FEMA director. So FEMA, the federal emergency management agency is the is the agency in the United States that's in charge of disasters. Right. So if there's a hurricane or a flood or an earthquake, FEMA steps in to help the people.

35:17They have something called population protection planning. Craig Fugate was Obama's FEMA director for eight years. And he just covered an extraordinary amount of catastrophes in the United States. He was also responsible for planning for a nuclear war. He told me that they did that. He also sent we planned for asteroid strikes. These are called low probability high consequence events. But what Fugate told me that was shocking is that there is no population protection planning in a nuclear war because everyone will be dead. And he explained to me that there's nothing that he could do as FEMA director.

35:56He would really be putting his efforts from this nuclear bunker where he would be, which is called Mount Weather. He would be putting his efforts on the continuity of government issues, the continuity of like the government has what are called essential functions. So, and you know, as a nuclear war is happening, the government is trying to prepare to keep the government running, which is a form of fantasy in itself. And when you read Fugate's interviews with me, he's just so candid about how there is nothing anyone can do. And you know, what he told me was so shocking, I went back to him and said like, I just want to really make sure these are your actual quotes that you that that and he absolutely, you know, he was one of the first people to write an Amazon review of the book after published here in the United States.

36:53And I find that both terrifying, but also heartening for this reason is that a lot of these people who leave office because my sources are all former in the title. They, when they are in the command and control, they are very focused on doing their job. Hence what we spoke about earlier about like following orders. They are civil servants. They're dedicated civil servants. They believe in national security. They believe in, you know, the Preserverence of government. And then they leave office and they are just regular people again. And that's when the heart, I think, begins to lead. And particularly as people get older, because I interview a lot of people in their 80s and 90s.

37:43And then they begin to think about what this means in terms of legacy. What is nuclear command and control really as buttoned up as this might be them talking, you know, as I thought. And is it a good idea in a world that is so rapidly changing both geopolitically and also in terms of technology? Was there one individual you met that comes to mind when I ask who the most troubled person was in terms of the work they participated in or troubled in the context of what they know and what it means for humanity and how they're grappling with that. The most concerned and sort of the most activated by all means would be former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry.

38:36And he's now in his 90s and I don't believe he's doing interviews anymore. But it's not surprising that Perry shared with me his intense worry about all of this because he has been actively working on this. And you know, for at least 15, 20 years. And when I say this, I mean bringing the information to the public so that the public is aware he wrote his own book with a colleague called the button. And he has, you know, really he did a podcast called at the brink. And what's fascinating is Perry spent most of his life dedicated to what you might call the military industrial complex. Right to the research and development of weapon systems that I write about in my other books, the DARPA book in particular because this is all part and parcel to what we're talking about here that you have this sort of industry, military weapon system industry that is in a constant state of forward movement.

39:44It's deeply tied to economics to jobs to prosperity. And so where does that take us and and at what point does it end? It was Eisenhower who said in his famous speech where the public really learned about this so -called military industrial complex because Eisenhower spoke of it in his farewell speech. But he also said an important thing in the second half of that speech, which doesn't get nearly as much airtime, which is that a knowledgeable and alert citizenry is how you balance sort of an idea of peace with an idea of defense. And I think what frightens both of us that we talked about in the beginning here was that peace and defense are very different than constant states of war.

40:3472 minutes. You go through this in the book, almost minute by minute, showing exactly what will happen. We know in this first couple of minutes there's a notification that there's a nuclear bomb coming in from somewhere. My question on that was, and I was thinking about this earlier as we're talking about it, how does the president know, how does the world leader of that country know the prime minister of the UK, whoever it might be, Netanyahu or Putin know where that nuclear bomb has come from? Because we talked about this sort of black, black book of places, this menu that the president has in that football that his aid is carrying around.

41:11How does he know which place to pick on the menu to send a nuclear bomb back? Powerful distinction, right? This is not 9 -11. Where suddenly there are planes in the trade center towers and, you know, everyone is scrambling to say, who did this? And the CIA is saying, this is al Qaeda. It has the mark of a, but no one knows for sure. This is not that. This is the fact that for 79 years, the United States has been building nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon systems, and also systems to detect other people's nuclear weapons should they have them? What are the submarines? Okay, so good point on the submarines, which is, but we have a set of satellites called Sibbers, which are parked.

41:58Now, I'm only talking, when you said, how would Netanyahu know, how would the president of Iraq, that is a different scenario. What I am talking about is the US president, because I have interviewed people in the US Defense Department and the intelligence community, and the Defense Department knows precisely where a weapon comes from within a second of launch, because the Sibbers satellites can measure the hot rocket exhaust. So you imagine a rocket taking off lots of fire beneath it. That is measured from 22 ,000 miles up in geosync. I mean, that is just a technological astonishment. And then there begins the data sent down to these various commands in the United States, the aerospace data center, the space force, and they begin measuring the trajectory of the missile and figuring out where it's going to go.

42:54Like it's not going to Moscow and it's not going to Guam. Those would be opposite directions. Is it going to San Francisco or is it going to the East Coast? That is learned in 100 seconds, approximately. Okay, now you are right. You cannot do you, if some, if a submarine launches a ballistic missile, there's no way of knowing where that came from, which is why in the scenario I have that happen, and it creates a whole other set of problems. What are those? I mean, what is the answer to that? Because I was imagining if the Sibbers system sees a nuclear bomb coming out of the Pacific Ocean, I mean, that could be Rishi Sunak, that could be, that could be the UK firing one at America, it could be, you know, could be anybody.

43:40You are absolutely right that there is no way of knowing. And in the scenario that I chose because I wanted to try to take the reader through a logical sequence, if you could even call any of this logical because it's all, you know, they call it mad mutual or sure destruction, it's really madness. But you cannot know who launched that. So does we just go for an enemy in that situation? I mean, do you know, you have a new task you are going to write nuclear war and even worse scenario because that's what you would do, right? If you're president Biden, your A turn is, you go, I president, there's a nuclear bomb heading our way.

44:20I go, I know who exactly who that who did that. And you might start firing a couple of back, back it, just the people that you assume would do it. And then they do the same. The nuclear armed submarines that are owned by Russia and China regularly come within a couple hundred miles of east of each coast of the United States. And you can assume the same about England. And how do we know this? Well, you can't see a submarine moving in real time, but you can track the submarine's movements after the fact, owing to a very complex system of underwater surveillance systems that we have in place. And there's a map that appeared in a recent defense department budget request to Congress, which I reproduce in the book that shows just how close those submarines, those enemy submarines get to the coast.

45:24And that reduces the travel time of a ballistic missile down to under 10 minutes. And so this idea that we really are living at the edge of apocalypse is not an exaggeration. The question is, how would this start? Why would this start? Again, read the scenario and you begin to realize this could start in or have a discussion with you. And you know, this could start in so many the training test tape. I mean, and the real takeaway is asking ourselves is, why did none of us know about this or most of us rather? There's so many ways this could start. And one of them, one of them obviously again has emerged front of mind for society since you started writing the book, which is artificial intelligence.

46:15Before I get to that, though, I really want to, I really want to close off on this 72 minutes. I understand the first couple of minutes there. What does the person listening to this need to know about what happens in the subsequent sort of 60 minutes? There's a very fast process where the trajectory of the ballistic missile is being determined. And we're talking in the first minutes of the sequence because everyone is getting ready to tell the president because what they're going to tell the president is, sir, you need to choose a counter attack. That is called get the blue clock running. Does the president not like getting some plane too quick?

46:54That's where the call that's a decision tree problem. So everyone is working on figuring out the trajectory of the ballistic missile. And there is the first confirmation when you see it. And by the way, a ballistic missile cannot be redirected or recalled cannot be now. Ultimately, the defense department will wait for second confirmation of that missile from a ground radar system. We have them around the world, the one in the scenario that would see it is in Alaska. It has to be able to see and confirm that missile is definitely coming this way. And that happens at around eight or nine minutes.

47:33And so the process in between that everyone's getting ready to brief the president about a counter attack. And so in the scenario the president learns around three minutes and then they're waiting on the secondary confirmation. And in my interviews with the secret service. As I was reporting the book, interesting things would happen exactly like your question like wait a minute. What would the president be staying at the White House? So I as the reporter put that question to the former director of the secret service who explains to me how there is a team called the counter assault team. And that is the sort of paramilitary organization of the secret service that's going to always be there to move the president really fast if need be.

48:22And in this situation they make a decision we're moving him if the target is Washington DC or anywhere on the East Coast for that matter. We cannot have the president anywhere near ground zero. And their job that they are sworn to do is to protect the president. And so that then you're going to have a bit of a stalemate because the military command wants the president on columns to be able to give him counter strike orders. That is what they want. And they can only get those orders from the president. But the secret service has a totally different agenda. And in my scenario, the secret service considering they're the only ones in the room that are armed when they take the president out and he flies out of Washington DC in Marine one.

49:13Marine one being that helicopter that is that you know and then I learned even more interesting details like okay so in the scenario the likely situation is that the electromagnetic pulse will really threaten the electronic system in Marine one. And it will be in deep danger of crashing. For people that don't know for people that don't know an electromagnetic pulse is like a three pulsed sort of shock wave that essentially just zeros out electronics. Imagine your house getting struck by lightning a direct hit and no surge suppressor. I mean just it's all the electronics go out and that will almost certainly happen.

49:53Marine one is outfitted retrofitted against EMP attack because they think about these things. But no one knows if it's going to really work. It's been tested in a chamber. So what you're saying sorry just to clear is that whoever's attacking the United States or another country would send an electronic pulse first. No, the pulse is part of the of the bomb. It's a it's inherent in the nuclear explosion. Okay. And so even if even if you're getting the president out if he's seven eight nine miles 10 miles out of ground zero as they rush because remember this is all happening in 30 minutes under 30 minutes as they rush to get him out of the White House.

50:33The EMP could seriously damage the Marine one so the secret service people I interviewed explained to me that they would have a backup plan which would be to tandem jump the president out of the aircraft. In a with the parachute they would strap the president on to them and jump out of the aircraft because at least there would be the aircraft is going to crash if it gets hit by the electromagnetic pulse. So at least there's a better chance. Well then you have to have the mill aid has to have a parachute because he's got the black book and the direct the special agent in charge of the president is definitely going to go.

51:08So then I learned that this incredible detail that there aren't parachutes in Marine one so they have to go to the White House office to get the parachutes. You know these kind of details I believe provide the reader with a number of things like the astonishing understanding of how many different scenarios are in play all the time. You know being rehearsed so that we because we might have a nuclear war at the same time that the messaging is we will never have a nuclear war. And then when you begin to look at all the competing agendas that will happen you realize it's just chaos upon mayhem. What if the president dies in the strike and before we've made a counter attack which is something that strat calm thinks about and it's certainly why I have that in the fight.

52:02And then I think that's the only way to get the scenario because if the president is the only one that can order a counter attack that can launch nuclear weapons what if he dies. And so I learned in the reporting that if you're the president let's say he even gives the order okay here's my counter strike I'm choosing this from the black book. The situation the command and control is set up that if the president orders 82 nuclear weapons is in response. You can't launch 83 nuclear weapons it's 82 and 82 only and then to do another launch requires passwords I mean it requires so much bureaucracy there's not time for that.

52:40And so there's this almost unknown little detail inside of the nuclear command and control apparatus called a universal unlock code which I learned about in the book and the eyebrow goes up for exactly that reason as did mine when I wait what. And then you find out that the president can release to the strat calm commander the universal unlock code which basically says okay you if I die you have permission to launch. Nuclear weapon number 83 or nuclear weapon number 5000 you know all the way up and that is a pretty shocking concept.

53:27The president responds to the nuclear attack. Hits I don't know let's say they they hit Russia they send the submarines out to send the ICBMs or whatever it's called to hit strike Russia Russia have these submarines as well they send more back. What does what's the aftermath of nuclear you know that 72 that 72nd minute because I imagine from the minute the president hears that gets the notification that there are it's been confirmed has had the second confirmation he's going to make the decision to fire nuclear weapons back I assume. And then from the marriage just all fire as far as I'm concerned there's a concept called jamming the president which is so the president learns in the scenario I write that North Korea has fired a ballistic missile and then a second one comes in from a sub and hits a nuclear power plant in California.

54:22What did you think of career. I picked North Korea because of my interviews with Richard Garwin the designer of the nuclear. Thermon nuclear bomb the first one which you designed for teller. Because in our interviews I asked him what scared me most Garwin also in his 90s has advised every president of the United States since Eisenhower. He was an early founder of NRO I mean our one of our most classified agencies his opinion matters and while he didn't want to be specific he gave me sort of a very interesting almost poetic metaphor when he spoke of the mad king. And the mad king with the nuclear arsenal and even use that French phrase up I'm wild the deluge.

55:09This idea of like after me the flood if I die who cares and I interpreted that that Garwin was talking about North Korea because North Korea is the rogue nuclear armed nation that regularly sets off ballistic missiles and doesn't tell anyone. There is an unspoken reality among the other nations that you inform people when you're going to test an ICBM with a dummy warhead of course North Korea doesn't adhere to that so you know when I interviewed people who are in those command and control bonkers those first hundred seconds we spoke of where the ballistic missile is on its way. And all of that command and control is focused on is this coming at us or is it as launching a space satellite or is it going into the sea of Japan that's what North Korea does they don't announce those tests and so imagine the anxiety in those command bonkers every time they launch a ballistic missile they have launched more than a hundred ballistic missiles and in 18 month period from like 2022 forward.

56:17Testing so this is so dangerous and so rogue if there you know on the one hand I say there are no rules to nuclear war but there are a few nuclear rules to nuclear deterrence like you tell your neighbors and that's why I chose North Korea but just to finish that the sequence. The president launches 82 missiles at North Korea in a counter attack and that is and in the scenario that I write the failure now becomes about miscommunication a very important concept and also about technology not working and I source in the book precisely where this information comes from so Russia. And so Russia misinterprets our launching nuclear weapons at North Korea as being launched at Russia why because actual fact our ICBMs do not have enough range to travel to North Korea without over flying Russia.

57:26And so imagine in a climate like now with hostilities as an all time high the Russian president just saying okay well maybe they're not coming for us and nuclear policy the policy of deterrence is you launch if someone's launching at you and so that is where you know in the second act of the book it's 24 minutes 24 minutes 24 minutes end game Russia launches and Russia. Launch you don't law if someone's attacking you with nuclear missiles you don't launch one or two back that's mad King logic. You launch the mother load and that's what I have Russia launch in the scenario what you mean mad King logic well mad King logic is why would you do that yeah okay so in the book in the mad King logic of the book the leader of North Korea who is nameless.

58:26Launches a nuclear weapon at the United States for reasons we don't know and we will never know because history will end the ability to write history ends in 72 minutes of the book. So we will never know why and that is the sort of you know question. Mad King logic is very different than defense department logic or many regards Russian nuclear command and control logic which I interview sort of the world's expert on those subjects to be able to you know give readers quickly an idea of what that logic is and why it has held for 79 years. Can't we just shoot out the sky. That is the great fantasy that is a fallacy right so let's talk numbers for a second America has 1 ,770 nuclear weapons on ready for launch status they're deployed okay they can launch in seconds minutes maybe some of the bombers take an hour or two.

59:33Russia has roughly the same 1 ,674 that's the parody of the nuclear treaties that says nothing of the thousands more that we each have in reserve but those are actual nuclear weapons that are pointed at one another ready to go ready to go okay so those numbers. The US has an interceptor program to allegedly intercept a long range ballistic missile not talking about short range or even medium range long range like that would come from Russia or North Korea. We have 44 interceptor missiles four of them are at Van and Berger force based in Santa Barbara 40 of them are at Fort Grelean Alaska. 44 so if Russia has 1 ,670 nuclear weapons how are our 44 interceptors going to go up against those and that says nothing by the way and I get into this in sort of the little bit of the wonkiness inside.

1:00:38A nuclear warhead many of them are what are called murked which means they have multiple warheads inside of it and so when the warhead unleashes the multiple warheads go out along with decoys so that if an interceptor missile is coming at it it greatly reduces the chance that the interceptor will be able to shoot it out of the sky the way that it was said to me was like this an interceptor missile which is basically just like a small ICBM right it's a small rocket. It is like trying to shoot a bullet with a bullet that's a quote from the spokesperson of at the Pentagon. One of them is traveling at 14 ,000 miles an hour the ballistic missile 14 ,000 miles an hour the interceptor the little kinetic vehicle inside of it that's going to hit the warhead hopefully is traveling at 20 ,000 miles an hour.

1:01:33That's where you get the trying to hit a bullet with a bullet and by the way this is all happening 500 miles up in space good luck. The success rate of our interceptor program is between 40 and 55 percent that's on a good day where they're testing these things and they go hey we're doing an interceptor test it might be around there right that's called a curated test that's not in the madness of the moment. The bombs land if I was a fly on the wall not that there would be a war left what would I what would I and I was looking at America or the UK after it been strike struck by these nuclear bombs by thousands of you know Russian North Korean nuclear weapons what would I see what would the visuals be in those minutes after the strike.

1:02:24I describe the first bomb in the scenario that strikes the Pentagon it's a one megaton thermonuclear bomb in painstaking horrific detail all sourced from defense department documents defense scientists who have worked for decades to describe precisely what happens to things and to humans and it's horrifying. But on top of the initial flash of thermonuclear light which is 180 million degrees which catches everything on fire in a nine mile diameter radius on top of the bulldozing effect of the wind and all the buildings coming down and more fires igniting more fires on top of the radiation poisoning people to death in minutes and hours and days and weeks if they happen to have survived on top of all that each one of these fires create a bomb.

1:03:14It creates a mega fire that is a hundred or more square miles and so essentially in essence what do you see well in the scenario at minute 72 a thousand Russian nuclear weapons land on the United States and so it just becomes a conflagration of fire it's just fire fires burning fires 100 200 square mile fires burning and then we move into nuclear winter. And that's sort of the day new month of the book where I tell you about nuclear winter from the point of view of one of the original scientists who wrote that original nuclear winter paper with Carl Sagan back in 1983 and his name is Professor Brian tune he spent the decades since working with the state of the art climate modeling systems that can now precisely tell us what nuclear winter will look like.

1:04:11Because I've always thought you know what nuclear war wouldn't be that bad if you know Russia launched a thousand of their nuclear bombs at the United States and I was here in New York where I am now. I would die instantly so I wouldn't really know it happened. Is that true? I think you would want to die instantly I mean there's a quote from Nikita Krushchev the former premier of the Soviet Union and he said after nuclear war the survivors would envy the dead. Because there is right there is this sense of if you survived I mean there is no more law and order there is no more rule of law there is no government Craig Vuegate made that very clear the bunkers that the people in the military command and control centers would be in let's say the secret bunkers not the ones that are targets that Russia is going to take out that I read about in the book but the smaller ones.

1:05:05Those are going to only function for as long as there's gasoline to run the diesel and the diesel generators and then those people are going to have to come out and who's left it's man returning to the most primal most violent state as people fight over the tiny resources that remain and by the way they're all malnourished everybody's sick. And most people have lost everything and everyone they know how's that going to feel. It's going to feel as you describe your own page 277 there are a thousand flashes of light super heating the air in each ground zero to a hundred and eighteen million degrees Fahrenheit a thousand fireballs each more than a mile in diameter.

1:05:55A thousand steeply fronted blast waves a thousand walls of compressed air a thousand American cities and towns where all where all engineered structures in five six or seven miles radius change physical shapes collapse and burn a thousand cities and towns with molten asphalt streets a thousand cities and towns with survivors and pale to death by flying debris a thousand cities and towns filled with tens of millions of dead people with tens of millions of unfortunate survivors suffering. Fatal third degree bands people naked tattered bleeding and suffocating people who don't look or act like people anymore across America and Europe hundreds of millions of people are dead and dying while hundreds of military aircraft fly circles in the air until they until they run out of fuel.

1:06:44I mean that is that is some visual how many people would be dead or dying do you think after the 72 minutes hundreds of millions of people die in the fireballs no question but the number that I think is very interesting to think about comes from professor tune and his team who wrote a paper for nature. Recently 2022 and sort of updated nuclear winter idea based around food and the number that they have is five billion people would be dead the population of the planet currently is about eight billion yes so there'd be three billion people still alive. Where shall I go to be one of the three billion I was just in New Zealand and Australia that's exactly where you'd go according to tune those are the only places that could actually sustain agriculture.

1:07:48I was there two weeks ago not even two weeks ago it was maybe 10 days ago is New Zealand and Australia and at that time I think Iran attacked Israel. Yes.

1:08:03I was kind of happy you're in the right place. I was kind of happy for where I was located from you know I was thinking I actually remember talking to my friends and I pulled up a map. I was trying to see how far away I was from everything. I was thinking if because world will three started training on Twitter I was thinking if it does break out now I think I'm pretty probably pretty well placed is that the place to be. That is that is according to professor to and I mean he was so generous with me he shared a lot of his slide shows that he has for his students and that is really pretty much what's left I mean because most of the world is certainly the mid latitudes would be covered in these you know sheets of ice the fresh water bodies.

1:08:43And places like I when you can crane would be would be just snow for 10 years and so agriculture would fail and when agriculture fails people just die and on top of that you have the radiation poisoning because the ozone layer will be so damaged and destroyed that you can't be outside in the sunlight. And so people be forced to live underground and so you have to imagine people living underground fighting for food everywhere except for New Zealand and Australia. There was also another interesting detail that that he shared with me that you know 66 million years ago and asteroid hit earth and wiped out the dinosaurs and something like 70 % of the known species.

1:09:39And professor tune compared nuclear war to that situation and so when you really think about it and again this was also echoed by Craig Fugate, FEMA's director. You think about it there's nothing we can do about an asteroid at least not right now and yet there is something that nuclear war is a man made threat. And therefore it has to be a man made solution. What is the solution? I really believe that people motivate other people it's like a fundamental truth on the smallest scale and on the biggest scale. And so there's one person who is incredibly powerful and that is the president of the United States for better or for worse it's just the way it is.

1:10:31And so in the same way that the president has presidential soul authority to start a nuclear war, the president also has a very powerful pen with which he can write executive orders and EO. And the story I tell on the hopeful note goes like this when I was in high school in 1983 there was an ABC TV movie called The Day After. And it showed a fictional war between the United States and then Soviet Russia. It was horrific and terrifying. Okay. A hundred million Americans watched it. A hundred millions Americans. It's like the third of the population. And I think it was half the population then. President Reagan was one of those Americans.

1:11:18He had a private screening at Camp David. His advisors told him not to watch it. He did watch it. Before that president Reagan was a hawk. He was pro nuclear weapons. His position was the more nuclear weapons the better. He was the one putting nuclear weapons in space with the Star Wars program, the SDI program. Okay. He couldn't have been more pro deterrence supremacy. He saw the day after and he changed his position. He wrote in his White House journal that he became greatly depressed, his words. And he reached out to Gorbachev. And then they had a Reckovic summit, a summit in Iceland, Reagan and Gorbachev.

1:12:05And through communication, right? Through both of them realizing this is madness, realizing what could happen. Seeing the day after and realizing, my God, this cannot happen. And they famously issued a statement that said, the joint statement between the two of them said, a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. And the result of the Reckovic summit was that the world has gone from 70 ,000 nuclear warheads. That was the all time high. 70 ,000. Why do you need 70 ,000 nuclear warheads? That's what there were in 1986. And now here we are because of the reductions, because of the treaties, thanks to those two.

1:12:5712 ,500 approximately, nuclear warheads. That is the movement in the right direction. And it came from a dramatic story being told. And it came from the president taking action because people would not stand for this anymore. There were massive protests. Do you believe we could ever get to zero? What is it? That is for the disarmament experts. I like to stay in my lane as a storyteller, as an investigative journalist. I like to give you the dramatic fast read. And then pass the baton to those who have been working on that issue for decades, because boy, are they qualified? I just had the great fortune of being invited to Brussels, where I was part of a nuclear expo.

1:13:47And there were members of the European Parliament in the audience. And I, and there were all these disarmament people there. And I learned a lot about all of these groups. And they have the answer. And they are the ones that should be asked that question. And they are doing a lot to get us there. From the moment you wrote the first word in this new book, Nuclear War of Scenario, to when you finished the book, how did your feelings change about the subject matter?

1:14:22It's interesting because you write, this is just my experience as a journalist, but you write the book and you're like any professional person, you want to do a really good job at your job, right? So I was very focused on gathering the facts and then relaying them in a readable way. You know, my husband, Kevin, always says like, you got to write something that someone can read on the beach or an airplane, which is not necessarily conducive to like Nazi scientists or the other things I've written about. But for this, it became clear to me, nuclear launch to nuclear winter fast. Have people read it fast because you want to grab their attention, because I'm a mother, you know, I'm a hopeful person that believes that we do not have to live with this threat overhead.

1:15:13And so my focus of the work was really on doing the best job I could to narrate the story. And I think you take your hat off about maybe any more sort of emotional or sentimental feelings. You try to push that into the pros, I suppose. So maybe in subtext, there is a sense of urgency and even fear. But for me, intellectually, you know, as an investigative journalist, it was just what's the next page going to be like. But how do you feel about the nature of the E? It's interesting as well, because when you think about the books you've written, I think, how many, have you written now six or seven?

1:16:00Seven books in total. The subject matter of your books are all the basis of a lot of conspiracy theory. That makes sense. You know, you've written about Area 51 and this thing called Operation Paperclip and the Pentagon and our nuclear bombs and the CIA, all these kinds of things, which are the basis of many of the conspiracy theories that I hear about. So you've got a very unique perspective on the world, because you've had the privilege and the excessive interviewing some of the most interesting people that are closest to these very interesting subjects. What are some of the things that you've come to learn that you once thought were just conspiracy theories?

1:16:37I mean, conspiracy theory is such a loaded word. And I think it's too bad that it's used as a catch all to kind of dismiss a lot of curiosity. Because curiosity is important, right? And curiosity leads toward reading. I mean, I couldn't be a bigger fan of reading or listening to, you know, educating yourself. I mean, things have really changed in terms of audio. Like you can listen to a podcast and learn a lot. You can listen to an audio book the same way that you used to have to read them. And so to just call things conspiracy theories, I find to be intellectually thin. Right? It's just too easy.

1:17:24And it's also very self -righteous. And I think two things I always work to avoid is like kind of being a know -it -all. And I am around a lot of know -it -alls because people who become experts and subjects, and maybe they don't get as much attention as they think they deserve, tend to become a little bit of self -righteous know -it -alls. And so I have to wind my way through that world because I'm always what interests me are subjects that make me ask the question, why? Like, why does no one know about Area 5? Why does Area 51 so secret? I mean, when I wrote the book Area 51, the word Area 51 was still classified.

1:18:12You couldn't say it. I went to the CIA and I was told by my minder, if you say a certain word and number, you will be asked to leave. It was classified. It only became unclassified when President Obama spoke about it publicly. Oh, really? He just mentioned it. And then it was unclassified. Right? And so to answer your question, I find it really interesting, tackling subjects that are in the zeitgeist, that people are interested in, and then trying to unpack the truths and the fictions. But is there something you heard about? You heard a whisper about and you thought that can't possibly be true.

1:18:58And then after doing a little bit of investigative researching and journalism, you discovered that it actually was true and you were blown away. And I say that in part because I lived much of my life thinking that a lot of these subjects, Area 51, the CIA, this idea that there's all these spies and they're doing all of this stuff. And I thought a lot of it was just internet rumors and people who, certain people who, you know, they have like the silver foil on their heads and they're just like, whatever. And then I had the privilege of speaking to some people on this podcast and just out there in the world who confirmed that a lot of the things I once thought were tinfoil hat stuff is actually true.

1:19:42And once you have the curtain pulled back, it kind of blows your mind open to what else could be true. And I'm a person that kind of like needs evidence and logic and I'm not going to believe something because I saw it on like an Instagram post or a story or a telegram community. But my mind's been blown, especially over the last couple of years about how some of these things that people consider to be conspiracy theories are actually very true. Have you had those moments in your career? Oh, absolutely. But I mean, you can really drill down on this stuff and figure out the thematic element of what's going on and then the specifics.

1:20:17And I'll give you an example. Like in area 51, I learned about something called strategic deception, which is a CIA concept. Okay. And this plays into conspiracy theories. And when you come across something, maybe having this information about to tell you, will help you go, okay, let me look at it in terms of these two lanes. So it goes like this. The CIA's had a, was building spy planes out at area 51. The U2 spy plane, which was going to spy on the Soviet Union in the 50s from above and figure out whether they were preparing for nuclear war. And the plane was built at area 51 because no one could know about it.

1:21:01It flew at 70 ,000 feet. It was out of range of any surface to air missiles. I interviewed the first man who flew over the Soviet Union in a U2, Hervey Stockman. And he took pictures with these massive CIA cameras that came back to the agency. It was wet film and allowed the CIA to understand what was actually going on on the ground in Soviet Russia. It was photographing military bases. So this spy plane was being built and it was so secret like only the president knew about it. At the same time, nuclear weapons were being exploded next door. So area 51 and then over at area 23 was where the bombs were going off.

1:21:44And there was, I was interviewing all the engineers who were building the spy plane. And Bob Murphy was one of the lead engineers and he told me this story about strategic deception. So he and others would go to the ranch, such as the Cold Area 51, then they'd fly back to Burbank, California where they all lived for the weekends to be with their families. And they would take this shuttle back and forth. And one day, they went to a big party the night before and Bob Murphy got drunk. He was not a guy who gets drunk, but he got drunk. He missed the shuttle. And he was like, oh my god, I'm going to lose my job.

1:22:18I'm in trouble. And he opens the doors, how he describes it to me to like, you know, go out and deal with this. And there's an FBI agent like about to knock on the door. And they tell, and the guy turns white as a ghost because Bob Murphy was supposed to be on that flight. So he was on the flight manifest and it crashed into Mount Charleston on the way there and ever almost dead. Okay. So that is just a dramatic thing to begin with. But here's how it ties up a strategic deception. The CIA learns that it's aircraft full of you two engineers, pod designers, all these incredibly important people on this top secret project are dead.

1:22:59They just crashed into Mount Charleston. What are they going to do? How are they going to keep this secret? All the new stations are racing up to the top of the mountain to try to get to the crash site. Oh my god, this is going to be the project is going to be blown open. What are we going to do? So they quickly rope off the areas. They do the damage control to the best that they can. But they're spinning and I have all the declassified documents from that part of it learning how worried they are. There's almost no doubt the project is going to be revealed. The YouTube program is going to be no more because once the Soviets know about it, it's off.

1:23:36And instead, the press comes up with a story. The press reports that it's all these atomic scientists working on this secret new weapon. They just completely make this up in essence, right? It's this new weapons project. And that's what they're all doing. Who knows who put what bug in someone's ear. And so that's the story that comes out. And the CIA is like perfect. And what I the story explains that there are two kinds of strategic deception. There's cover when you say like Bob Murphy said to his wife, I'm just a engineer working out there on some television systems. That's cover. That was his cover.

1:24:17He didn't say I'm working on the YouTube spy plan. And then there's disinformation when the press reports that the crash was full of a bunch of atomic engineers working on a secret weapons program. And those are both kinds of strategic deception. And so you begin to realize that there is a purpose behind a lot of information coming out into the public. And the CIA often uses that to his advantage. And so whenever a situation happens, you have to say to yourself, is this really what happened? Or is it covering up something else? And then of course you have to put your rational person hat on. And you can't just imagine what the true story might be.

1:25:03You have to actually find it and report it. Does the CIA or the think in the UK is called MI5 or MI6? Am I6 I think is the equivalent? Does MI6, all of these sort of special secret service agencies around the world, do they work with the media? That's a totally separate podcast we could talk forever because there's history of the CIA. And I'm not an expert on foreign intelligence agencies as much as I am on the United States. But by all means, there's a long history of the CIA working with journalist reporters, authors to put information there. I mean, there's almost nothing that the CIA hasn't done to my eye.

1:25:46The question is, you know, reporting it in the context of how that's happening. I write about in the Pentagon's brain if you want a little homework, you know, and you go into the back and in the index and look up brainwashing. And there's a long story where I talked to where I explained exactly how this happened in the 50s with what ultimately an element that became known as the MK Ultra program. Okay, so like MK Ultra was a real program and it had a lot of sinister components to it. Is it everything that, you know, certain groups of people that sometimes get called conspiracy theorists say that it was no, but there are threads of truth in it.

1:26:38And if you reverse engineer the brainwashing concept from the back, you will see what I'm talking about. And I think it's a very interesting story because it actually involves the head of the CIA guy called Alan Dulles and his son who got brain damaged in Korea, whom I tracked down and interviewed for that book, spoiler alert. What happens? Which part? I mean, which part of it? I'm so compelled by the whole idea of the CIA because we had someone here recently talking, we had Andrew here recently talking about what goes under the CIA. I think he wanted things he said to me is that the role of the CIA has changed over time.

1:27:16And once upon a time, it was more capable of doing more things. And by the way, he described it sounded like the CIA has less powers and can do less of the things that it's been accused of in the past. I think it's been accused of killing the president here by some people or being involved in the assassination of one of the presidents here. And does the CIA report directly into the president? The CIA features an almost every one of my books. The most sort of comprehensive look I did at the CIA was a book called Surprise Kill Vanished, which is about the CIA's paramilitary. And once I reported that, I understood that there are actually two very distinct components of the CIA.

1:28:00There's the sort of central intelligence agency, the primary human, it's called human intelligence. And there's analysts and there's espionage. And then there's the paramilitary organization, which was set up in 1947, specifically to go against the Russian version of itself. Sort of to do the darkest, dirtiest, nastiest operations that we had to because the Russians were. And so, you know, the CIA is a giant organization with a lot of tentacles. And I think it's important to speak, at least for me, having reported on many of these different programs. You know, Area 51 covers the aerial espionage element of the CIA, the science and technology.

1:28:56The CIA was responsible for putting the first satellite in space, the corona program. Dr. Bud Wieland, who I interviewed for Area 51, remarkable intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance programs. And then you have the paramilitary operators, the trigger pullers, the snake eaters, the individuals who, you know, find fix and finish people. That's a euphemism. The teams that do that. But I prefer to speak very specifically on programs because I find it's the most responsible or the most factual way for me to stick to a certain lane of the agency because it is so vast. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead.

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1:30:59Because we're heading towards a world of what they call artificial general intelligence, where a lot of these systems will be making autonomous decisions. They'll be able to and there's a couple of people that I've spoken to from DeepMind or from Google have talked to me about a world where this is an extreme case, but our elected leaders will be either AI themselves or being basically working in lockstep with AI. And then when you think about our nuclear weapon systems, who is better to make that decision? Is it a Joe Biden that's better to make a decision to launch a nuclear weapon or is it some kind of artificial intelligence that is so advanced?

1:31:35We might not even know what it's thinking or doing. Have you thought much about artificial intelligence since this book came out and since you started writing? Absolutely. It's something I covered at length in the Pentagon's brain, which is the book about DARPA. And I think that maybe I'll speak to an origin story here, right? Because I think of Shakespeare. It's like, what is past? Is prologue? We can understand better the question you raised, especially for younger people. Like, what is this going to look like in the future as a president? Really going to be working in concert with AI? If we know, wait, how did this all begin?

1:32:10It somehow, at least to my eye, becomes easier to think about these things in a grounded manner. And so I'll throw this detail at you. In reporting the Pentagon's brain, it was fascinating to learn that during World War II, computers were people. A computer was someone who computed mathematical, you know, called trajectories, bomb explosions were all measured by people and pencils. And I love the smile because suddenly it all becomes easier. Then you have a guy called John von Neumann, the Pentagon's brain. He was the first brain that the Pentagon really was interested in. And he created one of the first computers.

1:33:04You can't really assign the first computer to anyone, but there was a computer that was doing calculations for it called ENIAC. And ultimately after the war, von Neumann went to the Atomic Energy Commission, the most powerful organization in the world at the moment, and said, I want to build a computer that can actually think for itself. That he's kind of the progenitor of this idea of software, not just hardware. So for a long time, it was kind of Texas Instruments type computing, almost just like a giant calculator. And von Neumann wanted to put the brain inside the calculator. And they gave him a lot of money to do it.

1:33:46And he did this in the basement of Fould Hall over at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. And it was giant vacuum tubes. And he would do these tests. And I described this in the Pentagon's brain because it's really interesting to think this was only in 1945. There were vacuum tubes and, you know, cords, and they had to worry about mice eating cords. And John von Neumann was so brilliant and smart that he could beat the computer initially. His assistants would give him numerical calculations. He would do them in his mind. The computer would be trying to do them. He would win. And then one day, in like I think it was 1946 or 1947, the computer beat him.

1:34:32That was the moment that von Neumann realized computers are going to be... Computers just got smarter than me, than man. And then he began to develop and systems, the defense department began to put an extraordinary amount of money into computer systems. And if you really want to know where they took off, because this has to do with AI, this is man computer interface. The defense department hires a guy called Licklider to essentially shrink computers down from the size of a house to the size of this room and think of what they are now. So the defense department has always led with artificial intelligence, which is computer based.

1:35:17And when you can see that origin story, you can begin to understand where we're going. AI had to have the benefits of these military systems to develop, like nanotechnology. Things had to start becoming smaller. And that all happens in that book. Not all of it, but in other words, you can learn in a sort of poetic manner the trajectory of computers and where they began not so long ago and where we are now. And it was in 1983 that DARPA, that organization decided that the battle place, the battlefield is no place for humans. That was a statement of its first robotic AI program. I went on chat GPT a couple of months ago and I asked it, I said, could you play out a scenario where the world ends, because an artificial intelligence basically gets leaked out of its, out of the computer that it was born out, born on.

1:36:21And the scenario that it played out involved nuclear war, because halfway, I think it was in step three or four. It says that the AI basically takes control of the nuclear warheads or at least some of them. And then it kind of launches them at other countries.

1:36:39And hearing chat GPT say that. And in step three or four, use nuclear weapons as a way to kind of make the world extinct. It felt plausible. Okay, so I'm going to push back against that. Which is by no means right. I'm not right. What we're just having a sort of theoretical conversation here. Chat GPT is gathering its information. So I would argue that chat GP has got a lot of information from the Terminator movie. Okay. There is that in the zeitgeist of what happens. Then I want you to consider that the communication systems in nuclear command and control, which is actually nuclear command control and communication.

1:37:21The ability for NC3 to communicate with the actual weapons is so profoundly classified that I don't have access to it. But I'm going to give this to you as an idea. What I do know and learned reporting nuclear war scenarios, fascinating detail that stands as an analogy, at least for me, which is how analog our ballistic missile systems are because of the exact fear that you describe and that chat GPT described back at you. And will they stay that way forever? Probably not. But are they that way right now from what I understand? Yes. Our submarine launched ballistic missiles that are just so, the technology behind them, and I delineated for the reader, it's astonishing that you can launch a missile from underwater.

1:38:16It can breach the surface. It's after burners take off and then it begins its trajectory, you know, boost phase, mid course phase, terminal phase hits the target. This is incredible. And how does it get there? You might ask. I asked. It gets there by star -sighting. Oh really? So you realize there's this little panel that opens up in the ballistic missile. And there are other ways that it's navigating. But the primary mean of navigation is star -sighting. I mean, you just have to really stop and go, oh, my, first of all, it's actually a really interesting concept that the most advanced potentially civilization -ending ballistic missile is guiding itself to its target by this ancient concept, like that our hunter -gather ancestors used, which is looking at the stars.

1:39:18It's looking at the stars and then navigating using them. And that's meant to be a defense against a system, an enemy taking control of your nuclear weapons. The issue we have is that there's potentially 9 or 10 different nuclear powers, and they don't all have the same systems. So if we get to the point of AGI, which a lot of people almost see as the singularity, or unless you can't see past that moment, where there is a new being amongst us, that is capable of thinking faster and more expansively and more intelligently than humans, and those things we don't, I think it might look at our systems as child's play, as well maybe not our systems, but maybe it'll look at North Korea's systems as child's play.

1:40:04It might be able to put that VCR into the system and play out the nuclear simulation that tricks those people into believing they're being attacked. Yes. Which is maybe time for the answer to your question of should we be at zero, right? Yeah. So what you have presented, which would be the whole point of somebody like me writing a book that somebody like you would read of a younger generation, and begin having these conversations with their colleagues and their thought leaders, and the people that could maybe influence public policy and saying, well, that would be a very good reason to have zero nuclear weapons.

1:40:39Or everybody gets 10, I'm making that up. But right? Yeah, yeah. Because if you have 12 ,500 nuclear weapons, it's better than 70 ,000, but there's way too many for an artificially intelligent trigger scenario like you're talking about. Are you optimistic? Optimistic about. I am. I mean, I am an optimistic person by nature. And so. Do you think there will be a nuclear war in the course of humanity? I wrote this book as the optimistic, hopeful person that's saying, read this and realize that a man -made problem has a man -made solution. Earlier you talked about there being high consequence and low probability.

1:41:40But the more the years tick on, that probability increases by nature of there being this mad king. Absolutely. That might at some point. So, you know, and that's what I think. So I was asking myself, eventually, if we play this forward, I don't know, a thousand years, what is most likely to cause the end of humanity? Is it a mad king somewhere who doesn't want that, you know, he realizes that he's going to either die, he's got cancer, he realizes that, you know, he's got some sickness and he doesn't really want his son to take power. He starts getting a bit agitated. Maybe he has some kind of psychosis.

1:42:12Get some freni. I don't know. Decides to in his dying days to let a couple of these things fly. Is that eventually going to happen? The laws of probability, the laws of averages say that the longer we're here, the longer we have these weapons, the higher the probability. I mean, I leave that to people like you to think about and talk about. Because I do, and I am fascinated that I find that people of your generation ask that question a lot more than perhaps people of my generation and older. Like that was not a mindset that people necessarily had and talked about. And I think that has to do with the confluence of events that you talk about.

1:42:51First of all, people have access to information in a manner they didn't, you know, 30, 40 years ago, or it took a lot more effort. And also that there are these incredible new threats that you're talking about that are that you cannot overlook. And so you would think that it's time to kind of, and then not a polyanna, but you have to move away from seeing everyone and everything as an enemy. And moving toward, it's fine to have adversaries. Having opponents is, you know, sportsmen have opponents, right? But everyone being an enemy and having, you know, wars escalating around the world. It seems as if what you are saying is there has to be a fundamental shift in what people are considering important.

1:43:42But war has always existed, and it's existed as long as humans have. So it makes me think that war is just part of humans trying to coexist. And all of the things that are hardwired into us are such for status and ego and reproduction and resources and survival result in war. Like they result in recessions. So I read a lot about the origin of war. Like it's a debate, no one, you know, it, but it is discussed. And the anthropologists, I think, have the most interesting sort of thoughtful concepts around it, which I'll share with you, which is this. Because yes, technically, there has always been war.

1:44:16And one of the debates is, you know, did war begin with civilization or were hunter -gatherers warring? But more interesting to that, I think, is about the anthropologists who studied in the 60s, the hunter -gatherer tribes like in the Amazon, when they were still access to them. And they were sort of, you know, they were unaffected by civilization at all. And they could look at how they perceived enemies. And an interesting idea came out of that, which makes me think about optimists versus pessimists, right? Sort of, or rather those who trust versus those who are suspicious that, that no matter if a hunter is outhunting, you know, that's part of a hunter -gatherer tribal environment.

1:45:00And he comes across another person. Obviously, that person is either threatening or that person is someone to team up with against the greater threat. And the anthropologists do not know why it is that some people interpret this person with suspicion and then might kill him, and others would interpret that person as a teammate. And so if we don't know how human, you know, is it genetics? Like how do people either fall on one of those two sides? But what we do know is that people can learn to think differently. You talk with half your guests on the podcast about this. People can be trained, not, you know, propagandized, but people can learn to think differently.

1:45:53So if you're me, who is a hopeful person and wants to see the positive side of even my dark reporting, because that's a better choice for me and for my family, I train myself to find, if you will, the silver lining, or rather, if that's too polyannish, to find the way in which how do I look at the person coming at me as someone who could be on my team, or even an opponent, but not an enemy that I would have to kill? What's the most interesting thing that you've written about that we haven't discussed? I don't just need a new clue where I mean in all these books. I mean, I'm particularly fascinated by DARPA because I think in a lot of the world, especially in Europe, in the UK, we don't even know what DARPA means.

1:46:40So it was interesting reading about the existence of that. But in all these books, what is the most interesting thing, the most resonant thing when you talk about your work to people? Maybe that surprised you. I mean, every single one of my books is powerfully important to me, not just because of the information there, but because the people I met along the way. And I really could not put one over the other because that would be like favoring a child. And I mean that literally. Sometimes when I prepare to do a podcast, I read my own books. And I'm really, for me, it's the some total of these incredibly fascinating people I have had, the incredible fortune of interviewing.

1:47:26And also how fate and circumstance always seems to play a role in all of their lives. And that's maybe the theme that I take away from all of this as opposed to this specific shocking thing because remember that many of the people that I interview because they're war fighters or intelligence agency people. Many of their friends have died. Is there anyone you interviewed that brought you to tears when you're interviewing them? Oh, absolutely. I can't even say it now because I might. Yeah. I'm going to ask you for the example. You want to think sample. I'll tell you right now. It's a hard one.

1:48:08So I was just in. I was just in Brussels. I told you that the nuclear convention and. And I met a woman who was one year and 10 months when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. So she's a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb. Right? And I met her. I brought her a sign copy of my book, right? I mean, you just think about being a victim of that. And also I learned so much about the stigma that followed the survivors of the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stigma because they were perceived as sort of. Tainted people, tainted humans. And there was this deep fear of the legacy of radiation. And I met her and I expected to just be so composed.

1:49:10But in talking to her, I got very emotional kind of, you know, because you can't avoid that. And part of the reason why I got so emotional was that. And I haven't written about this yet. But I will is that. Someone I interviewed and someone that meant a lot to me and that I have written about a lot wired. That nuclear weapon. That was dropped on Nagasaki.

1:49:38And so when you think about it. And there's little old me, the reporter who, fate and circumstance, put in brothels last week at a new expo, you couldn't make that up. If you were me, you know, even a year ago, let alone 10 years ago, let alone when I was a child. And here I am. And one hand of my reporting goes to that source that worked with me for a very long time. Who's story I haven't written yet, who wired the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. And my other hand goes to someone who was there.

1:50:20That, that wells you up because it's the human condition.

1:50:30Can you speak to this impact that had on both those individuals? So starting with, if we start with the individual who was involved in wiring that bomb. Mm -hmm.

1:50:49So, and I know less about her than I know about him, right? And I've reached out to her and we will do interviews now, okay? So, but for him, it impacted his whole life. And he became a member of the Manhattan Project. And he became uniquely tied into the nuclear weapons industry. So, these kind of long arcs of history are so deeply interesting to me, especially as I get older. You move from the intensity of specific missions that people were on, of specific operations they ran. And you begin to look at a human over the course of their life and what that means. Because ultimately that's the most interesting storytelling of all.

1:51:45It's the most interesting conversation you and I can have. And you have to get a little bit older to know that. But sometimes when I'm interviewing people who are in their 80s and 90s, and I see them looking at me. And I, like, especially going back 15 years ago when I started reporting all this. And I could see, I can, you know, they're old and they're like, you're a lobe sag and they have, you know, credible wrinkles. And the course of their lives, what they have done and they're all involved in these top, formerly top secret programs. And I can, I can sense them looking at me with this sense of their own legacy.

1:52:27That they are like, I'm telling her my story and I'm going to be gone. And that's really, that's powerful. It's a lot of trust as well as a known. It is, that's the role of the reporter. You work, at least my job as an investigative journalist is like, you know, I want people to trust me that I am getting their information down on the public record. And that has a lot to do with why, you know, people say, how did you get so many people to talk to you about nuclear weapons? So to loop this back to nuclear war as an area. I know I'm doing my job, at least it feels like I'm doing my job properly or earnestly, that I can, in the same week, last week, have two people that are a hundred percent part of the military industrial complex working for the Space Force in Los Angeles, you know, at a Space Force convention come to my house for dinner.

1:53:29Have a conversation with my family, including my young son who's closer to your age. And then the week before have been with peace activists addressing members of the European Parliament, I have my lane. But yet all of these people are around me. They might not think they can get along, but they probably can. And if I'm the middle of the road of all of that, that is important to me as an investigative journalist, but also like as an American citizen, as, and as I said earlier, as a, as a mother. That individual that wide, that, that bomb, tip took part in the Manhattan Project was involved in dropping the bomb on the lady that you met recently.

1:54:18How do they feel about that now and hindsight with, with their age? And as they look back? He has died. He has died. And how did he feel about it? There were other things that bothered him more, which is the great conundrum of using your own eyes to perceive another person. And it's why I have not written that book yet, because it is still very confusing. And there is a lot of mysterious elements of it. And sometimes when people are involved in really classified programs, you have to spend a lot of time to dig and uncover and discover. It's a long process. And he was involved in some other programs that he had more intense thoughts about.

1:55:13And that alone is enough to, I mean, the look on your face is the look on my face interviewing him. A happy month. Absolutely. Absolutely. Regret? Yes, most definitely. Almost everyone that I end up spending hours and hours and hours with, that I would travel with. And you know, another person that comes to mind was Billy Wall on the surprise kill vanishing book, sort of the longest serving singleton for the US government as a paramilitary operator. The saying goes, Billy Wall killed more people than cancer. Okay. We traveled to Hanoi together. We traveled to Havana together. I spent a lot of time with him.

1:55:56They were, you know, both of these men were probably the two most powerful sources I worked with in my life in their 80s and 90s. I'm happy, man.

1:56:06Billy was more complex than happy, you know. You were hard to kind of get at the, to get at the character of someone and you, you, you, you try the best to represent them. But I mean, you know, Billy had so many people. He was involved in so many missions with so many people that died that I don't know of happiness is he certainly wasn't, he certainly wasn't sour. But he had a lot of anger about a lot of things. And then the lady that she was one and a half years old when the bomb was dropped, she survived as a baby. Her family, did they survive? Yes. And it was, it's fascinating. I'm not saying her name because I don't, I don't have quite her permission yet, right?

1:56:52So, but although she is a public figure, but she didn't know about her story until she got older because it was kept hidden from her. Which is, so these layers upon layers about what we know about our own selves, you've made me think of, which is you balance that out with question, what you know about your own self versus what, how easy it is to judge someone else or perceive someone else. And I think those two journeys in life are interwoven always like our own journey for self discovery, right? In a way you're on that with your podcast, I'm guessing you probably learn as much about yourself as you do about others.

1:57:37I know I do. I'm usually in your scene. And there's no camera runnings. It's just a pen. And so I can learn so much from people about how they speak, why they speak, what they say to me. I don't want this on the record. I want you to know this about me because it's important, but I don't want it publicly known. And I honor that because in a way being a journalist is being a trusted source that someone can share information with within a context that the person, IEmi, knows the groundwork about many people's grandchildren's grandchildren don't, they don't know what grandpa did. And they might not know for decades.

1:58:25I had a guy show up at one of my book signings at the LA Times Festival of Bull of Books just last Sunday. And he had a binder. And he said, after you're done signing, would you mind looking at this binder and interpreting it for me? And of course I did. And his grandfather was a seriously high ranking person working on nuclear, sub -launched ballistic missiles in the early days of what was called the Polaris experiment. And he had all these documents and no one in his family cared about it. He had ID badges and letters and pictures with the president and picture. And I could say to him, oh yes, this is, you know, I could give him some context and his wife was there.

1:59:06And, you know, it's just like, it's a great example of how we sometimes have a desire to know about our own selves or own legacy, where did we come from? And then grandpa has passed. And so my job is like getting grandpa's story on the record. That conversation you had since the book had come out with the lady you met in Brussels, did it change how you viewed your book and the work you've done here in writing this? Did it add an element? Oh, it most certainly enhanced and added. And particularly that emotional one that you saw for me when I think about that, you know. And I immediately had a long conversation with my husband about it when I got home, right?

1:59:50Because I use sounding boards to understand how I even really feel about things. But I already had a context to know about survivors having read a lot of accounts from survivors to report the book. And I mentioned some of them, Satsuko Thurlo was a survivor of Hiroshima and has given a lot of incredible public statements on the record to the United Nations and elsewhere. And I quote her in my book to narrate the part of the story where we learn about the bomb dropping on Hiroshima. And then I read a lot of the ancillary material about that. So I can understand more and try and a lot of work as a journalist, you're just at least if you write narrative nonfiction as I do, you're really trying to imagine the situation.

2:00:43But then you meet someone and it all becomes real. And that's where the this comes in because it's not just words on the paper. It hasn't been. When they say a survivor, how do you categorize or define a survivor of a nuclear bomb? There's a word in Japanese and I don't want to get it wrong. And it's something like Hubakshah. Right. So forgive me for not having that word. But that is an actual term that is used by anyone who lived through the atomic bombings in August of 1945 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So if you lived through it, you are in that category of people. And most of the yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:01:37And so in other words, now this was, you know, 79 years ago. So most of the survivors, you can just think about the ages of the people involved. Since Hugo Thurlow is 90, you know, she's, she's one, she was a recipient of the who I who I write about. She was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 with a group of physicians, Dr. Carlos Omana and others whom I met in Brussels that are all part of these organizations working to reduce nuclear weapons down to zero. Right. They are against nuclear war and their organizations work diligently to bring the information to the fore and to affect change at a geopolitical level like the United Nations.

2:02:32That conversation you have with your husband when you get home that day after meeting her. What can you tell me about that conversation? It's probably like you have with your, I mean, my husband, I've been married a very long time. So he knows everything. There's also a joke that he has what's called sprouts privilege, which he does, right? You can tell your spouse anything legally. But no, those conversations are priceless. Those are the conversations that allow me to try and peel back one layer of what the next book is going to be and what the next book aims to do. Because I am always working on the next book.

2:03:16I am one of those people who loves writing. And so, and I also love evolving as a writer. So you want to get better in terms of the small mistakes you make and you want to get better in terms of the intentions that you might have thematically about conveying it. And so thank you for pointing out to me. And I mean this sincerely is that what you help me realize is that the next book is trying, will try to move more toward those themes of cause. That was him and effect. That was her. This idea that there are always consequences. And very real people on both sides that, you know, one could class as both victims and innocent at the same time, I guess.

2:04:05I've just a horrific situation. Absolutely. I'm really intrigued now by this idea that you almost have to embody two roles. You're a human being. But at the same time, you've got a job to do here. And you've got a mission. And when you meet that person who was a survivor of a nuclear attack, those lines can understandably become at least in your head, the wall can drop between the two. And as you touched your heart, you referred to your head, which I think is typically when you're talking about your journalistic hat. But then we all have hearts as well. Thank God. You come home and I know the conversations I have with my partner.

2:04:42I guess I'm assuming, you know, the conversation you have with your husband there is about the complexity of the emotions you feel upon meeting that person. Absolutely. And what you do with that and what that means. And you want to be able to have those conversations so that you can, I think, have both of those, bring both of those components into your work. I mean, maybe with the exception being the military or the CIA, the two organizations I write about, you know, Billy walk can't bring his heart into the mission when he is assigned to go XYZ, you know, find fix and finish someone. They're not allowed to tell that that partner.

2:05:22So they in the CIA know what I was told to. And so, so what we that aren't in the military of the intelligence community have that luxury. Is it a luxury? I don't know, but it's a necessity for me. What if you couldn't? I wouldn't be myself. I wouldn't. I wouldn't choose that. I could never be in the military. I could never be in the agency. Because I think you are asked to wear a hat that removes your heart. And that's not possible for somebody like me. I mean, we just figure out our strengths and our weaknesses. And society needs all of those people, by the way. That is what a democracy is. It is made up of all kinds of people.

2:06:07I'm all for that. It's why I have so many friends and colleagues from different worlds on different sides of the aisle. They just make me think more interesting things about the world in which we all live. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you was written in Europe and we're over in our studio there. It is, what is the last thing you changed your mind about?

2:06:43Well, I'll just, it comes, this comes to mind only because it's apropos to what we've been talking about. And it has to do with reporting, not my personal life, which is maybe more interesting to people.

2:06:57I always strive to interview people and ask them questions, even if they're hard, even if I have a preconception that maybe they are the sort of bad guy, shall we say, or the, you know, the perpetrator. The perpetrator. Something not necessarily the way, but just that like I might not, my brain might not think I agree with what they did or the project they were on. And there was a general that I was trying to interview for the Pentagon's brain and he had, he was kind of the creator behind what's called the soldiers super suit. Okay, and that's a totally different subject, but then these idea to make super soldiers.

2:07:33Okay, off of this idea of the concept called the weakling on the battlefield that humans feel fear and get fatigued. And those are not good things for soldiers. And so there are all these programs to try and enhance our top tier military fighters to become super soldiers. This is a fact. And this one general was part of that program. And I had reached out to him and asked him to interview with me. And I get it. Lots of people say, and you know, I'm going to pass. I don't want to know. That's fine. But he ignored me. And I felt slighted. And so I'm telling on myself here from your view. And so when I was writing my narrative of the super soldier, he essentially was kind of cast as the bad guy.

2:08:18And then I was in the editorial phase of the book and I got an email from him and he said, I'm so sorry I didn't get back to you. My wife had cancer.

2:08:32And I what a valuable lesson. What a valuable lesson. And we did two interviews. And I told my editor, I have to rewrite that chapter. And I did.

2:08:46I mean, that story speaks to a lot of the subjects we've spoken about today, which is when we see someone is different when we see the Miss Aliens adversaries enemies opponents. We are much more likely to treat them as such. But in reality, it often turns out that we're all very much the same struggling with the same things with the same worries, anxieties, concerns, apprehensions. And it's just sometimes when there's a bridge built in the case of that email that we realized that we're not enemies after all. And that we don't need to be at war, whether that's with words or whether it's with nuclear weapons.

2:09:26And when you see that fellow hunter on the path, they might not be the enemy. They might be someone to work with. It's very good of you to admit that, Annie, because what you're actually admitting is that you're a human being because we'll do that kind of thing when we see someone as an adversary. I think, as you say, it feels like it's hardwired in Twisted some way. But also within that story, we learn to to try and find or make the bridge ourselves. Which in the world we live in now, a social media and stuff is, it doesn't seem to be easier obvious for people with all this polarization and such.

2:10:03And maybe if the, you know, if the US could make a bridge with some of these foreign adversaries, we wouldn't be talking about nuclear war in your book, nuclear war scenario. Thank you so much for writing this book because I'm a big believer and a big advocate of confronting the realities, honestly and openly, regardless of how uncomfortable it is, because if we don't, I think it actually increases the probability of us finding ourselves in a 72 hour scenario, as you write about in the book. 72 minutes. 72 minutes. Christ, 72 hours. We all make 40 minutes left. Okay, I wish it was 72. Well, actually, don't I?

2:10:42I don't know what is going to happen. I'd rather it just happened in the blink of an eye. But I think it's so, so important to write a lot of people will be scared. A lot of people would chose not to even click on this conversation because they're scared of the subject matter. But I think it's leaning in that helps us to resolve and find solutions to start the conversation. I know lots of people listen to this. You never know like that documentary or movie you talked about earlier, who's listening and the powers that they have and the decisions that they can make to change things or create one of those bridges to sort of denuclearize the world.

2:11:16And that's the work you're doing. So I think it's very, very important work. I'm glad that you've committed your brilliance to doing it. So thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

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