970: Annie Jacobsen | The Nuts and Bolts of Nuclear Annihilation

29:02Now you have to respond. And he chooses, as if it were a menu, what weapon systems to use out of the nuclear triad, which targets to hit. And he's also briefed on how many people will die. I found that incredibly interesting. That is interesting. So it's so almost, what is it, flippant? It's like, well, I'll take the submarine in the Arctic Circle. I want a couple of missile silos in Wyoming and what the, hey, let's launch some stuff out of Rammstein Air Force Base in Germany. It'll get there sooner. It's almost like ordering appetizers and wondering if you're still going to be hungry enough for the rest of the meal.

29:41And then it's like, oh, that's going to be 350 million Russian citizens and probably a few people in Soviet satellite or former Soviet satellite states that are near the detonations of these certain things. And he's just got to pull the trigger on that. No pun intended. And it's it's so it's got to be so weird for somebody like that to make a decision. And I assume there's somebody with him that knows a lot about this, because doesn't the president have a lot on his mind? He's probably the least informed person on all of this nuclear stuff of his immediate circle. Right. You're absolutely right about that.

30:13OK, so let's talk about the bunkers for a second. In that moment, you said, like, who is informing him? So there are three nuclear command and control bunkers. One is famously in Cheyenne Mountain, OK, in Colorado. And then there is another one underneath the Pentagon, which is called the National Military Command Center. OK. And then there is a so the president, if he's in the White House, let's say, he would be getting that information from his advisers at the Pentagon and the bunker beneath the Pentagon, the NORAD people in Cheyenne Mountain. And then also Strategic Command, which most people have never heard of.

30:55U.S. Strategic Command has a bunker, the Global Operations Center bunker beneath Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. And the way it was described to me is, you know, Cheyenne Mountain is the brain. The Pentagon is the heart. And Stratcom is the muscle, okay? And then the president has to make this decision. And so he's getting advice from his SECDEF and his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are probably at this point in the bunker beneath the Pentagon. He's getting advised from NORAD about a lot of the SIGINT situations. And in Colorado is where you have Space Force. It's where you have the NRO giving that, you know, all the early warning data is coming in from there.

31:41And then STRATCOM is on the line because it is STRATCOM that receives the order about how to launch and directs that order. And so you asked about what other information he's getting. On top of the casualties that he's briefed on quickly about how many people will die, I found it just eerily shocking that there's also a weather officer there in the STRATCOM bunker. And again, these guys rehearse for this 24-7 in case it happens in any moment. And the weather officer tells the president how many people will die from radiation poisoning in the days, weeks, and months that follow based on the weather of the day.

32:25Wow. And when you hear a detail like that, you're like, oh, my God, this is a system of systems about what happens if hundreds of millions, soon to be billions of people are about to die. Oh, my God. How can this be true? You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Annie Jacobson. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Strawberry.me. So I worked with a Strawberry.me coach recently. I ended that call feeling pretty reinvigorated. That's a good word for it. Way more aligned with where I'm headed and why. It's so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind, but that session reminded me just how powerful it is.

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36:07And many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company. You can find the course always for free at sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Annie Jacobson. I wonder if they make the calculations in advance. It seems like they would. So does the weather officer wake up? So he wakes up and goes, oh, it's pretty windy over there in Vladivostok. Like if we were to hit that with a 40 kiloton nuclear weapon, it would blow that way. Okay, well, we're adding an additional 50 million deaths today if we launch. Anyway, I'm going to have the sausage, egg and cheese on an English muffin.

36:42Like that's a weird morning. Not for that guy, but generally. Absolutely. And, you know, when you talk about technology, what's interesting is many of these weapon systems have not changed. Okay. And there's reasons for that. You know, like most like ballistic missiles are not wired. They are as they were back in the analog days, and that's kind of good because no one can hack something that isn't wired. But what you're talking about now, these statistics have been so modernized with AI, with what I call machine learning, because it's really more, you know, algorithms are able to do the job of the weather officer with even more precision because they can precisely tell you what's happening.

37:26You know, they can forecast weather in a way that didn't exist decades ago. Wow. So the big takeaway from the early part of the book is there's no way to win a nuclear war because it just happens too darn fast. And that was the first sort of big, scary takeaway, knowing the president has six minutes to decide how to respond, which is not a long time when you're talking about hearing the weather officer's report and then getting the recommendations on what to launch and where. I mean, that's all included in that six minutes. It's not like he has six minutes to go outside and take a quick walk around the block and decide how to respond.

38:00This is like all encompassing six minutes, give or take. And, you know, I was trying to figure out, OK, how long is six minutes? And I was like timing a commercial at the Super Bowl or, you know, this kind of thing and thinking what hits home the most that's six minutes. And it's basically for me who loves coffee, it's making a pot of coffee and waiting for it to be. That is six minutes. That's how much time the president has. And people say to me, Annie, how do you know it's six minutes? And okay, it's six or so minutes. But like, for example, and again, just sharing with listeners about how I reported this book based on facts.

38:36In President Reagan's memoir, he talks about the six-minute window. He describes it as irrational. He says something, I quote him actually in the book, but it's like, how could anyone decide how to unleash Armageddon in six minutes? I mean, he uses those words, and that is the truth. And again, this six-minute winnow, not to mention the fact, in my interviews with Secret Service people, it was shocking to realize, like, then they have their own issues. Once they learn that this is happening, that nuclear war is happening, that there is a missile coming at the United States, the Secret Service's job is to protect the president because simultaneous to nuclear war planning, as you mentioned in the opener, that we've spent all these decades planning for a nuclear war, hoping we don't have one, but planning nonetheless.

39:26At the same time, there are all these protocols in place to keep government functioning in the event of a nuclear war. So suddenly that's what the Secret Service is thinking about because they need the president to be the commander in chief. And so the Secret Service is massively moving to get the president out of the bunker, the PEOC underneath the White House, out onto the lawn and into Marine One so that they can get him to Raven Rock, which is the alternate command center of the Pentagon, trying to get him there so that he can continue to lead the nation. And that's where even more chaos is likely to ensue, as I write in the book, because you have these competing interests.

40:10Stratcom wants orders from the president, launch orders. Secret Service wants the president out of the White House. We haven't even begun to talk about FEMA, whose job it is to plan for nuclear war and then essentially deal with the population, you know, once the nuclear war happens. I don't even want to begin to tell you about that because it will really ruin both of our days. Yeah, I know. I have a note on it for later in the show, but the spoiler is FEMA's job is just to be like, hey, everybody, there was a nuclear war. You should probably, I don't know, drink some water and like save some water and maybe save some food.

40:48Anyway, we're out of here. Probably going to be dead tomorrow. Good luck. And you never hear from them again. That's it. That's pretty much all. Craig Fugate, who was Obama's FEMA director across most of that administration, you know, just gave me some really remarkable interviews. He explained to me how FEMA is the organization that plans for low probability but like seriously high catastrophe events. He said to me, Annie, we plan for asteroids. And it's Fugate who told me that there's nothing that FEMA can do if a nuclear war happens. He said to me, there's no population protection planning, that's what they call it, in a bolt out of the blue attack, a nuclear attack, because everyone will be dead.

41:34And that frankness shocked me. And I went back to him, you know, like, wow, that's a really powerful thing that you said. And he didn't say like, oh, I didn't mean to say that. Or, oh, you misheard me. He said, yep. Yeah, if an asteroid hits and takes out the tri-state area, the rest of the electrical grid will be around, we'll still be able to communicate. I mean, it'll be a massive, massive disaster. But most of us will hopefully survive. There's going to be big problems. We can sort of overcome it. FEMA will try and maintain order around that area. But yeah, in a nuclear situation, it's like, good luck surviving is kind of all they can really do.

42:11If they can even notify everybody about what happened, that's all they're really going to do. And that's really, really scary. There's a policy that's making this all, dare I say, more likely and more dangerous called launch on warning. Tell us about that. What is this? Launch on warning is exactly like it sounds, right? So we've now talked about how when a ballistic missile is launched at the United States, the satellite systems in place, the Department of Defense's very technically advanced satellite systems detect that launch within a fraction of a second initially. And then this process begins to determine where it is, if it's coming at us.

42:53Then there has to be a secondary radar system, a ground-based radar system. In most cases, or at least in my scenario, it would be the one in Alaska. Seize it coming in, okay? Once that second confirmation happens at around eight or nine minutes, the president needs to launch, right? Because we have a policy that you're asking about, launch on warning. And some people say, oh, we don't really have that policy. Well, Secretary of Defense William Perry set the record straight for the book. He said, Annie, we have a launch on warning policy, period. Once we learn of an incoming nuclear attack, we launch in response.

43:37We do not wait. And the reason is, is there's this colloquialism called use them or lose them, which is insane. But all of nuclear war is insane. And that's this idea that if we don't want, because America has a nuclear triad. We have the ICBMs on the ground. We have submarines at sea. And we have the bombers, the nuclear bombers. And the ICBMs on the ground, there are 400 of them across, you know, the sort of Midwestern area. You can find out the exact location of any of them on Google. You could find them on a map before Google existed. But they are known. They're in silos underneath the ground.

44:20And so those are going to launch immediately in a nuclear war because of the use them or lose them concept that that's what's going to be targeted by an incoming nuclear strike after a place like Washington, D .C. to take out leadership. then the attacker is going to take out the nuclear weapon systems and, you know, render the United States unable to win a nuclear war. I mean, these are the kind of, you know, machinations behind the scenes that war planners have gone through for decades in order to strengthen America's position. And, you know, we could get into this for days. And I think this is where a lot of listeners, their eyes start to glaze over when they have to hear about the nuclear triad, because it's just confounding.

45:12It makes sense, though, right? So we sense a nuclear missile coming in. We have to launch these 400 land based ICBMs that can't move, that are being targeted by the enemy ostensibly at some time. and yes, they'd have to hit 400 sites at once to take them all out, which is probably not happening, but why risk it? They're already launching a nuke at us. So this is why we can't stop a nuclear war, right? Because not only are these non-recallable, but there's 400. So where are they going? Into every military site, major city, known enemy silo that hasn't launched yet, that's already located by our intelligence agencies, which is probably like close to all of them.

45:51And maybe even they're being aimed at mobile launchers we see parked somewhere. Who knows? Because they can't drive fast enough to get out of the range of the nuclear of the ICBM that we're launching, even if they move right now, if we're launching right away. So that's why it's just sort of one domino pushes all this stuff over. And it just becomes really apparent when you start to read things about like these massive missile fields and in Wyoming or whatever. You didn't go see any of that stuff, did you? I did not. I did not. But like in my interview with former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who was also the director of the CIA, and he was also White House chief of staff through different administrations.

46:30So his experience and perceptions and analysis of all this was, like, profound. And he said to me that, like, even as CIA director, he had no idea about the degree of responsibility that weighs on his shoulder as the Secretary of Defense. And by the way, the Secretary of Defense is the one that the president is going to look to for advice. What do I do? Right. Even though he doesn't have to ask his permission, you can almost be certain unless you have a madman in the White House, he's going to ask the SECDF, what do I do? And so for that reason, to answer your question, Panetta went, told me that he went to these missile silos that were just really took home for him viscerally.

47:13how much all of this sits at the razor's edge and how little information the average person knows about any of this. And he really encouraged me in my process here writing this book, Nuclear War, Us Scenario, because he said, Annie, the people should know. I want to clarify one thing because you said an interesting thing about the 400 missiles in response, right? So the launch on warning policy, and you can find this, There's a great interview, by the way, which a CNN reporter named Barbara Starr did with Stratcom General Hyten, right? And not a lot of Stratcom directors go on the record talking about this.

47:52But Hyten did with Barbara Starr, and it's an incredible interview. You can YouTube it. She gives him a lot of really tough questions. And he says it was at the time of the fire and fury sort of Trump, you know, North Korea posturing. And Heighton tells her, we need North Korea to know, I'm paraphrasing him, but like, if they launch one, we launch one. If they launch two, we launch two, right? So you hear that. I see. And then you also can read, and I quote them, analysts like Bruce Blair, a former ICBM, you know, Missler himself with the Air Force when he was younger. And then he became a powerful spokesman all about nuclear weapons.

48:36And he wrote lots of really interesting papers. And his theory was if North Korea were to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States, which I use in this scenario, the response would be 82 nuclear weapons. That makes more sense to me. From the United States. Yes. So they launch one, we launch 82. He demonstrates in his powerful paper, which I footnote, why it would be 82. And I use those 82 targets in the example, in the scenario that I write. But then a lot of really, you know, calamitous things happen because I learned in the process of reporting this book, very serious national security flaws that exist that could draw Russia into the conflict.

49:25And that's the real threat. You know, North Korea has between 50 and let's say 130 nuclear weapons. It depends who you ask. The Defense Department puts the number at around 30 or 50. Analysts like from Rand, for example, put it as high as possibly 130. So is that going to end the world? Who knows? But Russia's, that I spoke of earlier, those 1 ,674 ready-to-launch weapons, that's the big fear. And if Russia gets drawn into the conflict, then it's endgame. Then you're talking about the billions. And that's what I write in the scenario because Secretary Panetta and others told me about some of these very serious flaws that could result in a full-scale nuclear war.

50:12We'll get to some of those in a second because I'm, of course, curious. But when North Korea was launching ICBMs, I was like, eh, whatever. This is just like tough guy talk from a backwater dictator who happens to have developed this. And it seems like now North Korea likely bought an ICBM engine that was stolen from Russia or stolen from the Soviet Union and shaved decades of development time off. So special thanks to whoever sold that thing. And it's also confirmed that warheads from those ICBMs, even from North Korea, will be largely successful in hitting the United States. It's just not that hard.

50:44It's harder to intercept them or interdict them than it is to get them to launch. So that's not great. And the fact that they were able to get their hands on this engine actually also does not bode well for keeping nukes out of the hands of insane theocratic ayatollahs in Iran either. So that's not very comforting. And you mentioned the interceptor program, right? Which is probably a good time to talk about that nightmare, right? Because people have an idea, an incorrect idea, that America has this, you know, shield, shall we say, right? If you look at like war fighting as a metaphor, right? It's always sword and shield, you know?

51:24And you go back to cavemen, sword and shield, right? Well, ICBM is a big giant sword. So what's the shield? Well, the shield, many people will tell you, oh, we have an interceptor program. Interceptor meaning we have missiles that will intercept their missiles, kind of like Israel's Iron Dome we've been seeing. Well, that's just simply not true, okay? I'll just give you the numbers. You don't have to guess because you read the book already, right? Okay? So we have 44 interceptor missiles, 44. How is that going to work against Russia's 1 ,674 incoming missiles? We have 44 interceptor missiles with a success rate of like around 50 % or less, okay?

52:14And not to mention the fact that if you really start to nerd out about warheads, as I do a little bit in the book, but again, read my notes, you know, go to some of the sources that I went to to really, if you really want to understand about the geeky stuff. You know, nuclear warheads, in the nose cone of a missile, there's often decoys, hundreds of decoys. So how's that interceptor missile with its one single weapon inside of it, which is called an exo-atmospheric kill vehicle, its real name, right? That's what's supposed to knock the warhead out of space. One system's moving at 14 ,000 miles an hour.

52:54The other system's moving at 20 ,000 miles an hour. Even a Defense Department official called this akin to trying to shoot a bullet with a bullet. And then you have the fact that the warhead can release 100 decoys to try to mess up the exoatmos kill vehicle as if it's a brain from taking out the real warhead. So the chances are so slim. I guess we can only hope that we have many, many tricks up our sleeve that are still classified. you know, and the idea that pops into my head first is lasers, but like, I don't know, really? Wasn't that sort of what we lied and told the Soviets we had back in the 80s that bankrupted them as the Star Wars laser program?

53:34That is fantasy. And to do that, you also have to start putting nuclear weapons in space or weapon systems in space. And that becomes its own nightmare because this is all about distrust and mistrust. You know, the only solution is communication. There are many people that have been working on nuclear nonproliferation. And my God, we've gotten the numbers down from 60 ,000 to 12 ,000, okay? But you can't solve this unsolvable problem of what if we have a nuclear war with more weapons? You just simply can't. At a point, the world has to realize it's just unsustainable. And also, I think a takeaway of the book is you realize that a lot of this began when there were just two superpowers.

54:22It's a heck of a lot easier to try and control, air quotes, you know, two warring powers than nine, right? There are nine nuclear armed nations and more trying to get into the game. And so the idea about communication is what's so important. Astonishing fact, when I was reporting the book, the Ukraine war begins, and I was shocked when, I don't know if you remember, but a Russian missile was erroneously reported as having struck something in Poland. Oh, wow. A NATO country, right? Wow. Okay. And so that, because of Article 5, could have been a NATO response. Disaster, right? But more at issue for me, in the middle of reporting this book at the time, was like hearing a press conference that then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley gave the day after, like a day and a half later.

55:22And he said that he wasn't able to reach his Russian counterpoint on the phone yet. Okay. And so when you said, oh, well, earlier in our discussion, you said, oh, well, we'll just pick up the red phone. Like, that red phone is a fantasy. If General Milley can't get in touch with his Russian counterpart when there's a possibility that a Russian missile hit something in a NATO country, Oh, my God. Right? That was like something like 36 hours after the fact. So communication, communication, communication. If anyone were to ask me, well, what's the big takeaway of your book? Like, what positive thing can I leave on now that I just read, you know, Nuclear Winter and Everyone Dead and the only people left are hunter-gatherers, right?

56:12Communication. It's so basic. We do it in our families. Why wouldn't you want to do it on the world stage? Now that we're closer to having an accidental nuclear war than we were during the Cold War with the whole multipolar world thing going on, it seems like all of this is just more and more and more important. And, you know, looking at the capabilities of some of these weapon systems, one paraphrase line from the book is that it's easier to find a grapefruit-sized object in space than a submarine at sea. So we're not going to find all of Russia's submarines. They're certainly not going to find all of our submarines.

56:46And the bad news is it really does sound like a crazy dictator who doesn't care about himself anymore could basically end the world. Kim Jong-un, maybe he's not as crazy, but a dying Putin on the verge of a coup or a defeat in Ukraine or escalates something and ends up miscalculating again, you know, that he could pull the trigger on this. And it's just, again, once the cat's out of the bag, there's nothing we can do. I think you hit the nail on the head there. I mean, one of the most profound set of interviews I did for this book was with Richard Garwin. And if most people aren't familiar with him, Richard Garwin's now 93.

57:26He drew the plans to the first thermonuclear weapon. Okay. Everyone knows Edward Teller is the father of the hydrogen bomb. Richard Garwin, he was 24 years old at the time, drew the actual plans. Teller could imagine it theoretically, but he couldn't draw something to make it work. That was Richard Garwin. He gave me a number of interviews for this book over Zoom during COVID. Remarkable. And he's the one that raised that very idea you just mentioned with me that helped shape the way I unfolded the scenario. Because he said to me, Annie, all it takes is one madman with a nuclear weapon. And he said that what he was worried about was this concept of après moi le déluge, which in French is, you know, after me, the flood.

58:21It's a Napoleonic phrase, and it just essentially means like, eh, you know, if I'm gone, who cares? And that is terrifying. And coming from a luminary like Richard Garwin, who arguably knows more about nuclear weapons and nuclear threats and has been advising the Pentagon and the CIA. He was a founder of NRO. He's significantly afraid of that situation. certainly means the rest of us should be too. In brief, what happens in Russia when the USA gets hit by, say, North Korea? Because it sounds from the book like Russian early warning technology is not that great, not as good as ours. They don't have what we have.

59:07They don't have look down technology. If you want to tell us briefly what that means so they can sort of mistake clouds for missile plumes or sunlight for fire. And it's like, should we give them what we have so that doesn't happen? but then also no, because then it affects deterrence. It's all just sort of a catch-22. And you're talking about the Russian's Tundra satellite system, okay? So our system, the Defense Department system, is called CIBRS, and that stands for Space Base Infrared System. And it's a constellation of satellites in geosync that's like 22 ,000 miles up, one-tenth of the way to the moon.

59:47Think about these school bus-sized satellite systems, incredibly advanced. They're built by Lockheed. And they are so precise. You know, they can see a golf ball from space, basically, right? I mean, they have these capabilities that are astonishing. They can see the hot rocket exhaust on a launching ICBM in a fraction of a second and begin to track it with help from the Space Force and NRO and other organizations in America. Well, the system you're talking about, the Russian system, because Russia and America, you know, we always have to have things on parity, right? So they have what's called tundra.

1:00:27And what I learned from various experts who confirmed all this as fact is that the tundra system is really lame, okay? It doesn't work. It does not have that look down capability. So it can't look exactly down, so it has to kind of have a sideway look. And what happens? It can easily mistake sunlight for fire. It can't properly interpret clouds. And so you can have misreadings. And that is a disaster because as a number of experts described to me in the scenario in I Relay is you can have, okay, so going back to the scenario whereby bolt out of the blue attack from North Korea, which is what I propose in the book, and then 80 nuclear warhead response, okay?

1:01:13Now you've got, okay, say half of them are missiles from the ICBMs, and half of them are going to end up coming from submarines. So there's 40 or 50 of them that launch out of Wyoming, going toward North Korea. Tundra looks at this and missees the number of missiles. That's problem number one. Problem number two is the fact, and this is where I couldn't believe it when I first learned this fact, that U.S. ICBMs do not have enough range to get to North Korea without flying directly over Russia. That was mind-blowing. I was like, how did you not see that this would be an issue, folks? I mean, I remember when I was like double, triple, quadruple fact-checking that, right?

1:02:01Because it came to me from Hans Christensen, who's probably the world's expert on nuclear weapons numbers. inside of the Federation of American Scientists. He writes something called the nuclear notebook with colleagues. Anyone who wants to geek out should go directly there. Hans Christensen is like the world's expert in this kind of thing. But even coming from him, I was like, is that really possible? It's like a direct quote from him. And so I took the question to former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. And he said, you know, we were talking about it as like this kind of hole in the national security system.

1:02:39And he said, yes, the hole, it's very problematic. Yeah. Yeah, because we can't just call and be like, OK, so listen, we're launching nuclear missiles and they're headed right at you. But hold on, hold on. They're going to go over you guys and hit Kim Jong-un. Are you in? Exactly. I mean, how could you possibly have a system? And that this is a fact is shocking. And furthermore, what we were just talking about with General Milley, there you are again with your, I wish your idea that there's this red phone you could just pick up and call were true. Oh, trust us. But what about the fact that Millie couldn't get his Russian counterpoint on the phone for 36 hours?

1:03:19This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Annie Jacobson. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our sponsors. All of the deals, the discount codes, the ways to support the show are all searchable and clickable over at the website, jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you're not sure if we have a sponsor for XYZ thing you're thinking about buying, shoot me an email, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface the code for you if we have one.

1:03:49Yes, it's that important. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Annie Jacobson. We don't trust each other. You know, Putin lies about this and the U.S. is lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Putin's lying about invading Ukraine and we're lying about helping him. I mean, he's not going to be like, oh, you're just going to fly a couple ICBMs over Vladivostok and a couple of other cities in order to hit North Korea. Well, I didn't really like those guys anyways. Let me know when you want to play golf. No, they're just going to launch stuff back at us, assuming we're striking them.

1:04:23That's the logical thing to do if you're a nuclear power with nukes flying at you. It takes my breath away hearing you talk about it and I read it and reported it, right? Yeah, regurgitating your stuff to you. But no, because, and this is why nuclear war scenario unfolds the way it does. This is like, okay, fact one leads to fact two leads to terrifying hole, right? And then you are able to see as you read along, like, this is just one bad situation becoming worse. What do you make of Putin saying or implying in the U.S. intelligence agencies sort of reading and that they might detonate nukes in space?

1:05:05I think as U.S. intelligence, this is I don't think Putin's on record at all with this. As you know from reading my book, it's what happens in Act Three of my book. And not in a million years did I think in 2024, right before the book publishes, this would be a news story, right? Because, yes, the capability exists. It has existed. It has existed for decades. But, you know, it's just so apocalyptic. It's such a bad place to go that the discussion about what we're talking about here is called a nuclear EMP or a super EMP. It's an electromagnetic pulse, right? So if you detonate a nuclear weapon 300 miles above the middle of the United States, let's say Nebraska, right?

1:05:57And this is direct from DITRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. It's, you know, born of the Manhattan Project. And DITRA is in charge of countering nuclear weapons. Their chief scientist, Steve Wax, has said, you know, yes, if a nuclear weapon, a small nuclear weapon, by the way, is detonated 300 miles up, over the United States, it will take out the entire grid in the United States. What he said, actually, was that the electromagnetic pulse would affect the contiguous landmass of the United States, right? So from coast to coast would be effective. And I describe in length in the book what this would mean, what a nuclear weapon exploded in space, what would happen.

1:06:44And it's just beyond horrifying. And again, fact-checking this part of it, even, you know, really getting like, wait a minute, oh my God, is this even possible? Because this subject, when it has come up decades ago, it was essentially like two groups of people fighting over the reality of this. the more conservative people that are often called hawks, shall we say, saying this is an incredible threat. And this is right sort of in the early 2000s after 9-11, you know, really concerned about nuclear EMP, the threat, because it was like, oh, the terrorists are going to get one. And then the more liberal thinkers pushed back against this idea saying this is all just a plan by the hawks to get more money.

1:07:27Well, whatever you think about the arguments, the facts are real. And that's what I present in the book. And that's what I went to the experts with. Richard Garwin. Again, Richard Garwin wrote the first paper on nuclear EMP in 1954. It's still classified. Gregory General Tuhill, he was in the Obama administration. He was America's first cyber chief. He wrote one of these papers. It's still classified. But they both told me about what actually would happen factually were this EMP, this is also called a super EMP, were to be detonated over the United States. And I'm not going to do the spoiler alert there because I think, Jordan, you and I both know it's almost worse.

1:08:08It actually is worse than, you know, being incinerated by a nuclear weapon because you're not going to remember any of that, right? But what happens when all the power goes out all at once and all the trains stop moving and the floodgates open literally because the dam controls no longer work and all train traffic goes awry and elevators fall and airplanes fall out of the sky and every infrastructure that is running on a computer goes haywire? That's really a nightmare beyond a nightmare. Right. Yeah. No phones, no Internet, no water, no electricity, of course, new communication. What does it do?

1:08:49Does it just make transistors not work? Is that how it kind of works? Does it just fry those things? I mean, in my discussion with Garwin, it was just very interesting because, OK, so imagine, I mean, and I also find it interesting that the smartest people in the world can just make things so simple. It's usually kind of the person with like the Ph.D. sort of. This is my bias that's like trying to lecture you. All this will happen. And then like the Richard Garwins of the world will just say like, you have to imagine a lightning strike. Yeah. If a lightning struck your computer, that's it. Just a direct strike on your computer.

1:09:27So an EMP, the electromagnetic pulse, it's a three-phased pulse, and it essentially just zaps out. it passes through all of the surge suppressors, all the industrial-size surge suppressors that exist, as if they weren't even there. Wow. So it's actually high voltage, not just like a magnetic thing that scrambles semiconductors? It's an electromagnetic pulse, a shockwave that essentially shorts out everything all at once. And then there's a cascading effect, which is how the calamity occurs. And so it's essentially just like it's a giant blackout. That's not repairable. It's not like you can just pop the fuse back in.

1:10:10Right. This is like fried. And this is the whole continental U.S. Maso menos, I guess. And that's just if one goes off over. What was it? Omaha. Was that the area over Nebraska is what DITRA, how they had described it. And the thing is, is that that weapon, you know, can essentially the fears inside the government that I report on. And again, from one faction of the government, there was an EMP commission that had been set up, and I interviewed the chief scientist. The head of the commission was a guy called Dr. Peter Pry, and he had been at the CIA on the Russia desk. And then he became the head of the EMP commission.

1:10:48And I interviewed him, and then he died. He was elderly. But his position was very clear that this was an actual existential threat. And he kind of led the charge, And there have been a number of very serious papers written on this. What is this about North Korea, then, possibly having an EMP satellite weapon that can target the USA? How likely is that? Because that is really extra, extra scary. Because that's a country where they're kind of like, yeah, we don't have electricity even outside the capital at all. And inside the capital, it's like five hours a day, give or take how much coal we have that day.

1:11:22They would love to send the United States back into the pre-industrial age, so to speak. This is why I use this narrative in nuclear war scenario, because it's a very real fear for some in the United States government. And again, others will say that's fear mongering. But let it be known that the capability exists. And it has existed for a number of years. The North Koreans launched a satellite in 2016, KMS-4, it means Bright Star 4. And they said that it was a payload, it was a communication satellite. That's all it was, right? And of course, you don't know what's in someone's satellite. You can't.

1:12:07Is it a reconnaissance satellite? Is it a communication satellite? Is there a nuclear weapon inside? Well, the capability on that satellite was about 400 pounds, right, which is enough for a small nuclear weapon. So in other words, the payload inside that satellite, which is going around the Earth, not in geosync, it's not parked. It's kind of on an orbit moving around at, lo and behold, right around 300 miles up. And the fear among many was that it could contain a nuclear weapon, a small nuclear weapon, which then once it got into position over the United States, if it were detonated, it would be what they called electric Armageddon, what the EMP commissioned it.

1:12:52So the technology is there. The capability is there. North Korea has shown that it has the capability to do that. And the final kind of like knife in the side is that right after North Korea launched the KMS-3 satellite in 2016, they released a paper that they said was about how important it was to have the nuclear might of the nuclear EMP. And so that was kind of the icing on the cake that no one was giving North Korea a capability that they themselves hadn't publicly stated they were going after. And this technology, by the way, Russia has had since, you know, the Cold War. It exists. And it's fascinating.

1:13:39I think, you know, I stay away from all politics in the book. Yeah. Because no one should be for or against nuclear war. Right. So that anyone politicizes these issues for me is just cringe, literally, because that should not be the point. The point should be the science and the fact and the capability and the lack of communication. The fact that this has come up now may or may not be political. The capability has always been there. The destruction from nukes, from EMP, it's just so horrific. And I want to say you do a really good job in the book describing it without being crass. And that's got to be a difficult line to walk, I would imagine, because you want it to be appalling and disgusting, but not like, wow, did she need to really do that?

1:14:24Like you kind of right thread that needle really well. Thank you. It's hard to describe zoo animals being caught in a nuclear blast and people throwing themselves into bodies of water instinctually because they're on fire and they're melting without sounding a little bit sick, like I just did, probably. Well, I'm interrupting for a second because what I tried to do is, not tried to do, what I did do is pull any scene I was writing from a factual text, right? So, for example, animals caught in a nuclear holocaust and bodies floating in a river in a nuclear holocaust is sourced directly from survivor accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

1:15:08And when you read those accounts, which you can, I source them all in my footnotes, you're like, oh my God, you know, people jumping into the river because their burns aren't such that they're going to die. And they jump into the river and they realize they're floating down the river with a bunch of dead, burned bodies. That's, as you would say, very close to crass, but it's also factual. And it's also really powerful because it happened and it could happen. You mentioned in the book that a lot of people would die of things like radiation poisoning and disease. And the description of that is quite gross as well.

1:15:45Like your blood won't coagulate, your intestines rupture, and you're essentially poisoned by the gut contents that you have. That was gnarly. Again, sourced from facts. There was a guy called Louis Slotin, and this is like right after the end of the war. He was a Manhattan Project scientist, and he was fed up with war, you know, after the war ended. And it was 1946, and he's like, I'm done. I'm out of here. I don't want to be at Manhattan Project anymore. And they said, that's fine, but you have to train others. And so they were at this secret site outside of the Los Alamos Laboratory. By the way, the Los Alamos Laboratory was extraordinarily helpful with me.

1:16:26They gave me documents, photos, answered questions, really a sort of degree of transparency there that was pretty intense. And they helped me with a Slotin situation. So Slotin was asked to train his replacements. And so he was in this secret site, Omega, and I say secret because it was kind of like off-site in case any accident happened. And they were doing this experiment called Tickling the Dragon's Tail, where they were kind of moving around this plutonium sphere. and it dropped and Slotin was hit by this dose of radiation that would kill him nine days later. The declassified account, classified for a very long time, the declassified account of his hospital stay and then his autopsy is shocking.

1:17:14And I relay that in the book to show you this is what's going to happen. It's a little bit like the show Chernobyl where the guy, the firefighter is in that plastic sheet hospital bed. And I mean, it's worse because you're really describing it as opposed to us just seeing a burned guy in a hospital bed. But it's, that's kind of what that guy was going through right in that, in the show Chernobyl on HBO, if y 'all have seen that, it's just really, really horrific. And that would happen to possibly hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, not just a couple of folks in a lab or that went to go fight a fire in a nuclear reactor.

1:17:48And that's part of what makes it so horrible, so horrible as the scale of the thing. I know we're running a little bit short on time. I would love we covered a little bit about the United States system here and we touched on other countries. What really kind of freaked me out was Russia's dead hand system. This seems like it could go really, really, really wrong. And that speaks to the real problem here behind all of this. And you and I have touched upon this, which is paranoia. It's the old paranoia will destroy you, right? And the counterbalance to paranoia is communication. The positive outcome of any of this is like, get the leaders to communicate with one another.

1:18:24Because paranoia leads in a really bad direction. And the dead hand, which you're referring to, which is also called the perimeter system, is built on the foundations of paranoia. The Soviet government was completely paranoid. Not entirely without reason when it comes to nuclear sable rattling. You know, the United States definitely had its part in building up this narrative of like, we're going to get you if. But the Soviet Union was terrified, we know this from declassified documents, of what was called a first strike, that the United States government would preemptively strike Russia to try to take out nuclear command and control, the Soviet nuclear command and control.

1:19:08And as a result, they created something called the dead hand. And that was this idea that if nuclear command and control were to be knocked out and the Russians couldn't get at their buttons, essentially, they couldn't get at their launch controls. They created a system. And again, this is reported by a Washington Post reporter named David Hoffman. He wrote a brilliant book called The Dead Hand. And, you know, what is actually known is really interesting versus a lot of what is thought to be known. But the thinking to be known part of it comes down to that the Russians created the dead hand, which was essentially an AI system before AI, right?

1:19:46They were using sensor technology to be able to, apparently they built a mechanized system that were the system to stop receiving verbal commands from nuclear command and control, stop receiving commands from humans, the system would be able to detect from seismic sensors, nuclear bombs going off around Soviet Russia, and in response, launch all remaining Russian nuclear weapons without a human hand, hence the dead hand. It just seems like the worst idea. Like, we can only hope that they got rid of that, right, when the Soviet Union fell. They don't even necessarily control all of those facilities anymore.

1:20:38I mean, that is just terrifying that somebody could be digging somewhere and it's like, oh, we're just going to launch all these because this wire got hit by an excavator. I don't know. Even worse, and I did not report this in the book because I couldn't get anyone to confirm it on the record with me. But there are now rumors that America, the Defense Department, is considering its own dead hand type system so that, you know, we let the Russians know, hey, we have it too. Oh, my gosh. You got to wonder who's crazy enough to do it. But I mean, North Korea has all those tunnels, right? The leaders can survive maybe for decades underground if needed.

1:21:17You got to hope they don't really want to do that. But we don't really know the state of mind of a lot of these people at any given moment. You have that Mad King hypothesis, right, where the North hits us and then attacks the South. I mean, it just seems unlikely. But again, we're relying on somebody being a rational actor that is not backed into a corner. And the worst attacks in history that happen are surprise attacks. Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor, 9-11. And so again, this builds up this kind of chicken and egg scenario. Like you have the Defense Department. We need stronger deterrence. You know, we're about to revamp.

1:21:53We can't build new nuclear weapons per se. But on the table right now is the new building of the upgraded nuclear weapon systems to the tune of, you know, trillion dollars. And this idea that chicken or egg, you know, we have to stay strong is really something that I think is worth American citizens thinking about, being aware about, knowing about. Congress takes action based on what their constituents are rattling, you know, them to do. If no one's paying attention to nuclear weapons, you can be sure the Defense Department still is. Let's leave on a high note. Just kidding. Tell me about nuclear winter.

1:22:39Tell me about that. Speaking of happy, cheerful topics, this is probably the worst. This is why you want to die first, right? I mean, nuclear winter, again, a series of incredible interviews with Professor Brian Toon. He is one of the five original authors of the nuclear winter theory, which was published in the early 1980s. And one of the other five authors besides Toon was Carl Sagan, who was Toon's professor, okay? And Professor Toon has been working on this issue ever since. And cutting right to the quick of it, like a lot of people are like, nuclear winter, wasn't that, you know, whatever word they want to use, and the answer is no, right?

1:23:22So initially, the Defense Department came out with this response of like, that's Soviet propaganda. And it wasn't. It's very real. It's very terrible. It's like what happens is the nuclear blasts themselves do all this kind of damage to humans and infrastructure that we spoke of earlier. But on top of that, then what happens, which is even worse and kills more people, are the mega fires that ensue. And those mega fires loft soot into the air to the tune of billions of pounds of soot. Oh, man. Okay. It's measured in like teragrams of soot. And that blots out the sun. And without the sun, there's no agriculture.

1:24:08And things freeze over. You know, bodies of water across America are covered in thick sheets of ice. Originally, the nuclear winter calculations based on kind of like pen, pencil, and calculator was that nuclear winter, the sun would be gone, 70 % of the sun's rays would be gone for a year. Now, state-of-the-art climate modeling and computers as we have them, it demonstrates that it's actually a lot worse than was predicted in the 80s. Brian Toon was telling me that nuclear winter will likely last for 10 years. and places like Iowa and Ukraine, he used as an example, agricultural bread baskets will be frozen over for 10 years.

1:24:54There will be snow and ice. So without agriculture, people starve to death. And I won't give you all the details, but of course, once the sun finally returns, the ozone layer has been so damaged that the sun is just poisoning everyone who survived with radiation. and there are plagues and there are pathogens and what can really survive are the small-bodied animals like insects and the bigger-bodied animals like humans begin to go extinct. And so Carl Sagan brought up that idea in the 80s when nuclear winter first became a thing that the only people left will be those who have like these incredible prepper skills, which is not a lot of people.

1:25:40That's if you didn't die in the nuclear holocaust and you didn't freeze to death. So there's the pleasant ending. Right. So you end up with these people who live in a bunker for 10 years if they didn't die of something like a blast. But then they have to survive the other survivors trying to find them. They have to survive diseases, which they can't really necessarily control. And just your own body breaking down. Like what happens if you have a heart attack in that bunker? Because, I don't know, you're not moving around enough or you're stressed, right? Like no one's coming to help you. There's no medical.

1:26:11And at that point, even if you make it through all that, then what? You come out and you've got this like locust infested, literally a post-apocalyptic hellscape that you're living in. You're getting too much UV. I mean, it's like, why? Why? That's why I was saying before, did researching this initially, I was like, did researching this make you want to become a doomsday prepper? I mean, I'm personally in camp kill me first, right? So I don't have to deal with everything after the fact. That's where I'm at. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Professor Toon left me with this really spooky thought, which is he likened the situation of nuclear war to the asteroid that struck Earth and killed all the dinosaurs 66 million years ago when 70 percent of the species died, including all the dinosaurs.

1:26:55But the difference is we can't control an asteroid. But my God, you know, nuclear war doesn't have to happen. But the way things are going right now, the clock seems to be ticking toward this very sober, very serious threat getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think I hope people read the book and join this conversation while we can still have it. Did you have a moment researching this book where you were like, I kind of wish I didn't know all of this? It's liberated me from feeling like I need to prep for this event because, again, I'm in camp, kill me first. But that's otherwise I'm like, oh, I kind of slept better before I knew most of this stuff.

1:27:42What about you? I mean, I've written previously six books on military and intelligence programs. And a lot of times if you learn as much as I have from really interesting sources as I have, the mind can say, yeah, you know, defense is good. We need to be strong. That's how you deal with the bullies in the world, because I think that's a lot of the narrative we hear. But writing and reporting this book actually had the opposite effect on me. It's really about communicating. The only solution is communication. The only solution is diplomacy. And if I had all felt a little bit of trepidation that I might be sounding a little softer Pollyanna-ish for saying that, that's now gone.

1:28:24That's now gone because more weapons, more nuclear weapons are not going to alleviate this threat. It's communication. It's diplomacy. You might not like the guy on the other side of the world with his saber, but it's not worth going to war over it. Thank you very much for doing the show. The book was fascinating. We'll have to have you back. Now I have to go buy all of your previous books and then interview you about them years later. I don't know if you're willing to do that, but, you know, try my hand. Absolutely. It's a pleasure talking to you.

1:28:57You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North on who he sees as America's number one adversary today and why. Nicaraguan resistance starting in 1980, growing all over the place. They were cut off by the Congress of the United States in 1984 with what was called the Boland Amendment. No funds made available by this act, which was the National Defense Authorization Act, may be used for the purposes or which would have the effect of conducting military or paramilitary action against the government of Nicaragua. OK, so the CIA was taken out of the business.

1:29:34They turned to me and said, find a way to support them. One of the lawyers for the hearing said to me, the day you got fired at the White House had to be the worst day of your life. I said, no, no, sir. Worst days of my life were when Marines died in my arms. For more on how Oliver North makes decisions in high pressure situations and what it's like to dodge an assassination attempt, check out episode 503 on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Sorry, folks, for my voice. I am getting over some. Speaking of voices, her voice is incredible. Get the audio book just to listen to that for a few hours. I'll tell you, how do we detect launches?

1:30:09We never really got into this. There are satellites that can detect plumes. We have radar. We have seismic detectors for underground detonations. There's really kind kind of a robust infrastructure for looking at missile launches, really amazing technology. Also, there are old Russian spies near all of our launch sites here in the United States, at least all the ones that they can find, right? And their job is just to report by phone if things launch. That's kind of an amazing thing to find out, right? There's some old guy, Cold War relic, who lives near a field in Wyoming, and his whole job is just to make a phone call to somebody if things launch from his backyard, knowing that he's definitely going to die in the next few minutes.

1:30:48That's just wild to me. We can't really see North Korean missiles, by the way. There's a lot in the book that explains kind of why. But the way that we are trying to track these missiles is 24-7 Reaper drone surveillance. They can take out a missile within 240 seconds. I don't mean they can always take out a missile within 240 seconds. I guess I mean they are able to, if at all, they have to do it within 240 seconds. Why is that window so small? Well, because after that, the missile with the warhead attached is in space. The engine goes cold and there's nothing you can do at that point, which is kind of terrifying, actually.

1:31:24There's scenarios in the book that are just straight out of a 90s action movie. The president has to be strapped to other staff and tandem jumped out of Marine One because the EMP is gonna crash the aircraft. It's just absolutely wild. So much can go wrong. Even with the best of plans, there's just tons and tons and tons that can go wrong here. Something that stuck with me after reading the book as well, what happens after a nuclear blast. We didn't really get into the gory detail here on the show, but pretty much all metals melt. No life is left whatsoever. Nothing cellular anyway. So no animals, no ladybugs, no nothing.

1:31:56The streets literally melt into molten asphalt. And the people that are luckiest, they die first instantaneously. There's a quote again from a Russian prime minister back in the day talking about how the survivors of a nuclear war will envy the dead. Imagine what happens to you if it's hot enough that the streets turn to asphalt, but you're in an air conditioned car for at least a few minutes. I mean, it's just, you know, like you're going to have a bad time. And if you're on the edge of that and your skin falls off or you just go blind and some of your skin falls off, I mean, it just gets grosser kind of the further away you get from things.

1:32:31You want that missile to knock you on right at the front door. You want to be right at the epicenter of that sucker. You do not want to be on the outskirts of a nuclear blast. Goes without saying that hundreds of thousands or even millions more will die of sickness or injuries suffered during a nuclear blast. There's something like 100 million people dead in the first few hours of a nuclear conflict. Almost everybody dies. Again, not just because the missiles incinerate them, but because the rest of the people, even if you're super far away, they starve to death. They get weird diseases. The supply chain, of course, stops.

1:33:02There's no electricity. There's no purified water. I mean, it's just a whole thing. You basically don't want to survive this. I don't know about all y 'all, but after this book, I will say, I want to die early in the game if we face a nuclear conflict. I am the opposite of a prepper. If I was on the fence before, now I'm like, nope, don't prep me. Just I'm opting out. And by the way, this sort of simulation about what happens in a nuclear conflagration, this is not a one random worst case scenario. The war games for nuclear war all end similarly. The death count, other powers enter, or maybe they don't, but it's really no better when you run the numbers somewhere else.

1:33:39So this isn't like, oh, let's take the most horrifying worst case scenario and run it. This is kind of a typical outcome. And by the way, we've already had a few close calls with nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. There's one in particular, the story of Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who saw his early warning system showing that the U.S. had launched about a half dozen nuclear ICBMs at the Soviet Union. So instead of reporting that incident up the chain, he just said, I'm going to say this is a false alarm. And that turned out to be true. It wasn't just his gut. He was trained to see that the United States would launch like a zillion missiles if it was going to be a surprise attack at the first salvo.

1:34:18And he only saw five or six. And he said, that doesn't look right. And who knows what else was going on. But he essentially saved the world from an all out nuclear conflict between the United States and the USSR because it was indeed a false alarm. It turned out that the satellite somehow had thought that sunlight and a certain type of cloud over North Dakota was a plume from an ICBM. Whoops. Of course, he was not rewarded at all for this by the USSR and was essentially demoted. The UN and other international organizations here in the United States as well have given him awards. Classic somehow, though.

1:34:50Saves the world and his bosses are annoyed about it because they were embarrassed. All things Annie Jacobson will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or just as the AI chat bot also on the website. Transcripts are in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. We've also got the newsletter where every week the team and I dig into an older episode of the show and dissect the lessons and takeaways. So, hey, if you want to know what to listen to next, you're a fan of the show, definitely go to jordanharbinger.com slash news and sign up for that.

1:35:22Don't forget about six-minute network as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram or LinkedIn. You can always connect with me there. I love hearing from you. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Emilio Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who's interested in, I don't know, the end of the world, nuclear war, military stuff, definitely share this episode with them.

1:35:56In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time unless we all die in a nuclear holocaust. This episode is sponsored in part by Conspirituality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspirituality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

1:36:35An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspirituality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics. Find Conspirituality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is sponsored in part by the Something You Should Know podcast.

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