The $100bn media battle that could change everything

20:12Donald Trump:News you can trust and the conversations that matter. With award-winning journalists at the heart of the stories from the UK and around the world.

20:20Elizabeth Warren:Breaking news here in Edinburgh. I'm Simon Marks. My American Week is next. Reporting from the heart of Cardiff.

20:26Donald Trump:Discover how today's story affects your life. Listen on our free Global Player app or the new LBC app. LBC, leading Britain's conversation.

20:42Donald Trump:The News Agents.

20:44Elizabeth Warren:Well, we're joined now by Noah Oppenheim. He's a television producer, was the president of NBC News, but most germanely for this. wrote the screenplay for House of Dynamite. Noah, thanks so much for joining us. Are you sick of talking about nuclear war yet?

20:57Emily Maitlis:I love talking about nuclear war. You sadist. My kids are sick of me talking about it. They've banned it at the dinner table. I bet they are.

21:04Elizabeth Warren:Just in case people haven't seen it yet, just could you just give an outline of the show? And indeed, what made you want to write the show?

21:10Emily Maitlis:Sure. So the film tells the story of what would happen if a missile was ever launched at the United States of America. And it depicts the... A nuclear missile. Presumably. It's presumed to be a nuclear missile.

21:23Elizabeth Warren:It's not specified. And indeed, who sent it in the film is not specified. Correct.

21:26Emily Maitlis:It's a strike that no one claims credit for, and it comes out of the blue. And we watch as the various institutions within the United States government try to respond to the attack, try to figure out who's responsible and what to do about it. And so you watch as the people who work at the White House, the people who work in our strategic command, And the young soldiers who work in our missile defense system try to stop the missile and try to figure out how to respond to it.

21:52Elizabeth Warren:And as I say, you've got a journalistic background. So was this a sort of journalistic itch that you've had for a long time or something that you'd been interested in, the kind of sort of mechanics of the American nuclear state?

22:03Emily Maitlis:Yeah. So Catherine Bigelow, who directed the film, who won the Oscar for Hurt Locker and made Zero Dark Thirty, she called me and said she wanted to tell this story, the story of what might happen if a missile were ever launched at the U.S. I had long been interested in it. As you mentioned, I used to run NBC News, was there when North Korea was revealed to be a nuclear power. Had always loved the genre of nuclear war movies, whether it's Dr. Strangelove or Failsafe or War Games. And so we did approach it journalistically by calling the people that she and I both knew who worked in national security and asking them to walk us through the steps that would unfold if this happened in real life.

22:40Emily Maitlis:And that's how we built the story. It was by talking to people who had held the real jobs you see depicted in the film. and hearing from them how these systems work. I kind of think that the pandemic has sort of slightly coloured the way

22:52Elizabeth Warren:these sorts of kind of apocalypse kind of movies or books or cultural things kind of like, or at least for me, how you sort of interpret them. Because like the pandemic, it was these sorts of things are so easy before to sort of go, oh, well, that's never actually going to happen, right? But then like when you actually have a sort of quasar, I mean, it wasn't an apocalypse, but it was like, you know, something that felt like it might be, right? So it does sort of color the interpretation or color the way you sort of look at these things.

23:17Emily Maitlis:Well, I think that's a great point because it speaks to the fact that we assume that these unlikely events will never happen right up until the moment where one does. And I remember in the early days of the pandemic, you know, running a news organization and hearing, oh, there's this new virus in China and they're locking down a city. And I was dismissive because I'd say, oh, I've been in news for so long and I've heard so many false alarms.

23:41Elizabeth Warren:And then before you know where you are, you're working on new shows which say quarantine announced. All right, we're in that timeline now. Yeah, exactly.

23:48Emily Maitlis:And so, you know, unfortunately, you know, the events that are depicted in A House of Dynamite are events that could kick into motion at any moment, right? All it takes is one domino. It takes one launch to set this whole machine spinning.

24:01Elizabeth Warren:And from your conversations with, you know, the people working in the American security states who work on this, who think about this, what was your impression of how likely they thought an event like this might be? I mean, how much do they stay up at night?

24:16Emily Maitlis:Most of the people that I spoke to who work in the nuclear threat field, right, think tank people, analysts, government officials, they think it's nothing short of miraculous that it hasn't happened yet. I mean, if you really if you look at the last 80 years of the nuclear age, the number of near misses that we've had is pretty staggering. I mean, people don't dig too deeply into it, but there have been occasions where we've one person has been all that's determined whether the world kept on spinning. I mean, there was a famous incident, the most famous in the early 80s with Soviet officer named Stanislav Petrov, who just his own his decision.

24:49Emily Maitlis:The Soviets thought that there were there had been American missile launch. He was on duty that night.

24:54Elizabeth Warren:It was a war game, wasn't it?

24:55Emily Maitlis:Well, it was in the Able Archer was the was the war game that was taking place. But this was an incident where he saw on his screen five incoming missiles and decided not to call up the chain of command because he was just like, I can't believe that this is actually real. And because he didn't call up, disaster was averted. I mean, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most obviously salient example of how close we've come to the brink. But yeah, people who live in this world, I think, realize that the threat is much greater than most people want to contemplate. And it's one of the reasons why we made the movie is because it used to be during the Cold War, movies like this existed with some regularity.

25:31Emily Maitlis:And people talked about this and it was a regular topic in American presidential campaigns. I don't know. You know, presumably it was a topic here. Like, who do you want with their finger on the button? Nobody talks about it anymore, even though the threat is just as great, if not greater.

25:43Elizabeth Warren:But although that sort of changed, hasn't it, to some extent?

25:45Emily Maitlis:In the last three months.

25:47Elizabeth Warren:Post, yeah. Also, I suppose post-Ukraine and so on. Ukraine has brought it back to the forefront, yes.

25:53Emily Maitlis:But prior to Ukraine and then prior to some of the saber rattling we've seen from the White House about resuming nuclear testing, it had not been in the headlines very much before that.

26:04Elizabeth Warren:Did it therefore have a kind of, I mean, it's a film, it's entertainment, right? But did you have a sort of journalistic intent in the sense that you wanted something to change as a result from it?

26:13Emily Maitlis:Catherine, who, again, the filmmaker, she's made very clear, she made it to try to reignite this conversation. Because, you know, and again, coming from the world of journalism, at least in the United States, that landscape is so polarized that it's very hard to convene any kind of conversation that crosses over ideological lines. but if you want to reach people at all ends of the ideological spectrum sometimes entertainment is is the more effective means of shining a spotlight on a topic because no matter what your politics are you might sit down and watch this film whereas depending on your politics you're only consuming

26:51Elizabeth Warren:certain news sources i mean presumably the culture war even in the u.s hasn't got quite so bad yet that there is a genuine sort of binary on whether we'd like to be vaporized or not not well right

27:00Emily Maitlis:No, but in terms of what are the platforms where people from all ends of the spectrum actually convene, there are not very many of those left. But hopefully we can all agree Armageddon is best avoided.

27:11Elizabeth Warren:Yeah, I mean, who knows? I mean, let's check in with Tucker Carlson and see what he thinks about it. I mean, something that you sort of arose, I think, from your research in it, which was surprising, is the idea that no president since Reagan has taken part in one of the nuclear drills that they sort of do periodically. That seems extraordinary.

27:28Emily Maitlis:It is extraordinary. they offer a number of reasons they'll say that they don't participate because they don't know they don't want it to leak what their decision might be in that situation I find that to be a somewhat odd reason for not doing it but I think you scratch a little deeper and it's just something that most of them don't really want to contemplate

27:47Elizabeth Warren:well they can't trust the top American brass not to leak what they would do whether they'd press the button or not

27:54Emily Maitlis:that's the explanation is that it wouldn't be just the top brass When you add in aides and deputies, you're talking 50, 60 people who might be aware of what the president decided in the exercise. And so they're concerned about an adversary ever knowing what their decision-making process might look like. I don't know if you know about the British version of that, but we have a sort of version of that, which is not so much on nuclear drills.

28:17Elizabeth Warren:But we do this weird thing that people have become quite obsessed with where when a prime minister becomes the prime minister, they're shown in by the cabinet secretary, sort of top civil service official and told, you know, congratulations, prime minister. And then like apparently they have to write a letter of last resort. I love. Yeah. You heard about this? Yeah. I thought, yeah. They basically apparently have to say in the event that, you know, Britain has been completely destroyed. Yeah. You know what you, the nuclear subs should do. Correct. Which I mean, and that never is revealed. Prime ministers have occasionally said, sort of hinted what they would do, but I think the letters are destroyed when the prime minister sort of leaves.

28:53Elizabeth Warren:But it's a sort of very sort of British, more scale version of kind of some letter that's put in some vault somewhere and sort of put away and then eventually put into a shredder.

29:01Emily Maitlis:Right. Well, it's a fascinating dilemma, you know, obviously. Do you nuke? Do you not nuke? Well, the fact, I mean, going back to your earlier question, why are we all still here? Well, presumably it's because of this idea of mutually assured destruction that nobody will use it because we assume the other guy will use it. And, you know, if a British prime minister were to say, well, my letter of last resort is as if the UK is nuked, absolutely don't respond because why bother killing another, you know, couple billion people. But if that ever were to get out, then obviously the whole strategic logic of mutually assured destruction breaks down.

29:31Elizabeth Warren:I mean, I always think that there have been very few genuine sort of watersheds in human history. But surely one of the most profound was the basic what happened in Los Alamos in the 1940s. From that moment onwards, you know, never before. I mean, as bloody and as horrendous as we had been to each other, you know, throughout the entire summer of human history. Yes. We had never had the ability, although it may have felt like it occasionally, to actually destroy every single other person.

29:54Emily Maitlis:Yeah.

29:54Elizabeth Warren:But that did change the nature of humanity, didn't it?

29:56Emily Maitlis:It did. Well, it's been observed by far smarter people than me that that was a moment in which our technological ability surpassed our humanity, that we now have sort of godlike powers that we can now destroy the entire planet. But obviously, our fundamental, you know, our emotional capacity, our lizard brains haven't really evolved much beyond the caveman days. And now we just have much more powerful clubs in our hands.

30:22Elizabeth Warren:And going back to your point about the number of near misses and actually how much opacity there is around this stuff, because this is so opaque. I also find it extraordinary the extent to which, you know, obviously this technology has now been around for 80 years. The extent to which states, nuclear armed states, still have the ability to control information about it and what happens and when and where is actually quite extraordinary, particularly when we compare it. and I'm sort of really fascinated by this comparison at the moment. You know, when you compare, if we assume that nuclear age plus the AI age are, you know, two game-changing technologies that sort of potentially transform what it means to be human, the sort of asymmetry between state power and those two things is profound, right?

31:03Elizabeth Warren:Because states have basically zealously guarded their control and abilities around nuclear and nuclear power and so on, but they have not with AI. Not yet. That's just a private, well, no, no, not yet. But that's basically private companies are pursuing that And actually, states don't really have a clue what they're doing. And it's a sort of fascinating comparison, I think.

31:22Emily Maitlis:It is. And one could argue that AI could prove, you know, who knows, more lethal than nuclear weapons in some regard. We'll see. I mean, I'll try to be optimistic about it. And the two things could fuse, of course. Hopefully never. Hopefully never.

31:33Elizabeth Warren:But it is true to say, I mean, in terms of sort of that zealotry about guarding information, it's true to say the Pentagon have not been entirely pleased with your film.

31:41Emily Maitlis:It's funny. They circulated one memo in which they objected to one plot point in the film, which is the idea that our current ground-based missile defense system, as we say in the film, is only 50 % roughly effective. And they circulated a memo internally to say, don't worry, this is not true. Our system is actually 100 % effective. Anytime anyone tells you they're 100 % effective, I think it's safe to be skeptical. In this particular case— Also, how do they know? Well, they've tested—I mean, the funny thing about that pushback is, first of all, it's not an argument between them and us as filmmakers.

32:13Emily Maitlis:because it's an argument between them and the entire community of nuclear experts and missile defense experts. And the great news is that it's all public record. We have this ground-based intercept system. It's been tested 20 times since 1999. The success rate is 58%. It's all out there easily to look up. They asserted this 100 % affected rate based on just the last several tests. So it's the equivalent of saying, well, I've missed seven penalty kicks in a row, but I made the last two, therefore I'm 100 % effective. So it was an odd argument for them to make. But I was just, I think we all were just thrilled that they were engaging at all because it's sort of the point of making a movie like this is to get a conversation going.

32:54Emily Maitlis:And they say that you hadn't engaged with them. We didn't engage with the current Pentagon, the folks who currently work there, but we engaged with dozens of people who were former Pentagon officials and former three, four star generals who work in the nuclear field. So we had done plenty of research. We just did not ask for official cooperation because that ties you up in a number of different ways.

33:15Elizabeth Warren:I mean, one of the ways in which the film is now inaccurate is that you have a character who's the Secretary of Defense working for the Department of Defense, but of course that position no longer exists, right? Because what you have instead, which again sort of would add a different sort of twist to the whole thing, is you have a Secretary of War and a Department of War.

33:32Emily Maitlis:Yes, it's hard to keep track of the nomenclature changes sometimes, but yes.

33:36Elizabeth Warren:Do you think that having now sort of talked to so many people in the sort of defense world, American defense world, and then, you know, thinking about this. Do you find that chilling? Having a Department of War and a Secretary of War in the US now as an American?

33:48Emily Maitlis:I think that there are many things to be chilled by in terms of what's going on in our politics, not just the United States, but around the world. You know, the labeling of the department certainly is a piece of that, but I think that the conduct of it is certain.

34:02Elizabeth Warren:Well, it's part of a whole trend which we've seen, right? I mean, because obviously we're talking about nuclear and it's being a defensive deterrent, right? But I mean, obviously, the whole kind of footing of the US military under Trump over the last year and under Pete Hegseth has become much more aggressive. I think it's very, I mean, even Hegseth has talked about, you know, having more, you know, that soldiers are too feminized. You need more sort of masculine soldiers. You talk about warriors, all this sort of stuff. The way that America is talking about its military and what it does with its military, we're seeing that in Venezuela at the moment, is changing, isn't it?

34:32Elizabeth Warren:It's becoming somewhat different.

34:34Emily Maitlis:It is changing. And then, but you've also, I mean, that's, you know, they're trying to change it. We've also started to see pushback, I think, from the other party. There's always a push and pull in these things. And, you know, the opposition in the United States is starting to get more active and effective in terms of pushing back against some of the other countries.

34:52Elizabeth Warren:I would see, I mean, obviously, the sort of extraordinary situation of the American military being deployed. I mean, this is obviously about a foreign threat, but American military being deployed to its own cities.

35:02Emily Maitlis:We have National Guard on the streets of Washington and other places right now. But again, you know, there were just a recent round of elections in which the results would suggest a softening of support for those parties.

35:13Elizabeth Warren:I mean, Trump has said he wants to resume nuclear testing, which is something that...

35:17Emily Maitlis:It's unclear what he means by that, right? So it's like, is he saying he wants to test the delivery mechanisms or the warheads themselves? And, you know, like I think is the case with many of those announcements, it remains to be seen what the actual follow through looks like.

35:31Elizabeth Warren:just one other thing i mean just you know with your sort of former nbc hat on and journalistic hat on um because i know i'm sure you'll have thought about this a lot i mean you you were around you know at nbc during the first of trump administration and obviously he's a different beast now this this administration's quite different his relationship with the media is a bit different just one that i mean we've obviously had this experience recently where um trump has threatened to sue the bbc and so on he's obviously done that to various american media companies it's just a bit of advice how do you think the bbc should handle that

36:00Emily Maitlis:I had the pleasure of actually working with the former head of BBC News. We were both at NBC News together. Oh, Deborah Channess. Deborah Channess. And so I don't feel particularly comfortable offering advice. I mean, the BBC has been around for much longer than I have. Longer than any of us. Yeah, it's a challenging moment, I think, for media. I think the Trump administration's posture is one of those challenges. I think the fracturing of the economic model is another one. You know, social media, I think, has done as much to undermine people's trust in legacy media institutions as anything.

36:36Elizabeth Warren:Do you think media companies have been too cowardly, for want of a better word, particularly by comparison with Trump one, where there was a more robust response, perhaps?

36:45Emily Maitlis:Yeah, I mean, I was I mean, listen, I the nature of the conflict during the first Trump administration was different. I mean, I was in that chair during the first Trump administration. there was friction there was occasionally hostility but it had never it had not crossed that line into formal legal action um and so it's i make it a point not to cast judgment on those i know how hard those jobs are and how hard those decisions are um i think it's rarely as simple as it seems from the outside obviously i'm somebody who believes very strongly in the importance of independent and free press and would like to see uh people continuing to to do that important critical work.

37:24Emily Maitlis:And I think there are people doing it. I mean, whether or not a huge company that's part of a big technology conglomerate is best positioned to do that kind of work in this age, there are a lot more challenges and considerations that they have to take into account than just their news divisions, which I think makes it hard.

37:39Elizabeth Warren:Noah Oppenheim, great to talk to you. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

37:53Elizabeth Warren:Right before we go, we thought we'd just bring you this. Yesterday, as you'll know, John and I spent the episode talking about the American new national security strategy, which, among other things, was talking about whether Europe would be civilisationally erased as a result of the immigration policies, cultural policies adopted by European governments. That seems to be what the Trump administration thought. We thought this was a jaw dropping document articulating many of the extraordinary themes which have been picked up by the Trump administration this year. Didn't receive that much attention in the rest of the media.

38:27Elizabeth Warren:Perhaps to our surprise, we thought we reading too much into it. Turns out perhaps we weren't. Here's Donald Trump talking to Politico overnight.

38:34Donald Trump:Your administration just released a new national security strategy that sent shockwaves throughout Europe. The strategy says a key pillar of American foreign policy should be, quote, cultivating resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European nations. How much should European leaders prepare for your administration to push to reshape the continent's politics? Well, Europe is a different place. What do you mean by that? And if it keeps going the way it's going, Europe will not be, in my opinion, many of those countries will not be viable countries any longer. Their immigration policy is a disaster.

39:09Donald Trump:What they're doing with immigration is a disaster. But most European nations, they're decaying. They're decaying. You can imagine some leaders in Europe are a little freaked out by what your posture is. No, they should be freaked out by what they're doing to their countries. They're destroying their countries. And they're people I like. Look, they're people I like. I get along with them. You know that. but they can't let this happen. And it gets to a point where you can't really correct it. There'll be a point, and it's very close to that point. And what will that mean? It will mean that they're no longer going to be strong nations.

39:50Donald Trump:Does that mean they won't be allies anymore? Or they'll be, well, it depends, you know, it depends. They'll change their ideology, obviously, because the people coming in have a totally different ideology.

39:59Jon Sopel:And so it goes on. I'm talking about how weak Europe is, the immigration policies, how nations will cease to be viable in the future. And so it went on and on. Indeed.

40:13Elizabeth Warren:Sometimes we speculate about whether, given that there are such sort of powerful people around Trump, some of whom with very clear, cohesive views of the world, perhaps more than the president, we speculate that some of this stuff might come from them rather than him. Clearly not, or at the very least, those views have sat deeply with the president. And you can hear him there talking again in these terms, which would have once been confined to the fringe. Basically what he's saying is, is because Europe has let in too many foreigners, in particularly usually they mean muslims that europe is losing itself that those countries will no longer be european countries by the end of this process and that therefore they're not reliable

40:49Jon Sopel:allies for america any longer anyway i did sort of sit and wonder oh that's good for politico to get that interview i wonder how politico managed to get an interview with donald trump like that um well politico had just named donald trump on tuesday the most influential figure shaping european politics i wonder whether that might have helped just a teeny bit i think he's one of the sexiest figures in European politics.

41:10Elizabeth Warren:Say it again. No, I think Donald Trump is one of the sexiest figures in European politics. And I myself would like to put that to the president in a special newsagent 60 minute interview. Not that 60 minutes, Don. Sorry, no, nothing to do with her. Don't worry. Dear Caroline Levitt, Lewis Goodall and I would

41:26Jon Sopel:like, we'll see you tomorrow. Bye bye. Bye bye.