Ep 204: Annie Jacobsen on Nuclear War

Annie Jacobsen, journalist and author of Nuclear War: A Scenario

Aaron MacLean:

Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Annie Jacobsen, the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist in history, The Pentagon's Brain, numerous other books, Area 51, Operation Paperclip, which I read a long time ago now it seems. It was an excellent book. And then most recently, and the subject of our conversation today, Nuclear War: A Scenario. Annie, thank you so much for joining the show.

Annie Jacobsen:

Thank you for having me.

Aaron MacLean:

Before we get to the rather grim subject matter of the day, tell us a bit about yourself. What was life like becoming Annie Jacobsen? How did you grow up? How did you come to be interested in this sort of stuff?

Annie Jacobsen:

I'm the author of now seven books about war and weapons, and national security and secrets. And yeah, sometimes people say it a little differently, "How did a nice lady like you wind up writing about things like this?" because I do write about very violent subjects. All of my books deal with the CIA and the Pentagon, and military and intelligence operations since World War II and actually including World War II. But the truth of the matter for me is I've always wanted to be a storyteller. So that is, although I am a national security reporter, meaning I do hundreds of interviews with people like former secretaries of defense and nuclear sub force commanders, but at the heart of the matter is a story that I intend to convey.

Aaron MacLean:

I see. But what was it? Was there some experience? Was it sort of like so many of us, professional happenstance that took you in the direction of national security reporting as opposed to political reporting more broadly, or whatever the other options may have been?

Annie Jacobsen:

Yes, and sometimes failure is a great pathway to success, and that was certainly my case. I went to boarding school at age 15 with a typewriter intent on writing the Great American Novel. And I did that in college as well, and I had zero success. Zero. Zero, you know? No one was buying what I was writing. And then a mentor suggested to me that... Can I swear on the show here?

Aaron MacLean:

You may, you may. It's authorized.

Annie Jacobsen:

Okay, because these are her actual words, which she said, "Stop making shit up. It's the truth that matters. Go be a reporter," and it was one of those moments. I was 34 years old at the time, so I had put a lot of decades into writing unsuccessfully. And it was just like the wax falls out of your ears and you just suddenly go, "Wait a minute. Maybe there's..." It just hit me like a bomb that that was the truth.

Aaron MacLean:

I remember years ago when I was quite young, I knew Christopher Hitchens a little bit. And I remember a conversation with him where he sort of surprisingly intimated that he had had fiction writing ambitions in his youth, which I would never have sort of expected a guy like him to be sort of vulnerable enough to make that point. And he had this interesting observation, which I'll never forget. He was sort of talking about his friends, people like Ian McEwan, and said something to the effect of, "I've noticed my friends who are good at it, who actually can write fiction. They're all very good at music, they understand music, they know something about music." So he was sort of suggesting that there was some fundamental difference between the fiction writing and the kind of work that he does and that you do. I mean, they're both journalists, right? And truth-tellers in some straightforward literal sense.

Annie Jacobsen:

Yes, and they ultimately work it sort of as plug-and-play to one another. I liked what you had said, that comment about circumstance is how you wind up where you are. I mean, I actually do write fiction now. I wrote a couple seasons of the Jack Ryan television series for Amazon.

Aaron MacLean:

Oh, amazing.

Annie Jacobsen:

And I also write others... So you kind of wind up there. At least that's my feeling of my own self with my own pathway. But the drive of nonfiction is so imperative. Because to your music analogy, I totally get that. If you listen to Beethoven, you may have these beautiful moments, but then, badababoom, the shit hits the fan, no pun intended, literally. And so nonfiction taught me about that. It taught me about how if you are dealing with really high stakes, you have to get there. And if you lose your audience before you arrive, then all is lost. And so in dealing with sources who have literally put their lives on the line for these operations that they've been involved in, for me, it's such a drive. I can't lose my reader. I have a responsibility to tell this story. And for whatever reason in my personality and my discipline, that really helped me to learn how to tell a story.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, and good nonfiction has a kind of music to it as well. I mean, your most recent book is, it's a bit of an oddity, it's sort of a middle category because it's nonfiction in a way but it's obviously premised on this big scenario, which we'll get into. But a great journalism magazine, journalism has a rhythm to it that's not alien to people who put fiction together, as I don't need to tell you, obviously, you have played both sides of the aisle.

So the audience for this show, we have a lot of military officers who listen, and also sort of DC policy types. The sort of last personal question before we move to the book. You're a reporter. For people maybe who haven't dealt much with a national security reporter because they're relatively junior in the military, something like that, what is it that you're after? What are you interested in? What drives you? What should they know?

Annie Jacobsen:

Yes, what a great question. I mean, well, first of all, maybe clarify that I am the kind of reporter who works with retired individuals. And that allows me a lot of bandwidth and leeway because I'm dealing with programs that are unclassified, or have rather been, I'm sorry, that have been declassified, classified programs that are no longer secret, which is very different for a reporter that is trying to get a story that is happening in the present moment. People always say, "My God, how did you get these incredible sources?" Well, they're retired.

And the biggest sort of irony I notice when sometimes people introduce me is, "Annie gets all this classified information." Well, that's absolutely not true. I don't get classified information. My sources would be arrested. I get information that is hidden, information that often... Because many of my sources have been in their eighties and nineties and they worked on programs that were incredibly classified when they were happening, but the public kind of lost interest. And so they kind of quietly get declassified and people think they aren't interesting anymore. But I have found that they are profoundly interesting because of course the past is prologue as Shakespeare taught us.

Aaron MacLean:

So the book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, as the name suggests, is largely an account of a harrowing and ultimately apocalyptic nuclear war, which happens very quickly in the account that you give. It's acute for me because, we're audio only but you may be able to see here on the screen, I am sitting squarely within what I guess you would call ring one of the nuclear impact on the Pentagon. So I guess it would be quick for me at least. You could write a book about nuclear war and the dangers of nuclear weapons a thousand different ways. How did you decide to do it this way?

Annie Jacobsen:

Well, I'm very interested in trying to do something original, meaning something I would want to read that I haven't already read. And there are hundreds or thousands of books on the history of nuclear weapons. And there are also books that pontificate how foreign policy, the landscape may present situations one, two, three, four that escalate to nuclear war. I did not do that. Specifically, I wanted to know what happens the moment that nuclear war begins, because I was fascinated when I learned that nuclear war begins in the first fraction of a second, that we have technology that can detect an ICBM launch in under one second. And I found that to be extraordinarily unique.

Almost no one knows that. That is an inside baseball detail. Certainly, now all the hundreds and thousands and millions of readers of Nuclear War: A Scenario know that. But that is just the first fact in a litany of facts that are very easy to understand, that are shocking, and that for whatever reason, nobody put out there one second at a time as I did. 72 minutes later, we're about to have 5 billion of us dead in a nuclear winter. That's the premise. Once I realized that that was the reality, that scenario, which is the scenario by the way, it's not the only scenario but it's how nuclear war ends, was fascinating to me. And it's a story I wanted to tell. I can think of very few things that are as dramatic.

Aaron MacLean:

Fair enough. So could we work through the scenario a bit? We won't give away every detail. People should read the book if they're interested in every detail, but just the main point. So, the North Korean leader launches an ICBM at the United States. That's how it starts. I guess, why did you pick that as the starting point and what would happen? We'd know within a second. What comes next once somebody pushes the button like that?

Annie Jacobsen:

So I think one of the things that's interesting about having written seven books and having a hundred sources on each book, I've been around long enough that my sources understand that I am the opposite of a gotcha journalist. I'm not trying to catch anyone. I'm trying to learn the most intense situations. And so I'm able to ask people candidly, "Tell me what you really think. Tell me what you are afraid of." And often they say to me, "Okay, great, but this is not for attribution," because they're not trying to keep a secret, but it's more like a pontification that they may be having.

But some people say, "I will go on the record about this." And so I asked enough sources what they were most terrified of, and most of them were like, "On background, it's this." And the "this" was precisely what you're asking me, a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack. And I had two major sources. One, Andy Weber, who was the top advisor for nuclear weapons in several administrations. And the other, Richard Garwin, who died last week at the age of 97, who-

Aaron MacLean:

Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

Annie Jacobsen:

... built the first thermonuclear bomb for Edward Teller, was able to create the architecture that allowed it to explode when Teller couldn't. And those two individuals went on the record saying "a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack." Garwin, even going so far as to say North Korea scared him most, allowed me to have actual legitimate sources that I could tie this to so that all these other people who inevitably have these great opinions about things could have their opinions. But the point is, well, you know what? This is what these two individuals that are deeply knowledgeable say Washington fears most.

Aaron MacLean:

And you can certainly see why. So, off the rocket goes. And one of the striking things about, I guess, the earlier parts of your scenario is you spend a lot of time discussing, I guess you would describe it as a policy called launch on warning. Talk a bit about that. Talk a bit about your criticism of it, which is very intense in the book, and how that would play out. What would the American national security establishment start thinking about doing as this missile works its way over the North Pole towards us?

Annie Jacobsen:

I will tell you, but I also just have to interject. I'm always fascinated listening to what people discern that my position is, because I strive to literally just give you the facts and then people get to discern. And so it's interesting to me that you would say that I am so critical of launch on warning because all I'm doing is just presenting you with the facts of how it exists. So, in many ways, my work, I think, becomes a little bit of a mirror for all of us. Perhaps we realize things about ourselves that we think. But launch on warning exists as a, and there's air quotes around whether it's a “policy.” Lots of people argue about this.

It is not not a policy, so we'll put it that way. No one has said, "We would never do this." And launch on warning is literally like it sounds. It means that when the nuclear command and control system is warned of a nuclear attack, that there is an incoming missile, an ICBM, we launch. We do not wait to absorb the blow. And that is part and parcel to nuclear command and control. Everyone on the military side, by the way, or at least everyone I've spoken to, says, "Oh, yes, that's absolutely policy. That is what we do." Now, some of those on the national security side of things, like Jon Wolfsthal, who I interviewed, will say, "Well, Annie, it's not really policy because the president could choose not to do it."

Aaron MacLean:

Right.

Annie Jacobsen:

But I think what you are pointing out and that what shocks readers is really that they learn that nuclear war begins before the missile hits the United States because we launch a counter-attack. And then when you learn what that counter-attack involves, I think as a reader, you go, "Whoa, this is not something I had any idea about."

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. No, and fair enough. It may be that I'm reading my own reactions and emotions into your drier presentation of your reporting. I mean, as you lay it out in this first part of the scenario, because obviously other things happen and there's more launches, and we can get into that, but in the first few minutes, what's kind of shocking reading your account is, in my reading, again, this is probably me reading things into it, but your account has villains. There are villains in your account beyond the North Korean leader who launches the missile, and it's the Strategic Command commander-

Annie Jacobsen:

Oh, my goodness. Wow.

Aaron MacLean:

... and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They're villains.

Annie Jacobsen:

Wow. Okay, that's your take. That's fascinating.

Aaron MacLean:

It is my take. Fair enough. But I mean, they-

Annie Jacobsen:

No, no, no. Totally fair. Totally fair, right? I mean-

Aaron MacLean:

Okay, I'll justify the comment, which is that the president, he's doing his thing, and all of a sudden he's got this world historical crisis on his hands. And the secretary of defense, the national security advisor, everyone's trying to figure out what to do and who to call. And relatively quickly within a couple minutes, it's the Strategic Command commander and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs who start pushing the president to launch on warning. Even though, you actually have a moment in the book where the Strategic Command commander sort of asserts that it's a nuclear weapon, flatly, when he can't possibly know that. And then later, he has to kind of retract it in the crosstalk. These guys are really pushing the president to do something that I feel like to the average reader seems kind of reckless.

Annie Jacobsen:

Well, hang on. Let's drill down on that for a moment, that you said-

Aaron MacLean:

Sure.

Annie Jacobsen:

... the Strategic... Well, for starters, when I interviewed General Kehler, a former commander of Strategic Command, I mean, the interview with him was profoundly illuminating to me. I'm extremely grateful for his wisdom. And if it weren't for him, I don't think the public would know a lot about what I was able to report, including the fact. Because what General Kehler said to me was, "Annie, the world could end in the next couple of hours." All right?

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:

So it's interesting. I do not see a STRATCOM commander as a villain. But again, I think you've picked up a really interesting point, which is that there is the position and then there is the person, and that is very interesting. But if there is an ICBM coming at the United States of America, and that's the point that you've brought up that I want to clarify here. An intercontinental ballistic missile that can get from one continent to the other, from North Korea in 33 minutes, from Russia in 26 minutes and 40 seconds, that's how precise we're talking. In the scenario, someone asks, "How do we even know there's a nuclear weapon in that warhead?" And that is a correct question.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:

There is no way of knowing, but it is not the strategic commander's fault or, I believe, villain attitude that he says, "Who would launch an ICBM at the United States if it didn't have a nuclear weapon in it or a biological weapon?" Meaning a weapon of mass destruction. And I think that's a fair answer given what deterrence is and why it is so complex, and why there is no simple answer to this book. You don't finish it and go, "Oh, I know exactly what we should do."

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:

You know? But anyways, I mean that only as, thank you for reading the book so closely and having distinct opinions about it.

Aaron MacLean:

Oh, I found it really, really interesting. And the scenario is terrifying and far from impossible. I mean, lots of things could happen, but my read of the scenario is that a number of people, beginning of course with the mad king as you put it, the North Korean leader who shoots the thing in the first place, do a lot of really reckless things. And I don't want to put words in your mouth, but the launch on warning, the pressuring of the president to launch on warning where there's a single missile in the air which seems to be en route to Washington DC. Spoiler alert, it does turn out to be a nuclear missile, and it does in fact destroy Washington DC. But before that's known, to pressure the president to launch essentially a regime-killing counter-strike against the North Koreans before you really know what's on that missile seems to me to be incredibly reckless.

And interestingly, Annie, in this scenario, the president doesn't do it. The president actually resists or there's enough confusion and it goes on for a few minutes. And then you have a second missile coming from a submarine, which impacts California very quickly, and that sort of clarifies things. If my facts are right, it's only after that that the president actually does it, which seems realistic to me that he would resist in that moment, I guess per Wolfsthal's council.

Annie Jacobsen:

Yes. Yes, but these are very complicated issues, meaning you're going to have a whole system of deterrents set up which says, "Don't you dare attack us or we will launch all the mother lodes at you." That's how it's set up. And so you can't at the same time, if we're just talking theoretics here, you can't then have a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who's put in that position or the commander of STRATCOM, "Oh, actually, I'm going to change my mind from what I've been trained and all of the rehearsing that I've done." Because I think another important point is that nuclear war games are jealously guarded.

Aaron MacLean:

Right.

Annie Jacobsen:

They are not public. And there is one that is public, which I report in the book, and I show what it looks like when a nuclear war game is released. And you look at the page and it is entirely blacked out. There is one word which says "scenario." And so readers, "Why would she put that in the book?" Well, I say, what I'm demonstrating is that the Pentagon doesn't want you to know the truth about this, and everyone agrees with this. The truth is that no matter how nuclear war begins, this is in all the Pentagon war games, no matter how it begins, it ends in total nuclear annihilation. Everyone leaves nuclear war games upset. That is what I have heard.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, true.

Annie Jacobsen:

And that is shocking because once it begins, there's no way to stop it. And that is why I think people get so upset and finish the book, and say to the person sitting next to them, "You got to read this book," because we all must think about this. And the answer isn't obvious.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. Yeah. And look, I mean, I don't want to be defensive here about my characterization of villainy, but there are scenarios where I could see, this is just Aaron's common sense, so there's no particular learning or doctrine behind this, but the launch on warning policy being necessary in a dark, awful world-killing way. If what is inbound, let's say it's a couple hundred missiles that are going to end the American war-making capacity, at that point, it would seem to me in its own awful way to make more sense that you would need to respond essentially in kind.

But the response to a single missile or what becomes two missiles, in fact, and it becomes clear that they are nuclear missiles with a regime-killing strike, immediately advances the world towards Armageddon without much in the way of consultation or consideration. And it is harrowing. And then the detail that really gets things cooking in your scenario, forgive the unintentional expression there, is that the missiles striking North Korea have to overfly Russia. So there's a huge package of missiles that get fired both from the submarines and from our own silos, and this gets the Russians going. We can't get in touch with that. I mean, I guess that's to your point that these things just have a way of escalating out of control.

Annie Jacobsen:

And everyone within the Defense Department knows this. They do know this because they go through the nuclear war games. And you have pointed out a technical problem that exists. I'm thinking now of the words of Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres, who said recently, "We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon." And that is the point, that there are too many razors' edges that the nuclear world sits on. And making the reality of not having a nuclear war seem paper thin in the event that the match is lit. And so I think what is shocking, again, is I just wrote Nuclear War: A Scenario. I did not write Nuclear War: The Only Scenario.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the part about overflying Russia struck home with me because I actually will never forget my first time flying to East Asia, which is, I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago now. I flew from Washington to Seoul, and I went to sleep, and I woke up in the middle of the night. And I don't know, I'm like 100 or 200 miles off the North Coast of Alaska, which was jarring to begin with, and I was not expecting that. And then as the flight goes on, we come into Russia. And you know they have those flight tracking thingies in the back of the seat, and the line between us and Seoul went right through North Korea. And I'm a young guy, I'm in the Marine Corps. I think to myself, "Wait. Does the pilot know? Does he know we probably shouldn't fly through North Korean airspace? Should I raise my hand? Should I say something?"

Obviously this was all ridiculous and we were going to fly around, but the little flight computer didn't know that. But your point about that sort of reminded me of this vivid experience of my own youth. So I mean, I take your point, which is a scenario, not the scenario. But it all happened so quickly in your scenario, it occurred to me, awful as it still is, if you can't get in touch with the Russians. I mean, do you think there's another scenario where in real life the people making the decision about the strike package would just use the submarines? That is to say they wouldn't overfly Russian airspace if they couldn't call the Russians, because that's ultimately what actually launches the global war in your scenario.

Annie Jacobsen:

Okay, so I'm going to answer the sub question, but let's tell listeners about the technical problem, right?

Aaron MacLean:

Sure. Yeah, of course.

Annie Jacobsen:

Because I don't think it's a spoiler alert because I think you can't learn it enough and you still can't believe it, which is that US ICBMs, which launch from the Middle West, do not have enough range to get to North Korea without overflying Russia. And that is a fact I confirmed with former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who said to me, he called it a hole. Like, "Yes, that hole is a problem." It's a big dark black hole of potential disaster. And so your question, also for listeners, is that America has a triad. We have ICBMs which are land launched. We have submarines, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and we have our bomber force.

And you are saying, "Why wouldn't, in the moment, the advisors that are going with the strike package tell the president only to use submarines?" And for that, you would have to know about the black book. Because what is in the black book that is inside the president's football, the emergency satchel which is with him 24/7, 365 and also with the vice president, in the event of nuclear counter-attack being necessary, it gets opened and the president chooses a counter-attack. And these are pre-designed, in essence, options for the president.

So you would have to assume that there would be... And remember what is in the black book is deeply classified. I had a number of people on the record talk to me in the most general way about what is in that black book, but they cannot talk specifics. But what was suggested to me is one would have to assume that there is an option there which says, "Oh, by the way, Mr. President or Mrs. President, you should do this because of this." And that is not what anyone has ever written down as far as I know.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, that's alarming.

Annie Jacobsen:

And maybe that will change. Maybe that has changed. I know the current president read my book because he said so on a podcast, and maybe that will change.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess to the extent that it's a terrifying book, and I mean that in a good way. I think you intended it to be terrifying. If I take solace in anything stemming from it, it's that some of the key players at key moments do things that I kind of hope in real life real people wouldn't do. I mean, beginning with the North Korean leader who we do kind of meet towards the end. We finally encounter him in his mountain bunker. And there are mad men in the world. There are, absolutely. There are terrorists and people with millenarian visions and people who, well, they're serial killers. They're people who just kill for fun.

But it's like a three-missile shot campaign that the North Korean leader engages in in your scenario. And it just sort of seems to be for terroristic purposes, and it's fulfilling his animosity, satisfying his animosity against America and the West. And it provokes this massive response, which it couldn't not provoke. And it doesn't seem to actually achieve any political end, nor could it. There is no way in which it could achieve a political end so constructed. And I guess I'm hopeful that, generally speaking, even very bad people, the Adolf Hitlers and Joseph Stalins of the world, still seem historically to have made war for political purposes. And your North Korean leader, he's more like a serial killer. He seems to me to be sort of in it for the mayhem.

Annie Jacobsen:

Well, again, why did I decide to use that premise? Well, that came from Richard Garwin who went on the record when I asked him what he was most afraid of, and he said, "A madman with a nuclear arsenal. A narcissistic leader." And he even used the French phrase Après moi le déluge. After me, the flood. It just doesn't matter. And there was the sense of that, and I interpreted that to mean North Korea, and some other hints that Garwin added made me think that. Now, the book has been published in South Korea and I did a lot of press in South Korea. And what was interesting is they were all saying, "We hope the leader of North Korea reads your book and understands there is a better way."

I found this fascinating that they felt that the educational factors in the book would outweigh the presumption that he's behaving like a madman, because he does behave like a madman. So on the record, as you learn in the book, once nuclear war begins, there really are no rules, except for there are policies and it winds up with launching the mother lode. But before that, in the deterrent world, in the world that keeps us from having nuclear war, the most important rule you could argue is when you launch a test launch of an ICBM, it is profoundly important to notify your neighbors for reasons that I take you through that are very technical and very specific. That as soon as the missile launches, it's detected in space by the very powerful Defense Department satellite system called SBIRS, and all of nuclear command and control is looking at that trajectory.

And so Russia notifies us when they launch. Everyone notifies us through the State Department, through what's called the NRRC, so you know it's coming. And then nuclear command and control can watch the trajectory and go, "Aha, yes, it's going into space." But North Korea doesn't play by that rule. They launch into the Sea of Japan. It is profoundly dangerous, you learn in my book. Those seconds could be misinterpreted, and there's no reason why the leader of North Korea needs to not notify his neighbors other than narcissism, other than playing strongman. Those are profoundly dangerous, and the fate of the world hinges on that.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. Another issue that you cover at some length in the book is the issue of missile defense. It comes up in this scenario several times and it doesn't go well, which is too bad. I'm curious what your sources tell you about this because I don't think anybody claims that American missile defense is up to the task of saving us from a Russian attacker, alas, now even a Chinese attack. But it's precisely the North Korean scenario that the system is designed for, basically, precisely the scenario that your scenario constitutes, and it fails badly. I think there's, what, four? The first missile is missed four times, I think, if I recall correctly. Why did you write it like that?

Annie Jacobsen:

I mean, and some sort of pundits will argue that four interceptor missiles should be able to statistically take out an incoming ICBM warhead. I'm not sure. I'm not convinced that they have drilled down on the technical aspects of that the way in which I have, specifically from individuals in nuclear command and control in missile defense who have said to me, "Yep," when I said, "Could all four miss?" "Yep," and that is because of the technology involved. They don't have what's called look, see, look. The four that follow, it's essentially four one-offs. One doesn't have the knowledge to know the errors of the previous trajectory, if that makes sense.

Aaron MacLean:

Right. [inaudible 00:35:39]

Annie Jacobsen:

Now, that technology could be changing. I don't know. I mean, obviously I'm not a proponent of like, "Oh, let's try and create more weapons to keep nuclear war from happening." But the current president has on order components for the Golden Dome that are very much 21st century CubeSat-based components that I do not know about yet. The people I have interviewed on this range from old school, older school inventors of this technology who say it is flawed. But the biggest thing I think for readers or listeners to know, and readers to learn in the book about your question about the interceptor program, is that just this simple number alone tells the story. Russia has 1,670 nuclear weapons on ready-for-launch status. So do we. There are 44 interceptor missiles in total, each of which by the Defense Department's own statements has a less than 50% chance of interception. Just do the math of 44 against 1,670.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. No, and I mean, that's why Trump, of course, goes in the direction of the Golden Dome. His response to that obvious problem is, "Okay. Well, we'll build a proper system that will do it at whatever the price." Another response, which I guess you sort of alluded to, is to sort of try to reinvent the system overall with less weapons, less defense in some sort of mutual way, right? They're sort of the two responses to the problem. It's been kind of a wild year for missile defense. I'm sure you've been following it. Most recently with the Houthi strikes on Israel, I actually think the case against missile defense was strengthened a bit, right?

There was the one that hit, is it two weeks ago now, the Houthi missile that hit the Ben Gurion campus, Ben Gurion Airport. The public reporting was that both the Israelis and the Americans missed it. I read there were two intercept attempts and they both failed. But then if you go back to last year to 2024, and I guess this is now theater ballistic stuff that we're talking about, not intercontinental, you had in April and September, these massive Iranian strikes on Israel. And actually, the full performance of the defense system in my view was pretty impressive. Though, I would grant, just to sort of drop back to your book, neither was really a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack at all. Everyone's sort of on edge. And it is the bolt-out-of-the-blue sort of scenario where no one's really ready. That just on a human level, I guess you would expect to see more failure.

Annie Jacobsen:

Well, I think that they're apples and oranges because all of the missiles that you're talking about, that you're referring to are going up against, let's say, a THAAD system or an Aegis system, these ground-based or sea-based launch systems that take out very specifically short-range and intermediate-range missiles. And maybe some ballistic missiles, but those are intermediate-range. I think it helps listeners to know that an ICBM, when it's in its midcourse phase, it's traveling between 500 and 700 miles above the earth. It is moving at approximately 14,000 miles per hour. The interceptor missile has, which is totally different than the Iron Dome, an interceptor missile has in its warhead, it's essentially a mini ICBM.

And its warhead is basically just like a giant bowling ball. Of course, that's an analogy, but it's not explosives. It's like a big giant thing. And it is moving at 20,000 miles an hour approximately. So if you close your eyes and imagine 500 miles above the earth, 14,000 miles an hour, this thing is coming in. It may be a MIRVed missile. It may have distractions so that the interceptor missile can't know which is what. But even if it didn't, imagine trying to have one item, the bowling ball, hit the warhead in space at those speeds that high up. In the missile defense agency's own words, "It is like shooting a bullet with a bullet."

So to make the comparison as many people do about the Iron Dome, I think, is unwise. And I think maybe a better analogy is what happened in the Ukraine war when Russia launched its... This was in November of 2024 and it was reported. Remember that?

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:

When Russia launched, it was reported by Ukraine as an ICBM, but in fact it was an intermediate-range ballistic missile. But still, that was profoundly dangerous. And when I heard about it in the moment in real time, I thought, "Oh, my God. That is how nuclear war could begin." Just a week later, I was in Washington DC and I was taken into the State Department into the NRRC, which is the center that listens for... And I learned there when I had heard in the public domain that Lavrov said, "Oh, we notified our Washington partners electronically." And I wondered to myself. I did not know what that meant. And I learned when I was at the State Department, what it meant was that Russia essentially sent an electronic message 30 minutes before and said, "This is not nuclear-capable."

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:

That is astonishing to me.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. The part of the scenario that I actually laughed out loud in a good way with, I don't know if you intended it to be funny but I thought it was darkly very, very funny, was when you killed Twitter. Did you do that on purpose? It's awful. Everything we're talking about is awful, but a nuke goes off in California, and I guess part of the cascading, whether it's EMP or just power grid effects is that it kills all the Silicon Valley data centers. And so Annie, you denied humanity the pleasure of their closing apocalypse posts with minutes still on the clock, like a solid half hour is still on the clock for most of humanity. That was cruel.

Annie Jacobsen:

And people should know that if they're ever doubting where I'm getting the science behind what I report, you can go to the notes and see, "Oh, this. Wait, wow. That is based on that? That could actually happen." So yes, that is exactly what happens. And I think it's both metaphor, and also legitimately, when you conceive that essentially the world ends and many of us have no idea what is happening.

Aaron MacLean:

So from what you're saying, it sounds like your sources sort of reject the Trumpian Golden Dome solution as potentially technologically unsound, though there may be other problems as well. Obviously, even if it's sound, it's enormously expensive.

Annie Jacobsen:

Remember, the book was published one year ago. So Donald Trump was not the president-

Aaron MacLean:

Sure.

Annie Jacobsen:

... when I was reporting the book, and the Golden Dome didn't yet exist as a concept.

Aaron MacLean:

Sure, yeah. But I mean, you could say even when you were writing the book that one policy response just theoretically is, "Okay. Well, let's have serious comprehensive missile defense," which presidents going back to, what, at least Ronald Reagan have considered as a possibility. And Trump seems to want to pursue it, but it seems there's skepticism that it would even work. And so let's just take that skepticism as we'll just grant it for purposes of argument.

So here we are. We have this big nuclear arsenal, so do the Russians. The Chinese are on their way, and you've got North Korea and potentially Iran at some point. Not to mention others. There's others out there, of course, as well. What are your sources, the people that you talk to, the sort of community of people who concern themselves with these things? If deterrence, and again, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I take your message to be, or a big part of your message to be that the whole theory of deterrence that we have nurtured and sort of founded our security on since at least 1945 or so, is itself profoundly dangerous. And we are a hop, skip and a jump from civilizational suicide because of deterrence. What is their alternative? As they think through potential futures, what would they propose?

Annie Jacobsen:

I mean, you've really come to the heart of the matter. And what comes to mind for me is that when all of this began, there were two nuclear superpowers, and now there are nine. And so the world is a profoundly more dangerous place just by that fact alone. Deterrence has worked for 70-odd years since the Russians got the bomb in 1949. So as some of my colleagues say, luck is not a strategy, because it really has been luck. So what is the solution? Well, the solution is something I learned that I did not write in the book because I couldn't confirm it as actually having happened. And then after the book was published, Newt Gingrich called me up and I asked him, because he would know, and he said, "Oh, yes, yes. This is all on the record true about President Reagan."

So I'll tell you the story of the hopeful side of things where I believe the solution lies, and that is in communication. That is in disarmament. That is in what the current president calls, interestingly, denuclearization. I'm an author, not an activist, but I have learned a lot from colleagues that work on these treaties that work to disarm the world, meaning move the world away from the brink of the numbers of nuclear weapons. People immediately argue, "Global zero is crazy. You can never get rid of it." Let's just deal with disarmament, meaning a movement.

And I'm going to now refer to the Reagan story, which is that as you and I both know as students of history, Reagan was a nuclear hawk. He proposed the original Golden Dome of those days, the Star Wars program, the strategic SDI. And he thought more nuclear weapons made America more safe, and then he watched an ABC television movie called The Day After. It was a fictional account of a full scale nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. This was in 1983. And it scared him like nobody's business. He wrote in his White House journal that he became greatly depressed. And he reached out to the twirling mustache bad guy. Looping around toward the beginning of our... The Soviet Union, that is what they were in 1983.

And instead, he knew that he needed to perceive them as the adversary. The enemy, in military terms, you kill if need be. The adversary, you can work with. And so in those talks with Gorbachev, which involved Reykjavik and others, the world went from, in 1986, the all time high of nuclear weapons was 70,000. That is insane. Right now, there are about 12,300, and that is due to the coming together and communicating of Reagan and Gorbachev. They issued the joint statement, which is so important and should never be forgotten, which is that, "Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." And so their idea was to disarm, and then a bunch of things got in the way and that didn't happen.

But that is the position of those in the United Nations who were working on the new treaty, which is called the TPNW, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, to move the world to disarmament. And what I would say on a hopeful note about the current president is, I follow all of his statements about denuclearization, his word. And I believe that that is what his intention is, and I certainly hope that he follows through with it. If he has his Golden Dome, okay. So, a good defense is a strong defense. But to be able to pursue denuclearization, and he's mentioned it within terms of Russia and also with China, that would be profoundly important, I believe, for the safety of all of us.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, in 2025, I don't think an American president, any American president has a choice anymore. It would have to be a triple approach, right? You can't disarm, you can't bilaterally disarm with one other country and leave a third country out there with a massive nuclear arsenal. That ship, I think, has sailed. It's interesting. Reagan, he's this fascinating person, isn't he, who has this duality to him. I've always seen the two parts that go together a little more closely. It's interesting. I haven't read through his journal. So you describe it as a kind of change of heart. I've always seen the hawkishness, and at the same time, the sort of religiously inflected desire to achieve a more peaceful world is almost going together in a way that seems sort of natural to me.

I'm struck by how you cite Trump's on the record saying these things. Reagan obviously made an ultimately somewhat successful push at arms control. Someone like Barack Obama when he came into office, he strikes me as somebody who is very committed. I mean, he won the Nobel Prize in 2009 for essentially his views on nuclear weapons. Why did the United States not make more progress as... Well, again, I don't want to put words in your mouth. I don't know. I don't know if you would consider, for example, no first use as a policy as progress, but why didn't we do that? Why didn't Obama, a much less hawkish figure than Reagan, make progress on those fronts?

Annie Jacobsen:

Boy, is that the million-dollar question. And we have yet to have a president, a living president, address this issue about why they didn't in their presidency. And I mentioned that in the book that many of the now former presidents came into office campaigning on, "I will get rid of this dangerous policy, launch on warning, which is profoundly dangerous," and then mum becomes the word once they take office, including from Obama. So we don't know. We don't know what and why. But that is why it was so stunning to me that the last president, President Biden, said nothing about any of this ever. And we were at such a time of peril. It was so deeply disappointing to somebody like me, but why isn't this being spoken about? The rhetoric had ratcheted up to a point where people were threatening nuclear war. So perhaps somebody like me is more interested in what's happening now. I would be super interested if a former president were to actually do an interview about this.

Aaron MacLean:

I don't know if he's a listener, but if anyone knows him who's listening, you feel free to pass that along.

Annie Jacobsen:

Wouldn't it be amazing to hear? But instead, again, people become very quiet on this issue.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. I wonder. This is pure speculation. And I want to be respectful of your time, so we can wrap here shortly. But people get into the office and they see these terrible things, they see these war games, they see everything that you're sort of constructing here. And they may come to conclude, this is a hypothesis, so you tell me if you think I'm way off base here, that for all that... I mean, obviously these are evil things, these weapons. There's just no way, you can't look away from that. Even an anti-communist hawk like Ronald Reagan comes to conclude that this is the kind of thing that just can never be used.

And so we're sort of on one side of this paper thin divide between us and absolute catastrophe basically every day. So that's on the one hand, and that's a great weight in that hand. On the other hand, even Barack Obama can't get rid of no first use, which to be clear for any listeners who don't know, would be the United States would... Or can't establish no first use. Sorry, I've been missaying it. The United States would declare, "We will not use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. We would wait for somebody else to use them," which is not currently our policy.

And it may be that it's because for all of their awfulness and horror, since 1945 or '49 or however you want to start the clock, they have actually had a stabilizing quality. There hasn't been a World War III. Deterrence, as you pointed out a few minutes ago, has actually held, and the effort to back off from the very complicated set of pressures that the different countries of the world are applying upon one another is itself inherently incredibly dangerous as a course. That's my hypothesis. That's my trying to channel my inner Barack Obama on January the 21st, 2009 as he sits down to learn what the real skinny is.

Annie Jacobsen:

Yes. I mean, I'm with you that I would like to know. I would like to hear about that. I'm fascinated where there are giant gaps in the public's right to know, and I'm curious about that. And again, it goes back to I am just profoundly grateful that the sources that I work with are willing to tell me. And a lot of times it has to do with the fact that they are in the third act of their life. And they're certainly not sharing state secrets that they can't, but they are sharing their own position. And maybe this is a great way to end, because one of the really more interesting sets of interviews that I did was with former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry.

Readers can probably discern that, "Maybe that's why you didn't add the sec def in your list of how you perceived villains," because the sec def is in the third act. Spoiler alert, the one that takes a moment and says, "Wait a minute. Just because all these missiles are coming at us, do we have to launch the mother lode and everybody die?" And that was what Bill Perry shared with me when I... A lot of people, I asked that question and they kind of were like, "I'm not going to go there because it's too much of a hypothetical."

But Bill Perry was willing to say and to reflect that his younger self, the self that was dedicated to the military and worked in the military-industrial complex his whole life and was somewhat of a hawkish person until later in life when he became involved in disarmament, that as an older man, as a grandfather, his position has changed. And that philosophically, I think, is something that you might be touching upon in your own question. And I would hope that as some of our current living presidents get older and older, they may share with us some of the things that have remained hidden from the public.

Aaron MacLean:

Annie Jacobsen, author of Nuclear War: A Scenario, I have really enjoyed this exchange. Thank you so much for coming on, and I hope as time goes on, you'll come back sometime.

Annie Jacobsen:

Thank you so much for having me.