Newt talks with Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen, about her new book "Nuclear War: A Scenario". The book explores the potential aftermath of a nuclear missile launch, based on interviews with military and civilian experts. Jacobsen discusses the concept of "Mad King Logic", where one irrational leader with a nuclear arsenal could trigger a global catastrophe. She also explains the devastating environmental and human impacts of a nuclear war, including nuclear winter and the death of billions. Jacobsen suggests that the way forward is to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and make their use taboo, following the example set by President Reagan. They also discuss how this could be implemented in a world with unpredictable leaders like Kim Jong Un and Ayatollah Khomeini.
On this episode of New World We're going to look at something very sobering. Every generation a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment, the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we live in, where one nuclear missile will get one in return, and where the choreography of the world's end requires massive decisions made on seconds notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have. Pulitzer Prize finalist Anny Jacobson's Nuclear War A Scenario explores this ticking clock scenario based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War Scenario is the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. Here to talk about a new book. I am really pleased to welcome my guest, Annie Jacobson. She is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Pentagon's Brain, author of the New York Times bestsellers Area fifty one and Operation paper Clip. She was a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times magazine. Annie, welcome and thank you for joining me on Newts World.
Well, it's a real honor to be here, so thank you for having me.
I'll say for a lot of our listeners that the subject of your book is bleak, but I think it's extraordinarily important. We live in a world where there are more and more countries with nuclear weapons. There are very real threats, and somewhere something could really happen in a way that's horrible. You begin your book with a very poignant quote from Winston Churchill who said, quote the story of the human races war. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world. And before history began, murderous strife was universal and on ending. That was Churchill's vision of the world. So, if you don't mind, I wanted to really dive right in with chapter three of your book, the build Up nineteen forty five to nineteen ninety, Will you talk about the arms race with the Civic Union.
Yes, and you know, thank you for that introduction, and of course what we're about to discuss here, the initial build up the arms race with the Soviet Union. It was a very different world with two nuclear armed superpowers. And as you referenced in your intro, now here in twenty twenty four we have nine nuclear armed nations and threats everywhere and saber rattling. But once upon a time, back in the fifties, when this arms race began, things were at the razor's edge in a different way in that as I demonstrate in the book, the Original Nuclear War Plan, the SIOP, was designed for the United States to be able to fight and win a nuclear war. However crazy that may seem to us now, that is what was at stake, and of course that idea changed and became deterrence, this idea that we must never fight a nuclear war because it cannot be won, and so we have lived with deterrence for all of these decades since. But I think what we're here to talk about today, and what I attempted to demonstrate in nuclear war a scenario, is how quickly it all could change were a nuclear warhead to come toward the United States.
With places like North Korea and Iran Pakistan putin under some circumstances, the terrence may not work. And I think what you did is very important in getting us to confront how really serious a problem is.
Well, call me the optimist in the room. I'm going to take the position that the reason I wrote the book, which was to demonstrate in appalling detail just how horrific nuclear war would be, was so that we never have a nuclear war. I don't believe that there really is survival after a nuclear war, and that is certainly a conclusion that I came to after interviewing people who were familiar with the plans should a nuclear war happen, including former FEMA director Craig Fugate, who told me that after a nuclear war there would be no protection planning because an actual quote from him, everyone would be dead. So I'm of the position what I learned, which is terrifying, is that there's no such thing as a small nuclear war.
Eisenhower said one time that the world after nuclear would be so horrifying he wouldn't want to be one of the survivors.
That's absolutely right, echoed by Khrush Jeff who said the survivors would envy the dead, which.
Is I think part of why Reagan really was trying to find a way to get away from nuclear war.
Well, you're absolutely right. And you know, amidst all this horror that I describe in the book, and for readers to understand this idea that it all happens so fast, is so troubling and also hopeful thanks to what I call the Reagan reversal, because in Reagan it's my understanding, and perhaps you can correct me, because you might know better if I'm wrong at any points. Of this is that when President Reagan saw the fictional ABCTV mini series or mini movie called The Day After, and that he had a private screening at Camp David in nineteen eighty three, that he became, as he wrote in his Presidential Journal, greatly depressed. And it was that that caused him to reach out to Gorbachev, which then led to the Rekovic Summit, which led from the reduction in nuclear warheads from seventy thousand in nineteen eighty six to the twelve thousand, five hundred that we have today. And so it was that Reagan reversal, that idea that the President of the United States, dates arguably the most powerful person on earth, could be so impacted by a hypothetical concept of the possible future that he would actually radically impact the safety and security of the world moving forward.
I think it's been helpful for our listeners for you to talk about why the reality of a nuclear war is so horrifyingly, what are the actual effects that occur.
I describe in the book a one megaton thermonuclear weapon striking the Pentagon, and the reason I chose that target is because it was said to me repeatedly that a bolt out of the blue attack against Washington, DC is what everyone in Washington, DC fears most. And I describe in horrific detail everything from the flash of light turning humans in the inner ring into combusted carbon, knocking over all structures, incinerating all forms of life down to a cellular level. And we're talking about five thousand, seven hundred square feet in diameter a little over a mile. And then I describe what happens in the cocentric rings moving out the bulldozer type blast wave of one hundred mile an hour winds, knocking over buildings, setting new things on fire. And then I describe what happens rings out after that, where you have people asphyxiating, people being impaled by flying objects, people being sucked up into the nuclear mushroom cloud it's really remarkable. When you close your eyes, you imagine that mushroom cloud that many people have seen either in movies or in the actual footage from the atomic test, in the stem of the mushroom cloud, in the cap of the mushroom cloud of a bomb that exploded on a city, there would be debris of human beings. That is what that cloud would be made of. And so these details and so many others that I convey to the reader gives you exactly that sense that you referenced earlier that you would perhaps rather be one of the lucky ones who died instantly.
Well, and in this case, you're describing one hydrogen weapon in a world in which there are thousands.
The basic fact that I think is great for readers to just sink their teeth into the United States has one thousand, seven hundred and seventy nuclear weapons today on their forward deployed meaning they're on ready for launch status. Russia has approximately the same. They have one thousand, six hundred and seventy four. Of course, the numbers change a little bit every year. That gives you an idea, these are weapons ready to go. And so as you say, and as I describe in nuclear war scenario, it's not just one nuclear weapon that gets launched, it's thousands, because there are thousands in reserve. And then you have a situation where you have essentially the continental United States on fire because every one megaton thermonuclear bomb creates a mega fire that is one hundred two hundred three hundred square miles burning. Imagine that times one thousand or more.
You emphasized the US in Russia. I mean, I think part of what has made me more concerned and reduced my sort of sense of being totally avoidable is when you see a regime that is as hard to understand as North Korea, which is annually acquiring more and more weapons and acquiring delivery systems that could reach the United States. I'm not totally sure that they can be deterred.
I am totally sure they cannot be deterred, and that's based on interviews. You know. I begin my scenario with the bolt out of the blue attack by North Korea. Russia gets involved because of technical problems and miscommunications that were conveyed to me by people like former secretaries of Defense That can and could likely have happen. But the reason I chose North Korea, and I think we agree on the danger that North Korea. The existential danger that North Korea brings into the mix in this present moment is because of a series of interviews I did with Richard Garwin, who I'm sure you're familiar with most listeners, aren't. Richard Garwin drew the plans to the first thermonuclear bomb ever exploded. It's on the cover of the book. It was called Ivy Mike. And so many people think that Edward Teller was the progenitor of the thermonuclear weapon, which he was, but theoretically those plans needed to be drawn. Teller couldn't figure out how to explode the bomb, and so he looked to a then twenty three year old Richard Garwin to solve that puzzle. And it was Garwin who said to me in our interviews, when I asked him what he thought the biggest existential threat it was, he shared a concept that he'd been thinking about called the mad king logic. And it's this idea that, as Garwin explained me, that all it takes is one mad king with a nuclear arsenal.
Which is why you sort of start with North Korea just because we don't actually understand them.
That's exactly right, and I wanted to present a puzzle to the reader. We never know in the book why North Korea started a nuclear war, why they lobbed one nuclear missile and then a second at the United States. What we do know, and I talk about is what mad king logic is, as it was explained to me by Garwin. And the best way he had of summing it up is the French phrase a prey mois le deluge, attributed to a number of sort of French crazy kings and leaders. That idea, after me the flood, the idea that some madman with an arsenal would feel as if the world didn't matter if he couldn't be in it.
In that sense, as you watch countries like North Korea not just have a hey nuclear weapon, but have a program. I think by the end of the decade we estimate they'll have three hundred nuclear weapons. And you don't know what they're thinking is there's a pattern with dogs called fear biting, where a dog will bite you because it's afraid of you. It's a preemptive attack if you will and you can imagine in some ways the Omkipper War in nineteen seventy three had a similar experience in that the Soviets deliberately misinformed the Egyptians and the Syrians convinced them that the Israelis were about to attack, and so they decided they had to launch a preemptive attack to stop the Israeli attack, which actually wasn't going to occur. And so I think you can imagine a circums sense where somebody, whether it's the Iranians who have a theological guarantee that if they swapp Tehran for Tel Aviv, at least the people in Tehran will go to heaven, or the North Koreans, who we really don't understand very much at all, and the South Grans don't understand them either. So it's a really complicated problem. But you also have this question which i'd be curious to get your reaction to. Every once in a while, Putin implies that he would at least use tactical nuclear weapons, and they run exercises to remind us that they have a very large nuclear capability. In your judgment with the people you talked to when you interviewed, do you think it is likely that Putin, faced with defeat, would in fact go nuclear.
I purposely do not get into politics in the book, but I can share with you my discussions on background this because that was a very important question of like how would tactical nuclear weapons play a role? For listeners, Let's just give a quick reminder, A tactical nuclear weapon is a battlefield weapon, a short range weapon. And what we are talking about in nuclear warfare and the big picture of deterrence has to do with what's called strategic nuclear weapons, really long range ballistic missiles, intercontinental missiles, submarine launched missiles. But this idea that Putin is talking about using a tactical nuclear weapon, I can tell you in my conversation with sources, felt extremely threatening to them because the fundamental premise that I learned in reporting this book is that all of the cold warriors close to the president, close to the nuclear command and control apparatus, conveyed to me that from war gaming out these situations for decades, we know, and we know from Reagan's declassified nuclear war game Proud Profit, that no matter how nuclear war begins, it ends in nuclear armageddon. And so to answer your question, how would it work with a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield precisely that way, it's almost impossible to think that it could not escalate to a position where strategic nuclear weapons become part of the war.
So in that sense, you go from attacking an enemy military formation to attacking cities or to attacking each other's nuclear capability.
Absolutely, you're crossing that red line that has kept us all alive for seventy nine years. So, in other words, the fundamental premise of Stratcom's Strategic Command, who is the combatant command in the United States that controls the nuclear weapons that will talk directly to the President in the event of a nuclear launch order, Strategic Command says all security is predicated onto deterrence, and the deputy commander of Stratcom, Lieutenant General Busier, recently said, if deterrence fails, it all unravels. And so that unraveling is where we wind up in nuclear armageddon. And that is why I take the reader from nuclear launch to nuclear winter in seventy two minutes. If you had a tactical nuclear weapon involved, perhaps there's a little bit of a longer build up, but once the war begins, it ends in seventy two minutes.
And is that because the danger of losing your weapons as such that you feel almost compelled to go to a total launch just to be sure that you have them.
Well, I think it has to do with that image you just conveyed to me, which I had never heard of, and I will never be the same sense, which is fear biting from the dog right, that idea of preemptive action is so tied into war fighting as a concept, and that it is tied into deterrence because all of our triad is built so that if somebody considers a preemptive nuclear strike, their generals will tell them the enemy has a first strike capability, a second strike capability, get the silos, their submarines will come after you. So there's this inherent idea that you cannot make a preemptive move. And so in a way, I would perceive the use of a tactical nuclear weapon as setting off a chain of possible preemptive nuclear strikes, and then you just have game on.
One of the points you make is that if you think about a spasm war in which there are multiple hydrogen weapons, that the impact on the environment, the impact on climate, even countries that were totally outside the threat of the war would in fact, be radically impacted by the degree to which you would have, first of all, a huge amount of material up in the atmosphere, much like the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs. In nuclear winter in that sense, is a real threat. So if you're India or your Nigeria and you think, well, at least I'm not in the direct lane of getting hit, you nonetheless could have your civilization deeply shaken by events that are overwhelming in the natural.
World, which is exactly why nuclear winter is really something that everybody should consider, I believe. Interestingly, in nineteen eighty three, when it was first written about, it was written off by the Defense Department as Soviet propaganda, and yet in declassified documents I located, you can see a real fear from the Defense Department knowing that nuclear winter was real. It is a real concept. As you said, the three hundred and thirty billion pounds of soot that would be lofted into the air from the nuclear megafires burning. After all, the nuclear blasts would blot out seventy percent of the sun. And so the new climate models that have looked at nuclear winter from a very technical, computerized point of view, with today's modern equipment suggest that all the freshwater bodies in the mid latitudes we're talking about from Iowa to Ukraine would be covered in sheets of ice. You're talking about a temperature drop around the globe from between twenty seven degrees fahrenheit and forty degrees fahrenheit. Parts of the world would freeze over and with that the death of agriculture, and with the death of agriculture comes the death of an estimated five billion people. And so the takeaway I believe from the book is precisely what we learned at the Recavic Summit from Reagan and Gorbachev when they issued that magnificent joint statement which is so impactful nuclear war cannot be one and must never be fought.
I would just point out that if you look on a minor scale at the impact of the explosion of Krakataol in the eighteen eighties, it led to three years of cooler temperatures worldwide just from one volcano. We do have practical, real knowledge of some of these impacts, and we do know that they can have an extraordinary impact on agriculture. And frankly, when you had talked about the number of dead, you described like five billion. That then leads to a whole range of biological problems as disease occurs and as people are further impacted by just another wave of horror, which truly would be, for all practical purposes, the end of our civilization as we've known it over the last three or four thousand years. So, given that, I agree generally with your concern, and I think that it's pretty horrifying.
Therefore we look to President Reagan's powerful reversal of position, his movement from someone who was considering the SDI program that perhaps the way to keep America safer was to build a ballistic missile defense system his idea and being in space so that you could sort of stop the incoming missiles. So I really see President Reagan as someone who went from looking to modern technology to solve the problem of nuclear weapons with more weapons systems, to someone who realized that there is no technological solve because the more nuclear weapons we have, the more dangerous the threat of nuclear use becomes. And so his movement toward reduction I see as a powerful indicator of change. I'm not being a Pollyanna and saying, you know, get rid of all nuclear weapons. I'm also not an activist. I'm an investigative reporter and a storyteller. So I gave you this story for you to read, for you to think about. But what I do know is many of the Cold Warriors, like yourself, while I was interviewing them, said to me that their position changed from perhaps being someone who felt we have this covered and then when the wall went down, saying, wow, the threat of nuclear weapons is behind us, to being elder statesmen who can look at the modern world with the lens of history, with a wisdom and a knowledge and realize that the pathway forward is not continuing along as we have been by all means not letting more nuclear armed nations join the four, but rather reducing this, essentially making nuclear weapons taboo. I believe the same way that biological weapons used to be part of America's arsenal, and then Nixon began the change out of that, no one says, now, well, we have a biological arsenal of bubonic plague weapons, and so if you launch yours at us, we'll launch ours at you. It has become taboo. And I think that the movement toward reducing nuclear weapons to a much smaller number would be a step in the right direction.
You're clearly very, very smart, and you do amazing research and the range of people you've interviewed is astonishing. I'm going to go out on a limb here for a minute. I think this is the book which sets up the threat and the problem, and we need you now to go back out and do another round of interviewing and start showing us. In a world where you've got North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, India, Russia, Britain, France, United States all have nuclear weapons and they're going to spread, how do you come up with a path which is implementable that somebody like Kim Jong un or Putin, or even at a more rational level, Jijen Peng decides, you know, for the survival of our entire civilization, this is a road I need to go on, or for that matter of the Eyetolaha may need. I am totally with you on how dangerous this is. And it's something which I guess since I was fifteen or sixteen, has been a part of my life every single day, and I think that it would be horrifying on a scale that is literally indescribable, and a good friend of mine took one tiny example of it with electromagnetic pulse, wrote a brilliant book called One Second after which I recommend to people, which is life in a small town in North Carolina after electromagnetic pulse destroys all the electricity capabilities. And you read it and you realize that's one version of a terrible future. What you described as an instantaneous version of a terrible future. But as somebody who's worked this issue now for my entire lifetime, I don't understand how to build a regime where Kim Jong Un and I told a Hamoni decide that a non nuclear future is better not putting in a spot today. But I want to raise the idea.
You want another book.
We need a second book which says nuclear war the solution.
Ah. That book would make me happy, But the question is can I write it.
It'd be interesting, though, if you went back out to a lot of these very smart people who already know how good you are, and you said to them, all right, so what's the solution in the real world. The solution has to fit the reality of Hamas and the reality of hamone, and the reality of Kim Jong un, and the reality of putin otherwise, it's not a solution, it's a fantasy. You would just starting that conversation. You would do an enormous service to the people of the entire planet.
You have given me my new assignment. Thank you.
This has been a very interest We're saying fascinating and terrifying interview, but I want to thank you Annie. You're very smart. You do your research at the most sophisticated level. This is an incredibly sobering book, and I would encourage anybody who has any doubt about how important it is for us to solve this problem to just read Nuclear War A Scenario and realize that it's real and that we have to find a way out of the trap.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you to my guest Danny Jacobson. You can get a link to buy her new book, Nuclear War A Scenario on our show page at neutworld dot com. Newt World is produced by Gingrash three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Neutuorld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my three freeweekly columns at Gingrishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Neutsworld