Ground zero of nuclear war

The United States has 1,770 nuclear weapons deployed, meaning those weapons could launch in as little as 60 seconds and up to a couple of minutes. Some of them on the bombers might take an hour or so. Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons. Same scenario. Their weapons systems are on par with ours. That's not to mention the 12,500 nuclear weapons amongst the nine nuclear armed nations. The sucking up into the nuclear stem, 300 mile an hour winds, you're talking about people miles out getting sucked up into that stem. When you see the mushroom cloud, Lex, that would be people 30, 40 mile wide mushroom cloud blocking out the sun, and that speaks nothing of the radiation poisoning that follows. In addition to the Launch on Warning concept, there's this other insane concept called Sole Presidential Authority. And you might think, in a democracy that's impossible, right? You can't just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you are the commander in chief, the President of the United States. In fact, you're the only one who can do that. We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon. No matter how nuclear war starts, it ends with everyone dead.

Let's start with an immensely dark topic, nuclear war. How many people would a nuclear war between the United States and Russia kill? I'm coming back at you with a very dark answer and a very big number. And that number is 5 billion people.

So the president, as part of the Launch on Warning policy, has six minutes... I guess can't launch for six minutes, but at six minute mark from that first warning, the president can launch. And that was one of the most remarkable details to really nail down for this book when I was reporting this book, and talking to Secretary of Defenses, for example, who are the people who advise the president on this matter, right? You say to yourself, " Wait a minute. How could that possibly be?" So, let's unpack that. So, in addition to the Launch on Warning concept, there's this other insane concept called Sole Presidential Authority. And you might think, in a democracy that's impossible, right? You can't just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you are the commander in chief, the President of the United States. In fact, you're the only one who can do that. And we can get into later why that exists. I was able to get the origin story of that concept from Los Alamos, they declassified it for the book.

And that's where you realize the immediacy of all of this is so counter to imagining the scenario. And again, all the presidents come into office, I have learned, understanding the idea of deterrence, this idea that we have these massive arsenals of nuclear weapons pointed at one another ready to launch so that we never have nuclear war. But what we're talking about now is, what if we did? What if we did? And what you've raised is this really spooky, eerie subtext of the world right now because many of the nuclear armed nations are in direct conflict with other nations. And for the first time in decades, nuclear threats are actually coming out of the mouths of leaders. This is shocking. So deterrence, the polite, implied assumption is that nobody will launch. And if they did, we would launch back and everybody would be dead. But that assumption falls apart completely, the whole philosophy of it falls apart once the first launch happens, then you have six minutes to decide, "Wait a minute. Are we going to hit back and kill everybody on earth? Or do we turn the other cheek in the most horrific way possible?"

So to you, the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, maybe you can draw the line between a tactical and a strategic nuclear weapon. That could be a catalyst. That's a very difficult thing to walk back from. Oh, my God. Almost certainly. And again, every person in the national security environment will agree with that, certainly on the American side. Strategic weapons, those are big weapons systems. America has a nuclear triad. We have our ICBMs, which are the silo-based missiles that have a nuclear warhead in the nose cone, and they can get from one continent to the other in roughly 30 minutes. Then we have our bombers, B-52s and B-2s, that are nuclear capable. Those take travel time to get to another continent. Those can also be recalled. The ICBMs cannot be recalled or redirected once launched.

So, there's a million other questions here. I think the details are fascinating and important to understand. So one, you also say nuclear submarines... You mentioned about 30 minutes, 26, 33 minutes. But with nuclear submarines, that number can be much, much lower. So, how long does it take for a warhead missile to reach the east coast of the United States from a submarine? Just when you thought it was really bad, and then you realize about the submarines. I mean, the submarines are what are called second strike capacity. Submarines were described to me this way, they are as dangerous to civilization... And let me say a nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered submarine is as dangerous to civilization as an asteroid. They're unstoppable. They are unlocatable, the former Chief of the Nuclear Submarine Forces, Admiral Michael Connor, told me it's easier to find a grapefruit-sized object in space than a submarine under the sea.

As you write, they're called the handmaidens of the apocalypse. What a terrifying label. I mean, one of the things you also write about, so for the land launched ones, they're presumably underground. So the silos, how long does it take to go from pressing the button to them emerging from underground for launch? And is that part detectable or it's only the heat? What's interesting about the silos, America has 400 silos, right? We've had more. But we have 400, and they're underground, and they're called Minutemen after the Revolutionary War heroes. But the joke in Washington is they're not called Minutemen for nothing, because they can launch in one minute. The president orders the launch of the ICBMs, ICBM stands for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. He orders the launch, and they launch 60 seconds later. And then, they take 30 some odd minutes to get to where they're going.

I think Americans are familiar with the football, at least anyone who follows national security concepts because it's a satchel. It's a leather satchel that is always with a military aide in Secret Service nomenclature. That's the mil aide. And he's trailing around the president 24/7, 365 days a year, and also the vice president, by the way, with the ability to launch nuclear war in that six-minute window all the time. That is also called the football, and it's always with the president. To report this part of the book, I interviewed a lot of people in the Secret Service that are with the president and talk about this. And the Director of the Secret Service, a guy called Lou Merletti, told me a story that I just really found fascinating. He was also in charge of the president's detail, President Clinton this was, before he was director of the Secret Service. And he told me the story about how, he said, "The football is with the president at all times, period." They were traveling to Syria, and Clinton was meeting with President Assad. And they got into an elevator, Clinton and the Secret Service team, and one of Assad's guys was like, "No." About the mil aide. And Lou said it was like a standoff because there was no way they were not going to have the president with his football in an elevator. And it sums up. For me anyways, you realize what goes into every single one of these decisions. You realize the massive system of systems behind every item you might just see in passing and glancing on the news as you see the mil aide carrying that satchel. Well, what's in that satchel? I really dug into that to report this book.

What is the interceptor capabilities of the United States? How many nuclear missiles can be stopped? I was at a dinner party with a very informed person, somebody who really should have known this, and this is what I was considering writing and reporting this book. And he said to me, "Oh Annie, that would never happen because of our powerful interceptor system." Okay. Well, he's wrong. Let me tell you about our powerful interceptor system. First of all, we have 44 interceptor missiles total, period, full stop. Let me repeat, 44. Earlier we were talking about Russia's 1,670 deployed nuclear weapons. How are those 44 interceptor missiles going to work? And they also have a success rate of around 50%. So they work 50% of the time.

I'm looking for a hopeful thing here about North Korea. How many deployed nuclear warheads does North Korea have? So does the current system, as we described it, the interceptors and so on, have a hope against the North Korean attack? The one that you mentioned people are worried about. So North Korea has 50, let's say 50 nuclear weapons right now. Some NGOs put it at more than 100. It's impossible to know because North Korea's nuclear weapons program has no transparency. They're the only nuclear-armed nation that doesn't announce when they do a ballistic missile test. Everyone else does. No one wants to start a nuclear war by accident. So if Russia is going to launch an ICBM, they tell us. If we're going to launch one, and I'm talking test runs here, with a dummy warhead, we tell them. Not North Korea. That's a fact. So we're constantly up against the fear of North Korea. In the scenario, I have the incoming North Korean one-megaton weapon coming in, and the interceptor system tries to shoot it down. So there's not enough time. And this, by the way, I ran through by all generals from the Pentagon who run these scenarios for NORAD and confirmed all of this as fact. This is the situation.

People forget. You mentioned the nuclear war scenarios that the Pentagon runs. I'd love to... What do you know about those? I mean, again, they are very classified. I mean, it was interesting coming across levels of classification I didn't even know existed. ECI, for example, is exceptionally controlled information. But the Pentagon nuclear war gaming scenarios, they're almost all still classified. One of them was declassified recently, if you can call it that. I show an image of it in the book, and it's just basically almost entirely redacted. And then there'll be a date, or it'll say, "Phase one." And that one was called Proud Prophet. But what was incredible about the declassification process of that is it allowed a couple of people who were there to talk about it, and that's why we have that information.

Who are the people around the President of the United States that give advice in this six minute window? How many of them just, maybe you could speak to the detail of that, but also to the spirit of the way they see the world. How many of them are warmongers? How many of them are kind of big picture, peace, humanity type of thinkers? Well, again, we're talking about that six minute window, so it's not exactly like you can, let me put a pot of coffee on and really tell me what you think and we can strategize here, right? You have your SecDef and your chairman, maybe the vice chairman.

Not to be political and not to be ageist, but do cognitive abilities and all that kind of stuff come into play here? So if so much is riding on the president, is there tests that are conducted? Is there regular training procedures on the president that you're aware of? Do you know? I don't think that has anything to do with ageism. I think it's an earnest question, a really powerful one. And if people were to ask that question of themselves or their sort of dinner party guests or their family around the dinner table guests, you might come to a real good conclusion about how bad our political system is and how bad our presidential candidates are. Because why on earth there would be two candidates, one of whom has cognitive problems and the other of whom has judgment problems? These are the two biggest issues with the nuclear launch, judgment and cognition. And so where's the young-ish, thoughtful, forward looking, wise, dedicated civil servant running for president? I know that sounds fantastical, but I wish it weren't.

What would you do if you were the commander of STRATCOM in that situation? What would you do? Because I think my gut reaction right now, if you just throw me in there, I would refuse orders. Okay, so good question. I asked that exact question to one of my very helpful sources on the book, Dr. Glen McDuff, who is at Los Alamos and who for a while was the classified... They have a museum that's classified within the lab, and he was the historian in charge of it. He's a nuclear weapons engineer. He worked on Star Wars during the Reagan era. And he does a lot having to do with the history of Los Alamos. By the way, because I've reported on nuclear weapons for 12 years now, and Oppenheimer movie had a very, to me, positive impact on Los Alamos' transparency with people like me. They had a real willingness to share information. I think before perhaps they were on their heels feeling they needed to be on the defensive, but now they're much more forthcoming. They were super helpful. I can tell you the origin story of the football, which they declassified for the book. But I asked this question to Dr. Glen McDuff in a different manner. I said, "Is there a chance that the STRATCOM commander would defy orders?" And he said, "Annie, you have a better chance winning Powerball."

How much do you know, in the same way that you know about the United States, how much do you know about the Russian side? Maybe the Chinese side, India and Pakistan, all of this? How their thinking differs, perhaps? Well, for that, you want to go to the experts. So for Russia, for example, there's a guy called Pavel Podvig who is probably the West's top expert on Russian nuclear forces. He works in parallel with the U.N. He also studied in Moscow. So my information comes from him. You do all the footwork to know what questions to ask, and then you take the very specific questions to him. And I learned from him about how the Russian command and control goes down. And it's very similar to ours, because America and Russia have been at sort of nuclear dueling with one another for 75 years now. And so everything we have, they have, with the exception of we have a great satellite system and they have a super flawed one. Theirs is called Tundra. And even Pavel Podvig admitted that there's serious flaws in Tundra. The Russian satellite system, for example, can mistake sunlight for flames, can mistake clouds for a nuclear launch. This is a fact.

You were talking about the procedure with the football. Is there any concern for cyber attacks? For security concerns at every level here, false signals, errors, shutting down the channels of communication through cyber attacks, all that kind of stuff? To answer those questions, I interviewed a number of people, but most specifically General Touhill, who was Obama's cyber chief. He was actually America's first cyber chief. The nuclear command and control system and really the triad functions on analog systems. It functions on old school systems. If there's not digital interface, you can't hack into it. So most of the issues that I raise in the book have to do with what happens to cyber after a nuclear attack? What happens to cyber in the minutes after a bomb, a nuclear weapon strikes America, and how that impacts the ability for people to communicate with one another? That's when chaos takes control.

And then the power grid goes out. Basically everything we rely on in terms of systems in our way of life goes out. You write, "Those who somehow managed to escape death by the initial blast, shockwave, and firestorm suddenly realize an insidious truth about nuclear war, that they're entirely on their own." Here begins a "fight for food and water." I mean, that is a wake-up call on top of a wake-up call that we go back to a kind of primitive fight for survival, each on their own. And by the way, those details were given to me by Obama's FEMA director, Craig Fugate. FEMA is the agency in America that plans for nuclear war. And what Fugate said to me was, "Annie, we plan for asteroid strikes. These are called low probability but high consequence events." And FEMA is the organization that when there's a hurricane or an earthquake or a flood, FEMA steps in and they do what's called population protection planning. They take care of people. And what Fugate told me is after a nuclear strike, after a bolt out of the blue attack, he used those terms, there is no population protection. Everyone's dead. And he means that metaphorically, but also kind of more literally. Because he just said at that point, "You just hope that you stocked Pedialyte."

For that, I was super privileged to talk to Professor Brian Toon, who's one of the original five authors of the nuclear winter theory. That theory was published in the early 1980s. One of Professor Toon's professors was Carl Sagan, who was sort of the most famous author of the nuclear winter theory. There were all kinds of controversies about it when it came out, including the Defense Department saying it was Soviet propaganda, which it wasn't. What the nuclear winter authors conceded back in the '80s was that their modeling was just the best it could be based on what they had at the time. And so, now flash forward to where we are in 2024, and talking to Professor Toon who's been working on this issue for all these decades since, he shared with me how the climate models today with the systems we have, the computer systems, reveal that actually nuclear winter is worse.

Let me ask you about the great filter. When you look up into our galaxy, into our universe, look up at the sky, do you think there's other alien civilizations that are contending with some similar questions? Perhaps the reason we have not definitively seen alien civilizations is because the others have failed to find a solution to this great filter. Something like nuclear weapons. I'm not sure. I'm going to have to think about that question. But what does come to mind is an answer that was given to me similarly by Ed Mitchell, who went to the moon. He was the sixth man to walk on the moon. And so, his opinion, I think, might count a little more than mine on that subject because his lens is so much greater.

I'd love to ask you about the extrasensory perception. You've written, like you said, the book Phenomena on the secret history of the US government's investigations into extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. What are some of the more interesting extrasensory abilities that were explored by the government, and maybe just in general, ESP. What is it? What do you know of it? The book was so interesting to report because I spend so much time dealing with mechanized systems, machines, war machines, and yet the military and intelligence were and continue to be incredibly interested in the human mind, in consciousness. And so, if one is called hard science, what we're talking about now is called squishy science. It was really interesting to delve into that world. It just couldn't be farther from weapons and war, or could it?

You mentioned you wrote a book on Area 51. For people who don't know, you've written a lot about security, the military, secrets, all of this kind of stuff. So Area 51 is one of the legendary centers of all of these kinds of topics. So high level first is what is Area 51, as you understand it, as you've written about the lore and the reality. I think everybody wants to know about Area 51, because it's like this American enigma. It's like to some people, it's the Shangri-La of test bed aerospace programs, and to others, it's the place of captured aliens and everything in between. I had the great fortune of interviewing 75 people who lived and worked at that base for extended periods of time, mostly leading up to the '90s because everything since then is classified. So things get declassified after decades. Not everything but some. And that allows you to piece together stories.

So there's a lot of incredible technological work going on there. So the legend, the lore, like you said, aliens, were there ever aliens in Area 51 as you understand it? So I've interviewed hundreds of people.

So if you believe that we're alone in this universe, that's a great motivator to build rockets and become multi-planetary and save ourselves, especially in the case of nuclear war, because otherwise, whatever this special sauce, this flame of consciousness will go out if we destroy ourselves on this earth. And for people like Elon, it's too high of a probability that we destroy ourselves on earth not to try to become multi-planetary. In your book on Area 51, you propose an explanation that I think some people have criticized at the very end that this might've been a disinformation campaign from, I guess Stalin, that the Roswell incident was a remotely piloted plane with a quote, "grotesque child-sized aviator". Just looking back at all that now, years later, what's the probability that it's true? What's the probability it's not? So you know I've never revealed to that sources.

And like you said, the programs both on the Soviet side and the American side, conflicting, I think is the term we used previously, ethically, morally, on all fronts. People have done some horrible things in the name of security. In your book, Surprise, Kill, Vanish, you write about the CIA and the so-called president's third option. So first of all, first option being diplomacy and second option being war. So when diplomacy is inadequate and war is a terrible idea, we go to the third option. And this third option is about covert action, and it's about assassination. So how much of that does the CIA do? That is open to debate. We know from the historical record that the CIA was heavily involved in assassination during the Cold War. That's non-negotiable. Even the names of the programs that were assigned to perform assassinations are fascinating and now declassified, like Eisenhower's, for example, was the Health Alteration Committee.

And I also would just like to say that I appreciate that you said, "Great question, I don't know." Not enough people say I don't know and that's a sign of a great journalist. But speaking about things you might not know about, let me ask you about something going on currently. So recently Alexei Navalny died in prison, perhaps was killed in prison. What's your sense from looking at it? Do you think he died of natural causes in prison? Do you think it's possible he was assassinated? Russia, Ukraine, Mossad, CIA, whoever has interest in this particular war. For that, I look directly to the historical record. Having written about Russian assassination campaigns and programs since the earliest days of the Cold War. And Russia has a long history of assassinating, murdering dissidents. And in Surprise, Kill, Vanish, I tell the story of an actual KGB assassin named Khokhlov who knocked on the door of the man he was assigned to kill. And by the way, this all comes from a book that Khokhlov wrote later. Because he defected to the United States. He knocks on the door and the guy answers the door. And instead of killing him, he has this moment of conscious of crisis or crisis of conscience and says, "I can't kill you, even though that's what I'm supposed to do." And then sits down with the guy and together decides, okay, we're going to defect. We're going to let the Western intelligence agencies know what we're doing here. And the CIA got involved.

So in the style of KGB assassinations. Is there something you can comment on about the ways that KGB operates versus the CIA when we look at the history of the two organizations, the Cold War, after World War II and the leading up to today? I mean, my feeling on that is always that there's a thread somewhere in declassified documentation about these programs of America working to maintain assemblance of democratic ideals, however surprising that may be. In other words, always trying to, I don't want to say fight fair because killing people isn't fair, but versus a certain ruthlessness, a real sinister totalitarian type ruthlessness certainly from Soviet Russia. I'm far less familiar with modern day Russian assassination activities, although we certainly know on the record that they exist. Some people have done great reporting on that. But there seems to be almost a sadism about the Russian programs that I personally have not seen in the American programs.

If we could return to nuclear war, you've briefly mentioned that a lot of things go back to the Third Reich and Hitler. If we go back to World War II, we look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dropping of the two bombs. I would love to get your opinion on whether we should or shouldn't have done that. And also to get your opinion on what would've happened if Hitler and Germany built the bomb first. Do you think it was possible he could have built the bomb first? In my researching Third Reich weapons for Operation Paperclip, because of course we got a lot of those scientists, after.

You open the book with a Churchill quote, " The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world. And before history began, murders strife was universal and unending." Do you think there will always be war? Do you think that there is some deep human way in which we're tending to this global war eternally? Well, the optimistic answer of that would be that we could evolve beyond that. Because certainly if we look at our ancestors, they had not developed their consciousness as far as we have to be able to build the tools that we have. So the hopeful answer is we will evolve beyond this brute force, kill the other guy attitude. Certainly these are questions that will become more obvious over time. I just want to play my little part in this world that I live in as the storyteller who brings information to people so that they can have these questions with themselves, with their friends, with their families. And I think in asking that very question, what you're really saying is, why don't we evolve beyond war fighting?

I mean, I am a fundamentally optimistic person. I must have come out of the shoot that way. Because I just am. Even though I write about really grim things, I get inspired by them because I do always believe in evolution. I also have the greatest family ever. Two kids, Jet and Finley, shout out to them. They're Lex Fridman fans. Oh yeah, oh you guys.