How often do you think about all the ways the world could end?
as its host gray area, I find myself engaging in this macabre exercise more than most. We did the episode Runaway AI And climate change And Fear of extinction. One of the few topics we haven’t covered though is nuclear war. Which is surprising because this scenario is basically near the top of every list of existential threats – and now seems to be newly important in recent news. North Korea, IranAnd China.
Annie Jacobsen is a reporter and author of a new book called Nuclear War: A Scenario. I’ve read a lot of books for the show and it’s stuck with me for longer than I care to remember. This is a book that clearly wants to shock the reader and it succeeds.
Jacobsen takes you through all the ways a nuclear disaster could unfold, and he gives a play-by-play breakdown of the horrific choreography that occurs in the minutes immediately following a nuclear missile launch.
So I invited Jacobsen gray area To talk about what a nuclear exchange would really look like and how dangerously close we are to that reality. As always, there is a lot More in the full podcast, so listen and follow along gray area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sean Ealing
I suspect that the image of the atomic bomb we still have is the image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that was a long time ago. How powerful are the thermonuclear weapons we are talking about today?
Annie Jacobsen
To give you an idea of a thermonuclear weapon, I went to one final source, a 93-year-old nuclear weapons engineer named Richard Gerwin, perhaps the most famous nuclear weapons engineer, physicist, presidential advisor, still alive. Garwin drew the plans for the first thermonuclear weapon. Its code name was Ivy Mike; It’s on the cover of my book. It was 10.4 megatons.
So consider that the Hiroshima bomb you mentioned was 15 kilotons and then think about 10.4 megatons. That’s about 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs detonated at the same time from the same central point. Garwin explained it to me in the simplest terms when he asked me to imagine this fact: a thermonuclear weapon using an atomic bomb as its fuse inside the weapon. That’s how powerful it is.
Sean Ealing
Draw the picture for me, as you do in the opening pages of the book, where you imagine a nuke being dropped on Washington, DC. What happens next?
Annie Jacobsen
So with a 1-megaton bomb on Washington, DC, what happens in the first millisecond is that this thermonuclear flash expands into a fireball that’s a mile of pure fire. That’s 19 football fields of fire.
Then the edges of the fireball compress—called a steep-fronted blast wave—as a thick wall of air pushes out, three miles in its path, downing everything in every direction, as it’s accompanied by hundreds-of-mile-an-hour winds.
It’s like Washington, DC, has just been hit by an asteroid and its accompanying ripples. When you think about this initial 9-mile diameter ring, imagine every single engineered structure — buildings, bridges, etc. — collapsing.
There is also a thermonuclear flash that sets everything on fire and melts lead, steel and titanium. Nine miles of outer roads have been transformed into molten asphalt lava. The details are so horrible; It is important to note that these are not from my imagination. They are drawn from Defense Department documents as the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense monitor the damage nuclear bombs do to people and things since the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Sean Ealing
When all this happens, we are at what you call “Day Zero” and then nuclear winter begins. What does that look like?
Annie Jacobsen
A major premise of the book was to take the reader from the nuclear launch to nuclear winter and the terrifying 72-minute period from the nuclear launch to Day Zero. As Stratcom Commander General [C. Robert] Kehler told me in an interview when we were talking about the nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States: “Yes, Annie, the world could end in the next few hours.”
So the nuclear winter begins in essence after the bombs stop falling and there is a process of mega-fire. The area around each nuclear explosion is eventually going to turn into what is now known as a mega-fire. You’re talking about 100 to 300 square miles of fire per bomb where everything in that area burns until it no longer exists. This is because, of course, there are no first responders anymore. No fire trucks, no way to put anything out.
With all these explosions, 330 billion pounds of soot is elevated into the troposphere. That’s enough ink to block 70 percent of the sun, of course, causing dramatic temperature plunges of up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the mid-latitudes.
These regions, for example, from Iowa to Ukraine, the whole band of mid-latitudes, the water bodies of that region are frozen in ice sheets. With this temperature drop, your agriculture is dead and that’s why 5 billion people will now die as a result of a nuclear winter after a nuclear war.
Sean Ealing
And if I remember correctly, those models also predicted that temperatures in places like Iowa and Ukraine would basically not go above freezing for at least six years. Is it correct?
Annie Jacobsen
That’s right.
I was reading Carl Sagan, one of the original five authors of the nuclear winter theory, who wrote about how after these bodies of water freeze for years, after they thaw and expose all the dead people, then you have to deal with pathogens and plagues. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier during the Kennedy administration, once told Kennedy when the two of them talked, “After a nuclear war, the survivors will envy the dead.”
Sean Ealing
After all the reporting you’ve done, are you sure there are enough checks and railroads in place to make sure we avoid a nuclear exchange if that’s possible?
Annie Jacobsen
Let me answer this question with a quote from the current Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, who said, “The world is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”
Sean Ealing
What does that really mean?
Annie Jacobsen
It means exactly what he says: that we can only have an accident. We may have an accident caused by a misinterpretation. A miscalculation would make a nuclear-armed nation think that another nuclear-armed nation is doing something it probably isn’t.
This leads us to some of the crazy policies that exist on the books, things like “launch alert” where once the US knows it’s being attacked by an ICBM or a sub-launched ballistic missile, the president then has six minutes with his nuclear weapons. To decide how to react. That’s what Guterres is talking about when he talks about miscalculations.
Sean Ealing
How much room is there for human agency in these command and control protocols? You always hear people say in presidential elections, “Do we really trust that guy with nukes?” But what is the right way to think about this?
Annie Jacobsen
You are raising an existential question that everyone should be asking.
Some of us are living a 79-year trial. Yes, you can say, “Deterrence has held up all these years.” Never mind that there used to be two nuclear weapon states and now there are nine; Don’t think you have new technology elements coming into the mix.
Never mind that nuclear saber-rattling has suddenly become acceptable among world leaders. It’s amazing. If you look at history, this has never been a part of rhetoric, especially from the mouth of a US president, as it was with former President Trump.
When I began reporting this book, the fundamental question I was trying to answer was not, “Is resistance great?” But what if resistance fails instead? The Department of Defense predicates its nuclear arsenal on the assumption that deterrence will exist. This is the basic assumption. It’s written all over the place. “There will be resistance.”
Well, I also had a discussion with the Deputy General of Stratcom talking to his colleagues, not in a classified setting but in a somewhat rarefied setting. What he said was: “If resistance fails, it all opens up.”
Sean Ealing
I think it was former CIA Director Michael Hayden who clearly told you that this process is designed for speed and decision. It is not designed to debate decisions. On some level, I get it. But the automation of the whole process, bet, is more than a little scary.
Annie Jacobsen
You better believe it. And Hayden actually told members of Congress that. And anyway, I believe that with the speech of the former president, Donald Trump, all that talk about “fire and fury” with North Korea, it worried Congress so much that they issued several reports that some of the concepts were not clear to the public. .
One of them is called Single Presidential Authority. So while Trump was saying, “I have a big button” and that kind of rhetoric, Congress released a couple of reports that made it clear that the President of the United States has sole presidential power. That means he doesn’t have to ask anyone for permission to start a nuclear war — not the secretary of defense, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not Congress.
Sean Ealing
You write something near the end of the book imagining that the secretary of defense, who is the acting president in this hypothetical situation, if this person has a crisis of conscience and wonders, “Is there any point in shooting these bombs and wiping out the other half of humanity?”
And it’s pretty clear that there’s really no room for that because the whole argument for resistance is predicated on the absolute promise that the process is static and automatic. What makes it a deterrent. But then again, it traps the actors in the process so they don’t really have any control over it.
Annie Jacobsen
Let me add something because Dr. Glenn McDuff of the Los Alamos Laboratory, who is both a nuclear weapons engineer who worked on the Star Wars program during the Reagan administration and a historian in the lab’s classified library. I asked him, “Do you think anyone would disobey the order?” And he said, “Annie, you have a better chance of winning the Powerball.”
Sean Ealing
Is there some near-future where, to further automate this process, we just have AI controlling the whole thing from start to finish?
Annie Jacobsen
I can’t imagine a worse nightmare scenario than bringing AI, or more machine-learning technology into the mix. There is an incredible amount of machine learning built into the system. For example, satellites detect launches and then process that data in space. About one-tenth of the way to the moon is where a Geosync satellite sits and that data is processed and streamed to US nuclear command and control bunkers. This is happening in seconds. But for the idea of putting an “AI” in the mix of a human decision-making layer or detection layer, that seems like a recipe for disaster, and is one of the reasons that many systems in the triad are still analog, not digital. In other words, they tend to be the same systems as when they were invented decades ago so they can’t be hacked.
Listen to the rest of the conversation And don’t forget to follow gray area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, pandoraOr wherever you listen to podcasts.
