Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy | Lex Fridman Podcast #420
- 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 minutes. Some of them on the bombers
might take an hour or so. Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons, same scenario, their weapon 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, 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. - The following is a
conversation with Annie Jacobsen, an investigative journalist,
Pulitzer Prize finalist, and author of several
amazing books on war, weapons, government secrecy,
and national security, including the books titled "Area 51", "Operation Paperclip", "The
Pentagon's Brain Phenomena", "Surprise, Kill, Vanish", and her new book, "Nuclear War". This is a Lex Fridman
podcast, to support it, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here's Annie Jacobsen. Let's start with an immensely dark topic, nuclear war, how many
people would a nuclear war between the United States and Russia kill? - So I'm coming back
at you with a very dark answer and a very big number. And that number is 5 billion people. - You go second by
second, minute by minute, hour by hour what would happen if the nuclear war started. So there's a lot of angles
from which I would love to talk to you about this. First, how would the deaths happen in the short term and the long term? - So to start off, the
reason I wrote the book is so that readers like you could see in appalling detail just how horrific nuclear war would be. And as you said, second
by second, minute minute. The book covers nuclear
launch to nuclear winter. I purposely don't get into the
politics that lead up to that or the national security maneuvers or the posturing or any of that, I just want people to know nuclear war is insane. And every source I
interviewed for this book, from Secretary of Defense, all retired, nuclear sub force commander,
Stratcom commander, FEMA director, on and on and on, nuclear weapons engineers,
they all shared with me the common denominator
that nuclear war is insane. First millions, then tens of millions, then hundreds of millions
of people will die in the first 72 minutes of a nuclear war. And then comes nuclear winter where the billions happen from starvation. And so the shock power
of all of this is meant for each and every one
of us to say, wait, what? This actually exists behind
the veil of national security, most people do not think about
nuclear war on a daily basis, and yet hundreds of thousands of people in the nuclear command and control are at the ready in the event it happens. - But it doesn't take too
many people to start one. - In the words of Richard Garwin, who was the nuclear weapons engineer who drew the plans for the
Ivy Mike thermonuclear bomb, the first thermonuclear bomb ever exploded in 1952. Garwin shared with me his opinion that all it takes is one nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal
to start a nuclear war. And that's how I begin the scenario. - What are the different
ways it could start? Like literally, who presses a button, and what does it take to press a button? - So the way it starts is in space, meaning the US Defense Department has a early warning system. And the system in space is called SBIRS, a constellation of satellites
that is keeping an eye on all of America's enemies, so that the moment an ICBM launches, the satellite in space,
and I'm talking about one 10th of the way to the moon, that's how powerful these
satellites are in geosync, they see the hot rocket exhaust on the ICBM in a fraction of a second after it launches, a fraction of a second. And so there begins this horrifying policy called launch on warning, and
that's the US counter attack. Meaning the reason that the United States is so ferociously watching
for a nuclear launch somewhere around the globe is
so that the nuclear command and control system in the
US can move into action to immediately make a counterstrike. Because we have that
policy, launch on warning, which is exactly like it says, it means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack. It will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits. - So the president, as part of the launch on warning policy, has six minutes. I guess it 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, you say to yourself, wait a minute, how could that possibly be? And 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, 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. But the idea behind that is that nuclear war will unfold so fast, only one person can be
in charge, the president, he asked permission of no one, not the Secretary of
Defense, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, not the US Congress. So built into that is
this extraordinary speed, you talk about the six minute window, and some people say,
oh, that's ridiculous, how do we know that six minute window? Well, here's the best
sort of hitting the nail on the head statement I can give you, which is, in President Reagan's memoirs, he refers to the six
minute window and he says, he calls it irrational, which it is, he says, "How can anyone
make a decision to launch nuclear weapons based on
a blip on a radar scope?" His words, to unleash Armageddon. And yet, that is the
reality behind nuclear war. - Just imagine sitting there, one person, because a president is a
human being, sitting there, just got the warning that Russia launched. You have six minutes. I meditate on my mortality every day, and here you would be
sitting and meditating, contemplating not just your own mortality, but the mortality of all the
people you know, loved ones. Just imagining, like what
would be going through my head is all the people I know and love, like personally, and knowing
that they'll be no more, most likely, and if they somehow survive, they will be suffering
and will eventually die. I guess the question
that kept coming up is, how do we stop this? Is it inevitable that
it's going to be escalated to a full on nuclear war
that destroys everything? And it seems like it
will be, it's inevitable. In the position of the president, it's almost inevitable
that they have to respond. - I mean, one of the
things I found shocking was how little, apparently
most presidents know about the responsibility that
literally lays at their feet. So you may think through
this six minute window, I may think through
this six minute window, but what I learned, like for example, former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, was really helpful in
explaining this to me, because before he was SecDef, he served as the director of the CIA. And before that he was the
White House Chief of Staff. And so he has seen these different roles that have been so close to the president, but he explained to me that when he was the White House Chief of
Staff for President Clinton, he noticed how President
Clinton didn't want to ever really deal
with the nuclear issue, because he had so many
other issues to deal with. And that only when Panetta became Secretary of Defense, he told me, did he really realize the
weight of all of this. Because he knew he would be the person that the president would turn to, were he to be notified
of a nuclear attack. And by the way, it's
the launch on warning, it's the ballistic missile seen from outer space by the satellite, and then there also must
be a second confirmation from a ground radar system. But in that process, which
is just a couple minutes, everyone is getting ready
to notify the president, and one of the first
people that gets notified by NORAD, or by Stratcom, or by NRO, these different parties that all see the early warning data, one of the first peoples that's notified is the Secretary of Defense
as well as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because those two together are
going to brief the president about, sir, you have
six minutes to decide. 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 like, 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. - Absolutely.
- 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? - Well, when nuclear war starts, there's no like battle for
New York or battle for Moscow, it's just literally, it
was called in the Cold War push button warfare, but in
essence, that is what it is. Let's get some numbers on
the table if you don't mind, because when you're saying
like, wait a minute, we're just hoping that it holds, let's just talk about Russia and the US, the arsenals that are literally pointed at one another right now. So 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 minutes. Some of them on the bombers
might take an hour or so. Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons, same scenario, their weapon
systems are on par with ours. That's not to mention the
12,500 nuclear weapons amongst the nine nuclear armed nations. But when you think about
those kind of arsenals of just between the
United States and Russia, and you realize everything
can be launched in seconds and minutes, then you
realize the madness of mad, that this idea that no one would launch because it would assure
everyone's destruction, yes, but what if someone did? And in my interviews
with scores of top tier national security advisors,
people who advise the president, people who are responsible
for these decisions, if they had to be made, every single one of them
said it could happen. They didn't say this would never happen. And so the idea is worth thinking about, because I believe that it pulls back the veil on a fundamental security that if someone were to use
a tactical nuclear weapon, oh well, it's just an escalation. It's far more than that. - 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, like 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
like 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. - That one is a
particularly terrifying one. So land launched missiles, rockets with a warhead, can't be recalled. - Cannot be recalled or redirected. And speaking of how little
the presidents generally know, as we were talking a moment ago, President Reagan in 1983
gave a press conference where he misstated that submarine launched ballistic missiles could be recalled. They cannot be recalled. Here's the guy in charge of the arsenal if it has to get let loose, and he doesn't even know
that they cannot be recalled. So this is the kind of
misinformation and disinformation. UN Secretary General, Antonio
Guterres, recently said, when he was talking about
the conflicts rising around the world, he said,
"We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away
from nuclear Armageddon." - So just to sort of linger
on the previous point of tactical nukes, so you were
describing strategic nukes, land launched bombers, submarine launched, what are tactical nukes? - So that's the triad,
and we have the triad and Russia has the triad. Tactical nuclear weapons
are smaller warheads that were designed to be used in battle. And that is what Russia
is sort of threatening to use right now, that is
this idea that you would make a decision on the battlefield in an operational environment to use a tactical nuclear weapon. You're just sort of upping the ante. But the problem is that all treaties are based on this idea of no nuclear use. You cannot cross that line. And so the what would happen
if the line is crossed is so devastating to even consider, I think that the conversation
is well worth having among everyone that is
in a power of position. As the UN Secretary General
said, "This is madness." This is madness, we must
come back from the brink, we are at the brink. - Can we talk about some other numbers? So you mentioned the number of warheads, so land launched, how long
does it take to travel across the ocean from the
United States to Russia, from Russia to the United States, from China to the United
States, approximately how long? - When I was writing an
earlier book on DARPA, the Pentagon Science Agency, I went to a library down in San Diego called the Giza Library, to
look at Herb York's papers, Herb Bjork was the first chief scientist for the Pentagon for
DARPA, then called ARPA. And I had been trying to get the number from the various agencies
that be, to answer you, like, what is the exact
number and how do we know it? And like, does it change? And as technology advances,
does that number reduce? All these kinds of questions, and no one will answer that
question on an official level. And so much to my surprise, I found the answer in Herb
York's dusty archive of papers. And this is information
that was jealously guarded, I mean, it's not necessarily classified, but it certainly wasn't out there. And I felt like, wow, Herb
York left these behind for someone like me to find. And he wanted to know the
answer to your question, and as the guy in charge of it all, so he hired this group
of scientists who then, and still are in many ways, like the Superman
scientists of the Pentagon, and they're called the JASON Scientists, many conspiracies about them abound, I interviewed their founder and have interviewed many of them, but they whittled the
number down to seconds. Specifically for Herb York,
and it goes like this, 'cause this is where my jaw
dropped and I went, wow, okay. So 26 minutes and 40 seconds from a launchpad in the Soviet
Union to the East coast. And it happens in three phases, very simple and interesting to remember, 'cause then suddenly all
of this makes more sense, boost phase, mid-course phase,
and then terminal phase. Boost phase, five minutes, that's when the rocket launches. So you just imagine a rocket
going off the launchpad and the fire beneath it, again, that's why the satellites can see it, now it's becoming visual,
now it makes sense to me. Five minutes, and that's where
the rocket can be tracked. And then imagine learning, wait a minute, after five minutes, the
rocket can no longer be seen from space. The satellite can only see
the hot rocket exhaust. Then the missile enters its
mid-course phase, 20 minutes. And that's the ballistic part of it, where it's kind of
flying up at between 500 and 700 miles above the earth, and moving very fast and with the earth, until it gets very close to its target, and the last 100 seconds
are terminal phase. It's where the warhead reenters the atmosphere and detonates, 26 minutes and 40 seconds. Now, in my scenario, I open with North Korea launching a
one megaton nuclear warhead at Washington DC, that's the
nihilistic madman maneuver, that's the bolt out of the blue attack that everyone in Washington
will tell you they're afraid of. And North Korea has a little
bit different geography, and so I had MIT professor
emeritus Ted Postol do the math, 33 minutes from a launchpad in Pyongyang to the East
Coast of the United States. You get the idea, it's about 30 minutes, but hopefully now that allows readers to suddenly see all this as a real, you almost see it as poetry, as terrible as that may sound, you can visualize it and
suddenly it makes sense. And I think the sensemaking part of it is really what I'm after in this book, because I want people to
understand, on the one hand, it's incredibly simple,
it's just the people that have made it so complicated. - But it's one of those
things that can change all of world history
in a matter of minutes. We just don't, as a human civilization, have experience with that. But it doesn't mean it'll never happen. It can happen just like that. - I mean, I think what you're after, and I couldn't agree more with is like, why is this fundamentally annihilating system, a
system of mass genocide, as John Rubel, in the book refers to it, why does it still exist? We've had 75 years since there have been two superpowers with the nuclear bomb. So that threat has been there for 75 years and we have managed to stay alive. One of the reasons why
so many of the sources in the book agreed to talk to me, people who had not
previously gone on the record about all of this, was because
they are now approaching the end of their lives. They spent their lives dedicated to preventing nuclear World War iii. And they'll be the
first people to tell you we're closer to this as a
reality than ever before. And so the only bright side of any of this is that the answer lies most
definitely in communication. - 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 kind of realize
about the submarines, I mean, the submarines are what are called second strike capacity, and
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 are unstoppable,
they are unlocatable. The former chief of the
nuclear submarine forces, Admiral Michael Conner, told me, "It's easier to find a
grapefruit sized object in space than a submarine under the sea." So these things are like hell machines, and they're moving around
throughout the oceans, ours, Russia's, China's, maybe
North Korea's, constantly, and we now know they're
sneaking up to the east and west coast of the United States within a couple hundred miles. How do we know that, why do we know that? Well, I found a document
inside of a budget that the defense department
was going to congress for more money recently and showed maps of precisely where these submarines, how close they were getting
to the eastern seaboard. - So wait, wait, wait, so nuclear subs are getting within 200 miles? - Couple hundred miles, yes, they weren't precise on the number, but when you look at the map-
- Couple hundred. - Yep, and that's when
you're talking about under 10 minutes from launch to strike. - Undetectable. - And they're undetectable,
the map making is done after the fact because
of a lot of underwater surveillance systems that we have, but in real time, you cannot
find a nuclear submarine. And just the way a submarine launches, goes 150 feet below the surface to launch its ballistic missile. I mean, it comes out of the missile tube, and with enough thrust, the thrusters, they ignite outside the water and then they move into boost. And so the technology involved is just stunning and shocking, and again, trillions of dollars
spent so that we never have a nuclear war, but
my God, what if we did. - 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 like pressing the button to them emerging from
underground for launch? And is that part detectable
or it's only the heat. - So what's interesting about the silos, America has 400 silos, we've had more. But we have 400 and they're underground, and they're called Minuteman, after the Revolutionary War heroes. But the sort of joke in Washington is they're not called
Minuteman for nothing, because they can launch in one minute. So 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. The submarines take about 14 or 15 minutes from the launch command
to actually launching. And that has to do, I surmise, with the location of the
submarine, its depth. Some of these things are
so highly classified, and other details are shockingly available if you look deep enough or
if you ask enough questions, and you can go from one
document to the next to the next and really find these answers. - Not to ask top secret questions, but to what degree do you think the Russians know the
locations of the silos in the US and vice versa? - Lex, you and I can find
the location of every silo right now.
- Oh no. - They're all there, and before
they were there on Google, they were there in maps,
because we're a democracy and we make these things known. Now, what's tricky is that
Russia and North Korea rely upon what are called
Road Mobile Launchers. So Russia has a lot of underground silos, all of the scenario takes you through these different facilities
that really do exist, and they're all sourced with
how many weapons they have and their launch procedures and whatnot. But in addition to
having underground silos, they have road mobile launchers. And that means you just have
one of these giant ICBMs on a 22 axle truck that can move stealthily around the country
so that it can't be targeted by the US Defense Department. We don't have those in
America, because presumably, the average American
isn't gonna go for like, the ICBM road mobile launcher driving down the street
in your town or city, which is why the defense
department will justify we need the second strike
capacity capability, the submarines, because I mean, the wonky stuff that is worth looking into if you really dig the book
and are like, wait a minute, it's all footnoted
where you can learn more about how these systems
have changed over time, and why more than anything,
it's very difficult to get out of this catch 22 conundrum that we need nuclear
weapons to keep us safe, that is the real enigma, because the other guys have them. And the other guys have
sort of more sinister ways of using them, or at least
that's what the nomenclature out of the Pentagon will always
be when anyone tries to say, we just need to really think
about full disarmament. - You've written about
intelligence agencies. How good are the intelligence
agencies on this? How much does CIA know about the Russian launch
sites, and capabilities, and command and control procedures and all of this, and vice versa? - I mean, all of this,
because it's decades old, is really well known. If you go to the Federation
of American Scientists, they have a team led by a
guy called Hans Kristensen who runs what's called
the nuclear notebook, and he and his team every
year are keeping track of this number of warheads on these number of weapons systems, and because of the treaties,
the different signatories to the treaty all report these numbers, and of course, the different
intelligence community people are keeping track of what's being revealed honestly and
reported with transparency and what is being hidden. The real issue is the new systems that Russia is working on right now, and that will lead us, we are kind of moving into an era whereby the threat of actually
having new weapon systems that are nuclear capable is very real, because of the escalating
tensions around the world. And that's where the CIA, I would guess, is doing most of its work right now. - So most of your research
is kind of looking at the older versions of the system, and presumably there's potentially secret development of new ones? Hopefully not.
- Which violates treaties. - Yes.
- So yes, that is where the intelligence agencies. But at a point it's overkill, literally and figuratively. People are up in arms about
these hypersonic weapons, well, we have a hypersonic
weapons program, FALCON, Google Black Swift,
this is Lockheed's doing. DARPA exists to create
the vast weapon systems of the future, that is its job, it has been doing that
since its creation in 1957. I would never believe that
we aren't ahead of everyone, call me over informed or
naive, one or the other. That would be my position, because DARPA works from the
chicken or the egg scenario, that once you learn about something, once you learn Russia's
created this typhoon submarine, which may or may not be viable, it's too late if you
don't already have one. - We'll probably talk
about DARPA a little bit. One of the things that
makes me sad about Lockheed, many things makes me sad about Lockheed, but one of the things is
because it's very top secret, you can't show off all
the incredible engineering going on there, the other thing
that's more philosophical, DARPA also, is that war seems to stimulate most of our, not most, but a large percent of our exciting innovation in engineering. But that's also the pragmatic
fact of life on earth, is that the risk of annihilation is a great motivator for innovation, for engineering and so on. But yes, I would not
discount the United States in its ability to build
the weapons of the future, nuclear included, again, terrifying. Can you tell me about the
nuclear football as it's called? - I think Americans are
familiar with the football, at least anyone who sort of follows national security concepts,
because it's a satchel, it's a leather satchel that
is always with a military aid, in secret service nomenclature,
that's the mill aid. 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 Lew 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, like about the mill aid. And Lew 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 kind of 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 mill aid
carrying that satchel, well, what's in that satchel? I really dug into that
to report this book. - What is in that satchel? (both giggling) - Well, okay, first of all, people always say it's
incredibly classified, I mean, people talk about
UFOs, it's incredibly, I mean, come on guys,
that is nothing burger, you wanna know what's really classified, what's in that football,
what's in that satchel? But the PEAD, presidential
emergency action directives, those have never been leaked,
no one knows what they are. What we do know from one of the mill aids who spoke on the record, a
guy called Buzz Patterson, he describes the president's orders, so if a nuclear war has begun, if the president has been told
there are nuclear missiles, one or more coming at the United States, you have to launch in a counter attack. The red clock is ticking, you have to get the blue
impact clock ticking. He needs to look at this list to decide what targets to strike and
what weapon systems to use. And that is what is on,
according to Buzz Patterson, a piece of sort of laminated plastic, he described it like a Denny's menu. And from that menu, the president chooses targets and chooses weapon systems. - And it's probably super old school, like all top secret systems are, because they have to be
tested over, and over, and over, and over, and over. - Yes, and it's non-digital. - Non-digital, it might literally be a Denny's menu from hell. - Right, and meanwhile I learned this only in reporting the book,
there is a identical black book inside the Stratcom bunker in Nebraska. Three command bunkers are
involved when nuclear war begins, there's the bunker beneath the Pentagon, which is called the National
Military Command Center. Then there is the bunker
beneath Cheyenne Mountain, which everyone, or many
people have heard of because it's been made famous in movies, that is a very real bunker. And then there is a third bunker, which people are not so familiar with, which is the bunker beneath
strategic command in Nebraska. And so it's described to me this way, the Pentagon bunker is the beating heart, the Cheyenne Mountain
bunker is the brains, and the Stratcom bunker is the muscle. The Stratcom commander will receive word from the president, launch orders, and then directs the 150,000 people beneath him what to do, from the bunker beneath Stratcom. He gets the orders, then he
has to run out of the building and jump onto what's
called the doomsday plane, we'll get into that in a minute, let me just finish the, I mean, but again- - This is good.
- These are the details, this is like, these are the systematic sequential details that happen in seconds and minutes, and reporting them, I never ceased to be amazed by what a system it is. A follows B, it's just numerical. - Yeah, but as we discuss this procedure, each individual person
that follows that procedure might lose the big picture
of the whole thing. I mean, especially when you
realize what is happening, that almost out of fear,
you just follow the steps. - Yep, or, okay, so imagine this, imagine being the president
and you got that six minute, you're looking at your
list of strike options, you're being briefed by your chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and your SecDef, and this other really spooky detail, in the Stratcom bunker, in addition to the nuclear strike
advisor who can answer very specific questions
if the president's like, wait a minute, why are we
striking that, not that? There's also a weather officer, and this is the kind of human detail that kept me up at night,
because that weather officer is in charge of explaining
to the president really fast, how many people are going
to die and how many people are going to die in minutes, weeks, months, and years
from radiation fallout. - Because a lot of that has to do with the weather system.
- Yes. Yes, and so the humanness balanced out with the
mechanization of it all, it's just really grotesque. - So the doomsday plane
from Stratcom, what's that? Where's it going, what's on it? - Okay, ready? It's gonna fly in circles. That's where it's going,
it's flying in circles around the United States of America, so that nuclear weapons can be launched from the air after the ground systems are taken out by the incoming ICBMs, or the incoming submarine
launched ballistic missiles. This has been in play since the fifties. These are the contingency plans for when nuclear war happens. So again, going back
to this absurd paradox, nuclear war will never happen. Mutual assured destruction, that is why deterrence will hold. Well, I found a talk
that the deputy director of Stratcom gave to a
very close knit group, where he said, "Yes, deterrence will hold, but if it fails, everything unravels." And think about that word unravels, and the unraveling is the
doomsday plane launches, the Stratcom commander jumps
in, he's in that plane, he's flying around the United States, and he's making decisions, because the Pentagon's been taken out. At 9/11, by the way, Bush
was in the doomsday plane. - And Bush had to make decisions quickly, but not so quickly, not as quickly as he would've needed to have done if there's a nuclear launch. - I mean.
- Six minutes. - It basically happens in three acts. There's the first 24
minutes, the next 24 minutes, and the last 24 minutes. And that is the reality
of nuclear weapons. - 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, like somebody who really
should have known this. 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 gonna work? And they also have a
success rate of around 50%, so they work 50% of the time. There are 40 of them in Alaska, and there are four of them at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara. And they are responsible
at about nine minutes into the scenario, after
the ICBM has finished that five minute boost
phase we talked about, now it's in mid-course phase, and the ground radar
systems have identified, yes, this is an incoming ICBM, and now the interceptor
missiles have to launch. It's essentially shooting
a missile with a missile, inside the interceptor, which
is just a big giant rocket, in its nose cone, it has what's called, the aptly named
Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle. There's no explosives in that thing, it's literally just going to take out the warhead, ideally, with force. So one of them is going like mock 20, and I mean, the speeds at
which these two moving objects hurdling through space
are going is astonishing, and the fact that
interception is even possible is really remarkable,
but it's only possible 50% of the time. - Is it possible that
we only know about 44, but there could be a lot more? - No, impossible. That I would be willing to bet. - And how well tested
are these interceptors? - Well, that's where
we get the success rate that's around 50% because of the tests. And actually, the interceptor program is, are you ready for this? It's on strategic pause right now, meaning the interceptor
missiles are there, but developing them and making them more effective is on strategic pause, because they can't be made more effective. People have these fantasies that we have a system like the Iron Dome, and they see this in current events, and they're like, oh, our
interceptors would do that, it's just simply not true. - Why can't an Iron Dome-like system be constructed for nuclear warheads? - We have systems I write
about called the THAAD system, which is ground based,
and then the Edge system, which is on vessels, and these are great at shooting down some rockets, but they can only shoot
them sort of one at a time, you cannot shoot the mother
load as it's coming in. Those are the smaller systems, the tactical nuclear weapons. And by the way, our THAAD systems
are all deployed overseas, and our Edge systems are all out at sea. And again, reporting that,
I was like, wait, what? You have to really hunker
down, are we sure about this? People really don't wanna
believe this is an actual fact. After 9/11, Congress considered putting Edge's missiles and
maybe even THAAD systems along the west coast of the United States to specifically deal with the threats against nuclear armed North Korea. But it hasn't done so yet, and again, you have to ask yourself, wait
a minute, this is insanity, one nuclear weapon gets
by any of these systems and it's full out nuclear warfare. So that's not the solution, more nuclear weapons is not the solution. - 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's gonna launch
an ICBM, they tell us, if we're gonna launch one, and
I'm talking test runs here, with the 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 by all generals from the Pentagon
who run these scenarios for NORAD, and confirmed
all of this as fact, this is the situation. So in the scenario I have
the nuclear ICBM coming in, the interceptor missiles try
to shoot down the warhead, the capability is not like
what's called shoot and look, there's not enough time to go, like, and we're gonna try to
get it, we missed it, okay, let's go for another
one, so you have to go. (mimicking shooting) So in my scenario, we fire off four, which is about what I
was told, one to four, because you're worried about the next one that's gonna come in. You're gonna use up 10%
of your missile force, of your interceptor force
on one and all four miss, and that's totally plausible, - Right, how likely are mistakes, accidents, false alarms taken as real, all this kind of stuff in this picture? So like, we've kind of assumed the detection works correctly. How likely is it possible? You've described this long
chain of events that can happen, how possible is it just to make a mistake, a stupid human mistake along the way? - There have been at least
six known, like absolute, like, oh my God, close calls, thank God this happened, type scenarios. One was described to me with
an actual personal participant, former secretary of defense, Bill Perry, and he described what
happened to him in 1979. He was not yet secretary of defense, he was the deputy director of
the research and engineering, which is like a big job at the Pentagon. The night watch fell on him, essentially, and he gets this call in
the middle of the night, he's told that Russia has launched, not just ICBMs, but submarine
launched ballistic missiles are coming at the United States. And he's about to notify the president that the six minute window has to begin, when he learns it was a mistake. The mistake was that
there was a training tape with a nuclear war scenario. We haven't even begun to
talk about the nuclear war scenarios that the Pentagon runs, an actual VHS training tape
had been incorrectly inserted into a system at the Pentagon. And so this nuclear launch showed up at that bunker beneath the Pentagon and at the bunker beneath Stratcom, because they're connected, as being real. And then it was like, oh, whoops, it's actually a simulation test tape. And Perry described to
me what that was like, the pause in his spirit, and his mind, and his heart when he realized I'm about to have to tell the president that he needs to launch nuclear weapons. And he learned just in the neck of time that it was an error. And that's one of five examples. - Can you speak to maybe,
is there any more color to the feelings he was feeling? Like what was your sense? And given all the
experts you've talked to, what can be said about the seconds that one feels once finding
out that a launch has happened, even if that information
is false information? - For me personally, that's
the only firsthand story that I ever heard, because it's
so rare and it's so unique. And most people in the
national security system, at least in the past, have been loathed to talk about any of this. It's like the sacred oath, it's taboo. It's taboo to go against
the system of systems that is making sure
nuclear war never happens. Bill Perry was one of the
first people who did this. And a lot of it, I believe, at least in my lengthy conversations with him, we had a lot of Zoom calls over Covid when I began reporting this, and he had a lot to do with me feeling like I could write
this book from a human point of view and not just
from the mechanized systems. And I only lightly touch upon this, because it's such a
fast, sweeping scenario, but Perry, for example,
spent his whole life dedicated to building weapons of war, only later in life to
realize this is madness. And he shared with me that it was that idea about one's
grandchildren inheriting these nuclear arsenals, and the lack of wisdom that comes with their origin stories. When you're involved in
the ground up, apparently, perhaps your different kind of steward of these systems than if
you just inherit them, and they are pages in a manual. - People forget, you mentioned the kind of nuclear war
scenarios that the Pentagon runs. 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, like 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 like, almost entirely redacted, and then like, there'll be a date, or it'll say like, 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. And I write about Proud
Prophet in the book, because it was super
significant in many ways. One, it was happening right, in 1983, it was an insane moment in nuclear arsenals, there were 60,000 nuclear weapons, right now there's 12,500, so we've come a long way baby in terms of disarmament,
but there were 60,000. And by the way, that was
not the ultimate high, the ultimate high was 70,000. This is insane, and Ronald
Reagan was president and he orders this war
game called Proud Prophet. And everyone that mattered was involved, they were running the war game scenarios, and what we learned from
his declassification is that no matter how nuclear war starts, there was a bunch of different scenarios, with NATO involved, without NATO, all different scenarios, no
matter how nuclear war starts, it ends in Armageddon, it
ends with everyone dead. I mean, this is shocking
when you think about that coupled with the idea
that all that has been done in the 40 some odd years since is, okay, let's just really lean in even harder to this theoretical
phenomena of deterrence, 'cause that's all it is,
it's just a statement, Lex, like deterrence will hold. Okay, well, what if it doesn't? Well, we know from Proud Prophet
what happens if it doesn't. - Almost always, so there's no
mechanisms in the human mind, in the human soul that stops it, in the governments that we've created. The procedure escalates always. - I mean, here's a crazy nomenclature jargon thing for you, ready? Escalate to deescalate,
that's what comes out of it. Think about what I just
said, escalate to deescalate. So someone strikes you
with a nuclear weapon, you're gonna escalate it. General Hayden recently said,
he was Stratcom commander, he was sort of saber rattling
with North Korea during Covid and he said, "They need to know, if they launch one nuclear
weapon, we launch one, if they launch two, we launch two." But it's actually more than that, they launch one, we launch 80. That's called escalate
to deescalate, like pound the you know what out of
them to get them to stop. - But I mean, there is,
to make a case for that, there is a reason to the madness, because you want to threaten
this gigantic response. But when it comes to
it, the seconds before, there is still a probability
that you'll pull back. - Which brings us to the
most terrifying facts that I learned in all of that, and that has to do with errors. Not errors of, like we
spoke about a minute ago with a simulation test tape, I'm talking about if one madman, one nihilistic madman were
to launch a nuclear weapon as I write in this scenario, and we needed to escalate to deescalate, we needed to send nuclear weapons at, let's say North Korea
as I do in my scenario. Well, what is completely unknown to 98% of the planet is that not only do the Russians
have a very flawed satellite system, so that
they cannot interpret what is happening properly, but there is a absolutely
existential flaw in the system, which Secretary of Defense,
Leon Panneta confirmed with me. Which is that our ICBMs
do not have enough range, if we launch a counter attack
against, say North Korea, our ICBMs must fly over Russia. They must fly over Russia. So imagine saying, oh no, no, these 82 warheads that are gonna actually strike the Northern Korean peninsula are not coming for you Russia,
our adversary right now that we're sort of saber
rattling with, just trust us. And that is where nuclear
war unfolds into Armageddon. And that hole in national
security is shocking, and as Panetta told me, no
one wants to discuss it. - And if one nuclear weapon
does reach its target, I presume communication
breaks down completely, or like there's a high risk
of breakdown of communication. - Well, let's back up, we are
both presumptuous to assume that communication could
even happen prior to, and let me give you a
very specific example, during the Ukraine war,
if perhaps you remember, I think it was in November of 2022, news reports erroneously stated that a Russian rocket, a Russian
missile had hit Poland, a NATO country, it turned
out to be a mistake, but for several hours, this
was actually the information that was all over the news, breaking news. 36 hours later, the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley,
gave a press conference and talked about this and admitted that he could not reach
his Russian counterpart during those 36 hours. He could not reach him. How are you going to not have an absolute Armageddon-like furor with nuclear weapons in the air if people can't get on the phone during a ground war? - I'd like to believe that there's people in major nations that don't give a damn about the bullshit of politics and can always just pick up the phone, sort of very close to the
top, but not at the very top, and just cut through the bullshit of it in situations like this. - I hope that's true, I doubt it is, and lemme tell you why, and neither you nor I are
political from what I gather, so I just write about Potus,
President of the United States. You have no idea what my politics are, because they shouldn't matter, no one should be for nuclear war, or no one should be for
national insecurity, yes, you wanna have a strong nation, but once you get into politics, then you're talking about sycophants. And the more a political
leader becomes divisive, becomes polemic, the more his platform is predicated on hating the other side, either within his own country or with alleged enemy nations. The more you surround yourself, as we see in the current
day, with sycophants, with people who will tell
you not only what they think you wanna hear, but will
help them to hold onto power. So you don't have wise decision makers, long gone are the days
where we had presidents who had advisors on
both sides of the aisle. That's really important,
because you wanna have differing opinions, but as
things become more viperous, both here in the United States and in nuclear armed nations, all bets are off at whether your advisors are gonna give you good advice. - Who are the people around the president of the United States that give advice in this six minute window? 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, you have your SecDef and your chairman, maybe the vice chairman, and, okay, we haven't even begun
to talk about the fact that at the same time
these advisors also have a parallel concern and that's called continuity of government. So while they're trying to advise on the nuclear counterstrike in response to the incoming nuclear missile,
they have to be thinking how are we gonna keep the
government functioning when the missiles start hitting, when the bombs start going off? And that is about getting yourself out of the Pentagon, let's say, getting yourself to one
of these nuclear bunkers that I write about at length in the book. So how much can you ask of a human? Because it comes down to a human, secretary of defense is a human. And imagine that job while
trying to advise the president. And then there's also a
really interesting term, which I learned about called
jamming the president, which is often understood in Washington that the military advisors would, we don't know if this is
legit, we've never seen it put to the test, but
jamming the president means the military advisors are gonna push for a really aggressive
counter attack immediately. And again, you're the
president who's not really been paying attention to this, because he has many other
things to deal with, speed is not conducive to wisdom. - Can you speak to the
jamming the president? So your sense is the advisors would by default be pushing for
aggressive counter attack. - That is a term in sort
of the national security nuclear command and control
historical documentation that many of the people
that you might call the more dovish type
people are worried about, that the more hawkish people are going to, the military advisors are
gonna be jamming the president to make these decisions
about which targets, not if, but what.
- Right, which targets. The argument will be about which targets, - Yes,
- not about if. - Yes. - I hope that even the war mongers would at this moment,
because what underlies the idea of you wanting to go to war? It's power, it's like
wanting to destroy the enemy and be the big kid on the block. But with nuclear war, it just
feels like that falls apart. Do do you think war
mongers actually believe they can win a nuclear war? - Well, you've raised a
really important question that we look to the historical
record for that answer, because astonishingly, all of this began, like when Russia first got the bomb in 1949, the powers that be, and I write about them in the book in a setup for the moment of launch, it's called how we got here. And you see, and I cite
declassified documents from some of these early meetings where nuclear war plans
were being laid out. And absolutely, back in
the 1950s, the generals and the admirals that were
running the nuclear command and control system believed
that we could fight and win a nuclear war despite hundreds of millions of people dying. This was the prevailing thought. And only over time did the kind of concept
come into play that no, we can never have a nuclear war, it's the famous Gorbachev
and Reagan joint statement. A nuclear war cannot be won
and must never be fought. But before that, many people
believed that it could be won, and they were preparing for that. - 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. - So that's one of the things
you should really think about when voting for president,
is this scenario that we've been describing,
these six minutes. Imagine the man or woman
sitting there for six minutes waiting for the pot of coffee. - But I think about that issue with any war, I mean, prior to writing "Nuclear War, A Scenario",
I previously wrote six books on military and intelligence programs
designed to prevent nuclear war. And I believe, the president
as commander in chief, should be of the highest
character possible, because the programs, the wars that we have fought since
World War ii have all been, how many octogenarian
sources have I interviewed? I'm talking about Nobel
laureates, and weapons designer, and spy pilots, and engineers in general, they've all said to me with great pride, we prevented World War
iii, nuclear World War iii. But that idea that the commander in chief and everyone within the
national security apparatus, should be making really
good decisions about war, it's the oldest cliche in the world that the wars are fought by the young kids, and that is not a cliche, it's true. And so the character
part about the president should be in play whether we're
thinking about nuclear war or any war, in my opinion. - Well, I agree with you first of all, but it feels like when nuclear war, one person becomes, like
exponentially more important, with regular war, the
decision to go to war or not, advisors start mattering
more, there's judgment issues. You could start to make arguments for sort of more leeway in terms of what kind of people we elect. It seems like with nuclear
war, there's no leeway, it's like one person can resist the jamming the president
force, the war mongers, all the calculation
involved in considering what are the errors, the mistakes, the missiles flying over
Russia, the full dynamics of the geopolitics going on in the world, consider all of humanity,
the history of humanity, the future of humanity, all of it just loaded
in to make a decision, then it becomes much more important that your cognitive abilities are strong and your judgment abilities against powerful, wise people just as a human being are strong. So I think that's something
to really, really consider when you vote for president. But to which degree is it
really on the president versus to the people advising. - Oh no, it's on the president, the president has to make the call. And that six minute
window happens so fast, I mean, the president is gonna be being moved for part of that time, the Secret Service is gonna
be up against Stratcom, Stratcom saying, we
need the launch orders, and the Secret Service is gonna be saying, we need to move the president. So it's not as much that
he's delegating the issues, it's more like the issue
is being postponed, because there is only one issue, for the president to say these targets, for him to choose from the Denny's menu, okay, this is what we're gonna go with. And then this astonishing thing happens, the president takes out his wallet, he has a card in it that's
colloquially called the biscuit, and that card with the
codes matches up an item in the briefcase in the football, that then is received by an
officer underneath the bunk, underneath the Pentagon in that bunker, it's a call and response,
Lex, it's like alpha zeta, that's it, and then back so that the individual in the bunker
realizes they are getting the command from the president. And then that order is passed to Stratcom. And Stratcom, the commander of Stratcom, and I interviewed a former
commander of Stratcom, commander of Stratcom then follows orders, which is he delivers the launch orders to the nuclear triad. And what's done is done. - What would you do if
you were the commander of Stratcom in that
situation, what would you do? Because 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. Glenn 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. So 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, and by the way, the Oppenheimer movie really, 'cause I've reported on nuclear
weapons for 12 years now, and Oppenheimer movie had a very, to me, positive impact on Los Alamos's 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. Glenn McDuff, like 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." - Why do you think, what's
his intuition behind that? - You don't wind up a Stratcom commander unless you are someone who follows orders. You follow orders. - You don't think there's
a deep humanity there? Because his intuition is about everything we know so
far, but this situation has never happened in
the history of earth. - All right, so you're
raising a really tricky, interesting conundrum
here, because during COVID, when President Trump and
the leader of North Korea were kind of locked in
various relationships with one another, good, bad, threatening, non-threatening, friendly,
just bananas you might say, like not presidential behavior. If you were someone
watching c-span like I do, nerding out on what Stratcom was actually saying about all this, you noticed that Stratcom
commanders were speaking out publicly to Congress more so than I had ever seen before. And this issue came up, would
you defy presidential order? So the caveat, I would
say, to Mcduff's answer of easier to win the Powerball, is that if the commander of Stratcom interpreted the president's behavior to be unreliable, to be non-presidential, then dot dot dot, but now you're into some really radical territory. - Well, I mean, fundamentally, it feels like just looking
at all the presidents of the United States in my lifetime, it feels like none of them are qualified for this six minutes. I could see as being the
commander of Stratcom and being like, this guy, like basically respecting no president. I know you're supposed to
the commander in chief, but in this situation, saying like, I mean, everybody, Bush,
Obama, Trump, Biden, if I was a commander of
Stratcom, I would be like, what does this guy know about any of this? I would defy orders, I
mean, in this situation, when the future of human civilization hangs in the balance, I mean, to be the person that says, yes, launch, no matter what, I just can't
see a human being on earth being able to do that in the
United States of America. That's a hell of a
decision, like, this is it, that's it.
- That's it. - Well, but now you've raised a great important presentation essentially, because what you're
saying is people be aware, be aware of like why you're voting or why certain individuals
are being escalated to even being able to run for president. What does that mean? Why are people in America
not more involved? As citizens, do we have a
responsibility for that? Because you've opened up the
door for people to understand, okay, the ultimate thing is
the nuclear launch decision. So if a person can't be trusted with that, everything unravels from there. - Also, I wanna look up who's
the commander of Stratcom now. (Lex giggling) Speaking of which, you've interviewed a lot of experts for this book. Is there some commonalities about the way, you've talked about this a little bit, but in the way they see
this whole situation, what like scares them the most about this whole system and the whole
possibility of nuclear war? - I first learned about nuclear
weapons from a guy called Al O'Donnell, who appears
in my earlier books, because I interviewed
him for over a period of four and a half years,
because he was an engineer who actually wired nuclear
bombs in the 1950s. He was a member of the
Manhattan Project in 1946, worked on Operation Crossroads, the first explosions of nuclear
bombs after the war ended, after World War II ended, and went on to arm, wire, and fire 186 out of the 200 some odd atmospheric nuclear tests that the United States did before this was banned. And so I learned from him
the power of these weapons. And I learned from him this very, almost nationalistic
idea about how important it was to have nuclear weapons. And while I learned a
lot about his human side, I also saw the side of him
that was very Cold War warrior. So he was kind of the first,
and then, I don't know, there've been a hundred
people that have been directly involved in nuclear
weapons along the way. Billy Waugh, who was my subject of my main sort of central figure in a book I wrote about
the CIA's paramilitary called "Surprise, Kill, Vanish". And Waugh HALO jumped a tactical nuclear weapon
into the Nevada test site with a small team,
almost unknown to anyone. Only recently declassified. And so his position was like, tactical nuclear weapons
may end up being used. So I'm trying to speak here to the scope of different people I have
interviewed over the years. And what has happened is, as I've gotten closer to
the present day in arrears, there seems to be a growing movement from some of these cold warriors, off the position of nuclear weapons make us great and strong, toward something must be done to reduce this threat. - 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, Indian, Pakistan, all of this, like how their
thinking differs perhaps? - Yes, well, for that, you
wanna 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 UN, he also studied in Moscow. So my information comes from him, like 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. And what was interesting
in interviewing him was also this recent very, very dangerous shift in Russian nuclear
policy, which is this, many Russian experts will tell you that Russia has always maintained that it never had a
launch on warning policy. Now, I don't know if
I believe that's true, but I'm just telling you what they say. And this is coming from the generals, the Cold War generals
in Soviet Russia saying, "Oh, no, no, no, we would wait," they were kind of playing
the noble warrior, "we would wait to absorb a nuclear attack until we launched." So many American experts will tell you that that's just posturing and propaganda, but that was their official position. And that changed just two years ago when Putin gave a speech, and he said that their
position had changed, that they will no longer
wait to absorb an attack, once they learn of, how did he phrase it? He called it like the
trajectory of the missiles, which is a way of talking about parody, the same way we see the missile
coming over in midcourse, Putin made that same statement
and said we would launch. - What do you know of the way Putin thinks about nuclear weapons and nuclear war? Is it just something to
allude to in a speech or do you think he contemplates the possibilities of nuclear war? - I don't know, but if I had
to guess it would go like this, I would look at his background, and he comes from the intelligence world. So my experience in
interviewing old timers who've spent decades working
for the CIA, or even NRO, or NSA, I know the way they think from having spent hundreds
of hours interviewing them. And then I know the way that military men think, and
it's very different. So Putin's not a military person per se, he's an intelligence officer. So what would concern me there, if I had to guess about his mindset, has to do with paranoia. Most intelligence officers
must have a degree of healthy paranoia or
they're gonna wind up dead. And so that's not a great quality to have. - You would be more trigger happy perhaps. So you would be more prone to respond to erroneous signals. - And you'd be suspicious,
and you can see that now. There's such a incredible distrust and sort of real conflict between Russia, between its leader and NATO, between its leader and all of the west. And then that is fueled by his closest advisors, kind of, they seem to be, from the
statements they have made that I've read in translation,
they seem to be fostering that same idea that NATO really has it in for Russia, America really has it in, and that is so dangerous
and disheartening. - And perhaps makes it less likely that the president would pick up the phone and talk to the other president. - Or that the close
advisors near the president would make that happen. - You were talking about the
procedure with the football. Is there any concern for cyber attacks, for sort of security concerns at every level here, false signals, errors, shutting down the
channels of communication through cyber attacks,
all that kind of stuff? - So to answer those questions, I interviewed a number of people, but most specifically General Touhill, who was Obama's Cyber Chief, and he was actually
America's first cyber chief. And 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. And that's when chaos takes control. - Well, let's talk about it. So God forbid, if a nuclear weapon reaches its target, what happens? Perhaps you could say what you think would be the first target
hit, would it be the Pentagon? - I was told by many people I interviewed that the biggest fear in Washington DC is what's called a bolt
out of the blue attack. That's an unwarranted nuclear
attack against Washington DC. The target would be the Pentagon, and that's what I begin the scenario with. And I reported in graphic, horrifying detail what happens. - Yes you did.
- Because I don't know what's worse, me writing that all out or the fact that it's all documented
by the defense department. I mean, they have been
documenting the effect of nuclear weapons on people,
and animals, and things since the earliest days of the Cold War. And all of the details I pull
are from these documents, like the effects of nuclear weapons. And again, this document was
the original information, the original data in this document come from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was all classified,
and then it was built upon by those 200 some odd atmospheric nuclear weapons test we did. And we're talking about
like millimeters and inches, we're talking about the defense
department knowing that, oh, seven and a half miles out, the upholstery on cars
will spontaneously combust, the pine needles will catch on fire, they will start more fires. You have all kinds of
mayhem and chaos happening based on reported facts from observations. And this is really shocking and grotesque at the same time. - So one warhead reaches the Pentagon, everybody in the Pentagon parishes. - 180 million degrees. The fireball on a one
megaton nuclear weapon is 19 football fields of fire. Think about that, nothing remains. Nothing remains. - And there's then a radius where people die immediately, and then there's people
that are dead when found. And then there's people
that will die slowly. - Yes.
- And eccentric rings. - And again, rings defined
by defense scientists, but before that, the bomb goes off, then there's this blast wave that's like several hundred miles an hour, pushing out like a bulldozer,
knocking everything down. Bridges, buildings, I mean, you can read FEMA manuals about what
the rubble will be like, you're talking about 30 feet deep rubble as the buildings go over
6, 7, 8, 10 miles out. That speaks nothing of the mega
fires that will then ensue. So once all these people die, and third degree radiation burns, did you even know there was such a thing as fourth degree radiation burns? We're talking about the
wind ripping the skin off people's faces many miles out. And then you have a sucking action, many people are familiar with what the nuclear mushroom
cloud looks like, and its stem actually creates, and again, this is from physicists who advise the defense department on this, 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, in a nuclear war, that would be people, those are like the remnants of people and of things in the cloud, 30, 40 mile wide mushroom cloud blocking out the sun,
and that speaks nothing of the radiation poisoning that follows. - 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, quote, "Those
who somehow manage 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, quote,
'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. So 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." - What do you think happens to humans? Like how does human nature manifest itself in such conditions? Do you think like brutality will come out, like people will, just for survival, will steal, will murder? - I can't imagine that not happening, I think that's why people
love post-apocalyptic television shows and films,
because they see that, and then of course, there's
always one great charismatic person who's trying to restore morality. And these are great
narratives that people like to tell themselves in the
world of science fiction. But what we're dealing
with is science fact in this scenario, and it is meant to terrify people into
realizing, wait a minute, this is a conversation that
absolutely should be had while it can still be had. Because the reality is,
when you have the director of FEMA telling you this,
it's a real wake up call. And by the way, Craig Fugate was so transparently human with me, and I quote him directly in the book, but he spoke about, you
asked me earlier about, like what would be going
through the president's mind, and we don't know, I don't know, but Craig Fugate told me what would be going through his mind. And he said along the
lines, I'm paraphrasing, "Like it's almost something
you couldn't even comprehend, it would just like ruin you." His words are really
powerful, and of course, the FEMA director in the scenario is notified in that first window, while the ballistic missile is on its way and no one in America yet knows, and I have the FEMA director
pull over to the side of the road and jump in
a helicopter sent for him to take him to the
bunker that FEMA goes to, which is called Mount Weather. And so Fugate was aware
that as FEMA director you would likely be taken to a safe place, however many hours you're gonna be safe, or days, or maybe weeks, or maybe months. But as I also learned from the
cyber people I interviewed, that there's a complete fallacy that these military bases
can continue functioning. They run on diesel fuel, and when the fuel stops pumping,
there's no more generators. - Electricity's gone, communication lines are all gone, the food supply, all of it, all the supply chains gone. It's terrifying. And that's just in the first few days, first few hours. In part five, you described the 24 months and beyond after this first
hour we've been talking about. So what happens to earth,
what happens to humans if a full on nuclear war happens? - So for that, I was super privileged to talk to Professor Brian Toon, who is one of the original five authors of the nuclear winter theory. And that theory was developed in, 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. And 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. And what the nuclear winter authors conceded back in the eighties 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. So to answer your questions, the bombs stop falling, in my scenario, 72 minutes after they first launch, the bombs stop falling, and
then the mega fires begin. Each nuclear weapon will have, according to the Defense Department, a mega fire that will burn
between 100 and 300 square miles. So 1,000 weapons, 1,500 weapons, think about those mega fires. Everything is burning, forests, cities, think about the pyro toxins in all the cities, high rises burning. And all of this soot
gets lofted into the air, according to Toon, some 300 billion pounds of soot. And what happens, it blocks out the sun. And without sun, we have nuclear winter, we have a situation whereby ice sheets form, you're talking about bodies of water in places like Iowa being frozen for 10 years. - So temperature drops. - Temperature plummets. And there are all kinds of papers that have been written about this, using modern systems. And the numbers vary, but the bottom line is agriculture fails. - Foods obviously dies. So the agriculture system
completely shuts down, so the food sources shut down. So there's no food, there's no sun, temperature drops
completely, no electricity. - And we haven't even spoken
of radiation poisoning, because the radiation
poisoning kills many people in the aftermath of the nuclear exchange. But after the nuclear freeze ends, after nuclear winter, after
the sun starts to come back, let's say 8, 9, 10 years, now you have no ozone layer, or you have a severely
depleted ozone layer, and so the sun's rays are now poisonous. So if you have people living underground, and you have this great thawing, and with that great thawing
comes pathogens and plague, and you have this system where
the small bodied animals, the insects and whatnot begin
reproducing really fast, and the larger body
animals, like you and me, begin to go extinct. Professor Toon said it
to me this way, he said, "66 million years ago,
an asteroid hit earth, killed all the dinosaurs and wiped out 70% of the species, and nuclear
war would likely do the same." And so here we are talking about this because there is a difference. There's nothing you can
do about an asteroid, but there is something you
can do about a nuclear war. - Do you think it's
possible that some humans will survive all of this? So if we look, I mean,
how long would it be? Would it be decades? Would it be centuries before the earth starts to have the
capacity to grow food again? - Carl Sagan talked about
that in this amazing book that he wrote with two
scientist colleagues called "The Cold and the Dark". And there's a bunch of
essays about exactly this, like what would happen and
how long would it take? It's really interesting, it's dated, it's from the eighties,
but man, is it shocking. And you think about that where, okay, so men return to sort of the worst, most base versions of
themselves, civilization is gone, meaning civil society,
there's no rule of law, it's just fend for yourself. There's people fighting
over what little resources there are, man returns to
a hunter gatherer state. And to really think about
this idea, I looked at the oldest known archeological
site in the world in Turkey, which is called Gobekli Tepe. And it's really fascinating to me, because I interviewed one
of the two archeologists who first found this site
in the early nineties. And the lead archeologist was
a guy named Klaus Schmidt, and Michael Morsch was
the young graduate student who was with him. And Morsch's description
of like coming upon this like rumored to be site, there was something called
a wishing tree on the site, which I just found so human and perfect that it was this magical
place and it was locatable, because there was a
wishing tree on a hill, and it's where people went to wish and to hope that their wishes came true, I mean, how human is that? And that is where,
beneath the wishing tree, kind of like in the shadow
of the wishing tree, there was a tepe, which is a hill. And beneath that, there
is the oldest known civilization in the
world, 12,000 years ago, a group of hunter
gatherers built this site, why, we don't know. But I imagined through
Morsch's descriptions of coming upon, like he tripped on a rock, he told me, he tripped over a stone that turned out to be the top part of a 12,000 year old sculpted man, giant pillar. And he talked about coming upon that, and then no one knows really
what Gobekli Tepe was for. And that makes my mind try and answer the question you asked me internally. Just as like a human who's here on earth for the amount of time I'm here, like if there were a nuclear
war, what would it be like? What would it be like when
someone in the future, would we become archeologists one day? Would civilization rebuild? Would we develop computers? Who knows, it's
interesting to think about, I hope we never have to. - What would we remember about this time? It is terrifying to think that most of it will be forgotten. Everything we kind of assume
will not be forgotten. We think maybe some of the
technological developments will be forgotten, but we assume, like some of history won't be forgotten. But realistically, especially us descending into primitive survival, probably everything
since the industrial age will be forgotten, like everything. Maybe some religious ideas will persist, some stories and myths will persist. But like all the wisdom we've gathered, higher level sort of technological
wisdom would be gone. Like that's terrifying to think about. And like, maybe even, as you touch on, the very fact of nuclear
war might be forgotten, like the lessons of nuclear
war might be forgotten. That there are these weapons, sort of the obvious elephant in the room would be one of the things
that's completely forgotten, or become so vague in the
recollection of humans that our understanding will change. It's almost as if a God descended on earth and destroyed everything,
maybe that's how it'll persist. Sort of like mythological interpretation of what nuclear weapons are. That's terrifying, 'cause
then it could repeat again. - But I think for me, the idea of what is buried becomes very
interesting and very human, and in a strange way,
optimistic and positive. Because if you can
visualize that wishing tree, and I have a picture of it in the book from one of the archeologists
who work on that. You think, what were they wishing? What were they wishing for? And then you think of your own self, what do I wish for in this world? Because I do think all things come from what happens metaphorically around the dinner table. Like what people put their eyes on becomes interesting and
expands what people talk about. And ultimately, when you think
about the long arc of time and human civilization,
it does kind of make you wanna communicate more with your enemies, with your adversaries. And I think about the quote, what Einstein has said to have said, which is that he was asked what weapons World War
III would be fought with. And he said, "I don't know, but I know that World
War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." - Lemme 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? And 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 gonna 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. And 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. And Mitchell was vilified when he got back from the moon, because it became known that he believed in things like extrasensory perception, and this kind of mystical, metaphysical way of looking at the world. And he really suffered from that, I mean, he was ridiculed and he lost a lot of his career and his friends. But what he said to me in our interview about his trip home from the moon answers that great filter question, I think in a way I might wanna adopt. Which is this, that he said that, as they were returning
from the moon to earth, he looked down at the earth, and I'm paraphrasing him, I write all this in "Phenomena", an earlier book, but the paraphrasing is that
he looked down from the earth, and it was 1971, and he
thought about all the conflict going on down below,
particularly the Vietnam War where many of his friends were. And then he looked behind
him into the great vast galaxy, and he had a moment, he says, that was like an epiphany, like not a near death experience, but a sort of near life experience, where he believed that
the human consciousness, which is where so much
of this thoughtfulness about metaphysics and ESP perhaps come from. Mitchell's theory was
that human consciousness, the way to understand
it had something to do with realizing that man's inner life and man's outer life are deeply connected, in the same way that man
is connected to the galaxy. And he said it much more eloquently, but you kind of get the idea, and I think it's why humans have always loved to look up. That there's more there, and
it's a bit like the wish, it's like the big version
of the wishing tree. What do I wish for, for myself? And what is maybe perhaps
the realignment of thinking for those of us in search of happiness, instead of war is, what does it mean to have a conscience, to have consciousness? What does it mean to be a thinking person? What does it mean to be on this earth, to be born, to live, to die? And then there is legacy,
and so all of those ideas, I think, foster the kind of conversation that deescalates conflict. - Yeah, so in some deep way, so the mysteries of what's out there when we look out to the
stars are the same mysteries that we find when trying to
understand the human mind. And they're coupled in some way. For me, thinking about alien
civilizations out there is really the same kind
of question, which is, what are we, what is this? What are we doing here? How did we come here? Why does it seem to be so magical and beautiful and powerful? Where's it going? Because it feels like we're really, perhaps the first time in history are in a moment where we
can destroy ourselves. And so naturally you ask, well, where's others like us? Is it perhaps, are we inevitably going to a place where
we'll destroy ourselves? Is it basically inevitable
that we destroy ourselves, we become too powerful? And insufficiently wise to know what to do with that power, But like you said, probably the
answers to that are in here. We don't need to look out there. 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 like, 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, this, what we're talking about now is called squishy science. And it was really interesting
to delve into that world, it just couldn't be farther from weapons and war or could it? And then I really began thinking, well, before science and technology, sort of the supernatural ruled the world, the oracle of Delphi in Greece exists before the common error rulers to go and beg to learn from the powers that be what was going to happen. So all ESP programs, I think, pull from that origin story. The leader's desire to know. And so I really found it amazing that many people think these systems, or rather these programs
started in the seventies, I learned they actually began
right after World War ii. And that was because, and in my reporting, I find all things sort
of always circle back to the Third Reich, to the Nazis. The Nazis had a massive occult program, an ESP program, psychokinesis
program, astrology, both Hitler and Himmler
were deeply interested in these occult concepts. I learned from records
at the National Archives that after the war, half of everything went
to the Soviets Union, and I'm talking about the
trove of Nazi documents from which the superpowers were then going to learn to fight future wars, and half of them went
to the United States. And so we got this trove of documents about all of this, and
the Soviets got the other, and so it set off a kind
of psychic arms race, which in a weird way paralleled
the nuclear arms race, which we've been talking about, in as much that it led one side to constantly wonder
what the other side had. - Have they been able to
find anything interesting in this squishy science analysis of trying to see how the human mind could be used as a weapon? - The CIA most definitely believed, from my reading of the documents, that there was something very legit, shall we say, about ESP. It was uncontrollable, it was unreliable, but nonetheless it existed. And being the intelligence
agency that they are, they cared less about why it worked, they just wanted to know
how they could use it. And then it got into all kinds of elements of placebo effect. And when the military stepped in and got involved in the programs, that was a complete
disaster in my opinion, because the military needs
to control everything in a mechanized, systematic way. And so they started, for
example, teaching people to be psychic, which is a
really, really, really bad idea. Flash forward to where we are today, these programs still exist, there's a navy program
which is working on, based on a lot of data
that came back from the war on terror with certain soldiers knowing, wait, don't walk down that
path, there is an IED there. And they call this the spidey sense, and they actually have a
program that works from this. So these things never go away, they kind of circle around in terms of being made fun of and then taken seriously and a little of this and of that. My biggest takeaway from writing that book was a quote that I
referenced in the beginning, which is the Thomas theorem, and it says, "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." - Yeah, I mean, placebo,
as you've mentioned, is a fascinating concept. By the way, a short plug,
I started listening to it, Andrew Huberman just released a podcast on placebo, the placebo effect. - Does he know the
origin story of placebo? We'll have to ask him. - We'll have to ask him.
- But, are you ready for this? CIA.
(Lex laughing) And not only that, I can tell
you that Dr. Henry Beecher, Harvard, I think he was
also at MIT for a bit, he came up with that term, and you might even say for the CIA. - Does that trouble you
that so much of this is coming from the CIA first? - You mean the placebo concept or the- - The placebo concept, but a lot of the sort of
scientific investigations. - Listen, I have such mixed
feelings about the CIA, as one should, I think you
should have mixed feelings about anything that you
cover as a reporter, or as a human, and maybe change that from mixed to conflicting. Because there are really positive elements of every organization within
the federal government. I mean, my first learning about the CIA came from the work I did
on the "Area 51" book about their aerial
reconnaissance programs, which were set up, again,
to prevent World War iii. Nuclear World War iii, it was this idea that information was king. The U-2 spy plane was
developed out at Area 51, and I interviewed Hervey Stockman, the first man to fly over
the Soviet Union in a U-2. Gathered all this
intelligence, prevented wars. Later I wrote a book about
the CIA's paramilitary, "Surprise, Kill, Vanish". So like, just when I was thinking, wow, the CIA is doing all this amazing non-kinetic activity with
aerial reconnaissance, then you learn about their kill programs, and that's a whole
different set of issues. - It turns out, as you write in that book, that the CIA assassinates
people sometimes, and we'll talk about it. But anyway, like you said,
conflicting feelings. - I mean, I work with
sources to report my books, and so put yourself in my shoes. I interview for dozens
or hundreds of hours, my primary sources, in the case of the "Surprise, Kill, Vanish" book, I traveled with Billy Waugh, the longest serving CIA operator, back to the scene of the crime, back to the battle, we went
to Hanoi, we went to Havana. And you really get to know someone, and that's when I say conflicting, I work with sources on a real trust basis, and sometimes people will
tell me things, they'll say, "Annie, this is off the record, this is for you to know about me on deep background because I
want you to know who I am." And that's powerful, and a
lot of times it's personal, it's personal, it's about
their personal life. And it isn't apropos to
what I'm writing about, but I need to know that,
and that's where it gets conflicted, because you, in a good way, because you realize where we're all such creatures of our personal lives. So you have a professional life where your national
security are in your hands. I don't know what that is like. - I wonder if you could
just speak to that. You've interviewed so
many powerful people, so many fascinating people. And as you've spoken about, trust is fundamental to that. So they open up and really
show you into their world. What does it take to do that? - I think willingness, we were talking about trust earlier, I have to trust that there's a reason I find myself in a certain situation. Otherwise, it would just be a constant doubt paradox, why am I
here, what am I doing? And so I trust that I'm going to learn something of value. And so I'm willing to listen, I really am willing to listen. And so far it's always proven, the expectations I might have going into something are dwarfed by the outcome, because people are so interesting, and because the people that I interview, because I write about war, and weapons, and national security,
and government secrets, and the people I interview are
at the heart of all of this. I mean, they are really capable people, intellectually brilliant,
physically capable. They go so far out on the
limb to do their jobs. And by the way, the reason
they're talking to me is 'cause they're still alive, and so many of their colleagues are dead. So it gives them also a wisdom about life, about sacrifice, not in cliched, sort of nationalistic
jingoistic terms whatsoever. I'm talking like real, real, what is their real truth? When I went to Vietnam with Billy Waugh, I mean, so much of it was, the details are just, every detail, I mean, starting with the fact that he showed up at my house
with a giant suitcase and a bunch of clothes, dry cleaning, pressed clothes in plastic
hangers, carrying them. I'm like, "Billy, we're going to Vietnam and we're going back into the jungle to find the Oscar Eight battle site, like, what are you carrying?" And he got really mad at me, he did not like anyone correcting him. And I got my husband on the job, like, Kevin, you gotta sort this out. And what transpired was that Billy Waugh had never taken a trip
for personal reasons. He operated, I think in 62 countries, every single time for the CIA. And it would go like this, Billy, go to there and get to there. And that's what he would
do, and when he arrived, whatever he needed, he would just get. It's not a fashion trip, so he had no idea how to
pack for an overseas trip, this was like, oh my God, how can you not have the hugest smile on your face going into this? I'm with a guy who's 89 years
old, he's got eight bullet, he's had eight purple hearts from Vietnam. I mean, he operated
against Osama Bin Laden 10 years before 9/11. He went after Bin Laden in
Afghanistan when he was 72. And he went after Kadafi
during the Arab Spring when he was 82, and now here
he is with me going Hanoi. The details, those human details. But my husband repacked his bag, and got him a proper
suitcase that was carryable and small and didn't have the hangers, he wasn't trailing the hangers, but it was the trip home in the taxi that I got at this really big reveal. Billy reached into that
small suitcase my husband had given him and pulled out
a rolled up American flag. And he had taken this flag, 'cause I had tried to help him
pack and he wouldn't let me, and I just thought it was like
an old guy being stubborn, but he didn't want me to see that he was bringing an
American flag to Vietnam, which is not legal. And he wanted to bring that flag and take it around everywhere with him, as he explained to me later,
to honor all of his friends who died there 50 years ago. And then when the trip was finished, he gave me that flag
and it's in my office. And that's the kind of
relationship that you can develop with people as a reporter
if you're willing to go the extra mile
with them, to trust them, that they'll tell you things of value. And to me, something
like that is as of value as any secret mission I'm
able to get declassified, because we are a nation of people. - And probably there's
a bunch of human details that you can't possibly express in words, things left unspoken, but
you saw in the silence, exchange between the
two of you, the sadness. Maybe you could see on his
face, looking back at memories of the people he is lost,
all that kind of stuff. - All that kind of stuff. - 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 testbed 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 nineties, 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 you talked to a lot of
people that worked there. What can you describe as the history of technological development
that went on there? - I mean, Area 51 is huge by the way, and it's a top secret military facility inside a top secret military facility, inside the Nevada test and training range, which is this massive,
not secret facility. So you're just talking about layers, talk about peeling the onion in reverse, and it began as a place
to test the U-2 spy plane. And literally, the CIA set up shop there to build this plane away from the public eye. And then that led to
another espionage platform called the A-12 Oxcart, which is, anyone who's seen the X-Men movies knows about the SR-71,
and that's a two-seater. And before that, there
was the A-12 Oxcart, and that was the CIA's
stealth mock three spy plane. Think about that in the early 1960s, it's astonishing, and I
interviewed the pilots who flew it. - What did they say about it? What was it like?
- Oh my God. I mean, look, I describe
in detail in "Area 51", but also the amazing thing,
Lex, about that was that, and I just look back on
that with such fondness, this is like in 2009 when
I was reporting that, and many of the guys who
were in their eighties and nineties were World War II heroes, like serious World War II
heroes, like Colonel Slater, who was the commander of Area
51, he flew the U-2 on the, the missions called
the Black Cat missions, over China in the early 1960s to see about their Lop
Nur nuclear facility. So all of these things tie
in when you're reporting on military and intelligence programs, but these guys had been
World War II heroes, and then were given this
cushy job out at Area 51, and it just came with all these perks. Colonel Slater told me this
one perk, I just love so much, they all had a hankering
for lobster one day. And here they are in the
middle of the desert in Nevada, and they have these really fast planes, and they literally called,
like they arranged, they didn't take the
Oxcart out for that one, but they got some lobsters
from Massachusetts, like delivered to them
in like record time, they didn't even need to put them on ice. And again, those are these
details where you're like, thank God, at least for me,
thank God I got these details, these guys are all passed now. - 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. - That worked there. - Well, not just at Area 51, but in all the different national security and military intelligence
and intelligence programs. And I personally have no reason to believe that aliens have ever visited earth, that's just me personally.
- Visited earth, period. - I have no information that causes me to
conclude that's the case. Now, with that said, many
of the primary players in this present day, there are aliens among us narrative, are
in my "Phenomena" book, I continue to communicate
with a lot of these people. I'm talking about astrophysicists, who fundamentally believe that
there are aliens among us. So we beg to differ on that issue. - But for you, in terms of doing research on government agencies that do top secret military work,
I mean, they would know. So you have interviewed a lot of people at every layer of the onion. You don't see evidence or a reason to believe
that there was ever aliens or UFOs captured from out of this world? - That is correct, and even
perhaps more important, and perhaps this colors my thinking, but I am uniquely familiar
with disinformation programs put forth by the CIA, or the agency as it's called by insiders. And I've learned firsthand
about these program, or rather learned from
firsthand participants in strategic deception
campaigns that the CIA has engaged in, beginning with Area 51. The idea that all these reports of this U-2 spy plane, this giant, long winged aircraft
flying 70,000 feet up, people didn't think airplanes
could fly that high, and it's the sun shining off of it, it looked like a UFO, and
all the reports coming in, and the CIA opened up a UFO disinformation campaign office, headed by a guy named Toto Otirenco, specifically for this reason. Now, does that mean
that every UFO sighting in the world has been a U-2? No, but I come from it
from that lane of thinking, and there are so many
strategic deception campaigns, and as I look over the decades of how these same UFO stories, and again, this is just my
opinion based on my reporting, this narrative that keeps reoccurring, it seems to me like a very large catchall to keep the public's attention
on that, not on that. - So to you, sexy stories like UFOs are going to be leveraged by the CIA
for strategic deception? - 100%, I mean, Google Paul Bennewitz, I'm always amazed that
Paul Bennewitz' story is not more widely spoken of. And I think that's because people, there's like the sort of
ufologists or the people who are like absolutely convinced
that aliens are among us, and I use that term loosely,
but you know what I mean, and then there's the,
quote unquote, "skeptics", and the skeptics tend to be
sort of like self-righteous. And I would never wanna be self-righteous, so I'm not a skeptic, I'm just agnostic I suppose. But Google Paul Bennewitz, and you can learn the story of that man, who thought he saw a UFO in
the seventies, early eighties, and the Air Force, because the Air Force intelligence community works
hand in glove with CIA a lot, and some of the other
intelligence agencies, of course, there's 17, not just the CIA, and they destroyed Paul Bennewitz, they sent him to a mental institution, by pulling a massive
strategic deception campaign against him because they
didn't want him to know about the technology that he was seeing at Kirkland Air Force Base. So look that up, and
then you go, oh my God, and to my eye, you can apply any of these other names,
substitute in Paul Bennewitz, or any of the current individuals who really become convinced of X, Y, or Z, when in fact there's a strategic deception campaign going on. - Yeah, there's a lot
of incentive for the CIA and other intelligence agencies to get you to look the other way on whatever, well, whatever is happening. Plus, from a enemy perspective, whenever two nations are at war, to try to create hysteria in the other. - But then you have the Thomas theorem that becomes applicable there too. If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. So this idea of like UFOs and we're being lied to, it becomes real to many people. And then that creates a
whole subset of problems, to the point where things
are spiraling out of control. And there is no center anymore, so a lot of people that
are briefed on programs maybe aren't even aware of their position within a greater campaign. Or I'm wrong and there
are aliens among us. - Right, so I appreciate you, the possibility of acknowledging
that you might be wrong. From everything you know
about the US government, if there was an alien spacecraft, like what do you think would happen? Would they be able to hold onto those secrets for decades? Like, would they want to
hold onto those secrets? Like what would they do? What's your sense? - I can't imagine that kind of exciting situation not
becoming public information. And the counter to that is this, which is, this is a very strong argument for why this is a big strategic
deception campaign. Think about the Defense Department, think about how jealously
they guard its airspace. I mean, you had a Chinese
balloon flying over and the whole world went crazy. It was front page news. So the fact that one element, or a couple people in
the Defense Department have made this statement,
we've lost control of our airspace, over this UFO, alleged UFO craft that they can't explain. I don't buy that at all. Zero.
- But of course it's possible that it is alien
spacecraft, if it is that, and they operate under
a very different set of technologically capabilities in theory. - In my interviews with Jacques Vallee, who is the kind of
grandfather of all ufology, and he's such an interesting person and has such a really unique origin story about how he came into all of this, and he's such a scientist. And he is profoundly
dedicated to this issue and stands completely on the opposite end of the spectrum from
me, and knows a lot more and has studied this for decades more, but what he said to me is
the most interesting thing, which is that, "It's
not a military problem, it's an intelligence problem." Because Jacques believes that this is some kind of intelligence, which really, the closest I can do to wrapping my head around that takes me to consciousness, the idea of what is consciousness. And I think that's where it
becomes very interesting. I think the government is
hiding bodies and crafts is very Paul Bennewitz,
read it, Google it, look into it.
(Lex laughing) - Yeah, I think this kind
of flying saucer thing is a trivialization of, if there's alien civilizations out there. - Trivialization, that's a great word, trivialization, I agree with you. - I tend to believe that there is, like a very large number of
alien civilizations out there. And I believe we would
have trouble comprehending what that even looks
like, were they to visit. I tend to believe they are
already here or have visited and were too dumb to understand
what that even means. And they certainly would not appear as flying objects to defy
gravity for brief moments of time on low resolution video. I tend to have humility
about all this kind of stuff, but I think radical humility
is required to even like, open your eyes to what
an alien intelligence would actually look like. And to me, it's beyond
military applications, it's like the basic
human question of like, what is even this thing, like you mentioned
consciousness that's going on. Like where does this come from? Why is it so powerful? Is it unique in the universe? I tend to believe not, of course, I hang out a bunch with other folks, like Elon who believe we are alone, but I think that belief, just like you said, has power, because it actually manifests itself in reality, 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
the 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 have been a
disinformation campaign from, I guess Stalin, that the Roswell incident was a remotely piloted
plane with a, quote, "grotesque child size 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 I've never revealed to that sources. - Yes.
- Did you know that? - I knew.
- You want me to tell you? - What the source?
- Yeah. - Okay, who was the source? - So before I say anything on that, let me speak to the
question that you asked. So what you asked me,
what's the probability that that is still standing as an idea, 12, 13, 14 years later. So I continued to work with that source for years afterwards,
we talked about this, look, I mean, his whole family knew it was him, and I knew his family, 'cause I was an integral part of, I was at his house, met
all his kids, grandkids. - And we should say the source
is the main expert advisor behind the story that it
was, maybe you can explain what the story is that
you report in the book, that it was a disinformation campaign created by Stalin to cause mass hysteria in the United States. - Yes.
- That's the very kind that we've been speaking
about with the CIA and so on. - Yes, predicated on the narrative of the "War of the Worlds". And the "War of the Worlds",
when it was a radio program in the United States,
made people go crazy, oh my God, we're being invaded by aliens. Well, the government was always
interested in this story, and Joseph Stalin was too, we know that from declassified documents. And so the source told me that the reason for this program and that the real Roswell
crash remains were, in fact, it was a black propaganda
hoax infiltrated, or rather predicated at this idea that you were gonna overwhelm
America's early warning air defense system, cause mayhem, and maybe be able to
attack the United States. That was the plan, and
Stalin was also messing with the United States,
messing with Truman, who sort of turned his
back on him at Potsdam. And the reason that the
source is important, and unlike a lot of people,
I saw this, I saw that, I learned that, was
according to the source, once it was determined
that this was a hoax and that Stalin was able to get a craft over the United States and it crashed, and it had people inside of it, they were people that
were sort of deformed and meant surgically
altered to look like aliens, the United States government
decided that it needed to know what on earth that was all about, and if it was possible for
us to have the same program. This according to the source. And so it sounds preposterous, and if it was just someone saying, you might say, well, it's ridiculous, get them onto another subject. But the difference was, is this source, who is very well placed and friends with all of the other 75 people, told me this as a confession. A real tearful confession, because what he said is he was involved in the American program
to do the same thing, and people died because there were human experiments that went on. And I write about this in the
last 12 pages of "Area 51", it was a explosive revelation, and I felt very confident in writing this because the source wanted it written, why? Because he said, "I'm
dedicated to my country. I know about being committed
to national security, and this kind of thing must never happen. And if you give people too much power, they would take advantage of it." And he wanted it on the record. And his wife of 60 years did not know until after the book published,
nor did his children. So after the book published,
I was called to his house and sat there with his family, and they said, "Tell us this isn't true." And he said, "It is true." Now, that source is Al O'Donnell, who is the nuclear weapons engineer who armed, wired, and fired 186 nuclear weapons. So if you wanna talk about somebody.
- Ah. - And you're the first person
I've told that on the record, but it's kind of about time. - Wow, well, you received a lot of criticism over this story and it confused me why, because given the context of
everything you've described with the CIA and other
intelligence agencies, it is reasonable that such
a action would be taken. - And the source is
extraordinarily credible. If you wanted to take the position, well, that person isn't very reliable, then you have to ask
yourself, why did they have top secret clearances
that are higher than any in the United States whatsoever? Because he was responsible
for arming nuclear bombs. He was called the trigger man. And by the way, he told
me that I could tell the world who he was. There's a lot of details
that are really dark involving that program. And when is it appropriate? Well, it feels appropriate
now, first of all, 'cause you and I have been
talking for several hours, so this is what is a truly
a long form conversation, and it's the outcome of a very long time of my reporting, and also being judicious about closing the loop on that. Because I do think it's important for people to know that sources have revelations. - 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. It turns out, so first of all, first option being diplomacy, and second option being war. So when diplomacy is inadequate
and war's a terrible idea we would 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. - Well, at least to have a sense of humor to this dark topic. - Then the more modern
names are targeted killing. Executive action, targeted killing. I mean, drone striking is
essentially assassination. And people jump up and down and say that's not true, well, I spent quite a long time interviewing the CIA's lead council, John
Rizzo, he died recently. But Rizzo was very forthcoming with me, of course, never sharing
classified information, but going up to the edge of
what can legally be known. Rizzo was thrown under the bus by sort of the general public for, he was the fall guy for
the torture campaign, the CIA calls it enhanced interrogation. And so Rizzo had this long career, he began working under
the Carter administration, and was responsible for the torture memos, was responsible for legally making sure the president's ass was covered, and then got thrown under the bus. And so he was very forthcoming,
not in a bitter way, but in a very earnest way about a lot of how these programs
are made to be legal, because if the president
of the United States says they're legal, they're legal. Executive Order 12333, it says we don't assassinate, but it can be overwritten
by another order, that's straight out of Rizzo's mouth. Also really important to keep in mind is that the military operates under what's called Title 50. It's part of the National
Security Code that gives, like, sort of rules et cetera, how you must behave in a war theater. Well, the CIA is under no such rules, it operates under what's called Title 50. And it's interesting to me as a reporter, 'cause before I wrote the book and reported openly about Title 50, it was not really discussed, and now you even see operators
themselves on podcast talking about Title 50,
which is kind of great, because it's like the
cat's out of the bag guys, that's what it's called,
and that's how it works, it means what we say goes. - Can you elaborate on what Title 50, so it basically says
assassination is allowed? - It says what the president wants, the president gets. And so, I mean, the best example is the killing of Bin Laden. We were not at war with Pakistan,
so Title 50 doesn't apply, you can't have a military
operation in a country you're not at war with. I mean the lines, my God,
now they've really blurred, but even then they were
a little more honored. And so what do you do? Well, Leon Panetta was the CIA director, and you work out a scenario whereby the Seals, and by the way, there was a rotational on
that killer capture mission, which was really just a kill mission. Seals were practicing,
Delta was practicing, and Special Activities
division was practicing. They were all practicing
at a secret facility in North Carolina. And it was just like, they're ready until they get the go order, and it just happened to be the Seals. So the Seals operate under Title 10. So they had to get, what
I call sheep dipped, because that's what the insiders call it, and that is a term that
comes from, interestingly, Area 51, the U-2 pilots
were Air Force pilots, they needed to be sheep
dipped over to the CIA, so they could do things
that defied the law. So you can see how these all entwined and you become more and more
informed and you go, aha. So that's how Title 50 worked. So the night of that mission,
it was a CIA mission, because the CIA is allowed
to go into Pakistan and kill someone, and the military can't. - That's fascinating, so people talk about the Navy Seals doing it, but it's really, legally speaking to get
the permission to do it within the whole legal framework of the United States, it was the CIA. - And if you look at their
uniforms that they were wearing, and now that you know this, oh, you'll see, there's no
nomenclature on them. So they're just meant to
be completely untraceable, were they to be shot down and captured, it's like, wait, who are these guys? Oh, a bunch of rogue guys. And this goes back, the
origin story of all that is in Vietnam with MACV-SOG, and these cross border operations that I chronicle in
"Surprise, Kill, Vanish", which still amaze me to this day. I mean, SOG missions, they
called it suicide on the ground, 'cause that's what it was. And these guys had no identifiable, nothing, I mean, they were
essentially in pajamas. Even their weapons were
especially designed by the CIA to have no
serial numbers, no nothing. So if they were captured
and they became POWs, I don't know who these guys are. - What do you think, and
how much do they think at the highest levels of power, about the ethics of assassination and about the role of that in geopolitics and military operations? Like to you maybe also, does assassination make sense as a good methodology of war? - I mean, again, I try to remain
agnostic on the policy part of it and just report the
operator's perspective. Because this is what people do, and this is what people are asked to do. And it depends on the individual, I mean, Billy Waugh went
on a lot of those missions, I mean the saying is like, oh, Billy Waugh, he killed
more people than cancer. Did Billy Waugh ever tell me
about direct assassinations? No, because they're all classified. Did he tell me about some failed ones? Yes, I'll give you an example,
it's really interesting. He would show me these PowerPoints that were just fantastic,
late in his life, he was constantly being
asked to go up to Fort Bragg and lecture to the young soldiers, and everybody loved him. And he would drive all night to get there and he would create these PowerPoints, and then he would show me the PowerPoints, all unclassified, but at one point, when Hugo Chavez was in power, Billy Waugh was kind of
asked, that's how it works, like, if you had to think
about doing something, what would it look like,
let's just say hypothetically. So he took me through this
PowerPoint that never happened, whereby he and a group of operators, agency operators were gonna HALO jump in to the palace and grab
Chavez and probably kill him, 'cause he wouldn't allow
himself to be captured. And by the way, HALO
jumping, for those listeners who don't know, high
altitude, low opening. So you jump out of an aircraft, and you go down like a pencil
until you're really low to the deck, like 1,000 feet,
you pull your parachute cord, and that way you're
not picked up on radar, and you're also not traceable
when you get to the ground, 'cause it's so fast. Billy Waugh took the second HALO jump in history into a war theater in Laos during the Vietnam War. So he's like this famous HALO jumper. So he and the team were
gonna go in, grab Chavez, and he said to me a very interesting thing that was kind of
a one moment in time where I saw a different side
of Billy Waugh, where he said, "I'm so glad we didn't do that, even though I really
wanted to at the time." Because can you imagine that country's problems where it is now? Can you imagine how we
would have been blamed? And it was like, an interesting
rare moment for Billy Waugh to comment on the bigger picture that you're asking me about. I think pretty much the operators I know, they just stick to the mission. - So in the technical
difficulty of those missions, just your big sense, how
hard is it to assassinate, to assassinate a target on
the soil of that nation? - I suppose that just depends. All right, here's another insightful thing Billy Waugh said to me, and
I'm answering the question around because I don't
know, because again, I never had anyone say to
me, here's how it went down. Because you can't, that would be, first of all, those are classified, so I'm never gonna receive
classified information. I did hear a lot about
reconnaissance missions when people would be in charge of, you have to be able to,
what's called make book, on the target before. And making book on the target
means photographing them, then that gets run up the chain of command to make sure this is really Imad Mughniyeh we're about to kill. But I once asked Billy, when I was trying to get the question and
he wouldn't answer it, and I said, so there's
another person in my book named Rick Proto, who's also
like a legendary agency guy, he's like 20 years younger than Billy. And I said, "Billy, if you and Rick had to kill
each other, like who would win?" I was trying to imagine
this like hypothetical, like how would that work, who would win? And I posed the question to each of them. And of course, each of them said me. Then I went back to them and Billy said, "Let me tell you how I would win." And he said, "I'd cheat. I'd show up before the
dual and I'd kill him." - I have a lot of friends
who were Navy Seals, it's such a guy conversation. - Well, you would be amazed
at what the women do, let me just tell you that. Women are part of the
special activities division, a big part of it. - Can you comment on that? - I can, women can get a hell
of a lot closer to a target. And I mean that literally. - The special operations, do you mean, is this part of the CIA? - The special activities division, now it's called the
Special Activity Center, but originally, that's the umbrella agency that has the different paramilitary
organizations under it. So the most lethal one is ground branch. And that's what I reported on
in "Surprise, Kill, Vanish", and its origins go way back
to the Guerrilla Warfare Corps that was started in
1947 for the president. - So women are also a part of the alleged assassination? - Absolutely. - And you're saying they can, at times be more effective. I'm just gonna leave that pause there. The reason I ask of how
difficult the assassinations are, with Bin Laden, it took a long time. So I guess the reconnaissance,
the intelligence for finding the target,
I imagine with Mossad, maybe the CIA now, the
leadership of Hamas, or the military branch of Hamas is much wanted from a
assassination perspective. So to me as an outside observer, it seems like it's more
difficult than you would imagine, but perhaps that's the
intelligence aspect of it, not the actual assassination
of locating the person. - Well, I think it's because
mostly from what I understand, it's a really dirty game and
people are covering for people. And I'll give you the
example of Billy Waugh and Imad Mughniyeh, if I may. So Imad Mughniyeh was
the most wanted terrorist in the world before Bin Laden, Hezbollah's chief of operations. And he was wanted by every, Mossad, John down, but
no one could find him, he was missing for 20 years, there wasn't even a photograph of him. And then he resurfaced, and of all places he
resurfaced in Saudi Arabia. That's when I say it's a dirty game, Hezbollah, Iran, Hezbollah, Iran, enemies with Saudi Arabia. Why on earth was Imad
Mughniyeh in Saudi Arabia? Well, that's where he
was, there was a Navy Seal who was doing reconnaissance on him, this is according to Billy
Waugh, and this is around 2005. So Billy's in his eighties at this point, late seventies, eighties. And he gets word that the Seal who has been tracking Mughniyeh
to get photographs of him to give the photographs to Mossad and CIA so they can do a joint
operation to kill him, which they did with a
car bomb in Damascus, that's the end of the
story, but how we got there was the CIA needed confirmation, you can't kill the wrong person. So the Seal panicked,
according to Billy Waugh, and was just like, I'm outta
here, this is too dangerous, and I do not wanna wind
up in a Saudi prison. So who do you send in? Billy Waugh, he shows up, he's there for 24 hours, he knows where Mughniyeh
lives from the Seal. He positions himself in
a cafe across the street, which is run by Sudanese men, and of course Waugh speaks some Sudanese because he operated in Sudan. And he's shooting the shit
with him, by his own words, he had the most foul mouth that was just absolutely
delightful to listen to. And then in between him and
Mughniyeh's house is a dumpster. And Billy Waugh being Billy Waugh, who will go to any lengths to do the job, decides to conduct reconnaissance from inside the dumpster. And that is where he is
when he takes the picture of Imad Mughniyeh, living
so comfortably in Saudi that Mughniyeh came, according to Billy, came out of his a apartment building with dry cleaner plastic bag
hangers over his shoulder. That's how comfortable, he lived there. It was his neighborhood. Click, click, click, Billy
Waugh takes the photographs, runs 'em to the CIA headquarters
in Saudi at the embassy, oh my God, it's Mughniyeh,
get the hell out of here, he gets to the airport, he leaves. Those photographs get sent to the agency, and then they do the
operation with Mossad, and Mughniyeh is dead. Now the truth about that
being a co CIA mission was not reported for many
years after the fact. Mossad took credit as the CIA often likes to just give other people credit. They just want the job done. - Well, speaking of Mossad,
what in your understanding of all the intelligence agencies, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the different intelligence
agencies out there? CIA, Mossad, MI6, SVR, and FSB, and Chinese Intelligence, all this kind of stuff. Is there some interesting differences, insights that you have from
all your studying of CIA? - That's a really interesting question. I don't know, and here's why, it's because I've never interviewed any intelligence officer
with those other agencies. I've interviewed a couple people with Shin Bet in Israel. But until I speak to an actual source whose job it was, I don't know. And so the information that I'm getting is based on perception of others, which one would think
would be deeply clouded by the idea that America's the greatest. (Lex giggles) - [Lex] Right, right. - We're better than them. - Yes, well, actually
the fascinating thing is, 'cause you've spoken to a
lot of people about the CIA, how do you know they're telling the truth? And this actually
probably applies generally to your interviews with
very secretive people. How do you get past the bullshit? - Well, that's just
like multiple sourcing. So you find the story
out and then you have to, you go to the national archives,
and you find the operation, and then you learn all about this, and then you interview
other people who were there, and you put the story together
to the best of your ability, and you make very specific
choices with quote, so and so said, end quote, said so and so. And very rarely do I
report on a single source, as I did in the end of Area 51, and then it says essentially, look, dear reader, this is
what the source told me, I have no way of corroborating it, this is legit and here it is. So that's an area to make
your reader comfortable with the information
that they're being given. And then in all of my books, whether there are three or 400 pages, there's always 100 pages
of notes at the end. So you can see all the sourcing, and you can begin to get an understanding of how journalism in the
national security world works. And also great opportunity for me to say, I'm often standing on the
shoulders of journalists before me who did an incredible
job digging into something and being able to report what they knew. Often the books are 10, 20, 30 years old, and so much more has come to light since. - 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, (Lex giggling) 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 like this moment of conscious of crisis,
or crisis of conscience, and says like, "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 gonna defect, we're gonna let the Western
intelligence agencies know what we're doing here. And the CIA got involved, but Russian assassins were able to poison Khokhlov with polonium, what happens to him is insane and it's a miracle he
didn't die, but he doesn't, and then he defects to the West and he writes these books, and he tells lots of incredible secrets
about the Russian assassination programs and their poison labs, and they're really,
really, really interesting. And so to answer that question, I mean, to my eye, of course, I don't know, but it certainly looks
like Russia is acting in the same vein that it has always acted, taking care of dissidents
that go against Mother Russia. - 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 a semblance of democratic ideals. However surprising that may be. In other words, always trying to, I don't wanna 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 a kind of, almost a sadism about the Russian programs that I personally have not
seen in the American programs. - What about on the surveillance side? It seems like America's pretty
good at mass surveillance, or at least has been revealed through NSA and all this kind of reporting, and leaks, and whistleblowers. Can you comment to the degree
to how much surveillance is done by the US government,
internally and externally? - If you'd asked me five years ago, I would've a very different answer, first of all, they're looking
for a needle in the haystack, they're looking for the Bin Laden, and they can't find the
needle in the haystack, but they continue to create the haystack and survey the haystack. But the real problem, what has happened, and I write about this in
my book, "First Platoon", which is about a group of young soldiers who goes to Afghanistan and
unwittingly becomes part of the Defense Department's biome efforts to capture biometrics on 85% of the population of Afghanistan. Which, by the way, China then emulated in their own biometric
surveillance program. And I think this is a terrible idea, but what has happened,
these biometric systems that have been created, and biometrics are of course fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and IRIS scans,
that allow you to tag, track, and locate people. And what has happened in the five years since this question was
first on everybody's minds about NSA surveillance, is
that the civilian sector companies have essentially done all the Defense Department's biometric surveillance job for them. By all of us sharing our
facially recognizable images on Instagram, and Facebook,
and everywhere else, X, by sharing information,
by writing up narratives about ourselves, this
information has become part of the database. Five years ago when I was
reporting First Platoon, I was interviewing the
police chief of El Segundo, which is kind of like
on the outskirts of LA, it's right near the airport. And why it's important is 'cause it's like defense contractor haven. So they have like massive surveillance. And Chief Whalen, when I
posed this question to him, he said to me, "Annie, let
me show you something." And he had Clearwater AI, the recognition software on his phone. And this was still when it was like, quasi not supposed to have to, you have that for law enforcement, and he said, "I want
you to go down the block and I want you to just turn the corner and come back toward me." Which I did. And he just didn't even hold up his phone, it looked like his hand
and his phone was on me. And he went back down, it was
like the tiniest movement. And when I came back to
him, he went like this and he showed me, there I
was, everything about me, everything about me, facts, and figures, and all images. And he knew who I was
before I even got to him. So is that a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, we could have another three hour conversation about that alone. - So you're saying more and
more you don't need an NSA where we're giving over the data ourselves publicly or semi publicly? - Yeah, during the War on terror, people were just like incensed to learn that there's a drone that's flying at something like 20,000
feet, it's called ARGUS-IS. And it can capture, it's not a license plate, it's like, it can basically capture
what's written on a golf ball from 17,000 feet, 20,000 feet up. And people went crazy over this, like, oh my God, it's Big Brother. Well, one of the lead engineers on that, Pat Bilgin, is someone
I talk to regularly, because we talk about surveillance a lot, 'cause he thinks about it a
lot 'cause he has kids now. And he has given so much thoughtful, really thinks about this issue, because he believes, just like you stated, that what we are turning
over about ourselves actually exceeds anything
that ARGUS-IS could do from above because we're
doing it willfully. And so what it's doing is
it's creating an ability, if someone wants to know about you, if someone, let's say in government, wants to know about Lex Fridman, they can find out everything about you. And then that gets used for tagging, tracking, and ultimately. In the war theater, it was
called find, fix, finish, well, what do you think the
finish is in that statement? - It's not pleasant. - It's called a drone strike. Find, find them with the biometric, fix him, meaning fix his position, we know he's moving in a
car, that's him, that's him. Finish him, call it
in, drone strike, boom. - 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. - Which is another great book and a terrifyingly complicated operation. - Yes, at what point do the ends justify the means? But in looking at those programs, and we acquired Hitler's
favorite weapons designers, and I'm talking about
weapons of mass destruction, like chemical weapons
and biological weapons. But of course, America was
ahead in the nuclear program, and an interesting detail
reading Albert Speer's memoirs, was Speer referring to
a conversation he had with Hitler where Hitler said, "No, I don't wanna do that,
that's Jewish science." And so because of
Hitler's own racial ethnic prejudices, they didn't develop the bomb. As far as should we have
dropped the bombs on Hiroshima, I've interviewed all kinds of people with different opinions, most of them that had ended the war. The best interview and
most meaningful perhaps that I ever did was with Al O'Donnell, who was a participant in
the Battle of Okinawa, which was like this insane, just to read stories about Okinawa, it makes your hair stand on end. And O'Donnell, like so many others, was slated to invade mainland Japan to his
almost certain death. So somebody like that, it makes sense right from the get go why he would be pro nuclear weapons. It saved his own personal life and it saved everyone that he knew that he was fighting with,
and it ended the war. - Do you think it sent a signal, like without that we wouldn't have known perhaps about the power of the weapons? In the long arc of that
history, 70 years plus, it is the reason why
deterrence has worked so far. - Yes, that's an interesting thought. My thought goes to this idea of more, that everybody always wants more. It's a very dangerous,
it's like more power, literally, not just figure, more power. And what is more confounding to me beyond the fact that we
dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
and the war ended, is that this decision was then made to develop the thermonuclear bomb. The degree of magnitude of
that power is mind-boggling, I mean, even projects
within the Manhattan Project defined thermonuclear weapon, the thermonuclear weapon
as the evil thing, like it was evil, it's
a weapon of genocide. Atomic weapons destroy cities, thermonuclear weapons
destroy civilizations. - 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, murderous 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 attending to this kind of 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. And so the hopeful answer is, we will evolve beyond
this kind of 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 kind of 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? - It is very possible. And your book is such a
stark and powerful reminder that human civilization as we
know it ends in this century. It's a good motivator to
get our shit together. - But aren't you really saying human civilization could end, not it ends? - Could end.
- Could end. - But the power of our
weapons is growing rapidly. - As they say, it's time to
come back from the brink. And it's time to have that discussion while we're still talking. - And there's another complexity sneaking up into the picture in the form of artificial intelligence
and in cyber war, but also in hot war, the
use of autonomous weapons. All of it starts becoming
super complicated as we delegate some of
these decisions about war, including nuclear war to
more and more autonomy and artificial intelligence systems. It's gonna be a very interesting century. Do you, just to zoom out a little bit, hope that we become a
multi-planetary species? - I'm all for adventure. (both giggling) - And I too, while am for adventure, I'm all for backups in all forms. So I hope that humans start a civilization on Mars and beyond out in space. And if you zoom out across all of it, what gives you hope
about human civilization, about this whole thing
we have going on here? - I mean, I am a fundamentally
optimistic person, I must have come outta 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 like the greatest family ever, two kids, Jet and Finley,
shout out to them, they're Lex Fridman fans. And my husband. So what inspires me is
like this idea of legacy, I think that you always
wanna have your eye on being a good example
to the best that you can. And passing on what you know and believing kind of
in the next generation. And again, that's a sentiment echoed by all these cold warriors
I've been talking to, because they also share that, that idea that, wow,
look at what we have done as a civilization and
look where we're going, whether it's exoplanetary travel or AI, it's just that the human factor of like
the desire to fight, the desire to have conflict, needs to be reconfigured. Because with all these new
technologies that we have, the peril is growing at
an accelerating pace, perhaps faster than the
average human can keep up with. - Well, Annie, thank you for
being a wonderful example of a great journalist, a great
writer, a great human being. And I'm a big fan of yours,
it's a huge honor to meet you, to talk with you today, so thank you so much for talking today. - Thank you for having me. - Thank you for listening to this conversation with Annie Jacobsen. To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from John F. Kennedy. "The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society. And we are, as a people, inherently and historically
opposed to secret societies, the secret oaths, and
the secret proceedings." Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.