Transcript

EP29 The Handmaidens of the Apocalypse

From Dan Carlin · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 2 min · 9,835 words · 57 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "EP29 The Handmaidens of the Apocalypse", an episode of Dan Carlin published April 5, 2024 (1 h 2 min, about 9,835 words). It mentions 15 people, works and ideas, including Annie Jacobson, Nuclear Winter, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Nuclear War: A Scenario.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Annie Jacobson, Fred Kaplan, Nuclear War: A Scenario
  2. – 20:00: Annie Jacobson
  3. – 50:00: Bill Perry, Nuclear Winter
  4. – 1:00:00: Albert Einstein, Nuclear Winter, Annie Jacobson, Leon Panetta
  5. – 1:01:46: Annie Jacobson, Nuclear War: A Scenario

Notable quotes from "EP29 The Handmaidens of the Apocalypse"

  • Insanity extra shows the last Supernova in the East show the Hardcore History addendum we did with Fred Kaplan many common sense shows that touched upon nuclear weapons the…
    about Fred Kaplan · at
  • Head which brings me to a new book by investigative reporter pulit Sur prise finalist Annie Jacobson that she did called nuclear war a scenario when I got this book I didn't think it was going to be for me because.
    about Annie Jacobson · at
  • About nuclear war nuclear weapons and where all of this stuff is heading Annie Jacobson's new book is nuclear war a scenario it begins 1 second after a nuclear weapon is…
    about Nuclear War: A Scenario · at
  • My conversations about exactly this with former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and he's the one who described that crisis of conscience to me now let's keep in mind Perry is in his 90s and so his he was very clear in our.
    about Bill Perry · at
  • 24 minutes the last 24 minutes and in and then we have the aftermath which is nuclear winter but in that sort of you know Shakespearean All Is Lost moment in the third act that is when the nuclear EMP happens for reasons that you will learn.
    about Nuclear Winter · at
  • Are doing and why you know it was an interview with former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that really hit home when I asked him about this particularly about that you know…
    about Leon Panetta · at
  • He's the philosopher and mathematician that was putting out you know warnings to the world with Albert Einstein and stuff and he makes it you know he talked about what we would…
    about Albert Einstein · at
  • World War I will be fought with sticks and stones you know that reminds me of something that philosopher Nick Bostrom who works at the Oxford future of humanity Institute once…
    about Nick Bostrom · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

Books & papers

  • Nuclear War: A Scenario — Book · 2 mentions · first at
  • The Day After — Book · 1 mention · first at
    Better we're we want to have American Supremacy you know Mr tough guy and he saw the day after ABC miniseries and as he wrote in his Memoirs he became greatly depressed those…

Companies & orgs

Concepts & topics

Places & events

  • Pakistan — Place · 1 mention · first at
    Where none of the traditional Powers we would have assumed would have been involved I mean an India Pakistan nuclear war would defy any of the Rand Corporation type you know…

Full transcript with timestamps

it's Hardcore History aandm throughout the entire history of the Hardcore History Podcast we've been talking about nuclear weapons whether it's on shows that we've done about nothing else but nuclear weapons like the destroyer of worlds or The Logical insanity and logical Insanity extra shows uh the last Supernova in the East show the Hardcore History addendum we did with Fred Kaplan many common sense shows that touched upon nuclear weapons the changes to Warfare that they've created and the opportunity that they've opened up for dystopian outcomes that were practically unimaginable before their invention if we want to think about how we're going to end up with a Statue of Liberty in the sand moment in our future while nuclear weapons would seem to be the oddson favorite vehicle for creating it I can't think of a more important topic for discussion and something that should be far more a part of our

conversation at all times than it is I think we've forgotten how it felt during the height of the Cold War to consider the fact that you could wake up and find out that the missiles were on the way and then sometime after the Soviet Union fell and we entered into that period sometimes referred to as the end of History um when people sort of forgot as we had referred to it in the destroyer of world show that we had metaphorically speaking as a civilization a gun pointed at our head which brings me to a new book by investigative reporter pulit Sur prise finalist Annie Jacobson that she did called nuclear war a scenario when I got this book I didn't think it was going to be for me because it is written WR almost in a dramatic narrative sort of form and I'm not a Fiction guy but once I got to reading it I realized that that was precisely what made it so good and that so much of what I had read had sort of

removed the dramatic part of the story that turned it into kind of a dry history where we were talking about you know megat tons and blast radius and destructive Valu and uh systems that were in place and all of a sudden sometimes you just need a reality check moment that brings you back down to if you're pardon the upon Ground Zero and reminds you what we're talking about here not just the destroying of all the people but every creation that humankind has ever come up with now does that mean that that needs to be the way it goes there's been a lot of military thought into the idea of having a nuclear war that one can win or a limited nuclear war but in Jacobson's book she goes a long way to pointing out how unlikely it is that you could limit a nuclear war once nuclear weapons are employed by anyone I would not like this book if it was just some fictional account coming out of her brain but instead she talked

to dozens and dozens and dozens of people who are in such high positions of authority in terms of their closeness to the nuclear weapon secrets that there were times in the book where she had to be very careful to avoid violating things like the Espionage Act but all these people were able to give her enough information on what they all have thought that nuclear war would be like and what they studied and what the war gaming showed and what the best guesses are and what the procedures and Protocols are to give her enough material where she could write a scenario that gave you a sense of what it would be like and it's a page Turner there's a dramatic narrative in this that keeps you wondering what's going to happen next even though you know it's going to be terrible you kind of want to figure out in what way it's going to be terrible and by the time you're done with the book there's an overwhelming sense which

is the sense you should have after any one of our shows on nuclear weapons but she makes it perfectly clear in an entirely new way an overwhelming sense that we're not talking about this enough and maybe it's just too hard for us to think about but if thinking about it is going to make this even one iota less likely then I can't think of anything more important than thinking about nuclear war nuclear weapons and where all of this stuff is heading Annie Jacobson's new book is nuclear war a scenario it begins 1 second after a nuclear weapon is launched in her fictional account and then how everything proceeds from there uh she's currently making the rounds on a book tour so she's talked to a lot of people but perhaps we're going to take it in directions they didn't so without further Ado our conversation with Pulitzer priz finalist investigative reporter Annie Jacobson talking about well you know the light AA and uplifting

topics we normally address things like nuclear Holocaust let's start by talking about the the subject I mean you've got to decide you want to spend a year or two or more on this and it's got to be something you can maintain an interest for and maybe feel like uh you're doing some good in the world so let me ask you why this subject and why now so Dan I'm an investigative journalist and I write about war and weapons and National Security and secrets and in my previous six books which have been about military and intelligence programs everything from the CIA to DARPA I cannot tell you how many sources have said to me with kind of a swelling Pride Annie I dedicated my life to preventing nuclear World War II and so during the previous administration when former president Trump was talking about fire and fury and the sort of nuclear laor rattling rhetoric I got to thinking what if deterrence fails and then I took that

question to the highest level National Security people I knew and the result is the book okay so at first when I first opened the book I didn't think I was going to like the approach you took cuz I don't read a lot of fiction and I opened it up and I realized that what you're doing is concocting a scenario and I thought uh I'm more of a of a history guy I just want to read facts and figures but then when I got into it I realized that you were helping us overcome something by doing it this way that reminded me of a bertran Russell quote that I I looked up where he was trying to explain our inability to comprehend what we're talking about here and he said um what perhaps impedes understanding of the situation more than anything else is the term mankind when he's talking about humankind feels vague and Abstract he said said people scarcely realize in imagination that the danger is to themselves and their

children and their grandchildren and not only to a dimly apprehended Humanity they can scarcely bring themselves to grasp that they individually and Those whom they love are in imminent danger of perishing agonizingly and I thought that what your book really did that many of the other books I read on the subject that were much more you know cut and dried your book gave us the impression that helps us to understand that reality that as bertran Russell points out is so impossible to conceptualize and you are absolutely correct I wanted to demonstrate in appalling detail just how horrific nuclear war would be well and let me not uh spoil anything for anybody out there but the way that the book is organized is it starts 1 second from the first missile launching and within about 57 minutes the world is for all intents and purposes destroyed so that's a pretty um that's a pretty in yourface uh historical lesson of the

future that you're giving us yeah and you know what I mean what a great way to say that in your face because that's exactly what it felt like when I was interviewing people like General Robert keler the former director of stratcom and in our discussions we I posed to him you know a scenario whereby Russia and the United States were involved in a nuclear exchange and he said to me yes Annie the world could end in the next few hours and that's the kind of jawdropping things that were said to me time and time again from sources who went on the record about this I was originally doing the reporting during covid when people had a little more time to talk to somebody like me and that was kind of fate and Circumstance intervening I think in my favor because it allowed for me to really explore how people felt about what could happen and so that is where I came up with the fact-based scenario of it all

well and let me bring that up too because I would not have been interested had you just sort of extrapolated a little data from some secondary sources and but you talked to more than a hundred people who have found themselves up close and personal with how this whole thing works in fact there were a couple of areas where I you know we felt we were in danger of of of crossing the Espionage Act line and that to me is what makes this really real you're you're extrapolating information that people who know about this stuff and have been intimately into the rooms and the conversations and the wargaming and then turning it into a scenario based on you know the the best information that's available and maybe a little of the best information that's not even available like I said I read a lot about this stuff and you surprise me with a number of different things I mean for example can we talk a little bit about the

space-based defense system that maybe isn't quite the defense system that we in the back of our minds hope and pray it is I mean we can talk about anything because it's all sort of one like oh my God after the next and you're talking about cbers which is the Lockheed bill bu space-based system of satellites that the United States government the defense department has parked in geosync over America's nuclear armed enemies and adversaries so that we can see the hot rocket exhaust on an ICBM launch in under 1 second that is an astonishing fact I mean pretty much like you said you are very learned so am so am I and yet to learn that fact was news to me that it happened so fast and then of course I think that helps your average person on the street who I always write for to understand that this situation is all about seconds and minutes not weeks and months nuclear war happens so fast because an ICBM takes only approximately

30 minutes to get from one side of the world to the continental United States well and this I've explored this issue in in relation to Presidential Power because we were asking the question once why the president has this amount of authority uh when it comes to for example making a decision that could kill hundreds of millions of people or more and the answer always is the time window right you don't have time to convene Congress and have a big debate on the question that the very the very shrinking time window is what makes the way it is the way the protocol is set up so important I think in your book you talked about maybe six minutes of decision-making time is that correct yeah and people often say like how do you know it's six minutes and I know other people report it differently but you know I Source everything in the back of the book in my notes as you probably noticed so that people who have those

doubts you know how does she know that we go to the back of the book and look how I know that and the six-minute window there that you're talking about and that's from the moment the president is notified of an incoming nuclear missile the president has roughly six minutes to give the Counterattack order to stratcom and that information comes from President Reagan who wrote about that in his Memoir and he when he describes it he uses the word irrational he's saying saying like that is an irrational amount of time to have to make a decision about unleashing Armageddon and more than that and this is another one of the things that surprised me in the book that I wasn't expecting because one would imagine that when a person takes office as the person who has their finger on the metaphorical button so to speak that this would have been something thought out planned to the nth degree and well understood and

yet in your book you point out that by the time this scenario actually ends up at the foot of the president they may not really even have planned or thought much about it I mean the number of times that the Secret Service in your book bursts into the room and grabs the president from underneath both armpits and he seems like he's a little lost by the whole experience was disconcerting to say the least and you know I I mean I don't mean to laugh but it's like if it wasn't so tragic it would be comical and again that stuff is not coming from Annie Jacobson imagination um that is coming from for example an interview I did with the former director of The Secret Service about what his position would be in the event of a nuclear strike while you have you know the sort of defense department and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff trying to get the president to give this Counterattack order to

stratcom you would have this parallel Movement by the Secret Service by the cat team that's the counter assault team within the Secret Service and then there's something called the element which is even inside the cat team again details sourced from the people who are in the know on these things you then you would see this vying for you know precedence over who does what and that's where you begin to realize nuclear war is happening so fast this sequence of all these events that are rehearsed over and over and over again in the event that there is nuclear war are going to all go to essentially Hell in a hand basket in real time and let's talk power for a minute for people who may not understand just a little bit of background here about the difference between say a hero aized Atomic weapon and the larger thermonuclear bombs that we possess in our Arsenal today actually some of the larger ones are even larger than what we

have in the Arsenal cuz they're so large that there's not even a good military use for some of them I mean for example at the Castle Bravo uh nuclear test that's the largest bomb the US ever set off 15 megatons that's about a, times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and then you have the largest one that the Soviet Union ever ever uh uh unleashed the Zar bomba 50 to 58 megatons 3,300 times more powerful than Hiroshima you talk about a 1,000 uh you talk about a one Megaton weapon which is about as powerful as 66 Nagasaki atomic bombs um let's talk about the difference in the power of these things compared to you know the only images we really have of the post Atomic uh Ground Zero situation we're taken of post-atomic Ground Zero situations with much much less powerful Weaponry um the hirosima bomb for example is 15 kilotons and again these numbers can be dizzying I mean you and I both know that and we also know that

that our job you know is to try and make these numbers accessible to people so thank you for asking about like in layman's terms what does it really mean the the best way that it was explained to me okay so on the cover of my book there's a there's an an a mushroom cloud and that is a mushroom cloud it's a photograph from Los Alamos of the ivy Mike thermonuclear test which was actually the first proof of concept test in the Marshall Islands in 1952 and it's a 10.4 Megaton thermonuclear bomb so it is almost 1,000 hirosima the man who drew the architectural plans for that bomb is a man named Richard Garwin and I interviewed him for the book he's now 95 he was 23 or 24 when he drew those plans and I asked Garwin the same question you're asking me which is like explain it to me in layman's terms and he said that one way to think about it was that the thermonuclear bomb has a atomic bomb in inside of the weapon that

acts as a fuse and when you think about that that hero the hirosima bomb would be essentially the ignition point of the bigger bomb you can start to get a sense an Inc a sense of how incomprehensible these orders of magnitude of power really are and then the question then arises as to how one might use something like this rationally and you go over and it is one of the most astounding things how quickly we went from testing the first thermonuclear weapon that's a hydrogen bomb in in layman's terms to how quickly we started manufacturing the things and it's dizzying how fast I mean at one point you said we're making like five of them a day um and then we get up to more than 30,000 in the US I think the Soviet Union had uh significantly more than that even what is one even conceptualized doing with that number of weapons when you think about deterrence one would think that if you had oh I

don't know five or 10 large nuclear weapons that would be enough to deter anyone but somehow this whole system became a runaway formula here for an ever increasing number of these weapons the well let's put it this way if 30,000 nuclear weapons isn't Overkill I don't know what is but we went there and we paid for it and we had them in the Arsenal what accounts for that in the people that you spoke to that explain means that level of irrational Behavior I mean it really is madness isn't it and it's ironic that the term Mutual assured destruction mad is what everyone quotes you know that this idea that deterrence you just have a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at the other side and they have them pointed at you and therefore you will never use them but really at its core that is utter Madness because we know that this is all a mechanized system it's it's a machine you know nuclear command and control is

made up of men and machines and all machines fail and so this mad situation that we have ourselves in to answer your question how did we get here I mean you know the only answer is sort of a non answer which is it's Madness that got us here because when you look back at it through the lens of history as I do and I try to take the reader through it quickly or rather like parsimoniously I just for example like you said I give you the stats of how of year by year the numbers multiplying and you think to yourself where was the sane person in the room to say enough is enough and that person wasn't there and I think that again speaks to why so many of these sources in their 80s and 90s agreed to talk to me at this moment in history right now because looking back they realize at least it was conveyed to me this sense of like whoa we used to think once upon a time that nuclear war could be fought and won and we know now

that is not true and yet we have that same Legacy the foundation upon which it was all built is still with us which is all of these nuclear weapons some of them reduced in Arsenal size but the existence of the Arsenal was born of this time of utter Madness well you just bring up a great point so where was the the voice of reason in the room and you talk about this for a minute so let me quote from the book for a second when you talk about uh one of those seminal moments in the history of nuclear weapons and you write quote in 1960 the world's population was 3 billion what this meant was that the Pentagon had paid 1300 people to compile a war plan that would kill 1th of the people on Earth in a preemptive nuclear First Strike it's important to note you WR that this number did not account for the 100 million or so Americans who would almost certainly be killed by a Russian equal measure Counterattack nor did it account

for another 100 million or so people in North and South America who would die from radioactive fallout over approximately the next 6 months then you point out that there are people who will die that have nothing to do with the nuclear war or the powers involved and you and you quote a marine commandant David M shup who uh is the only person that speaks out in this conference where they're you know kind of in a very sort of clinical almost like accountant type fashion going over these casualties that non-combatants in countries not even in the war would face and he said all I can say is any plan that murders 300 million Chinese when it might not even be there war is not a good plan and you said that that was the only voice in the room that said anything I I mean it just it even to hear you read it astonishes me still and you're referring to this 1960 meeting of sort of generals and Admirals

who had put together the first integrated nuclear war fighting plan so hard to believe but before that moment each of the military organizations had its own Arsenal I mean we're talking about the Air Force having its nuclear weapons and weapon systems Delivery Systems uh the Army having its own and the Navy having its own and the incoming Secretary of Defense at the time got word of that and thought Oh my God we have to integrate these so that there's one unified War plan and in that integration that that meeting that you referred to took place and one individual named John rubel had the hood Spa to write about that meeting only time any eyewitness to that event ever wrote about it rubel wrote about it when he was in his 80s and dying like in the early 2000s and it's a tiny thin Memoir almost no one knows about I found it I quote from it everybody seems to be astonished by it and I think with good reason because

these are jealously guarded Secrets within the defense department no one is supposed to know about them well and there were some good books written about how the nuclear weapons just ended up getting folded into the traditional service rivalries and whatnot I mean uh traditionally for example the Navy was the early service opposed to all these nuclear weapons and calling them these EV evil devices and everything until they got a hold of some for their own ships and then they became a player in the game too let's talk about the Triad for a minute the the fact I mean I love a term you used and I'm going to use it for the name of the show I think handmaidens of the Apocalypse right the idea of the nuclear subs role in the traditional Triad for those who don't know nuclear weapons there's a Triad and now if you want to add space maybe more than that but traditionally there are the bomber based nuclear weapons there

are the landbased missile based nuclear weapons and then there are the submarine ones and the submarine ones seem to be the ones that were the most terrifying controversial and difficult for an opponent to deal with in your book The handmaidens of the Apocalypse you called them can we talk a little about that because you said they had a 30 minute warning if if the missile was launched for example from ground zero in another country but you have a lot less than that if a subjest pops up off your coast and decides to hit one of your nuclear power plants with one I mean you're absolutely right and vice admiral Michael Connor who's a former uh formerly in charge of America's nuclear sub forces told me that it was easier it's easier to find a grapefruit sized object in space than a nuclear armed nuclear powerered submarine under the sea and that is a chilling example of just how stealthy just how

impossible these submarines are to locate which is why they're called in Washington the handmaidens of the Apocalypse because no one can take them out not ours and not theirs not until they return to port and that the fact that they're out in the sea lurking around sneaking up to our coasts our adversaries and enemies are sneaking up AR coast and we are doing the same and that they could unleash a subl launched ballistic missile in literally 14 minutes from launch order and then that missile takes you know less than 15 minutes depending on precisely where it is to reach its Target and the fact that each like the American Ohio class submarines for example can have 90 nuclear weapons on them I mean that's that's not just a city Destroyer that's a country destroyer and maybe a continent Destroyer I found it interesting the adversary that you chose to make the one launching the initial nuclear weapon the bolt out of the blue

as it's called as you informed me um in the book because I think you know when we did a nuclear war show we talked about um a gun aimed at our head and we talked about a generation that wasn't accustomed to having a gun aimed at their head the ones that lived in the prenuclear world who then transition to a nuclear world but we wondered about those who are born into the nuclear world right people that never knew anything else and how you sort of maybe get used to the idea of a gun aimed at your head and don't even notice it anymore and maybe start to assume that there are enough controls or safeguards built into our system or our principal ad adversar system potentially a Russia or a China right you feel like there are intelligent men in charge there are systems there are controls there are safeguards but then you use sort of a Madman kind of scenario to point out that it isn't always going to be that

way even if that way is deemed to be safe and that's far from a safe conclusion but but what happens if a Kim John un decides he's got a way to win a nuclear war and enough of a of a of a system built for him to survive it talk about that a little bit and your choice of that as sort of if you'll pardon the pun Ground Zero in this story so I discussed this idea of a scenario with multiple sources and it was one of the many conversations I had with Richard Garwin that I landed on the scenario that you that I used for the book whereby it is a rogue bolt out of the blue attack from North Korea and that's because I asked Garwin who arguably knows more about nuclear weapons than anyone on this Earth and has been advising presidence since the 1950s and you know was a founding member of nro and so he knows all about space and he knows all about reconnaissance and he knows all about all of these

issues that crisscross into nuclear Armageddon and I said what is the worst case scenario and he said one nealis mad man with a nuclear Arsenal and he sort of used that French phrase which suggests you know after me who cares right after me the flood and that is North Korea North Korea is the only nuclear armed nation of the nine that not only does not adhere to sort of the rules of nuclear launch tests right if you could call them rules the announcement of tests to other countries but they flagrantly violate them they have launched over 100 missiles since January of 2022 and after you read the book you begin to understand once you know that it only that for the first 150 seconds after launch every single person in nuclear command and control and those early warning system uh organizations are looking at that launch to try and determine is it going to Moscow is it going to the continental United States

if so San Francisco Hawaii oh and then they realize wait it's going into space or it's going into the Sea of Japan and so that kind of Razor's Edge antagonistic behavior is so dangerous that's why I chose that for the opening Salvo in the bolt out of the blue attack in my scenario well then that gets to a part of the book that I found traditionally troubling as you might imagine and it's the idea that something like that can so quickly expand into something that involves a lot of people that weren't involved in the initial attack I mean if there's a bolt out of the blue from North Korea to the United States and many people may not know that there are now missiles that North Korea possesses that can reach the continental United States but why would all of a sudden that mean that you have a general nuclear Holocaust involving the US and Russia how do things within an hour's time get to that level of freakout why

can't they be contained and just involved the powers that are seemingly you know the the launcher and the target of the attack so for listeners like we talked about Soul presidential Authority that the president has to make this decision alone about the Counterattack and that c Counterattack is part of an American policy called launch on warning and so the system is set up that once the commanderin-chief is notified of an incoming nuclear missile and a secondary early warning radar system confirms that that is in fact a ballistic missile coming in the president has that six-minute window that he must make a Counterattack and so now you can see how radically the clock is ticking and everything is unfolding so fast here's where errors occur starting with as professor ameritus at MIT Ted postal who used to be an adviser to the Pentagon explain to me the first like real technological oh my God everything could

go wrong in this moment is that so we spoke about the cers system that the defense department has and how incredibly accurate and precise it is parked over the other countries able to detect missile launch in one second Russia's system claims to be on balance claims to have parity with ours but us defense scientists and those that are experts in Russian nuclear forces alike will tell us that their Tundra system the Russian early warning satellite system is deeply flawed and it can often mistake things like clouds or sunlight for an IBM launch it can also misidentify numbers and so in the scenario I choose a very real situation that defense scientists are worried about that Russia's Tundra system would see this you know Counterattack and immediately see it as an aggressive attack toward Russia and then here's where we learn the most horrifying detail I think from the whole experience of reporting this book spoiler alert on

my own book America's icbms do not have enough reach to Target North Korea without overflying Russia so imagine Russia having to just believe that the I cbms headed their way are going to fly over their country not at their country and that's where things can really go wrong you know it's interesting I realize that this violates every tenant of uh uh military thinking but it it almost makes an argument doesn't it to share better technology with the Russians so that they'd be less likely to mistake our incoming missiles that directed at them than directed at somebody where they're just overflying Russian territory to get to I realize that violates all of the ideas of sharing high technology with a potential adversary but it would seem to work in our favor possibly let me ask you this because you brought up an interesting point which is that the president has sole Authority president of the United

States to launch a retaliatory strike and to launch on warning which is the protocol but let's ask the different question in the 1950s and whatnot when the US didn't have a problem with the idea of a first strike capability uh if they were trying to uh deal with an balance of conventional forces for example in Central Europe does the president of the United States have full authority to launch a first strike I mean that has been debated you know over and over and over again across the decades and you'll often see situations where presidents are cornered into saying you know we don't no we don't I remember this very vividly during the war on terror years with bush and Cheney and office and I think that presidents always if you look at it they hedge around having a commitment to that but so far as far as I know no one has actually gone on the record to put an EO an executive order in play that we do

not have a launch on warning policy um that I'm not a th% sure on because I don't address that in the in the book but it is really indicative of what I learned in reporting the book that whatever the position of incoming presidents may be for whatever reason once they take office they must learn something from their briefings that puts them very far away from wanting to commit to changing the policies the procedures in place in any manner and that is very mysterious well because you've mentioned in the book that several uh presidents or would be presidents had mentioned how ridiculous this system was and that it should be changed and yet didn't change it presidents from both major political parties by the way so you're right there's a sort of a missing ingredient for X there um one of the things that's always fascinated me and I'm sure you as well are all of the uh efforts after the nuclear age began to try to figure out

how to live with these weapons um in the best possible way I mean that's why you get these think tanks created with you know these amazing intelligent Minds The John V nyans and people like that um you know coming up with Game Theory and all the the prisoners dilemma and all these kinds of ideas I'm always fascinated with this weird idea of deterrence though and you know and you mentioned it in the book the idea that if deterrence fails the next step is to try to reestablish deterrence and all that kind of crap um but I'm interested in this idea of having to retaliate at if deterrence fails there was a wonderful line I wish I could remember who said it uh but they were talking about the metaphorical red button right the you know if there were a red button that launched nuclear weapons and the idea was that maybe the red button shouldn't be attached to anything that there shouldn't be any electrical wires

attached to it at all because if deterrence fails why would you push the button then and then kill an extra 500 million human beings when it's going to happen anyway um are there any conversations about the idea that it makes no sense if deterrence fails to just go ahead and kill a lot of the enemy even if they are the enemy and of course pollute the world kill a bunch of people for example in China who have no dog in the fight and things like that I mean that is a great question and I certainly ask that and I bring that up in the book in kind of one moment where the Secretary of Defense has a crisis of conscience kind of like you describe there and of course again giving away my own book The the commander in- Chief the president is missing um having been zipped out of the White House on Marine one and not being able to get out before an EMP takes down the helicopter and so the SE defa who has

escaped to Raven Rock has a crisis of conscience and this part of the scenario comes directly from my conversations about exactly this with former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and he's the one who described that crisis of conscience to me now let's keep in mind Perry is in his 90s and so his he was very clear in our interviews in a very melancholy remorseful way at least my interpretation of it that here he was someone who had spent spent his whole life in the defense industry in the military industrial complex in the very center of it as an old man reflecting about a crisis of conscience and so we have to imagine with kind of a deep horror well in a real scenario that acting president isn't going to be a 92-year-old man it's going to be somebody who has a different outlook on life and might not have that same crisis of conscience um either way he gets overruled by stratcom in the scenario so

you know it's all Madness it really is and I think what I would hope is that people would read this book and be duly horrified to kind of ask themselves to think about this a little bit more deeply that and instead of sort of playing ostrich you know with like the head in the sand and the neck exposed because that's where it seems to me we're all living right now well that you brought up the EMP uh pulse question the electromagnetic pulse question and I found that to be a part of the book that hit me a little differently because anybody who's studied the subject at all knows about this but I I guess I hadn't followed the natural line of thinking to its logical conclusion about what that meant and you talked about you talked about for example something about the weapons which we all understand right when they explode you create a dead zone and what a dead zone means is all the people all the animals all the insects

which hadn't occurred to me I mean everything so it's like the moon we get that but you talked about the idea that a country in this scenario North Korea could actually hide a weapon in a satellite that's orbiting the Earth all the time you wouldn't even know it was there you wouldn't think about it and then that weapon could be exploded at an altitude so high most of us wouldn't even be aware it had gone off and the resulting e MP blast effects if you know it's crazy to say this but it almost seems like if you wanted to look at the downstream effects of the nuclear weapons that was almost as bad as anything else I read talk to me a little bit about that scenario first of all about a nuke in a satellite that's orbiting us all the time but also what an EMP blast really means on the ground I mean that is that was one of the most horrific parts to report and also one of the most difficult because that issue

has been the subject of huge polemics and again this is very inside baseball sort of military and you know PhD people debate this issue vociferously in other words that one side says that the other side is wrong and that side says the other side is wrong and so I had to really drill down on this and go back to multiple sources because you know put simply the more sort of liberal-minded people have taken the position that the EMP threat a nuclear weapon detonated in space is not a real threat and is this concocted idea by a bunch of hawks who were trying to raise money for the EMP commission okay that's one set of idea and the other is that this is a very real threat and for listeners the the reality that you spoke of is that there have been fears expressed that North Korea might actually use a satellite to carry a small nuclear warhead into orbit which it would then detonate in space and that capability is

very real it does exist and so the argument has been whether or not the effects would be as one side likes to call it electric Armageddon or it would be a nothing Burger in layman's terms and I went to the people like General to Hill America's first cyber Chief under Obama who wrote a paper on EMP and it's still classified Richard Garwin wrote a paper on EMP in 1952 and it's still classified and everyone told me in the sort of General manner without breaking their security clearances that this is an incredibly real threat and so to answer your question what happens on the ground you detonate an an a new small nuclear weapon 300 miles in space up in Space over C you know the central part of America over Nebraska say and you have this massive three-phased electromagnetic shock wave so incredibly powerful that all of the industrial strength surge suppressors do not hold and you have a colossal grid loss and you have

catastrophic failure of basically every system you can imagine from railroads to Ports to airplanes to GPS to fiber optics it truly is electric armagedon oh you mentioned even cars which you don't think about except that they're becoming more computerized all the time so they're vulnerable to that too I mean everything goes out and you know I describe that in sort of The Shakespearean I I do the book in in acts right and as you know it's like 20 there's the setup 24 minutes the second 24 minutes the last 24 minutes and in and then we have the aftermath which is nuclear winter but in that sort of you know Shakespearean All Is Lost moment in the third act that is when the nuclear EMP happens for reasons that you will learn narratively which sort of unfortunately make sense to the National Security apparatus and that is when you know it's sort of like just when you thought the nightmare couldn't get any worse it gets

worse this brings me to the nightmare getting worse question uh which is about nuclear proliferation um it's a weird subject when you realize that we're talking about essentially if we're if if we consider Atomic weapons to be in the same enal family we're talking about a 75y old weapon system at this point um and it's weird to expect Nations to not even be allowed to build a weapon system that's that's 3/4 of a century old it almost smacks I mean if I if I was Iran for example I would want a nuclear weapon and that would seem like an absolute National Security concern for me because look at the different way a country with a nuclear weapon gets treated versus a country without a nuclear weapon so if you're looking at it from the point of view of a of a have not in the nuclear race here having a nuclear weapon makes total sense but for the world as a whole or nuclear powers that are already in existence that is

the worst nightmare around and and I think the question that I have is one how reasonable is it to keep this out of the hands of of emerging powers and more and more of them also if more Powers get it is it axiomatic that we can expect the chances of a bolt of the blue to expand from a North Korean possibility to multiple countries that don't have nuclear weapons now but might in the not too distant future you know when you when you think about that initial buildup of nuclear weapons that we were talking about earlier when it was like just Russia and the United States and you kind of close your eyes and think of all these swords pointed at each other except for their icbms and you think about the standoff you who have written and thought and spoken so much about war over Millennium right and you think about the duel and you think about two parties okay and then you're like on don't or Dante right but then you add

multiples into there and you realize how precarious it is and how much could go wrong and so what was set up for two and then three and then a couple more nuclear armed Nations is now nine and I think it's impossible to think anything other than adding multiple nations with nuclear weapons into this mix is only taking us in One Direction because I found in reporting the book in learning from sources that where things really go wrong is the other Nation other nuclear armed Nations reactions to what those who are engaged in a nuclear exchange are doing and why you know it was an interview with former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that really hit home when I asked him about this particularly about that you know what we were talking about earlier whereby the the missiles have to overfly Russia to get to North Korea and how could Russia just take America's word at it and I asked Panetta what he thought about that

that sort of massive hole in National Security and he said it's a real problem and he also told me that he really didn't believe that there was a lot of thought put into this idea of all that could go wrong with mad chemistry when the bombs start flying well and you think about powers that could get involved in a nuclear war where none of the traditional Powers we would have assumed would have been involved I mean an India Pakistan nuclear war would defy any of the the Rand Corporation type you know war games that they were working on in the 1950s um you know I think about the bertran Russell stuff a lot because of course he's the philosopher and mathematician that was putting out you know warnings to the world with Albert Einstein and stuff um and he and he makes it you know he talked about what we would have to do too and and it was he said basically that once the weapons have become so

powerful that you can't imagine a war being fought with them then you have to face the the to humankind maybe brutal reality that maybe we can't have War anymore and I remember the line and I'm going to quote it here because it's such a wonderful Coda to everything you've been talking about he said quote you your families your friends and your countries are to be exterminated by the common decision of a few brutal but powerful men to please these men all the private affections all the public hopes all that has been achieved in art and knowledge and thought and all that might be achieved Hereafter is to be wiped out forever our ruined lifeless Planet will continue for countless ages to Circle aimlessly around the Sun unredeemed by the joys and loves the occasional wisdom and power to create Beauty which have given value to human life end quote I think of what Germany lost in the second world war sometimes and it's not just

you know when you realize it every city you you know above the level of like heidleberg was reduced to rubble and you think okay that might have been what was required to get rid of Hitler but what did that do well that destroyed civilization in that area for humankind forever none of us can ever enjoy the history of Germany from you know like a like as a world heritage site if you want to look at it that way but not just that generations of Germans from now until the end of time are now denied that and in a nuclear war one country turned to Rubble would be minuscule compared to what we would have you you make the point in the book and and I I I saw it over and over this idea of all the things that would be lost you keep pointing out monuments I mean you mentioned the Coliseum in Rome all these things that we think of as having survived through the trials and tribulations of eons of human Wars and

and yet gone in an instant can we talk about what humankind loses in terms of its Legacy and Heritage and everything that's built up over millennium in well one hour in your book I mean I love thinking about that because it is the only sort of Ray of Hope and it's why after I talk about nuclear winter which is just an astonishing concept that you know when it came out in 1983 um this idea nuclear winter that the the soot that would be lofted up into the troposphere after the mega fires were burning um that soot would block out the sun's rays and the Earth would become colder and things would freeze over and you would have nuclear winter and initially the defense department took the position that that was Soviet propaganda and now we know from state-of-the-art climate modeling and thanks to a couple professors who have been on this issue ever since that in fact nuclear winter would be worse than was imagined in the

1980s and so you are really talking about exactly what you've brought up which is that all would be lost and Not only would all The Monuments and the things built by human Ingenuity and human imagination be gone but human Brilliance itself because a drop in 40° fahren around the mid latitudes would result in the the death of Agriculture and that means man would return to a hunter gatherer State and so it reminds me you quote Bertram Russell and I'm going to like sort of paraphrase Einstein which is where he was said uh you know I don't know what weapons World War II will be fought with but nucle but World War I will be fought with sticks and stones you know that reminds me of something that uh philosopher Nick Bostrom who works at the Oxford future of humanity Institute once said when he was defining the term existential threat because most of us think of an existential threat as meaning we would

just be eliminated off the face of the Earth but he he includes another definition and his other definition is if humankind were to get knocked back in a capabilities sense never to regain what they had used to possess so think about like you know losing the Roman Empire all of a sudden you can't build the aqueducts and the baths or anything anymore or losing the ability to put satellites into space or losing the internet and never getting it back again that's the kind of thing you're talking about now I always say that this is a rainbow and unicorn free zone here on this program but I do want to try to end on a more uplifting note and just ask you is anybody working on this I mean when when when your book has the impact that it should have given the visibility of it does that make people sit down and go you know maybe we've been ignoring this uh for the last cuz you know the end of History happened when the Soviet

Union fell we didn't have to think about you know the the end of the world anymore theoretically but you're reminding us that that never went away is this a problem that people are working on and is it something that we can solve well the Ray of Hope I think no unicorns no rainbows just facts here comes from the concept of the Reagan reversal right so when I was in high school in 1983 there was an ABC miniseries yes indeed called which I know you know about which was called we saw right I was in high school too I saw it yes we are dating ourselves but nonetheless this is the Ray of Hope because of course you know that that show was horrific it depicted a fictional scenario of a nuclear war between the United States and then Soviet Russia and it terrified everyone it terrified me it terrified a hundred million Americans but the very important American that it also terrified was President Ronald Reagan who had been in

essence a nuclear Hawk definitely had this position of like more weapons are better we're we want to have American Supremacy you know Mr tough guy and he saw the day after ABC miniseries and as he wrote in his Memoirs he became greatly depressed those are his words words and as a result he reached out to gorbachov and what transpired from their communication was the rovic summit which reduced the number of nuclear warheads from their alltime insane high of 70,000 nuclear weapons to the approximately 12,500 that we have today that's pretty hopeful if you ask me I'm sorry I see it differently that the president had to see a TV show to sort of grasp what he'd been in charge of the whole time it strikes me as a little different differently let me ask you has there has there been anything I haven't asked you today that we need to bring up you know it's a joy talking to you because I love listening

to Warfare reduced to its sort of human Concepts right because I think this is very interesting to be able to talk about weapons and War and aggression and then the human at the center of it all and how we have these sort of big lofty ideas that we sometimes and people like Einstein or Bertram Russell that we quote and we think about and I really am a believer in that the conversation leads to the transformation you know I really believe that that communication is where we evolve so I'm all for hardcore history in the Dan Carlin conversation I can't thank you enough for having me oh that's so nice you listen I always say about those people in the stories we talk about that they're often trapped in the gears of history but I don't like the idea that that could apply just as much to us as to them Annie Jacobson you've done a wonderful job here with this book I hope I hope a bazillion people read it and

wouldn't it be the greatest thing in the world to have as your Epitaph that your book prompted some actual change in making the world a safer Place brilliant my thanks to author and investigative reporter Annie Jacobson for coming on today's program her new book is nuclear war a scenario and as strange as this is to say about a book on factual matters like this it is a dramatic page Turner pick your copy up wherever you enjoy getting your books and if you don't have a preference well we'll put a link to buying it in our show notes as we almost always do for books we mentioned on the program just quick note we are working as always on the next big Hardcore History show uh if you're one of those ones that enjoys when we play the hits you should like this next show which will probably be a series also a reminder we do sell the old shows uh they stay free for several years and then we move them to the paid

archives if you'd like to get any of our paid archives we keep them inexpensive in the hopes that you'll want them if you don't already have them or if you want to buy a gift for someone else head on over to dancarlin.com and pick yourself up a few old shows would you hope everyone's doing well stay safe and until I talk to you again thanks for everything thank you for all the bucka show donations without constant help from people like you Dan and Ben would simply not be here go to dancarlin.com to donate using PayPal or by sending a good oldfashioned check support us with patreon by going to patreon.com danan Carin or go to our donate page at dancarlin.com dc- donate

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "EP29 The Handmaidens of the Apocalypse"?

In order: 0:00 Annie Jacobson, Fred Kaplan, Nuclear War: A Scenario; 10:00 Annie Jacobson; 40:00 Bill Perry, Nuclear Winter; 50:00 Albert Einstein, Nuclear Winter, Annie Jacobson, Leon Panetta; 1:00:00 Annie Jacobson, Nuclear War: A Scenario.

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

15 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Annie Jacobson, Nuclear Winter, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Nuclear War: A Scenario, Fred Kaplan. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP29 The Handmaidens of the Apocalypse"?

The episode runs 1 h 2 min; the transcript is about 9,835 words in 57 timestamped sections.

More from Dan Carlin

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.