#192 – What would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US (Annie Jacobsen on the 80,000 Hours Podcast)

We just published an interview: Annie Jacobsen on what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US. Listen on Spotify or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.

Episode summary

Ring one: total annihilation; no cellular life remains. Ring two, another three-mile diameter out: everything is ablaze. Ring three, another three or five miles out on every side: third-degree burns among almost everyone.
You are talking about people who may have gone down into the secret tunnels beneath Washington, DC, escaped from the Capitol and such: people are now broiling to death; people are dying from carbon monoxide poisoning; people who followed instructions and went into their basement are dying of suffocation. Everywhere there is death, everywhere there is fire.
That iconic mushroom stem and cap that represents a nuclear blast — when a nuclear weapon has been exploded on a city — that stem and cap is made up of people. What is left over of people and of human civilisation.
- Annie Jacobsen

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author Annie Jacobsen about her latest book, Nuclear War: A Scenario.

They cover:

The most harrowing findings from Annie’s hundreds of hours of interviews with nuclear experts.
What happens during the window that the US president would have to decide about nuclear retaliation after hearing news of a possible nuclear attack.
The horrific humanitarian impacts on millions of innocent civilians from nuclear strikes.
The overlooked dangers of a nuclear-triggered electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack crippling critical infrastructure within seconds.
How we’re on the razor’s edge between the logic of nuclear deterrence and catastrophe, and urgently need reforms to move away from hair-trigger alert nuclear postures.
And plenty more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering team: Ben Cordell, Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

Highlights

The minutes after an incoming nuclear attack is detected

Annie Jacobsen: OK, so pause for a second. On the one hand, you have this lane of action, which is the advisors taking the information to the president. On the other hand, at the same time, you have all the nuclear command and control facilities working to, A, confirm the information, B, determine the trajectory of the missile — that’s happening in seconds and minutes — and then you have a process by which the interceptor missile system is going to try and intercept it. This is again happening in the first few minutes.
And then ultimately, the system requires that there is a secondary confirmation that that ballistic missile is indeed coming to the continental United States. That happens around nine minutes. That happens when long-range radars that are ground-based, as opposed to the ones in space, confirm this information when they can finally see the missiles coming over the horizon.
So when you consider all that is happening, on the one hand, that is with the machine systems. Then you consider the human element, as you’re asking me. And that human element involves people, and it also involves the Black Book, which is that document very underreported — it so jealously guarded, the contents of the Black Book — that sits inside of the president’s football. The football is also known as the emergency satchel. And it follows the president ²⁴⁄₇, 365 days a year. It looks like an overstuffed briefcase. It’s carried by a military aide. Everyone on the team knows him as a mil aide.
And inside that football is an ability to confirm the identity of the president, which is coupled with a small laminated card the president must carry in his pocket at all times. It’s known as the “biscuit.” And that confirms his identity in an old school analogue way. Very interesting. It’s not state-of-the-art biometrics digital systems. It is a call and response. I drill down on this in the book.
And then also in there is this set of documents called the Black Book. Once a mil aide went on the record to talk about it, and he described it as a Denny’s-like menu. And what he means by that is that if you pull back, theoretically, and think about the nuclear war plans that exist: they are specific to a nation, they are specific to a potential attack. And then they must get synthesised down into a readable document — again, a very quickly readable document, because the president is going to be reading it in that six-minute window — which gives the president a list of counterstrike options.
And what I learned from an individual named Ted Postol, who is actually familiar with the contents of the Black Book, is that the counterstrike options — these nuclear strike options, which are then going to kill millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people on the other side of the globe — have been so watered down that they have become profoundly objectified. In other words, the way that Postol put it to me was that his concern was that the president almost won’t even know what it is he is authorising.

Deciding whether to retaliate

Luisa Rodriguez: I guess the thing I’d like to happen is for the president to be surrounded by thoughtful advisors, to have kind of rehearsed the scenario many times, and to be extremely thoughtful and wise about the decisions in front of them.
But the picture I got from your book is that there’s actually this intense chaos, I think, coming from all sorts of directions. A couple of directions that particularly struck me were, one, there’s STRATCOM, which is going to want the president to make decisions about the retaliatory strike as soon as possible. But also there’s the Secret Service. And the Secret Service has a duty to protect the president at all costs, and they’re going to want to move the president. And I got this sense that these kind of six-plus minutes aren’t going to be conducive to making reasonable strategic decisions. To what extent does that feel true to you?
Annie Jacobsen: Absolutely. I mean, you’ve pointed out a very important problem here. On the one hand, you have the president, who’s in charge of all of it. On the other hand, you have the military command and control system. And then on the third hand, you have the president’s advisors.
So if you consider the nuclear command and control system, the military chain of command, you have the STRATCOM commander, who’s the person who’s going to receive the counterattack orders from the president, and put the nuclear counterstrike into effect. And underneath the STRATCOM commander, there are 150,000 military people waiting and at the ready, all of whom have been rehearsing nuclear war. That really must be considered: they have all been rehearsing this action.
On the other hand, you have the president of the United States, who I learned from his close advisors is among the least well informed of people in any scenario. Meaning the way that it was said to me by former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was, “It’s almost as if the president doesn’t want to know.” And then you have the fact that the military advisors around the president — I believe, at least, having interviewed a lot of them — are very wise and knowledgeable individuals, but they cannot force the president to pay attention to something while he’s in office worrying about political concerns, worrying about domestic problems, worrying about big foreign policy issues having to do with conventional warfare.
So what I learned in reporting the book was that the idea behind the president actually ever having to consider, “Oh my god, I’m the one in charge here, and I have to make this decision in six minutes,” it’s almost become like the ostrich with the head in the sand scenario. It’s easier to remain naive to this.

Russian misperception of US counterattack

Annie Jacobsen: The reality that US ICBM Minuteman missiles do not have enough range to target North Korea without overflying Russia is a fact. It’s a fact almost no one knows. It’s a fact I didn’t know, and I’ve been writing about nuclear weapons since 2009. That fact was conveyed to me by Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists. He and his team keep track of information like this for the Nuclear Notebook. It’s an incredible resource, for anyone who wants to learn more.
It’s such an astonishing fact that I fact-checked it with former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta himself, because you almost can’t believe that this is actual reality. And not only did Panetta confirm this, but he conceded that it’s a major problem.
And when you say, you know, could interpret — Russia could interpret — my question would be, how could it think anything else? And the only way it could think anything else would be is if the president of the United States had a direct line to the president of Russia to say, “By the way, those missiles that are coming, they’re not coming at you.” And the two men would have to have a good enough relationship, a relationship based on trust, where you might take someone’s word for it. And that is impossible to think about in this climate.
Coupled with the fact that I learned in reporting Nuclear War: A Scenario that Russian technology systems, early warning satellite systems, are deeply flawed. So the idea that Russia has the same capacity to understand trajectory the way that the United States does is pure fantasy.
Luisa Rodriguez: I basically just knew that American systems could, with pretty astonishing accuracy, predict where incoming missiles were going to hit, and just assumed that surely Russian ones could too. And yeah, it just sounds like that is totally false. And not only false, but wildly wrong, and that the Russian early warning system is incredibly inaccurate. I think from memory it might interpret five missiles as hundreds. I might be getting the details wrong, but just like wildly inaccurate.
Annie Jacobsen: You’re absolutely right. You are right. And furthermore, it can mistake the hot rocket exhaust on a ballistic missile: it can interpret clouds or sunlight as hot rocket exhaust. So it could see a launch where there isn’t a launch, and it can see more missiles than there are.
And part of what is at issue here is that Russia would never want to admit it’s lacking in this field. So there’s a certain bravado from its defence scientists that its systems are as good as the United States’s. But when I was reporting on that, I went to sources that are not only US analysts, but people like Pavel Podvig, who is the world’s expert on Russian nuclear forces — speaks Russian, studied in Moscow, acts as a liaison to the UN — and he conceded how dangerous this issue is, and how lacking some of the Russian technologies really are in the early warning department.

The nuclear launch plans that would kill millions in neighbouring countries

Luisa Rodriguez: It actually reminds me of another fact from your book. It’s a bit of a tangentially related fact, but we’re going to go with it because it really shocked me. Many casualties of an attack — whether it be a retaliatory attack on North Korea in this case, or an attack on Russia or another country — wouldn’t be citizens of the target country. For example, you explained that the 1960 nuclear strike plan against Moscow would have also killed half the population of China because of all the fallout that would have been carried by wind.
So even if the president can get a hold of China or Russia and say something like, either, “This attack isn’t meant for you,” or maybe in the case of China, something like, “FYI, we’re launching nuclear weapons. They’re not for you, and we don’t want to start a war with you, but they might kill millions of your citizens. But please don’t be mad and launch a retaliatory strike on us” — that also seems like an incredibly uninspiring default. That is another way I can imagine escalation being not just plausible, but likely. Just the fact that other nuclear powers might be the unintended, indirect targets of a large-scale nuclear attack.
Annie Jacobsen: What you’re hitting upon here, I believe, is an issue that really pertains to transparency, that pertains to a bigger understanding of these secret plans behind the veil. The SIOP that you’re referring to, the Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear war — whereby 600 million people would be killed, one-fifth of the world’s population at the time; and that says nothing about those in America that would die in a counterattack. As you mentioned, one-half of the population of China, who wasn’t even involved in the war, would die from fallout.
This was an actual nuclear war plan. And it was and remained classified at the highest levels of classification all the way until a decade ago. And even still, the details of that are classified. The reason we know the contents is because a participant named John Rubel wrote about it in a tiny memoir in 2008, shortly before he died. And I wrote about it in my book. Rubel’s memoir went almost unnoticed. America was in the middle of the war on terror, and he wrote it, and it was kind of… No one read it.
The point of this is that the world has existed, you know, with the sword of Damocles hanging over our head, based on the plans and decisions of small groups of military men for decades. Why? Why? Why was it OK to have this plan in place and to know that millions, perhaps billions of people would die, and yet no one spoke up? The why I ask in that question comes from John Rubel on his deathbed in 2008, and it gets echoed by me now in 2024, and I think asked by you — which is really the question of, what are the plans behind the veil, and why are they so secret, and why are they OK?

The war games that suggest escalation is inevitable

Annie Jacobsen: You know, the nuclear war plans are among the most jealously guarded secrets in the United States. One has been declassified. I paused on that word, because if you look in the book, I reprint a couple pages of what a declassified nuclear war game looks like. It is 98% redacted, blacked out. There’s like one or two words here or there — you know, “scenario” and “global implications” — and that’s it. Everything else is blacked out. You do not learn a thing.
Luisa Rodriguez: Wow.
Annie Jacobsen: So you might say, why reprint that? Well, as I explain in the book, the declassification allowed one very important person in that war game to speak about it publicly without violating his security clearance. That person is Professor Paul Bracken of Yale University. And in his own book, he is able to describe thoughts on that nuclear war game from 1983. And what Bracken tells us is that, no matter how nuclear war begins — whether NATO is involved or NATO isn’t involved, whether China is involved or China isn’t involved, you get the idea — no matter how it begins, it ends in total nuclear apocalypse.
Bracken wrote that everyone left the war game depressed. He’s talking about secretaries of defence and national security advisors. The game was played over two weeks. There were multiple scenarios, and yet it always ends in Armageddon. So that is the answer to, “How does nuclear war end?” It only ends one way.
Luisa Rodriguez: Did Bracken explain why these scenarios inevitably ended in escalation and basically Armageddon?
Annie Jacobsen: I think if you read Nuclear War: A Scenario, you learn precisely why, because, and you know, it’s not called Nuclear War: The Only Scenario; it’s not called Nuclear War: The Scenario That… I mean, you can fill in the blanks. It is a scenario. It is one of many. And every step of the way, the seconds and minutes that I take the reader through, pulling quotes from the individuals who would be involved in certain situations, in any part of the nuclear triad, the missiles, the submarines, the bombers, the close presidential advisors…
I interviewed people from the Secret Service who would be responsible for moving the president. The different conundrums that arise as the decision trees unfold… You realise that different groups of people, the Secret Service, for example, have an entirely different agenda than STRATCOM, who wants to get the counterattack order from the president. And then we haven’t even begun to discuss my interviews with FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] Director Craig Fugate, the agency that was allegedly responsible for the public after a nuclear war. Fugate told me there would be no population protection planning after a nuclear war, because everyone would be dead. That is a quote from President Obama’s FEMA director.

A super-electromagnetic pulse

Annie Jacobsen: So a super EMP is a three-phased electromagnetic shockwave so powerful that industrial-strength surge suppressors and lightning arrestors — all of which have been designed to block this kind of high-voltage spike — all become rendered useless at once.
Where does an EMP happen? Well, specifically, a super EMP happens by detonating a nuclear weapon — and it can be a small nuclear warhead — in space. Three hundred miles above the United States would do unbelievably catastrophic damage to the entire country.
What’s interesting, and I think unfortunate, about EMP as a concept, is that the issue has gotten so politicised in the United States. Among insiders, I’m talking about here. This was a result of the formation of an EMP Commission to investigate this. Shortly after 9/11, the government was afraid that terrorists would get hold of a small nuclear warhead and somehow get it into a satellite in space. And this issue became unfortunately politicised, so people took sides. And I think, or at least I found in my reporting, that those who put a certain horse in the race — either EMPs are terrifyingly dangerous, or EMPs would never happen — have found it difficult to unwind their initial position, I think to everybody’s detriment.
I went to the world experts to drill down on this: as I mentioned, General Touhill, Obama’s first cyber chief, and also Richard Garwin. Not only did he design the first thermonuclear weapon, Ivy Mike, but he wrote the first classified paper on EMP back in the 1950s. It’s still classified.
They both confirmed with me that the collateral effects of this EMP strike are what would be so deadly. In simple terms, what essentially happens is the whole electrical grid would shut down. It would be a catastrophic failure: a failure of the systems of systems ultimately centred on this one concept I think that listeners might be able to wrap their head around, which is there’s a system in the United States that pretty much runs everything, and it’s called SCADA. That stands for “supervisory control and data acquisition.” It sounds like a mouthful, but what it really is is a system of systems of computers and people that control all the systems of the industrial underpinnings of the United States.
So imagine losing control of railroad routers, of the liftgates on dams, of gas and oil refinery transmission centres. You’re going to lose assembly lines, you’re going to lose air traffic control, port facilities, fibre optics, GPS, hazardous materials. I go on and on in the book about what happens. It all happens in a second. Never mind that at least, at minimum, 10% of all cars in the United States will stop running simultaneously.
Luisa Rodriguez: The passage that struck me most, I’ll just quote:
There will be no more fresh water, no more toilets to flush, no sanitation, no streetlights, no tunnel lights, no lights at all — only candles until there are none left to burn. No gas pumps, no fuel, no ATMs, no cash withdrawals, no cell phones, no landlines, no emergency communication except for high frequency radios, no hospital equipment.
It’s really the end of…everything.