Annie Jacobsen

First five minutes.

Imagine a rocket.

You've seen launches, that fire coming out the bottom.

That boosts the rocket for five minutes.

That's when it's detectable from space.

Then it enters mid-course phase, which is going to be 20 minutes, arcing across the globe to its target.

That is the only place where the interceptor missile can get it, if it can.

And it's 500 miles up.

And it's traveling at something like Mach 23, 14,000 miles an hour.

Okay?

So that's 20 minutes.

And then the last phase...

It's called terminal phase, appropriately so, 100 seconds.

When the warhead, the nuclear warhead, reenters the atmosphere, boom, it explodes over its target.

The interceptor system is designed to take out the missile in midcourse phase.

So we have 44 interceptors.

Remember I told you we have 1,700, let's say, nuclear missiles on ready for launch status.

Russia has about the same.

We have 44 interceptor missiles.

How are 44 interceptor missiles going to go up against more than 1,000 Russian nuclear weapons coming at us?