Annie Jacobsen

Well, it's terrifying.

But the one hopeful part of it would be, again, going back to the Reagan reversal, by the way, is the only glimmer of hope I ever found in all of this.

Tell me what you mean when you say compromised.

Absolutely.

So then you have to ask yourself what is also going to happen now that these big contracting organizations, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed, are now being threatened by Silicon Valley, by the new defense contractors that are coming into the pipeline, that are threatening their contracts because they can do it faster and cheaper.

And so I fear that you will see even more of that entrenchment that you're talking about, even more of the, you know, the bureaucracy churning out more weapons under the guise of defense.

Because they'll have to ramp it up.

Yeah, because there's a competition, you know, which is that double-edged sword because competition is what makes America great.

I believe in that truth, you know.

But I do also think what's interesting is, like, someone I interviewed here in the book was Leon Panetta.

So not only was he a former SecDef, but he was former CIA chief and he was former White House chief of staff under Clinton.

And in our interview, I learned a lot from him about those three kind of elements of the national security, advising the president, being SecDef, being in charge of all of this, and being CIA chief from the intelligence point of view.

But

What was even more interesting about interviewing Panetta was that he said to me at the end of our interview, it's good that you're doing this.

The American people need to know.

That's a direct quote from him.

So here's a guy who has spent his entire life entrenched in that system that you're talking about.

And then outside of it, once he retires, puts on his, shall we say, grandfather's hat.

the human hat and is suddenly like this is really going in the wrong direction.

I would hope that that would lead to more people thinking wisely about what it is they're doing when they're in office as far as nuclear war is concerned.