Annie Jacobsen
speaker
2,389 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard 4 Mar
Annie Jacobsen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
One of the reasons I believe my book is popular is because no one knows my politics, which doesn't mean I can't talk about them, but... This issue impacts all of us. And so there's no political component of the book. It is POTUS president of the United States. And we let people infer. And I know you guys do, too.
You infer and make your judgments about individuals judgment about individuals cognition. Another important factor in a POTUS in charge of with sole presidential authority. And so what I would hope is that the book would never change. Ironically, terribly, what I demonstrate is what was true in the Cold War in the 1950s about nuclear weapons launching is true today.
You would absolutely think. I mean, and those words of wisdom, I might add, come from two former secretaries of defense whom I interviewed for the book, among scores of others. And in particular, Leon Panetta, who before he was SecDef was director of CIA for listeners.
And before that, the White House chief of staff, which gives him a breadth and scope of understanding about the president organization. across multiple decades and multiple administrations. And that is remarkable when Panetta said to me that, indeed, many presidents are under-informed. That original thought was made very clear by former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, who was...
very vociferous on the record about how under-informed presidents are and how dangerous that is. And this is a very... It's complex when you hear something like that coming from a former SecDef, but it's also imperative because...
I find remarkable that individuals in their later stages of life, and these, you know, I never expected to be a reporter who spends the lion's share of her work interviewing, you know, men in their 80s and 90s. And I say men because nuclear command and control, they were all men in the Cold War. And so...
It is interesting from a sort of philosophical point of view, or all of us looking at our own humanity, when you think an older person reflects differently upon what it was like to be there and advise the president than the younger person, the younger self.
So it's so interesting that you speak of systems of systems because that is the sort of it's a big machine. And when you can really realize how many different components of the system there are, that in and of itself is astonishing. And they are all so important. When I learned from interviewing a STRATCOM commander, there are 150,000 individuals at the ready beneath him in the chain of command.
That is just a stunning number that I can almost guarantee Americans don't know because I certainly didn't know it. And writing this book was just learning one fact after the next. This is coming from someone who has studied, you know, war and weapons all her career. And yet every component of nuclear war literally stunned me.
But let's break it up for listeners into two different parts because I think they're important here. One is what happens before nuclear. And that to Amy's question, I thought when you were asking about like leaders and how important is it, I thought of JFK because the Cuban Missile Crisis is so well known. Many amazing books have been written about it.
And of course, that was a situation of the old cooler heads prevailed because of a president who could lead with extraordinary foresight, despite having generals that were pushing him, you know, toward nuclear launch. But that's all before. And I didn't want to write that book or rewrite that book.
I wanted to write a book that was a speculative scenario based essentially on what you guys do, on what wargaming, nuclear wargaming, those jealously guarded secrets inside the Pentagon that happen with astonishing regularity, I learned. And so I take the reader from nuclear launch to nuclear winter. And in essence... To answer your specific question, redundancy at that point doesn't matter.
That's what's so astonishing, I think, about reading the book. Once nuclear war begins, it only ends in nuclear annihilation. Everyone at the Pentagon knows that. Everyone knows that. No one has said to me, you know what, Annie, I'm going to change my opinion and take that back.
When, you know, you do as I'm the kind of author that just does interviews and interviews and interviews and reading and research. And then then you find the aha moment and then you understand a certain point in the narrative where that aha moment lives, exists. And then you almost reverse and reverse engineer everything from there. And that was for me.
doing an interview with retired general Robert Keillor, who was the commander of STRATCOM. Right. And then at one point I said, just cutting right to that question that you kind of don't want to ask, but have to ask, which is what would happen in a full scale nuclear exchange with Russia? And the general said to me, Annie, the world could end in the next couple of hours. And it was just a boom.
And I went, oh, my God, this is coming from the STRATCOM commander. And I knew that was both the end of the third act before nuclear winter and the moment that it all begins. Because... The sort of inescapable nature of nuclear war is what terrifies all of us. And the second moment was I'm also a television writer. For example, I wrote the Amazon series Jack Ryan.
When you're writing TV, you learn about what's called a B story. And you have to have a B story in there to make sure that people don't leave the television set and go do their laundry. I'm talking literal and figuratively and literally. And so I learned narratively that that's a wise approach because I want readers to stay with me.
I write about really complex, deeply disturbing, esoteric, you might say, concepts that you guys are familiar with because these are your careers. But most Americans... don't, can't, won't, et cetera. How do you make it interesting for them? So in seeking a B story, I thought,
well, goodness, you know, this is going to be very interesting when I find out how continuity of government works, how the president is rushed out of the White House and how he'll wind up at Raven Rock, which is actually the alternate nuclear command and control center from the Pentagon. You guys know that. Readers don't know that. It's a real place. It's not just in movies.
You know, Bill Perry had spoken of it. So I called up Obama's former FEMA director, Craig Fugate. And in our interviews, I asked him, you know, I just confirmed you guys prepare for nuclear war, correct? And he said, oh, yes, it is what is called a low probability, high consequence event. Wow. He said, we also prepare for asteroid strikes. Wow. Wow. Okay.
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