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
And then he told me a little bit about what's called population protection planning. The acronyms that you guys are so familiar with it. That's how FEMA prepares to help people in the event of an earthquake of, you know, a hurricane fire. And he said to me, Annie, in the event of a nuclear war, there will be no population protection planning because everyone will be dead.
Absolutely. And I hope I conveyed that to readers. And I think I might have, you know, given the readability of this book. And, OK, Sibbers is technologically astonishing. A satellite system one tenth of the way to the moon that can recognize hot rocket exhaust coming out of the back of an ICBM from a nuclear adversary in under a second.
So, yes, you know, America's technological capabilities are incredible. Much to be admired.
But on the flip side of that, you have the horror that the reason that Sibbers even exists is because an ICBM, that is for listeners, an intercontinental ballistic missile that can travel from one side of the earth to the other in approximately 30 minutes, 33 minutes precisely from a launch pad in Pyongyang. It cannot be redirected and it cannot be recalled.
I'm sure most listeners do not know that if they haven't read the book or it didn't work in your world because everyone tells me that, that I speak to, they come to book signings and whatnot. No one knows about, very few people know about sole presidential authority or launch on warning protocols.
Almost no one knows that Russia's technical system, which they allege is as good as Sibber's, is nowhere near the capacity. Their system that is in space can mistake clouds for a rocket launch. It's profoundly dangerous.
And then, of course, the ultimate danger, which was a fact so astonishing I had to actually confirm it with Leon Panetta because I simply couldn't believe this is true, that an ICBM, a U.S. ICBM launched from the Middle West to hit Pyongyang, which is what would happen if a bolt out of blue attack happened against the United States, a single weapon. if it was launched by North Korea.
If we were to launch ICBMs from the Middle West at North Korea, they do not have enough range to reach Pyongyang without traveling over Russia. In the crisis moment, in situations that you are talking about are happening in seconds and minutes, not hours and days.
The reality that the Russian president could think, would almost certainly think those nuclear weapons were coming for him, is almost undebatable. And that is where you could have that full-scale nuclear exchange that former STRATCOM commander General Keillor warned me to warn you about.
Yes. I think that one... way of thinking and talking about the Golden Dome, which The president ordered and, you know, right after taking office, asked for bids, gave 90 days for them. It's obviously very serious. Some of those bids have come in. You have SpaceX and Anduril, among others, leading that.
So clearly this is going to be, you know, very high and now still entirely classified technologies that have to do with CubeSats and... concepts that very few of us, certainly me, know the technical specifications on because they're still being developed and they're obviously classified.
So you have to I have to hold both of those ideas on in balance because no doubt the Iron Dome is not the gold. I mean, the Iron Dome that everyone wants to make the analogy is just simply a bad analogy because Iron Dome we're talking about what's in Israel is very effective with short range rockets and perhaps even middle range rockets. But not long range ICBMs.
And for listeners, let me just give you a detail that might allow them to kind of visualize this and bring it home instead of being a hypothetical. And then I'll go back to Iron Golden Dome. And I'm curious more about what you think, which is that, you know, as it was explained to me to MIT physicist, Professor Emeritus Ted Postol.
The ICBM, the warhead at that point that is, you know, racing toward, let's say, the United States that the Golden Dome would, you know, defend against. The warhead, because all of the back of the rocket has been let loose, so it's just simply a small, literally a smallish object.
In space, moving approximately 14,000 miles an hour, 500 to 700 miles above the Earth. And so the current system, the interceptor system, launches a rocket with a kinetic warhead in it, essentially like a giant bowling ball, if you will, metaphorically, that is going to be traveling at 20,000 miles an hour to try to take out the moving warhead. And that is why the failure rate is below 50%.
It's like hitting a bullet with a bullet. Those are the words of the Missile Defense Agency. And so I think that helps listeners to understand what you're trying to deal with. And so the Golden Dome, from what I understand, is an entirely different array of systems that are in space that will identify and attack the incoming warhead, plural, because there's always MIRVs involved,
Yes. So from multiple altitudes, that alone, you can understand why most of us in the room, this room or any room, are at a serious deficiency trying to accurately discuss that. Now, I took this question to Richard Garwin, who developed the thermonuclear, who drew the plans for the thermonuclear bomb, for... Edward Teller when he was 23 years old. And I took this question to Ted Postal and others.
And while all of them know that the that the old Star Wars idea was was, as you say, a complete boondoggle, meaning it was not. I mean, I did an interview with Charles Townes a decade, a decade ago now who invented the laser. Yeah. And had this discussion with him. You know, I've been talking about this for a long time.
And again, not getting overwhelmed with kind of nerding out on engineering statistics, of which I am not capable, but rather as a metaphor to try and understand poetically. Is this. And. I don't know the answer and neither do any of those individuals as technology advances.
And that's very troubling for finances and for transparency and for democracy, because we just have no idea if it's a boondoggle or if it's actually legitimate.
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