Annie Jacobsen

That's why nuclear war begins and ends in 72 minutes because the Sibber satellite system sees the launch and then the U.S.

nuclear command and control goes into – begins.

And by the way, an ICBM cannot be redirected and it cannot be recalled.

So ballistic missiles are hypersonic.

So a little bit of a misnomer there.

And also a hypersonic missile, let's just say it went from Russia to the United States, it might take an hour.

A ballistic missile launched from a launch pad outside Moscow takes 26 minutes and 40 seconds to get to Washington, D.C.

That number is not going to change.

That's gravity.

That's physics.

That's what it was in 1958, 59, and that's what it is today.

Yes, but our – okay, so if you go with that logic and you say, well, it can move around, so it would be harder to shoot down.

Right.

As I explain in the book, and again, as was relayed to me by defense officials –

We can't shoot down ballistic missiles, long-range ballistic missiles, with any kind of certainty or accuracy.

It's not like the Iron Dome or anything like that?

The Iron Dome is almost like terrible for nuclear war, you know, for people to understand how dangerous nuclear war is because the Iron Dome can—

shoot down short-range missiles and mid-range missiles.

So even the U.S.

Aegis systems out on the sea, the Navy systems, shot down some of those Iranian drones.