Annie Jacobsen

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?

Never mind the fact that each interceptor has a 50% shoot-down rate.

And that's by the missile defense agency's spokesperson.

So there's this perception that we have a system like the Iron Dome that could take out these incoming missiles.

And we simply don't.

Which is why when nuclear war begins, it only ends in nuclear Armageddon.

Jeez.

I mean, you know, you take your when you're reporting or writing, you kind of take your hat off of the emotional or the sentimental part of things where you, you know, the mother in me, you know, you can't think like that.

You just have to tell the story.