Cliff Sims

So in a bolt out of the blue scenario, this is where the researchers say there may only be a six or seven minute window where the president has to decide the future of the world in that.

And it's very, very scary, you know,

People do not have an appreciation today the way that I think they did at the height of the Cold War, which even precedes us, really, of the danger of nuclear war and just how quickly we could lose everything, everything that we know of as life.

for the few people that would survive a major nuclear exchange would not be a life worth living.

The living would envy the dead in that scenario.

And it's very, very scary.

And I don't think we have an appreciation for how close, how real that possibility is that that could happen.

Yep, yep, because you want to try to, for all of these things, you want to try to plan in a non-emotional state so that when you're met with a crisis, you can fall back on the great preparation planning work and make a good decision in the middle of a crisis.

The thing that I don't envy any president,

is how do you make a good decision in that window of time with those stakes?

Literally humanity hangs in the balance in some ways.

And you're trying to decide like, first of all, you're trying to take in the information of like, well, what's the strike coming toward us look like?

Is it a nuclear missile?

or is it 200 nuclear missiles?

And then, okay, what's the response to that that's going to, you know,

keep us from ending the planet, you know, but also protecting American national security in some way.

I mean, it's just an impossible decision-making matrix that you're confronted with.

It's just, I mean, it's unimaginable.

And, you know, some of the things that stuck with me the most from my time working in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence were the planning for those, for different scenarios.

One day when I was at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, we got to go inside one of these so-called doomsday bunkers.