In Conversation With Annie Jacobsen
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Why is nuclear proliferation a pressing issue today?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Truth in the Barrel, Devil's Cut. I'm Amy McGrath with Denver Riggleman. Today, we are talking more about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Why? Because it is a super important issue that we need to understand a lot more about. If you take us back to the Cold War, we had two nations that built up massive arsenals of nuclear weapons that could be launched in the air. They could be launched from the ground or from the ocean. And we had massive arsenals of bigger and bigger bombs, okay? And over time, In the 1960s, we had serious leaders in this country and in the Soviet Union that decided, hey, this isn't smart. The destructive power of these weapons is so big that a war itself would destroy all of us. So let's try to limit some of these weapons.
And that was the start of arms control. and so you might think well the cold war is over and so we don't have to deal with this stuff anymore that is not true we have actually multiple threats and a very complex world with china and russia having nuclear weapons rogue states like north korea now having nuclear weapons the potential for iran and in the current age of donald trump We have our allies and partners now thinking they might need to get nuclear weapons. And so we have to talk about all of this stuff. So joining us today is an amazing author of a book called Nuclear War, a Scenario. Her name is Annie Jacobson, and we're going to bring her in to talk about nuclear weapons and what Americans need to know right now.
Doesn't get better than this. And there she is. Welcome to our special guest, Annie Jacobson, author of Nuclear War, a Scenario. And I'll just start out. I'm not going to ask the first question, Annie. Denver is going to do that. But I just have to tell you, I've studied nuclear weapons for a long time. And your book was fantastic. the best book I have ever read that could really portray the destructive power of these weapons to everyday Americans. So thank you for being on our show, Annie.
Thank you so much for having me.
And, Annie, I tell you, you know, reading the book, you brought me back. I'll tell you that because, you know, my background, United States Air Force to NSA, then I did joint special projects. So when you're talking about DeafSmack, talking about Global Strike at STRATCOM, when you're talking about Cheyenne Mountain, when you're talking about Peterson, when you're talking about Fort Belvoir, when you're talking about the ADF in Denver at Buckley, I've been to all those places, and your research, the way that you actually threaded it, and how those multiple commands and multiple lines of communications work, Annie, well done. Well done, you know. And so my first question, I want to throw out a question so that you can go where you want to go, but I hope you're excited about this. So, you know, Amy and I have both written books.
We know it's a bit of a timeline. So I have a bit of a question after looking at everything you did in your book, you know, fog of war, chain of command issues, when you're going to confusion, right, in your actual lines of communication or how your orders are processed, all the things that me and Amy have done on tabletops, you know, our whole life. If you wrote the book and started it today, which you've already seen in the first four and a half months of the Trump administration, I don't know if you have been asked this yet, Annie, but if you wrote the book today, Do you think it would even have more elements of chaos? Do you think you would still structure it the same? Or have you seen things since you've written the book during the Trump administration that lead you to believe that maybe you were on to something in some of the things that you were actually identifying in your book?
Mm-hmm. Okay, multiple questions. I mean, first of all, it's so great to be here with two of you who are, as you said, have done tabletop exercises like this. You guys are what I would call the real inside baseball players. And what's remarkable about that, and it's so exciting that we get to talk about this, but I'm going to preface it by saying that, you know, as a journalist and an author, and of course, this is not my first rodeo. This is my seventh book. I always write about, you know.
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