Annie Jacobsen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Just imagine sitting there, one person, because a president is a human being, sitting there, just got the warning that Russia launched. You have six minutes. I meditate on my immortality every day. And here, you would be sitting and meditating, contemplating not just your own mortality, but the mortality of all the people you know, loved ones. Just imagining. What would be going through my head is all the people I know and love personally, and knowing that there’ll be no more, most likely. And if they somehow survive, they will be suffering and will eventually die. I guess the question that kept coming up is how do we stop this? Is it inevitable that it’s going to be escalated to a full-on nuclear war that destroys everything? And it seems like it will be. It’s inevitable. In the position of the President, it’s almost inevitable that they have to respond. I mean, one of the things I found shocking was how little apparently most presidents know about the responsibility that literally lays at their feet. You may think through this six-minute window, I may think through this six-minute window. But what I learned, for example, former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta was really helpful in explaining this to me because before he was SecDef, he served as the director of the CIA. And before that, he was the White House Chief of Staff. And so, he has seen these different roles that have been so close to the President. But he explained to me that when he was the White House Chief of Staff for President Clinton, he noticed how President Clinton didn’t want to ever really deal with the nuclear issue because he had so many other issues to deal with. And that only when Panetta became Secretary of Defense, he told me, did he really realize the weight of all of this, because he knew he would be the person that the president would turn to were he to be notified of a nuclear attack. And by the way, the Launch on Warning, it’s the ballistic missile seen from outer space by the satellite. And then, there also must be a second confirmation from a ground radar system. But in that process, which is just a couple minutes, everyone is getting ready to notify the president. And one of the first people that gets notified by NORAD or by STRATCOM or by NRO, these different parties that all see the early warning data, one of the first people that’s notified is the Secretary of Defense as well as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because those two together are going to brief the president about, “Sir, you have six minutes to decide.” And that’s where you realize the immediacy of all of this is so counter to imagining the scenario. And again, all the presidents come into office, I have learned, understanding the idea of deterrence, this idea that we have these massive arsenals of nuclear weapons pointed at one another ready to launch so that we never have nuclear war. But what we’re talking about now is, what if we did? What if we did? And what you’ve raised is this really spooky, eerie subtext of the world right now because many of the nuclear armed nations are in direct conflict with other nations. And for the first time in decades, nuclear threats are actually coming out of the mouths of leaders. This is shocking. So deterrence, the polite, implied assumption is that nobody will launch. And if they did, we would launch back and everybody would be dead. But that assumption falls apart completely, the whole philosophy of it falls apart once the first launch happens, then you have six minutes to decide, “Wait a minute. Are we going to hit back and kill everybody on earth? Or do we turn the other cheek in the most horrific way possible?”…

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