Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy | Lex Fridman Podcast #420

Annie Jacobsen explains to Lex Fridman why nuclear war between the US and Russia would kill 5 billion people within months, and why 44 interceptor missiles with a 50% success rate are America’s only defense.

• US has 1,770 deployed nuclear weapons, Russia 1,674; all can launch within 60 seconds to minutes, giving the president only a 6-minute decision window.
• America has just 44 interceptor missiles total, with roughly a 50% success rate, against thousands of incoming warheads — the program is currently on strategic pause.
• Nuclear submarines are undetectable and have crept within a few hundred miles of the US coastline; flight time from launch to US coast is under 10 minutes.
• ICBMs cannot be recalled or redirected once launched; Reagan publicly misstated in 1983 that submarine missiles could be recalled.
• In 1979, Deputy Defense Secretary Bill Perry was minutes from waking the president to begin launch sequence before learning a training VHS tape had been accidentally inserted into a live warning system.
• Jacobsen names Al O’Donnell — the nuclear weapons engineer who armed 186 bombs — as her source for the claim that the Roswell crash was a Stalin-orchestrated black propaganda operation using surgically altered humans.
• Hitler rejected nuclear weapons development as ‘Jewish science,’ according to Albert Speer’s memoirs, which Jacobsen cites as the reason Germany never built the bomb.

Guests: Annie Jacobsen, investigative journalist and author of Nuclear War: A Scenario · 2024-03-22 · Watch on YouTube