THE TERRIFYING AFTERMATH...What nuclear annihilation could look like | Vox

Paint the picture for me, as you do in the opening pages of the book, where you imagine a nuke is dropped on Washington, DC. What happens next?

---- Sean Illing

Sean Illing
Is there some near-future where in order to further reinforce the automaticity of this process, we just have AI controlling the whole thing from start to finish? 

Annie Jacobsen
I can’t imagine a worse nightmare scenario than bringing AI, or more machine-learning technology, into the mix. There’s an incredible amount of machine learning that is built into the system. For example, the satellite detects the launch and then that data is processed in space. 

About one-tenth of the way to the moon is where a geosync satellite sits and that data is processed and streamed down to the nuclear command and control bunkers in the United States. This is happening in seconds. But to the idea of putting an “AI” into the mix on the human decision-making level or identifying level, that seems like a recipe for disaster and is a reason why so many of the systems within the triad are still analog, not digital. In other words, they continue to be similar systems to when they were invented decades ago so that they can’t be hacked.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

I suspect the image most of us still have of nuclear bombs is the image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that was a long time ago. 

How much more powerful are the thermonuclear weapons we’re talking about today?

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What nuclear annihilation could look like

“The survivors would envy the dead.”

by Sean Illing

Jun 23, 2024, 4:00 AM PDT

Peter Zelei Images via Getty Images

How often do you think about all the ways the world could end?

As the host of The Gray Area, I find myself engaged in this macabre exercise more than most. We’ve done episodes on runaway AI and climate change and extinction panics. 

• One of the few topics we haven’t covered, however, is nuclear war. 
• Which is surprising because this scenario is near the top of basically every list of existential threats — and now feels newly salient with recent news involving North Korea, Iran, and China.

Annie Jacobsen is a reporter and the author of a new book 

I read a lot of books for the show and this one stuck with me longer than any I can recall. 
It’s a book that clearly wants to startle the reader, and it succeeds.

Jacobsen walks you through all the ways a nuclear catastrophe might unfold, and she gives a play-by-play breakdown of the terrifying choreography that would ensue in the minutes immediately after a nuclear missile launch.

So I invited Jacobsen on The Gray Area to talk about what a nuclear exchange would really look like and how perilously close we are to that reality. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.