Annie Jacobsen on Nuclear War, Intelligence Operations, and Conspiracy Realities
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
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Summary
Annie Jacobsen has a favorite word for America's nuclear doctrine: madness. It's madness that any single person has six minutes to decide the fate of civilization, madness that we've built weapons capable of ending the world in 72 minutes, and madness that everything hangs by the thread of deterrence. But to Tyler, life is "a lot of different kinds of madness," and the real question is simply getting the least harmful form available to us. It's a conversation sparked by her latest book Nuclear War: A Scenario, which Tyler calls one of his favorites from last year—and which is compelling enough that Denis Villeneuve is turning it into a screenplay.
Tyler and Annie explore whether we should be more afraid of nuclear weapons or if fear itself raises the risks, who should advise presidents during the six-minute decision window, whether moving toward disarmament makes us safer or more vulnerable, what Thomas Schelling really meant about nuclear war and rational actors, the probability that America would retaliate after a nuclear attack, the chances of intercepting a single incoming ICBM, why missile defense systems can't replicate Israel's Iron Dome success, how Pakistan-India nuclear tensions could escalate, why she's surprised domestic drone attacks haven't happened yet, her reporting on JFK assassination mysteries and deathbed phone calls, her views on UFOs and the dark human experiments at Area 51, what motivates intelligence community operators, her encounters with Uri Geller and CIA psychic research, what she’s working on next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded May 19th, 2025.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:09.4 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. |
| 0:13.5 | Learn more at Mercadis.org. |
| 0:15.7 | For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, |
| 0:20.4 | visit Conversationswithtyler.com. |
| 0:26.4 | Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. |
| 0:30.5 | Today I'm chatting with Annie Jacobson. |
| 0:33.1 | Annie started off by studying at Princeton. |
| 0:35.9 | She now has, I think, eight books. Most recently and |
| 0:39.5 | prominently is a favorite of mind. It's called Nuclear War, a scenario, was one of my favorite |
| 0:45.3 | books of last year. The book is also being turned into a screenplay and will be directed by |
| 0:51.2 | the Dune Director, Dennis Villanueva. Annie also has co-written three episodes of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan TV series for Amazon Studios. |
| 1:01.3 | Annie, welcome. |
| 1:02.7 | Thank you so much for having me. |
| 1:05.0 | Now, your last book, of course, it focuses on nuclear weapons and nuclear war. |
| 1:09.8 | Would it actually help if we were more afraid of nuclear weapons and thinking about them more often? Or does that just not help at all? |
| 1:16.6 | I think it certainly helps, and you probably gathered that from reading my book. I mean, what I wanted to do, sometimes people say, why did you write such a terrifying book? And the answer is very simple. I wanted to |
| 1:29.0 | demonstrate in appalling detail just how horrific nuclear war would be as a way, perhaps, for people to |
| 1:38.6 | have precisely the kind of conversation that you and I are having. But say when I was a kid, |
| 1:45.3 | people thought about nuclear weapons much more. It seemed more dangerous. It actually seemed more thinkable then. If we're just |
| 1:51.2 | obsessed with nuclear weapons and nuclear war, can't that raise the risks by making it |
| 1:55.4 | psychologically more salient? I would say certainly not. And also, you know, what we perceive and what we think about is not necessarily what happens. I doubt many people imagined a pandemic was going to show up and shut down the whole world as it did. So I do think it's valuable to think about things, not in any kind of hypochondriacal way, if that is an exact word, but more about |
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