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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator, and I'm joined this week by the investigative journalist Annie Jacobson,

whose new book is

Nuclear War, A Scenario, which describes a non-fiction thriller and it is terrifying and

compulsive in equal measure. Annie, can you start by telling me what you were trying to do with

this book exactly? What was the conception behind it? So as an investigative journalist,

I have previously written six books on war, weapons, national security and secrets. All of the

programs inside of those books, all of the sources I have used to report those books,

have shared with me that everything they have done has been dedicated, in essence,

to prevent nuclear World War III.

And so I began thinking right around the time of the pandemic, when we had a former president

in office who used a lot of nuclear rhetoric for the first time in decades, I began asking

myself as a reporter, my God, what would happen if deterrence or prevention failed? And I began asking that exact question of sources who I have longstanding

relationships with here in the United States, many of whom are the uppermost echelons of national security.

And what I learned shocked me. And there began writing and

reporting nuclear war a scenario. Well, you obviously have these very high up sources.

But one question that immediately strikes me is this is the most secret, most classified, pretty much,

of anything. If we assume that America's military, industrial, secret state is any good at all

...