'Hundreds of millions would die in the first 72 minutes of nuclear war', expert warns

'Hundreds of millions would die in the first 72 minutes of nuclear war', expert warns

Michael Moran

An expert has issued a stark warning about the threat of nuclear war, claiming that "no matter how it starts, it ends with everyone dead".

Annie Jacobsen, who has authored several best-selling books on America’s military, including studies of top-secret research lab DARPA and the infamous Area 51, says that in the event of a Russian or Chinese missile launch being detected, the US president would have just six minutes to make a crucial decision.

Do they retaliate – leading inevitably to the deaths of almost the entire world population – or allow one of America's cities to be wiped off the map?

She told podcaster Lex Fridman the current US doctrine of “launch on warning” means that retaliation would take place before there was time to ask questions about why the initial alert had been triggered.

“We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon and no matter how nuclear war starts, it ends with everyone dead," she said.

“The US Defense Department has a early warning system. And the system in space is called SBIRS, a constellation of satellites that is keeping an eye on all of America's enemies."

“So the moment an ICBM launches, they see the hot rocket exhaust on the ICBM a fraction of a second after it launches. And so there begins this horrifying policy called launch on warning, and that's the US counterattack.

“The reason that the United States is so ferociously watching for a nuclear launch somewhere around the globe is so that the nuclear command and control system in the US can move into action to immediately make a counterstrike.

“That policy, launch on warning, is exactly like it says, it means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack. It will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.”

In more than one occasion in the past, the order has been given for Russian or American forces to launch a nuclear strike, only for it later to emerge that the command was issued in error. We may not be so lucky next time.

Annie adds that at least one former US president has expressed doubts that it’s rational to unleash Armageddon based on a blip on a radar screen.

“The best sort of hitting the nail on the head statement is in President Reagan's memoirs," she said.

"He refers to the six-minute window and calls it irrational. He says, 'How can anyone make a decision to launch nuclear weapons based on a blip on a radar scope?'"

She points out that unlike what we see in the movies, a nuclear missile cannot be recalled or diverted once the launch button has been pushed – something President Reagan himself didn’t know.

The effects of a nuclear explosion are still not widely understood she says, and the resulting mushroom cloud would pull in people from miles around and hurl them into the sky as they burned to death – with the horror being repeated in cities across the world.

"The United States has 1,770 nuclear weapons deployed, meaning those weapons could launch in as little as 60 seconds and up to a couple minutes. Some of them on the bombers might take an hour or so," she said.

"Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons, same scenario, their weapon systems are on par with ours. That's not to mention the 12,500 nuclear weapons amongst the other nine nuclear-armed nations."

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